He’d forgotten all about taking samples from Jack Sullivan and sending them out. It was routine, something he did whenever he was acting as the medical examiner. It was so incredibly obvious how the outsider died—ligature strangulation performed by an unknown assailant—that Lucas never really thought about it again once Sullivan was gone from his morgue. Then Rodriguez arrested Walsh for the crime and Lucas accepted that his part was over. It was now up to the lawyers and the judges and the shrinks to figure out why the hell the deputy did what he did.
They already knew how. Rodriguez and his team carted off the rope and the guns before they took Walsh down. The samples wouldn’t change anything. He should just file them away, wash his hands clean of the whole thing. The case was over. The outsider detective solved it.
Slapping the manila envelope against his palm, Lucas lasted about three seconds before he shook his head and reached for the metal clasp on the back. He slid the thin stack of papers out of the envelope, quickly shuffling through them as everything the lab found in the samples reaffirmed his initial findings.
Until one word jumped out at him. Lucas blinked. His fingers crumpled the edge of the report. He scanned it again, just to make sure it said what he thought it did.
It did. And he still couldn’t believe it.
Fucking hell.
Knock, knock.
Tess was scrolling through her cellphone, an absent gesture because she was far too restless to do anything else. The soft rapping at her front door stole her attention away from another series of addictive cat memes that barely even merited a second glance, let alone a giggle.
She couldn’t remember the last time she laughed. Back in Hamlet, she decided. That small town took so much away from her, kept so much from her. Her laughter too, it seemed.
Knock, knock.
Her grip tightened on the edge of her phone. Her heart sped up, though she willed it calm. By now, she should’ve been used to random visitors. Ever since she arrived back home and started to make the arrangements to live in a world without her husband—letting those who knew him learn what happened to him—she’d had more than enough people come by.
And to think, when th
ey first drove into Hamlet, she actually thought no one would miss them if they were gone. It was a big world out there. Just not big enough.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Nibbling on her bottom lip, she hesitated. Someone wanted her to open up pretty badly. They weren’t going away. Even if she thought she should pretend she wasn’t home, her car was parked in front of the apartment. All it would take was a nosy neighbor to point it out. And since her visitor was still knocking, eventually someone would poke their head out into the hall.
Might as well see who was out there.
The well-wishers and guests coming to offer her condolences had trickled away after her second week back. And though she had enough casseroles in her freezer to last her a year, she prayed that it was a salesperson or something like that lurking on her doorstep. Jesus, if one more person told her that they were sorry for her loss, she was going to lose it.
In another life, Tess would’ve tossed her phone to the couch, then peeked through the peephole to see who was out there. That was the old Tess. The new Tess, the one who fled from Hamlet with the ghost of her husband as her passenger, she realized she no longer liked the idea of being without the safety net of her phone for any longer than she had to.
Without loosening her grip, she slowly approached the door. She stood on her tiptoes, the angle of the peephole distorting the features of the dark-haired man on the other side.
Tess recognized him anyway. There was no way she could ever mistake those icy blue eyes.
The door was locked. The deadbolt she had installed the night she returned home was tricky and it took her a second to remember how to undo it. She knew how easy it was for someone to get in to do harm. She refused to make it even easier for anyone to get close enough to hurt her again.
He was still standing there when she finally managed to get the door open. His hair parted precisely, that sly dimple that appeared in his right cheek as he offered her a friendly smile that didn’t quite meet those guarded, icy cold eyes.
Her heart thumped wildly.
“Doctor De Angelis. What are you doing here?”
Lucas was dressed in civilian clothes. Freshly pressed khaki slacks and a blue button-down shirt without a single wrinkle in it despite the fact that Tess’s home was at least a seven-hour drive from Hamlet—five, she considered, if he sped like a demon in that Mustang of his.
If she didn’t know he was a doctor, she never would’ve been able to tell. He was too pretty. A model, maybe. An actor. She’d had that same thought the first time she ever saw him. He had had the face of a movie star, the hands of a healer and a determination that forever unnerved her.
Standing outside of her apartment, Lucas deliberately adopted a pose to put her at ease. One hand in the front pocket of his pants, the other relaxed at his side as he idly twirled the ring of his car keys around his index finger.
She remembered him telling her once how his patients complained about his bedside manner. Tess called bullshit. Lucas was a pro at projecting a carefree air. And he could read body language like no one she’d ever known.
Too late, she realized she was gnawing anxiously on her thumbnail. She stopped, dropping her hand to her side. The barely there quirk of his eyebrow told her she’d been caught.
Damn doctor was like a mind reader. She should’ve known she’d never fool him. She never had before.