CHAPTER
THIRTY

Georgetown
Dr. Samantha Owens

Sam didn’t like funerals.

No one does, she knew that. But she’d developed a deep and abiding discomfort of wakes and processionals and graveside tears when she was a kid, at the funeral for a childhood friend who’d been hit by a car, and it had never gone away. Her job was to uncover the cause of death, not to see the person into the ground. Not experience the agony of the people left behind.

And yet here she was, one of the left behind.

With everything that had happened, she honestly didn’t know if she could manage to get through the afternoon. It was too soon. She wasn’t ready to face a hole in the ground. And she knew she wasn’t ready to bury Donovan, either.

But she didn’t have that luxury. Susan and Eleanor needed her. So instead of putting her head in the sand and waiting for the day after tomorrow, she was on M Street, walking into White House|Black Market to find an appropriate black dress to wear.

She’d rescheduled her flight home so she could stay for a few more days. Called work and told them she was taking a week of vacation. But she only had three days’ worth of clothes, and nothing appropriate for Arlington. Susan had offered to let her go through her closet, but she didn’t feel right about that. She and Susan were the same dress size, but there was something really creepy about wearing your ex’s wife’s clothes to his funeral. Sam had demurred, and set out for a walk down the hill, knowing she would amble by plenty of shops on the way.

Sam used to love to shop. That was another thing loss did to you, it stole your pleasures. But the day was sunny, the air filled with the scent of flowers, and she was surprised to find herself enjoying the outing. She found several pieces that she liked, along with some shoes that were more appropriate than her clogs or loafers.

Walking back up Wisconsin with her bags slung over her shoulder, she ran through the case in her head. She felt like everything had stagnated. She couldn’t break the code in Donovan’s journals. She’d left three unreturned messages with Detective Fletcher. Her cursory search into the whereabouts of Donovan’s friend Xander had turned up nothing. Short of driving up to the Savage River and asking around for him, she was at a loss for what to do next. And if this man was responsible for the death of two men, she couldn’t particularly go running toward him. Instead, she wanted to back away, away from everything going on, from her cruel emotions, the hurt she was digging up like pieces of shrapnel caught deep under her skin.

Think like a detective, like Taylor, Sam. What would Taylor do?

She wouldn’t back away. She’d charge forward, heedlessly even, and solve the case. But that’s why she was who she was, and Sam, well, that’s why she was a pathologist. Charging forward had never really been a part of her personal lexicon.

Sam was a cautious woman. To the point that she took pride in the fact that she always looked before she leaped. She thought things through, measured the cost, the impact, the consequences, before acting. Spontaneity was not her strong suit.

Yet here she was in D.C., forging through a murder investigation without a road map. Simon would have laughed at her. He was as cautious as she. It must have something to do with their chosen professions: she a pathologist, he a geneticist. There was comfort in the explained, the immutable constants of science, for both of them.

His death wasn’t explainable. The death of the twins wasn’t explainable. Her own miscarriage right before she lost her whole family wasn’t explainable.

So why did she keep trying to find answers in that which was utterly without reason?

Sam felt her breath coming fast.

Shit.

She dropped the bags on the street in front of her and pulled the antibacterial gel from her purse.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four.

God, the urge had snuck up on her, laying her bare in front of this street full of strangers. She couldn’t help that, ignored their curious glances, just scrubbed and scrubbed until her hands were dry, then poured more gel in her palms and did it all over.

Simon. Matthew. Madeline.

Donovan.

She stopped short when she realized she’d added him into her frantic prayer.

Breathe.

Open your eyes.

Cars driving by, the construction workers on the corner, the scrambling students hurrying past on their way to class. Slowly the real world came back. She looked to her left and realized she was standing at the base of the Georgetown University steps.

How many times had she stood in this very spot? Meeting friends before a night on the town carousing, exchanging study notes, sneaking kisses with Donovan, taking a breather after a run. The memories flooded her like waves on a beach, relentlessly crashing into the hard sand.

The code in Donovan’s journal.

He was referencing dates. Dates that corresponded to their time together at Georgetown.

As if he’d known Sam was going to see his journals one day.

She shook her head and sat down on the second step from the bottom. Think, Sam. That was crazy. That wasn’t it. You’re being narcissistic.

And then it hit her.

He wasn’t sending her a message. He was sending them to himself.

She sat there for a few minutes, letting the pages of the journal run through her head. She remembered …. Her breath caught. All the tumblers fell into place, and the vault in her mind opened wide.

The code she thought she was seeing wasn’t a code, per se. They were memories. Memories. That’s how he wrote his journal, covering the parts of his days that seemed so mundane, interspersed with memories. Now that she had that, she could see they certainly didn’t all refer to her, though some did, especially recently. But there were many, many moments he’d captured.

The elegance of his system made her smile. But my God, forty years of memories … Whatever was referenced on the missing pages could have been anything, from any time in his life.

Donovan had never been shy about the fact that he journaled. He used to talk about the process with their friends. He told them emptying his mind of what was there, regardless of topic or length, helped him sleep, so he did it every night, even when he was drunk, or so tired he couldn’t get the pen to run along the page properly.

That’s when Sam bought him the fountain pen. She thought it might be more fun for him to write with than a cheap blue Bic ballpoint.

Those close to him knew he wrote in Latin, but she couldn’t imagine him telling too many people that fact. Despite the teasing way he’d lorded it over them in school, to share such a detail with just anyone smacked of arrogance, and while Donovan had always had machismo to spare, he wasn’t a braggart.

Someone knew that he’d written down something incriminating, and had determined that they needed to stop him from sharing. So they broke into the house and stole the incriminating pages from the journal.

If she was right, if that theory held together, the culprit must be someone very close.

Or … when he received the note, he tore the pages out himself and destroyed them.

God, she felt like she was running in circles. She picked up her bags and started up the street, anxious to get back and look through the journal one more time. She couldn’t help but wonder again about the people he worked with at Raptor, and the men he’d served with. His death wasn’t random. Whoever had killed him was someone he knew well.

Sam needed to read Donovan’s journals from the time he was overseas with the unit comprised of the five men in the picture. See what story they had to tell. Susan had gone into the footlocker in the attic last night and pulled three dark red leather diaries from the pile. They were waiting for Sam back at the house.

The closer she got to the answers, the farther away she felt. But at least she had an idea of what to look for now. Leave it to Donovan to scatter a trail of bread crumbs, no matter how purposeful or unwittingly he’d done so.