The Arms Of The Law

by Jenna Ryan

  “Are you coming or going?” he asked, though he could see by the color in her cheeks and the snow clinging to her boots that she was coming.

  “Figure it out, Vachon.” Eyes challenging him, she added less tartly, “Any messages, Irene?”

  “Verity Whyte would like to talk to you later if that’s possible. Off the record,” she said. “And Dr. Deana’s father called. He mentioned dinner at your grandmother’s this weekend.”

  “No sign of Martin?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  Vachon got his lustier thoughts under control long enough to venture a dry comment. “Maybe he used one of the other entrances.”

  Nikita treated him to a dispassionate smile as she moved away. “Are you always this aggravating, Vachon? Or are you trying to emulate my brother?”

  A step behind her, Vachon hid a grin. “I take it your brother annoys you.”

  “Frequently.”

  “It must be a general failing. He annoyed Manny and me all day by never being where he was supposed to be.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t suppose he has to be anywhere you’d expect. Take a tip, Vachon.” She stabbed the call button on the old-fashioned cage elevator. “Other than court dates, Martin tends to run anywhere from two to three hours behind whatever loose schedule he’s set for himself. If you really want to catch up with him, call his service. They’ll page him.” Her gaze frosted. “One thing I can promise you is that my grandmother has neither the inclination nor the patience to follow his daily meanderings. You and Manny wasted your time today barging into her home.”

  Vachon strolled into the elevator behind her. “I was removing, not barging, Nikita. And if you’re concerned about your grandmother, why not set me up with your roving brother? His secretary insists you’re one of the few people who can pin him down.”

  Before Nikita could make her selection, he depressed the button for the basement.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. In the gilded pool of elevator light, she looked appealingly vexed. Suspicious of his motives, he imagined, but more curious than angry.

  Vachon deemed it wiser to stare at the flashing lights than at her face. “I have to talk to Dr. Flynn. I figured you might want to be there.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  He regarded her through veiled eyes. “You care about the reputation of the hospital, don’t you, Nikita? As much as or more than Deana does.”

  The look she shot him had a tinge of pride attached to it. “I could teach you a thing or two about reading people, Vachon. I don’t give a damn about the hospital’s reputation. I care about the people within its walls. The staff, whom I trust and, more important, the patients who trust me.”

  “You worked hard to earn that trust, too, right?”

  “Of course I—What are you getting at?”

  Obviously, she didn’t trust him. Not that he blamed her. He’d been baiting her since they got into the elevator—and he had an uncomfortable feeling he knew why.

  To be attracted to Nikita was to resurrect the pain of his grandmother’s decline and ultimate death. The woman was a shrink, for God’s sake. Underlying meanings in everything. It was a wonder her kind didn’t trip over all the innuendoes they discovered in a perfectly harmless statement of fact. His poor grandmother hadn’t known up from down in the end, thanks to the head doctor who’d convinced her that psychoanalysis was her only hope for recovery.

  “Vachon?”

  His brow furrowed as his train of thought broke. “What?”

  “We stopped thirty seconds ago.” She stood in the shadowed corridor, impatient hands planted on her hips. “You never answered my question. I was halfway to Flynn’s lab when I realized you weren’t with me. Are you always so suddenly and completely preoccupied, or is it a cop thing to shut people out in the middle of a conversation?”

  “No more than it’s a psychiatric thing to analyze a conversation to death.” He wished he could have offered a more glib reply, but caught off guard it was the best he could manage. “To answer your earlier question, trust is a hard-won commodity. I wasn’t implying any deeper meaning.

  “I think you were,” she said with a shrug, “but I’ll let it go for now.” Offering him a smile, she motioned along the brick-lined corridor. “It looks like something out of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, doesn’t it? The forbidden laboratory one step in from the back alley.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and moved past her. “It’s dark, if that’s what you mean.”

  Her laugh contained a bewitching musical quality. “Your teeth are clenched, Vachon. Are you afraid of the dark?”

  His lips twitched as she unlocked a set of double steel doors. “You’ve obviously never spent time in falsebottomed trunks. My father was a magician, Nikita. All I see in darkness is a place that could use a handful of his glitter.”

  “Lemuel Vachon.” She led the way past shapeless trolleys draped with dust cloths. “My grandmother mentioned his name on the phone.”

  He glanced over but didn’t touch. Even shadowed, her features glowed. “You’re grandmother’s an exceptional woman.”

  “I know.” Grinning, Nikita raised a hand to one of the polished wooden doors. “Unfortunately, so does she. Donald, are you in there? Don—Jesus!” She jumped as if bitten, frowned, then peered down. “Lally? What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to—How did you get here?”

  Huddled next to the door sat a painfully thin woman with wilted blond hair and panicky green eyes. “I followed Dr. Flynn. I—I wanted to—see.”

  Nikita crouched beside her. “See what? His experiments?”

  “No.” Lally’s eyes darted to Vachon’s face, then back. “She was here last night, Dr. N.”

  Vachon’s ears pricked instantly, but he allowed Nikita to ask, “Who was here?”

  “Laverne Fox. I saw her.”

  “Back off, Vachon,” Nikita warned, not looking up. “She saw Laverne in her mind. I think,” she continued gently, reaching out a hand to the timid woman, “that you should let me take you upstairs. I don’t—oh, damn.”

  The door opened, and Dr. Flynn’s wheat-blond sheaf of hair swung out. “Who knocked? Oh, Detective Vachon.” He glanced down, clearly perplexed. “Nikita, too, and Miss Monk. Can I help you?”

  The scene was so incongruous that Vachon was tempted to laugh. Only Lally’s fearful face and the grim look Nikita slanted upward stopped him.

  “I have a few questions, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  His amiable tone didn’t fool Flynn. Gnawing on his full lower lip, the doctor glanced from one to the other, then finally gave in and opened the door.

  Bright light spilled into the passageway, giving Lally the look of a terrified rabbit. And yet…Vachon did a double take. Had there been a glint of something else deep in her eyes? A hint of a sly gleam?

  Torn between pursuing the woman’s so-called vision and interrogating the wary doctor before him, he chose Flynn. Nikita’s protective stance reminded him strongly of a mother bear. He’d be hard-pressed to get anywhere near her patient right now.

  “Come on, Lally.” She held out her hand. “Let’s go upstairs and talk.”

  Lally blinked. “About the ring?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “I didn’t…”

  “I know. Let’s go, okay?”

  Vachon caught Nikita’s eyes before she could get past him. “Ring?” he asked softly.

  “It has nothing to do with—well, maybe it does.” She let Lally wander ahead, humming an off-key show tune. “I’ll explain what I can later.”

  And with that, he knew, he would have to be satisfied.

  Ignoring Flynn’s tapping fingers, Vachon watched Nikita go. She had a deadly figure under that coat, long legs, firm breasts and always that ready, slightly teasing, not quite flirtatious smile hovering on her lips. She dared him with that smile. Dared and dazzled and made his loins harden despite his better judgment.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?
” Flynn murmured, distracted. “I like beautiful women, but they make me jealous.”

  Vachon kept his gaze on Nikita. “Of what? Their inaccessibility?”

  “Oh, no.” Flynn walked, hips rolling, into his brilliantly lit lab. “They’re accessible enough, Detective. You might not think it to look at me, but I adore a sexy female. Well, part of me does, at any rate.”

  “And the other part?”

  “Thinks that no female has the right to outshine the male of our species. Then again, I’m a firm believer that beauty is largely a state of mind. Don’t you agree?”

  Vachon regarded the array of weird machinery in the lab, including a row of padded chairs backed by a bank of computers. “To a degree,” he admitted. “Did you consider Laverne Fox a beautiful woman?”

  Flynn ran a delicate hand over one of the chair backs. His composure seemed to be building by the minute. “Feature for feature, no. But she believed in her beauty and so made others do the same. Other men, that is.” An odd smile flitted over his lips. “The interesting thing is, she had no depth to her personality and nothing special about her body. Yet men were invariably attracted to her. It’s as if she emitted some primal scent the way they swarmed around her. But that wasn’t it, either. I’m convinced it was her attitude that drew men in. Attitude is formed in the brain, Detective. Thus my fascination with the human psyche.”

  His effeminate manner made no impression on Vachon. The weird glow on his face did. “The power went out here at eight forty-five last night. Does the backup generator extend to your lab?”

  Flynn’s composure faltered. “Well, no. I have candles.”

  “So you sat here by candlelight until Laverne Fox came banging on your door. Which door was it, by the way?”

  Flynn pointed to the outer wall where he’d set up a small garden under glass. “They’re aromatic herbs,” he explained, noting Vachon’s gaze. “I use them on my subjects. Aromatherapy.”

  Vachon sent him a skeptical stare. “Are we talking human subjects?”

  “Volunteers,” Flynn corrected. He rubbed the fingers and thumb of his right hand together uneasily. “Is that all, Detective?”

  Sensing an attack of nerves, Vachon closed the gap between them. His smile was deceptively genial. “Not quite. Tell me, Dr. Flynn, when was the last time you used Laverne Fox as one of your volunteer subjects?”

  THERE WAS NO ROOM for error, Laverne Fox’s murderer realized. There was room only for calculated risk, a sad fact, but true of most crimes.

  Detective Daniel Vachon must be avoided. He was shrewd, and slips were easily made.

  The murderer took care when opening the flat brass box on the desk. Here it was, proof of the crime, memento of a woman’s death.

  A ripple of power skimmed along the murderer’s nerve ends. One minute alive, the next dead—what a rush it had been. Nothing for Laverne to do except stare at her killer in fear and astonishment, right before she died.

  A face swam into view. The murderer’s fingers halted their caressing motion.

  Lally Monk. Sacrificial lamb. What had she told Nikita this morning?

  The lid on the box came carefully down. Had she spoken of Laverne’s death to Nikita? Would she approach others in the hospital? Dr. D., perhaps? A visitor? Another patient?

  The murderer stroked the precious brass box. How would the investigation turn out? A woman had been killed last night. An original thought spawned an original deed. How good that had felt for one so long confined. The murderer’s lips curved into an evil smile. How much better it would feel a second time.

  The demon inside was free at last, and only one person in all the world knew it.

  Chapter Five

  “It’s like an igloo in here,” Nikita exclaimed to her grandmother’s housekeeper, who was bundled in so many layers of wool and tweed that she resembled Mrs. Claus. “How long have the heat and power been off?”

  “Since two this morning,” the woman replied. “My Jacko’s got a small fire lit on the service porch, and he’s bringing wood for more—or will do when he gets back from buying a stock of kerosene.”

  “Grandmother’s orders?” Nikita presumed, blowing into her mittened hands.

  “She wants light before heat, bless her eccentric heart.”

  Nikita doubted that the housekeeper, or any of the other staff members, would really be blessing the old woman’s heart after seven hours of freezing cold. More likely they were cursing her to hell and back.

  Adeline’s mansion in the prestigious Back Bay area had retained its air of stately grace for more than a century and a half. The walls were constructed of a rich oak paneling. The carved newel post and railing had been imported from Spain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and the downstairs fireplaces had once been part of an English manor. She owned three Degas paintings, two Picassos, four Van Goghs, a Rembrandt and God knew what else. Nikita had spotted a Renoir once, languishing in the attic amid a pile of sea chests and outdated encyclopedias.

  Adeline had dismissed the artistic treasure with a sniff. “If I want pornography hanging on my walls, I’ll tear pages out of your brother’s floozy magazines and tack them up over my bed. Your grandfather bought the silly thing, not me. I like my men and women dressed and laughing.”

  “Why laughing?” Nikita remembered asking.

  “Because they know what’s under the clothes,” she had replied.

  Normally, the entrance hall and corridors were brightly lit, but today the weather was overcast, and there was no power for the wall lamps. Sure of herself even so, Nikita made her way along the carpeted hallway to Adeline’s favorite room on the far side of the house.

  The library was as much of a treasure trove as the attics. It boasted three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, some glassed, some not, but all crammed with books, everything from Jane Austen to Anton Chekhov. Nikita knew the latter resided there out of deference to her late mother, whose parents had been born and raised in Russia.

  Because she could hear Adeline shrieking at her maid upstairs, she didn’t bother to knock, merely pushed open the double oak doors and directed her gaze upward. The elegant scrollwork on the ceiling had fascinated her as a child; it elicited the same feeling of awe some twenty-seven years after her first glimpse of it. Naked cherubs were apparently permitted where painted nudes were not.

  A clatter from the fireplace brought her eyes swiftly down. Two men knelt on the hearth. At first she thought the one on the left was Vachon—she spied dark, curling hair trapped in the collar of a black overcoat—but then the man swore and she realized with a flicker of disappointment that it was only her brother.

  Too bad, she thought wistfully. Detective Daniel Vachon might rub her the wrong way, but he would have been easier to take at nine on a winter morning than her acidtongued brother.

  The man beside him heard her enter and turned his head. “Ah, Nikita,” he exclaimed. He gave Martin a none-toogentle prod. “Stand up, your sister’s here.”

  In profile, Nikita could see what Martin thought of Dean Hawthorne’s order. She smiled. Dean could try, but Martin was not of the old-European school. His idea of good manners ran to not belching in public places and offering pretty females any service he could render.

  “Is Dee with you?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “She’s on the early shift.” Nikita came to crouch behind them. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to light a fire for the grand high witch upstairs. The damned flue’s stuck shut. Probably hasn’t been used in—oh, hell!”

  Nikita tried very hard not to laugh as her disgruntled brother emerged covered in a thick layer of soot. As if by magic, the power chose that moment to come on. It did so in a dazzling flash of light and a blast of Verdi from Adeline’s favorite classical radio station.

  Deana’s father glanced unconcernedly at his blackened son-in-law, rose with Nikita’s help and strolled to the stereo system as serenely as a king.

  “You’re looking pretty th
is morning,” he observed. He stood half a head shorter than her, had a faint German accent, a charming goatee that was more salt than pepper these days, a walking stick with a horsehead handle, an ever-increasing paunch and occasionally, though certainly not always, a twinkle in his blue-gray eyes. Reaching up, he twirled a stray strand of her hair around his finger and gave a teasing tug. “You remind me of Heidi, rosycheeked, fresh and healthy. Nothing like your brother, who currently resembles a Cockney chimney sweep. Who has put this glow on your face, eh? One of your new colleagues, perhaps?”

  His hands had a severe arthritic twist to them, Nikita noted sadly. It was a shame for a man barely into his sixties to have been forced to give up his surgical practice. Still, she had to wonder if his decline over the past ten years hadn’t been largely responsible for Deana’s swift climb up the medical ladder. Dr. Dean Hawthorne knew a number of important people, almost as many, Nikita reflected with a touch of latent resentment, as her own physician father.

  “This is what I get for trying to help the old biddy.” Martin’s grumbling shattered Nikita’s uncharitable thoughts. He used a handkerchief to wipe off the worst of the soot and with his head motioned his sister aside. “What’s with these cops who’ve been tracking me?” he demanded in a terse whisper. “I know Beldon, but I didn’t catch the name of the other one.”

  “Daniel Vachon,” Nikita replied promptly.

  Martin swore. “Daniel P. Vachon, formerly of Vice, now in Homicide?”

  Nikita would have painted a more flattering physical picture, but she nodded. “What does the P stand for?”

  “Who the hell cares?” Taking her arm, he dragged her farther away from his father-in-law, who was circling the room dousing the myriad lights Adeline had left burning. “Does he think I did it?”

  “He thinks a lot of people might have done it, including me, I imagine.”

  “And Deana?”