by Jenna Ryan
She would not, she vowed, allow Vachon to upset the balance of that life. Working at Beldon-Drake was a stepping stone in her career. She planned to open and operate her own clinic one day, along the lines of the Baylor Clinic, where Verity worked.
She ran absent fingers along the lapel of Vachon’s coat as she headed toward the hobby room. Poor, kindhearted Verity. Her breakdown had been coming on for a very long time. And now here she was, smack in the middle of a murder investigation. Nikita wondered if Vachon had learned about Verity’s connection to Laverne Fox at Baylor, then assumed he had. Why else would he want to talk to her?
She halted abruptly at the junction between two main corridors. Preoccupied with his thoughts, Vachon bumped into her.
“What?” he asked, returning to the present.
“Your coat” She tugged it off, not because she didn’t enjoy the warm feel of the wool and the tantalizing scent of him that clung to it but because she’d spotted Lally and Verity walking toward them from the elevator.
He took it but stopped her before she could intercept her patients. His fingers curved around her waist, stopping just short of a caress. “What about lunch?”
“Uh, yes, fine.” She glanced at the approaching women. “Is two o’clock okay?”
Was it a spark of humor that gleamed in his dark eyes? “Talk to Deana today, Nikita. I can’t put off questioning your patients for long. If I don’t do it, Manny will.”
“Dr. N.?” Lally hailed her tentatively, her feet slowing. Verity had halted further back and was staring mistrustfully at Vachon.
“Two o’clock,” Nikita repeated and started away.
She glanced back once when she reached Lally but couldn’t tell which patient he was looking at.
Lally plucked fearfully at her sleeve. “He thinks I did it, doesn’t he? Because of the ring?”
Nikita made a hushing motion. “He doesn’t know about the ring, Lally.”
“He will, though.” Lally hung her head. “That other policeman came and talked to Dr. D. You weren’t here, so she—she said he could ask me some questions. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I know I told him about it.” Her voice trembled. “I told him I had Laverne’s ring, and that I didn’t know how I got it.”
“YOU HAD NO RIGHT giving Manny Beldon permission to talk to Lally.” Nikita made no attempt to conceal her anger from Deana. “She’s my patient, and you knew I was coming on duty at eleven.”
Deana, who’d been stony-faced when Nikita burst into her office, looked faintly contrite. “I’m sorry, Niki, but it’s been a lousy day. Martin called, screaming his head off about coercion and dirty police tactics. I gather he’d just finished giving his statement downtown. Then Manny showed up and told me in no uncertain terms that he wanted to talk to anyone and everyone who was on duty the night of the storm.”
“How did that involve Lally?”
“It didn’t.” Deana’s knuckles went white on her blotter. “Lally bumped into him in the hall and panicked. She started babbling about Laverne’s ring and—oh, I don’t know—a bunch of other gibberish. It was either let Manny ask his questions then or be faced with a court order later. Frankly, I’d like this thing cleared up as quickly as possible.”
Nikita paced in front of her friend’s desk, snapping her fingers softly. “So would I, Dee, but not at the expense of our patients’ mental health.”
Deana sat back, running tense fingers through her mass of corkscrew curls. “What if she did it, though? I’m not saying she did, but the possibility exists. Don’t you think it would be better for all of us to know the truth?”
Nikita gazed out the window at the gentle snowfall. “Lally had no motive,” she reminded her friend.
“Lally doesn’t need a motive, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t.” Nikita spun, her temper ignited. “And neither do you. It could have been any one of us who killed Laverne. We all have access to barbiturates, and I doubt if anyone has an airtight alibi for the entire period of time during which she might have been murdered.”
Deana rolled her head and neck as if to work out a kink. “Niki, Martin admitted to the police that he drove Laverne out here from Boston that night.”
“What time?”
“He doesn’t remember. Somewhere between eight and ten o’clock.”
“Donald Flynn says that Laverne came banging on his door at nine. Martin arrived upstairs after ten.” Nikita considered the discrepancy, then gave her head a resolute shake. “Donald must be mistaken.”
“Or lying,” Deana suggested quietly. She added bitterly, “Unless Donald’s telling the truth, and Martin was off—”
“Killing Laverne?” Nikita’s chilly tone hid her fear. Her tone melted when Deana’s face crumpled.
She dropped her head into her arms on the desk. “No.” Her voice had a strangled quality. “I was thinking he might have been off seducing someone else. Laverne was just one of a pretty horde, Niki.”
Partly because she couldn’t refute the remark but mostly because she knew her brother’s habits well enough to feel sorry for Deana, she went to stand behind her friend. “He’s a rat, Dee. He doesn’t deserve you, or any other decent woman, but I’d swear on my mother’s grave that he isn’t a murderer.”
“Daddy thinks he might be.”
“Well—” a reluctant smile curved Nikita’s lips “—daddies are notoriously protective, especially yours.”
“True.” Deana lifted her head. “Fathers protect their daughters the way doctors protect their patients. I’m sorry, Niki, I shouldn’t have let Manny talk to Lally. My thinking’s not one hundred percent clear right now. On top of which, Manny threw me for a loop when he talked to Lally. I’d have thought if he wanted to question any patient it would have been Verity. Did you talk to her last night, by the way?”
Nikita gave her friend’s hair an absent stroke, then skirted the chair and sank onto the buttery soft leather couch. “No. She fell asleep in her room, so I decided not to wake her. I’ll see her later today.”
“What about Vachon?”
“What about him?” Nikita countered carefully.
“Can you put him off?”
Did she want to, Nikita wondered, then realized that Deana was referring to their patients. “I’m not—I’ll try,” she promised. “I’ll do my best, but he’s awfully—persistent.”
“Well, just so long as the hospital isn’t disrupted.” Deana’s smooth brow furrowed. “Why do you keep looking at your watch? Did you schedule a session or something?”
Nikita expelled a fatalistic breath. “I have a half-session with Mr. Bedrosian. I told Vachon I’d have lunch with him afterward.”
Clearly astonished, Deana stared. “Really? I wouldn’t have thought he was your type. I mean, he’s sexy enough for ten men, but I pictured you with someone more like Manny Beldon.”
Now there was an unpleasant thought Nikita smiled as she stood. “I’d better go before Mr. Bedrosian launches another clay missile.”
“For what it’s worth, I sent Sammy off to the west wing to heft crates. Niki?” Deana caught her hand and squeezed. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Vachon strikes me as a little—I don’t know—something.”
“Unorthodox?” Nikita asked.
“More like unpredictable. I heard he burned out in Vice. I’d hate to think—yes, Derek, what is it?”
Her handsome secretary stuck his head in the door. “Sorry, Dr. D., Dr. N., but Ms. Thimmins is on the phone from Supplies. She’s been doing the quarterly inventory. We’ve come up short in one area.”
“Which one?” Nikita asked when Deana didn’t.
Derek glanced from one to the other, then replied unhappily, “Drugs.”
NO LUNCH for Dr. N. and Detective Vachon. Too bad, Lally thought, twisting her gloved fingers.
“You’re not rolling your snowball, Lally,” Verity scolded with a laugh. “We can’t make fairy-tale characters without snowballs.”
Lally jumped, then immediately began
to roll. She hadn’t known until today, but Talia didn’t like Verity. Maybe she was jealous. No, that was silly. Talia was strong, and strength had no time for jealousy.
A snowball thwacked between her shoulder blades. Ten yards away, Mr. Bedrosian giggled. “Dead on,” he exclaimed and stooped to make another.
Lally ignored him and continued with her task. There were five of them out here this afternoon, supposedly under the direction of two nurses and three orderlies, but Lally knew that it was really Verity who was in charge. Sick or not, she was a psychologist. She had more training than the others. She was also nicer than they were, and smarter, too. It had been her idea to make snow figures who looked like characters from “Beauty and the Beast.”
Her cheeks and nose red with the cold, Verity trudged over. “Shall I help you?” she asked.
Lally blinked at the snowball near her feet. “Which character is this?”
Verity smiled. “The Beast, Lally. The most important one. Certainly, he’s the most complex.”
“Because he has a prince living inside him?”
“That’s part of it.” She packed fresh snow and began to roll. “What were you saying a moment ago about Nikita and Vachon?”
Had she spoken out loud? Lally dipped her head. “I heard them make a lunch date, but Dr. N. broke it”
“Why?”
“I—” Lally licked her lips. “I’m not sure.”
Verity’s laugh sounded like tinkling bells amid all the fresh and still-falling snow. “I think you are, but you’re afraid I’ll chastise you for eavesdropping.”
“It wasn’t me who eavesdropped.” Lally defended herself. “It was—someone else. I just heard about it.”
Straightening, Verity worked a knot from her lower back. “What did you hear?”
Lally swallowed her sudden attack of anxiety. She had no reason to be nervous around Verity. “Some things went missing,” she confided in a low voice, then pressed a finger to her lips to indicate a secret.
Verity regarded her seriously. “What things?”
“Some of the medicine the doctors use. Sammy—I mean, I heard the police found drugs in Laverne Fox’s blood. Now they’re saying that those drugs came from the supply room downstairs.” Her voice dropped to a fearful whisper. “They’re convinced that it was someone inside the hospital that night who killed her.”
FOUR DAYS of pure hell and a fifth one close to over.
Exhaustion pulled on Nikita’s energy reserves, sucking them dangerously close to dry. She hadn’t seen Vachon since before their canceled lunch date two days ago, but she’d heard plenty of bad news.
Lally had grown introspective and uncommunicative, an event not so much unusual as it was untimely. Deana was by turns distant, short-tempered, pensive and resigned. Martin refused to talk to anyone, including his sister. Sammy Slide blamed Nikita for the reprimand Deana had dished out to him—no patient contact for ten days. His duties would be strictly confined to grunt labor.
Dr. Flynn had shut himself up in his lab and turned over his patients to his fellow doctors. “Consider it a week’s vacation,” he’d said breezily and sent Deana a look that dared her to countermand his request.
“He’s not worth the effort.” That had been Deana’s weary response. Nikita was inclined to agree, although sometimes she questioned Sherman Drake’s choice of resident psychiatrists.
It was Verity, however, who concerned her most. She seemed determined to shut out doctors and friends alike. Nikita was both her doctor and one of her oldest friends, and the rejection stung. It also worried her.
“I hear there was a drug theft,” Verity finally remarked to her late that fifth afternoon, Friday. They’d gone for a walk in the woods at Nikita’s suggestion. Verity looked pale. She hadn’t been outside since building her snow scene two days ago.
Finnigan romped ahead of them on the white path, stopped suddenly and stuck his ears straight up. Letting out a happy woof, he took off toward the parking lot.
“It wasn’t really a theft,” Nikita explained. “Some bottles went missing. We don’t know if they were stolen or mislaid.”
“You called the police, Niki. I’m not sick enough to believe you did that on a whim. There were barbiturates missing, weren’t there?”
“Among other things.”
They entered the crystalline woods, a fairy-tale forest if Nikita had ever seen one. Snow clung to bare branches as if spray-painted by Currier and Ives. There was even a cottage in the distance, once part of the estate, now a storehouse for whatever supplies could not be crammed into the lower west wing. A pond twenty yards from its front door had frozen early, thawed twice during Christmas then frozen again this past week.
Verity’s expression became wistful as she surveyed the frosted oval of ice. “I’d love to go skating,” she said softly. “Just glide around in the cold winter air wearing white skates and red mittens and a fuzzy hat. I wish I were a stronger person, Niki,” she said quietly, “Or a better one.”
“Better how?” Nikita asked. “Verity, you’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. You’re unquestionably the gentlest.”
Verity turned her head away. “Would a truly nice person be glad that Laverne Fox is dead? Would she have come here after a nervous breakdown specifically to confront the person she believed to be the source of her unhappiness?”
“I don’t know,” Nikita answered honestly. “She might.” She considered, then shrugged. “I might.”
“Really?” Verity stopped, surprised. “I always thought you didn’t have a bitter bone in your body.”
Nikita grinned. “Oh, I have plenty of bitter bones. One of them is for you. I thought you chose Beldon-Drake because you knew I was going to be joining the staff and that Deana was already here.”
“Friendship above resentment?” Verity managed a wan smile. “I suppose I did come because of you, but I won’t deny I knew Laverne was here, too. I relished a chance to get my claws into her. Verbal, not physical,” she added. She rubbed the center of her forehead with gloved fingers, battling a headache. “I didn’t kill her, Niki, I swear I didn’t. But I don’t have an alibi. I could have left the building that night, and you know me well enough to know I’d have been perfectly capable of getting my hands on a quantity of barbiturates.”
“Yes, I do know that.”
Nikita’s gaze shifted to Finnigan, who was barking exuberantly as he raced toward them. His tail flew out behind him like a golden plume.
“Oh, damn,” she murmured, though her heart responded with a tiny lurch of excitement. “It’s Vachon and Manny.”
Verity’s large eyes widened. “Oh, God, not the police. Not Manny Beldon, especially. I don’t trust men with sweet faces. Detective Vachon’s fine, but please, please get rid of his partner.”
“With pleasure,” Nikita agreed and forced a smile of greeting.
Manny had his notebook out as the men approached. His scowl ruined the divine facade. “Verity Whyte?”
Verity appealed to Nikita, who inserted herself firmly between them.
“No questions, Detective.”
Manny’s face reddened. A leisurely pace behind, Vachon ruffled Finnigan’s ears and said to Nikita, “I told him not to come, but he was determined to try.”
“Not try, get,” Manny corrected. “You can stay, Dr. Sorensen, but I will ask my questions.”
“The hell you will.” Frigid calm won out over a tempting display of anger at his high-handed manner. “This is hospital land, and while you might have the right to be here, you have no right to barge in and tell me what you’re planning to do with my patients. I decide when you can question them, not you. Is that clear?”
She wouldn’t have believed that an angel could look so malevolent. Manny’s eyes narrowed to slits. Who knew what nasty response he would have offered if Vachon, black overcoat floating around his ankles, hadn’t sauntered casually closer.
“Matches and gunpowder,” he said in an undertone to Nikita. Speakin
g over his shoulder, he spoke serenely. “Let it go, Manny. You’re scaring the dog.”
On cue, Finnigan barked at Manny, whose thinned lips and flared nostrils made Nikita think of a celestial bull.
“I only want to ask a few basic questions,” he said stiffly.
Verity spoke before Nikita, whose gaze was covertly fixed on Vachon, realized her intent. “What you want to know, Detective, is, did I kill Laverne Fox. The answer is no. Do I expect you to take my word for that? No, again. It’s all nos, I’m afraid. No, I didn’t like her. No, I don’t have an alibi. But the most important no in all of this is a resounding no, I did not specifically wish Laverne dead.”
Her lovely doelike eyes had gone from round to bulging; her fingers twitched at her sides. Nikita shot Vachon an impatient look, then transferred her full attention to Verity.
“Let it rest for now,” she advised. “When you’re ready, you can tell the police the whole story.”
Without looking up, Manny, who’d been scribbling entries in his notebook, muttered grimly. “Just a few more—”
“No more,” Nikita interrupted with finality. “You’re agitating my patient. Take your notebook and leave.”
Verity sighed. In all the years Nikita had known her, she had never liked dissension. “I’ll talk to him.” She indicated a silently watchful Vachon. “As long as you stay, Niki.”
A small nod from Vachon convinced Nikita. While she didn’t trust him completely, her instincts told her that he had no cruelty in him. Finnigan liked him, and after all, it had been Vachon, not her, who’d broken off their kiss on the sun porch two days ago.
“All right,” she agreed, aware of a faint constriction in her chest. “But no tricks, Vachon.”
His eyes glinted. “No verbal tricks,” he returned easily.
Manny glared one last time, but said nothing, simply slapped his notebook closed and crunched off in the direction of the hospital.
“I don’t think he likes you very much,” Vachon remarked in his partner’s wake.
Nikita arched unconcerned brows. “That makes us even. I hope you remembered to write Manny’s name on your suspect list, Vachon, because from what my gran told me last night, he’d love nothing better than to get hold of this estate by default.”