by Linda Howard
“If she does, I’ve never seen it,” said Sally doubtfully.
“That’s because most of her clients are people who like her signature style. She wants to branch out more, attract other clients. Redoing your bedroom will be good business for her.”
“I’m not willing to pay one more cent to her. Twenty thousand dollars!”
“She isn’t asking for more money. She isn’t the bad guy here. There isn’t a bad guy.”
“Well, crap.”
If I could have laughed, I would have. We looked at each other in perfect understanding.
“I’ll call him tonight,” she said, and sighed. “I’ll apologize. I’m an eagle and he’s a penguin. He can’t fly. Got it.”
“I took him to see a piece Mr. Potts was refinishing, a big armoire. Mr. Potts told him he’d already put in around sixty hours on it. Jazz will never know furniture, but now he has a better appreciation of how much work you put into your bedroom.”
“Oh, God, Blair, thank you,” she said, grabbing me and hugging me again. “I hope we would have worked it out on our own, eventually, but you’ve speeded up the process.”
“It just needed an outside view,” I said modestly.
Chapter
Twenty-seven
All that talking had done a number on my whisper, so I stopped at a pharmacy for a jar of Vicks ointment, intending to give it a try. I would smell like a cough drop, but if this stuff would help my throat I didn’t care how I smelled. I intended to have the Big Talk with Wyatt that night, so it would help if I could, well, talk.
I was on my way to a third fabric store when Wyatt called my cell and told me to come back to the police department. He was in lieutenant mode; his tone of voice made it an order, not a request.
Frustrated, I changed directions. I remembered to watch and see if any of the cars behind me changed direction, too. None did.
I wasn’t going to be able to put this wedding together on time. The Fates were against me. I accepted that, now. I wouldn’t be able to find the material for a gown, the wedding cake maker wouldn’t come through, the caterer would bail out, and all the silk flowers that were supposed to be woven through the arbor would get some mysterious silk rot and fall to pieces. Wyatt hadn’t even started sanding and repainting the arbor. I might as well save myself the wear and tear on my nerves and give up.
In a pig’s eye, I would. The stakes were too high. It was either do it, or find myself in some drive-up wedding chapel in Las Vegas. If we got married.
This was driving me nuts.
When I got to the police department, Detective Forester met me in the parking lot. He must have been waiting for me, because he said, “You’re going to the hospital with me. We have permission to look at photographs and review film, if it still exists. The hospital chief of security is checking that out as we speak.”
The front passenger seat of his car was piled high with notebooks, files, reports, a clipboard, a can of Lysol, and some other official stuff. I wondered why he needed the Lysol, but didn’t ask. I picked up the stuff out of his seat, slid in, and held everything on my lap while I buckled up. The files looked interesting, but I didn’t have time to read them. Maybe he’d have to stop and get gas or something; I could give them a quick look-see then.
At the hospital he asked for the chief of security by name, and in a few minutes we were met by a short, slender man in his forties, with close-cropped hair and the erect posture of someone who hasn’t been out of the military very long.
“I’m Doug Lawless, chief of security,” he said, shaking hands with a brisk, firm up-and-down when Forester introduced both himself and me. “Let’s go to my office, Ms. Mallory, to review the photographs in question first, then the security tape if necessary.”
We followed Lawless to an office that was nicely middle-of-the-road—not so big that it would inspire jealousy, but not so small that he’d get the idea he wasn’t appreciated. I’ve heard hospital politics can be cutthroat.
“I pulled up the files myself,” he said, “and pasted the only photographs into a separate file, so no privacy concerns will be compromised. Sit here, please.” He indicated his chair in front of an LCD monitor and I sat down. “This is everyone with whom you came in contact the night of your accident,” he said. “This includes radiology and nuclear medicine, as well as laboratory personnel. And admitting, of course.”
I had come in contact with more people in the hospital than I ever would have guessed. I recognized several faces, including that of Dr. Tewanda Hardy, the physician who had released me. Because hair can be changed I didn’t look at hair at all, just faces, and particularly eyes. I remembered that she had very long eyelashes, and even without mascara her eyes would be striking.
She wasn’t there. I was positive of it, but went over the faces again at Forester’s insistence, then shook my head just as firmly as I had the first time.
“We’ll go to the security recordings of the hallways,” said Lawless. “I’m sorry this particular floor doesn’t have digital surveillance, not yet, but I’m working on it. The ER and critical care areas do, and some of the other floors, but not this one. Still, our tape quality is good.”
He closed the blinds in his windows, darkening the room. The tape was already in the VCR, because all he did was punch a button and a color picture swam into focus on a second monitor.
“The tape is on a timer,” he said. “Do you remember about what time this nurse entered your room?” With a pen he indicated which room was mine. The proportion of everything seemed off, because the cameras were in the ceiling, but the images were sharp and clear.
I thought back. Siana had arrived about eight-thirty that morning, but even though Mom had had an appointment she hadn’t yet left, so…“Between eight-thirty and nine a.m.,” I whispered.
“Good, that’s a relatively narrow window. Let’s see what we can see.” He fast-forwarded the tape, and people began zipping up and down the hallway and in and out of rooms like Chihuahuas on speed. He stopped the tape twice to check the timer, then overshot a little and had to rewind. “Here we go.”
Surveillance tapes are interesting. I watched Siana saunter into my room, and gave both Forester and Lawless a moment to recover from their silent appreciation. “She’ll be along any minute now,” I whispered. “She was wearing pink scrubs.”
And then there she was, at eight forty-seven. “That’s her,” I said, pointing. My heart started pounding, hard and fast. There was no doubt about it: pink scrubs, tall and slim, no hesitation, walking directly toward my room and entering. That flat brown hair looked unnaturally dark on the film, hanging around her shoulders. She was carrying a clipboard, which I hadn’t noticed at the time, but hey, I’d been concussed. The camera angle caught her from the back, so there wasn’t a good view of her face at all, just an occasional hint of the angle of her jaw.
Both men were leaning close to the monitor, watching the screen as intently as two cats waiting for a mouse to venture from its hole.
Mom left my room and I heard their quick little intakes of breath. “That’s my mom,” I said, before either of them could slip and make some kind of guy comment that would require me to take action.
Then, at eight fifty-nine, she left my room, but again the angle on her face wasn’t good. Either the clipboard was in the way, or her head was down, or her shoulder was hunched.
“She’s aware of the cameras,” Lawless said. “She’s hiding her face. I don’t know every employee in the hospital, of course, but I don’t recognize her. I wish you remembered her name, Ms. Mallory—”
“She wasn’t wearing a name tag,” I whispered. “At least, not one that I saw. I thought maybe it was clipped to one of her pockets, or the waistband of her pants.”
“That’s against this hospital’s regulations,” he said immediately. “The identification tags are to be readily visible, photo I.D. required, either clipped or pinned in the upper left chest area. I’ll have to investigate further before I c
an say for certain, but I don’t think she’s an employee here. For one thing, she didn’t knock on your door, she just walked in. Everyone employed here knocks before entering a patient’s room.”
“You can get another angle on her, can’t you?” asked Forester. “She had to get to the fourth floor somehow, she didn’t just materialize there.”
“Perhaps,” said Lawless. “That was a week ago. Some of the records, both digital and tape, have already been recorded over or erased. If nothing happened that requires us to make a permanent file, then we don’t. There is also the possibility that she entered the hospital wearing something else entirely, carrying a bag, and changed in one of the public restrooms, so even if we did record her entering or leaving, we wouldn’t know it.”
She could also have worn her hair twisted up, or had on a baseball cap. My hopes had been up, but now they came crashing down. She was smart, savvy, and she was still one step ahead of us. I had no idea who she was, and this review hadn’t provided any answers. I should have realized anyone working at a hospital would be required to have their I.D. tags highly visible, because of security concerns.
“I’m sorry this wasn’t more productive,” said Lawless. “I’ll review what we have from that date, but I’m not optimistic.”
“At least I can guess height and weight,” said Forester, jotting notes down in one of the little notepads all cops seemed to carry. “That’s more description than we’ve had before. Height…five-eight to five-ten. Weight, one twenty-five to one forty.”
We thanked Lawless and left the hospital. My thoughts were racing, because it seemed as if the likelihood that she wasn’t a hospital employee at all meant something—something other than that she worked somewhere else, of course.
As soon as I was belted into Forester’s car, my lap loaded down with his stuff again, I got one of the notebooks, flipped to a blank page, and began writing because I thought it might be a good idea to share my thought about the rental cars with the police, but I wanted to save my voice.
“Throat not any better?” he asked as he buckled himself in.
I nodded and held my left hand up, thumb and first finger about an inch apart.
“A little bit, huh?”
I nodded again, and kept writing. When I was finished I tore out the page and handed it to him. He read and drove at the same time, frowning at my note, and I don’t know why because I used nice clear printing without a single curlicue or a little heart used to dot an i. I never did that anyway.
“You think she might be changing up rental cars, huh? What gave you that idea?”
I wrote some more, then gave him that page.
He read what I’d written, his gaze darting back and forth between the street and the sheet of paper. “Hmm,” he said.
My hypothesis was that, if she didn’t work at the hospital, then logically the only way she could have known I was even in a hospital would be if she’d called to see if I’d been admitted. But why would she think to do that, unless she’d been the one to put me there? Therefore, logically, she had to be the driver of the Buick.
I wrote him another note. I distinctly remembered telling her that Wyatt was a cop and that he was reviewing the mall parking lot security tapes, trying to get a tag number of the car that had almost hit me. No, I hadn’t told her he was a cop, not exactly, but who else would be reviewing security tapes and getting tag numbers, and when she’d said something about it being nice having a boyfriend who was a cop I hadn’t corrected her, so indirectly I’d confirmed it for her.
In any case, Wyatt hadn’t been able to pull any useful information off the tape, but she hadn’t known that. So she’d switched cars, to a white Chevrolet. And now I hadn’t seen the white Chevrolet in a while, so possibly she was in something else, which to me meant she either had access to a used-car lot or she was using rental cars.
Forester grinned when he was finished reading my notes. “You think like a cop,” he said approvingly, and I was so proud of the compliment that I blushed.
When we got back to the police department he insisted I go in, so we rode the elevator up to what I thought of as the cop floor. I guess technically they were all cop floors, except for the ones where the cells were, but that one seemed to be where the actual cop work was done.
I naturally went to Wyatt’s office, while Forester went to his desk. Wyatt’s door was open and he waved me in. He was on the phone, pacing in his small office, his suit jacket off and his sleeves rolled up as usual. I paused in the door for a moment, admiring his ass as he paced, because Wyatt had a mighty fine ass and I appreciate art wherever I find it. In this case, it was in his pants.
He looked a little sweaty, I thought, as if he hadn’t been here in the office all this time. In fact, he looked as if he’d just come back in. It was a nice warm day, warm enough to make a man sweat if he was wearing a suit jacket, so he’d been out on a scene somewhere. That was why Forester had gone with me to the hospital instead of Wyatt; he’d been available, and Wyatt hadn’t been. Actually, Forester would normally have gone anyway, but Wyatt took a close interest in my cases.
He noticed that I was still standing in the door and he solved that by tucking the phone against his shoulder, holding it with his head tilted to the side as he pulled me into his office with one hand and closed the door with the other. I could hear some man’s voice on the other end of the call, droning on and on. Still holding my arm with his left hand, Wyatt grabbed the phone with his right and held it down against his thigh while he bent his head and kissed me very thoroughly.
He definitely smelled a little sweaty, too, damp heat rising off him, and that was enough to flash me back to our lovemaking the night before, to the hot, sweaty intensity of it. I clutched at his ribs and put a little extra into the kiss—okay, a lot extra, melting against him, automatically checking out the status of Old Faithful. He broke away from me, growling a little, his pants tented. His fierce green gaze promised, Later. Then he patted my butt and returned the phone to his ear. After listening a second or two he said, “Yes, Mr. Mayor,” as he resumed his seat.
I was sitting decorously on one side of the desk and Wyatt was leaned back in his own chair when Forester knocked on the door a moment later. Well, I didn’t know it was Forester until I got up to open the door, but it was. Wyatt waved him into the office, too. Forester’s eyes were very bright and full of anticipation.
Finally Wyatt was able to get off the phone and he clicked it into its cradle with a snap, his focus already on Forester. “What did you find?”
“She was on the tape, but not in the employee photos. Because of certain behaviors, plus the lack of photo I.D., Lawless, that’s the chief of security, thinks she isn’t a hospital employee. So we don’t have an I.D., which puts us back at square one—almost.” Forester shot a glance at me. “Blair came up with a theory that makes sense to me, though our information is so slim I don’t think we have enough to cross-check it.” He handed my notes over the desk to Wyatt.
Wyatt swiftly skimmed my notes, shot a quick look at me, and said, “I agree, she was probably driving the Buick, which means that wasn’t a sudden fit of road rage, it was a deliberate attempt at murder. But we can cross-check by the dates. The rental agencies have some overlap in the type of cars they rent out, but not all of them will have Buicks available. Find the ones that do. If she’s using rentals, the beige Buick would have been turned in last Friday. She would have gotten the white Chevrolet the same day, but I very much doubt she would have used the same rental agency. I think she would have gone to another agency, but hell, there’s a row of them at the airport. If she’s that smart, then she would have turned in the white Chevrolet and gotten something else on Wednesday, before she set the fire. Since Blair survived that, too, I’d say she would have turned that vehicle in yesterday. So now she’s in something else, and we don’t have a clue what to be on the lookout for.”
Forester was taking notes, writing rapidly, pausing once to scratch his jaw. “I can ge
t the rental agencies to give me the names of all females who rented vehicles on these particular dates. If any of them pop up twice, I’d say we have a person of interest.”
Wyatt nodded. “Get on it. We’re running out of time today, if any of them balk and require a warrant.” For routine investigation stuff like that, most judges wouldn’t deal with signing a warrant on the weekend; it would have to wait until Monday.
Forester glanced toward the door, and in it appeared one of the female detectives, her eyes big with excitement—and focused on me.
“Ms. Mallory,” she gushed, her voice loud enough to attract the attention of everyone on the floor. “I’m so excited to meet you! Would you autograph this for me, please? I want to post it in the women’s locker room.” She handed over a sheet of paper with ragged edges, while a crowd gathered behind her, peering into the office. I could almost feel the accumulation of glee.
Automatically I took the sheet of paper and looked down at it, recognizing it immediately. It was one of the notes I’d written while I was locked in DeMarius Washington’s squad car, and stuck to the window with chewing gum. But what was it doing here?
In a flash I remembered DeMarius leafing through the notes and grinning, and Forester doing the same. One of them must have filched this particular note, instead of dropping it in my tote with the others.
“Let’s see that,” Wyatt said with resignation, recognizing a setup when he saw one.
Very helpfully, Forester plucked the note from my hand and placed it on Wyatt’s desk, while everyone gathered outside the door burst into raucous laughter.
In very big block letters, which I had gone over several times to make them darker, was what I had meant to be the coup de grâce on all the asshole men who hadn’t let me out of that stinky squad car:
SIZE MATTERS
Chapter
Twenty-eight
“Size matters, huh?” Wyatt growled, grabbing me around the waist when he entered the house not five minutes behind me late that afternoon. I’d escaped his office amid the howls of laughter and made a beeline for the third fabric store, where—tah-dah—I’d found my fabric. I’d been so happy and relieved I hadn’t even questioned the price, which had been steep, but then you don’t get quality fabric for a dollar ninety-nine a yard. My booty now rested safely in the trunk of my rental, and I was taking it to Sally’s house in the morning. She intended to work on the dress all weekend.
