Page 39 of Forever Dark
She turned to practical ground instead.“We should split up.”
Connor’s head came around.“What?”
“We’ll cover more ground that way.”
Something in him cooled.“Right.”
Selena kept her voice even.“You’ve got better local footing.Ask around.See if anyone saw Brenda, or anyone else, skulking around the old church lately.”
Connor looked at her, annoyance just visible behind his eyes now.Then he nodded once.“I’ll look into local resources.I’ll ask around.If anything hits, I’ll get back to you.What are you going to do?”he asked.
Selena opened her car door.“Go over the case files again.Think through a strategy to canvass the area with limited sources.I might visit the coroner and see if he’s found anything new.”
“I should come with you, he’s a bit of a character.”
“No thanks.”Selena’s words sounded harsher than she meant them to be.
Connor rolled his eyes.“Whatever you say.”
The remark scraped.
She chose not to bite.
Connor got into his SUV, then paused with the door still open.“If you’re really just going to kick dust so you don’t have to be around me, you should go see Jessie or your dad.”
Selena looked over at him sharply.
He pointed upward toward the fading sky.“It’ll be getting dark sooner rather than later.Remember you’re back in the country now.”
Then he pulled the door shut and drove off.
Selena stood beside her rental car for a moment, watching the sheriff’s SUV disappear up the road.
Annoyance rose first at his remark about Jessie and her dad.
Then the worst truth came behind it.
Connor was probably right.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The county morgue sat at the end of a narrow service road behind the old municipal building, half-hidden by a row of bare maples and a loading bay that looked as if it hadn’t been painted since the seventies.
Selena pulled up outside and killed the engine.
For a moment, she stayed where she was.
The building was brick, two stories, with narrow windows and a slate roof patched in three different shades.A rusted sign near the side entrance read COUNTY MEDICAL SERVICES, though someone had scraped away part of the lettering so it now looked less like a department and more like a warning.
She checked the time on her phone.
Connor had warned her that the coroner was an acquired taste.
That was fine.But she resented the implication that she couldn’t handle it.She didn’t need him to hold her hand through a morgue visit.She had dealt with coroners before.She had stood beside bodies in better facilities and worse ones.She had watched city pathologists work in glass-walled labs with digital recorders clipped to their coats, and she had watched rural doctors make do with bad lighting, old tables, and the kind of silence that got into your teeth.
Still, as she stepped out into the cold, the place made her hesitate.
Not fear.Irritation.
