Page 14 of Blood
“I’m a coroner,” he replies dryly.
“Who also works as the town’s only doctor. It’s either that or you don’t get your money.”
A minute of silence stretches between us. This dick really thinks I didn’t check him out before approaching him three months ago.
“I don’t like it,” he finally adds.
And I don’t like you.The previous coroner had been honorable, a good man. His replacement, not so much. This one has a gambling addiction and morals for sale. I’m stuck with him for now. Once I find her, he might just go missing.
“And I don’t like paying ten thousand a month, yet here we are. Now, have you found anything?”
“I’ll have to charge more than normal, taxes and stuff,” he mumbles, still negotiating, but I’m done.
“I don’t care. Charge what you want. Did you find her?”
Sam fills my vision, waving at me through the office windows. My throat feels thick. Two women who I’m obsessed with and neither one that I can have.
The woman who birthed me and the woman I live for, my sister. Adopted or not, that’s what she is.
But I’m not adopted, am I? My birth mother hadn’t cared enough to find me after I ran from her pimp. And even with all the money and resources the Cromwells have, they’ve never been able to find her.
Didn’t help she would leave the game for whatever man wanted her, uprooting us from home to home, never staying for more than a year or two. If we were lucky.
And then there’s the fact that she might already be dead.
Blinking, I turn away from Sam.
Helen and Christopher took in an angry, scared boy and showed me love. My brothers showed me how to be at peace with who I am.
“No,” Brown says. “The states had thousands of Jane Does in the past ten years alone. I’ve only managed to check records going back a few years, but none of them match your description.”
“She’ll be different now.”
“I know, I know. I checked. I even widened the scope you gave me. No females between forty and fifty, which is what she’d be now. Well, one came into the hospital the week before last, but it wasn’t her.”
I’m actually going to kill him.
“Did you go look at her?”
“No!” he screeches. “You can’t just go around looking at dead people in other morgues. Not even in my job. I looked at the pictures on their system. I used to work there, and they never revoked my access.”
I know.It was the second reason I picked him. He can look at places others can’t.
“She was O negative. You said the woman who you’re looking for was AB positive. Right?”
“Yes.”
A memory of my mother being beaten by a John when I was seven assaults me. It had been bad, worse than usual. We’d had to go to the emergency room, and a sweet lady had let me sit at the nurses’ station and color. She’d complimented my neat coloring and steady hand; said I’d make a good doctor.
I smirk. She wasn’t wrong. I am good with knives and have even used a scalpel a few times. I’d seen my mother’s chart, colored on it. She was AB positive.
“Well, she can’t change that. It wasn’t her.” He pauses briefly before asking, “What billing info do you want to use?”
I roll my eyes and catch sight of Sam and Shelby heading this way. Great, now both of them are bored.
I reel off my home address and reach for my wallet. Flipping it open the same time Sam nudges the office door open just enough to poke her head in.
“Are you done?” she whispers.
