by Jenna Ryan
“Ma’am?” Leona stuck her head in. “That detective’s here. Shall I send him up?”
Delighted by Nikita’s shocked expression, Adeline made a hurry-up motion. “Yes, do, right away. Well?” she demanded when Nikita failed to react. “Aren’t you going to yell at me? This is a setup, you know. Entirely deliberate.”
Because she couldn’t stop them, Nikita chose to ignore the butterfly sensations in her stomach. “Did it ever occur to you, Gran, that Vachon and I are grown adults, that we don’t want, need or appreciate your interference?”
“Nope.”
Nikita dropped the shoe and flopped against the deep floral cushions. “Why do I bother?” she muttered, then pushed herself up and off the chair as Vachon entered the room.
Black pants again, and the same long black overcoat she’d borrowed last night This time, though, he wore a red shirt, and it was just possible he’d run a brush through his hair sometime between last night and this morning.
Two days of stubble darkened his narrow features and heightened the darkness of his eyes as they took in the chaos around him.
“You have a lot of clothes, Adeline,” he noted, tongue in cheek.
“Thank you.” She smiled from ear to ear, plopping her cane onto a patch of uncluttered Persian carpet. “So what’s the poop on Sammy Slide? Is he coming?”
“It’s scoop, Gran,” Nikita corrected. Then she spun to confront the pair of them. “Coming! Gran, you didn’t ask Sammy?”
“No, I didn’t” She chuckled. “I got Vachon to do it for me. More intimidating that way.”
“I don’t believe this,” Nikita murmured.
Adeline hobbled past her. “You believe it,” she said, still chortling. “Someday when you’re old and wrinkled you’ll be just like me. Better looking, of course. God didn’t give me Russian grandparents on my mother’s side, more’s the pity.”
“He didn’t give you much common sense, either,” Nikita retorted, exasperated. “Sammy Slide? Gran, the man’s an absolute ass—”
“Don’t swear.”
“Well, he is.”
“Fine, we’ll sit him next to Donald Flynn. And before you yell at me, yes, I invited him, too. He comes from old Boston stock. I’ve met his mother and grandfather. Chimpanzees have more refinement, but that’s what comes of improper marriages. Now you and Vachon…Oh, bother interruptions.” This as her cordless phone began to shrill. “Where is the silly thing? I hate to miss a call.” She poked at piles of clothing with her cane, mumbled about the evils of technology, then exclaimed in delight when Nikita located the handset and gave it to her. “Hello? Mabel? What? I am speaking up. Put your hearing aid on, for heaven’s sake!”
Grabbing her brown leather jacket, Nikita passed close by Vachon en route to the door. “I’d escape if I were you.”
She waited, arms folded across her chest, until he joined her in the hall, then confronted him. “Are you out of your mind?” Her foot tapped in irritation. “Gather the suspects for dinner at an elegant Boston mansion? The only thing missing will be the thunderstorm and Nick Charles’s witty one-liners. Do you do drugs when you’re off duty?”
Vachon smiled and reached out to tuck back a strand of loose hair. “I do lots of things off duty, Nikita. Including attending unusual dinner parties. Are you bringing Lally Monk?”
“No.”
“Verity Whyte?”
“Maybe.” She batted away his lingering hand, in no mood to fight off feelings that shouldn’t be there in the first place. “I don’t like this whole stupid idea. I think Gran should have her brain washed out with soap for dreaming it up. And I can’t believe Manny Beldon wants any part of it I’m sure he was delirious when he heard about Dr. Drake’s reaction to the murder.”
Vachon trapped her arm before she could move, turning her slowly to meet his dark, probing gaze. “What are you really afraid of, Nikita? What harm can come of a simple mystery dinner-party?”
She pulled ineffectually on her arm. “What I’m afraid of,” she answered around a lump in her throat, “is that someone here tonight will turn out to be the murderer. Possibly someone I love.”
IT WAS a hideous start to her day off, Nikita reflected as she drove too fast along the ice-slick streets.
She needed a workout, she decided, noting the fierce grip of her hands on the steering wheel. Maybe a long swim in the hospital pool would help, followed by a sauna, lunch and a Brontë novel to absorb her mind for the rest of the afternoon.
It was either that or think about Vachon and the potentially disastrous evening that awaited her.
She covered the distance to the hospital in thirty minutes, pulled into the staff parking lot and took her usual spot under the chestnut tree. She kept her gym bag in the trunk. Swimming, aerobics and a sauna would settle her jumpy nerves. With luck she’d fall asleep and miss Adeline’s party completely.
“Not an option, Niki,” she murmured, popping the inside lock release on the trunk. “They’ll hang Martin out by his private parts if someone isn’t there to defend his despicable behavior.”
At the image, she yanked up the trunk with an irritable tug. Now where was that bag?
The question and everything before it fled from Nikita’s mind as hazy daylight hit the interior. Her body felt leaden; her mouth and throat went dry; her fingers lost their grip on her keys. They jingled into a snow rut at her feet, leaving nothing except the sound of her terrified breathing and the distant hum of furnaces from the hospital.
This couldn’t be. It was impossible!
She closed her eyes then inched them open again. The image remained. But how on God’s earth had a woman’s body gotten into the trunk of her Toyota Camry?
She swallowed the nausea in her throat She was hallucinating; she must be. Drawing a deep, shaky breath, she bent closer. She saw a pair of lifeless eyes staring at her and jumped back as if punched. Lifeless blue eyes. Pretty. Longlashed. Unknown to her—yet oddly familiar.
The woman’s legs were wedged against the wheel hub. Her right hand rested across her chest Nikita didn’t need to look again to know that the silvery blond hair wrapped around the broken right finger came from the corpse’s head. Several silky strands of it fell over her staring eyes.
Words clanged in Nikita’s head like a ponderous funeral bell. Two women dead in five days. And she’d found both bodies. Two dead in five days. She reached up with both hands, slammed the trunk lid shut then pressed her palms to her frozen cheeks. “My God, what is this? What’s happening here?”
She had to get help. Her eyes searched wildly. No sign of a police car. They’d been hanging around for the better part of a week, and now when she needed one, there were none to be seen.
Vachon! She whirled and took off at a dead run for the nearest door. She’d left her keys in the rut behind her car, but it didn’t matter. The security guard recognized her and immediately released the outer lock.
“Call the—” she started, then changed her mind, snatched up the telephone and dialed. How she remembered the number, she didn’t know, but two rings later, she heard his voice.
“Detective Vachon.”
“Vachon.” She croaked his name, ordered herself to calm down and continued. “There’s a…I found a woman’s body in my trunk.”
The security guard gaped. Nikita snapped her gaze to the tree-shrouded lot as Vachon demanded, “Are you all right, Niki?”
“I’m fine. But there’s a—a dead woman.”
“I heard you. Where are you now?”
“In the hospital, at—” she checked “—the east lot door. It’s one of the main entrances. There’s a guard with me.”
“You’re not hurt?”
“No. I found her body when I got here. I opened my trunk and I—saw her.”
“You’ve had a shock, Niki. I want you to stay where you are, do you hear me? Don’t go back to your car.”
“But I left my keys…”
“Don’t go back. Can you see the parking lot from
there?”
“Part of it.”
“Can you see your car?”
“No.”
“What about people coming and going?”
“I’m not sure.” She steadied her breathing and repeated the question to the guard. “Jerry says they leave from all parts of the building. He sees some but misses more. There are a lot of trees and shrubs, Vachon.”
“A lot of doors, too,” he said impatiently. “I’ll be at the hospital in fifteen minutes, Niki. Remember what I said. Don’t go back to your car.”
Reaction set in. Nikita’s legs gave out and she dropped into the guard’s padded chair. She rubbed the aching area between her eyes with her index and middle finger, pictured the dead woman’s broken finger and shuddered. “I checked her, Vachon. She’s been dead for some time. I’d guess eight hours, at least. Her face was blue.”
“Did you know her?”
The question was gently put, but even that couldn’t dispel the gruesome memory. She shivered again, so deeply this time that she thought her teeth might rattle out of her head. “Not personally, but I’ve seen her. She was one of our outpatients. Patti something. Andrew Baines was her doctor. He’d know.”
“Okay. Ten minutes, Niki.”
She managed to say, “I’ll wait,” then dropped the receiver into the desk cradle and her head onto her arm beside it Two murders in five days…
Her head came up slightly. Had there been blood? Yes, at the base of her throat, though she’d been wearing a black sweater and a red wool coat.
Her right index finger had looked broken, just like Laverne’s. Why? What kind of monster stabbed someone in the throat, broke one finger and wrapped a strand of hair around it?
But that was a redundant question, wasn’t it? The act was unbalanced, psychotic, insane. And if the act was insane, so must be the perpetrator.
“IT’S GONE!” Nikita exclaimed. She stared into the trunk the way Vachon had often gaped into his father’s black top hats. “How can it be gone? It’s only been twenty minutes.”
And in those twenty minutes had formed the beginnings of another snowstorm. Only the start of it, though. Vachon couldn’t see these lightly swirling flakes providing much in the way of cover for a body thief.
As astonished now as she had been frightened earlier, Nikita stepped resolutely from the car. “I saw her, Vachon. She was here, and she was dead.”
Backup officers had arrived with silenced sirens. Vachon motioned to two of the uniforms to search the trunk. Then he drew Nikita away.
“Who else parks around here?”
“You mean you believe me?” The look she slanted him made clear her doubt.
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask.”
She let out a deep breath. “Marcia Hopkins is on one side, Donald Flynn on the other. Deana’s spot is over by the Scotch pines.”
“That’d be a long haul,” Vachon mused. But he checked it out anyway. When he returned, he shook his head. “The hood of her car’s cold, and the tires have a flat spot. She hasn’t moved it for a while.”
“What about Flynn’s Lincoln?”
“Same thing. Cold. He’s closer, though. He could have carried the body over. Who’s Marcia Hopkins?”
Nikita managed a faint smile. “She’s a doctor, five feet tall, ninety-six pounds and she has a bad limp. Childhood polio.”
“What about that Porsche over there?”
“That’s Dr. Drake’s.”
“And the Mercury?”
“I don’t know. Vachon, it was twenty minutes, tops. Who would move a body in broad daylight?”
Vachon returned to her trunk, glanced at the hospital, then around the lot itself. “No windows,” he murmured. “No attendants on the gate.” He shot her a dark look. “Why is that?”
“We don’t need gate attendants, or at least Dr. Drake doesn’t think we do. Our patients aren’t homicidal maniacs, they’re troubled. Most of them would be clinging to the overhead light fixtures if you came up behind them and said boo. We have bars on the windows, electronic and computer locks on the doors and security guard stations at five of the nine entrances.”
“We took blood and hair samples, Detective,” one of the forensic people informed him. “We’re vacuuming the rest now.”
Vachon nodded. “Get the owners of these other vehicles out here and have them unlock their doors and trunks for us. Look at this, Nikita,” he said, taking her by the arm and pointing to the branches of the spreading spruce. “The view from the hospital windows is blocked by this tree and that other one ten feet away. It could explain why your car was used in the first place to stash the body.”
“That’s impossible. I always lock my doors.” She ran both hands around the back of her neck in exasperation. “Damn—almost always. It wasn’t locked when I came out this morning.” At his level look, she retorted, “Well, who’d steal a car from a mental institution way out in the middle of nowhere?”
Her defiance was an excuse. He knew her well enough to recognize a smokescreen when he saw one. He moved toward her. “What aren’t you telling me, Niki?” He sensed he didn’t want to hear her answer.
“Nothing concrete.” She rubbed her chilled arms.
He stepped closer. “Who are you covering for? Lally?”
“No. I heard that Patti and Lally were friends. Lally would never hurt a friend.”
“Who would?”
“No one. I don’t know.” Her fingers curled into her palms. “Stop badgering me, Vachon. I’m not a hostile witness.” Her eyes came up to meet his. “Am I?”
She was hostile enough at this moment. However…“No, you’re not. You’re hiding something, though.” He stopped less than a foot away from her. “You might as well tell me what it is. I’ll find out eventually. Does it have to do with someone you care about?”
She looked away.
“Someone you love?”
No response.
“Someone you’re related to?”
“Yes—no!” The affirmation and subsequent denial burst from her like water through a dam. She pushed him away with her palms and started angrily for the hospital.
Bingo, thought Vachon, though it was a hollow victory.
He caught her in two strides, taking her firmly by the wrist and turning her to face him. Tears shimmered in her deep blue eyes.
“Martin?” he guessed.
She dipped her head. Although he longed to hold her, he restricted the contact between them to his hand on her wrist.
“I heard a rumor when I started here, one of those tidbits of gossip that got shushed whenever I came around. You’d never know it now, but Martin used to spend a lot of time at the hospital. I hoped it was because of Deana, but I had a feeling deep down that it wasn’t. I think I knew about Laverne. I’m sure I knew, in fact. At first I refused to believe any of the other rumors.”
Vachon wondered distantly why he felt so heavyhearted. “Martin had other affairs at the hospital—with non staff members?”
“That was the scuttlebutt. I gather there was one who liked him very much. She got better and was discharged about the time I arrived.” The look she sent him brought a pang to his chest. “No one ever actually said it, but I’m almost positive her name was Patti.”
LALLY KNEW that Patti Warneckie was dead. She felt jitters and jangles and palpitations all through her nervous system. She felt something else, too. Something she didn’t want to acknowledge.
She rocked back and forth on the pretty Bentwood chair in her room. “Talia,” she whispered. “Please don’t leave me alone. Don’t go away. I didn’t kill anyone. You know I’d never kill anyone. I love him, I really love him, but I loved Patti, too. I wanted her to stay, to come and see me when I felt blue.”
She heard a voice in her head. Talia’s voice? No. Talia never talked to her, and she’d heard this voice before. It was quiet, repetitive, cajoling. “Tell Dr. N.,” it said. “Patti’s dead. Tell her about the picture your mind saw this time. You can’t hide
from the truth, Lally. Show her what you found. Patti’s gone. You must show her what you found.”
The voice continued. Was this what Dr. N. called her subconscious mind? If so, Lally didn’t like it. It felt dreamlike, funny, not like her at all.
Her fingers scrunched the delicate red, black and gold silk scarf that lay beside her on the rocker. A pretty scarf. Patti had been wearing a scarf just like this when she’d come to visit last night.
Lally hung her head. She heard the door open and smelled expensive perfume.
“What is it, Lally?” Verity knelt beside her and ran gentle fingers through her hair. “Why are you crying?”
“Patti’s dead.” Lally choked the words out Then she sniffled. “A voice told me. Or maybe I saw it. I can’t remember. But she’s dead, and I’ve got her scarf.” She wadded up the silk square and shook it in her fist. “It was folded in with my clothes from yesterday.”
Verity stroked her neck. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she soothed in that vaguely hypnotic way of hers. “I haven’t heard anything about a death.”
“You will,” Lally said dully.
Verity jiggled her shoulders to encourage her. “Now don’t get down on yourself, Lally. Talk to Nikita—Dr. N. Tell her what you’ve just told me. Show her the scarf. Let her help you.”
Verity’s words merged with those droning in Lally’s head. Talk to Dr. N., they both said. Show Nikita what she’d found.
But what if what she’d found turned out to be proof of guilt? She hadn’t killed Patti, she was sure of it. But what if someone very close to her had?
Chapter Ten
Thank heaven Adeline saw fit to postpone her dinner party. Only by one day, but it was something.
Nikita opted to work Saturday afternoon rather than watch the police investigate what her grandmother, a huge Nancy Drew fan, would have called The Case of the Disappearing Corpse. She fixed a quick lunch in her apartment, changed from jeans to a navy pantsuit and lab coat and headed toward the central patient wing.