Panty Raid

by Diane Vallere

  I shrugged. “It seems almost too convenient, right? Especially with his friend Marc here. I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity. I can trust you to tell him, right?”

  “But of course.”

  “One more thing,” I said. I reached over the counter and picked up a notepad and a pen. “I have one friend in Las Vegas who I’d like present. Detective Marbury. Can you call him at this number and ask him to come to The Left Bank as soon as possible?”

  “Sure,” Jacques said. By this point, his accent was dropping in and out and I doubted he even knew it.

  I left Jacques in stunned disbelief and went to the bridal salon. Assuming he’d call Marc’s room, I knew I’d be expected upstairs in half an hour. That was half an hour to kill shopping for overpriced bridal attire for a wedding that wasn’t going to take place.

  I bought a veil, browsed the clearance dresses, and went to my room. It was neat and tidy. The maid service had removed all signs of the mess Kristin, Sue Ellen, Amanda, and I had left behind. I poked my head out the door and looked down the hall. The room service cart I’d pushed into the hallway was gone.

  I rooted through my suitcase for one particular sample from Intimate Mode. It was a small gift bag from Joey Cheeks, and inside was a T-shirt that said #RealityIsOverrated. I took off my white shirt and pulled on the tee, changed out of my cropped black pants and into a pair of #GetCheeky panties, and brushed out my hair until it was full and bouncy. I slipped the white veil on and looked at my reflection. Was I going to do this?

  Yes. I was. Because nobody else could do it for me, and if I didn’t do it, nobody could end the cycle.

  33

  I left my room and went to Marc Rico’s suite. The Do Not Disturb sign hung on the door. I knocked, and Marc opened the door seconds later.

  “Sammie,” he said. His eyes moved from the top of my head, down my torso to my feet, and back to my face. “This is a surprise. Come on in.” He held the door open and I entered. Unlike my newly serviced room, his bed sheets were tossed, and empty bottles of booze lined the windowsill.

  “Is Nick here?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “No. He’s downstairs in the casino.”

  Jacques had told me Nick was up here, and I’d been counting on that as part of my plan. I’d also counted on Jacques getting Detective Marbury to the hotel. What if I’d made a mistake relying on Jacques?

  “You’re a bad influence.” I joked. “What’s Nick’s game today?”

  “The usual. You know Nick.”

  “Not when it comes to Vegas. We’ve barely set foot in the casino. You probably know more about his gambling habits than I do.”

  Marc studied me. “Blackjack.”

  “Blackjack?” I repeated.

  “Does that surprise you?” He snapped his fingers. “Quick decisions. Calculate your odds. Fast money. It’s a risk taker’s game.”

  But Nick wasn’t into Blackjack for the very reasons Marc claimed to like the game. And if Marc had paid attention while he was at the casino with Nick, he’d know that.

  Was Nick in the casino or was he somewhere else?

  “I left a message for Nick at the front desk, so I should probably check in with Jacques to see if he was able to reach him.” I headed toward the door.

  “It would be bad luck for him to see you,” Marc said. “Use my phone.”

  “That’s okay. Nick’s probably either waiting for me in our room or outside the chapel.”

  “What’s the rush? Come here. Let me adjust your veil.”

  I felt the walls closing in on me. I’d asked Jacques to deliver not one but two messages. How long until Marbury was here? Twenty minutes? Thirty? I had to wait out the moment and act like everything was fine.

  I crossed the room and faced the full-length mirror. Marc stood behind me and fluffed my veil. “You look just like she did before she died,” he whispered in my ear. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

  My blood ran cold, and I stiffened. “Relax, Sammie. There’s no point in worrying about things you can’t control. But I should tell you Nick’s not waiting in your room or outside the chapel,” Marc said. He locked eyes with my reflection, and my skin felt prickly. “He’s not playing Blackjack. He didn’t get your message and he’s not going to join us.”

  I didn’t know if Marc was lying or telling the truth. I didn’t know if Detective Marbury was on his way or if that message hadn’t been delivered either. The only thing I knew was if I didn’t get out of the room, I’d end up a victim.

  “I know it was you,” I said softly. “You knew exactly how the police would investigate what appeared to be a suicide because you lived through the investigation with Pamela Martin.” Marc’s hands stopped adjusting the fabric of the veil. I looked into the mirror and caught his eyes.

  “You don’t know anything,” he said.

  “You tried to make it look like Lydia killed herself. If her death were ruled a suicide, you’d be in the clear. You even tried to feed Nick info—fake memories of you two hanging out together while Lydia supposedly jumped to her death. You thought you could use Amanda too.”

  “I thought my money would buy more than her pathetic company.”

  “All of the clues pointed to something at Intimate Mode. But there wasn’t anybody at Intimate Mode who wanted Lydia or Chryssinda dead. There was absolutely nothing at the entire show that held any sort of a threat to either one of them.”

  “That’s quite an imagination you’ve got, Samantha.”

  For all the times I’d wanted to hear him say my actual name, the sound of him speaking it now chilled me to my bones. “There weren’t any death threats against you, were there? Nobody is claiming to come after you for what happened to Pamela. You made that all up to insulate yourself. That’s why there were no calls to ping off cell phone towers. You made it all up. You are cold and calculated and evil and greedy. There was no security detail watching over Lydia when you and Nick made a scene at The Heart Club. You did that to create an alibi. You murdered Lydia Moss and attempted to murder Chryssinda.”

  Marc Rico’s eyes were flat and emotionless. Creases by the side of his mouth deepened. His face looked as though it had been carved from a rock. Deep circles under his dark brown eyes aged him. Yesterday, those circles had given him the appearance of an exhausted new groom who was worried about his wife’s safety. Today, the safest thing for Chryssinda was for me to keep Marc away from her.

  “I knew you were going to be a problem,” he said. His hands hovered over the veil and I sensed his body tense. If he wanted to, he could have strangled me right then and there.

  “That’s right. You didn’t count on me, did you? You hired Amanda to work for you at Intimate Mode. She’d be the perfect eyes and ears.” I thought about what Amanda had told me. “It must have been like a gift from the universe when she called you for a job.”

  “I haven’t thought about those days at I-FAD for a very long time. Amanda brought it all back. Chryssinda should have left things the way they were. But her friend Lydia had a big mouth and knew too much about my business. She told Chryssie I was the big payoff. Two working girls thought they could trap me into marriage and get half my money.”

  “You said Chryssinda had her own money.”

  “Chryssinda’s ‘family money’ came from me. I wired five million into an account to make her look respectable. If people knew she was after my money, they’d know I had a reason to kill her.”

  “But if you wanted her dead, then why did you marry her?”

  “She caught me killing Lydia. I had to keep her quiet. Forcing her to marry me was my insurance policy. Keep her close. I could have killed her whenever I wanted. She knew that. I had complete control over her.”

  He was talking too much. Telling me things that could send him to jail. We both knew why. Marc didn’t expect me to leave the room alive.

  “And Nick? Why did you get him involved?” I asked.

  “
Nick should’ve been so drunk he passed out in my room. When he left in search of you, I had to find a way to account for my time. I threatened Chryssinda’s life and she played her new role perfectly. And a wife can’t testify against her husband. It was the perfect insurance.”

  Extorting money from Marc had been Lydia’s idea. That had bothered me, how a lingerie model who was nothing more than a friend of a businessman’s fiancée would know intimate details of his financial life: how often he was hit up for money and how much he could afford to lose. This plan of hers and Chryssinda’s explained why she cared so much about people asking for Marc’s money. Everything I’d seen that first night, the diva attitude, the protectiveness over her man, the dismissive attitude of Nick and me, it was all her protecting what she and Chryssinda had set into play.

  I turned around and faced Marc. The mirror was behind me. We were less than a foot apart. I was nervous, more nervous than I’d ever been in my life, but I couldn’t let Marc see fear.

  “You used Nick as your alibi. Spontaneous bachelor party with your old college friend. Clever. You got Nick so drunk he didn’t remember what happened—you tested his memory in our room. You killed Lydia and when Chryssinda caught you, you forced her to the chapel for an unexpected ceremony—paying off another couple for their spot. All part of the plan, right? Throw money around, show the world you can’t wait to marry your bride, so when her best friend is found dead the next day, you can make people think Lydia killed herself. You were going to make it look like she was secretly in love with you.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I think you lined up multiple witnesses who can verify your whereabouts the night Lydia died.”

  “Not to mention the chapel guestbook,” Marc said with a smile.

  “See, that’s the thing,” I said. I looked past him and tapped my finger against my lips as if thinking about what I already knew. “Irene, the lady at the wedding chapel, spilled a cup of coffee on the guestbook and the pages got ruined. She tore them out so the rest of the book wouldn’t be soiled, and now she’s recopying the names. When Detective Marbury follows up on that, your signature isn’t going to be in there, is it? Shame.”

  Marc’s eyes narrowed. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “And then there’s Joey Cheeks, who you tried to set up. But Joey is married to the hotel manager, Alain Remie. The photo of Lydia in the newspapers was taken while Lydia was alive. During a photo shoot that was pre-arranged. Alain already turned his pictures and camera over to the police to verify what time the picture was taken.”

  “That doesn’t tell anybody anything.”

  “No, I guess it doesn’t.” I took a deep breath as if giving up. “Well, it wouldn’t tell anybody anything if Nick hadn’t set his iPad up to take a time lapse video of the sun going down over the Eiffel Tower on our very first day here. You know, we changed rooms so many times that we stopped unpacking. That iPad is just sitting in the bottom of my suitcase. Now, I wonder, when the police analyze it frame by frame will they see anything unusual? I know Lydia didn’t jump like the placement of her body suggested. You put her there.”

  If this were a game of poker, then I’d just bet the house on a bogus hand. There was no time lapse video. Nick and I had changed rooms so many times the first day we were here that he’d abandoned the idea. There was nothing incriminating to show Marc Rico depositing Lydia Moss’s body in the common area outside The Left Bank, but Marc didn’t know that.

  If Marc Rico discovered I was bluffing before help arrived, one thing was certain: Nick would be left standing at the altar.

  34

  I watched Marc closely. I didn’t doubt he had the mental acuity to make strategic business decisions, gamble on investments, and predict the competition’s next move before they knew they were being watched. And had Marc spent any amount of time around me since we’d first met, he might have had a chance. But he hadn’t. He’d bet everything on Nick and Amanda, loyalties and long-buried emotions from college days. And now that they both appeared to need something from him, he thought he could exploit their dependency to let him get away with murder. He hadn’t known Nick never got over his suspicions, and he hadn’t known Nick would confide in me.

  No, Marc Rico had never seen me coming.

  “You’re bluffing,” he said. “If you had any evidence, you would have turned it over to the police.”

  “Well, see, that’s one of my flaws. I tend to think I can figure things out that the police can’t. Surely you learned about that from Nick, right? There’s this cop in Pennsylvania, Detective Loncar, and he’d probably arrest me if he could come up with charges that stuck. Even Nick and I broke up over it once. One of these days, I’ll learn my lesson, I’m sure.”

  Marc reached up under the veil and grabbed my hair. He yanked my head backward and the sudden moment caused a splice of pain to shoot through my neck. He put his lips up against my ear. “Show me the iPad,” he hissed.

  I didn’t have to act to make tears appear. I twisted my neck to minimize the pain. Marc jerked my head the other direction. My shoulders hunched. I blinked several times to free the tears. It didn’t matter how well I acted to try to trick him. Pain was pain.

  Marc turned me toward the door and pushed. There was no point dragging my feet or digging in my heels. Nobody was going to come crashing through the doors of Marc Rico’s room to save me. This man had rented out the entire floor. The room service bill I’d racked up in the past three days was probably higher than my monthly mortgage payment, and it was built on twenty-two variations of mac and cheese and champagne for hookers. Marc’s mini-fridge was stocked with more groceries than I bought in a month.

  I’d come up against greedy people, desperate people, jilted people, and corrupt people. I’d never taken on someone who saw people as commodities that could be traded like futures on orange juice. I had zero sense of the level of power money could give a person like Marc Rico, but with his fist twisted up in my hair underneath a cheap veil I’d bought in a Las Vegas boutique, I knew if we went head to head, he’d win.

  Winning for him meant getting away with murder.

  Losing for me meant dying.

  It wasn’t a gamble I was willing to take.

  We were halfway to the door when I remembered what Sandra Bullock had taught me in the Miss Congeniality movies. It was time to SING.

  I balled up my fist and drove my elbow backward into Marc’s solar plexus. He doubled over and yelled. Before he could recover, I stomped onto his instep. He let go of my head and I slammed it backward. His scream confirmed that I connected with his nose. I whirled around and kneed him in the groin.

  Marc dropped to the floor. He grabbed my ankle.

  I tried to kick him off. He was too strong. He pulled my leg toward him with one hand and in the other, held a syringe.

  Where’d he get a syringe?

  An image of Chryssinda’s closed eyes and limp body flashed into my mind. Was this what he’d used to put Chryssinda in the coma that put her in the hospital? And how he kept her in that coma after his visit last night?

  With a renewed desire to flee, I jerked my foot back and forth. My shoe came loose. I bent down to grab it. The veil fell off my head and landed on Marc. He cursed. His grip relaxed. I jerked my foot away and ran to the door. It took two attempts to get it open. I ran to the elevators. My ankle felt hot like I’d been stung by a bee. As I stumbled down the hall and felt my extremities go numb, I glanced down and confirmed the worst thing I could have imagined.

  Marc had injected me before I’d gotten out of the room. The syringe was hanging from my ankle.

  35

  Nick found me in the hallway. Face down. In my #RealityIsOverrated T-shirt and #GetCheeky panties. One shoe on, one shoe off and a broken needle jutting out of my flesh. My veil was on the floor ten feet behind me.

  It was not a proud moment, but I was alive.

  Detective Marbury found Marc Rico o
n the staircase between the sixth and seventh floor. A helicopter was circling the building. Had he gotten to the roof, odds were he could have disappeared in a way that would have required extradition to prosecute him.

  The odds weren’t in his favor.

  Yay.

  Between what I could tell him and what he was able to discover after searching Marc’s room, Detective Marbury pieced together what had happened: Marc Rico had murdered Lydia Moss and attempted murder on Chryssinda Sykes and me. He used high doses of an injectable skeletal muscle relaxer to incapacitate each of us. In Lydia’s case, he gave her an overdose of painkillers while she couldn’t fight back. The pain meds would be detectable on a standard toxicology screening, confirming suspicions of suicide, but the muscle relaxer wouldn’t.

  Marc’s whole plan had been to tie the models to a scandal at the lingerie fair and let the industry implode under the pressure of perfection heaped on top of models. His guidebook had been the death of Pamela Martin twenty years before. He had a front-row seat to the police investigation and knew which questions would be asked, which tests would be run, and which alibis would stand. He also knew which drugs would get the job done, and he knew how to get them.

  Deep pockets weren’t just a fashion statement.

  ***

  My return flight to Ribbon was scheduled for Thursday. Neither Nick nor I were on it. With Marc no longer paying for our room, when the hospital released me, we had no place to go.

  “How did you figure it out?” Nick asked. I sat in a wheelchair—hospital insurance policy dictated I remain in one until I was off their property—and he sat in a chair next to me. He had my left hand sandwiched between both of his.

  “I kept thinking about the clues. Every single clue pointed to the lingerie fair. But I was at the lingerie fair, and nobody acted like they thought anything bad had happened. I kept wondering why nobody was scared, and it finally occurred to me that it was because the crimes had nothing to do with them. To all the vendors inside Intimate Mode, it was business as usual.”