Girl Three (16 page)

Michael shook his head. “I can’t see your eyes. And it’s freezing out here. Can I come in, at least into the foyer, and we can close the door?”

She bit her bottom lip and narrowed her eyes, then backed away from the gate. “All right.”

Michael stepped inside the foyer and closed the door. Jessie backed toward Sam’s condo looking cornered and suspicious.

“I saw Senator Talmont leave.” Michael pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his coat pockets.

“And what are you doing here?”

“I’m working on something that involves him. Now it looks like it might involve you, too.”

She considered this, then slipped her hands out of her pockets and crossed her arms. Satiny fabric pressed against her breasts.

Michael risked a glance. “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

She almost smiled. “You think I would have let you in here without some kind of protection?”

“You know how to shoot?”

“Aim and pull the trigger.”

Michael gave her a pained look. “Comforting.”

“So what are you working on that involves Talmont?”

“Did he hurt you?”

She looked away. Michael wondered if she was thinking of Talmont’s claim that Croft had called her insensitive and heartless.

“I ask,” he said, “because I’m suspicious about Sam’s death and Talmont’s potential involvement.”

Jessie narrowed her eyes, but he saw something in them that looked like hope. “Meaning?”

“I think there was foul play and a tidy cover-up—and I have a feeling that you do, too.”

Her face went white. “How would you know that?”

“In my line of work I see a lot of things that other people might not notice. And I have a network of resources.”

Jessie suddenly seemed to become self-conscious. She tugged her robe tightly around her and tied the sash. The gun hung heavily in her pocket. “Who are you working for? The guy who’s opposing Talmont in the next election?”

If you only knew.

Michael clenched his teeth, forcing himself to think before he spoke. He needed her to trust him, so, ironically, telling her the truth was not an option. “I want to find out what happened to Sam,” he said, “and here’s what I know. I know about her extortion scheme and the senators. That’s plenty of motive for each of them. But the alibis of Senators Olney and Ketter check out. Olney was in Texas for a photo op with an oil rig. Ketter was at Georgetown Medical Center passing a kidney stone.”

“Talmont was with his wife.”

“You asked him?” Michael had to ask, even though he already knew the answer.

Jessie nodded. “Do you know about his affair with Sam?”

“Way more than I want to know.”

She lowered her eyebrows and her gaze fixed on him as if she’d locked on a target. He felt more scrutinized than he had when he’d been vetted for the Secret Service. Sweat prickled beneath the layers of his T-shirt, fleece, and coat.

“There’s one thing I need to know,” she said finally.

Michael feared she was going to ask him again whom he was working for. “Just one?” He smiled.

Her mouth turned up at the corners and her eyes brightened, but she looked no less determined. She stayed silent as her expression became serious again.

“Did you have a…relationship with Sam?” she asked, with heart-wrenching vulnerability in her eyes.

Michael stepped toward her, deliberately but cautiously, and she held his gaze. “No.” He slowly raised his hand to her face, smoothed his fingers down her flawless cheek, then swept them beneath her chin. “I was never involved with Sam. I’m much more intrigued by her sister.”

Jessie’s lips parted slightly.

Michael channeled all the discipline he’d ever practiced to keep himself from kissing her.

“I’ve got two things on my mind right now,” he said. “Justice, and you. And not necessarily in that order.”

Before he pushed things too far, Michael turned away from her and left.

Chapter Twenty-One

Jessie’s hands trembled as she closed the wrought-iron gate and watched Michael walk away. When he had gone far enough that she could no longer see him, she turned the lock on the foyer door, went back into Sam’s condo, and flipped another lock. The exercise was futile if any more strangers had keys, but it made her feel safer right now. As an extra precaution, she took one of the chairs from the kitchen and wedged it beneath the knob of the condo’s door.

She climbed the stairs, and the gun in her pocket grazed her thigh. The idea that she—a candidate for a Presidential Commission—had held a senator at gunpoint was almost too ridiculous to comprehend. Her life had become surreal. She sat on the bed, wrung out from adrenaline and emotional extremes. A thundering headache was settling in at her temples.

Jessie thought about Michael—the intensity of being with him, their undeniable chemistry, and what he had said. She was relieved to know that someone else was suspicious about Sam’s murder. Someone like Michael with a network of resources, as he had said. She wasn’t alone.

Feeling calmer, she took the gun from her pocket and slipped it beneath her pillow, then looked in her purse for an Advil but found none. She checked the cabinets in the bathroom and came up empty.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She might have a migraine coming on. It had been over a year since she’d had one, so she’d stopped carrying the prescription pills she took to prevent them. Maybe the stress had triggered one.

Her head throbbed as she bowed it over the sink and splashed cold water on her face. She thought about going to a twenty-four-hour drugstore for whatever she could get over the counter. Blotting her face on the hand towel, she caught her reflection in the mirror, and that only made her feel worse. Doubly so, because Sam had two mirrors—one in a large black frame that hung above the vanity, and a smaller, frameless one on the adjacent wall.

As Jessie looked away, the edges of the smaller mirror caught her eye. Almost flush with the wall, it hung like a door, not a picture. She tugged at its bottom edge, but nothing moved. With a harder pull, the mirror swung away from the wall, revealing a metal medicine cabinet with glass shelves. She scanned the prescription and over-the-counter drugs on the shelves, her gaze settling on a bottle of Excedrin.

“Yes.”

She shook two caplets from the bottle with a clatter, popped them in her mouth, and washed them down with water.

The next morning, Jessie slept later than she’d wanted to. She had to hurry to get ready to go to the Rite Aid Pharmacy several blocks up on Constitution Avenue because she was anxious to get there right when it opened. After quickly pulling her hair up, she put on her cloche hat, her scarf, and her coat, and dashed outside into the single-digit cold.

She’d hoped to beat the Saturday morning crowd in the pharmacy, but when she got there, people were already waiting. They coughed, blew their noses, and blotted their eyes. At the end of the line, a young mother held a pink-cheeked, sleeping toddler. Jessie got in line behind them.

The line moved slowly. Fifteen minutes later, the young mother in front of Jessie stepped away from the counter.

“Help you?” the petite clerk asked Jessie. Her Rite Aid smock hung off her shoulders.

“I need a copy of my prescription drug records covering the last two years,” Jessie said.

“You have a photo ID and an insurance card?”

Jessie opened her wallet and handed the woman what she’d asked for.

The clerk glanced at the bandages crisscrossing Jessie’s palm. She checked the insurance card and the driver’s license, squinting at the picture, then looking at Jessie.

“Thank you, Ms. Croft,” she said.

“Could you move it along up there?” called a man from the back of the line.

The clerk shook her head. “I’ll have to ask the manager if we can do this. It usually only takes a few minutes, but we’re already backed up this morning.” She stepped away from the counter and went behind a glass partition to talk to a man with thinning gray hair. As unlikely as it was, Jessie hoped the manager wouldn’t recognize her. That made things uncomfortable at the best of times.

The clerk pointed at Jessie, then showed the manager the license and insurance card. He put on his reading glasses and had a closer look.

Jessie swallowed hard and kept her gaze trained downward.

Accompanied by the clerk, the manager came to the counter and said to Jessie, “We’ve got a full workload trying to fill prescriptions.” He gestured toward the line of people. “But if you’ll wait a few minutes, I’ll run your report for you.” He glanced at the license, his eyes narrowing. “Ms. Croft.”

Jessie gave him a half smile. “Thank you.”

She stepped away from the counter to wait, hoping the manager wouldn’t figure out that he was running a report for a dead girl.

Jessie sat at a table in Starbucks with Sam’s prescription drug records spread on the table in front of her. After she’d opened the medicine cabinet last night, several prescription bottles had caught her attention. Whoever had cleared out Sam’s condo might not have realized that the mirror hid a medicine cabinet—just as she hadn’t—and had left the prescriptions behind.

The first bottle Jessie had picked up rattled with fexofenadine tablets. Allergy medication, filled two weeks ago. The second, dispensed the same day, was a pack of birth control pills with nine missing from the twenty-eight-day dosing cycle. She’d taken the last bottle from the top shelf and flattened its peeling label. Doxycycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

Her curiosity had been piqued when she noticed that the date on the prescription matched the date on one of the pictures she’d received—the last photo of Sam leaving Ian’s practice.

Jessie had focused on the label.
Prescribing physician: Ian Alden, MD.

Ian could have prescribed Sam the antibiotic for a variety of conditions. But the coinciding dates of the prescription and the picture had made Jessie wonder why Sam had needed the drug and why Ian had been the one who prescribed it, instead of the doctor who’d prescribed the other medicines.

As Jessie had suspected, she’d found no health insurance claims or medication records in Sam’s files, so she planned to ask Ian about Sam’s prescription and the pictures of her at his office. She wondered if she’d get a straight answer from him.

Fortunately, Jessie had found Sam’s ID and her insurance card, and those had allowed her to get the report she now studied as she drank her tea. She needed more than a theory before she could risk confronting Ian. Now she had the facts.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Michael hadn’t slept after he’d left Jessie and couldn’t have if he’d tried. He had gone over their conversation, questioning whether she’d believed what he said, and whether he’d gained any of her trust. Even before he’d gotten the signal that the door to Sam’s condo had been opened, he’d been fighting insomnia.

He wanted to stay ahead of Jessie, to find out who was sending her pictures and driving her actions. But his 24/7 surveillance of her made it difficult to chase down clues. The only free time he had was when she slept, which was when he tried to rest. But his dreams reeled with scenarios of Sam’s murder, the identity of the killer ever-changing. Then Sam morphed into Jessie. She struggled against a faceless invader as Michael watched from the sidelines, powerless.

He felt the same way every time he saw her—unable to guide her, yet responsible for her safety. As she built her roster of murder suspects, the pressure to protect her multiplied. And the closer she came to revealing the killer, the more desperate that person would become. Desperate enough to murder again to keep Jessie quiet, just as Nina had said.

Damn Croft. If it weren’t for his contract, Michael could be totally honest with Jessie. They’d find Sam’s killer together. But Croft had crafted a contract that prevented it. Michael wondered if it was by coincidence or design that the judge wanted to keep him and Jessie apart. Croft had caged Michael with his contract, but Michael was rattling the bars.

Driven by more than the job, he’d been repulsed when he heard Talmont come on to Jessie. The idea of the sleazy senator alone with her—seeing her sexy and vulnerable, as Michael had later—tied him in a furious knot. He’d been disgusted over Talmont’s relationship with Sam, but never as defensive and protective of Sam as he had become with Jessie.

Already.

And when he’d been in the foyer with her last night, he’d sensed that she wanted him to kiss her. That idea alone made it impossible for him to emotionally distance himself from her.

He should’ve learned his lesson with his assignment to Sam, cut his losses, and given his father’s death the grief it demanded. But now there was Jessie, and she’d started to complicate things. Sam had asked for all the trouble that came her way, but Jessie had been trying to do the right thing.

Until today.

Michael had lagged behind her after she left Rite Aid. He’d been freezing, but was thankful it was winter and easier to hide beneath a hooded coat. Now that Jessie could recognize him, he had to be extra cautious.

She’d crossed Connecticut Avenue and gone into Starbucks with Sam’s drug records in her purse. He had figured out Jessie’s ruse when he’d heard the pharmacy clerk call her by Sam’s name when she’d given Jessie the report. Now Michael couldn’t shake the feeling that he might have misjudged Jessie. He hadn’t expected her to brazenly break the law, even to find Sam’s killer. Maybe she
was
like Sam, and a little like her father. Maybe deceit pulsed through the Croft bloodline.

But he hadn’t seen it in Jessie’s eyes. Maybe he wasn’t the most objective judge, but he hadn’t lost all of his critical instincts.

She had to know she would never get appointed to a Presidential Commission with a rap sheet. He considered the risk she’d taken with her future, and how much it must mean to her to avenge Sam’s death. He had to give her credit for that.

Michael had followed Jessie’s path, avoiding icy patches on the sidewalk, and crossed Connecticut Avenue. Her voice had come through his Bluetooth clearly as she ordered a venti lowfat chai something. Black coffee suited him, so he’d never learned the lingo. He watched from outside as she sat at a table next to the window and focused on Sam’s report. She had to believe she was on to something with Sam’s prescription history, or she wouldn’t have taken such a chance to get it.