“And you didn’t tell the police?”
“I don’t like Ms. Duncan,” Heidi said. “Besides, they only asked if I’d seen any strangers around. Aaron wasn’t a stranger.”
No, of course not. “So you went with Cressida and Harold to Six Flags—” I should have suspected that something was wrong when I heard that, because it hadn’t seemed like something she’d do, and I had in fact suspected that something was wrong, but I had believed Heidi when she told me that Harold had made her go, “—and Aaron broke in, and Harold reported the gun missing because you’d already taken it away before Aaron could.”
She nodded. “And when I realized that Harold knew I’d killed Carly, I used it to shoot him. I got coffee on my negligee when he dropped his mug, so I had to go in the kitchen and drop my own, too.”
“What did you do with the gun?” Surely Mendoza must have looked for it in the house.
“Gave it to Aaron,” Heidi said.
“What did Aaron do with it?”
She shrugged. “When I talked to him yesterday, it was still under the seat in his car.”
In that case, I guess Mendoza would find it when he got around to searching the Jeep. And at least I could take some comfort in the fact that Heidi wasn’t planning to shoot me. “I guess you told Aaron to go up on top of the hill across from Harold’s office last night, too, and shoot at us.”
“Of course,” Heidi said. “But he wasn’t supposed to hurt us. Only make it look like Tara was guilty. He dropped the gun off in her backyard afterwards.”
“I know,” I said. “Mendoza already found it. He was over there this morning, with a search warrant.”
“Good.” She smiled pleasantly.
“So what happens now? I mean… you just told me what you did. And you can’t expect me not to share it with Mendoza. He knows you’re here.”
“But he’s on his way to Aaron’s apartment to look for clues,” Heidi said. “By the time he gets here, it’ll be too late.”
A chill started at the back of my neck and crept down my spine. “Too late for what?”
“To tell him anything.” She smiled sweetly. “The wine was full of drugs. The same stuff I gave Carly. By the time Detective Mendoza gets here, you’ll be out cold. Or maybe dead. It didn’t take long last time.”
Another chill made its way down my back. At this point I was no longer sure it was the cool rationality of her voice. My tongue was starting to feel a little thick, and it was difficult to form the words. “You came here to kill me?” If the drugs had already been in the wine when she knocked on the door, there couldn’t be much doubt about that.
“Of course,” Heidi said.
“How’d you know I’d go for the white wine? What if I’d chosen the red instead?”
“I would have given you the red,” Heidi said.
“You mean, they’re both poisoned?”
She nodded.
“So you’re killing yourself, too.”
“Of course.” She sounded perfectly complacent about it. “I don’t want to go to prison. And I don’t think I’d enjoy life as a fugitive.”
Probably not. But— “Why me? What did I do?”
“This is all your fault,” Heidi said. “You were supposed to be the witness that saw Tara outside Somerset just after Harold was shot, and you were supposed to believe that Tara shot at us last night. I had it all figured out. Tara was going to go to prison, and the brat to juvie, or maybe into foster care, and things were going to go back to the way they were.”
“Except Harold would be dead.” It was definitely getting harder to form the words. Or for that matter to think in coherent sentences.
“Don’t matter,” Heidi answered, and her words were starting to slur, too. She was leaning back against the sofa, and her eyes were at half mast. If I were going to make a move, now was the time. Before I lost consciousness completely, and it was too late.
I looked at the lovely antique Persian rug on the floor, the one that had cost David many thousands of dollars. It was a damn shame to ruin it. But even if Heidi would have let me get up and move somewhere else, I wasn’t sure I could manage. My extremities—feet and fingers—were starting to go numb. I had to use one hand to brace the other, and then bend my head to get my mouth to where I wanted it—or not exactly wanted, because there was no part of me that wanted to do this; I just didn’t want to die more…
The wine came up, and so did everything I’d had for lunch. Right onto David’s antique rug. Heidi didn’t stir, so she must already be going under. She’d had more to drink than me, since I’d spent some of the time on the phone with Mendoza.
Mendoza…
It seemed to take an eternity for my thoughts to make the circuit of my brain. Eventually I lifted a limp hand—it took two tries—and managed to knock the phone onto the floor. There was no way I could have picked it up and held it. And luckily, it landed on a different part of the carpet than where I’d lost my lunch. I flipped it over—that took two tries, too—but from there it was easy, or fairly easy, to push the buttons.
It rang. A few seconds passed, and then I heard his voice. “Mrs. Kelly.”
“Det…” I couldn’t get the word out.
His voice changed immediately. “I’m almost there.”
He was?
“Just hang on. Are you hurt?”
“Drrrr…” I tried, and found that wrapping my tongue around the pronunciation of ‘drugged’ was too much. “Poi…”
He said another bad word, the same one as earlier. “Three minutes. I’ll call an ambulance. Can you make it to the door?”
“No idea,” I said. It came out sounding more like Noah. I was willing to try, though. So when Mendoza told me to hang on, he was on his way, I grunted something and let the phone lie where it was, and started dragging myself toward the hallway and the front door.
Heidi still hadn’t stirred, and part of my brain—the part that was functioning at above the lizard stage—wondered whether I could make my way over to her so I could stick my finger down her throat, too. The other part just focused on getting to the door.
It took all of the three minutes Mendoza had promised before I got there. And then it took several more seconds while I balanced on my knees and braced myself on the wall to get up where I could turn the locks and unfasten the chain. By then, I could hear the sirens come closer. By the time I had managed to drag the door open, the gray sedan had come to a squealing stop behind the Porsche. Mendoza jumped out and ran, as the ambulance took the turn into the driveway on two wheels and powered up the drive.
Chapter 20
”She’s going to make it,” Mendoza said three hours later.
I was still at the hospital, but getting ready to leave. Because I’d done a good job of emptying my own stomach, it hadn’t needed to be pumped. Heidi was not so lucky. By the time Mendoza and the EMTs got to her, she was unresponsive. She’d had more poisoned wine than me, either by accident or design, and while activated charcoal—according to Mendoza—is the preferred method of dealing with overdoses these days, Heidi was far enough gone that extreme measures were necessary. So they hauled her off to the hospital and did the whole stomach tube thing. All I had to do was swallow some charcoal to make sure all the drugs were absorbed and out of my system before they let me go.
By then, Mendoza had already taken a statement as to what had happened, and had abandoned me to the tender mercies of the hospital staff while he hovered over Heidi to see whether he’d get the opportunity to arrest her.
I honestly wasn’t sure whether I hoped she’d survive or not. She’d tried to kill me, so I’d be OK with her paying for that. And she’d killed Harold and Carly, and tried to put the blame on both Aaron and Tara. She ought to pay for that, too. But she was absolutely going to hate to spend the next fifty years in prison, and in her place, I probably would have wanted to die just so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.
That was clearly what Heidi had wanted, since it was what she had tried to bring about.
As a result, when Mendoza came through the door and told me she was going to make it, I wasn’t sure how to respond.
Luckily, he didn’t wait for a response, just wandered closer and looked me up and down. “Going somewhere?”
I was back in the clothes I’d been wearing earlier, and they were a little worse for wear. When I got back to Hillwood, I planned to burn them. But right now, I had nothing else with me.
“Home,” I said. “I’m waiting for my ride.”
He contemplated me for a second, head to one side. “I would have driven you home.”
“That’s kind of you. But I didn’t want to assume.” And I hadn’t been sure he’d be ready to go when I was. He was working. “I called a friend.”
“Greg Newsome?”
“No,” I said. Greg was the last person—or second to last person, anyway—I wanted to see me like this.
Unfortunately, the last person I would have wanted to see me like this had been the first through the door. Although that was partly my own fault, since I’d called him.
Right now he was giving me a politely inquiring look. “Rachel,” I added.
Mendoza nodded. “You’re looking better.”
“I could hardly look worse,” I told him. “When you walked in, I looked like death warmed over.”
He didn’t correct me, so I guess I must have. I added, “But I do feel better. Less like I’m going to die any moment.”
“The doctor says you’re going to be fine. No side effects of anything.”
Good to know. “You arrested Heidi?”
“I’ll make it official as soon as she’s awake and aware and can hear me. For now, she’s handcuffed to the side rail of the bed.”
After a second he added, “Not that she’s in any condition to go anywhere.”
No. “Hard to believe she’d actually try to kill herself.”
“She’s not the type who’d do well on the run,” Mendoza said.
“That’s what she told me. But I would have expected her to try to get away with it. Not to give up.”
“She got away with it for thirteen years,” Mendoza said, with a snap of strong, white teeth. “That’s long enough.”
No arguing with that. “I’m glad you didn’t go through with searching Aaron’s apartment and car when you told me you were going to. If you hadn’t already been on your way when I called, I’m not sure I would have made it.”
“You would have been fine,” Mendoza said, and continued before I could say anything, “but as soon as you told me Heidi was there, getting to you took precedent over searching Aaron’s place. If he hadn’t taken the gun, she would have had to. Or Harold, but he was the one who ended up dead.”
“So you knew then that she was guilty. And you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want you to say anything that might give it away,” Mendoza explained. “At that point I didn’t realize she’d come to kill you. I thought she might if you said the wrong thing, so I tried to make sure you wouldn’t say the wrong thing, but I didn’t think she’d do it anyway. And I didn’t want to scare you by telling you what I suspected.”
“A little warning might have been nice. I wouldn’t have had any of the wine if I’d known.”
“If you’d refused the wine,” Mendoza said, “she would have suspected you knew something, and would have tried to kill you in some other way.”
Maybe so. “It worked out all right, anyway. Although this is the third time someone has put something in my drink to try to knock me out. I’m going to have to be more careful about who I accept food and drink from, from now on.”
“You could start with Greg Newsome,” Mendoza suggested, and turned toward the door just as it opened, before I had the chance to say anything. “Rachel.”
He nodded politely as Rachel burst into the room. She barely took the time to glance at him before she beelined for me, her eyes worried. “Are you OK, Gina?”
“Fine,” I said, my eyes on the guy who’d come in with her. He stepped to the side, and took up station beside the door, as far away from me as he could get.
It made no difference, of course. I still recognized him. “Daniel?”
He nodded. Semi-politely. “Gina.”
I turned an outraged look on Rachel, but before I had time to say anything, she told me, “I told you it was none of your business.”
“You’re dating my—” no-good sponge of a “—brother-in-law, and you think it’s none of my business?”
“We’re adults,” Rachel said, “are we not?”
She and I certainly were. Daniel, I wasn’t so sure about.
“You’re dating Daniel?!”
Daniel shuffled from one foot to the other. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he looked embarrassed. “Now, Gina…” he rumbled.
Rachel, meanwhile, put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “We were on our way to dinner when you called. If you don’t want help, we’ll just keep going.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that she could just do that, I’d call a cab, when Mendoza got in ahead of me. “You go ahead, Rachel. I’ll take Mrs. Kelly home.”
His voice was uneven with what was probably laughter.
“Thank you, Jaime.” Rachel smiled benevolently at him, before turning a scowl on me. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Gina.”
Her tone made it clear that this was a threat, not a promise. And before I could respond, she took Daniel by the arm and swept him out the door. It shut with a careful deliberation that was as loud as a slam.
I winced. Mendoza looked like he was having trouble keeping a straight face. “Maybe we should wait a minute before we follow them?” he suggested.
I nodded. “I think that’d be a good idea.”
“Just let me know when you’re ready.” He sat down on the edge of the bed next to me and folded his hands.
I looked at the door and counted slowly backwards from a hundred.
About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jenna Bennett (Jennie Bentley) has written more than 40 books, most of them in the mystery and suspense genres. She lives in Music City - Nashville, Tennessee - with a husband and two boys, plus an ever-changing array of critters.
For more information, please visit her website,
www.jennabennett.com
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Copyright © 2020 by Bente Gallagher
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