“Slow down, ma’am, I’m having trouble understanding you.”
The Plexiglas walls were scratched and covered with graffiti. Bea’s breath fogged the FUCK YOU FUCKER! scrawled in purple Sharpie. “David Lassiter hid something in the trunk of his car—I saw him in a parking garage near Sixth Street and Penn Avenue.”
“Did you see the make of the car?”
“Yes, it’s a BMW. I didn’t get all of the license, but I think the first letters are J, B, and C.”
“Okay, got it. We’ll pass it along. Can I have your name?”
Bea hung up the phone and crossed back to her car. She’d parked in a tow-away zone in front of an empty storefront with large FOR SALE signs yellowing in the window. Had anyone seen her? Would they remember if they had? Not that it mattered. No one would remember an older woman in a brown wig and shapeless, gray wool coat. People were attracted to shiny, pretty things; they ignored the ugly.
A police car lurched around a corner onto the road, lights flashing. Bea looked straight ahead, hands gripping the wheel as the siren wailed, but it screamed past without the driver so much as glancing in her direction. She smiled as she pulled the car back onto the empty road and sped away.
chapter thirty-five
DAY TWENTY-THREE
The older patrolman became a maniac behind the wheel of the patrol car, his siren parting traffic like Moses at the Red Sea. Jill jumped out when he screeched to a stop in front of the emergency-room doors at Mercy Hospital, running inside and into chaos. Police officers milled around a waiting room crowded with patients, among them a man with a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand, a woman trying to soothe a screaming child, and an elderly man holding a leaking bag of ice to his leg while arguing with an obese young woman trying to help him into a wheelchair. Jill pushed through the crowd to the front desk.
“My husband was just brought in by ambulance. Lassiter, David Lassiter.”
The harried-looking nurse shuffled through papers. “He’s in surgery right now; they just took him back.”
“Surgery? For what?”
“Mrs. Lassiter.” A police officer she didn’t recognize materialized at her elbow. “Your husband was hit by a car.”
“Where? How did it happen? Is he going to be okay?”
“All I can tell you is that he sustained some pretty serious injuries,” he said.
The nurse interrupted. “You can go to the waiting room, Mrs. Lassiter. Go out that door, take a left to go into the main entrance, then take the green elevators to three and follow the signs.”
The hospital was confusing. She took two wrong turns before finding the waiting room. It was at least quieter than the emergency room, if only slightly less congested. The people waiting looked anxious or resigned. Some people stared blankly at the television monitor playing a talk show where an anorexic female host promoted a new book on weight loss. Others flipped through old issues of Ladies’ Home Journal and Sports Illustrated.
Jill couldn’t sit. She paced the room, looking from the clock to the large closed doors stamped HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY. The patrolman who’d brought her appeared, sinking into a seat nearby. Jill got a cup of coffee from the high-tech machine in the corner, but couldn’t take more than a few sips.
Thirty minutes passed, then an hour. People passed in and out of the doors, but no one for her. Had David died and they weren’t telling her? The thought made her sick—she had to swallow hard a few times—and that feeling, in turn, gave her pause. She was so angry with him, so full of rage. If he’d been in front of her earlier in the day she could have run him over. She didn’t want to care about him, her rational mind told her most definitely not to care, that he’d betrayed her and their marriage, but she couldn’t ignore the fear that washed over her at the thought of losing him. No matter what he’d done, she couldn’t simply stop loving him.
Just before the two-hour mark a woman in scrubs came through the doors from the inner sanctum, searching the room. “Mrs. Lassiter?”
Jill stepped forward. “How is he? Is he okay?”
The woman gave her a grim smile. “Your husband was hit full-on by a car. The trauma caused a pneumothorax—a collapsed lung, which we’ve repaired; and a severely fractured left arm and leg. He’s also suffered a concussion, several cracked ribs, and some lacerations. He’s critical, but stable.”
Jill staggered and the doctor grabbed her arm to steady her. “Can I see him?”
“He’s in recovery,” the doctor said. “You can see him once we’ve moved him into a room.”
When they finally gave her the room number, Jill practically ran to the elevators. She was surprised when a few police officers, including the patrolman who’d driven her, got on with her. She was even more surprised to see Detective Ottilo on the fifth floor. He flashed one of his enigmatic smiles. “Hello, Mrs. Lassiter.”
She brushed past him into David’s room, ignoring the patrolman stationed at the door. The shades were drawn and a doctor and several nurses surrounded the bedside. When one of them moved she saw David lying still and white against the bleached hospital sheets. For a moment she flashed to Ethan lying in his crib. But there were oxygen tubes protruding from David’s nose, an IV attached to a vein in his hand, and a heart-rate monitor registering with steady beeps. He wasn’t dead; he hadn’t left her. She dropped her purse and coat on a chair, and a nurse moved aside so Jill could stand next to the bed.
David’s skin looked unbelievably pale, except for the places where it was scratched and bruised, Rorschach inkblots of dark purple around his temple, left eye, and chin. His shirt had been removed, his chest was bandaged, and his left arm was in a cast. His left leg was in a longer cast and there were steel pins protruding from it. “Oh, David,” Jill whispered, eyes watering.
“I’m sorry, but I need to check his vitals,” the nurse said, touching her arm gently. Jill brushed a soft kiss on the only uninjured spot she could find on David’s forehead and stepped out of the way. The nurse picked up a plastic bag on the tray table next to the bed and handed it to her. “Here are his things; you should hold on to them so they don’t disappear.” Jill looked in the bag and saw David’s keys, cell phone, and wallet. His iPhone screen was cracked and the brown leather wallet was stained with what looked like blood.
“Mrs. Lassiter, if I could have a word.” Detective Ottilo took her by the arm and steered her back into the hall.
Jill pulled free. “What is it? Can’t you leave us alone for five minutes?” She looked away from his probing eyes back into the room, but the attention of the guard and other police officers was on her, and the nurses standing at their station several feet away were also watching, and she could see the suspicion in their eyes and something else—excitement?
“Where were you this morning?”
“Out.” Jill looked back at the detective who continued to stand there, his calm just increasing her frustration. She added, “Visiting friends.”
“Did you see your husband this morning?”
“No.” Didn’t he know that David wasn’t living at home? Of course, he must. They had to have seen David carting his clothes out of the house. Jill wondered if there were police officers taking turns patrolling her in-laws’ house.
“So you didn’t make an arrangement with your husband to hide the knife?”
The question took her completely by surprise. “Knife? What knife? What are you talking about?”
“Mrs. Lassiter, your husband was hit by a car in the parking garage next to Adams Kendrick. He was seen hiding something in the trunk of his car. That something turned out to be a knife.”
“What knife? I don’t understand.”
“It had your fingerprints on it,” Ottilo continued. “As well as traces of blood.”
“This is crazy. I don’t know anything about a knife.”
“Analysis indicates that the blood type matches your daughter’s.”
She gaped at him. “Sophia’s blood? Are you sure?”
&nb
sp; “Jill Lassiter, at this time I’m arresting you for the murder of Sophia Lassiter,” Ottilo said, and as if he’d been waiting for this moment, the uniformed cop on the chair behind him stood up, producing handcuffs.
“This is crazy.” Jill looked from one to the other. “I don’t know anything about a knife.”
The patrolman reached for her arm and she stepped back just as an alarm began shrieking in David’s room and a woman’s calm, disembodied voice came over the paging system: “Code Blue, five, two eleven. Code Blue, five, two eleven.”
Medical personnel came racing down the hall, one of them pushing a crash cart. Jill stepped to one side, Ottilo and the patrolman to the other. Jill couldn’t see past the crowd around David’s bed. A doctor barked orders that Jill couldn’t understand. Someone shifted and she thought she caught a glimpse of a flat line across the heart-rate monitor.
“What’s going on? Is it his heart?” Jill yelled at the nurse, but she didn’t answer. Ottilo and the patrolman’s focus had shifted to what was happening in the room, not Jill. In a split second, several thoughts raced rapid-fire through her mind: David could die, she would be arrested, and if those two things happened Sophia would never be found. At the same moment she saw a red exit sign glowing above the door to the stairwell at the end of the hall. Jill hadn’t fully processed the final thought before she took off running.
chapter thirty-six
DAY TWENTY-THREE
The dog didn’t bark his usual greeting when Bea got home. No sound came from the child’s room and Bea went straight upstairs, grateful for a reprieve. She poured a glass of wine, wishing she had something stronger, and collapsed on the couch, taking a healthy slug. It was cold inside. She rubbed her arms and pulled a blanket down around her. Was David Lassiter alive? Had they arrested him yet? The remote sat on top of the TV, but she was too tired to stand up and get it. She wanted nothing more than to sleep, but Avery would wake up soon and Bea would have to feed her and the dog. Why hadn’t he barked? He should have been barking by now, scratching and pawing at the door to be let out.
Bea forced herself up from the couch and went back down to the basement. The bolt wasn’t drawn across the door. Bea cursed. In her hurry to leave she’d obviously forgotten to lock it, but the child was still drugged, she couldn’t have gotten out. She pushed the door open, silence rushing at her instead of the dog. Bea cried out when she saw the empty room.
She ran to the bed, running her hands over the sheets as if she’d find the child hidden in the bedclothes, but what she felt was stickiness and she remembered the drug shooting from the needle, spilling out when Avery bumped her arm. She checked under the bed just in case, but the child was well and truly gone. And so was the dog.
Bea grabbed her coat and ran back upstairs. She spotted a chair pushed against the kitchen counter and an empty package of cookies left on the table, with crumbs smattering the surface and the floor. Maybe they were in the backyard. She opened the door and looked out, but she couldn’t see anything except falling snow. And then she thought of how cold the house had felt and ran to the front door. It stood ajar.
Bea shuddered from the cold, staring down at the front steps and beyond to the driveway disappearing beneath the canopy of trees. How far could the child have gotten? She couldn’t have been on the driveway when Bea came home or she would have seen her. Could she have gotten all the way down the dead-end street and on to the main road? “Avery?” she called as she hurried down the steps—called not screamed, nothing loud enough to make any inquisitive neighbor call the police.
Snow fell in small, hard flakes that blew in stinging bursts against Bea’s face. Already it coated the steps and gravel driveway and clung to the dead grass and dry leaves. There were no footprints, no sign that the child had come this way, but Bea started down the driveway anyway, diverting periodically into the woods on either side to search, stumbling over tree roots as she lost most of the light coming from the gray, cloud-heavy sky. Her pulse was erratic—pounding one moment, fluttering the next.
“Avery?” she called again, but the wind stifled her cries. Light sifting through the trees created shadows. She thought she saw the child up ahead and hurried down the hill toward her, but there was no one there. What if a car had stopped to pick the child up, or worse, hadn’t seen her in time to stop? Bea’s mind tormented her with images of the child’s bloody body lying on the road.
As she reached the end of the driveway, she saw something through the trees ahead. The yellow glow of a house light. The house down below, the one owned by the snowbird. No one was supposed to be there, but there was a light coming from an upstairs window. Had Avery seen the light, too?
Bea ran down the neighbor’s road, which curved like hers through trees. It ended sooner, opening up to a big circular driveway, a grand entrance for a large brick colonial. Parked out front was a white sedan that looked dingy next to the purer white of the snow piling up on the hood. Lights were on all over the house, spilling from the windows onto the snow-covered yard. As Bea watched, a man passed by a front window and paused to stare out at the driveway. It was the old man she’d seen out walking, the one she suspected of calling the police. She ducked back into the woods and that’s when she heard it. A bark. A single, short yip, but it was enough. She knew that sound. She stood still, listening hard. Another yip.
She scanned the property and spotted a shed tucked left of the house. Bea moved stealthily along the perimeter of the yard, staying close to the trees. The shed was large, but old, graying boards with traces of moss and algae around the rusted closure on the double doors. It wasn’t locked; one door stood slightly ajar. Bea pushed it open and the dog rushed her, barking a warning.
“Cosmo! Stop it, Cosmo, it’s me!” She hissed as she stepped inside, fending off the dog with her foot. The shed smelled of motor oil and fertilizer, the walls hung with garden tools surrounding a large riding lawn mower. Dim light poured through a cracked and rotting window frame that had long since lost its glass. Bea peered through the gloom. “Avery, where are you?” she called in a hushed singsong. Something moved in a corner and she spotted the child huddled near some bags of grass seed.
“There you are! Come here.” Bea took a step forward, but the child shrank back, shivering so hard that Bea could hear her teeth chattering. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but at least she’d managed to put on shoes. “Come on, now,” Bea urged, moving farther into the shed. “We need to get you home.”
She tried to smile, stretching out a hand, encouraged as Avery finally inched toward her. Just as Bea was about to grab her, the child darted left, clambering over the fat tire on the lawn mower to get out the other side of the shed’s double door. It burst open at her push and Bea sprang after her, but the dog was faster, darting between her legs to follow at the child’s heels, while wheeling back to bark at Bea.
She hissed, “Shush, Cosmo, stop barking!” But the dog wouldn’t cooperate, baring its teeth and barking like crazy as the child slipped on the frost-slicked ground, and Bea made a wild lunge for her, managing to catch the back of her sweater.
“No, no, no!” the child screamed. Bea wrapped a hand around the child’s mouth, but Avery bit her and she cursed, dropping her hand long enough for the child to scream again. Bea stifled her a second time, pulling her coat sleeve into the child’s mouth to block her teeth.
Cosmo barked frantically and Bea kicked out at him, trying to silence the damn dog.
A sudden loud noise came from the house, a whoosh of a well-insulated door opening, and she heard a male voice call, “Who’s out there?”
Bea ducked back inside the shed, pulling the child with her. “Who’s there?” the voice called again. “You’re trespassing!” The sound of gravel crunching. Bea brushed against a pair of wicked-looking pruning shears and caught them by the closed straight blades before they fell, still holding the child pressed tight against her chest. She could feel the small body convulsing, the tiny nostrils flaring, as the girl struggled
to breathe. Bea held her own breath as the footsteps moved even closer.
“What the hell?” The door creaked. He’d found the open shed; he was right outside. Bea breathed shallowly. “If you’re in there, you’d better come out! I’ve got a gun!”
She pressed her back against the cold boards, heart thudding in her ears. What should she do? What could she do? She pictured Frank shaking his head, urging her to give up. Years of resentment spurred her on. There had to be another move. She set Avery on her feet, releasing her. The little girl ran forward, Cosmo running out after her.
“What on earth?” the man exclaimed.
“I wanna go home!” Avery cried.
“Where did you two come from?”
Bea crept to the edge of the door gripping the handle of the shears. She was less than five feet from him, close enough to see the stooped posture of old age, the liver spots on his bare, bald head. He didn’t notice her there in the shadows to his left; his focus was entirely on the child and the dog. He was quite old, with a tremor in his voice that suggested Parkinson’s, and the shuffling gait of someone worried about breaking a hip. She could see a glint of silver in his hand—the muzzle of a gun. “It’s okay,” he said to Avery, beckoning with his other hand, “I won’t hurt you.” But when Avery took his hand, Cosmo ran at the old man, barking aggressively.
Startled, he stepped sideways too fast and lost his balance. As he fell backward, the old man put his hands out to catch himself and the gun went off, a boom loud enough to make everyone flinch and stop the dog barking.
* * *
“Stop!” Ottilo’s surprised shout came as Jill reached the stairwell door. She pushed through it and hurtled down the stairs. She raced down three levels and burst through the door onto the second floor. Fortunately, nobody was in the corridor at that end. She walked quickly but quietly down the hall, smoothing her hair and trying to still her harsh breathing. The only thing she had with her was the bag with David’s things. She tucked it under her arm and tried to look as if she knew where she was going. Monitors chirped and she heard the quiet chatter of television. The sterile rooms seemed populated only by the elderly. She walked past a room where a nurse was checking a patient’s vital signs. The young woman looked up and her eyes narrowed. Jill quickly ducked around a corner just as the stairwell door banged open behind her.
Only Ever You Page 25