He smiled. “It was a long drive, Mrs. Sullivan. Maybe you should invite me inside.”
As if she had a choice. “Of course. Come on in.”
The apartment was in a state of disarray. He could almost forgive her for not inviting him in right away. Half-filled moving boxes were scattered around the living room. Haphazard stacks of sloppily taped boxes filled the corner by the brown leather couch. The matching recliner was buried under an avalanche of clothes.
On second look, he noticed that most of the walls were bare. They hadn’t always been. He could see countless nails still studded in the walls, the only sign that photos and frames had once hung there.
Either she was trying to remove any reminders of the life she had shared with Jack Sullivan or she was in the middle of getting the hell out of the apartment. After a second, Lucas decided it was probably both.
“Almost done packing?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she nodded at the couch. “Please, take a seat. Can I get you anything to drink? Water? I might still have a beer or two in the fridge.”
“Thank you, but no.”
Shrugging, Tess disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of water. As Lucas relaxed into the couch, his arms spread across the back, his leg folded so that his ankle rested on top of his knee, she drank him in with her eyes before guzzling half of her water. Suddenly, her mouth was so dry. The plastic crinkled as she took deep pulls.
“Why don’t you come join me?” Lucas patted the empty seat next to him.
She recapped her half-empty water bottle and tossed it on top of the massive laundry pile. As tempting as his offer was, she knew better. She could sense the tension in the air. Something big was about to happen.
Keeping her tone light—and staying right where she was—Tess said, “Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”
“Somehow I doubt that very much.” His pleasantness sent chills coursing down her spine. “You had to know that this was coming.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.”
“Before you left, you said something that stuck with me. Do you remember?” When she shook her head, he told her, “You asked me if I really wanted to do this now. I didn’t ask you what you meant by that because I knew. And, trust me, I’m more than ready.
“Hamlet is a very small community,” he continued as she stayed silent. “We weren’t prepared for what followed you into town. A man dies anywhere else, there’s an entire police force to look into the crime.” Lucas ticked them off on his fingers. “Cops, CSI’s, lab techs, DA’s.” He let out a soft snort. “An ME who isn’t making it up as he goes along. But not in Hamlet. Caitlin didn’t trust outsiders. Most of us don’t, but she took her paranoia to a whole other level. We had the five of us.” He raised his hand again, folding his fingers down as he named them. “Me. Caity. Wilhelmina. Sylvester. Walsh. We had to figure it out all on our own. Well, most of it.”
Tess was following along. “The phone records,” she guessed. “She couldn’t get those on her own.”
“Right. But the thing is, the sheriff wasn’t the only one who sent out to the outside for help.” He let his words hang there for a beat. “Your husband’s toxicology reports came in this morning. It was routine for me, sending out samples to the lab after I performed his autopsy. I knew how he died. I just wanted to make sure that everything backed up my initial report.” A quirk of his lips, a meaningless smile that didn’t quite meet the ice in his gaze. “Imagine my surprise when something came back flagged.”
“Oh.”
“Tox reports indicate that he ingested a liberal amount of Nembutal. Are you familiar with it?”
Her legs folded beneath her and she dropped down on the edge of the recliner. The water bottle slipped from her hand. The peak of the clothes mountain tumbled onto the carpet.
“It’s a sedative,” Lucas told her, as if she didn't already know. “A very strong one, too. Mixed with the alcohol in his stomach, he had enough in his system to knock him out cold for hours.
“Seeing that he took it the night he died, I have to ask myself why he would do such a thing.” Lucas’s shrug was casual. Easy. “And I don’t think he did. I mean, he could’ve administered it to himself, yes, but it doesn’t make sense to me. So next question. Who was close enough to Sullivan to give it to him? No sign of a fight, so he took it willingly. Who would he trust enough that he would accept a drugged drink without thinking twice?”
Tess slumped forward. A pair of panties fluttered to join the pile of spilled clothes on the floor.
She closed her eyes. “Me. It
was me.”
“I know,” he agreed, so readily that her eyelids fluttered open again. “And I’ve driven all this way for one last question. Why, Tessa? Why drug him?”
Tess’s bottom lip trembled. Her eyes turned glossy with the sheen of sudden tears. Dashing them away with a shaky hand, she looking imploringly over at the doctor.
“It’s all my fault, Luc,” she admitted. “I know I was supposed to stick to the plan and that was it, but I had to. When you did it, when you… I didn’t want Jack to feel any pain. You’ve gotta understand. It was one last thing I could do for him.”
That’s exactly what he thought. In the hours it took to drive to Tessa, he already worked it all out. She’d never once shied away from what he told her she had to do. After reading the tox report, he kicked himself for not thinking she would do something like this.