Takeover (15 page)

I pull back into one of the legal driving lanes and go for the brake to prepare for the ninety-degree turn I have to make in less than half a block. The brakes. Oh my god, the brakes aren’t working. I see the turn, and I’m not going to be able to make it. The road goes on straight, but I’m coming to a red light.

I force my foot down as hard as I can, slowing the car a little bit, but not nearly enough for the turn. I instinctively try to jerk the wheel anyway, but it’s not moving. What the hell is happening?

I pump the brakes, just trying to keep the wheel straight now as I approach the intersection, my horn blaring, but it’s no use. Nobody’s going to hear me or see me in time. I close my eyes as my car goes into the intersection, trying to force my body to relax so I’m less likely to be seriously injured, but I don’t think that plan is going to work. I hear the horns around me and then nothing.

Well, it’s not that I hear nothing. I mean, I can still hear the sound of my engine and the tires on the road, but I was expecting a loud crash or some squealing tires, but nothing happened. I didn’t get hit. I don’t know how, but I’m alive. My celebration is short-lived though, because I’m now heading for the rear end of a pickup truck at thirty-something miles per hour. He’s stopped at a red light, and I can’t stop or steer. There’s nothing I can do but close my eyes again and pray.

Late to Work

––––––––

T
he good news is: I’m alive. The bad news is: my car is totaled, the guy who was sitting in the truck in front of me keeps clutching his neck and I’m pretty sure that he’s on the phone with his lawyer right now. To top things off, I’m in a stretcher. I don’t think I’m hurt, but the paramedics keep assuring me that sometimes the pain and soreness of a serious injury can be delayed.

I’m definitely sore and certainly in pain, but I don’t think a trip to the emergency room is going to do anything for me but drive up the cost of my insurance. I try to explain what happened to a police officer, but he seems more interested in whether or not I was drinking or on some kind of psychotropic substance.

I try to tell the officer that I’ve never driven drunk in my life, but he’s going to wait for the blood tests to come back. Until then, I guess, I’m going to be handcuffed to this gurney.

My neck is in a brace, so I can’t turn my head, but I can see the wreckage out of the corner of my eye. Who would have thought that a thirty-mile-per-hour crash would do so much damage?

I’m hoisted into the back of the ambulance, and I can hear the man from the truck complaining that, as the victim, he should have first dibs on the ambulance. If I could, I’d be shaking my head at the man’s stupidity. What can I say? With a few exceptions, the last week hasn’t done much to maintain my usual, cheery disposition.

The drive to the hospital is a little awkward. Apparently, even the paramedics are assuming that I’m on something, so they’re not very considerate. When I’m unloaded at the hospital, I’m finally able to convince the officer at my side to call James and let him know what happened. I try to get the man to let me do the talking, but that’s not going to happen.

The first thing they do, after uncuffing me from one gurney, moving me to a hospital bed and cuffing me to that, is take some blood. I try to tell them that I’m terrified of needles, but apparently word travels fast about a suspected DUI related crash and they’re going to make me as miserable as they possibly can while I’m here.

The next hour or so is filled with awkward silences, x-rays and either a CT scan or an MRI; I can never tell the difference. James finally arrives, but he’s not much help. He’s far too worried to be a comfort. On the bright side, at least he called Jillian before he left. When she comes into the room, the whole mood changes: the doctors and nurses know who she is, so they’re on their best behavior. She quickly relegates James’s bubbling nonsense to the far corner of the room and she takes a seat by my bed.

“How are you feeling?”

“Been better,” I say.

She pulls out her notepad and a pen and looks back at me. Apparently, she’s expecting more.

“I’m sore,” I start, “I’m in pain, and this was not my fault. I didn’t have anything to drink, and I don’t do drugs. The car just went—I don’t know. I couldn’t steer, and the brakes went out.”

“They went out?” she asks, making a note in her pocket tome.

“Well, not exactly. There was still a little bit of grip, but it wasn’t enough to stop the car.”

“I see,” she says, tapping the point of the pin against her lip. “Do you think that your vehicle was tampered with?”

“No,” I say. “That’s insane, who would want to kill me?”

“Who says they wanted to kill you?” she asks. “It sounds like you had just enough control to prevent a worse accident, but not enough to avoid one altogether. Can you think of anyone who might want to harm you?”

“Why isn’t the officer asking me these questions?” I ask.

“Because he thinks you’re a drunken addict who was driving about twenty-miles-per-hour too slow to get what you deserved. Have you received any threats? Has anyone intimated that you might be on their bad side? Anything?”

“No,” I start. “Wait. Last night I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize.”

“A text?”

“Yeah,” I say, trying to sit up but being held back by a few different restraints. “It said, ‘Back off.’”

“Back off,” Jillian repeats, writing the words down on her pad. “Where is your phone now?”

I chuckle as much as I can given the fact that I’ve managed to seriously piss off my body. “Somewhere in what used to be my car, I guess.”

“Do you remember seeing anyone strange near your car over the last couple of days?”

“No,” I say, “well, I didn’t see anybody. Last night, I thought I heard a car door open and shut, so I got up to check it out. I heard the noise again, but by the time I looked outside, nobody was around. I don’t even know if it was my car that I was—”

“I think it’s pretty safe to assume that it was,” she says. “Now, here’s what I’m thinking. You just got released from jail having been falsely accused of killing your boss. I think that someone wanted to keep an eye on you after you got out, and whatever it was that you did during that time, you pissed them off. They tamper with your brakes, possibly your steering and you end up in here, too scared to share what you know.”

“What I know?” I ask. “The only thing that I know is that some crazy woman in my office made up a story about me killing Mr. McDaniel.”

“Do you think it could have been her, trying to finish what the court wasn’t willing to?”

“I really don’t—”

“Ow!” the tip of Jillian’s pen goes into her bottom lip.

“Oh my god,” I say, stupidly trying again to sit up.

“What?”

“Could it have been a pen?”

“Could what have been a pen?”

“The murder weapon,” I say. “What they killed McDaniel with.”

“I don’t know,” she says, leafing back through her earlier notes. “I guess it could have been. The vein was pretty torn up, so they weren’t able to deduce what the tip of the weapon would have looked like, only the entry wound, perfectly circular, not very thick, but more than enough to get the man to bleed out in a matter of minutes.”

I slap my knee hard. “That’s it. It was the pen! That’s why he looked at me so strangely yesterday when I showed it to him.”

“Who?” Jillian asks.

“Mr. Waite,” I say. “He saw me with the pen, he saw me with Melissa. He even saw me leaving with her last night!”

“That’s a great theory,” she says, “but I already took a look at him. I mean, as far as motive goes, the man who takes over for the recently murdered CEO would have a lot to gain, but he has an alibi.”

“Where was he?” I ask, completely incapable of accepting the fact that I could be wrong.

“He was at a fundraiser,” Jillian answers. He was there from about an hour before the killing to just after it happened, when the news hit that McDaniel was dead.”

“That has to be some kind of mistake,” I say dismissively. “It had to have been him.” I want to believe that I’m wrong, but right now I don’t see how that’s very possible.

“Well,” Jillian says, “it’s going to be your speculation versus about fifty blue bloods who say that he never left other than to go to the bathroom.”

“The bathroom,” I say, trying to figure out a way he could have worked it out. “I don’t suppose he was in the bathroom long enough to drive over to Opulence, sneak into the office, kill Mr. McDaniel and get back before anyone noticed, was he?”

“No,” Jillian chuckles. “I think someone would have mentioned that.”

“Yeah,” I say. It wasn’t him. But who else had the motive?

“What about that Stokes woman?” Jillian asks. “Melissa.”

“I don’t think she could have killed him,” I say. “Someone would have seen her going to his office.”

“I mean in regard to your vehicle’s mechanical issues,” Jillian says slowly enough to be condescending, but quickly enough to give me just enough doubt that that’s what she’s trying to be.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “When I left her house last night, she was pretty out of it.”

“Out of it how?”

I sigh. We’re not getting anywhere. Unless we can get a trace on that text or someone finds fingerprints that could only indicate foul play with my car, I don’t see how any of this is going to make the slightest bit of difference.

“Where was he?” I ask. “Mr. Waite. I know he was at a fundraiser, but do you know which one it was?”

“Let’s see,” she says, going back through her notepad. She finally sets it back in her purse and pulls out another.

“How many of those do you have?” I ask, chuckling.

“I average about three per client,” she says. “Right here,” she points to the paper, “it was Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”

“Now
that
can’t be a coincidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lou Gehrig’s Disease is ALS. One of the partners gave me a pen that he was given from an ALS fundraiser a few years ago. Mr. Waite had one too, but said that it broke. I wonder if that shard could be—”

“Don’t tell me you’re back on Waite,” Jillian interrupts. “I told you, guy’s got an alibi. I don’t think it gets much more airtight than a posh fundraiser. Those rich wastes have time for three things—money, screwing others to get more money and gossip. They’re an observant bunch, even if they are sociopaths.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

She smiles. “Try being a high-priced defense attorney sometime. You wouldn’t believe what those people get away with.”

“That’s perfect then,” I say. “All we have to do is find someone who Mr. Waite could have given his pen to. He must have asked for it back, that’s the only thing that would explain how a piece of the pen got into his hand if he wasn’t the one to do the stabbing.”

Jillian rolls her eyes. “Listen Rose,” she says as kindly as she can, “I know that you’re trying to make sense of all of this. We all are, but you’re talking about the one man that we know it wasn’t.”

“It was him,” I say. “He just didn’t have the guts to do it himself.” Most of me still wants to believe in the man who worked a miracle the other day, but I don’t know that I can.

“Do you have any information that might lead to that end?” Jillian asks impatiently.

“The way he was acting, the fucking splinter in his hand—he had something to do with it, I know it, Jill.”

“Don’t call me Jill.”

“Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Mr. Fyurek gave me a pen from the exact type of fundraiser that Mr. Waite was at while Mr. McDaniel was being killed, probably with that very kind of pen?”

Jillian sighs. “Yes,” she says, “I do. Unless you think Mr. Fyurek had something to do with it—”

“No,” I interrupt, “he still had his pen. He gave it to me. The thing was in perfect condition. It’s in my purse in the car somewhere, you’ll see.”

“What would that have to do with anything?” Jillian asks. “I get that your old boss could have been stabbed with a pen, but everything else—hell, even that is speculation. What we need to focus on right now, Rose—and I know you’re not going to like hearing this—is who could have screwed with your car.”

“It had to be him,” I say. “Melissa is the only one who ever claimed to know anything about it. She got all quiet and weird when he walked up. I thought it was just because he’s the CEO, but maybe it’s because she actually knows what he did. She was just too scared to come forward about it.”

“He wasn’t there,” Jillian repeats, slowly kneading the words into my brain.

“She knows something,” I say. “I have to get out of here. James!”

“Yeah?” my weak-stomached fiancé answers from the corner of the room.

“Call Melissa,” I say. “If I’m right, she knows something. She might actually talk to me. We had a good chat last night. I think I really made a difference.”

“Okay?” he says, obviously unsure exactly what it is that I want him to do as if I was somehow unclear.

Jillian puts her hands up. “Listen,” she says, “I know a guy on the police force. They’ve got your car in impound and they’re going to go through it looking for drugs. Let me give him a call and see if your vehicle was tampered with in any way,
then
we can come back to your ‘theory.’” She actually bothers making finger-quotes.

“Fine,” I say. “I’m feeling better now, when do you think you can get me out of here?”

Jillian sighs. “My guess is sometime after we find evidence that your vehicle was sabotaged,” she says. “Until then, I don’t know when they’re going to let you out of the hospital, but I’m guessing the DA is going to love having you back behind bars. I’ll make that call now, but I wouldn’t expect to hear anything today.”

“I have to get out of here,” I say, trying to sit up for the third time, only to be jerked backward again.

“You want my advice?” Jillian asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Tell the doctors whatever you have to so you can stay here. It may not be ideal, but this room is better than a jail cell, don’t you think? I don’t know if they’ll still try to take you in when your tests come back negative for drugs and alcohol but the longer you’re here, the longer you’re not there, do you understand me?”