by Jenna Ryan
“She was acting strangely,” Nikita murmured. “Even for her.”
Deana continued to rub her temples. “Who?”
“Lally.”
“What about her?”
“She had a ring like Laverne’s. Only Laverne’s not wearing hers, and Lally said she found the one she has beside her bed.”
“She probably did, then. Lally’s no thief. She’s no murderer, either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well, don’t.”
At the snapped response, Nikita glared at her. Retaliation would have been close behind if she hadn’t caught sight of two familiar figures making their way along the snowy path.
“Vachon…” His name slipped out before she could stop it. “And Manny. They’re going to be upset when they see the body.”
“You had to check her,” Deana said gently by way of apology.
She was two inches taller than Nikita, with a riot of curls and a sweet Shirley Temple face that belied the expertise of the woman inside. Round brown eyes gave her a look of perpetual wonder. Sometimes, like now, the look fit; more often it did not. To be flustered was not Deana’s way. Or hadn’t been, until Sherman Drake had gone on vacation and left her in charge of the hospital.
The newness of the post would wear off soon enough, Nikita knew. She’d settle in as she always did, Laverne Fox’s death notwithstanding.
She watched as Vachon approached. He handled the snow better than his angel-faced partner. It was Manny who took on the aspect of a thundercloud when he examined the crime scene.
“You had no business disturbing the snow,” he mumbled, flipping out his notebook.
Nikita faced him, unrepentant. “And if she’d been alive? She wouldn’t be by now, I promise you. It’s ten degrees, at most.”
“You’ve probably destroyed valuable evidence,” Manny retorted.
“It had to be done,” Vachon said quietly from his haunches.
Manny released an agitated breath. “Where was the blood?”
“Near the neck.”
“Vachon?”
“It’s a deep stain, still visible. She was stabbed in the throat I’d guess a three-inch blade. A kitchen knife, maybe.” Without touching, he examined her hands. “No outward sign of a struggle. No visible hair or skin under the fingernails. Ah—but here’s something.” Gaze fixed, he switched sides. “This is interesting.”
So, Nikita thought, was the fact that he regarded her and not his partner when he spoke.
“Her right index finger appears to be broken. And there are several strands of red hair wrapped around it.”
“Her own hair?” Manny joined Vachon.
“She’s a redhead.”
“Henna rinse redhead,” Deana muttered strictly for Nikita’s benefit.
It was no secret around the hospital that Deana and Laverne had not liked each other. Why should Deana have been expected to like a woman who flirted outrageously with her husband and, as Deana often wearily admitted, God knew what else.
Damn Martin, Nikita reflected. His flagrant sexual advances were going to make Deana a prime suspect in this. Unless, of course, she had a good alibi.
Vachon rose with the lithe grace of a cat. Again he spoke to Nikita. “We’ll have to question several people at the hospital.”
“Not the patients,” Nikita and Deana said as one.
“Several people,” Vachon repeated as the breeze stirred his long hair.
Nikita suspected the tightness currently assailing her chest had a different cause than before. Aggravated at herself for reacting like a teenager in front of a rock star, she stood firm. “Our patients are not well, Vachon. They have mental and emotional problems that would not respond advantageously to police interrogation.”
His dark eyes mesmerized her in the frosty light of day. “I’m sure we can work something out. In the meantime, I’d like a list of every worker on and off shift at the hospital from—when was Laverne Fox last seen?”
“By me?” Nikita shrugged. “A day and half ago. Dee?”
“I talked to her at noon yesterday. She said she was in Boston at her aunt’s and that she’d be a little late for her shift. You can check the call, Detective. Our system’s monitored. But let me say one thing. No one connected with the hospital is a killer. I don’t know how, but this has to have come from outside.”
Manny sent her a cryptic look, then scribbled the pertinent information in his notebook. “The uniforms are on the way, along with the medical examiner. I’ll hang around out here, Vachon, if you want to get the question ball rolling.”
Nikita slid her gaze to Manny’s guileless face. She wasn’t sure how much she was going to like this man.
Squaring her shoulders, Deana said, “You can talk to my staff, Detective Vachon, but not to any of the patients.”
“Without permission or supervision,” Nikita added at Vachon’s raised brow. She saw Deana’s fists and added, “They’re cops, Dee. They’ll get a court order if we don’t cooperate. At least this way we can retain a modicum of control.”
Her explanation seemed to appease the other woman. Shoving the welter of escaped curls from her frost-reddened cheeks, Deana started for the hospital. Her voice, a heavy monotone, drifted to them on the wind.
Vachon moved closer to Nikita, incomprehension darkening his face. “What did she say about her husband’s car?”
Nikita stared after her sister-in-law with a blend of sympathy and consternation. Sympathy for her marital plight. Consternation over her words.
She raised puzzled eyes to Vachon’s. “She said that she smelled Obsession in Martin’s car when they left here last night.” A shiver swept through her as she glanced at the nurse’s lifeless form in the snow. “Obsession was Laverne Fox’s trademark perfume.”
LALLY MONK sat immobile at the hospital window. Dr. N. had gone for a walk and found Finnigan. That was good. Then the police had come, the death officers, and they’d all gone down to the woods together. She could see Dr. D. coming out now in her Dijon mustard coat and fur-topped boots.
Lally swallowed the panic that swam upward from her stomach into her throat. Someone was dead. She knew it. No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t know it; she sensed it. She felt the knowledge inside her. She also felt she just might know who it was.
“I didn’t do it,” Lally whispered to the empty lounge. “And if I saw who did, I don’t know who that is. I’m sure I couldn’t kill anyone. I’m not a killer. I’m not.”
“No one said you were,” a woman’s voice, soft and warm and comforting, soothed. “You’re as mild as Ivory soap, Lally—though a great deal prettier.”
The tiniest portion of Lally’s panic subsided. Verity Whyte was Dr. N.’s old friend and Lally’s new one. She was kind and terribly sweet. She’d tucked Lally into bed last night and even sat with her while she drank her usual glass of warm milk. Lally had slept like a contented infant after that.
“What’s going on?” Verity asked, bending over her shoulder. She wore her nut-brown hair in a loose bun. Her features radiated gentleness. Her eyes were large and exquisitely shaped, golden hazel in color. Her mouth was soft and expressive, her manner refined and invariably warm. How could someone so nice have a nervous breakdown?
Lally hunched her thin shoulders and tried not to think too hard about anything. “I saw the police go into the woods,” she said stiffly. “Dr. N.’s still with them.”
“I see.”
“It was the death officers.”
One thing about Verity, she never let you know what she was thinking. Her soft mouth compressed slightly, but otherwise she offered no reaction.
“I wonder,” she murmured, and bit the inside of her cheek.
Lally swallowed. “Who’s in there?” she finished shakily.
“We don’t know yet that anyone is.” Verity patted her icy hand. “Even if there were someone, it’s as likely as not a stranger.”
A chill like an Antarctic
wind skimmed through the center of Lally’s bones. “It isn’t a stranger,” she whispered. Her pale green eyes darted fearfully to the empty corners of the lounge. Her voice dropped. “It’s the nurse that you—that we—don’t like. It’s Laverne Fox.”
Chapter Three
“It’s a perfectly reasonable question, Nikita.” Vachon had to crisscross the doctors’ opulent dining room to keep up with her. She moved from papered wall to mahogany sideboard to Louis Quatorze table as if endeavoring to outmaneuver a persistent fly. “Look, stop avoiding me, will you?” He grasped her by the arm. “I’m not asking if your brother was having an affair with the woman. I only want to know if it’s possible that he drove her out here from Boston last night.”
With effort, she restrained her temper. “Ask him,” she replied levelly and for the fifth time. “I’m Martin’s sister, not his keeper. Of course he knew Laverne. But many other women wear Obsession, Vachon. Even I do from time to time.”
Her chin came up on that one, drawing a small smile from him. “It wouldn’t suit you,” he said simply. He reached out with a finger and trapped a lock of dark hair that was not confined as it had been last night. Bringing it to the level of his lips, he inhaled the woodsy scent then let a spark of amusement dance in his eyes. “Sun, Moon and Stars,” he murmured, his eyes half-lidded. “Mystery’s more your style.”
She didn’t move a muscle, didn’t flinch or pull away. She simply stared at him and retorted, “You’re the one with the mystique, Vachon. I’m just a hardworking shrink with several patients to see before lunch.”
“And a dead nurse in the woods,” he reminded her. He breathed her scent one last time then reluctantly released the silky tendril and jammed his hands in the pockets of his black coat. “Cooperate, Nikita,” he suggested.
She filled her coffee cup, Wedgwood by the look of it, and carried it to the table where four other doctors poked at their food. “Martin’s a big boy, and a lawyer to boot. He can defend himself these days.”
“Meaning he couldn’t once?”
Her perfunctory smile didn’t fool him for a minute. She set down her cup and folded her arms across her chest. “You have a true cop mentality, don’t you? My grandmother’s like that in her own way. She pounces on every slip of the tongue. Since I found it impossible as a child to guard against all slips, I had to settle for jumping out of her clever traps before they snapped shut. Martin is two years older than me, and as far as I’m concerned a totally different person. He’s married to a very old, very dear friend of mine. And that, Vachon, is where my knowledge of his personal life ends.”
“Bull.” Vachon hid his amusement by countering her challenge. “Sisters know too damned much about every sordid detail of their brothers’ lives. I’ve been through it, Nikita. I’ve got two of them. One older, one younger. Both hold my rebellious adolescence in their memories.” Before she could respond, he caught her wrist, pulling her closer to him and peering into her amazing royal blue eyes. “Who are you afraid for, Nikita, your brother or someone else?”
She shook her head. “Forget it, Detective. I’m not biting. Yes? Did you want something, Donald?”
Without looking, she directed her question at a slender, fine-featured man in his late thirties. Donald Flynn’s hair was even longer than Vachon’s. He had the kind of staring gray eyes Vachon had seen many times before. Eyes that dissected people while their minds dissected conversations. He probably analyzed everything, right down to the food served at mealtimes.
He frowned as he regarded his plate. “I was just listening, Nikita. I heard about Laverne. What was her face like?”
Vachon’s eyes, and only his eyes, slid sideways. “I beg your pardon?”
“I wouldn’t,” Nikita murmured. Before Dr. Flynn could elaborate, she jumped in. “Donald, this is Detective Vachon. Donald has a lab in the lower west wing where he conducts experiments on mental awareness.”
Neatly put, but Vachon didn’t buy medical double-talk. He didn’t trust the absent bouncing of Dr. Flynn’s knee, either. He released Nikita’s arm and circled the good doctor’s chair. “What do you care about a corpse’s face, Dr. Flynn?”
Flynn gave his heavy fall of blond hair a shake. Not a particularly adept front, in Vachon’s opinion. He was sweating under his lab coat. “No more than you’d expect. Expression at the moment of death, emotional reaction, that sort of thing. The brain is a fascinating organ, Detective. We only tap into a fraction of it. Imagine its potential if fully functional. Imagine, too, how the synapses must respond a split second before death. I heard she was shot in the neck.”
“You heard wrong,” Vachon retorted.
“Much of Donald’s work is privately funded,” Nikita said. “He’s, uh, entirely legitimate.”
She waffled a bit on that statement, one designed, Vachon imagined, to portray the hospital in a positive light.
He kept his attention focused on Dr. Flynn, whose fingernails, he noticed, were filed to perfect ovals. “Were you on the premises last night?”
Flynn made an X in his scrambled eggs. “I was in my lab from eight in the morning until almost midnight.”
“Any witnesses?”
“One, but it wouldn’t benefit me to tell you her name.”
“Laverne Fox?”
Flynn wiped his upper lip with a napkin. “At nine o’clock or thereabouts she came banging on the outer door. Said she was late and didn’t want a tongue-lashing from Bright Eyes.”
“Don’t call her that.” Nikita defended her friend. Her rival, too? Vachon speculated. He’d have to explore that wrinkle thoroughly, because if he didn’t Manny certainly would.
Flynn shrugged. “I’m only repeating what Laverne told me, Nikita. And besides, it isn’t insulting to be compared to Shirley Temple. Laverne said, and I quote, ‘I’ve got to sneak upstairs. If Bright Eyes realizes how late I am, she’ll kill me for sure.’”
“DONALD FLYNN is an effeminate freak with delusions of I don’t know what,” Nikita insisted fifteen minutes later in her elegantly appointed office. She paced along one deep coral wall hung with everything from delicate prints to charcoal sketches to a colorful mask her grandmother had brought back from Carnival in Rio. “He resents Deana’s being left in temporary charge of the hospital.”
Vachon sat on the patients’ couch, a deep-cushioned affair half a shade lighter than the walls. “He resents it?”
Damn his perceptive eyes and fascinating hands, which dangled, long-fingered and sexy, between his legs. He leaned forward, she noticed, to challenge her with that subtle inflection in his voice. Since he probably had grounds for the remark, however, she made no attempt to deny it.
“All right, fine, I resented it a little myself. But I’m not stupid, Vachon. I’ve only been here for two weeks. Experience I have, but not hands-on at this particular hospital, and no more than Deana overall.”
Vachon cocked his head. “Who’s the better doctor, in your opinion?”
“We’re both good.”
“But you think you’re better.”
“What I think—” she pressed her palms onto her desk and leaned forward to emphasize her point “—is that you’re completely impertinent. How I do or don’t feel about Deana has absolutely no bearing on Laverne Fox’s death.”
“Possibly, but I prefer not to overlook any details. Now about your brother…”
Thankfully a knock on the door halted him. “You have Verity Whyte scheduled in five minutes,” a nurse named Marilyn reminded her. “She’s in the conservatory.”
Nikita felt as though she’d lived through two full days in the past two hours. She opened the teak cabinet under the window and extracted Verity’s file. “Try Martin’s office in Boston, Vachon,” she said tiredly. “He should be there today. Personally, though, I’d check on Dr. Flynn’s story first.”
Vachon stood. Nikita sighed, knowing she’d have to pass him to reach the door. “Was Flynn having an affair with Laverne?” he asked as she came into range.
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Forced to stop, Nikita cursed him for his proximity and her rapid heartbeat. Holding Verity’s file like a shield, she shrugged noncommittally. “I have trouble picturing that. I can tell you that she assisted him more than once after hours in his lab. After her hours, that is, not his. Other than that, she lived with two of the staff nurses near Cambridge. They rented a house and probably weren’t all that close. Still, you could talk to them.”
Vachon’s fingers trapped her wrist before she could escape the suddenly claustrophobic confines of the office. “You want the investigation turned away from the hospital, Nikita. Why? Does it have to do with Ezekiel Beldon’s will?”
That got her attention. “Why should—” Her eyes narrowed. “What about his will?” she demanded after a pause.
“You don’t know?”
“Know what? Look, Vachon, if this is some sort of trick…”
“Simply put, Zeke Beldon’s will states that if the hospital doors close for any reason beyond that of an act of God, the estate reverts to his surviving heirs.”
“You mean Manny?”
“I mean,” he said, sounding annoyed with himself for starting this, “that someone, for whatever reason or reasons, wanted Laverne Fox dead. And dead she is.” His eyes glittered “The questions now are when, why and, most important, by whose hand.”
“IS THAT YOU, Niki? Speak up, girl. This line’s wheezing like an asthmatic cat.”
Adeline Sorensen shouted into the receiver with such gusto that Nikita had to hold it away from her ear. Ninety-three she might be, but nothing about the woman was frail. Her vocal cords, particularly, were as healthy as ever.
“I’m looking for that brother of yours,” Adeline said crankily. “I’ve had police here all afternoon asking after him.”
“Damn you, Vachon.” Nikita swore under her breath. “What did they say, Gran?”
“That some woman out your way got herself stabbed in the windpipe. They want to know how well Martin was acquainted with her.”