Drop Dead Gorgeous Read online

  “If she does, I’ve never seen it,” said Sally doubtfully.

  “That’s because most of her clients are people who like her signature style. She wants to branch out more, attract other clients. Redoing your bedroom will be good business for her.”

  “I’m not willing to pay one more cent to her. Twenty thousand dollars!”

  “She isn’t asking for more money. She isn’t the bad guy here. There isn’t a bad guy.”

  “Well, crap.”

  If I could have laughed, I would have. We looked at each other in perfect understanding.

  “I’ll call him tonight,” she said, and sighed. “I’ll apologize. I’m an eagle and he’s a penguin. He can’t fly. Got it.”

  “I took him to see a piece Mr. Potts was refinishing, a big armoire. Mr. Potts told him he’d already put in around sixty hours on it. Jazz will never know furniture, but now he has a better appreciation of how much work you put into your bedroom.”

  “Oh, God, Blair, thank you,” she said, grabbing me and hugging me again. “I hope we would have worked it out on our own, eventually, but you’ve speeded up the process.”

  “It just needed an outside view,” I said modestly.

  Chapter

  Twenty-seven

  All that talking had done a number on my whisper, so I stopped at a pharmacy for a jar of Vicks ointment, intending to give it a try. I would smell like a cough drop, but if this stuff would help my throat I didn’t care how I smelled. I intended to have the Big Talk with Wyatt that night, so it would help if I could, well, talk.

  I was on my way to a third fabric store when Wyatt called my cell and told me to come back to the police department. He was in lieutenant mode; his tone of voice made it an order, not a request.

  Frustrated, I changed directions. I remembered to watch and see if any of the cars behind me changed direction, too. None did.

  I wasn’t going to be able to put this wedding together on time. The Fates were against me. I accepted that, now. I wouldn’t be able to find the material for a gown, the wedding cake maker wouldn’t come through, the caterer would bail out, and all the silk flowers that were supposed to be woven through the arbor would get some mysterious silk rot and fall to pieces. Wyatt hadn’t even started sanding and repainting the arbor. I might as well save myself the wear and tear on my nerves and give up.

  In a pig’s eye, I would. The stakes were too high. It was either do it, or find myself in some drive-up wedding chapel in Las Vegas. If we got married.

  This was driving me nuts.

  When I got to the police department, Detective Forester met me in the parking lot. He must have been waiting for me, because he said, “You’re going to the hospital with me. We have permission to look at photographs and review film, if it still exists. The hospital chief of security is checking that out as we speak.”

  The front passenger seat of his car was piled high with notebooks, files, reports, a clipboard, a can of Lysol, and some other official stuff. I wondered why he needed the Lysol, but didn’t ask. I picked up the stuff out of his seat, slid in, and held everything on my lap while I buckled up. The files looked interesting, but I didn’t have time to read them. Maybe he’d have to stop and get gas or something; I could give them a quick look-see then.

  At the hospital he asked for the chief of security by name, and in a few minutes we were met by a short, slender man in his forties, with close-cropped hair and the erect posture of someone who hasn’t been out of the military very long.

  “I’m Doug Lawless, chief of security,” he said, shaking hands with a brisk, firm up-and-down when Forester introduced both himself and me. “Let’s go to my office, Ms. Mallory, to review the photographs in question first, then the security tape if necessary.”

  We followed Lawless to an office that was nicely middle-of-the-road—not so big that it would inspire jealousy, but not so small that he’d get the idea he wasn’t appreciated. I’ve heard hospital politics can be cutthroat.

  “I pulled up the files myself,” he said, “and pasted the only photographs into a separate file, so no privacy concerns will be compromised. Sit here, please.” He indicated his chair in front of an LCD monitor and I sat down. “This is everyone with whom you came in contact the night of your accident,” he said. “This includes radiology and nuclear medicine, as well as laboratory personnel. And admitting, of course.”

  I had come in contact with more people in the hospital than I ever would have guessed. I recognized several faces, including that of Dr. Tewanda Hardy, the physician who had released me. Because hair can be changed I didn’t look at hair at all, just faces, and particularly eyes. I remembered that she had very long eyelashes, and even without mascara her eyes would be striking.

  She wasn’t there. I was positive of it, but went over the faces again at Forester’s insistence, then shook my head just as firmly as I had the first time.

  “We’ll go to the security recordings of the hallways,” said Lawless. “I’m sorry this particular floor doesn’t have digital surveillance, not yet, but I’m working on it. The ER and critical care areas do, and some of the other floors, but not this one. Still, our tape quality is good.”

  He closed the blinds in his windows, darkening the room. The tape was already in the VCR, because all he did was punch a button and a color picture swam into focus on a second monitor.

  “The tape is on a timer,” he said. “Do you remember about what time this nurse entered your room?” With a pen he indicated which room was mine. The proportion of everything seemed off, because the cameras were in the ceiling, but the images were sharp and clear.

  I thought back. Siana had arrived about eight-thirty that morning, but even though Mom had had an appointment she hadn’t yet left, so…“Between eight-thirty and nine a.m.,” I whispered.

  “Good, that’s a relatively narrow window. Let’s see what we can see.” He fast-forwarded the tape, and people began zipping up and down the hallway and in and out of rooms like Chihuahuas on speed. He stopped the tape twice to check the timer, then overshot a little and had to rewind. “Here we go.”

  Surveillance tapes are interesting. I watched Siana saunter into my room, and gave both Forester and Lawless a moment to recover from their silent appreciation. “She’ll be along any minute now,” I whispered. “She was wearing pink scrubs.”

  And then there she was, at eight forty-seven. “That’s her,” I said, pointing. My heart started pounding, hard and fast. There was no doubt about it: pink scrubs, tall and slim, no hesitation, walking directly toward my room and entering. That flat brown hair looked unnaturally dark on the film, hanging around her shoulders. She was carrying a clipboard, which I hadn’t noticed at the time, but hey, I’d been concussed. The camera angle caught her from the back, so there wasn’t a good view of her face at all, just an occasional hint of the angle of her jaw.

  Both men were leaning close to the monitor, watching the screen as intently as two cats waiting for a mouse to venture from its hole.

  Mom left my room and I heard their quick little intakes of breath. “That’s my mom,” I said, before either of them could slip and make some kind of guy comment that would require me to take action.

  Then, at eight fifty-nine, she left my room, but again the angle on her face wasn’t good. Either the clipboard was in the way, or her head was down, or her shoulder was hunched.

  “She’s aware of the cameras,” Lawless said. “She’s hiding her face. I don’t know every employee in the hospital, of course, but I don’t recognize her. I wish you remembered her name, Ms. Mallory—”

  “She wasn’t wearing a name tag,” I whispered. “At least, not one that I saw. I thought maybe it was clipped to one of her pockets, or the waistband of her pants.”

  “That’s against this hospital’s regulations,” he said immediately. “The identification tags are to be readily visible, photo I.D. required, either clipped or pinned in the upper left chest area. I’ll have to investigate further before I c