COLLATERAL CASUALTIES (The Kate Huntington mystery series) (21 page)

            Kate shot her an odd look.

            “Just because you’re paranoid, and all that jazz,” Rose said.

            Kate smiled. “Let me get my briefcase and we can get out of here.”

            In the parking lot, Rose went over Kate’s Prius with the debugger. When Kate started to get in the driver’s side, Rose put out a hand to stop her. “Better let me drive, just in case.”

            “In case of what?” Kate asked.

            Rose handed her own car keys to Manny. “Follow us in my car. Watch for tails.” She turned back to Kate. “In case fancy driving is needed.”

            She soon discovered these were wise precautions.

            A block from Kate’s office, Rose glanced in the rearview mirror. A dark sedan had cut between her and Manny. “Hang on.” She sped up, then turned right at the next corner, then right again. The dark sedan also sped up and made the same turns. It was following so closely now that it hit the rear of Kate’s car when Rose slowed to avoid a truck at the next intersection.

            Rose ignored the screech of metal and the stop sign. She jabbed the button to lower her window as she whipped around the corner. “Get down!” Swinging the car to the curb, she jammed on the brakes and reached down to her ankle holster.

            The dark sedan rounded the corner only seconds after them. Rose shot out its far front tire. The sedan veered into the path of an oncoming taxi. The driver’s efforts to avoid the cab threw the car into a spin. It slammed into a postal service mailbox across the street.

            The driver’s door of the sedan flew open. A black-sleeved arm slashed at the air bag that had deployed. Rose jammed her gun into her pocket, but kept her hand on it. She ran across the street, dodging between the cars that had stopped at odd angles.

            The man attached to the arm had fought his way out of the car. He glanced back, then took off between two buildings.

            A siren could be heard several blocks away. Rose weighed her options. The sedan might not have been traveling alone. She returned her gun to her ankle holster and loped back to Kate.

            Rose stuck her head in the open window. Kate had managed to fold herself into the foot well on the passenger’s side.

            “Are you okay?”

            “Yeah. Can I get up now?”

            Rose looked around before answering. Manny had pulled to the curb behind them. He jumped out. His gun disappeared as a police cruiser–lights flashing and siren fading with a sickly squeal–stopped beside the dark sedan across the street.

            “Yeah.” Rose’s brain was churning through ramifications and options. She motioned Manny over. “Kate, give me your driver’s license. Then go with Manny to the new safe house. I gotta do some damage control here.” Once again she crossed the street.

            A uniformed officer had stepped out of the police car and was examining the wreckage. He didn’t notice when Kate slipped out of the passenger door of her banged-up Prius. She and Manny edged their way through a gathering crowd of onlookers to Rose’s car.

            “Guy was going too fast,” Rose told the officer, while memorizing the license number of the sedan. “Hit me when I stopped at the corner and shoved me into the intersection. Then he tried to swerve around me and lost control of his car.” She was hoping that none of the gawking crowd had seen her gun, or had made the connection between the loud bang and the sedan spinning out of control.

            The top of the license plate was muddy, while the rest of the car was polished to a high shine. Stepping closer, she brushed away the dried mud.

            “Diplomats’ kids.” The cop was unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. “Come over here from D.C. Think they can joyride around town and nobody can touch ’em ’cause of diplomatic immunity.”

            “Yeah, well, I think Daddy may do more than touch him when he comes home on foot, without his shiny new car,” Rose said, a fake smirk in her voice. “Love to be a fly on the wall at that embassy tonight.”

            The cop nodded.

            Rose handed over Kate’s license. He barely glanced at the picture, as he wrote the license number, name and address on his pad. She gave him Kate’s home phone number.

            “Is your car driveable?” the officer asked.

            “Yeah,” Rose said. She’d take a cab if it wasn’t. She didn’t want to deal with a tow truck.

            The cop handed back the license along with a slip of paper with the police report number on it. “You’ll need that for the insurance company.”

            “Thanks, officer.”

            Jogging back across the street, Rose slid behind the wheel of Kate’s car, hit the lock button, raised the window and then let out her breath.

            As she started to pull away from the curb, a throwaway phone rang in her pocket.

            “My charge is on her way to the hospital,” Lilly said when Rose answered.

                                            CHAPTER FIFTEEN

            “What the hell happened?”

            “Looks like a suicide attempt,” Lilly said. “Cops are on the way.”

            “You still at the apartment?” Rose asked.

            “Yeah. The other guard’s following the ambulance. She’s being taken to St. Joseph’s.”

            “Catch the cops at the elevator. Stall ’em. Act hysterical, whatever it takes. I need to see that set-up before they move anything.”

            On a busy Friday night, investigating a possible suicide when the person was already on their way to the hospital was low on the Baltimore County police department’s priority list. Rose got to Janice’s building well before the cops, sparing Lilly the indignity of pretending to be an hysterical woman, a role for which she was ill-suited.

            As they loped down the hall to the apartment, Lilly told Rose that she’d knocked on Janice’s door to ask to use the bathroom. When there was no answer to her repeated pounding, she’d kicked in the door and found Janice lying in the living room, a wine glass next to her.

            Rose zeroed in on the note. It was on the living room floor, one edge under the air mattress she had slept on the previous night.

            “It was almost completely under there,” Lilly said, “until an EMT kicked the mattress out of the way to get the gurney past.”

            Rose stooped to examine the note without touching it.

           
Typed, no signature.
“‘Please forgive me, friends and family,” she read aloud, “but without Richard, life is not worth living.’”

            She spun around and headed for the wine on the counter.

            Lilly informed her that Janice had the bottle with her when she came home. Rose sniffed the top without touching it, then pulled out her handkerchief and used it to pick up the circle of foil that had been removed from the top. She held it up by its edge. The light from the kitchen shone through a small hole in the middle of it.

           
Syringe through the cork.

She carefully replaced the foil on the counter. “I need something to put some of this wine in.”

            “I have evidence bags,” Lilly said. “Well, they’re just baggies I carry just in case.”

            They heard the elevator ding down the hall.

            “Have to do.” Using the handkerchief, Rose grasped the bottle toward the bottom, where she was less likely to smear fingerprints. She tilted a small amount of liquid into the baggie Lilly held open.

            She’d just barely got the bottle back on the counter when two uniforms came through the open doorway of the apartment. Lilly held the baggie behind her back as she sealed it.

            Lilly succinctly told the officers how she’d found the apartment’s tenant on the floor, leaving out that she was guarding the woman. One of the cops wrote down what she said in his notepad.

            “It’s not a suicide attempt,” Rose said.

            “Your name, ma’am?” the older of the two officers asked.

            “Rose Hernandez. We’re both friends of Ms. Browning. I used to be with BCPD. Now I’m private. You need to treat this scene as a possible homicide attempt.”

            The officer looked skeptical.

            “Note’s totally out of character. It implies he left her. Other way around. I was there the night she got her stuff out of their condo. She was relieved to be rid of him.”

            “Where’s her stuff?” the officer asked.

            “Still in storage. She just got this place.”

            “And what did she use to try to kill herself? No weapons,” Lilly said. “Had to be something in the wine. Something pretty potent since she hadn’t even finished the bottle.”

            “If she put something in the wine, where is it?” Rose asked.

            The other officer had zeroed in on Janice’s purse at the far end of the breakfast bar. Using a pen, he maneuvered it so that the contents spilled out on the counter. “Got a prescription for Xanax here,” he called over to his partner.

            Lilly used the distraction to slip the baggie of wine into her jacket pocket. Rose caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and prayed the bag wouldn’t leak.

            “Is the pill bottle empty?” she asked, craning to get a look at it without being too obvious.

            “No, ’bout half full,” the cop said.

            “Probably not enough to make her pass out after just a few glasses of wine. And why did she bother to put the pill bottle back in her purse?” Rose said.

            The senior partner shrugged. “Logic don’t always apply when it comes to why folks do things.” Left unsaid was
especially when they’re depressed
.

            Rose decided it was time to take advantage of the cops’ resistance. “Look, we’ve got to get to the hospital and make sure our friend’s okay.” She scribbled a throwaway cell number on one of her business cards and handed it to the senior partner. “That’s where you can reach us. If you don’t want to believe us, fine, but to be on the safe side, you should send the note and wine to the lab.” She gestured for Lilly to follow her as she headed for the door.

            When the elevator doors had closed, Rose said, “So two mysteries. Where did she get the wine, and how did the suicide note get in there?”

            Suddenly Lilly stiffened beside her. Staring straight ahead at the elevator door, she said, “I’d like to tender my resignation, Ms. Hernandez.”

            “Say what?”

            “I screwed up. A bed was delivered this afternoon. I went into the bedroom to watch while they set it up, in case they were bogus deliverymen there to plant a bug or something. The door was locked, but I didn’t flip the deadbolt. Someone could have popped the lock with a credit card and slipped in with the note.”

           
She bought a bed?!?
Rose suppressed the urge to curse a blue streak. Her employee would assume it was aimed at her rather than Janice.

            “Honest mistake. And the guys we’re dealing with are extremely well-trained.”

            Rose caught Lilly’s sideways glance of confusion. She hadn’t told the young woman any details, had just instructed her to guard Janice and to be highly suspicious of Hispanics. Lilly had no doubt found that politically-incorrect instruction especially strange coming from her Hispanic boss.

            Lilly shook her head. “I should’ve–”

            Rose cut her off. “I got no problem with the way you handled yourself here. Let’s get over to the hospital. Mind if we take your truck?”

~~~~~~~

            Kate and Manny arrived at the new safe house a few minutes after Skip and Rob. It was the fishing shack of one of Mac’s buddies, nestled amongst some trees on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore.

            It was not quite as bad inside as its ramshackle outward appearance implied. The main room was quite dusty and contained only a card table, four folding chairs and an old-fashioned porcelain sink. A bare lightbulb hung from a cord over the table.

            Kate wrinkled her nose at the musty smell. “I guess it’s not safe to open the window or leave the door open?”

            Rob was in the process of wiping the worst of the crud off the table and chairs. He looked skeptically at the only window in the room, that was almost completely obscured by cobwebs. “I seriously doubt you could get that open.”

            Kate held up the bags in her hands. “We went through the drive-thru at the KFC in Chestertown.” She unloaded the feast of grease and chicken, with mashed potatoes, biscuits, and cole slaw on the side.

            Manny took some of the food outside to the other guards.

            They had no plates so they passed the side dish containers around, eating out of them with the plastic sporks provided by the restaurant.

            Skip’s jaw tightened as Kate told them about the dark sedan that had followed them and hit her car. Then he and Rob filled her in on their encounter with the ambassador that afternoon.

            They were just finishing their meal when they heard a ringing phone. It took a moment to figure out which of the throwaways in their various pockets it was.

            Skip answered it. “It’s Rose.” He put the phone on speaker and placed it in the middle of the table.

            “Kate tell you about the car?”

            “Yeah. Did you get a look at the driver?” Skip asked.

            “A quick one. I did some research this afternoon on Delgado. Sounds like a nasty dude. I found one picture of him. He was a lot younger in the picture, but there is a definite resemblance to the guy who rear-ended us.”

            Kate didn’t like hearing that they were being chased by a ‘nasty dude.’ But at least now their enemy had a face and a name.

            “Also talked to Mac,” Rose said. “He thinks this guy may be here to assassinate the Colombian president, then blame it on Garcia, i.e., the rebels.”