Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy

by Hughes, Jill Elaine

  Starla brightened. “Yep, I think I do. This is about all those old people that died, isn’t it?”

  Rebecca nodded. “You bet it is. And we both know who I’m talking about, don’t we?”

  “Billy Hartzell?”

  The older woman nodded again. “You were involved with Billy, weren’t you?”

  Starla blanched. “Yes, I was. Briefly. How did you know?”

  “Word gets around,” Rebecca said, soothing her tone at the younger woman’s pained expression. “Don’t worry, you aren’t getting into trouble for it or anything. In fact, I think maybe you and I are kindred spirits?”

  “How so?”

  “You’ll see.” Rebecca turned to greet Howard Baylock, Stateville’s lumbering, seventy-three-year-old Chief of Police. “Good evening, Chief Baylock. It’s been a long time.”

  The grizzled old police chief extended his hand. “Indeed it has, Ms. Marsh,” he said. “Now what’s this I hear about you a-wantin’ to report some murders?”

  “Well, you remember all that hullabaloo we had over at the Geriatrics ward the other week?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I believe we ruled that accidental.”

  “Well, I have reason to believe that it wasn’t accidental,” Rebecca said, a strange and sinister smile pulling at her features. “Would you like to hear about it?”

  “This better be good,” the chief grumbled, and motioned the two women into his office. Starla wasn’t sure why she needed to be there, but she joined the meeting out of sheer curiosity.

  They sat down in Chief Baylock’s cluttered office. “Well, shoot,” he said to Rebecca.

  “Chief, you and I have known each other for a long time. And I think you’d know by now that I wouldn’t come in here making accusations of murder if I couldn’t back it up.”

  Chief Baylock blinked and sighed. “Go on.”

  “I have strong reason to believe that Billy Hartzell, the contract employee who mixed up the IV bags that led to the overdoses, did it deliberately as an act of mass murder.”

  Starla gasped; Chief Baylock’s eyes widened. “That’s a rather bold statement, Ms. Marsh.”

  “I realize that. But I have proof.”

  The gruff old cop raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

  “Well, maybe not proof per se,” Rebecca conceded. “But I’ve got an odd coincidence, and a pretty strong hunch as to why it happened.”

  “Go on.”

  “I believe Hartzell committed the act to impress a woman. Dana Johnson, a pretty young woman who moved here from Georgia a few months ago. And it seems to have worked. Billy Hartzell is back in town, and he’s staying at her home. They’re romantically involved. I saw them in each others’ arms. The only reason I can think of why a woman like Dana Johnson would get involved with someone who caused several deaths—directly or indirectly—is because she wanted him to do it.”

  “Interesting theory,” the police chief mused, stroking his beard.

  Starla couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Billy Hartzell might be a no-good, lowdown scoundrel for screwing her against a bathroom wall just before taking up with that mousy little nobody Dana, but she seriously doubted he was a murderer. Why would the flame-haired HR executive make such an accusation?

  Why, indeed?. For the same reason that Starla wanted some kind revenge on almost everyone in Statesville. Like Starla, Rebecca Marsh was a woman scorned. And hell hath no fury.

  Chief Baylock stopped fiddling with his beard, stretched, and yawned. “Well, I don’t know if there’s anything to that,” he said. “But I’ve known you a long time, Ms. Marsh, and as such I take what you say seriously. I don’t think there’ll be any harm in bringin’ the kid in for questioning. Not on charges, o’course. Not yet, anyway. If he’s really done somethin’ bad wrong, my guys here in the station’ll make him crack right quick.”

  Rebecca smiled wider. “I think that’s a very good idea. And the state inspectors are coming tomorrow to investigate the deaths as well. You might want to try hanging on to Mr. Hartzell until they get here. I don’t want him going anywhere.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the old man said, pushing his chair back from his desk. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go send a coupla my best detectives to go round this boy up.”

  Chief Baylock showed the two women out. Starla finished filing her vandalism report and turned it in, but she was starting to feel a little sick to her stomach. She wasn’t sure she wanted to get mixed up in something as sinister as a murder plot. And that’s exactly what it was—a plot.

  Starla didn’t believe that Billy was a murderer any more than she believed he was the King of England. Still, she wondered if Rebecca Marsh knew something that she didn’t. And she wasn’t exactly in a position to defy her employer’s head of HR, either. Starla might hate her job, but she still needed to hang onto it.

  She decided that the best course of action would be to sit back and keep her trap shut. And her eyes wide open. For all Starla knew, she could be next on the flame-haired vixen’s list of targets.

  Hah. Not if she could help it. In a way, Starla saw Rebecca’s vendetta against Billy as a major opportunity. In the midst of all the confusion and hullaballoo of the death investigations, Starla knew she could carry out a vendetta or two of her own, completely unnoticed.

  What happened to Billy Hartzell didn’t matter to her anymore. She had plenty of other fish to fry, after all. And she was about to get out her frying pan.

  Eighteen

  Billy and Dana dozed, their bodies intertwined as dawn was breaking. They both occupied that delicate place between sleeping and waking, neither of them ready to cross all the way over into the world. But unbeknownst to them, the world was just about to come and grab them, like it or not.

  Dana heard a heavy pounding from somewhere far away. Willing herself to open her eyes and ears from sleep, she deduced that someone was pounding on her front door hard enough to knock it down. But who would be doing such a thing at five o’clock in the morning? And why?

  Before she could form another thought, a gruff male voice blared over a loudspeaker outside. “”This is the Statesville Police. Come out with your hands up!”

  Dana rubbed her eyes. Police banging on her door and shouting over a loudspeaker at five a.m.? She figured she had to be dreaming, rolled over, and went back to sleep

  Five minutes later, she awoke to find a uniformed Statesville police officer standing over her bed, shaking her body awake while he blared that loudspeaker in her face. “”Dana Johnson, he barked, you and Billy Hartzell will come with us down to the station.”Billy jerked awake at the sound of his name. “Wha?” he stammered. “What’s going on?”

  The cop yanked the bedspread to the floor, exposing Billy and Dana’s naked bodies. “Get dressed, kids. You’re coming with me.”

  ****

  Billy and Dana each sat in separate interrogation rooms, sweaty and nervous underneath the blinding-hot lights. Neither had a clue what was going on. And both were scared senseless.

  Dana sat in her harsh interrogation room alone. There was a large mirror on one side of the room, which she knew, from watching Law and Order episodes, was one-way glass. She didn’t have the slightest idea why she was here, or Billy, either.

  Well, maybe not. She supposed she had at least some idea. The deaths at the hospital were probably the reason she and Billy were here—but those deaths had been ruled accidental, hadn’t they? And it wasn’t against the law for someone to die by accident. At least, not yet.

  Why were the police suddenly involved? And moreover, when they’d come for Billy, why had they dragged her along, too?

  Dana’s mouth was dry, her throat parched. And she was starving. The officers had dragged them both out of bed, thrown their clothes at them, and forced them out of her house while they were still pulling their clothes on. There hadn’t been time for breakfast, a drink of water, or even a trip to the bathroom.

  After what seemed like an eternity,
a short, stout female plainclothes detective came in, carrying two cups of steaming coffee. A tall, skinny male cop in uniform followed close behind, carrying a plate of Krispy Kremes. The two cops sat down across from her. The female cop kept one cup of coffee for herself and handed the other to her partner. The tall drink of water offered Dana a Krispy Kreme. A regular good-cop-bad-cop routine.

  “So Miss Johnson,” the female cop barked. “Why don’t you explain to us why you told Billy Hartzell to kill those poor people at the hospital?”

  Dana gasped. “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t try to play dumb. We already know everything.”

  Dana felt her blood turn to ice. The old Dana would have turned tail and run, or maybe even have broken down crying. But not the new Dana. The new Dana stared injustice right in the face and fought back. “Oh really? Then why don’t you just explain it to me?”

  The detective slurped her coffee. “We’d rather hear it from you.”

  “Fine. I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, because you’re talking about bullshit.”

  The detective choked and spat out a mouthful of coffee into her lap. She clearly hadn’t been expecting that. No, she’d probably been expecting the old, timid, obedient Dana Johnson, the one who just rolled over and took whatever crap she got handed. Well, that Dana Johnson was dead and buried.

  The tall uniformed man—the “good cop”—bit his lip, took a moment to form a new strategy. “What we mean to say, Miss Johnson, is that we’re curious why Billy Hartzell would have come back to town after what happened at the hospital last week. More specifically, what he was doing staying at your house.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Now it was Good Cop’s turn to choke. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My personal relationship with Billy Hartzell is none of your business,” Dana repeated. “I have committed no crime, and neither has he. And unless you’re going to charge me with something, you have to let me leave. I know what the rules are. I watch Law and Order.”

  A slow smile spread across Bad Cop’s troll-like features. “Well, Ms. Johnson, we do intend to charge you with something. Assault and battery, to be exact.”

  Dana flushed deep red. They’d hauled her in because she’d kneed that oaf Craig in the groin? “If this is about what happened back in the Psych ward, that was self-defense.”

  “Oh, really?” Bad Cop growled. “Prove it.”

  “He tried to grab me. He would have raped me if I hadn’t stopped him. I did what any woman would have done in my position.”

  The two cops leaned into one another and conferred in hushed voices. After a moment, they got up and left, leaving Dana behind with the plate of Krispy Kremes.

  “I want a lawyer,” she said to the empty air.

  Billy sat in his own interrogation room, jostling his knees up and down and wiping his sweaty palms on his thighs. He knew why he was here, but he didn’t understand exactly how it had happened. The deaths had been ruled accidental, so why was he in the police station? Did it have something to do with his encounter with Dana? Had he blown his cover just by coming back to the woman he loved? Were the small-town cops here in Statesville really that petty?

  Apparently so.

  The female plainclothes detective and the tall uniformed man who had already interrogated Dana filed into the room. This time the two cops decided to reverse the good-cop-bad-cop roles, hoping to appeal to Billy’s sensitive side. “So you killed five people, Billy,” the male cop barked. “Why don’t you tell us why?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” Billy retorted. “I just delivered some IV bags that ended up getting misused. Why don’t you go after the nurses who actually OD’d the patients?”

  The female cop gently patted him on the sleeve. “We realize you’re upset about what happened, Billy But we’d just like to know why you did it.”

  “I didn’t do anything on purpose. I just did what I was told to do.”

  The detective smiled. “We know you did,” she said softly. “Now why don’t you tell us who told you to do what you did?”

  Billy bit his lip. “The head nursing administrator, Maryam Malone. She told me to pick up the IV bags and drop them off. And I’m pretty sure she’s the one who’s supposed to supervise the supply ordering, too.”

  The two cops backed away to a far corner of the room and whispered between themselves. Obviously, that wasn’t the answer they’d been looking for.

  The tall drink of water—Bad Cop for now—got in Billy’s face. “We know you did it to impress your girlfriend,” he barked. “We know you did it because of her. Why don’t you just admit it?”

  “Because it isn’t true,” Billy snapped. “I want a lawyer.”

  Both cops frowned and stomped out of the room, locking the door behind them. George McGill and Rebecca Marsh met them in the hallway.

  “Well, they aren’t talking,” the female detective said. “And they both have asked for lawyers, which means there’s not a whole lot else we can do right now.”

  “What do you mean?” Rebecca blurted. “I thought you said your detectives would get whatever information we needed. I demand you go back in there and get a confession out of both of them!”

  Chief Baylock waddled down the hall from his corner office, where he’d been observing the interrogations on closed-circuit TV. “Excuse me, Miss Marsh, but this is my investigation, and I’ll conduct it as I see fit. Unless you’d prefer we forget about the whole thing and just send the two lovebirds on their merry way.”

  George McGill coughed. “Surely you wouldn’t do that. We need those two to testify for the state investigators later today, and we can’t afford to have them running off now.”

  Chief Baylock’s eyes narrowed. “Look here, both of you. My case against these two is pretty damn flimsy. The coroner already ruled the hospital deaths accidental, and it looks to me the assault was an act of self-defense. The DA probably isn’t gonna touch either of these two kids with a forty-nine foot pole.”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning gray locks. “But I’ve known the both of you a long time, and I have a lot of respect for you. I’ll do what I can, but I can’t hold these two much longer unless I can come up with something to charge them with. And murder one ain’t never gonna stick.”

  Rebecca and McGill conferred for a moment. “What about involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide?” McGill suggested. “Would that stick?”

  “It might. But it looks like there’s somebody else I’d have to bring in if that’s the charge you want to make.”

  “Do whatever you have to,” McGill barked without thinking.

  “You’re the boss,” Baylock said, and shook his head, irritated. He really didn’t have time for this. Statesville might be a small town with a low crime rate, but he could think of at least a dozen more pressing criminal matters that needed his attention over this. But Covington Community Hospital was the biggest employer (and taxpayer) in town, and he could ill afford to ignore the wishes of its top administrators.

  Well, he wouldn’t ignore them. But maybe if he did exactly what McGill and Marsh asked, they’d finally learn their lesson when it came to meddling in police affairs.

  Baylock waddled back down the hall to his office and shut the door behind him. He picked up his desk phone and dialed the shift supervisor in the main precinct room.

  Officer Jackson, a weathered old beat cop four months from retirement answered.“Yeah, Chief?”

  “Jackson, do me a favor and send an arrest team over to Covington Community Hospital. We need to bring a nurse in. Name of Maryam Malone. Need a descrip?”

  Jackson coughed. “No, I know who Nurse Malone is. Used to check in with her when she was the head ER nurse back in the day. What’s the charge gonna be?”

  “Negligent homicide. But just bring her in for questioning for now. I need a little more ammo before we can book her.”

  “Can do,” Jackson said. “Though I’m
not sure that little old lady would hurt a fly.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Baylock barked, and slammed down the phone.

  Goddamnit, he was getting too old for this. I should retire, he mused. He and his wife bought some land on Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland last year, after they saw a commercial for cheap lakeside lots on TV. They’d planned to wait a few years before having a house built on the lot, where they’d eventually go to retire. And at seventy-three, Chief Baylock could have retired years ago, but he’d kept putting it off.

  Today was the day Chief Baylock would charge a hardworking nurse who was even older than he was with negligent homicide. He figured that was as good a day to retire as any.

  As soon as they hauled Maryam Malone in, Baylock would tender his resignation.

  Nineteen

  Maryam sat in her office, signing off on a pile of Supply requisitions. She hated her Supply duties with a passion. There used to be an entire department devoted to tracking and ordering medical supplies for the hospital, but thanks to the recession, most of those jobs had been cut, leaving only two minimum-wage storeroom clerks and one loading-dock worker. The task of ordering, monitoring, and managing supply requisitions was left to department heads. As the head nurse administrator for the whole hospital, nursing supplies fell to Maryam.

  She hated her Supply duties so much, she’d let them pile up, procrastinating until the last possible moment before she had to slog through the hundreds of pages of request forms, matching up the products with product numbers and prices in the medical supply catalog. The pile of requisition forms on her desk was at least six inches thick and represented a three-month backlog. She was getting complaints from nurses all over the hospital that they were running out of key supplies. No more procrastinating for her.

  “Damn it all, I hate this part of the job,” Maryam muttered to herself. “I’m a nurse, not a goddamn quartermaster.”

  She completed and signed off on the last of the requisitions and dumped them into her outbox for the mailroom guy to pick up. No sooner did she look up from her desk did a strange sight send her heart into a lurch.