The Alibi Man (24 page)

chapter
41

         
I HATE
hospitals. I especially hate emergency rooms. No one working there ever believes what is wrong with you is an emergency. They never believe your story of how you came to be there. They never believe you might actually be dying, unless you have an obvious gunshot wound, arterial bleeding, or exposed brain matter.

I’d had two out of three when I was rushed in by ambulance the day meth dealer Billy Golam’s 4×4 dragged me down the pavement. It was the only time in my life I had gone to an ER and hadn’t been stuck in a room and abandoned for hours on end, only to later be treated like an annoying hypochondriac.

Lisbeth had none of the Big Three. They stuck her in what seemed to be a utility closet with a bed wedged into it along with a lot of surplus equipment. She sat in a little ball, still wrapped in her bathrobe. I paced, chewing at a ragged thumbnail.

“Why don’t you lie down, Lisbeth?” I suggested. “Try to rest a little. When the detective gets here, he’ll want to ask you a lot of questions. You’ll need to answer them.”

I had managed to get her to tell me at least part of the story as we waited. Someone—she didn’t know who—had put a bag over her head, choked her, hauled her out into the wilderness, and held her head under swamp water until she nearly drowned.

I was willing to bet that didn’t happen to people back in Buttcrack, Michigan. The kid was as traumatized as anyone I’d ever seen.

A girl in scrubs stepped into the room, looked at me like I was a bad piece of cheese, went to Lisbeth, and took her pulse without so much as saying hello.

“Excuse me. Who are you?” I asked.

She gave me a dirty look.

“A nurse? A doctor?” I said. “A twelve-year-old playing dress-up?”

“I’m Dr. Westral,” she snapped.

“Of course. I should have known that through mental telepathy. I’m off my game. Are you a real doctor,” I asked, “or are you still saving your Lucky Charms box tops until you’re old enough to cross the street to the mailbox all by yourself?”

“I’m a first-year resident,” she said, as if that elevated her above the great unwashed like myself.

“So the answer is B: not a real doctor.”

She tipped Lisbeth’s head back, and blasted her light into one of Lisbeth’s bloody eyes.

“This is Lisbeth Perkins,” I said. “She’s a human being.”

Snake eyes. “Please be quiet.”

She listened to Lisbeth’s chest with her stethoscope while Lisbeth coughed and wheezed.

“Someone tried to drown her,” I said.

The look again. “Can
she
speak?”

“Why don’t you ask her? She has a brain and a tongue and everything.”

“Who
are
you?” the child doctor demanded. “Her mother?”

“I’m a friend,” I said. “That’s a person who is kind and has concern for another’s well-being. I only explain this because I’m sure you don’t have any friends, you snotty little bitch.”

Landry stepped in and looked at me. “Making friends?” he asked.

“Detective Landry,” I said. “This person claims to be a doctor. I suspect her name is Brittany, or Tiffany, or another of the popular-
ny
names.”

Westral abandoned Lisbeth, turned, and introduced herself to Landry, who flashed his badge. She shook his hand, smiling politely, the perfect professional. I rolled my eyes.

She turned to me. “Ma’am, you need to leave now.”

“You think so?” I said. “I think you need to kiss my ass.”

Landry intervened. “Dr. Westral, I need to ask you to step out now. You can complete Miss Perkins’s examination after Special Agent Estes and I have finished questioning her.”

I narrowed my eyes at her as she passed me on the way to the door.

I turned to Landry. “Special Agent? I’m moving up in the world.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“You’re not going to ask me to step outside?”

“No,” he said.

“Good for you.”

He stepped close to me, his back blocking Lisbeth. “We recovered Irina’s car,” he said quietly.

“Where?”

“In the parking lot of the Wellington Green mall. It’s being processed. We have a pretty good partial footprint on the floor mat. I’ve got a rush on getting a comparison to the footprint at the dump site.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Not when I left.” He tipped his head in Lisbeth’s direction. “Has she told you anything?”

I filled him in on what I knew.

“So, whoever killed Irina did this to Lisbeth to shut her up,” Landry said.

“And so far, it’s working.”

“Weiss is checking into getting access to the video from the guard shacks at the Polo Club for Saturday and Sunday. If we can get our hands on the tapes for last night, maybe we can get a look at Walker coming home that night, what he was driving. If it was him.”

Lisbeth had started coughing again. I went to her, sat on the gurney, and put my hand on her back. “Lisbeth, Detective Landry needs you to tell him everything you can about last night. I’m going to go find you a real doctor. If I don’t get thrown out of the hospital, I’ll be back in a little while.”

She was trembling as if she was freezing to death. “Don’t l-leave me a-a-alone. Please.”

“You won’t be alone,” I promised. “Detective Landry will be right here or right outside the door until I get back, okay?

“He’s a good guy,” I said, glancing over at him. “He can be a real butthead, but he’s a good guy.”

Landry followed me into the hall. I stayed close to the door. Landry stayed near me so we could keep our voices down.

“Taking in another stray?” he asked, his expression softer than I would have liked. God forbid someone should accuse me of being kind.

“I feel sorry for the kid. Shoot me.”

“You think they’ll keep her here?”

I shrugged. “It’s the age of managed care. These places usually manage not to care one second longer than they have to.”

“And if they don’t keep her?”

“I’ll take her home with me,” I said without hesitation. “She can’t go back to Brody’s.”

He frowned. “I don’t like you taking her with you. Someone tried to kill her, Elena.”

“No. Someone tried to scare her,” I corrected him. “If they had wanted her dead, she would be dead.”

“Semantics,” he said. “Someone nearly killed her. She’s in danger, you’re in danger.”

“Well, guess what? It’s not your problem.”

He jammed his hands at his waist and blew out a sigh. “Elena—”

“Don’t. It’s a dead horse. Leave it alone.”

He opened his mouth to try to say something, stopped himself, looked away, tried again, couldn’t.

“Unless you have something germane to the case,” I said, “I have to go find that girl an actual doctor past the age of puberty.”

“They all lawyered up,” he said. “Brody’s crowd.”

“I know. I ran into Brody this morning.”

“Then you know who his lawyer is.”

“Yes.”

“How is that going to be for you?”

“Shitty,” I said, irritated with him for bringing it up. “I get to relive one of the worst times of my life, have the press dig it all up like a compost heap. And my esteemed father—who is more of a bastard in practice than I am by definition—will get to knock me around and tell the world that I’m mentally unstable, a pathetic, bitter woman who might do anything to wreak havoc on the life of the man who betrayed her twenty years ago.

“How would you feel?”

There was nothing he could say to that. Landry had grown up in a normal middle-class blue-collar family. He didn’t know what it was to have to feel like a stranger, out of place in the only home he had ever known, betrayed by the only people he should have been able to count on unconditionally.

How would you feel?
How did I feel? Upset that those memories still had so much power over me.

Landry’s pager went off. He checked the number and frowned.

“You’d better go outside to answer that,” I said, glad for the excuse to get rid of him. “Before you have every pacemaker in the building going haywire.”

He clipped the thing back onto his belt.

“I’ll call you when I know something,” he said.

The olive branch, I thought. Or bait. Or a thin thread to keep us connected.

“All right,” I said softly. “Thank you.”

He started to walk away, then turned back, cupped his hand around the back of my head, and kissed me with restrained frustration.

“Please don’t get yourself killed,” he said.

Surprised, I stood flat-footed and watched him leave the ER, wondering if I was pushing away one of the few people in my life who might have stood behind me in what was to come.

chapter
42

         
EDWARD ESTES
was a distinguished-looking man: neat, lean, elegantly dressed. His face seemed to arrange itself quite naturally into a look of disapproval.

Alexi Kulak sat in his office in the back of Magda’s bar, watching Edward Estes on the television screen with an intensity that would have frightened the man had he been able to see it.

Estes.

Alexi’s blood boiled harder every time he read the name at the bottom of the screen.

This was not a common name, he thought. He knew from different things Irina had told him that Elena Estes came from a wealthy background. She knew these men with whom Irina had entangled herself. And now these men were being represented by an expensive lawyer of the same name.

Just how much a part of this group was the woman he had chosen to find out who had killed his Irina?

With every passing moment he became more and more convinced that she would never give him the name of the murderer. She would lie to him. She would lie to protect her own kind.

A single knock sounded against his door before it opened and Svetlana Petrova stuck her head in.

“I brought for you lunch,” she said, slipping into the office.

Every move she made was like a reptile slithering, Alexi thought. There was always that look in her eye as well: cold, sly. His brain, twisted with grief and lack of sleep and the pills he was popping to stay awake, superimposed an image of Irina over her. Irina, tall and elegant, proud. Irina, slender and graceful, her eyes large and watchful, her lips as full as ripe berries. Then the image melted away and once again he could see only Svetlana. Svetlana, short and stubby, calculating. Svetlana, with her piggy little eyes and garish makeup, her clothes too tight, her hair too big and brittle with spray.

She came around the desk and took a seat on the desktop.

“You are too sad, Alexi,” she said. “You torment yourself. It was not your fault. Irina did as she pleased, and this is what happened.”

Kulak stared at her, hating her more with each passing second. She wasn’t worthy to have kissed Irina’s feet.

She leaned forward so he could see her breasts inside her sheer blouse. She reached out a stubby little hand and touched his cheek.

“Let me make you feel better, Alexi,” she whispered. “Let me take your grief away, if only for a short time.”

“You told me you brought me lunch,” he said bluntly.

She smiled her sly reptilian smile. “But of course I did.”

Her feet braced on the arms of his chair, she leaned back, raised her skirt, and allowed her legs to fall open.

Alexi stared at her as she touched herself, opened herself. Her pussy was wet and red. He could smell her. Heat filled him.

Heat, but not the heat of sex.

The heat of rage.

“You fucking cunt!” he shouted, coming out of his chair.

He backhanded her hard across the mouth, the force of the blow knocking her off the desk.

“You dare do this!” he shouted, rounding the desk. “You dare debase my grief! You are nothing but a whore!”

Svetlana was on the floor, dazed. She looked up at him as he came toward her, bore down on her, and she tried to turn onto her hands and knees to scramble away.

Kulak grabbed her by the front of her flimsy blouse, which tore away as he tried to lift her to her feet. She landed hard on her backside and tried to push herself backward, but as she started to turn, she ran into the old file cabinets.

This time he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to her feet.

She tried to say no, but her jaw hung slack, and all that came out of her were animal sounds of fear.

“You dare think you can take her place, you stupid, filthy cow?”

Still holding on to her hair, he made a fist with his other hand and punched her in the breast as hard as he could—once, twice.

She was crying now, hysterical, trying to pull away. Her nose was broken and bleeding, the blood running into her mouth.

Alexi shoved her roughly to the floor, where she landed in a heap, half naked, mascara running twin black rivers down her face, making her look like a ghoulish clown. She glanced toward the door, looking for someone to come and save her, knowing no one would.

He made to strike her again, and she cringed and cowered like a dog.

“I should kill you!” he shouted. “I should kill you!”

And he might have, had something on the television screen not caught his eye. A photograph of a man, handsome, arrogant. Beneath the photograph a name:
Bennett Walker
. And beside it a photograph of a woman. Much younger than she was now, with a wild mane of black hair. Beneath the picture a name:
Elena Estes
.

He looked down at Svetlana and spat on her. “You are not worth my effort.”

He had more important things to do.

Once more he stared at the television screen. A photograph of Irina filled the frame beneath the title:
MARKOVA MURDER.

He went back around his desk, took a gun from a drawer, and left.