The Arms Of The Law

by Jenna Ryan

  His countenance solemn, Manny regarded the women before him. “Now that that’s settled, I have a question for you, doctors.”

  Did Deana’s agitation diminish a fraction? No question about the dimpled smile that appeared on her face. “What would that be, Detective Beldon?”

  From the pocket of his tan overcoat, Manny produced a heavy, beaten brass doorknob. “Which one of your inmates launched this cannonball at the windshield of our Chevy Blazer?”

  “YOU ONLY LOOK like Peter at the Gate, right?”

  Vachon moved through the lower-level admissions area of the hospital well ahead of his partner. His black coat blew around his ankles like a cape. He was well aware of the air he possessed, of mystery and mist-shrouded darkness. Something about his veiled eyes and the dark curling hair that he allowed to float carelessly to his shoulders. The look had worked for him in New Orleans and later on the streets of Boston. Would-be dealers in most things illegal usually resembled dark angels.

  The ironic state of affairs never failed to spark Vachon’s perverse sense of humor. He’d been dealt the shadows and mystery while Manny possessed the outward demeanor of Saint Peter. Yet it was Manny who’d gone out of his way to agitate an already touchy situation tonight.

  His partner caught up at a trot. “I only asked who tossed the damned doorknob through the window.” He defended himself in a sullen voice.

  “You couldn’t have guessed they already knew about it?”

  “Patients are supposed to be monitored. And don’t give me that ‘half the staff isn’t here’ garbage, Vachon. Laverne Fox is the only no-show. I checked.”

  Flipping up his collar, Vachon prepared to brave the elements. “It’s my Blazer, Manny, not yours. If I’m not complaining about a cracked windshield, why should you?”

  He ducked into the blizzard before his partner could respond. He had the door shut and the engine roaring by the time Manny arrived, gasping with a blend of cold and indignation.

  “What’s with this damned high horse you’ve climbed onto, Vachon? You’re no saint, Deana’s no Fanny Fall-Apart, and that other one looked like she could take care of herself just fine.”

  Vachon sent him a steady sideways look while blowing into his frozen hands.

  Manny sighed and let his fair head fall onto the rest. “All right. You want the truth? It bothers the hell out of me to come here. Old Ezekiel had no right leaving this place to that buzzard business crony of his. He had a son, and his son had a son, and that son had a son and a daughter, neither of whom have more than a few thousand dollars to their names.” He scowled ripely at Vachon. “How would you have felt if that rich grandmother of yours had left the French Quarter mansion you grew up in to an old flapper friend?”

  “Pissed off.” Vachon searched for, and failed to find, a break in the storm. “That doesn’t mean I’d go around trying to goad whoever happened to be in the place. This hospital’s gained a lot of notoriety in the past twenty years since Sherman Drake took over as director.”

  “Most of it pure hype.”

  Vachon swallowed a weary sigh. Manny got like this sometimes. He’d learned that during their two-year partnership in Homicide. It shouldn’t annoy him. God knew he had his own demons to deal with; he should be able to understand his partner’s. But they’d had little to do with the Beldon-Drake Hospital during their stint together, and in any case Manny had a slight phobia about the patients here.

  Vachon didn’t know if he had a phobia or not. He’d never given that or the hospital much thought. Then again, he’d never seen the beautiful Dr. Nikita Sorensen before tonight.

  She was long-legged, tall and slender. Her elegant bone structure spoke of Eastern Europe and reminded him strongly of the torchlight songs he used to hear in smoky New Orleans clubs. Not of the singers themselves—her features were too fresh and clear for that—but of the general mood of the clubs and the mystique that had fascinated him as a child.

  Son of a magician and a magician’s assistant was Daniel Vachon’s heritage. Holy terror, defier of teachers, nannies and especially of the antiquated servants who’d littered his grandmother’s elegant home. He’d loved his grandmother deeply and mourned her death to this day. He had resented her dismal slide into depression, a state of mind during which she’d felt compelled to take her own life.

  Not that that should have anything to do with Nikita Sorensen. However…

  Resentment toward psychiatrists in general had lingered long after Isadora Vachon’s death. That and a vague sense of revulsion at the intrusiveness of their profession.

  Next to him, Manny slapped the dashboard. “Watch it, Vachon. You nearly skidded into that drift”

  Vachon corrected automatically. “It’s slippery.”

  “Yeah, right. I know you, partner. You were thinking about that pretty new doctor, Niki something.”

  “Nikita Sorensen.”

  “Let me guess. You really like them dark-haired and blue-eyed. That’s why you never called blond, green-eyed Luz again after all the trouble I took to arrange a blind date for you a couple years back.”

  Vachon kept his eyes on the road. “I wasn’t looking for a date, blond, dark or otherwise. I was in Vice then. I’d just come off eight months on the street, for Chrissakes. Live with junkies, especially one like Paulie Warsaw, for over half a year, Manny, and see how eager you are to meet new people.”

  Manny grinned, his first sign of humor since leaving the hospital. “You took the assignment, Vachon. Reckless plunges are your specialty, not mine. I’m a planner, dull and methodical.” In the warmth of the Blazer’s interior, he unbuttoned his coat. “She isn’t married, by the way.”

  Vachon frowned. “What did you do, interrogate her?”

  “Deana. They’re old friends. Sherman Drake recruited Nikita before he took off on his vacation to Borneo. She’s beautiful and bright. Not quite as good as Deana, but popular with the patients and staff. Only one drawback, as far as I can see.”

  Knowing Manny, it would be a bombshell. Vachon sent him a skeptical sideways glance. “That is?”

  “Her brother is Martin Sorensen, the same Martin Sorensen who, through loopholes and a lot of slick flimflamming, got your bastard junkie drug dealer, Paulie Warsaw, acquitted on a murder charge eighteen months ago.”

  Chapter Two

  It was Spellbound and then some.

  Nikita loved the hospital, which was much more like a country rest home than a sterile institution. The onetime Hubert Hall was a charming cluster of gray stone and mortar segments, or wings, as Dr. Drake preferred to call them. The central and east wings housed the patients; the west wing held supplies, storerooms and labs. The north was entirely residential. That is to say, several of the doctors and some of the senior nurses lived there.

  Deana didn’t, of course. She and Martin had a condo in Boston. She had a small room for resting on the night shifts, but nothing as lovely as the suite Nikita had been offered.

  Each apartment had a bed-sitting room, a living room, a compact kitchen and a full bath. Nikita could have moved in with her paternal grandmother in Boston, but she’d decided to take the suite, instead. Although she adored Adeline Sorensen, she wasn’t sure she would have been quite so fond of her after two weeks under the same roof.

  Dawn broke with delicate threads of light that stole through the surrounding woods like the glow of a candle. A morning person by custom if not strictly preference, Nikita was up, showered and dressed by six-thirty. By seven-thirty she’d eaten, skimmed the newspaper, watched “The Flintstones” and made several notes in Lally Monk’s everthickening file. She’d also paused more than once to think about the intriguing man she’d met last night.

  “Daniel Vachon.” She tested his name on her tongue as she surveyed the delicate panorama of white landscape from her third-floor vantage point. For all the havoc last night’s blizzard had wrought, the morning promised to be a Norman Rockwell painting. She wondered if Vachon liked Norman Rockwell.

  Sn
ow coated evergreens and bare-branched trees alike. A fluffy white mantle graced the lawns and paths of the estate. The wind must have died sometime deep in the night, allowing gentler flakes of snow to soften the picture.

  It took Nikita only a few minutes to make up her mind. A walk would be the perfect start to her day. She bundled up hastily in her long white winter coat, white stirrup pants and boots, added a crimson wool scarf and pulled on the white faux-fur Russian hat her maternal grandmother, still firmly ensconced in St. Petersburg, had sent two Christmases ago. A pair of white wool gloves on her hands and she was off.

  Almost.

  She was shortcutting through the central patient area on the third floor when a timid voice reached her from the shadow of a potted lemon tree.

  “He didn’t come to see me last night, Dr. N. He always comes to see me.”

  Nikita combed the dark patches. A tiny movement and a flash of dull blond hair gave Lally Monk’s huddling place away.

  Nikita crossed to her at once, going to her knees a few feet away. Lally got panicky when trapped. And when panicky…Nikita shook the unpleasant consequence aside. “Who didn’t come, Lally?”

  “Finnigan.”

  Finnigan was the hospital dog, a golden Labrador who’d wandered onto the grounds one day as a very hungry, very affectionate homeless puppy. The patients adored him. They called him Finnigan in honor of everyone’s favorite hospital cook.

  “He sleeps with me when it’s cold,” Lally went on tearfully. “I think he must have gotten out in the blizzard.”

  Nikita sat on her heels. “Maybe, but I don’t see how. The doors were locked tight after the storm started. Only Martin came and went.” And two others, she recalled, not entirely sure she liked Vachon’s face popping with such clarity into her mind. “The guards at the door would have stopped Finnigan.”

  A fierce shudder passed through Lally’s willow-thin body. “You don’t think Dr. Flynn took him, do you? For one of his experiments?”

  Nikita kept her gaze placid. “You know about Dr. Flynn’s experiments?”

  Lally sniffled. “Most of us do. Sometimes Sammy Slide says things.”

  Sammy Slide should be shot, Nikita decided angrily. At the very least, he should be fired. But that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. He was the nephew of the director’s wife, and his job, barring an act of absolute idiocy, was assured. That didn’t mean, however, that he could do any damned thing he liked and get away with it.

  “I’ll have a talk with Mr. Slide,” she promised.

  Lally hunched her shoulders and began to hiccup.

  “Come on, Lally,” Nikita entreated. “Let me take you to the lounge. I’m going for a walk. I’ll have a look around for Finnigan.”

  Lally’s face immediately brightened. She scrambled to her feet. She was wearing the same rumpled jeans and sweater she’d had on last night—and something Nikita hadn’t seen before, at least not on Lally.

  “Where did you get that ring?”

  Lally’s fingers curled. “I—I found it. On the floor next to my bed. I—I was going to tell you later this morning. I didn’t steal it.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. I just think it’s pretty.” Familiar, too, but she didn’t add that. She held out her hand. “Come on, you can play cards with Mr. Bell. He’s always up at the crack of dawn.”

  “He cheats,” Lally said, wiping at a stray tear with her wrist But she smiled and came along to the plant-filled lounge in her usual docile fashion.

  It was eight o’clock by the time Nikita made her way down the winding rear staircase to the back door. The kitchen was hot, alive with steaming pots, cooling racks of bread and white-clad assistants scurrying between island counters. Nikita waved to the original Finnigan then slipped out into the unspoiled snowscape.

  Light was still a scarce commodity, barely a soft, opalescent glow through the trees and in the clouds overhead. Slow dawns, her father called such mornings whenever he landed in Boston for more than a week and had a chance to view them. A retired surgeon, widowed for the second time seven years ago, Andrew Sorensen spent the bulk of the year in Europe, Asia and Africa. Nikita figured he’d be in Prague about now, soaking up old-world charm and deriding any and all Western forays into that relatively untapped merchandising market.

  The snow in spots reached almost to the top of her boots. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have chosen the woods as her destination under these conditions, but she’d promised Lally she would look for Finnigan, and like most dogs he had a fondness for trees.

  “Finnigan,” she called as she drew closer. Her breath formed a cloud of white steam in the frosty air. “Come here, boy. Breakfast.”

  She stopped and listened but heard nothing. No answering bark, not even a whimper. He’d probably gotten locked in a storeroom. Lally’s concern for his safety was prompted by her fear of Dr. Flynn’s experiments, the nature of which few of the doctors, never mind the patients, really understood.

  Donald Flynn was a complete eccentric, nice-looking in a boy-next-door way but a little spooky if you happened to stumble across him when he was on the verge of a breakthrough in—well, in whatever it was he spent hours in his lab experimenting on. Weird or not, however, he was no threat to Finnigan or any other canine.

  The gauzy light of day grew steadily stronger. Nikita heard a squirrel chattering in an oak tree and the crunch of her boots on the snow. Ahead she spied small indentations covered by a layer of white. Paw prints?

  “Finnigan?” she called hopefully.

  Her voice echoed through the trees, then vanished. She was about to turn left when she heard a short yip.

  “Finnigan?”

  Nikita was rewarded with a whining sound, deep enough to belong to a Lab.

  It took her several minutes to locate the source of the whine, a stand of trees next to a fallen cedar.

  Protruding roots and frozen vines impeded her progress, but she spotted him at last in a hollow on the far side of the log.

  He seemed fine to Nikita. At least, he was circling the way he always did when he scented another dog or a dead bird. Had he killed a squirrel, she wondered, swinging her legs over the log and hopping down.

  She caught his collar easily with two gloved fingers. “I hope you haven’t turned hellhound, Finnigan,” she said, giving his gold head an affectionate scratch. “You had Lally worried last night. She thought you’d be a Popsicle by now.”

  Lifting his nose from the snow, Finnigan gave a soft woof, then returned to pawing the drift.

  “Terrific.” Nikita let out a resigned breath. “So you did catch something. I swear, Finnigan, if you’ve killed a rabbit, I’ll…”

  She halted midthreat and, frowning, bent to peer at the mound. A reddish brown stain, a smudge really, six inches long, stood out clearly against the fresh white snow. One smudge where Finnigan was sniffing and another a foot away.

  Queasy apprehension churned in her stomach. It could still be a rabbit or squirrel but the mound had a funny shape to it now that she looked, and Finnigan never quarreled with any of the creatures on the grounds.

  The dog whimpered. Nikita swallowed and dropped his collar. “Five and a half feet,” she murmured, measuring the mound with her eye. “Long enough to be a…”

  Before she could finish, Finnigan’s teeth caught something. Giving his head a hard shake, he dislodged it. Snow and ice flew in all directions. Nikita had to hold up a hand to keep from getting pelted in the face.

  Whatever he’d found, Finnigan let it fall. Blinking, Nikita squinted—then caught her breath and immediately jumped back. The log almost tripped her, but she regained her balance. She followed the line of the log, retreating all the way to the base of the oak.

  “My God,” she breathed. The sheer horror of the dog’s discovery sent blood rushing to her head. It thrummed loudly in her ears and made her lungs constrict. “How—” She stared at it dry-mouthed. “Who—is it?”

  All Finnigan did was bark. When she failed to react, he be
nt his head again.

  Nikita’s paralysis broke. “No, don’t!” she exclaimed, and clawed for his collar.

  The dog’s action forced her to look again, to realize that, yes, it definitely was what it appeared to be. An arm, a woman’s judging by the size and the bright purple coat sleeve that encased it, but one that could not possibly be attached to a living body.

  She’d found a corpse in the snow!

  “IT’S LAVERNE FOX. Deana pressed gloved hands to her cheeks and spun from the frozen stare of the woman in the snow. “What do we do? Sherman won’t have reached Borneo yet.” She jerked as if in inspiration. “I’ll call Martin.”

  “I’ve already called the police.” Nikita regarded the nurse’s body from a safe distance. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen death at close range, but this—this was murder; it had to be. Laverne was stiff as a board, ghostly white and staring blankly at the mist-gray sky.

  Nikita found it difficult to breathe. She felt giddy and more than a little unreal, like the scene that had played out when she’d been forced to dig Laverne’s body from the drift.

  She hadn’t touched it, but she’d been duty-bound to check, to see if there was any chance of revival. There hadn’t been.

  Heart heavy, she turned and trudged to where her friend stood. Deana’s shoulders were hunched as Lally’s had been earlier. She rubbed her forehead in obvious distress.

  Something nagged in the back of Nikita’s mind as she glanced at Laverne. Her left hand was bare. No glove or rings. But there should have been at least one ring. Laverne was engaged. She’d worn a white gold band littered with tiny diamond chips.

  A picture sprang to mind, an image of the ring Lally had been wearing. Whether the same or not she couldn’t say, but they certainly looked similar.