A Shattering Crime (19 page)

I reached to set it back atop the steel table I thought it may have fallen from. It wasn't until I had gathered the other half a dozen or so boxes I had also knocked over that the memory struck me.

Atropine. The coroner's office. Lucky Hendricks had mentioned atropine as one of the poisons that were almost impossible to detect. And yet here was the substance, just lying around a veterinarian's office where anyone could . . .

I froze.

No. Not just anyone. Only people who had access to the private areas of the vet's office—or who had tumbled in through a window—could put their hands on this substance. And of those people who had legitimate access, one face came clearly to mind. The face of the same person who had access to the stockroom at the bakery.

Nicole.

*   *   *

U
nsurprisingly, my less-than-stealthy entry into the building set a couple of yapper-type dogs into alert mode. They may not have been protecting their home, may not have seen an unauthorized person wandering around, but they knew the noise I made was wrong and therefore worthy of much high-pitched barking.

That was good news for me. It meant I could follow the sound out of the exam room I'd landed in and find the small animal kennels. On my way to find Friday, I
could call Diana and let her know what I'd found. She might be surprised to hear I'd talked with the coroner about poisons—and I'd have to confess to it and apologize, maybe over a glass of wine—but she was with Nolan, and according to him, he knew everything about what I'd been up to anyway.

I got to my feet and took the few steps to the door. Reaching into the pocket of my jacket, I closed my hand around my car keys. Rats. Reaching into the other pocket, I closed my hand around . . . nothing. Not even lint. Twin rats. My phone was in the cup holder of my car, acting as a GPS device.

This shouldn't have been a challenge. There were phones throughout the office. Of course, I didn't actually know Diana's number, or Nolan's for that matter. I stored those numbers in my contacts, obviating the need for memorizing them. But, I could call 911 and ask for a patch through to the precinct.

Thinking that was my best option, I lifted the receiver on the phone by the door. The numbers on the panel obligingly lit. By their glow, a strip of paper to the left became visible. It had names like
RM
1,
RM
2,
SURGERY
,
RECPT.
Great. A networked phone system. A little red light beside
RM
2 informed me of where I was. But how did I get an outside line? Did I need one?

I punched in 911. Waited.

No further sound came from the phone.

But somewhere in the building a door slammed.

My heart leapt to my throat; my stomach sank to my knees. The odds of that door being slammed by wind,
free roaming dogs, or ghosts were slim to none. I was not alone.

I sucked in a breath intended to calm me. I reasoned I might still be all right. I may not have been the only one creeping around a closed, dark veterinarian's office under cover of night, but that didn't mean the other creeper knew about me, right?

Slowly, as quietly as possible, I set the receiver back in its place. The lights winked out. And from my knees, my stomach sent a wave of dread and nausea to the rest of me.

The little red light beside
RM 2
told me where I was. And told anyone else in the building the very same thing.

I loved my cat. Before that day I think I never understood the depth of my affection for her. She was sweet to have around, especially when her little warm body curled against my feet at night. She was fun to play with and made me laugh at the way she teased Fifi. I loved her a bunch and more. But I had to get the hell out of the vet's office.

Breath gone shallow, I turned around and tiptoed back to the window.

Climbing in had been one thing, and it had been hard work for a reason. From the outside, the window was slightly higher off the ground than it was from the inside. Deep foundation? Storage cellar? Didn't matter. What mattered was that rather than the window ledge being level with my chest as it was on the outside, it was now level with my navel.

I rested my hands on the sill and stuck my head out. Before my motion was complete, I knew that would be the wrong approach. It equated to diving out the window head first, which made the action a whole lot like a frying pan vs. fire choice. I would have to reverse my climb.

I pulled head and shoulders back into the room then tried to hike my leg up onto the window ledge. My hamstring shrieked in protest. The side of my shoe hit the wood. I wriggled my foot, trying to ease my leg farther up and over. My hip lodged a complaint. And the lights came on in the room.

Startled, I lost my focus on the window. My foot dropped back to the floor, and I turned, blinking against the light, hoping to face a nighttime vet tech, hoping to have explaining to do, explaining that would result in a call to the cops—a win for me either way. Lee stood in the doorway, fury writ deep on her face.

“Where do you think you're going?” she growled.

“Um. My cat,” I said. “I just wanted to see my cat. You never called. I wanted to see if she was okay.”

“I called your house,” she said, not a hint of kindness in her voice, not a note of nice. “I left a message.”

“Oh. Okay. I'll just, um—” It hit me anew that I was alone, really alone. Sure I'd had my brushes with trouble in the past, but someone had always been with me. This time, it was only me.

“You'll stay right where you are,” she snarled.

I put my back to the window. “You should call the police,” I said. “Have them, uh, have them come arrest me for trespassing.”

She tipped her head to the left, ear over her shoulder. “Not yet,” she said.

Fear felt like it opened up a hole in my belly. There was a strange sense of emptiness there, as though all the blood in my body was racing for one extremity or another.

“I should have listened to Nicole.” She took a step toward me. “She warned me you were clever. Said Rozelle was always talking about how
clever
you are.”

“Where is Rozelle?” I asked, all the while thinking,
Please say you don't know, please say you don't know
.

She tugged forward the handbag draped over her shoulder. Without so much as a glance, she reached inside and withdrew a slim paper package, another of its like falling to the floor. “That's no concern of yours,” she said. Her voice had gone quiet, almost hollow. The overt anger that had been there when she first turned on the lights seemed to have receded. But this new tone raised gooseflesh on my skin.

She peeled the package open the way you would an elastic bandage, exposed the syringe within.

My mouth went dry and yet I swallowed hard. What was up with that? Frantic thoughts bombarded my brain, none of them making any sense, given the severity of the moment. How could I care at a time like that, that I might have forgotten to lock the car? What did it matter that I still had the hood up on my jacket and I was beginning to sweat? And why was Lee walking around with syringes in her purse anyway?

“Look,” I said, backing hard against the window ledge. My fingers found the sill and I clutched it tightly. “Just
tell me how my cat is and I'll go. We can forget this ever happened.”

“Your cat?” She dropped the paper wrapping. It fluttered to the floor, the top layer curled backward but facing upright. “Don't worry about it.”

There was something written on the paper, but I couldn't make it out without giving it my full attention. And I needed to keep that attention on the woman with the syringe.

“This was meant for Rozelle. But I'll make an exception for you. After I give you this tiny little injection, I'll make sure your cat is waiting for you in the afterlife. You just hold still.”

Like that was going to happen. After she threatened both me and Friday.

She tugged the small plastic safety cap off the syringe and tossed it away. It hit the floor in the same moment she took her first step toward me.

Exam table to my right, cabinets to my left, I had limited choices for escape. I couldn't get around the demented woman walking toward me wielding a syringe of who knew what. But I wasn't keen on throwing myself out the window either.

She took another step, and I went with the only plan I could devise.

Hands gripping the windowsill, I rocked my weight backward then kicked up and out with both legs. I wanted to catch her in the chest, knock her back against the wall. One foot rose higher than the other; only that foot connected. The judder of impact, my foot against her midsection, traveled up my leg and to my hip. I knew I'd hit her
hard. But not hard enough to move her far. A half step, no more.

She bared her teeth, jaw clenched, hesitated.

I considered diving out the window. If I did it right, I might hurt a shoulder or an arm. I wasn't likely to hit my head, and there was an excellent chance I'd be able to get up and run away. But I'd have to be faster than Lee.

She spread her arms and came toward me again. Again I kicked out at her, one leg lower not making contact. The other leg grazed her front—she'd not gotten as close as she had before—and as gravity and lack of muscle brought it back down, Lee took hold of my ankle and yanked.

Ripped off balance, I fell. My fingers slipped from the sill and both my elbows smacked against it as I went down.

Lee didn't let go until my lower spine hit the ground with a stab of blinding pain.

I yelled, an incoherent shriek of pain.

She fell on top of my foot, her knee pinning my lower leg to the floor.

I did my best to sit up, reach for her, try to keep her from—

“Aaaah!” I screamed anew as the needle slipped effortlessly through the thin fabric of my dress slacks and sank into my flesh. Searing hot pain exploded in my calf, and I cried out again then proceeded right on to a continuous shout of expletives and tears.

She jumped off me, pushed the hair that had fallen from its bun out of her eyes.

“Not so clever now are your six horses,” she seemed to say.

My vision squeezed sideways . . . or the room did. I blinked. Slowly. Her face elongated, chin falling to mid-chest like a fun-house mirror. The fading of functional brain cells warned me what I was seeing wasn't real, but the terror began to rise within me all the same.

“Water is cat.” I thought she grumbled. And then she spun away from me, spinning and spinning and spinning.

A group of men appeared in the doorway. Hundreds of them. All wearing the same coat. Shouting. Pointing fingers. Shining lights and yelling,
Freeze! Freeze! Freeze!
The echo went on forever.

My head hit the floor. My eyes closed.

I was so tired . . .

I
always thought that when you wake up in a hospital, the first thing you're aware of are the bright lights overhead followed by the sound of a heart monitor comfortingly bleeping away at a steady pace. I have every confidence I got this idea from television.

In reality the first thing I was aware of was an increasing discomfort on the back of my hand. Wiggling my fingers only made it worse. And when I opened my eyes, all I saw, in order, was a honeycombed white blanket that I knew didn't belong to me, a white board on a yellow wall, and ceiling tiles that looked like they had coffee stains on them.

I lifted my head, lifted my hand, trying to see what the problem was. An IV. That indeed was a problem.

“There she is,” someone said. The voice. I knew the voice. Grandy.

“I'll get a nurse,” someone else whispered.

And then Grandy was standing beside me, one hand on a bed rail I had failed to notice, the other resting heavily on my shoulder. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“I think I feel like you look,” I said. Dark circles ringed his eyes, he had wrinkles I'd swear I'd never seen before, and he was visibly in need of a shave.

“Thank God you're all right.”

I wanted to touch him, to reassure him. I tried to lift my arm, the one that didn't have a needle stuck into it, but it was heavier than it should have been and . . . why couldn't I bend it?

“Careful,” Grandy said. “You've got a little fracture there.”

“
What?
” I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, and hoisted my arm into the air. A plaster cast reached from mid upper arm to mid forearm.

“Do you remember hitting your elbow at all?” he asked.

“Um.” I had to think, needed to piece back together the last memories I had.

When they came back in a rush, I decided the heck with the pain in my hand. I smacked the mattress repeatedly. “I want to sit up. Help me sit up. Does this head lift? Make . . .”

Grandy was already untangling the control box from the bed rail. A moment later the upper half of the bed began to rise and that made me happy right up until the
pain at the base of my spine asserted itself. I gasped, and Grandy dropped the control box.

“Why does that hurt?” I whimpered.

“You broke your ass,” Grandy said.

I chuckled. “I didn't know that was a thing.”

“The nurse will explain. There's a series of bones. Well. They'll tell you.”

“Grandy,” I said, lifting my head again. It was the only way I could really communicate urgency. “Rozelle. Is she okay? Did the police find—”

His smile was blissfully content. “She's fine. She's down the hall, sound asleep.”

“She's here in the hospital?”

“The doctors just want to keep an eye on her. She was a little dehydrated but otherwise fine.”

“The police found her? Where was she?”

“In Lee's house. In the basement,” he said. He went on to explain how Lee and Nicole had kept her there, arguing over whether they should let her go and turn themselves in or dose her with the same drug they'd given to David Rayburn. Atropine. Just like Lucky had suggested, and readily available in the veterinarian's medicine closet.

“But . . . ” I squinted, trying to put thoughts into words. “But why did they drug David in the first place?”

He shook his head. “If I understand it right, Lee wanted to put a permanent end to any opposition to the promenade. She had some notion she could get a job there, get herself out of debt, and put her daughter through college. She saw David Rayburn as getting in the way.”

When he put it that way, I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. “What about Rozelle though?

“You know how Rozelle is.” He smiled fondly. “She wanted to do something nice for Nicole because the poor kid was out of work, too. So Rozie baked her some cookies, and when she dropped them by the house, Nicole confessed everything her mother put her up to. Of course, Lee couldn't let Rozelle leave after that.”

I followed along, worry and relief for Rozelle chasing circles through my mind, until my thoughts wandered back to my own troubles. There was one thing—well, probably a lot more than that but one primary thing—I didn't remember at all. “The police found Rozelle,” I said. “But who found me? How . . . The last thing I remember was Lee talking gibberish.”

Grandy nodded. “That would be the anesthesia she'd managed to get into you, right before the police arrived to save the day.”

It hurt to furrow my brow. “But how did the police know?”

“Because,” Diana said, striding into the room with a nurse on her heels. “We were watching you. Did you honestly not notice? We've been following you for days.”

“You've been following me?”

“Not just me. We took turns. All of us. Nolan figured you'd stumble on to some important information sooner or later and you'd lead us to Rayburn's killer or Rozelle's kidnapper if we gave you enough space. So he gave the order and we followed.”

As she spoke, the nurse wheeled a portable blood
pressure machine into place then slapped a cuff on my somewhat free arm.

“And so they broke into the vet's office? They . . .” I had climbed in through the window. How did they get in?

Diana leaned over the bed, grin on her face. “The front door was open, you dummy. It seems Lee planned on making a quick getaway after she helped herself to a few syringes of sedatives. While she was stuffing her purse, you went and climbed in a window. And the door was open the whole time.”

I was remotely aware of painkillers dulling my nerve endings, and yet I had the instant sensation of feeling every muscle and bone in my body ache at the thought of clambering through that window. “And you're never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“Not a chance.”

“Pressure's good,” the nurse said. She released whatever control allowed the cuff to relax its grip on my arm and I felt a dull sense of blood returning to its normal flow. “How are you feeling?”

I told her I was feeling confused, beat up, and hungry.

“I'll see if we can get some food up for you. You've got a hairline fracture in your elbow and you've cracked your tailbone, so I'd avoid hard chairs for a while if I were you. The crazy woman you tangled with injected you with a pretty heavy anesthetic. It's going to take a couple of days for your system to really clear it, so you're spending the night with us here and the doctor will see you in the morning. Questions?”

I ran her request through my brain. Did I have any questions?

“You comfortable? Doctor left a scrip for a painkiller if you need one after your last wears off.”

“Question,” I said.

She raised her brows, expression welcoming my question.

“Is my cat okay?” I asked.

“Questions I can answer,” the nurse clarified.

“Friday's fine. I spoke with Dr. Bucherati. After she got past the shock of finding out her receptionist was an alleged killer, she said the surgery was uneventful and all you have to do is make sure the fur ball doesn't go hanging off any chandeliers for a while,” Diana said. She smirked at the nurse before looking back to me. “Your stepfather has her.”

Oh, good grief. “He's not my stepfather,” I said as the nurse murmured a “be right back” and headed out of the room.

“Your mother's husband.”

“Ben. Fine. He'll have to do. I'd hate to ask Carrie to have to take her.”

“Well, she couldn't anyway. She's down in the coffee shop waiting with your mom.”

Dread dragged through my belly. “Mom's going to try and get Carrie on her side to convince me to move out of Wenwood the minute I'm released.”

Grandy caught a curl of my hair between thumb and forefinger and tugged, the same as he had when I was young. “You stay as long as you like. Leave your mother to me.”

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I was in the
hospital; my friends and family were there with me. And I could stay with Grandy indefinitely. Maybe it was the anesthesia aftereffect, maybe it was the pain and discomfort, maybe I had some lack of sleep going, but I was on the verge of becoming a puddle of mush.

“Did you call Carrie?” Grandy asked.

Diana shook her head. “Not yet. I thought I'd give Tony a head start.”

“Tony?” I said. “He's . . . he's not here, is he?”

Diana gave me one of her oddly rare smiles. “That loser's been in the chapel for the past half hour. He swears he wasn't asleep but—”

“I wasn't asleep,” Tony said.

Because all at once he was there, in the room, pushing past Diana, taking my hand in his as he slipped past Grandy to stand next to the head of the bed. He leaned over the railing and pressed a long, fervent kiss against my forehead before pulling back and locking his gaze on mine. “You okay?” he asked softly.

Ignoring the discomfort of the IV hanging from my hand, I pressed my palm against his cheek. “You're here. You're staying. I'll be fine.”

Well, I could have done without the cast that was going to limit my stained glass work for the next several weeks, and heaven knew the broken tailbones were going to pose a problem with Grandy's antique and hard-as-stone furnishing, but Rozelle was safe, Friday was okay, I would heal, and most of all, best of all, I may have been a lot of things, but alone wasn't one of
them.