“You’re going to lose this fight, so get on with it,” she muttered, and opened the box.
How disappointingly ordinary. Antiseptic cleansing wipes, plastic bandages in various sizes, chewable aspirin tablets, a cold compress, gauze, first aid tape, an American Red Cross first aid pamphlet, vinyl gloves, scissors, tweezers, a thermometer…
And, underneath, a computer memory stick.
Bailey regarded the small device with a sense of disbelief. Not because it was unusual; she owned several of the things herself for backing up her computer and sharing files with friends. But because, obviously, her sister had put it there intentionally.
She used me.
Okay, that wasn’t the worst thing Phyllis had ever done. And Bailey supposed that, if you wanted to hide information, you wouldn’t go telling your kid sister about it. It wasn’t even that big a deal; Phyllis could just as easily have stored it online somewhere.
Except that if it was findable via her computer, then Boone might have located it. A physical memory stick, off the premises, lay beyond his access.
Had Phyllis been hiding information from the authorities, from Boone, or both? In any case, she’d chosen a place no one else was likely to look. All weekend, her sister had protested loud and long that she trusted and believed in her husband. That she’d stand by him and prove everyone wrong. Yet all the time, this little item had lurked beneath Bailey’s bathroom sink, evidence that Phyllis had suspected something all along.
Well, people were waiting. Curious though she might be, Bailey didn’t intend to compound her snooping by trying to read the thing. With her marginal computer skills, she might accidentally damage it or lose data, and then all hell would break loose. She might even become accessory to a crime.
She replaced everything in the kit the way she’d found it, or as near as possible. Taking the whole box, Bailey was about to rush to her car when she felt a prick of dread. Did carrying this apparent evidence of a crime put her in danger? Suppose Boone showed up and demanded she hand it over?
Maybe she was being paranoid, but Bailey peered through the window to make sure the coast was clear. Couldn’t tell much through the overgrowth. After a moment’s internal debate, she went in the kitchen and armed herself with a knife. Then she let herself out cautiously, alert to any sudden movement or unexpected sound.
Next door, a lawn mower started up. Bailey nearly jumped out of her flip-flops. Good thing the guy who lived there couldn’t see her through the trees, or at least, she hoped not.
Walking fast, she made it to her car and locked herself inside. Then, with the knife beside her on the seat, she took off for the lawyer’s office.
OWEN DIDN’T FIND OUT from Bailey what was in the first aid kit. And, when he arrived home Monday night, he saw no sign of her. Gone again. Loyal to her sister.
That didn’t bode well, any way you looked at it. Sticking by Phyllis presumably meant sticking by Boone, as well. And even though he knew his brother was entitled to his day in court, the man’s continued absence screamed “Guilty” louder than any jury foreman.
Unless something bad had befallen Boone. But Owen doubted that. His brother was top dog in any fight.
He hoped Phyllis had hidden some damn good evidence in that first aid kit. Much as he disliked the way she’d put her sister in the middle, at least she’d had the sense to protect herself.
On Tuesday, Ned’s continuing cheerfulness grated on Owen once again. But the young man didn’t seem to be hiding anything or smirking behind Owen’s back, either. A carefully worded question, “Seen Bailey recently?” brought the artless response, “She’s sticking like glue to that sister of hers. But you’d know more about that than I would.”
That afternoon, Dr. Rayburn’s secretary called and asked him to stop by the administrator’s office as soon as he was free. Around two-thirty, Owen found himself sitting at a private conference table with Mark Rayburn and Jennifer Martin.
“Flash News/Global broke the word today that your brother’s been arrested in the Caribbean on financial fraud charges,” Mark said. Flash News was an internet wire service and video feed for which Jennifer’s journalist husband had once worked.
“First I’ve heard of it.” That had been quick, considering Boone’s presumed elusiveness. Whatever information Phyllis had provided to the authorities, it must have been potent. “Is the news mentioning me by name?”
“So far, no,” Jennifer said. Dark-haired, with a low, husky voice, the PR director could have been an appealing on-camera presence herself. “We ought to be prepared, just in case.”
“Sorry to ask you this, but were you even tangentially involved in your brother’s financial dealings?” The administrator’s calm manner took the sting out of his words.
“Financial? No.” The personal dealings were nobody’s business. “I co-own a house with him and his wife, but that predates this whole business.”
“Excellent.” Mark leaned back. “I think we’re in the clear.”
Jennifer wasn’t so easily reassured. “We may be all right if this blows over quickly, but if it gets bigger and lasts longer, it could affect the opening.”
“Are you suggesting we delay?” Owen didn’t like the idea. For one thing, he’d done nothing wrong. For another, a ton of work and planning had gone into the events scheduled to begin within a few weeks. “That feels like an over-reaction to me.”
“Agreed. A few weeks or a month isn’t going to make any difference, anyway,” Mark said, and Jennifer nodded slowly.
“Good,” Owen said emphatically. “I’m sorry my half brother’s got himself into this mess and hurt people, but we’re doing important work here.”
“That’s a good line to take,” Mark replied. “Keep the focus on the fact that you’re helping people.”
Jennifer shook her head. “Be careful. You don’t want to be perceived as attacking your brother when he hasn’t been convicted of anything yet.”
That struck Owen as reasonable. “So I express concern about my brother and his activities, and hope that justice is done one way or the other. Is that bland and inoffensive enough?”
The others chuckled, Jennifer with a hint of nervousness. “It’ll do,” Mark said.
That hadn’t gone badly, Owen reflected as he walked down the hall to his administrative office. No one had even mentioned Bailey. He wondered if they planned to brief her also, but he doubted that. It was unlikely the press would pay any attention to an obscure nurse.
Obscure. Didn’t that mean vague, murky and ambiguous? Hardly the right words to describe someone so vital and forthright.
They needed to talk about the twins and their future. About what kind of home the babies should grow up in. About how to support them and cherish them. Owen smiled, remembering those little figures cavorting inside their mother on the sonogram. He missed sitting next to Bailey at the keyboard or on the couch, watching TV. He missed the awareness of his children being so close.
Get to work, Doc. You’ve got an opening to prepare for. He also had a paper to present at the conference scheduled the following month. As he’d said, this was important work.
Owen didn’t come up for air until around 6:00 p.m. when his cell rang. It was Jennifer. “There’s a camera crew outside the hospital asking to speak to you.” She sounded uneasy. “You might want to slip out the back way.”
“You’re telling me to cut and run?” Owen couldn’t believe she’d advise such a tactic.
“They have questions about your brother,” Jennifer explained. “Somehow they made the connection to you. Remember Hayden O’Donnell, that fellow who interviewed you about the multiple birth?”
“Vaguely.” The reporter had been rather pompous, but Owen supposed some people would describe him that way, too.
“Well, this is now an international news story and he believes anything that focuses on Safe Harbor is his territory. He’s going to dig for as much dirt as he can.”
Maybe Jennifer was right, but…
“If they catch me sneaking out the doctors’ entrance, it’ll look even worse.”
“We could take you away in an ambulance,” Jennifer proposed.
That sounded like a scene from a TV comedy. “How about a helicopter?” he joked. The hospital did have a helipad on the roof.
“Okay, I was kidding. Sort of.”
“Let them ask their questions. They’ll get bored and move on.” That had been Owen’s experience with the press in a few previous cases where the public got worked up. One had concerned a doctor on his staff who’d eloped with a seventeen-year-old girl, and another had involved a mentally unstable woman who’d sued after he’d refused to provide fertility treatments. She’d later dropped the suit.
Still, he took a moment to compose himself and review what he knew about Boone’s situation, which wasn’t much. Then he splashed some water on his face, ran a comb through his hair and descended to the lobby.
“We’ll be fine,” he told Jennifer and Mark, who were waiting for him. The administrator was his usual unflustered self and, stepping out to find only one camera crew and a couple of reporters from local papers, Owen felt equally comfortable.
He didn’t care for the way Hayden stuck a microphone in his face and intoned his questions as if the fate of the earth hung in the balance, but Owen easily dispatched the topic of his half brother—eight years older, different fathers—and the investment scam. “Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen my brother for several years,” he said honestly. “We have zero financial dealings together aside from co-owning a house.”
The reporter’s face lit up as if he’d just been handed a Christmas present. “A house where you currently cohabit with the sister of your brother’s wife, isn’t that right?”
Where had the man dug up that bit of gossip? “We’re sharing a house. It was unplanned. Her sister and my brother didn’t communicate with each other when they each separately offered us a place to stay.”
“I understand she’s a nurse here and that she’s pregnant—a surrogate for Boone and Phyllis Storey,” O’Donnell said. “Did you perform the insemination, Dr. Tartikoff?”
Uh-oh. The guy was verging on dangerous territory. “A relative? Absolutely not. I never even met Miss Wayne until I arrived in Safe Harbor last month.”
“Are you her physician?” O’Donnell probed.
“I am not.”
“But you live together?”
“As I explained, we barely know each other.”
“What a coincidence,” the man said sarcastically. “The two of you set up cozy housekeeping here in Safe Harbor, while your brother and her sister are busy stealing forty million dollars.”
Beside him, Owen heard a gasp from Jennifer. In that moment, a couple of points struck him.
First, he wondered how on earth Boone had managed to steal that much money. Second, he realized that this was a bigger scandal than he’d imagined, and it wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.
Third, he could see in O’Donnell’s eyes that the man had more inflammatory questions, a whole sheaf of them, and that he was going to keep poking and probing as hard as he could.
Sneaking out the back way, ambulance or no, was beginning to sound like an option he should have considered a lot more seriously.
Chapter Fifteen
“Look at him.” With the lid of her nail polish bottle, Phyllis gestured at the giant TV screen. “That suit’s new, and it cost a bundle. Apparently he had an entire house full of stuff that I didn’t know about. Possibly a whole private island. The only thing missing is some bimbo on his arm, but I’ll bet he has a few of those stashed around, too.”
“Yes, but look at his black eye,” Bailey said. On the set, a handsome but bruised Boone, wrists manacled behind his back, was half led, half shoved through a crowd by a couple of tough-looking men. The caption bore the name of a Caribbean island called Isla del Diablo and Accused Scammer Waives Extradition.
“Apparently the one thing he failed to check out is how the thuggish dictator on Devil’s Island treats fugitives. Especially fugitives who neglect to pay him off in advance,” Phyllis muttered.
The newswoman’s voice caught Bailey’s attention. “After what appears to have been a rough night in a local jail, fugitive Boone Storey agreed to surrender to U.S. authorities to face charges in the theft of an estimated forty million dollars. The money was allegedly swindled from senior citizens in a spreading investment inquiry.”
The newscast cut to a studio in Los Angeles, where a blonde anchorwoman turned to a man beside her. “Forty million dollars. How much is that exactly, Burt?”
“A whole lot of coconuts,” he said, and flashed white teeth as if he’d said something funny.
Bailey uttered a low growl. Grateful as she was that her brother-in-law had to face charges, she hated seeing her family business splashed out there for the whole world to mock.
Beside her, feet plopped on the teak coffee table, Phyllis resumed applying pink polish to her toenails. She hadn’t even bothered to lay down a cloth to protect the furniture, Bailey noted unhappily. Just because the place was rented didn’t make it okay to ruin things.
This entire entertainment room reeked of excess. The biggest, the newest, the fanciest equipment. A wet bar, a snack fridge, a popcorn stand—anything you could name. Soon, she had no doubt, Phyllis would be giving it up, but clearly her sister intended to enjoy it to the last possible moment.
“I can’t believe you suspected what was going on and didn’t try to stop him.” Bailey had been aching to say that all evening.
Phyllis paused with the brush in the air. “Don’t you start judging me.”
“I’m not, but what do you consider me, your mule?”
“Mule?” Her sister cocked an eyebrow.
“That’s what drug traffickers call the suckers who carry their junk for them and run all the risks,” she said. “You used me to hide your evidence.”
“Oh, that.” Phyllis dabbed a spot she’d missed. “I’m not stupid. I could tell he was keeping secrets, and while I figured that’s just his nature, I decided to back up all the information on his laptop. Usually he kept it password protected but one day he forgot to log off.”
“Which doesn’t explain why you hid the memory stick in my first aid kit,” Bailey shot back.
“What better place to put it?” was her sister’s unfazed response.
Bailey had had a rough twenty-four hours since presenting that evidence at the lawyer’s office. He and Phyllis hadn’t been the only ones present. A couple of people she gathered were prosecutors or high-level investigators had also sat around studying her as if she were an unindicted coconspirator. She’d practically flung the thing at Phyllis and fled.
Today at work, she’d heard murmurs when her back was turned, conversations in the hallways and cafeteria that stopped when she approached and resumed a moment later. Everybody seemed to know that she was pregnant with the children of this awful man. They acted as if it were somehow her fault he’d robbed all those people, when she’d been cheated of her lifesavings, too.
“There’s no point frowning at me.” Phyllis recapped the bottle. “I don’t have the money. Boone spirited it away. It really frosts me that he ripped you off and double-crossed me.”
“What about those old people?”
“The prosecutor says that with the data I turned over, they might be able to recover some of their money.”
“Pennies on the dollar,” Bailey muttered.
“Most likely.” Phyllis brightened. “The good news is, for turning state’s evidence, I might get a suspended sentence. I loved that crook, but I’m not going to prison for him.”
“I hope not.” Before Bailey could say more, a new image on the screen caught her attention. “Wait a minute!”
“Guess they connected the dots to Dr. High-and-Mighty.” Phyllis upped the volume a few notches.
On the hospital steps, Owen stood, expression hovering between impatience and indulgence. Trying
to humor the press, Bailey gathered. A caption read “Dr. Owen Tartikoff, Brother of Former Fugitive Boone Storey.”
“You cohabit with the sister of your brother’s wife, isn’t that right?” demanded a smug middle-aged reporter in what appeared to Bailey to be a heavily edited cut.
“We barely know each other,” Owen answered snappishly.
“Did you own a share of his financial business?” A close-up of the reporter, identified as Hayden O’Donnell, might have been shot later and edited in, Bailey thought. Jennifer’s husband, Ian, had once conducted a workshop for staff about how the press could alter your statements and take them out of context.
“Absolutely not. I arrived in Southern California a few weeks ago as director of Safe Harbor Medical Center’s fertility program. My half brother and I were virtually estranged.”
“Estranged?” Phyllis let out a hoot. “That liar!”
“He said ‘virtually,’” Bailey felt obliged to note.
“What about the part where he barely knows you?”
She had a fierce sensory image of Owen making love to her on the bathroom counter, the two of them wrapped in each other, lost in the moment. Of course he couldn’t mention that on television, but still…
“Let’s get back to you sharing a house with Mrs. Storey’s sister—the one who’s pregnant with your brother’s child,” O’Donnell went on. “Is she really a surrogate or is your brother running some kind of harem?”
Phyllis let out a shriek, followed by a string of curse words. “How dare he!”
Bailey started to shiver. Could someone really say things like that about you on TV and get away with it?
“Of course she’s a surrogate,” Owen replied tautly. Why wasn’t he outraged? Why didn’t he call the man a jerk?
“But you had nothing to do with that?”
“With inseminating her? As I explained, I wouldn’t do that with a family member.”
“Now she’s a family member,” O’Donnell prodded. “I thought you hardly knew her.”
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