Cover Shot (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery Book 5) (26 page)

37.

Panic button

Don’t panic.

The words pounded through my head on repeat, my hands frozen to the steering wheel. I swallowed hard and licked my lips, trying to force them to form words.

I’ve dealt with my share of nutcases. But a gun pressed to my head, locked in a car with a guy who’d killed at least two people and shot a cop in broad daylight—this took the gold trophy for worst day ever.

Talk, Nichelle.

Getting him to ramble was the only way to buy time.

Until what? A tiny voice in the back of my head asked. Kyle was on his way to Rockett’s Landing, and Joey was pouring wine and waiting for me.

Damn.

I glanced at the elevator.

A hundred people forty feet above my head, but I couldn’t run for it. This guy was in better shape than I was, and I couldn’t have a massacre in the newsroom.

I tried for even breathing and willed my lips to function.

“Why?”

It was all I could manage.

“Come on, Nichelle.” His voice was colder than the steel of the gun boring into my head. “Haven’t you written about a hundred murders? More? ‘Why’ is the most trite question. Is there ever a good answer? Start the car.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“You drive. I’ll navigate.” He jiggled the gun. “Now.”

Shit. Hands shaking, I turned the key.

Jeff lowered the gun when I pulled out of the garage, digging it into my side just under my ribcage. “Take a right up here.”

I complied, looking around at all the normal people milling around the sidewalk. How the hell was I going to get out of this? I could honk, and he could shoot me. I could jump, and the car could kill a lot of people. I snuck a look in the rearview. Was Jeff buckled into a seat?

No.

I could hit the brakes, but I needed more speed behind that than downtown at six will allow.

“Maynard let someone you love die,” I said. “But why Stephanie? Why Tom Ellinger? What’s going on, Jeff? You don’t seem like the crazy mass murderer type.”

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you? Figured it out, when the cops were a mile off base. But you don’t know a damned thing.”

I turned at the light.

“I know we’re going to Maynard’s office.”

“I have a plan. You’re trying your best to fuck it up, but I’m not going to let you. I tried talking to you, feeding you information that would make you look elsewhere. But you didn’t follow.”

“I’m just trying to find the truth, Jeff. Help me understand. Tell me your story.”

A glance in the rearview showed his lips clamped together, his eyes stony and staring straight ahead. He stayed that way until I pulled into the empty little lot and parked. Maynard’s office door was still crisscrossed with police tape.

“What if the police come back?” I asked.

“They have better things to do. Somebody shot a cop this morning, didn’t you hear?”

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel to keep from slapping the smirk off his face.

Bastard.

He shoved the muzzle of the gun into my ribs hard enough that I yelped.

“Get out. Don’t try anything stupid.”

The sun had disappeared entirely as we drove, the lot dimly lit by the streetlamp a football field down the block.

I opened my door and stepped out. My bag. I’d put my BlackBerry in the bag. My mace was in there, too.

I reached for the handles and Jeff knocked my hand away, hard. “You won’t need lip gloss, princess.”

“It’ll be easier for them to ID me if my purse is in there,” I blurted the first words that came to me, and he stepped back and tipped his head to one side.

“I suppose it will.” He grabbed the bag with his free hand and pulled it over his shoulder.

Not exactly what I wanted, but I tried to keep that from showing on my face.

He fished a set of keys from his back pocket and opened the door.

No forced entry.

“You did the robbery, too,” I said, stumbling over the high threshold when he shoved me through the door.

“Needed the files.”

“And did you find them?”

“Nobody else has, either. I’ve been listening to the cops every day. Who notices the doorman? They all just talk.”

“Why did you want them?”

“None of your business,” he barked.

Puzzle piece: he didn’t know I had them.

Gear change. “How did you know? About me?” I asked.

“Mrs. Eason was going out and she said you called and asked about me. After what happened with the cop this morning, I knew it was only a matter of time. I was just hoping to get my money and go before it happened.”

He gestured with the gun, and I backed toward a hallway. He kept the gun trained on me, following slowly.

“What money?”

“There are a lot of people who don’t want anyone to know what Dr. Maynard was working on, because it would kill their profit margins.”

“Shannon,” I breathed. I stepped backward into a small room that reeked of funky chemical smell. “Shannon wanted the files. So he could bury them.”

“You did your homework.”

“Enough to know that dude wasn’t getting his hands dirty.”

No time to be proud of myself for getting it all right on a couple of photos and a file list.

Don’t die now. Be excited later.

Jeff flipped on a light and I looked around.

Oxygen cylinders. A truckload of them. Plus some nitrous canisters.

Open ones.

I closed my eyes.

“If you just breathe it in, this will be much less painful,” Jeff said.

My eyes settled on the gun.

“Don’t.” I coughed. “Please.”

“With this?” He gestured with the pistol. “I don’t have any intention of dying with you. My baby Rosie is here.” He nodded to the door and I caught a glimpse of a soft rifle case. A pet name for his gun. Cute. “She can take those canisters at seven hundred yards.”

“You’re awfully sure of yourself.”

“If I can hit the temple of the driver of a moving vehicle with IEDs all around me outside Baghdad, I can hit this. I hit the cop this morning.”

I clenched my jaw. Probably not the best time to let my temper loose.

“I read your record. You’re a freaking hero. Explain to me how a sniper ends up on the wrong side of the law. Money isn’t everything.”

He shook his head, his eyes glistening in the fluorescent light. “The money will let me get away with it. But this was never about money. It’s about justice. Maynard took Kat from me, and I took his life from him. Eye for an eye, like it says in the Bible.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. I bit blood out of my tongue to avoid asking him if he should be stoned to death over his polyester blend chinos.

“I thought we had a legal system for that.”

“They don’t care that he let her die.” His voice caught. “She was nineteen years old, and never smoked a single cigarette. He could have cured her. People walked out of there and went back to their lives. Why not her?” A tear slipped down his cheek and he swatted it away. “My baby sister. I promised my momma on her deathbed I’d take care of Kat. But I was deployed and couldn’t argue with Dr. God Complex. And now she’s gone.”

I blinked. I was going to start feeling sorry for the guy if he kept talking.

My tone softened. “I don’t argue the injustice of that, but it’s how these things work. If there’s no control group, how can they tell whether the treatment is getting results or people are just getting better? Or if the new treatment is more effective than the old one, like in the case of Kat’s trial?”

His head snapped up and he waved the gun. “You don’t think I know that?” Another tear fell, followed by another, the pistol drifting back to his side. “But the funny thing about that is, it’s all in the name of science until the one that ends up in the ground is someone you love.”

My mom, weak from chemo and smiling at the doctor who’d come to admit her to the trial, flashed through my thoughts.

Yeah. I know, dude. “My mom had breast cancer. A trial saved her life. I get it.”

He swiped at the tears, shaking his head as he leveled the gun at me. “I don’t think you do. Because why are you helping them?”

Helping who? The poor guy they had set up to take the fall? My temper flared. Deep breath. “For what it’s worth, all I’m ‘helping’ is the truth. Once it’s out, the chips fall where they fall. Speaking of, why Tom Ellinger? He’s pretty much in the exact same boat you just described as being so shitty.”

Jeff’s eyes were glazing over from the gas, his voice thicker when he opened his mouth. “If I’d managed to find the damned files, his wife would be getting ready to go home to his kids. I bet he’d trade a few years in prison for that in a heartbeat.”

Wait. “What?”

He braced his free hand on the wall. “I couldn’t let Shannon bury Maynard’s research. I wanted the bastard dead, sure, but his work—that’s something the world has a right to know about. I found a guy online, a researcher at Duke. I was going to send him the files. But Shannon double-crossed me before I could double-cross him. Asshole.” His eyes flicked to the rifle. “Ellinger fell into my lap, the last piece I needed to make this work. I lost Kat. I would’ve given him a way to keep his wife if Shannon hadn’t gotten there first.”

Well, hot damn. Tom would’ve taken the trade outright, given a sliver of a chance. And I suddenly wanted nothing more than to get out of that building and watch Alan Shannon go to prison. For a long, long time.

“How’d you figure out it was me?” Jeff asked, dumping my bag onto a table. My BlackBerry hit with a clatter, my makeup bag falling on top of it. The mace canister rolled off the end and under a cabinet. Dammit.

I tried to shake off the cotton candy haze in my brain, inching toward the table and hoping Jeff’d direct his eyes back to the floor. “Pictures.”

“Come again?” He turned his back, walking to the other side of the room and turning a valve on another canister. My head spun. Dammit. I tiptoed to the table and slid my hand under the makeup bag, my words tripping out, not wanting to give him reason to turn around again.

“There was a cell phone photo of you at the hospital, in the room across from the closet. Just a silhouette, but I recognized your build and sentry stance from the door at the complex. Then one of our photographers got a distant shot of you this morning on the rooftop. The watch. It’s so different.”

“We all had one, the guys in my unit. Jimmy’s dad was a jeweler in Chicago.” He flipped another valve and burst into peals of laughter.

My fingers closed around my BlackBerry.

I turned as a canister clattered to the floor, and found Jeff doubled over in a giggle fit.

“Something funny?”

“The way things work out. I liked you.” He scrubbed a fist over his eyes. “You’re hot. You’re smart—I spent months planning this like we planned missions. Every detail. Who suspects a sniper of strangling a man? Enough pressure to kill him, but not enough to point to me. Ellinger is weak. It fit. Months of going over everything. And you got me from a couple of photos? You handled yourself in that hospital ward with Ellinger. I could fall in love with a woman like you. And now I have to…” He shook his head, the smile fading as he stood and turned for the back door—and the rifle. “Anyway. Just funny how things work out.”

I opened a text.

Maynard’s office. He has a gun.

Kyle.

Joey.

Landers.

Send.

I looked up just in time to see Jeff drop the handgun as he tried to unzip the rifle case.

It fired, and my eyes fell shut.

38.

A locked room

T
he roar of the gunshot faded, silence following behind it just as loud.

I kept my eyes closed for close to a minute, the lack of fiery death pain processing. When I opened them, Jeff was putting his rifle together, the handgun tucked in his belt and a surgical mask covering the lower half of his face.

His eyes were as flat and cold as the black metal in his hands when he looked up.

“Casualties of war. They happen every day.” The mask muffled the words and I felt my brow furrow.

“Huh?”

“Ellinger was hanging around outside the building. Looking for the doc. I chatted him up. Got him talking about deer hunting. He had a rifle. I found out what kind. Picked one up at the sporting goods store. Offering suggestions is so much easier than giving orders. And almost guarantees he won’t mention it to anyone.”

“And Stephanie?”

He shrugged. “Part of the deal with Shannon. Bonus fifty grand. Something about a document. I didn’t ask.”

“Aaron?”

“The cop? I heard he was asking about me. Someone told him Shannon put in a good word for me with the building manager. I followed him this morning. Didn’t know he was with you until you came outside, though.”

A high giggle escaped my lips and I flinched.

My head felt two sizes too big, and everything was suddenly hilarious.

Damn, damn, damn.

I grabbed for the edge of the table.

He clicked the last piece of the gun into place and set it gently on the floor.

Stepping toward me, he reached for his belt buckle.

I stumbled to the other side of the table. Laughing gas be damned, that wasn’t funny.

He stopped, his eyes rolling back. “I’m not into that. I need you to stay put.”

Because he had to go outside.

He tapped a finger on the table.

“If I tie you to something, it doesn’t look like an accident.”

“You think people will believe this was an accident?” The words sounded slurred, coming out too slow.

“You broke in looking for information, knocked over a canister, caused an explosion. Sad cautionary tale for your colleagues.”

“I’m not exactly going to sit here while you blow up the building.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “You will if the doors are locked.” He crossed to the one we’d come in and threw a keyed deadbolt, and my stomach fell to my ankles.

“I’m sorry it had to be this way.” Jeff gave me a sad look and grabbed the rifle and case, disappearing out the door.

Shit, double shit. I fished my phone out of my pocket. No new texts.

Nice time for everyone to be occupied.

I had however long it would take Jeff to run several hundred yards.

The windows.

I needed something heavy. That wouldn’t make a spark if I missed and hit the metal window frame.

The table was steel, and heavy.

The canisters were metal.

My eyes scanned the corners.

There.

Under a pile of hospital-grade blankets and pillows sat a wooden ladder back chair. I lunged for it, the linens scattering as I raised it and swung at the window. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jeff’s back retreating into the dark. He thought he had it all sewn up.

Asshole.

The glass gave with the second swing, a spiderweb crack spreading across the window as Jeff stopped and turned back.

Could he see me? Didn’t care.

I turned the feet of the chair toward the glass, braced them, and shoved.

A jagged hole appeared, the cool fresh air hitting my face as I dropped the chair. I gulped it. Jeff took a step back toward the building, then raised the rifle.

Righting the chair, I stepped up onto it, my head clearing a smidgen with every breath.

I dove for the sidewalk as the gun fired.

Pain ripped through my left arm and hip as I hit the concrete, but I didn’t have time to be hurt. I rolled to the right, my arm coming with me under heavy protest, and scrambled to my feet. The bullet hole in the window frame told me he was shooting at me, not the canisters. Shit.

I bolted, three steps from my car before I realized my keys were inside with the rest of my stuff.

The footsteps on the gravel behind me told me Jeff was double-timing it back, and his double-time was faster than mine.

I ran, my feet slipping in the mules and my sore toe throbbing with every step.

When he was close enough for me to hear the swearwords punctuating every footfall, I panicked. The adrenaline-fueled burst of speed got me to the corner. How could this part of town be so dead? Ten minutes from the capitol building, and a guy with a rifle on his back could chase a woman down the street without an audience. Something I normally found charming about Richmond. Right then, not so much.

My legs and lungs burned, and I wished desperately for the foresight to have put on my sneakers with my gym shirt that morning. It seemed like a million years ago, changing in the car. Snippets of events and people flashed through my head.

Joey’s headlights rounding a corner last summer as another fruitcake with a gun chased me through an alley.

I stumbled over a curb, the street in front of me wavering.

Not Joey’s headlights.

Not a memory.

Landers’s unmarked police sedan squealed to a halt, his door opening before the car had stopped rolling.

“Get down,” he shouted, his Sig 9 coming up over the roof of the car.

I screamed as my shoulder hit the pavement a second time, raising my good arm to cover my head as the evening exploded around me.

Everything stopped.

I couldn’t look.

If Jeff was about to shoot me, so be it. Where could I go?

“Nichelle?” Landers’s breath came hard, but the voice was his.

“Oh, thank God.” I half-sobbed the words, tears forcing their way out against my better judgement.

I didn’t want to cry in front of Landers, dammit. I had to work with him. I rolled onto my back, something warm and sticky spreading under my side.

“Jesus, your arm.” Landers grabbed my outstretched, uninjured hand, then dropped it. “Nope, stay there. We need another ambulance.” He pulled out his phone, and I noticed his gun was still trained on Jeff, who was writhing on the ground several yards away, blood pouring from his lower half. I looked back to Landers.

“I thought center mass was the target for a gunman?” The words sounded far away.

“Not when you think he might be wearing a vest. I needed him down. Took hitting both knees, but he’s down.”

Landers stepped into the light from a street lamp and I saw a darkening spot on his brown polo.

“He shot you.” I tried to sit up.

“You stay put. It’s my shoulder. I’ll live.” He stepped closer to Jeff, kicking the rifle away from him. “This is the bastard who shot Aaron?”

I nodded, the sirens in the distance the best sound I’d heard all day.

Landers pulled a foot back and landed a solid kick to Jeff’s ribs. “No vest. Oh, well.”

The lights from the ambulance wavered across the pavement, my eyes fighting to stay open.

“It’s okay, Nichelle. Everyone is going to be just fine.”

“My story…” I forced the words out.

“Will wait. You texted me. I called for the ambulance from my phone. Nobody else has it.”

The last words filtered in as I drifted off.