Morgan took a cleansing breath, inhaling artificially cooled air and the lingering scent of antiseptic. This was familiar territory.
Quiet calm settled over her as she walked into the room and saw the corpse laid out on a stainless steel table before her. The part of her brain that dealt with the living went still so the other part could get to work.
She read the body methodically. Starting at the periphery, working in.
She confirmed the forum details one by one. Male, forty to fifty. Well-maintained—the haircut recent, the nails clean, the skin of his hands smooth in the way of someone who worked indoors. A desk worker, or something adjacent. But not entirely soft. There was a small thickening on the web of his dominant hand, the kind of callus that came from regular grip work—a weapon, probably, maintained through practice rather than use. This man was trained.
No obvious trauma. No signs of struggle. No defensive wounds, bruising, or contusions.
Conscious of the time ticking away, she worked the neck, the inner arms, the spaces between fingers quickly and efficiently. Then, at the hairline behind the left ear—there. Small. Very small. A pinhole, faint bruising around the periphery, the signature of a fine-gauge injection delivered with precision by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
Morgan looked at it for a long moment. Another piece of information, useless without corroborating evidence.
She looked at the chart. Cause of death—cardiac event. She checked for the markers a genuine one would leave—petechial hemorrhaging, specific patterns of physiological distress—and found none. Their absence was as definitive as their presence would have been.
Whatever had stopped this man's heart, it hadn't been his heart deciding to stop.
She straightened. Made notes in the plain notebook she'd brought. Stepped back.
The door opened, right on time, and the attractive woman in the white lab coat stepped in. “Time’s up.”
Morgan removed her gloves, tucking them into a bag she’d brought with her. “I’m done. Thank you.”
The woman’s expression was cautiously curious. “Find what you were looking for?”
“I've seen what I needed.”
She had. And something else, too—a nagging pull at the edge of recognition. The set of the jaw. The angle of the brow. She'd seen the dead man’s face before. Somewhere, in some context, that had nothing to do with Pine Ridge.
Or had it?
The question remained at the forefront of her thoughts as she crossed the street and approached the SUV. Patrick was exactly where she'd left him.
She got in the car, taking a moment to appreciate the scents of leather seats and whatever made Patrick smell so good.
“Well?” he asked.
“It wasn't a medical event,” she said firmly. “I found an injection site behind the left ear.”
“Like from a needle?”
“Or a dart. Fine gauge, precisely placed. Someone knew exactly what they were doing.” She looked at the building. “The ruling is wrong.”
“Deliberately wrong, or not the kind of thing a small town ME would look for wrong?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask your friend in there,” she said, hating the edge in her own voice.
Patrick seemed taken aback. “She's not—she's my cousin Declan's friend, not mine.” He spoke the words carefully—deliberately—with a softness she hadn’t heard before.
Morgan looked at him. Caught the flicker of some emotion she hadn’t been prepared to see. He cared what she thought.
“I wasn't—” she started.
“I know,” he said, easily. “I’m just saying. She’s Declan's friend. That's all.”
She looked out the window. “Okay.”
“Okay.”