Fair Warning

by Hannah Alexander

  “She told me to wait outside for her, and that’s what I’ll do,” Willow said.

  He nodded and closed the door, then turned toward the apartment. “She’ll be here in just a few moments.”

  She watched him walk down the sidewalk, and was relieved when Carl followed him. She had learned from Travis that often the person who reported a crime became a suspect. This was too close for comfort.

  As another siren blasted through the trees and another police cruiser arrived, Willow felt as if her nightmares truly had followed her into her waking hours. Reality had a harsher edge to it than her dreams. Sandi’s bloodied face would forever haunt her.

  Within a few minutes, the drive was lined with vehicles. A small knot of neighbors had gathered on the lawn, drawn by the sirens, watching the excitement with obvious fascination. Doubtless, Carl had explained to them what was happening. Willow watched the man as he spoke with Mary Ruth and the Jasumbacks.

  He wasn’t as old as she had thought him to be when she first came here. His face wasn’t as deeply lined as someone who would be nearing seventy. Perhaps he’d retired early.

  “Good, you waited for me.” A strong female voice spoke from behind her.

  Willow turned to find Detective Rush walking toward her. The woman wore a fitted brown pantsuit today. As before, her only jewelry was a watch and a wedding band. Her face was devoid of makeup. “Of course I waited.”

  Willow gestured toward her car, which was blocked by two police cars. “I couldn’t go anywhere anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, Willow, I still have to question you, but I also need to stake out the crime scene. I want you to stay here for a while longer.” She turned to leave.

  “Wait.” Willow followed her up the sidewalk. “Can you tell me what’s going to happen to Lucy and Brittany?”

  “That isn’t for you to worry about,” Trina said without breaking stride.

  “Excuse me, but I’m very worried. They don’t have anyone else.”

  Trina Rush stopped and turned around, her expression guarded. “You have some way of knowing that?”

  “They told me. They said their father was dead and they didn’t have any aunts or uncles or grandparents. In fact, they talked more about Preston than they did about any other man, except for some stranger who made their mother cry.”

  Trina’s expression softened momentarily. “You’re in no position to do anything about the children, and neither am I. The DFS has already been notified of the situation, and the caseworker will take the children from school and find a relative who will take them, or place them in a foster home until someone can be found.”

  “Detective, please. They know me and they like me. Can you imagine how horrifying this will be for them? First, to find out their mother—the one person in the world they trust and depend on—has been murdered? And then to be taken away by strangers?”

  The detective studied Willow in silence for a moment, but the softness slowly drained from her face to be replaced, once more, by firm determination. “I’ll be back when I’m finished.”

  She turned abruptly and strode toward the apartment, leaving Willow to wait.

  Graham walked to the far end of the hallway and pulled out his cell phone. This time when he tried Willow’s number, it went through. She answered almost immediately.

  “Graham?” Her voice sounded tense, and the reception was bad.

  “Yes. Willow, can you come back to the hospital soon? There’s been an incident here with Preston.”

  There was a soft gasp. “What kind of incident?”

  “He was given penicillin. He’s out of danger for the moment, but it would help if someone knowledgeable about his medical history could answer some questions for the doctor.”

  There was static on the line. “What! Who did that? He’s…” There was more static and her voice cut out.

  “I’m sorry, Willow, I can’t hear you. I’m trying to figure out what happened. As I said, he’s out of the woods now, though they had to place him on a respirator. The police have been called.”

  “The police?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to take any chances. I was hoping you would be on your way here already.”

  “Are you at the hosp…” More static. Her voice cracked, disappeared.

  “Willow? Are you still there? Yes, I’m at the hospital. Where are you?”

  “I’m…something awful has…Graham, I need…” Her voice broke into white noise. The signal ended.

  He punched her number again. This was a rotten time for interference.

  No answer. What was happening with Willow?

  He entered Larry’s number, but the line was busy.

  Graham seldom lost his temper, but right now he was frustrated enough to lob this little cell phone out the window onto the highway below. He resisted the temptation.

  Willow tried to redial Graham, with no result. She would have to be in an area with better reception before she could reach him again. She shoved the phone back into her purse and studied the police cruisers blocking her from her car. She circled them, measuring distance to see if she could somehow squeeze between them, but there was no way.

  She had to get to the hospital. She should never have come on this insane trip in the first place.

  But as she thought about it she realized, with a sharp pang, who would have discovered Sandi if she hadn’t—Lucy and Brittany.

  She ran down the sidewalk to the apartment, where two husky uniformed officers stood guard, talking in low tones, jotting notes.

  “Please, would you ask someone to move one of those cruisers?” She turned and pointed toward her car. “I have to get to the hospital, and I’m blocked into my parking space.”

  “Ma’am, you need to stay here until Detective Rush is finished with her work inside.”

  “No, you don’t understand. My brother is in critical condition at the hospital, and I have to get to him.” She moved as if to go past them.

  “Hold it right there.” The officer on the left took her by the arm, pointing to the crime-scene tape at the doorway. “No one is allowed inside right now. You’re in danger of impeding an investigation.”

  “Then would you please help me get to the hospital?”

  “Willow!” called Carl from the edge of the small cluster of neighbors and onlookers huddled beside the gazebo a distance from the door. “What’s happened now?”

  She gave up on the officers and crossed the lawn to the others.

  “What’s going on?” Carl stepped over to meet her.

  “Preston’s in trouble at the hospital, and I need a ride there. My car’s blocked.”

  “Mine isn’t. What’s wrong with Preston?”

  “He’s having an allergic reaction to penicillin.”

  “What!” The man’s eyebrows rose in alarm. “Who’d do something like that? It says on his chart, plain as day, he’s allergic.”

  “I don’t know. My connection was interrupted. I need to get to the hospital.”

  “I’ll take you to him.”

  “Willow?” It was Detective Rush.

  Willow turned. The detective was stepping up to her across the grass. The lines of her face seemed to have deepened in the past few moments, and though her expression remained calm, her complexion was a shade paler than it had been. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Detective Rush?” Willow hurried to meet her. “My brother—”

  “Is in the hospital, out of danger.” She sounded irritable.

  “You knew about it? And you didn’t let me know?”

  “I just found out myself,” she said. “Look, he’s in good hands and there’s an officer being sent to guard him, so there’s nothing you can do for him at this point.”

  “I need to get to—”

  “You’re where you need to be right now. The hospital will give Preston excellent care.”

  “You’re not going to have those cars moved?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Willow brist
led at the harsh finality of the detective’s tone. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not at this time, but don’t push me right now.” She fixed Willow with a level look. “What were you doing in Sandi’s apartment? You were warned to stay away from her and her children.”

  “I told you, she’s the one who contacted me—”

  “And what about the call on her answering machine? Some would consider your message to be threatening.”

  “I wasn’t threatening her. I was—”

  “Save it for the interrogation. I’ll be out when I’m finished here. Meanwhile, the longer you detain me now, the longer you will have to wait.”

  Willow glared at her, but the glare was wasted. The detective had turned away and marched stiffly back toward the apartment.

  Graham stood in the doorway of Preston’s room, waiting for a police officer to arrive. They were posting a guard. Meanwhile, he’d tried twice more to reach Larry on his cell phone, without success. He dialed the clinic and left a voice message for Ginger to contact him between patients.

  Preston was improving. The swelling in his face had decreased considerably and his head no longer resembled a pumpkin. Now Graham wondered if he should have been quite so adamant with Willow about returning to the hospital. Still, she needed to stop trying to play detective on her own.

  Preston would most likely be off the ventilator in a few more hours, once his doctor felt he was out of danger.

  “Dr. Vaughn?” Sheila Jackson came striding down the corridor from the direction of the nurses’ station, looking harried, eyes darting up and down the hallway as if a killer might jump from any of the patient rooms. “I need to talk to you.” She entered Preston’s room and waited for him to follow, then closed the door.

  “What’s up?” Graham asked.

  “I just finished speaking with the pharmacist.” She glanced toward Preston’s bed, where he lay watching her intently. She smiled and stepped closer to him, including him in their conversation. “They’re doing a comprehensive inventory to see if anything else is missing.”

  “Have they found anything yet?”

  She bit her lip, then nodded, her friendly hazel eyes filled with concern. “Multiple quantities of dopamine and haloperidol. The police are coming in force.”

  “Those aren’t even drugs of abuse. Why would anyone take them?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve never experienced anything like this before.”

  “Does anyone know how this happened?”

  Sheila nodded. “Rosie Quick, our head nurse, always keeps a set of keys in the right pocket of her scrubs. She’s the only one with a key to the pharmacy on her shift. She just told me that about a week ago she reached for her keys and they weren’t in her pocket. Later she found them in the top middle drawer of her desk.”

  “Couldn’t she have accidentally left them there?”

  Sheila shook her head, frowning. “Everyone knows she never leaves them unguarded. She’s convinced we have a pickpocket. The whole hospital’s going to be in an uproar over this. As if it isn’t already.”

  “Someone could have lifted those keys, made a wax impression of the key to the pharmacy and placed them in her drawer later,” Graham said. But even as he said it, he considered another possibility. It might not have been necessary for the thief to lift Rosie’s keys if he had a key of his own for the pharmacy door.

  “When Mr. Black was sleeping this morning—he didn’t get much sleep last night—someone slipped into his room and injected the penicillin into the IV port in his arm,” Sheila said. She looked at Preston again, and her gaze seemed to linger on him a moment.

  Graham noticed Preston holding her gaze. Right about now, if Ginger were here, she might be making some remark about attraction and steak knives. “Sounds like you’re convinced this was no accident.”

  Sheila nodded. “It’s hard to look at it any other way, now that we know the drugs were stolen. I’m just worried who else might become a victim.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Willow warned herself not to let her temper control her actions. The police were doing their jobs. As a cooperative citizen, she needed to obey Trina Rush’s orders and wait.

  “You still need a ride to the hospital?” Carl said, once again meeting her halfway across the lawn.

  “I’ve been told to wait here,” she grumbled. “Detective Rush says Preston’s in stable condition.”

  “Are you under arrest?”

  “No, but legally they can detain me without placing me under arrest.”

  “Even in an emergency situation like this?” he asked.

  Another car came speeding down the drive past the police vehicles. It was a red Firebird.

  “Rick’s getting off late today,” Carl said.

  The car didn’t park in its assigned spot, but pulled onto the grass as the driver window slid down. Rick Fenrow’s face was, for once, devoid of a smile. He looked worried. His long face held a grimace.

  “Willow Traynor, you’re a hard person to find. Has anyone called you about Preston?”

  “Graham did a few minutes ago.” She stepped over to the car. “The police informed me he’s in stable condition.”

  Rick’s brows lowered. “That just shows the police don’t know everything. He’s had a setback.”

  Oh, no. Please, Lord. “What kind of a setback?”

  “His breathing isn’t as good, and he’s swelling again. You might want to head to the hospital.”

  “I can’t—my car’s blocked.” She glanced over her shoulder toward Carl.

  “What’s all the commotion here, anyway?” Rick asked. “Did those little girls disappear again?”

  “Sandi Jameson’s been killed.” She saw the shock spread across the man’s face. “Rick, do you have a cell phone I can use?”

  “I can do better than that. Hop into my dream machine and see how well this baby handles.”

  She made an instant decision. “Carl, when Detective Rush comes out, will you tell her I’ve gone to my brother at the hospital? He’s had a setback. I’ll talk to her later.”

  She ran around the front of the car and got in. Trina Rush would just have to understand.

  Graham walked out the front door of the hospital, relieved, at last, of his duties with Preston. An officer had been assigned to monitor anyone entering the room. The police had taken Graham’s warning seriously.

  He reached his SUV, and was reflecting on how quickly he had become dependent on a tiny electronic device he carried in his pocket, when it sang to him. He answered the call. It was Larry.

  “You’d better sit down for this one, boss,” Larry said by way of greeting.

  “What’s going on? Have you found Willow?”

  “I haven’t seen her yet, but I know where she is. I’ve been burning up my battery since I talked to you last. First of all, she’s not at Big Cedar. Are you sitting down?”

  “Just tell me.” Graham unlocked and opened his door. Sometimes Larry reminded him of a ten-year-old kid playing cops and robbers.

  “Sandi Jameson was murdered in her bathroom sometime this morning.” Larry paused for dramatic effect. “I just heard it from the sheriff’s deputy.”

  Graham did sit down then, stunned to silence, unable to wrap his mind around Larry’s words.

  “Want to take a guess who found her? And while you’re at it, want to take a guess who’s their top suspect?”

  When he could find his voice, Graham asked, “Where is Willow now?”

  “Last I heard she hasn’t been taken into custody yet, and the police are all swarming the crime scene, so she’s probably still at the lodge.”

  Graham slumped back in his seat. “Unless she’s on her way here in response to my call. Where are you?”

  “On Highway 65 headed toward your lodge, where else? I should be there in five minutes, maybe less if I take the curves on less than four wheels.”

  Automatically Graham made a mental note to call Ginger and have her check into apply
ing for emergency guardianship of Sandi’s children. If he understood correctly, Willow had told him last week that Sandi had no close family. Lucy and Brittany needed to be with someone they knew. They had at least met Ginger on one or two occasions.

  “There’s more, boss,” Larry said.

  “How can there be more?” How much worse could it get?

  “Listen to this. Before I talked to the sheriff’s deputy, I called my old partner in K.C.—I told you I’ve been wearing down my cell battery—”

  “What else do you have?” Graham couldn’t quite curb his impatience.

  “My old partner talked to someone who worked the Sperryville case. Now that I know what questions to ask, the news is flying hot and heavy. Seems Sperryville developed Parkinson’s after he went to prison. His health has deteriorated rapidly, and he hired an attorney a little over two years ago to try to get him released due to the illness.”

  “Did they get him released?”

  “No, but the attorney he hired did a little more investigating, questioning some people at the hospital from which Sperryville was arrested seven years ago. Care to guess what he found?”

  “I’m not up to guessing games right now, Larry,” Graham snapped.

  “He found that a certain ICU nurse helped with the investigation. He tried to use federal regulations to convince the judge that the evidence they uncovered due to her loose lips should have been inadmissible in court.”

  “Please tell me the judge dismissed it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So now we probably know the origin of the attacks, but we still don’t know who’s doing the footwork.”

  “Have you been able to get any information out of Preston?” Larry asked. “How’s he doing, anyway?”

  “His swelling is still going down, and he’s fighting the tube down his throat like any self-respecting man should do. He doesn’t remember seeing a thing. An officer has arrived to guard his room.”

  “Good. You need to leave something for the police to do.”

  “I could, but I have no guarantee they’ll act on this until it’s too late.”