Rules in Deceit Page 18

  He’d gone into plenty of situations like this before, but this wasn’t just another one of his clients. This was Waylynn. She mattered. He’d trained with Blackhawk Security, offered his clients personal protection, home security and investigative services as well as tactical training, wilderness survival and self-defense. But none of that would do Elliot a damn bit of good now. He was running off instinct. Because when it came to that woman, he couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.

  Debris cut into his bare feet as he moved deeper into the dark apartment. A broken picture frame—Waylynn’s doctorate degree from Texas A&M University—crunched beneath his weight. Torn couch cushions, a broken vase, a purse that’d been dumped over the floor. Signs of an obvious struggle littered the living room, but it was the trail of dark liquid leading to the back bedroom that homed his attention on the soft sobs echoing down the hallway. Blood. “Waylynn? It’s Elliot. Are you dead?”

  “Don’t come in here!” That voice. Her voice.

  “I take it that’s a no.” While his gut twisted at the hint of fear in her voice, relief spread through him. She was alive. And the scream... Something horrible had happened to make her scream like that. The front door had been locked. No breeze came through the apartment from a broken window. Elliot moved down the hallway, putting his survival skills, which had been engrained into him since he was fourteen, to good use. No sign of a break-in. No movement from an intruder. He hit the bedroom and pushed on the partially open door with his free hand. The bed had been perfectly made, brightly colored throw pillows straight. Not much damage in this room. Light from beneath the closed bathroom door stretched across the beige carpeting.

  And Elliot froze.

  The gun faltered in his grip as water seeped from beneath the bathroom door. Not just water. Water mixed with blood. He shot forward. “I don’t care if you’re naked, doc. I’m coming in.”

  Elliot shouldered his way into the brightly lit bathroom and caught sight of his next-door neighbor huddled against the wall. Ice worked through him as he took in her soaked long blond hair, her stained oversize sweater and ripped black leggings, the terrified panic in her light blue eyes as she stared up at him, openmouthed.

  And the dead woman in the bathtub.

  “Oh, didn’t realize this was a party.” A hollow sensation carved itself into the pit of his stomach as he dropped the gun to his side. Terror etched deep lines around her mouth. Pressure built behind his sternum. Elliot set the gun on the counter and crouched in front of her, hands raised. Mildly aware he wore nothing but a pair of sweatpants, he ignored the urge to reach out for her. He’d take it slow. The woman in front of him wasn’t the one he’d moved next door to a year ago. This wasn’t the woman who’d caught his attention with a single smile and a six-pack of beer in her hand when she’d made the effort to introduce herself to her new neighbor. This woman was scared, vulnerable. Dangerous.

  “Who’s your friend?” he asked.

  Her gaze wandered to the body, far too distant, far too empty. Color drained from her face. “Alexis.”

  “Okay, then. First piece of the mystery solved.” Elliot framed her chin between his thumb and index finger and softened his voice. He didn’t have a whole lot of training when it came to trauma victims, but he couldn’t keep himself from touching her. “Second question. Are you the one bleeding?”

  “I’m...” She turned that ice-blue gaze back to him, her voice dropping into hollow territory. “I’m not the one bleeding.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He lowered his hand, careful of where he stepped, careful not to leave prints. He’d barged into the middle of an active crime scene. A crime scene where the most trusting woman he’d known stood in the center. There’d been a struggle, that much was clear. Things had obviously gotten out of hand, but he needed to hear the rest from her. He’d learned to trust his instincts a long time ago, and something about the scene, about Waylynn’s scream a few minutes ago, didn’t sit right. He pointed to the bathtub. “Last question. Why is there a dead woman in your tub?”

  “I don’t remember. It’s all a blur. I woke up facedown on the bathroom floor. Water and—” she shuddered, wrapping her arms tighter around her middle “—blood were spilling over the edge of the bathtub. I got up and then I saw her. I screamed.” Tears streamed down her cheeks and she wiped at them with the back of her long, thin fingers. She worked to swallow, her knees pressed against her chest, hands shaking. She blinked against the brightness of the lighting. “It’s Alexis. Alexis Jacobs. She’s my assistant at the lab.”

  Genism Corporation’s lab. The largest, most profitable biotech company in Alaska. Also one of the military’s biggest prospects for genetic testing, from what Elliot had learned, because Dr. Waylynn Hargraves herself had put them on the map. Advancing their research by decades according to recent publicity, she’d proven the existence of something called the warrior gene, a strand of DNA that ultimately predicted violent behavior.

  Elliot scanned the scene again. Her research would’ve come in use right about now.

  He dragged his thumb along her cheekbone, focused entirely on the size of her pupils and not the fact that every hair on the back of his neck had risen at the feel of her. Only a thin line of blue remained in her irises, which meant one of two things in a room this well lit. Either Waylynn had suffered a head injury during an altercation or she’d been drugged. Or both. He scanned down the long column of her throat. And found exactly what he was looking for. A tiny pinprick on the left side of her neck. The right size for a hypodermic needle. He exhaled hard. Damn it. She’d been drugged, made to look like she’d gone berserk on her assistant and then framed. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Anything to give them an idea of who’d done this. Because it sure as hell hadn’t been Waylynn.

  She blinked against the bathroom lights as though the brightness hurt. “I... I was supposed to meet Alexis here, at my apartment. She said she’d found something alarming in the recent study I oversaw at work, but she didn’t want to discuss it over the phone or at the lab. She insisted on somewhere private where we couldn’t be overheard.”

  If Waylynn had headed that study, anything alarming her assistant uncovered would’ve fallen back on her, threatened the project. But not if Alexis disappeared first. Whoever’d killed the assistant had known she and Waylynn were meeting and had planned the perfect setup, pinning his next-door neighbor as a murderer.

  “Okay. You had a meeting scheduled here,” he said. “You obviously got in your car and left the lab. Then what?”

  “I—don’t remember.” She wrapped her fingers around his arms. “Elliot, why can’t I remember?”

  “Sorry to be the one to tell you this, doc, but I think you were drugged.” He pointed at the faint angry puckered skin at the base of her throat to distract himself from the grip she had around his arms. “Hypodermic needle mark on the left side of your neck.”

  “There’re only a handful of sedatives that affect memory. Benzodiazepines mostly. We store them at the lab.” Hand automatically gravitating to the mark, she ran her fingertips over the abrasion. Her bottom lip parted from the top, attracting his attention to her mouth. That wide gaze wandered back to the tub, which absolutely destroyed her expression. Waylynn worked over sixty hours a week at the lab. Stood to reason her assistant did, too. They’d probably spent a lot of time together, gotten close. Shock smoothed the lines around her eyes. Her hands shook as she covered her mouth. “But drugging me doesn’t explain how Alexis... This can’t be happening. Not again.”

  Again? Alarm bells echoed in his head and his fight instinct clawed through him. “You know, that makes me think you killed somebody in a past life I don’t know about.”

  Movement registered from somewhere inside the apartment, and Elliot reached for the gun on the counter. The metal warmed in his hand as he barricaded the door with his back.

  V
oices thundered through the apartment. Then footsteps outside the bathroom door. “Anchorage PD! We received a disturbance call from one of your neighbors. Is anyone here?” a distinct feminine voice asked.

  “I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had this much excitement since getting shot at a few months ago.” This night was getting better by the minute, yet Waylynn hadn’t moved. “I don’t mean to alarm you, doc, but I think the police are here. And they’re probably going to arrest you.”

  “Elliot, I think I killed her.” Waylynn’s fingernails dug into his arms harder. “I think I killed Alexis.”

  Copyright © 2019 by Natascha Jaffa

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Witness in the Woods by Michele Hauf.

  Witness in the Woods

  by Michele Hauf

  Chapter One

  Joseph Cash raced toward the admittance doors of St. Luke’s emergency room. He’d driven furiously from Lake Seraphim the moment he’d heard the dispatcher’s voice announce that an elderly Indian man near death had been found crawling at the edge of County Road 7. A young couple had spotted him, pulled over and called the police.

  Joe had responded to Dispatch and asked if he could take the call. She’d reported back that an ambulance was already at the scene and the man was being transferred to Duluth. The patient was seizing, and the initial report had been grim. They couldn’t know if he’d arrive alive or dead.

  The description the dispatcher had given Joe could have been that of any elderly Native American. Sun-browned skin, long dark hair threaded with gray and pulled into a ponytail. Estimated age around eighty.

  But Joe instinctually knew who the man was. His heart had dropped when he’d heard the location where the man had been found climbing up out of the ditch on all fours. That was the one place Max Owen had used to rendezvous with Joe when he brought him provisions, because from there it was a straight two-mile hike through the thick Boundary Waters to where he’d camped every summer for twenty years in a little tent at the edge of a small lake.

  Joe hadn’t seen Max since June, two months earlier. He’d looked well, though his dry cough had grown more pronounced over the past year. Max had attributed it to the bad habit of smoking when he’d been a teenager. If anything happened to end that old man before Joe could see him—no, he mustn’t think like that.

  Now he entered the too-bright, fluorescent-lit hallway of the ER intake area. Three people queued before the admissions desk, waiting to be assessed for triage. Normally, Joe would respectfully wait his turn, as he had occasion to check in on patients he’d brought here himself while on duty as a conservation officer with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

  Fingers curling impatiently in and out of his fists, he stepped from foot to foot. He couldn’t wait. If the emergency crew hadn’t been certain about Max’s condition...

  “The Native American man who was brought in,” he said over the head of a stooped elderly woman at the front of the line.

  The male nurse behind the bulletproof glass glanced up and, at the sight of Joe, smiled. Though weariness etched the nurse’s brow, his eyes glinted. “Hey, handsome, who you looking for?”

  “An old man was found on County Road 7 about forty-five minutes ago. Dispatch says they brought him here.” He wore the conservation officer’s green jacket over his matching forest-green cotton shirt, so he had the official gear to grant him authority. But it probably wouldn’t matter, Joe decided, as the nurse winked at him.

  “Please, I don’t mean to interrupt, ma’am.” Joe flashed a smile at the old woman who was giving him the stink eye. “I think I know him. I can provide identification. He’s eighty-two, Native American...” Joe thought about it less than a moment, then clasped his fingers at his neck. “And he always wore an eagle talon on a leather choker at his neck.”

  The nurse nodded. “We got your guy.” He glanced at the computer screen before him and then muttered, “Oh.”

  That single utterance dropped Joe’s heart to his gut. Because he knew. The nurse didn’t need to say anything more.

  Wincing through the sudden rise of sadness that welled in his chest, Joe nodded toward the doors that led to the treatment rooms. The nurse touched the security button, which released the lock on the doors, and Joe dashed through, calling back a mumbled thanks.

  He hadn’t bothered to ask for a room number. There were only two rooms designated for those bodies that awaited the coroner’s visit. He knew that from previous visits. Walking swiftly down the hallway, he beat a fist into his palm as he neared the first room. The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows. All the curtains had been pulled, and no light behind them shone out.

  “Officer?” A short blonde nurse in maroon scrubs appeared by his side and looked up at him. She smelled like pink bubblegum.

  “I heard the dispatch call on the old man,” Joe said. “I may be able to identify him.”

  “Excellent. We thought he was a John Doe. I’ll just need your badge and name for our records. Why don’t you step inside the room and take a look to confirm your guess while I grab some forms?”

  “Is he...? When did he—?”

  “He was DOA. Dr. Preston called it ten minutes ago. Presented as ingestion of a poisonous substance, but we’re waiting for the coroner to do a thorough workup. I’ll be right back!”

  She was too cheery, but then Joe had learned that the ER sported all ranges of personalities, and it was those who exuded cheer who survived longest the grueling emotional toll such work forced upon them. Either that, or she was faking it to get through yet another endless shift.

  He opened the sliding door, which glided too quietly, and stepped inside the room. Though the body on the bed was covered from head to toe with a white sheet, he just knew. The ten-year-old boy inside him shook his head and sucked in his lower lip. Not fair. Why Max?

  Carefully, Joe tugged back the sheet from the head. Recognition seized his heart. He caught a gasp at the back of his throat.

  “Oh, Max.” Joe swore softly and gripped the steel bed rail. The man had been so kind to him over the years. He was literally the reason Joe currently worked for the DNR.

  Poison? But how? It made no sense.

  The sudden arrival of the nurse at his side startled him. She moved like a mouse, fast and stealthily.

  “Sorry.” She handed him a clipboard and then turned on a low light over the bed. “Just need your signature. Do you recognize the deceased?”

  “I do.” Joe scribbled his name and badge number on the standard form and handed it back to her. “His name is Maximilien Owen and he’s Chippewa. The Fond du Lac band. Doesn’t live on the Fond du Lac reservation, though. Hasn’t associated closely with his tribe for decades. Eighty-two years old. Has never seen a doctor a day in his life. I thought he was healthy, though he’d had a dry cough of late. Are you sure it was poison?”

  “That was the initial assessment. You know these Native Americans have herbs and plants they use for rituals and whatnot. Probably ate the wrong plant or something. It’s very sad,” she added.

  Joe lifted a brow. She had no idea.

  “Max would never eat the wrong plant,” Joe insisted. “He lived off the land his entire life. He knew the Boundary Waters like no one else. His dad used to be a tracker in the Vietnam War, and he taught Max everything he knew.”

  “Oh, that’s touching.”

  She wasn’t in the mood to hear the old man’s life story, and Joe wasn’t going to gift her with Max’s wonderful tale. He pegged her cheery attitude as a false front.

  “I’m going to stick around for the coroner,” he said. “I want an autopsy.”

  The nurse’s jaw dropped. “Do you...know his family? We don’t usually...”

  “He didn’t have family. I’ll pay for the autopsy. This is important.”

  Joe wasn’t about to let the old man be filed away as
an accidental poisoning. That was not Max. At all. Something wasn’t right. And Joe would not rest until it was confirmed that Max’s death had been natural—or not.

  Two weeks later...

  BURNING CEDARWOOD SWEETENED the air better than any fancy department store perfume Skylar Davis had ever smelled. Pine and elm kindling crackled in the bonfire before her. A refreshingly cool August breeze swept in from the lake not thirty yards away and caressed her shoulders. She breathed in, closing her eyes, and hugged the heavy white satin wedding dress against her chest.

  It was time to do this.

  Beside her on the grass, alert and curious, sat Stella, the three-year-old timber wolf she’d rescued as a pup. Skylar could sense the wolf’s positive, gentle presence. The wolf was there for her. No matter what.

  She opened her eyes and then dropped the wedding dress onto the fire. Smoke coiled. Sparks snapped. Stella sounded an are-you-sure-about-this yip.

  “Has to be done, Stella. I can’t move forward any other way.”

  Using a long, charred oak stick peeled clean of bark—her father’s fire-poking stick—she nudged the lacy neckline of the dress deeper into the flames. The tiny pearls glowed, then blackened, and the lace quickly melted. The frothy concoction, woven with hopes and dreams—and a whole lot of reckless abandon—meant little to her now.

  Stepping back to stand beside Stella, Skylar planted the tip of the fire-poking stick in the ground near her boot and nodded. She should have done this two months earlier—that Saturday afternoon when she’d found herself marching into the county courthouse with hell in her eyes and fury in her heart. An unexpected conversation with her uncle an hour earlier had poked through her heart and left it ragged.