by Lisa Childs
And Dominic’s heart stopped beating entirely for a moment. “Why – why do you think I would be able to identify her?”
Had someone told the detective it was Taylor? His girlfriend?
“Because she’s a working girl,” the detective said, “and you’re the one who hired her.”
Dominic’s knees threatened to fold beneath him. Taylor? He hadn’t hired her, but someone might think so – if they knew. But how could they know? Only Taylor and Michelle and he knew the truth. No. It couldn’t be Taylor.
“Why – why would you think I hired her?” Dominic asked.
“You’re the best man,” the detective replied.
Dominic shook his head. “No, no, I’m not...”
“But it’s your twin getting married...”
“My brother and I – we’re not that close,” Dominic admitted.
And the detective’s dark eyes narrowed with something curiously like suspicion. “You’re not?”
Dominic shook his head. “Unfortunately, no...”
“I don’t know if that will make it easier or harder for what else I have to tell you then,” the detective said.
And Dominic’s heart flipped again. “What?”
“In addition to the woman in the morgue, there is a man in the hospital,” the detective continued. “Your brother was just taken there.”
“No...” He shook his head. He’d just played tennis with his brother that afternoon. Roderick was in perfect health. But he’d just been partying. What all had they been doing in the groom’s suite? “What’s wrong with him?”
The detective shrugged, and the suit bunched around his shoulders, too. “I don’t know.”
“I – I need to get to the hospital,” Dominic said. But he glanced around the hallway that was empty but for the detective. Where the hell was Taylor? Was she – could she – be the working girl in the morgue?
“I can drive you there,” the detective offered. He stepped back and waited for Dominic to join him in the hall.
But he hesitated a long moment. Should he just leave? Shouldn’t he try to find Taylor in the hotel first – alive? Shouldn’t he make sure she was alive before he made sure she wasn’t dead?
His head pounded, and he really wished he’d been drinking. Maybe then some of this would have made sense – because at the moment none of it did.
And he didn’t like the way the detective kept studying him, as if he was a suspect. Just what the hell had happened tonight? How had one person died and one wound in the hospital?
And where the hell was Taylor?
He had to make sure she wasn’t the one in the morgue. He stepped out of the room and pulled the door closed. Taylor being unable to get into the room was the least of his concerns. If – or hopefully when – she returned, she could always call down to the desk to have them let her in. Or better yet, she could call Michelle and leave the hotel because it wasn’t safe for her to be there when a detective was investigating.
What if Butler frisked him and found the card in his wallet? No matter that he hadn’t hired Taylor, could he still be arrested for solicitation? And what about Michelle? What would happen to her?
At the moment, he didn’t really care though – what happened to either him or his sister, the madam. He had to make certain that Taylor was okay.
“We can stop at the morgue first,” he told the detective as they stepped into the elevator together, “and I can see if I can identify the body.”
The detective narrowed his eyes even more. “But I thought you hadn’t hired any of the entertainment?”
“I didn’t,” Dominic said. “But I was there...at the bachelor party.” For just a few seconds...
Butler nodded, as if he believed him. But Dominic was worried he had his doubts, that he’d raised the detective’s suspicions.
***
Sam Butler had a sixth sense about when people were lying to him. Or maybe it was a seventh sense and his sixth sense warned him when something bad was about to happen. Because he’d known something bad was about to happen; he just hadn’t imagined it would be this.
Whatever the hell this was...
He had a movie star in the ER and a dead hooker in the morgue. And he didn’t have any idea what had happened. Crime scene techs were working the groom’s suite now, collecting evidence. And the coroner was going to get started on the autopsy as soon as the dead girl was identified.
So eventually his questions would be answered. But for right now, his most pressing one was why the brother of the movie star had wanted to go straight to the morgue instead of check on his twin first.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asked the guy. He looked more like a movie star than his twin who’d been carried away, unconscious and foaming at the mouth, on a gurney earlier that evening.
Dominic Rowe stood next to him, in the viewing area of the morgue. His face was pale now, and he looked a little shaky. Sam knew he was some kind of artist. Not that he probably had to work at all with being the son and the brother of movie stars.
The son of a housekeeper himself, Sam didn’t envy him at all. He was happier growing up the way he had than any of the entitled people of the Village of St. Bartholomew’s ever appeared to be. They were bored, and being bored got them in trouble.
Or dead...
Was his mystery madam bored? Was that why she’d started FANTASY ENTERTAINMENT? Was this poor dead girl one of her escorts?
His fingers itched to take out his cell phone and call her. But how could he when he had no evidence of FANTASY ENTERTAINMENT having any connection yet to the case?
Dominic Rowe drew in a deep breath and nodded. “Yes, please, I need to know...”
“Know what?” Sam asked. What the hell was this guy hiding? And it was obvious it was something? He was more nervous than Sam’s mystery madam probably was in church.
“I – I need to know what happened tonight,” Dominic continued. But Sam suspected that wasn’t what he really wanted to know. Studying the man’s face closely, he gestured for the coroner to open the blinds on that little window so they could see inside the morgue.
The man had closed his eyes, so Sam needed to wait for a moment – until he opened them again and peered through the window. A ragged sigh slipped through his lips. Was it a breath of relief?
“Do you know her?” Sam asked.
Dominic Rowe shook his head. “No, no, I never saw her before...”
“But you said you were at the bachelor party,” Sam reminded him. Was the guy lying to him about that or something else? Because every instinct told him Rowe was lying. “Other men who attended the bachelor party said that Roderick went into the bedroom with one of the strippers.”
“I just poked my head inside,” Rowe said. “I didn’t stay.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “It’s not my kind of scene.”
“The party or the girls someone hired for the party?” he asked. This Rowe was the artistic type; maybe he preferred men. Not that all artists were gay – just some of the ones Sam had met.
The guy tensed now. Maybe he’d taken offense if he’d understood Sam’s question. He must not have because he just nervously sputtered, “I – I didn’t hire that girl...”
“That girl?” Had he hired a girl?
“Any girl,” he continued. “I didn’t hire any girl.”
Maybe Sam had been right about him. But then the guy’s face flushed as he must have realized how that sounded. “Or anyone,” he continued. “I wouldn’t hire anyone...”
“Who do you think hired them?” Sam asked. “Who’s the best man?”
“Roderick’s manager,” he replied. “But Roderick probably hired them himself.” He turned toward Sam now. “How – how is my brother?”
Sam shrugged. But he needed to check on him. He needed to know if he was investigating one suspicious death or two. “Let’s go upstairs and find out,” he offered.
But Rowe hesitated in front of that window yet.
“Do you know what happened to her?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know...” Yet. But he would find out. “It could have been some kind of overdose...”
“No!” the guy quickly responded. “Not my brother. Roderick doesn’t do drugs.”
Skeptical, Sam arched a brow. “He’s a movie star...” And a spoiled rich kid. He didn’t know many of those who didn’t party too hard – with illegal substances.
“That’s why he wouldn’t,” Dominic said. “He’s not that good an actor, and he knows it. He keeps his partying under control, so that he doesn’t miss work or get too bad a reputation that no one will want to work with him.”
“But he does have a bad reputation,” Sam said. Earlier this week he’d been warned about the movie star’s wedding taking place at St. Bart’s Inn. But Sam had only been concerned about the paparazzi that had descended on the village. He hadn’t considered that anything like this might happen because of the Rowe wedding party.
While he’d suspected something bad was going to happen, he’d figured that it was going to be because of her – his mystery madam. And he wasn’t convinced that it hadn’t.
Dominic sighed again. “My brother’s reputation is for being a womanizer.”
While Sam never paid much attention to the tabloids, he had heard that, and now he had proof. The night before his wedding the guy had been in bed with a working girl. Was she one of his madam’s girls? Would she come down to identify the body if he called her?
“So it can’t be a drug overdose,” Dominic insisted. “What does that leave?”
From what Sam had seen in that hotel room, it left one other option. “Poison,” he said. “I think someone tried to kill your brother.” And maybe they’d been successful.
Dominic Rowe shook his head. “No, that’s not possible...”
“You said yourself that he’s a womanizer,” Sam reminded him. “Usually womanizers wind up pissing off the wrong woman or the wrong man...”
Now Sam just had to figure out whom that woman or man was. He had a feeling that Roderick Rowe might have pissed off his brother a time or two. How much? Enough that Dominic might have wanted to get even with him?
Or was Sam’s earlier suspicions correct and the mystery madam was somehow involved in this murder like she’d been St. Bart’s last murder?
Chapter Nine
May 17
Early morning
I went undercover myself last night. Not in the way that I would have liked – especially not once I saw Detective Sam Butler, looking like his muscular body was about to break out of his suit. Did he see me? Even if he did, he wouldn’t recognize me from anywhere but maybe Elaine’s father’s wedding.
I saw him, slipping out the rear entrance of St. Bart’s Inn. Unfortunately Dominic was with him. Sam hadn’t made him sit in the back of his police issued sports utility vehicle, but he took him somewhere. Where? The police department? I wanted to follow them there, but I didn’t dare. What if Sam noticed my tailing them and caught me? How would I explain...anything?
I’d been dressed as if I were homeless, rummaging in the dumpsters in the alley behind the inn. But yet I drove a Maserati. Yes, that would have been hard to explain. But I needed an explanation. I needed to know what was going on – why someone had called the FANTASY ENTERTAINMENT number. Had it been Sam? But yet, I couldn’t imagine he would call and not speak to me. And now, more importantly, I needed to know where he’d taken my brother. And what had happened to Taylor? I still hadn’t heard from her.
I was more worried than ever that something had happened to my best friend. Especially when I heard the news...
Michelle dropped her pen onto the desktop. Her hand trembled, and she couldn’t write the words. Writing them would make them even more real. And they couldn’t be...
No. Nothing bad was supposed to happen this time. Nobody was supposed to die. But once she’d driven away from the back of the hotel, after Sam had driven off with Dominic, she’d circled around to the front. She’d seen the lights flashing of the police cruisers and the emergency vehicles. And hand trembling then, she’d turned the radio onto a local station where she’d heard the news flash: Tragedy at St. Bart’s Inn – at least one casualty
One casualty. Dominic was alive. But who had died?
Taylor?
***
Taylor was dead...on her feet. The clock on the hospital wall showed it was four – am. For the past two nights, she’d had little to no sleep. If she’d been with Dominic, she wouldn’t have minded. But she’d spent too much of last night and this morning with the bitchy bride-to-be.
And she was still with her, sitting in the waiting room of St. Bartholomew Memorial Hospital. Hours ago, they’d been pulling each other’s hair – now they were holding hands.
Taylor told herself that she was just doing it for the story. And what a story it was. A twinge of guilt struck her heart, though, that someone had died. She wouldn’t have believed it...
But she had followed Courtney to the groom’s suite, where the bride-to-be had been hell bent on confronting Roderick and Dominic to find out who’d really had the FANTASY ENTERTAINMENT card in his wallet. Knowing how difficult it was for Dominic to lie, Taylor had chased after her, so that she could help him cover up.
They’d found something else covered up as they’d arrived at the suite: a body zipped into a bag. They’d stopped the morgue workers rolling it out of the suite.
Courtney had started screaming – stopping only when Taylor had shaken her a little. “It’s too small to be Roderick.”
But Courtney had refused to listen and had jerked down the zipper to see for herself. Then she’d screamed again as she stared down into the open, glassy eyes of the young dead woman staring up at her. “Who is she?” she’d whispered. Then more loudly, she’d demanded to know, “Who the hell is she? And what was she doing in Roderick’s suite?”
The morgue attendants had had no answers for her. So she’d pushed past them and rushed into the suite, screaming, “Roderick! Roderick, where the hell are you!”
“They took him to the hospital already,” one of his groomsmen had told her.
“Why?”
The guy had shrugged.
“What’s wrong with him!” Courtney had shouted.
The guy had already been flushed – probably from drinking – but now he turned a darker shade of red. “I don’t know...”
Taylor had glanced quickly around the room. If it had been a big bachelor party, most everyone had left. Only a few police officers and few party-goers remained. And a couple of scantily clad party girls...
Where was Dominic? With his brother, of course. That was where he would be. No matter how Roderick treated him, Dominic was loyal.
“What happened!” Courtney demanded to know.
The guy had just shaken his head again but one of the officers had stepped forward. “Who are you, ma’am?” he’d asked her.
And Courtney had sputtered, “The bride. Where’s my fiancé? What happened?”
The young officer flipped through his notes and recited, “The groom went into the bedroom with one of the exotic dancers. He was gone for several minutes before he stumbled back out and collapsed on the floor...”
Courtney had been shaking her head then. “No...no...” Then she’d turned back to Roderick’s friend. “Are you sure it was him? Could it have been Dominic?”
The guy had actually laughed. “You’re kidding, right? Dominic wouldn’t have been with a hooker...”
“We’re not hookers!” one of the dancers had shouted.
“Dominic wasn’t even here,” the man had added.
He hadn’t attended the bachelor party. So did he even know what had happened?
The waiting room doors swooshed open, and Dominic stepped through them. Before Taylor could jump up, Courtney hurled herself at him. “Oh, thank God you’re here – they won’t tell me anything about Roderick’s condition...”
That was true. The hos
pital staff had refused to tell her anything. They’d cited privacy laws and used the fact that they weren’t married yet as a reason for their reticence. Taylor figured it was because the bride-to-be was a bitch.
Dominic put his hands on Courtney’s arms and gently pushed her back. Then he turned toward Taylor. “Are you okay?” he asked with concern.
Heat rushed to her face as she considered how she must have looked. She knew she had at least one scratch on her cheek, and her hair was tangled. But she’d given better than she’d got. Courtney looked worse. Her lip was swollen and so was one eye.