Echoes of Home: Sweet, Small-Town Romantic Suspense (Heart Lake Book 12) by Jo Grafford

Author:Jo Grafford [Grafford, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JG PRESS
Published: 2024-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Ten minutes earlier

The portable morgue van idled motionless in the long train of vehicles outside the Heart Lake Medical Center. Its driver tapped the steering wheel restlessly. It had been several minutes since the last time he’d moved. Even then, it had only been a car length or two.

At this rate, it could take another hour or longer before reaching his final destination with the two bodies he was returning. In a manner of speaking. They were strapped with explosives, so they wouldn’t be back inside the medical center for long.

They were the wrong corpses. He wasn’t sure how he’d snatched the John and Jane Doe by mistake. He’d been very careful with his planning and reconnaissance of the medical center’s lower level. He’d checked and rechecked the body tags. Then he’d checked them a third time just because. There was no way he’d gotten them mixed up.

Unless…

An idea grew and blossomed in his mind, filling him with raw fury. There shouldn’t have been more than two sets of mummified remains at the morgue. There were no others besides Iris and Jesse Hawling on record. But what if Dr. Hawling had been one step ahead of him yet again? In the past, she’d proven to be as clever as a fox and as slippery as an eel. He should’ve anticipated her subterfuge.

She and her Comanche friends hadn’t needed any blasted blood tests to prove what they already knew. Though their savage rituals and oral histories were often dismissed by the rest of humanity as fables and myths, those same “fables” and “myths” had managed to preserve the Hildebrand-Hawling lineage. Yeah, the attorney in New York would probably require an official blood test before doling out the money, but Bliss and her cronies could’ve easily skipped the rest of the dog and pony show they were putting on.

Who knew? Maybe she’d allowed their foolish town sheriff to talk her into it. Maybe smuggling an extra pair of mummified bodies into the lab had been his idea, too. At this point, none of that really mattered. There was only one way to fix this. He was going to destroy the lab containing the DNA markers. Then he was going to take Bliss Hawling out of the picture, once and for all.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel again, hating that every entrance into the parking lot was jammed with cars trying to enter from multiple directions. The only thing that had bypassed the line so far was an ambulance that had flown past him on the shoulder, lights flashing and sirens screaming. The parking lot attendants had waved it into a special lane marked with orange cones for authorized personnel only.

A flash of movement from the corner of his eye made him glance into his side-view mirror. He watched as a white police cruiser zoomed around the line, using the shoulder like the ambulance had. The cruiser was stopped by one of the parking lot attendants.

The officer at the wheel rolled his window down and leaned out to speak with the man in the neon orange vest.

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