Crazy for You (32 page)

“Yup. That happens sometimes when you go around trying to kill people.”

He had a tiny hole like a pimple crater in one of his magnificent cheekbones. His expensive ripstop nylon snowpants hadn’t been shotgunproof; they were shredded, and blood was seeping out of scores of tiny holes.

“Mazie, come on, help me out here—this was all a huge mistake from the start.” He attempted a smile, though it made a frowny mouth on his upside-down face. “You know I didn’t intend any harm to you—is that a
phone
you’ve got there? Hurry up! Call for help, get a rescue team out here—what are you waiting for?”

“You want a rescue team? Hmm, let me think about it.” My brain was working furiously. The emergency operator was still on the line, trying to get a fix on our position. Things were happening; rescuers were on their way. Now might be my one and only chance to get the truth out of Jared Kennison.

I clicked on the phone’s video feature. The Walgreen’s clerk had been right; you really never knew when you might need to make a video. Already talking confidently about rescue teams, Kennison probably figured that once he was back to civilization, he could lawyer up and explain everything away.
This was all a huge mistake
, indeed. That would be his story and he’d have lots of time to cover up the incriminating evidence.

“Mazie?” he said plaintively. “Come on! I could die here. This water is freezing, I’m getting hypothermic—”

I gave him a big, fake smile. “Tell you what, Jared. Each time you answer a question, I’ll award you one digit of the emergency number. Want to try for that first nine?”

“Are you crazy? Do it now! I’m—” His neck muscles suddenly gave out and his head dipped down into the creek as far as his eyebrows. He jerked back up, flailing around with his free leg, managing only to wedge himself in further.

“Tell me how you killed Rhonda Cromwell.”

“You’re a nasty little bitch, you know that?” he snarled. “Under that cute, sweet surface, you’re really vicious.”

“You haven’t seen vicious yet, Jared.” Setting the phone carefully on a mossy log, making sure the lens was pointed the right way, I worked myself down the slope toward the creek until I was a foot or two above Kennison. I examined the tree branch trapping the machine’s ski. It looked pretty flimsy. “Hmm,” I mused aloud. “Wonder what would happen if this thing broke?”

“Mazie …” His voice rose to a higher pitch.

I took off my gloves. I gripped Gozzy’s knife, set the blade against the branch and started sawing. Jared’s whole body began to rock, dipping lower, toward the water.

“What are you doing?” he screeched. “Stop it!”

I kept sawing. This was kind of fun. Maybe I could take up wood carving as a hobby.

“Rhonda was a piece of garbage!” Kennison sputtered. “She was a blackmailer, a pig, no better than a murderer herself. She deserved to die.”

I stopped sawing, wiped my brow with my sleeve. “You meant to kill Rhonda the night of the party. That’s why you were dressed in dark clothes, so you could skulk through the neighborhood.”

“For God’s sake, use your phone!”

“Didn’t an-swer the question,” I singsonged, and went back to sawing, enjoying the green, sappy smell rising from the wood. “How did you kill Rhonda?”

He maintained a stubborn silence for another thirty seconds or so, then spoke in a sudden rush. “I had a key to her house. I stole it the night of the party. I let myself in, waited until she came in after Labeck dropped her off. Then I—I wrapped the shoestring around her neck and squeezed. I wanted her to know how it felt to be squeezed.”

“Not bad,” I said, “You earned yourself a nine.”

This was taking too long. If Labeck went into shock from blood loss, Gozzy might jump him, wrestle away the shotgun, and kill him. What I needed right now was a sixty-second admission of guilt like the express confessions Father O’Brien used to run on Saturday nights back in Quail Hollow.

“Rhonda was blackmailing you?” I asked. “Why? Twenty words or less.”

“She saw me operate on the Lennox girl. A simple chin incision. I—my scalpel slipped, cut into her aorta. It was an accident. The wretched little cow was thrashing around—Petrov hadn’t given her enough gas.”

I started sawing again. The knife was sharp; it bit easily into the soft wood. The branch creaked loudly, and Kennison’s whole body descended an inch farther into the water. He screamed.

“The girl died,” he gabbled. “Asphyxiated on her own blood. I hadn’t followed procedures; there was no nurse present, and I was hungover. If anyone had found out I’d have been ruined, sued, maybe gone to jail—”

“You earned yourself another digit. Okay, Tippi’s body.”

“Medical-equipment box—” His head splashed down into the water. With an effort he pulled himself up again, sputtering. This must be doing wonders for his abs. Maybe Pilates could add a new water pull-up regime to their core-strengthening program: crunch or die. “Petrov put on the girl’s things, pretended to be her. I drove the body to a gravel pit in the country, buried it.”

“Rhonda saw everything?”

“Prep room behind the surgery. Buttocks lift. Saw through crack in blinds—Jesus, I’m drowning!” His face was rigid with fear and panic.

“Why didn’t Petrov turn you in?”

“Oxy.”

“What?”

“OxyContin. He’s addicted—I supply him.”

“Why’d you send him for Rhonda’s hard drive?”

Kennison was thrashing around with his free leg, which only rocked the snowmobile and made it settle lower in the water. Suddenly his whole head sank under the surface. I scrambled down the bank into the water and jerked his head up. It took him a long time to get his breath back.

“The hard drive,” I reminded him.

“Thought … Rhonda put stuff about Tippi … in file,” he gasped. “Couldn’t … take … chance … on police finding …”

I’d been so absorbed, I’d barely heard a distant buzz, but now it grew to a
whapwhapwhap
sound, and a helicopter burst into sight above the treetops. Had they seen us? I could run out into the clearing and wave my arms, but in the time it took to do that, Kennison might drown.

Poetic justice, I thought, but I didn’t give in to my baser instincts. I kept holding Kennison’s head up, even though the snowmobile was rapidly sinking and I had to wade into waist-deep water so frigid it sucked my breath away.

The helicopter descended lower, the noise of the rotors growing louder as the pilot searched for a place to land. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears, but didn’t dare move my hands. As we waited to be rescued, Dr. Jared Kennison, filled with gratitude that I was saving his life, profusely thanked me.

Just kidding. He swore and cursed and called me a lot of filthy names. “I should have finished you off Tuesday night,” he snarled.

“When I came to your clinic?”

“You trusted me, didn’t you?” The blue eyes flashed maliciously. “You thought I wanted to seduce you. And you would have let me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I had a needle, a syringe loaded with a nerve paralytic. If that goddamned cop hadn’t shown up, you’d be a rotting carcass at the bottom of a swamp right now, and I’d be going to Thanksgiving dinner with my fiancée.”

“You mean Granny Clampett?” I laughed. It was hard to feel hatred toward Kennison at the moment, because the chopper had landed in a clearing and two large, competent-looking rangers were jogging toward us.

“If it’s any comfort,” I said, trying to keep my teeth from chattering, “they might allow conjugal visits in your prison cell.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

If the man you love has to go to the hospital, make sure all his nurses are male.

—Maguire’s Maxims

A nurse had the nerve to tell me I had to leave. Leave Bonaparte Labeck alone with a bevy of soap-smelling, pulse-taking, pretty young things? Not by the grimy hairs of my chinny-chin-chin!

The nurses were all over him, fussing with blood pressure and thermometers and dressings, and he was enjoying it, the creep! He’d at least been spared the excruciating embarrassment of being discovered with sanitary pads strapped to his legs. The pads must have slid off during the chase in the woods.

Ben’s doctor said that he’d been extremely lucky; the bullet had ripped through flesh, not bone or tendons. Still, he’d been a quart or two low on blood, and had spent an hour in the emergency room having O positive dripped into his veins.

The search-and-rescue helicopter team had merely been the first wave in an onslaught. The county sheriff’s department, state forest rangers, and the fire rescue squad had followed shortly thereafter, and soon after that, hordes of reporters and television news crews had descended on the woods. They gained access to the site via a fire lane not five hundred feet from the spot where Labeck and I had set up our snowmobile ambush. If we’d been able to go on a minute or two longer, we’d have stumbled across the road ourselves. Kennison, Gozzy, and Petrov were whisked away in ambulances under heavy police guard, while Ben and I got to ride to the hospital in the helicopter.

After Labeck was patched up in the emergency room, he’d been moved to this hospital room, where we were both offered the institutional version of Thanksgiving dinner. We fell on the turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie like starving feral hogs.

Afterward the Brookwood PD got their crack at us. Vince Trumbull and Officer Olafson hulked around Labeck’s bed, throwing questions at him and acting as though
they didn’t believe a word he said. Josie Wheeler was there, too, in her official role of department secretary, sitting in a chair to one side, quietly taking notes and acting as though she’d never seen either Ben or me before.

Finally, thanks to Jared Kennison’s recorded confession, Vince Trumbull, looking as though he were being forced to undergo a root canal without anesthetic, told Labeck that—barring any other evidence that might turn up—he was no longer a suspect in Rhonda Cromwell’s murder.

When they’d gone, Ben lay back against the pillows, pretty much wiped out.

“Mazie?” he whispered. “Do me a favor?”

“Yes, baby?” I bent over his bed. Did he want a kiss, a cuddle, a back rub? I gazed into his eyes, droopy-lidded and pouchy with fatigue, waiting for him to express his desire. “What would you like?” I crooned.

“Would you see if you can find the Cowboys game?”

I picked up the remote. I would have told Labeck where he could stuff that remote if he hadn’t looked so completely pathetic, because hospital gowns have a way of making even six-foot-two-inch specimens of manhood appear ridiculous. I clicked on the TV. Dallas hadn’t even kicked off before Ben fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

I watched the game with half my mind, mulling over the events of the past two days. I’d nearly lost Ben, I
had
lost Pig, and I’d been forced against all my deepest principles to shoot another human being.

On the positive side, I’d managed to avoid Thanksgiving dinner with my family yet again and got to ride in a helicopter.

A piece of paper at the foot of Labeck’s bed caught my attention. It was a sheet ripped off the legal pad Josie Wheeler had been using to take notes.

4th Floor, Room 10A
, it read.

Confident that Ben was in good hands, though I would have preferred that those hands belong to eighty-year-old nurses who had false teeth and wore support stockings, I quietly slipped out of the room and went up to the fourth floor.

Which turned out to be the maternity ward. The newborns’ nursery was 10A. Josie was standing at the window in front of the display rows of brand-new babies.

“I’m just crazy about newborns,” Josie said, turning and smiling as I approached.
“My cousin Becky just had a baby—that’s him in the blue cap on the far right.”

“Cute,” I said, because it’s what you’ve got to say. Nobody wants to hear that their precious offspring looks like a boiled turnip.

“Sorry for all this clandestine shit,” Josie said. “But if I’m going to keep on being Bonaparte’s mole, I can’t let anyone see us together, and there are cops all over this hospital today. How’s he doing?”

“Asleep. Ten seconds into the Dallas game.”

She grinned. “He’ll be okay. He’s tough stuff. Wooooh, Mazie, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like down at the station. I got called away from Thanksgiving dinner at my folks’ because all hell was breaking loose. Trumbull was so pumped! He thought this was going to be his chance to bust Labeck. But then it turns out that this plastic surgery doctor—the one all the north shore society dames go to—was Rhonda’s killer! And you got it all in a video!”

“His confession may not hold up. It was done under … considerable duress.”

“No prob. If he doesn’t get nailed for Rhonda’s murder, there are a dozen more crimes to pick from.” Josie’s eyes sparkled. She was wearing a sequined gold top that caught the light when she moved, and crepey white hostess pants. “This guy left a trail behind him, Mazie. When we ran his prints through the system, it was like coming up cherries in Vegas. Bells and whistles.”

“Dr. Kennison has a record?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am! He’s always been one step ahead of the law—disappears when the shit hits the fan. Turns out that Kennison isn’t even his real name. His medical degree is from some diploma mill in El Salvador, and he’s left a trail of botched surgery and bodies behind him.”

“Bodies?”

“Kennison’s moved around the country a lot. California, Iowa, Florida … he’d start a practice, mostly foolproof stuff like Botox and collagen injections, he’d develop a loyal patient base, then he’d marry a wealthy, older woman, and get hold of her money. Two of his former wives died under mysterious circumstances.”

“How mysterious?”

“Supposedly heart attacks, but possibly injections of some hard-to-trace nerve
paralytic. Then there’s the patients he’s left with permanent damage—lips like Daffy Duck, lopsided boobs, tendon damage. One of his victims lost the tip of her nose. That guy should never have been allowed to even have a plastic picnic knife in his hands.”

I scanned the bassinets of tiny, exquisite baby girls. How many of them would grow up with the images of impossibly thin, beautiful women presented as the ideal? How many would resort to starvation diets and drastic surgery attempting to live up to that ideal?