I thanked the receptionist, noting her coat, a tan suede hip-length style trimmed in white shearling, sitting on her desk. Her handbag and keys sat in the metal inbox tray next to it. The clock mounted to the wall over her head indicated I’d had plenty of time until their offices closed at five, but if I’d dawdled one iota more, I would have been on the unfortunate receiving end of the result of the receptionist leaving early. Of all days! But today, not my problem. My work here was done.
“Can you direct me to your ladies’ room?” I asked her.
“Sure. Out the doors, to your left. It’s clearly marked.”
“Thank you.”
She stood up and shrugged into her coat, buttoned the top two faux wooden buttons that were shaped like tiny ram horns, and switched off her monitor. The building was silent, and I guessed the receptionist wasn’t the first person to leave early.
I found the ladies’ room easily. It was like most office building restrooms: spacious, with a row of stalls along the back wall and a row of sinks along the front. Two of the five stall doors were closed. I reached for the door on the far-right stall and heard the sound of someone getting sick.
My stomach clenched in an unconscious reaction to the sound. I stepped back and bent down, looking for shoes. I recognized a pair of legs in familiar low-heeled brown pumps pointed the wrong direction inside the middle stall.
I pushed aside my own needs and my battered pride and tapped on the door. “Jane? Is that you? It’s Madison. Are you okay?”
The toilet flushed. Seconds later, the door opened. Jane faced me. She looked like a piece of chalk that someone had gotten wet. Her normally alabaster skin was pale and ashen, and a ring of moisture had broken out on her forehead and temples. Dark, purplish-black circles were pronounced under each eye.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said. She stepped toward me and this time, when Jane Strong let loose on me, it wasn’t in email form.
THREE
I backed away to avoid being hit by Jane’s tossed cookies. Jane stumbled forward. Her eyes rolled up into her head and her legs gave way underneath her. As she fell to the floor, she grabbed my arm and brought me down too. We landed on the soiled brown and taupe ceramic tiled floor.
There wasn’t time to think about the condition of the floor. I pulled myself up to a sitting position and cradled Jane’s head in my lap. Her eyes were closed. “Jane,” I said. “Jane! Can you hear me?”
She didn’t respond.
Think, Madison. I scanned the bathroom. The door to the stall closest to me was still closed. I slid down and stretched my leg out to connect with the dark brown metal, and then kicked the heel of my Courrèges boot against it. “Help! Is someone in there? Please, we need help!” From my angle on the floor I saw no feet. The stall had probably been locked after being deemed out of order.
I looked back at Jane. Her body was still. I felt for a pulse—it was weak. I had to get help, and fast, but I didn’t want to leave her alone. Not here, not now, not today, not like this.
The restroom was equipped with the least practical hand-drying option: a loop of white fabric that self-sanitized with each pull to rotate the fabric. My coat and bag lay in a pile by the far-right stall. I unzipped my dress and pulled it off over my head, balled it up, and eased it under Jane’s head. In my vintage ivory slip, I crawled to my handbag and dumped the contents to find my phone. I’d forgotten to turn off the personal hotspot, and after hours of working at the library, it was dead.
I threw on my pink coat and pulled open the door. “Help! Is someone there? Please! We need help in the ladies’ room!”
I was met with silence. I ran down toward the DIDI offices and yanked on the solid chrome handles. The doors were locked. I moved farther down the hall, making as much noise as possible. The elevator doors bonged! behind me, and an attractive gray-haired man got off. He wore a gray wool suit, white shirt, and narrow patterned tie and held an expensive briefcase in one hand and a coffee cup in other.
“Help!” I called. I ran forward and grabbed his arm. “There’s a woman in the restroom who needs medical assistance.” I turned and ran back to the restroom. The man overtook me in the hallway and reached the door first. “The floor is slick,” I called. “Be careful.”
When I re-entered the powder room, the man knelt beside Jane. Something dark discolored the floor by the man’s shoe. At first I thought it was my dress. It wasn’t. When I realized it was a gradually expanding puddle of blood coming from the back of Jane’s head, my cookies joined hers on the floor.
To my credit, I didn’t pass out. The man in the suit stood. He dumped the contents of his coffee cup in the sink, filled the now-empty cup with tap water, and held it out to me. “Drink this,” he said.
“Give it to her,” I said.
He knelt down next to Jane. “Did you call the police? 911? Building security?”
“My phone is dead.” Immediately I cringed at my choice of words. “The battery died.” Again. Why did we insist on morbid expressions to describe the status of our cell phones?
“Was she like this when you found her?”
“No. She stumbled out of the stall and threw up and then collapsed.”
“She was alive?” he demanded. “You should have gotten help immediately. That could have saved her life.”
“I couldn’t just leave her.”
“Go down to the lobby and alert building security. Now.”
I didn’t like this man’s attitude, but I’d had enough experience around crime scenes to know that it was more important to deal with the tasks at hand than to worry about politeness. There was a directness to his instructions, and for better or worse, I knew he was right. Still, I wasn’t comfortable leaving Jane alone with him.
His expression softened. “I’ll call the police. Delbert is closer than they are, and we’ll need his help too.” He stood and lifted Jane’s body off the floor. “She doesn’t need to lay in filth.”
I picked my dress up off the floor and tossed it into the sink under running water. “Use that to clean her up a bit. I’ll be right back.”
By the time I reached the front lobby, I was out of breath. The immediate adrenaline rush of encountering Jane and needing to find help had waned, and my legs were shaking with the trauma of what I’d seen. I kept one hand on the wall for stability and approached Delbert. He seemed surprised to see me.
“Miz Madison! What are you still doing here? I thought you left hours ago.”
There wasn’t time to explain that I’d returned. “Delbert, we need your help. Jane Strong is upstairs in the ladies’ room. She’s—she’s not well.”
“She’s sick?”
“She needs our help.”
Delbert froze. I didn’t know what I’d expected of him, but the terror in his eyes was something I hadn’t anticipated. Outside the building, I heard the faint sounds of sirens. There was no way of knowing if they were headed our way or toward another emergency. “There’s a man upstairs with her. He asked for you.”
“I can’t leave the lobby unattended.”
“You can’t ignore the woman dying in the building either,” I demanded.
The sirens, as it turned out, were for us. A small emergency vehicle parked in front of Republic Tower and several men in white uniforms climbed out. They pulled a collapsible gurney from the back of their van and approached the building. I pushed the door open and let them in.
“She’s on the twenty-third floor,” I said. “I’ll take you up.”
As we waited for the elevators to reach us, I kept an eye on Delbert. He remained behind his station, his eyes shifting from our small group, to the doors, to the clock on the wall. I didn’t know what caused his apparent discomfort, but something had rattled him more than I’d ever seen before. When the bong! sounded, I pushed thoughts of Delbert’s panic out of my mind and prepared to lead the men to
Jane.
But when the elevator doors opened, the man in the gray suit stepped off. He held Jane’s body, though her head and shoulders were hidden under my newly-rinsed brown dress. Her arm dangled toward the floor, exposing her delicate wrist and burnt umber bracelet sleeves. I flashed back to the blood on the bathroom floor and couldn’t begin to imagine what she looked like under my garment.
One of the EMTs stepped forward. “You shouldn’t have moved her,” he said. “Any movement can make her injuries worse.”
“Her injuries don’t matter anymore,” the man said gently. He moved past the technician and laid Jane’s body on the flat gurney.
Reality hit. “She’s dead?” I asked. The nausea returned.
He nodded. “She passed away right after you left.”
The technician with the shaved head spoke directly to the businessman. “How did she die?”
The man looked at me. “You said she’d been sick,” he said. “When you left her in the loo, she probably tried to stand and fell and struck her head. Accidental death—not uncommon, but unfortunate all the same.”
I stood riveted to the ground, staring at the carpet runner that protected the Italian marble floors. No, I thought. Jane can’t be dead. We had unfinished business. We had to make amends. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
Immediately a reel of events played out in my mind: hearing Jane getting ill in the bathroom, knocking on the door to find out if she was okay. Her chalky, damp appearance right before she threw up on the bathroom floor, and the moment she collapsed and knocked us both down. She’d been alive after that. I’d checked her pulse, and I’d felt it—weak, but there. Something about the scene, from when I’d left to when I’d returned with help, felt off. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to recall details that my self-preservation instinct wanted me to block: the locked bathroom stall, the gray state of Jane when she opened her door. The lack of blood on her head when I’d sat with her and the presence of blood when I returned. Precious few moments had passed in that window of time, but it had been enough for someone to do the worst.
“Jane was ill. When I went into the bathroom, she was throwing up in one of the stalls. But that’s not what killed her,” I said. I looked slowly from one face to the next. They were waiting for me to continue. “Jane’s death wasn’t accidental. Somebody knew she was incapacitated in there. Jane Strong was murdered.”
FOUR
Half an hour later, the lobby of Republic Tower was swarming with police officers. Jane’s body had been removed from the building shortly after my statement. The only information Jane could contribute would come via the medical examiner when he determined the actual cause of death.
I wasn’t unfamiliar with police procedure, though I tended to blur on the specifics of what the officers were required to do. The businessman in the gray suit gave his statement to two uniformed officers. Delbert had locked the doors to the building and led a photographer, a detective, and another several uniforms to the twenty-third floor. And I sat by myself in an uncomfortable brown leather chair by the windows that looked out on Thanksgiving Square. Despite my familiarity with more than one of Dallas’s finest, including their captain, Tex Allen, I didn’t recognize any of the men who were working the scene. I might have considered calling Tex if my cell had been operable. Fate made that decision for me.
A blond man with a ruddy complexion approached. “Are you Madison Night?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Detective Henning.” He held out his hand. I rose and shook it. “You’re the one who claimed this wasn’t an accident,” he said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” I said.
He gestured toward the chairs and I sat back down. He sat across from me. We were separated by a large chrome and glass coffee table that held an assortment of Neiman Marcus catalogs. The flagship location of the luxury retail chain was two blocks away, making the catalog choice feel more like support of a local business than the profiling of potential clients.
“Tell me about what happened earlier today.”
“In the bathroom? When I went in, I heard someone getting sick. I recognized Jane’s shoes under the stall door and asked her if she was okay. She opened the door and said she didn’t feel very good and then got sick again.” Detective Henning’s eyes moved from my face to my buttoned up pink London Fog coat. “I stepped out of her way, but she didn’t make it to the sink.” I said. “She threw up on the floor, and then her legs gave out and she fell forward and knocked us both down.”
“What makes you suspect she was murdered?”
“When we fell, we were closer to the row of stalls than the sinks. I checked her pulse and it was there—faint, but there. She was laying on her back. I took off my dress and put it under her head. There wasn’t any blood. Another one of the stall doors was closed and I thought someone might be inside. I kicked at the door—I was able to reach it with my foot, but nobody answered or came out to help.”
“Why did you leave Ms. Strong?”
“I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I had to get help.”
“You knew she was ill and you left her.”
“I called for help and nobody came. The receptionist to DIDI locked up early and the rest of the floor was vacant.”
“DIDI?”
“The Design in Dallas Initiative. It’s an organization that’s focused on the beautification and revitalization of the downtown area.”
“What was your business with them?”
“I’m a designer. Today is the cutoff for the Very Important Property competition. I wanted to make sure my application was accepted on time, so I dropped it off in person.”
Detective Henning didn’t say anything at that. He sat in the chair opposite me, watching me, listening to me. I wished I knew something about him, but I didn’t.
While we sat off to the side, an officer in a baggy uniform approached us. It wasn’t until he was a few feet away that I recognized him. “Officer Clark?” I asked.
“Madison, I mean, Ms. Night. I was looking for you.” He stood awkwardly by us, as if he needed something but couldn’t find the words. I glanced down at his hands and saw he was holding my purse.
“I think that goes better with my outfit than yours,” I said with a smile. Clark looked embarrassed. He held my bag out to me, and I set it on my lap.
Officer Clark had been part of the Lakewood Police Department for years. When I’d first met him, he’d been on the portly side and had been partnered with Donna Nast, a bombshell officer-turned-private-sector security company owner who had become something of a nemesis. Since I’d last seen Clark, he’d transferred from the LPD to the Dallas Police Department, and in that time, it appeared he’d lost about thirty pounds.
“You lost weight,” I said.
“High blood pressure. Gave up beer and butter. Not sure it was worth it.”
“Just think of all the bad guys you can catch now.”
Clark laughed.
Detective Henning asked Clark, “You two know each other?”
“Sure. She’s Captain Allen’s…” his voice trailed off while he seemed to search for the appropriate word, “friend.”
Henning turned back toward me. “How well do you know Captain Allen?”
“Fairly well,” I said. I didn’t add any qualifiers. Henning’s tone changed when he asked that, and I didn’t know why. “Do you need anything more from me?”
“Not now.” He stood up and turned to Clark. “Get her contact information and then walk her to her car.”
“I don’t need an escort,” I said.
“Ms. Night, while I have no conclusive evidence to back up your claims, according to your statement, a woman was murdered. You were the last person to see her alive. You’re a ‘friend’ of a police captain. All things considered, I
’m assigning you an escort.”
“But I wasn’t the last person to see her alive,” I protested. “He was.” I pointed across the lobby to the businessman. “Who is he?”
“That’s Gerry Rose,” Clark said. “He owns the DIDI.”
“And he’s Jane’s ex-husband,” I said under my breath.
Detective Henning’s mouth drew into a tight line and he glared at Clark for a moment. “I’ll see to it that Mr. Rose gets an escort too. Thank you, Ms. Night.” He held out his hand and I shook it again, this time feeling less comfortable.
Officer Clark and I walked to the elevator wells. Despite my protests to Detective Henning, I was happy to have company on the way to my car. The reality of Jane’s death was too fresh in my mind. Her lifeless body. Her blood pooling on the ceramic tiled floor. Her glassy eyes staring upward. I’d left to get help for such a brief amount of time, yet it had provided enough opportunity for a killer to take her life. That same killer could be anywhere now. In Fort Worth, on their way south toward Mexico, or hiding in a car in the parking garage to watch the fallout. Either way, I felt exposed, and not just because I now wore little more than a slip under my coat.
“Where’s your dog?” Clark asked.
“He’s spending the day with his family.” The police officer looked confused. “Rocky was responsible for a litter of puppies back in March.”
“I thought he was a boy.”
“He is.”
“You didn’t have him—you know?” He made scissor motions with his fingers.
“No. I consulted with the vet when I adopted him, and he said if I was planning on being a one-dog household, as long as I kept up with Rocky’s health checks, it wasn’t mandatory. I guess in the back of my head, I always thought it would be nice to have the option of puppies.”
LOVER COME HACK Page 3
