Bada-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  “You’ve worn paper booties at crime scenes,” Janet said. “Could you put them on over the five-inch heels she wore that day?”

  “No way. The booties would fall off because they wouldn’t stay up. And if they did, the sharp heels would puncture the paper.”

  “How would you solve that?”

  “Take off the heels.”

  “That’s what Alexis did too. When she changed, she took off the heels and put on the booties. She walked barefooted into the OR.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “When Tony and I met you and Alexis in the hall before we discovered Gary’s body, he remarked to me about how good her legs looked in those heels as she walked away from us. As I watched the tapes, I remembered how her stride was affected by the high heels. The cleaning lady had a heel-toe gait way different than a woman walking in five-inch heels.” She paused. “And then there were the goggles on her forehead.”

  I remembered what we’d seen on the security tape. “The cleaning lady went into the OR wearing goggles, but when she came out, she had them on top of her head.”

  “Alexis didn’t realize she had done it, because she always does it with her sunglasses, but it made me think about glasses.”

  I looked up as the EMT truck drove out of the garage with Alexis’s body. “Alexis had on sunglasses when she shot herself.”

  “She did.”

  “But it was cloudy when we had our meeting at my house. She didn’t have sunglasses on because she didn’t need them.”

  “I looked at the security tapes. It recorded her going into Wickham’s office. She didn’t have the sunglasses on when she went in or came out.”

  “But she had them on when I ran up to help her. I remember that the nurse had to take them off to put the oxygen mask on her face, and then I put them in her purse.”

  “They were Fertig’s.”

  “She took off the wig and slid the sunglasses up on her forehead.”

  “And forgot she’d done it.”

  “Like she did with the surgery goggles when she came out of the OR after killing Gary. How do you know the sunglasses belonged to Fertig?”

  “He bought them at Neiman Marcus. They had a record of the purchase.”

  I kept taking notes. My hand no longer shook.

  “There was one final thing,” she continued. “When the cleaning lady went into the OR, her green top was tucked into her pants. When she came out, the top wasn’t tucked into the back of the pants, and the label in the back of the top stuck up.”

  “She was in a hurry to get dressed after she killed Gary.”

  “And after meeting Fertig for a quickie. Having sex with him in the OR was the only way she could assure he would be in there at the same time as Gary.”

  “She needed to have the cameras record Fertig going into the OR.”

  “But she didn’t know about Fertig’s secret door. We needed evidence to arrest Fertig. Her only option was to record ‘Fertig’ killing Wickham.”

  171

  “But how did Alexis get Wickham to go down to the garage?” I asked.

  “She did it the same way she did with Clark,” Janet said.

  “Klonopin?”

  She nodded. “We checked Clark’s desk again and found that several sample bottles of Klonopin that he’d signed for were missing. We confirmed it with that company’s drug rep. And Klonopin was found in Wickham’s system at autopsy.”

  “How did Alexis do it?”

  “The security cameras recorded Alexis going into Wickham’s office. She came back out and called you to tell you Wickham wasn’t there and she was heading down to check the call rooms.”

  “She did, but you’re saying Wickham was still in her office.”

  “I am. Alexis went through the exit door toward the back stairs, pretending to go to the call rooms, but stopped and went into Wickham’s private back door instead.”

  “Were there any security cameras in there?”

  “No, allowing her to go into Wickham’s office where they sat down in the doctor’s private office and had a drink together.”

  “Wickham’s drink was laced with Klonopin.”

  “It was. While she was in la-la land from the drug, Alexis changed into Fertig’s clothes, and they came out Wickham’s front office door. The cameras recorded Wickham staggering and leaning heavily on ‘Fertig’. But Wickham also had a large black purse slung over her shoulder.”

  “It was Alexis, and Wickham had Alexis’s purse.”

  She nodded. “The cameras recorded that it was ‘Fertig’ with Wickham. They went down to her Lexus where the cameras recorded that ‘he’ murdered Wickham.”

  “But it was Alexis who pulled the trigger.”

  “She did.”

  “But she didn’t know all those recordings would be removed by Warren’s people.”

  “Not until the two Warrens told her when they were paying her off.”

  “And then she knew she had to get the evidence she’d hidden in the ceiling.”

  I pictured what I thought was Fertig running away from me in the hallway. “His boots didn’t fit her properly, and that’s why I noticed ‘Fertig’ had a weird gait running away from me. And I remember that ‘he’ looked taller.”

  “Because it was Alexis.”

  “But when did she change back into her clothes?”

  “Did Alexis have anything in her hands after she shot Wickham?”

  “I forgot that. It looked like she was carrying something.”

  “It was her purse with her own clothes and shoes.”

  I remembered the phone call from Alexis. “She stopped in the hallway, changed into her own clothes, climbed up, and called me. She dropped her phone, shot herself, and then hid the evidence in the ceiling.”

  “That was why her clothes were covered with the black hairs from Fertig’s wig. She couldn’t avoid them.”

  172

  “When did Alexis get Fertig’s clothes and other stuff?” I asked.

  “When she came into the OR to kill Gary, Janet said. “First, she took a detour and went into the doctor’s locker room. He had so many outfits in his lockers, he never realized any were missing. Same with the boots and sunglasses.”

  “She had his gear hidden in the cleaning cart when she left the OR after killing Gary,” I said.

  “That’s the only timeline that makes sense,” she said. “I went to the doctor’s locker room, and Mr. Hunter unlocked Fertig’s lockers. We searched the four lockers together. There were supposed to be fourteen pairs of cowboy boots, fourteen black wigs, twenty white coats, and twenty-four sets of white scrubs.”

  “I guess that’s why Fertig needed so much space.”

  “And you would be right. Hunter went over the inventory on his iPad and discovered one set of each item, including a pair of sunglasses, was missing.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Did you say Hunter unlocked Fertig’s lockers?”

  “I did.”

  “Then how did she get into Fertig’s lockers to grab some of his hair when we were there before?”

  “She didn’t. She had the opportunity to snag some of his wig hair several of the times they had sex. She never opened the lockers when you were there together because the doors were locked.”

  “Then how did she get in there the second time?”

  “Seen your lock pick gun and torque wrench recently?”

  I looked through my backpack. Janet put her hand out and stopped me.

  “I found them in her purse. There were scratches on Fertig’s lock.”

  “You warned me about that.”

  “First thing my CSI guys looked for. She should have practiced more before she used it.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Nope. She came into the locker room dressed as a cleaning lady. She opened the lockers with your lock pick gun and torque wrench and found she had everything she would need to frame Fertig, so she took the necessary items.”

  “Why
didn’t Hunter stop her?”

  “He confronted her but realized she was a cleaning lady and left her alone. When she came back with you for your visit, he didn’t recognize her, because when he first saw her she was wearing the cleaning outfit, the scrub hat which covered her blond hair, and the goggles.”

  “And, because of her heels, she was five inches taller.”

  173

  “What about the blood spatter from her wound?” I asked.

  “That blood pattern on the walls and floor suggested that she climbed up and shot herself before she hid everything, including the gun,” Janet said. “She was bleeding profusely when she climbed down. When I read that the blood expert felt the spatter suggested downward bleeding, I came back here. I pushed up the ceiling tile and had her.” She paused. “One thing I can’t help you with.”

  I waited.

  “The list of doctors.”

  Uh-oh.

  “I never thought I had to research it because Alexis gave it to me and I’d trusted her,” I said.

  “That was your biggest mistake. There was one person who did know who the doctors on the committee were, but you never bothered to ask her.”

  Damn.

  My already-churning stomach began to spasm. “Brittany. She’s too good a reporter to miss doing that.”

  “I called her. She texted me the list. As you mentioned, Peter Warren had been the chairperson, but none of the victims were on it,” Janet said.

  “I should have included Brittany in our meetings. She would have told us who was on the committee.”

  “Diane Warren shut the committee down the day after her husband died. She didn’t want anything negative to come out about Fertig.” She paused. “Of course, at the time, she didn’t know Fertig had AIDS.”

  “If I hadn’t pushed so hard on Peter’s story, none of this would have happened.”

  “Alexis had already started making doctors sick by giving them toxic doses of her drugs after they had sex. And then she killed Denning, which was probably accidental. After that, the rest were obviously planned.”

  “How did she give the Anectine to Gary?”

  “First, she learned how to do it after what she did with Denning. She gave Denning oral sex, and when he ejaculated, she pushed him out the window. That’s why he didn’t fight. He probably never felt it,” Janet said.

  “Your partner would probably say that was a great way to go.”

  “He already did.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Making a house call to console Diane Warren.”

  “I still have problems with that picture.”

  “Me too.”

  “What about Gary?”

  “Like I said, more oral sex. When Gary’s happy ending came, she injected the Anectine into his rectum.”

  “He probably never even felt it. And I made it the planning easier for Alexis because I invited Eddie to our home, and he gave her a blueprint about how to do it.”

  “You worked the story from a different angle.”

  “I did, because I wanted to finish it before Brittany did.”

  “And she wanted to beat you to it.”

  174

  It’s always good to be in the arms of the man who loves you. I needed a hug after what had happened with Alexis.

  Monday night, Carter and I cuddled on the couch, an open bottle of Fourth Estate Pinot and two partially-filled glasses on the coffee table in front of us. Kerry was already in bed.

  “It was a good thing Janet arrived when she did,” Carter said.

  This was the story Janet and I concocted to tell Carter. When I confronted Alexis, she pulled out a gun. Before she could shoot me, Janet fired twice, killing her. If Carter ever learned the truth, he would never trust me again about anything, especially writing stories.

  “And, like you said several times, this wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous story,” I said.

  He picked up his glass and sipped some wine. “No, but the denouement certainly was not what I ever anticipated.”

  “There are some unanswered questions.”

  “You said Linda has been trying to find out if someone absconded with the funds from the MidAmerica Hospital Foundation. Has she been successful?”

  “No, but if any of those funds have disappeared, it might point toward Fertig faking his death and running away with a whole pile of money.”

  “I seriously doubt that Diane Warren will let that happen. She is now in charge of the foundation, so I assume she will close off any access Fertig might have to those funds.”

  “If he’s still alive. The autopsy will take a long time, considering the severe damage done to the body by the explosion and the fire.”

  I thought about Tony and his description of what happened to Dr. Peter Warren: bada-bing, bada-BOOM! Now the same thing could be said about Dr. J. Randall Fertig.

  “But is Fertig dead?” I asked. “Was that his body in the wreckage of the plane?”

  “We’ll have to wait for the final report.”

  I shivered.

  David John, the man who blew me up in Arlington, landed me in the hospital here and then saved me. He was still out there.

  Maybe Fertig was too.

  I shivered again.

  And where was the man I shot in the hands?

  175

  I snuggled deeper into Carter’s arms. “But honestly, honey, I’m tired of this story. I need a break.”

  “I’ll assign it to Brittany, if you don’t mind,” Carter said. “She has the time and chops to write it.”

  “I agree, and she’s good. She’ll find out what happened, plus she has a lot of background on the story.”

  “But it might take a while. She has several other stories she’s working on.”

  “There is one story I’d like to stick with.”

  He waited.

  “The original one about Fertig and his operation to cure breast cancer patients,” I continued. “I want to know if it worked, and if it did, how did he do it?”

  He looked over the rim of his glass and raised his eyebrows. “And there is Mrs. Warren.”

  “You caught me. Yeah, I can’t stop thinking about her. The woman bugs me, and I would love to take her down.”

  “As I said before, it would make a terrific story.”

  “Even though she might bring a lot of pressure down on you?”

  “My dear, let her try. If you write a factual story about her, I’ll see that it is printed, or I’ll resign my position.”

  I took the wine glass out of his hand and put it on the table. “Whatever Fertig did, or didn’t do, doesn’t interest me right now.” I kissed my hubby. “I have something else in mind.”

  Kerry needs a little brother or sister.

  From brainy-BOOM!

  To be published in the fall of 2019:

  The average-looking man stood behind a cement pillar in a parking garage across from David Scott and Rick Carey’s condo. Using binoculars, he watched the women and two men through the windows facing him. They sat and talked together in one place for the first time since he began tracking them again after he got out of the hospital.

  The boss told him to get rid of them, and he wanted to do it even more than the boss did. He owed that bitch for destroying his fingers.

  He put the binoculars away and walked back to the stolen truck. Opening the rear doors, he took out a long wooden box. It slipped from his grasp and clattered onto the cement floor of the garage. He looked at his mangled fingers. She’d done this to him, but he could still fire a weapon like this.

  He opened the box and pulled out a rocket-propelled grenade. The RPG was a Russian-made Tavolga with a thermobaric warhead, way more than enough firepower to blow away the condo and everyone inside.

  He put the RPG’s strap over his shoulder and walked back to the cement pillar he’d previously been standing behind. He fumbled with the weapon but finally brought it up into firing position.

  All he had to do now was step
out from behind the pillar and aim. Once he activated the trigger mechanism, the rocket would do the rest.

  BOOM!