Cover Shot (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery Book 5)

by LynDee Walker

  My stomach lurched. Charlie and I had always been rivals, but neither of us had ever gone after the other in so blatant a fashion.

  “Out for some blood, Charlie?” I kept my voice from trembling—barely. “I’m O-negative if you have to call for a transfusion.”

  “Nothing personal. My producer is tired of losing to you. You’ve kicked everyone’s ass for months, like you think you’re some sort of journalistic superwoman. Hell, I heard people in our break room talking about your piece on this murderer yesterday. Asking each other what they’d do in his shoes. Sweeps week means payback. I thought you’d appreciate the warning.”

  I closed my eyes, hatred of Rick Andrews burning in the pit of my stomach. Charlie wouldn’t stop ’til she got something. And there were six hundred and seventy-eight ways to spin that story that would make me and Aaron look like lying idiots and Tom Ellinger look like a murderer. And people would believe it. Journalism even before the age of the Internet 101: perception is nine-tenths of the truth, and everyone loves a good scandal.

  Hell.

  “Charlie—” I didn’t quite get the word out before Aaron stepped to the tape line at the edge of the grass and started his rundown.

  By the time I finished talking to the coach and a pair of bawling mothers, Charlie was gone.

  I sped to the office and filed the story, then spent my “day off” poring over notes and reading old studies Maynard was linked to. The research was all over the map. Chemo drugs, some I’d never heard of and others that had revolutionized treatment. Gene therapy. Non-invasive homeopathic approaches.

  I clicked another link and found an article about treating brain tumors with live Polio virus. I blinked at the screen. The research in front of me was new—and working. On more than half the patients in the trials.

  But Maynard had done it almost a decade ago, with at least some success, according to Bob. Hoping Miss Emma could find details on that, I saved the article on my screen. If Maynard had been that many years ahead of the research curve, maybe Ellinger wasn’t nuts.

  Not sure which of these roads might lead to his murderer, if any of them did, I closed the computer at four thirty, ready for a long walk and a game of fetch with Darcy. Charlie’s voice on the TV followed me into the elevator, and I wondered how much she knew. The only safe way out of this was to find the truth—assuming I was right and it wasn’t the obvious choice—before she got her hack job ready for air.

  Tick.

  Tock.

  22.

  Looking for a miracle

  “I love you, Mom. Send pictures of that bouquet, and I’ll call you in a couple days.”

  I smiled at her “I love you more” and said it back twice before I hung up the phone and stretched. Being woken on a Sunday by a call from my mom was significantly more fun than waking up to Aaron’s grouching about bored over-privileged kids the day before.

  Hearing her voice had been more welcome than usual after a week peppered with painful reminders of almost losing her.

  It also redoubled my determination to find the why in Maynard’s murder. Aaron and Kyle wanted the who and the how. The why was always a nice bonus for them, but would they dig for it with so much pressure coming for an arrest? Nope. Which left that stone to me. And if there was a sliver of a chance what was under it could save my mom if she ever again needed saving, I would find the right rock or die trying.

  But first, coffee. I was always more productive with caffeine on board. I shuffled to the kitchen and brewed a cup of vanilla caramel crème before I let Darcy outside and went to the front door to grab the newspaper.

  “Coffee and comics. Now this is Sunday morning.” I put a bowl of Pro Plan in front of the dog and settled myself at the table, hunting for the Lifestyles section.

  I pulled it free, my eyes lighting on a half-page photo of a gorgeous redhead hugging a preteen with each tanned arm.

  “Miracle Mom,” the headline screamed in ninety-two point Chancery.

  The gibberish I’d been trying to recognize at bedtime Friday settled into actual words in my head: “Doctors said she should have died,” in Eunice’s Virginia drawl. I popped the section front straight and read every word of Kim’s article four times.

  “Jiminy freaking Choos, Darce.”

  The dog ignored my jaw hitting the floor, licking her bowl clean and trotting off in search of a toy.

  I stared into the bright blue two-dimensional eyes of Felicia Lang, who’d been dragged from the jaws of death two years before, lying in an ICU bed with a cancer-ravaged body and an utter lack of hope.

  And our best feature reporter had artfully written around the cause of this miracle.

  I’d bet my last cup of coffee that was because the woman wouldn’t say how she got well.

  And I’d wear Uggs all winter long if it didn’t turn out to be Maynard who pulled off the last-minute rescue.

  I groped back through my memory for the Tuesday staff meeting that seemed an age ago. Kim had to beg for the interview, Eunice said. And only got it because her husband knew these folks.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran for my phone. So much for a lazy Sunday morning.

  Kim knew jack squat. Four hours talking to the Langs, and no matter how she phrased her questions, they wouldn’t spill.

  Yes, it was odd. No, she didn’t see the need to push. It was a feel-good feature. She saw the medical records and photos—the woman really had been hanging across the threshold of death’s door.

  I thanked her and hung up, underlining the phone number she’d offered for Felicia Lang. Dialing it wouldn’t get me anywhere but hung up on. But three minutes with Whitepages got me an address.

  Hot damn. Seven blocks from me. And the story said Felicia Lang worked with the local animal rescue center.

  A quick shower and a little makeup, and I clipped Darcy’s leash to her collar before we strolled out into the autumn sunshine.

  Nineteen hours (or a good twenty minutes of Darcy investigating every weed and pebble in the Fan) later, I tried to be unobtrusive, staring at the Langs’ antebellum brick-front home.

  I knew the block. Senators and CEOs were counted among its residents. “These folks can be good at keeping secrets, girl,” I murmured to the dog.

  Darcy nosed at a dandelion, unconcerned. Until a squirrel darted out of a bed of ivy.

  Darcy is not a fan of squirrels.

  I grabbed for her, but it was too late. She slipped her collar faster than Joey can unhook a bra and charged the rodent, who had enough of a sense of self-preservation to turn and run back into the yard.

  “Darcy!” I hissed, jangling her collar.

  Completely ignored.

  Yipping like a bloodhound, she tore through the ivy bed, the squirrel’s tail waving in her face like a racetrack flag.

  For the love of God.

  I stared, not wanting to put a toe on the perfectly manicured blanket of rye in front of me. The squirrel leapt onto a tree trunk and scurried up, turning to look back at Darcy from a high branch. I could almost hear the “nyah nyah nah nah nah,” and binoculars might have shown me a little pink tongue poking out at the dog.

  Darcy clawed at the bark, her whole body on alert, baying like she’d chased Charles Manson up there. I jogged up the driveway and down the sidewalk and scooped her up, clipping her collar back in place and pulling it a centimeter tighter. “No running off,” I said, bumping her nose with mine. I turned back for the street as the front door opened to reveal our Sunday Life section cover boy.

  He paused, raising an eyebrow at me, before he turned his head and bellowed. “Mom! Someone’s here to see you!”

  I flinched. I wanted an introduction, sure, but I was fresh out of icebreaker ideas. And pretty certain I’d come across as a stalker, likely as not.

  I pasted a smile in pl
ace as the kid grabbed a skateboard from under the porch and disappeared up the street. Felicia Lang appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later, wiping her hands on a blue dishtowel. “Can I help you?”

  I held Darcy up. “The dog saw a squirrel. Sorry to bother you.”

  “She’s adorable!” She laid the towel on a table and bounced down the front steps, scratching behind Darcy’s ears.

  All right then. Point for Darcy. I smiled. “Thank you. She’s my princess. But she’s a handful—she slipped her head out of her collar and took off though your flower bed before I could grab her.”

  Felicia frowned and put two fingers under Darcy’s collar. “It’s too loose.”

  “I worry about tightening it because she’s so tiny,” I said. “Most of the time she’s just in our yard, and there’s a fence, so I don’t worry.”

  She nodded. “It’s hard when they’re so fluffy. What you think looks too tight isn’t. But you could always get her a harness.”

  “Do they make those this small?” I knew good and well they did, but wanted to keep the conversation going.

  “Sure they do. Any pet store should be able to help you.” She stroked Darcy’s fur. “You want to be able to take her on walks without worrying about her getting hurt.”

  “I’ll look into that, thanks.” I tipped my head to one side, studying her face, and snapped my fingers. “I know where I recognize you from! You were in the newspaper this morning. What a great story.”

  She smiled, dropping her gaze to the aggregate sidewalk. “Thank you. I’m a girl blessed.”

  “My mom is a cancer survivor too,” I blurted. “Six years in remission.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. “What kind of cancer did she have?”

  “Breast cancer. I managed to get her into a clinical trial for a new drug several years back.” I kept my tone light, conversational.

  She nodded. “Sometimes getting in on the floor of a new treatment saves your life.” The words were so soft, I almost didn’t hear them over Darcy’s breathing.

  “Were you in a trial, too?” I asked. “For which drug?”

  “It was—” She paused. “That’s not exactly how it worked.”

  I fiddled with the dog’s leash. She didn’t want to talk about this, if Kim couldn’t get it out of her. But talking to a survivor’s daughter and talking to a reporter are two different things. Usually. And I wasn’t looking to quote her.

  “I still find myself looking all the time for successful treatments. My mom is great, but I worry. What if it comes back? How would we fight it?”

  She nodded, turning to sit on the steps and gesturing for me to join her. “I can certainly understand that.” She bit her lower lip.

  I perched next to her, petting Darcy. “Who treated you? Someone local?” I held my breath.

  She nodded. “He’s a brilliant man. We’re just lucky he happens to be in Richmond. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.”

  “My mom is in Texas, so I don’t know many of the doctors here, but I’m always happy to add new ones to my list.”

  “Dr. Maynard keeps his patient group small,” she said. “But he really cares about everyone he treats. No one is just a number or just a paycheck to him.”

  Bingo. I swallowed hard and tried not to croak out the next question.

  “I read in the paper that you were nearly end stage. Do you know how he saved you?”

  She shrugged. “Not specifically. Other than he said he was working to perfect the treatment so it could be made available to everyone.”

  I nodded. “Were there other people in the trial with you?”

  “Not many. A handful of us, and a control group.”

  “Do you still talk to the others?”

  “One or two of them. Almost all of us lived.”

  “Almost?”

  “Dr. Maynard was different. He treated the control group, too, after he’d had time to gather data. But before he got to that point, we lost one person. It really shook the doc up for weeks. I remember going in one evening and he was shouting at another man, who was yelling right back at him.”

  Interesting.

  “You didn’t happen to notice what they were fighting about?” The words popped out before I could stop them, and she gave me a raised brow.

  “Not that it really matters,” I said. “Just curious. I always wondered what went on behind the scenes when we’d sit in the doctors’ offices and people watch.”

  She nodded. “I don’t remember. Something about test results and registration. It didn’t make sense to me.”

  Ah, but it did to me. I squeezed Darcy a little tighter, Goetze and his lunch companion floating through my thoughts.

  “Do you still see this Dr. Maynard for check-ups?” I asked. “I mean, if I wanted to get him to take a look at my mom’s charts, do you think I could?”

  “Only once a year,” she said. “Other than that, I see my regular OB/GYN. But there’s no harm in asking him to look, right? He’s brilliant. Truly in his own class.” She reeled off the office address and I recited it over a dozen times in my head.

  I smiled. “You look fantastic. Feeling good?”

  “Fabulous. As dark as those days were, I hope I never stop seeing every new one as a gift. And I hope your mom’s health remains good.”

  A child bellowed from inside the house, and I stood. “I think that’s your cue.”

  She laughed. “I love it. It was nice to meet you…” The eyebrow went back up.

  “Nichelle,” I said. “And this is Darcy.”

  She scratched the dog’s head again before she turned to go inside. “Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  I trotted back down the drive toward my house, turning her words over in my head.

  Un-freaking-believable. If David Maynard hadn’t found the golden grail, he was two breaths from it. So someone made sure he stopped breathing.

  23.

  Two and two

  Stepping out of Amy’s room the next day, I closed the door softly and sucked in a deep breath before I turned for the nurse’s station.

  In my hand was a notebook full of heart-wrenching love story, with a healthy dose of everything that made the U.S. healthcare system unfair. In my head was a brain just as full of questions.

  If I could get Alisha talking about Goetze again, maybe she’d share something I could use. Or maybe she’d remember something about Maynard.

  Anything was better than the big fat black hole currently in the middle of this puzzle.

  I waited at the end of the counter for her to turn around, my eyes roaming the hallway. People moved quietly in and out of the rooms, the doctors and nurses bending their heads and talking in hushed tones. I spotted a slight, rumpled man staring at me as he shuffled down the hallway. I waved. He ducked his head, his thick black hair shining under the fluorescents, and scurried into a room three down from Amy’s.

  Huh.

  I took a step toward the door, then paused. He was keeping watch over someone he loved, who had to be pretty sick to be in this ward.

  But why run from a simple wave?

  Before I could follow that rabbit trail too far, a doctor stepped out of the room next to Amy’s, making notes on a tablet touchscreen. He tapped with the stylus twice and stuck it back in his pocket before striding into the room across the hall.

  My scarlet Manolos grew roots into the linoleum, my eyes still fixed on the space the doctor had vacated.

  All this time, we’d been looking for Maynard’s files.

  And it wasn’t that he was crazy and didn’t keep them, or that they’d been stolen.

  They were electronic.

  I reached into my shoulder bag and tapped a finger on my BlackBerry. I loathe feeling s
tupid.

  There was a good chance Kyle would feel just as dumb. So would Aaron. They spent days tearing apart the doc’s home, after all. By time comparison, they should’ve had this way before now.

  I had Kyle’s number half-dialed and stopped.

  What if they did?

  To hear them tell it, the President himself wanted them to keep quiet. If they’d found Maynard’s iPad, would they tell me?

  Nope.

  Was there a way for Charlie to land here? Or Alexa?

  If I could, so could they.

  Damn.

  I was still debating calling Kyle when Alisha turned to me.

  “Good morning!” she chirped. “Good to see you again. Mrs. Ellinger has been doing so much better since you were here the other day.”

  “She didn’t look better this morning.”

  “She has more lucid moments. At this stage of her illness, that’s pretty remarkable all by itself. She seems to be in less pain.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” I smiled, swallowing the lump in my throat and thinking of Felicia Lang. Had she been as sick as Amy?

  “What brings you back here this morning?” Alisha widened her eyes expectantly.

  “I’m doing a series on the Ellingers. What happened here last week. Why it happened. How. What are the underlying issues that drive people to act out violently? No one’s ever really gotten to interview a guy who walked into an occupied building and started shooting. They usually don’t make it out.”

  She shook her head.

  “I saw it with my own eyes, and I still can’t believe it. They’re such a nice family. He’s such a nice man. How on Earth did he end up there?”