3 Fat Chance

by Rhonda Pollero

  Liam loomed behind her. I felt his eyes scan my entire body, and then some of the deep lines between his brows relaxed. “There are easier ways to get out of going to class.”

  I grimaced. “Yeah. Not exactly going to win me any points with Tony.”

  There was a flash of something in Liam’s eyes, but it was gone when he asked, “So, what happened?”

  Leaving my left arm immobile—I was fine with the minimal amount of pain and was in no hurry to irritate the gash—I pressed the fingers of my right hand against my forehead. “I was late for class, probably going a little faster than the posted twenty-five-miles-per-hour limit, when I went into the on-ramp too fast and couldn’t stop.”

  “Finley,” Becky chided. “I’m sure you’ll be getting a visit from the state police accident investigators. Do not incriminate yourself by admitting you committed a moving violation. Not unless you want to pay damages to the other six cars involved in the accident.”

  “What?” I asked. “Please tell me no one was hurt. God, if I—”

  “No one was hurt,” Becky assured me.

  “But smart money says they’ll all develop whiplash as soon as they visit personal injury lawyers.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  Liam scoffed audibly. “Hit by a BMW driven by a chick with a Palm Beach address? Once they get copies of the police report, their friends and families will convince them to see ambulance chasers and chiropractors.”

  “I can’t afford to get sued,” I said, feeling fresh tears well in my eyes.

  “You’re insured, right?” Becky asked as she sat on the side of my bed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’ll be fine,” Becky reassured me. “Your insurance company will defend the suits. Worst-case scenario, they’ll raise your premiums.”

  Again, I thought. “Great.”

  A tall, lanky man dressed in designer casual wear arrived. He was thin, with expensively cut and styled brown hair and a spray-on tan. “Don Adair,” he said, grabbing up my case binder, then weaving past Liam and reaching across Becky to shake my hand.

  Becky stood and said, “Thank you for coming, Doctor. Finley, we’ll be in the waiting room and come back when you’re all stitched up.”

  Adair examined both injury sites and offered me a smile. “Nice clean edges. In three months or less, you won’t even have scars to remind you of tonight.”

  “Sounds good. How did…who contacted you?”

  “Liv Garrett called. Concierge Plus did my daughter’s sweet sixteen party.” He went to the sink, washed his hands, then collected a chrome tray with a blue cloth draped over it before rolling a stool to the left side of my bed. “Liv was amazing. Have any children?” he asked as he snapped on latex gloves and inspected the syringe, two suture kits, and scissors in vacuum-sealed casings. A nurse came in and stood by the opening of the curtains.

  “No,” I said.

  He chuckled softly. “Well, let’s just say that there wasn’t a lot of sweet in my sixteen-year-old. Don’t get me wrong,” he continued as he started work. “I love her. You might feel a little pinch from the lidocaine. But she changed party themes a dozen times and was, um, difficult, to say the least.”

  Little pinch? It burned like hell, and I had to summon up all my willpower not to yank my leg away. “Liv thrives on difficult,” I agreed through partially gritted teeth.

  “Sienna is the poster child for difficult. She’s a typical, over-indulged only child. But she’s our baby, and neither my wife nor I seem to be able to say no to her.” Dr. Adair chuckled and proceeded to sew up the cuts on my knee and my arm. After instructing me to call his secretary next week to schedule an appointment to have the stitches removed, Dr. Adair shook my hand and left.

  Now that I was all put back together, I wanted to leave. I was contemplating using the call button when two big, bulky state troopers appeared at the foot of my bed.

  Their uniforms included big gun belts with nightsticks and handcuffs that jingled with the smallest of movements. One officer, Gutierrez, had one of those faces that gave away nothing. The other one, Kasey, had a shaved head. Both men had bulging muscles that inspired instant fear.

  Kasey turned a knob on the radio clipped at his shoulder, silencing the squawk. Gutierrez followed suit. “Do you feel up to giving a statement, Miss”—he flipped open a notebook—“Tanner?”

  “Sure. But I may be a little fuzzy on the details,” I hedged.

  “Understandable,” Kasey said with a nod. “Any idea who did this?”

  Now I actually was fuzzy. “Did what?”

  Kasey frowned. “You don’t know what caused the crash?”

  My lead foot? “Not exactly, no.”

  The officers exchanged looks that gave me goose bumps.

  “What?”

  “Your car was tampered with. More specifically, the brake line was punctured. You might have tried to apply the brakes, but nothing happened?”

  “Yeah, that happened.”

  “Any thoughts on who might have wanted to do this?”

  “Couldn’t a nail or some sort of road debris have punctured the line?”

  Kasey shook his head. “A clean puncture. If your car was in motion at the time the line was cut, we would have seen ragged edges at the puncture site.”

  I shivered. “I have no idea who would do something like this.” The Panty Thief? Stealing my undies was one thing, trying to kill me another. Same guy? Different guy? Bad enough knowing one person wanted to scare me, terrifying to think there might be two of them.

  “We understand from the sherriff’s office that you had an incident at your home over the weekend, and that you recently ended a long-term relationship?” Kasey probed.

  I spent the better part of thirty minutes trying to convince the state police that there wasn’t anyone in my life, past or present, who could or would do such a thing.

  Kasey flipped his notepad closed and put his card on the tray table. “If you think of anything that might help the investigation, call me. Is there someone you can stay with when you get outta here?”

  First choice Liam, second choice, Tony. Third choice, nothing came screaming to the forefront. “Is that really necessary?”

  “Yes. Miss Tanner, someone out there wants you dead.”

  I’m not afraid of anything until something scares me.

  thirteen

  AFTER RE-DRESSING IN MY bloody clothes and signing a bunch of forms, I was taken by wheelchair to the exit where Becky’s blue hybrid—her nod to decreasing her carbon footprint—idled.

  Refusing assistance, I got into the passenger’s seat and tucked my purse on the floor behind my legs. “Thanks for hanging around,” I said. “I didn’t relish the idea of taking a taxi home.”

  “I think you should stay at my place for a while.”

  I gave her a genuinely grateful smile. “Thanks, but I’ve slept on your futon before. I’m saying this with nothing but love, but it’s like sleeping on a medieval rack.”

  “I’ll give you the bed.”

  “Not necessary. If you don’t mind taking me by my apartment, I’ll pack a bag and go stay at my mother’s.”

  “Did you suffer a major head injury? You’ll go crazy before you finish sharing your first cup of morning coffee with her.”

  “She’s out of town. Plus it’s a secure building, and I know where she keeps the spare set of keys to her Mercedes. Solves my transportation problem and provides security.”

  Becky pulled out of the hospital and steered toward my apartment. “I had one of the interns pull the surveillance tapes from the parking lot. He’s dubbing a copy for the cops and another one for me. Hopefully The Panty Thief is on the tapes.”

  I’d completely forgotten about Dane, Lieberman’s parking lot cameras. “Hopefully is right. I’m scared.”

  Becky patted my shoulder. “I know you are, honey. We’re all scared for you. We all feel useless, too.”

  “The state police think its Patrick.�
�

  Becky groaned. “They won’t after they meet him. He doesn’t have the balls for this, and like I told them, he wants you back, not dead.”

  My mind was swimming, and my thoughts fractured as each new wave of fear crashed to the forefront. “But he does know about brake lines and engines.”

  “C’mon, Finley. I loathe the guy, but even I know he’d never do anything like break into your apartment and steal your panties and leave a fake skeleton. Nor would he tamper with your car.”

  “What if he didn’t mean for the brakes to fail. Just, I don’t know, cause a fender bender? Maybe he thinks if I get scared enough, I’ll turn to him.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to call him and let him know that I am ready, willing, and able to superglue your butt to a chair to keep that from happening.”

  “You’re right, I’m being crazy. Where did Liam go?”

  “Who knows,” Becky said on a rush of breath. “Got a call on his cell, and then said he had to see a guy about a thing.”

  “God, that’s an infuriating habit.”

  “I don’t know. There’s something sexy about a man cloaked in mystery. Add that to his God-given sexiness, and he’s one fine specimen of a man. If he wasn’t interested in you, I’d be on him like a cheap suit.”

  “He is not interested in me,” I assured her.

  “He is. And you know he is. This is me, Finley. I see the way the two of you try not to look at each other. The room steams up when the two of you are together.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” I insisted as I fidgeted in my seat. I filled her in on all the stuff I’d been doing to try to identify the skeleton from the Palm Beach house.

  “I hope you told all this to the police,” Becky said. “You start investigating Melinda the Foster Mother and coincidentally really bad shit starts happening?”

  “They already knew most of it from talking to the deputies that responded to the fake skeleton, and they said they’d be talking to Graves and Steadman about the real skeleton tomorrow.” Fatigue settled in, and I pressed back against the headrest. “FYI, you’re wrong about Melinda. My family has known her since I was a kid.”

  “But until last week, you hadn’t seen her in years. People change.”

  “True, but I’m just having a hard time thinking she changed so much. Granted, I was young, but I remember her giving Lisa and me gifts at holidays and birthdays. Jonathan invited her for dinner several times. So I think it’s safe to scratch her off the suspect list.”

  “But you said she was acting weird. Maybe she has an accomplice who doesn’t want or like you stirring up the past.”

  My gut told me it wasn’t Melinda who had tried to kill me, but I was pretty sure Becky wouldn’t be interested in my intuition.

  We spent about an hour at my place while I changed, packed, grabbed my laptop and all the chargers I needed for my various electronics. Then we headed to the office to pick up the dubbed security tape from the intern.

  It was pitch-black, and the air was completely still. While Becky unlocked the door, I was keeping diligent watch for some unknown bogeyman. My heart was pounding by the time we entered the building, locking the door behind us.

  “You’re shaking,” Becky said, her green eyes filled with empathy.

  Taking a deep breath, I let it out slowly. “Guess I’m a little more spooked than I thought.”

  “Makes sense,” Becky said, draping an arm around my shoulder as our respective heels clicked and echoed in the empty foyer on our way to the elevator. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me? Just for tonight?”

  “I’m sure. Besides, my mom’s place is closer to work.”

  “Closer to work? Who are you, and what did you do with my friend Finley?”

  Forgetting the stitches, I gently jabbed my wounded elbow into Becky’s ribs. “Ow!”

  “God smote you for being mean to me,” Becky joked. “Besides, I think—and I know I can sell it to the partners—you should take tomorrow off. Christ, Finley, you rolled your car six times across three lanes of I-95. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get you out of the car.”

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “Have you used up all your sick days?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said, clearly frustrated. “You need a day of rest and relaxation. Isn’t there a spa in your mother’s building?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be nice to you.”

  I was convinced. “Okay. I need a couple of things from my office,” I said as I stabbed the button for the second floor. “I’ll meet you in your office in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “’Kay.”

  Wincing every so often, I put several of the foster care files into my tote. Sitting at my computer, I emailed the relevant documents to my personal account, then powered off the computer. I wasn’t sure if I would actually work on my sick day, but I wanted the files on the foster children just in case. That thought stopped me in my tracks. When had I become the kind of person who works outside the office?

  Maybe the stuff they’d put in my IV had turned me into some sort of Stepford Employee. Now that was a scary thought.

  Becky frowned at me when I arrived carrying my tote. “You only have one good arm,” she reminded me.

  Ignoring the criticism, I pointed to the shiny gold CD sliding into her CPU tower. “Is that the video?”

  “Yep. You sit here and I’ll stand.”

  “I got three stitches, not a partial amputation. Besides, the lidocaine is still working its magic.”

  “Fine, be a pain in my ass.”

  Her coral polished fingernails worked the keyboard, opening the media file and selecting Play. The first scene on her flat-panel screen was time-stamped before 8:00 a.m. More than an hour before I’d even arrived at the office. “Can we speed it up?”

  “We might miss something.”

  Leaning against the edge of her desk, my eyes fixed on the screen. At four times normal speed, we watched employees and clients come and go. I had to squint to even venture a guess at the identities, and I worked with these people. “How come we can film the surface of Mars with total clarity, and video surveillance footage is so dark, grainy, and crappy?”

  “Because the nation spends billions on those cameras and Victor Dane paid less than two hundred dollars for this system. And that included installation,” Becky answered.

  “Nice to know he’s so concerned about our safety.”

  “He only did it to get a break on the property insurance.”

  That was the Vain Dane I knew and loathed. “Slow it down!” The time indicated the image was captured a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Becky slowed the playback, rewound it a few frames, then played it in slow motion. The quality of the image was terrible, and about all I could make out was a guy moving between my car and Vain Dane’s Hummer3. More accurately, I saw a bulky human who was probably male, based on his gait, but his face was completely obliterated by the bill of a baseball cap.

  His image dropped between the two cars for less than a second. “He could be puncturing the brake line,” Becky said.

  “Or picking up a penny,” I countered. “You can’t even be sure it’s a man. Is there any way to enhance this?”

  Becky shrugged. “I can ask the IT people tomorrow. Or maybe the cops will do it as part of their investigation.” Becky replayed the five seconds of footage, starting with the guy coming into the frame, bending down, then stepping through the landscaping to the sidewalk east, toward Clematis.

  We continued the tape and discovered that a big brown delivery truck blocked the view of my car for more than seven minutes around four thirty. “There could be a dozen mechanics working on my car and we couldn’t see them through that truck.”

  “Well, at least we got one guy on tape.” She swiveled in her chair. “You look exhausted. How about I take you to the Witch’s Castle.”

  I snickered. “And you have to stay long enou
gh to help me cover all the headless statues with towels and napkins.”

  “What are best friends for?”

  I WAS UP EARLY the next morning. Leisurely, I drank a pot of coffee and watched the sunrise from the terrace overlooking the intracoastal. I bathed, keeping the dressings dry, and marveled that the minimal amount of soreness was easily eradicated by a couple of Tylenol I swiped from my mother’s medicine cabinet. It was a beautiful day; bright sun, a few wispy clouds, and temperatures projected to climb to a comfortable eighty-two.

  It was just before nine when my cell rang. “Hello?”

  “How are you?”

  The sexy, deep sound of Liam’s voice traveled though me, settling in the pit of my stomach. “Great.”

  “Penthouse living agrees with you?”

  “How did you know…scratch that.”

  “I hear you’re taking the day off.”

  Actually, I was contemplating the almost four-hour round-trip drive to Daytona Beach to track down Abby Andrews, but I wasn’t about to share that fact. “You heard right.”

  “Get a call from Jennings yet?”

  “No, why?” A sliver of hope hung on that question. Nothing would make me happier than to hear that the sherriff’s office had apprehended The Panty Thief.

  “What do you know about fingerprints?”

  “Everyone’s are different.”

  “Right. There’s an anomaly with one of the sets of prints they lifted from the windowsill at your condo.”

  “Anomaly?”

  “Your boy Patrick have any birth defects?”

  Mild irritation overtook hope. “He isn’t mine, and no, not that I know of, why?”

  “They lifted full finger and palm prints from the sill, but unless Patrick’s thumbs are on the outside of his hand, the prints were a plant.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Remember the vase of flowers you ditched that night?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t fond of Patrick, but tossing beautiful flowers had been difficult.

  “Someone went to the trouble of lifting his prints off the vase, then transferring them to the windowsill. Obviously to throw suspicion on your ex.”