Deadly Force (18 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Claire knew she should go back to work but she just couldn’t bear it. Instead, she went to her apartment. She could barely put one foot in front of the other as she made her way up the three flights of stairs. She was grateful that Nadine was working. She couldn’t face anybody.

She went to her bedroom and sat on her bed. She’d have to leave Chicago after all.
Then she wouldn’t have to worry about running into Sam or Sam stopping by to check on her ever again.

She wouldn’t go back to Nebraska. Maybe New York. There were advertising agencies there. Maybe they’d be willing to take a chance on somebody new. At least she had the award that she could add to her résumé. And some seed money. The check was really going to come in handy now. She knew rent
would be even more in New York than it had been in Chicago and she wouldn’t have anyone to share the expense with. She couldn’t expect Nadine to leave a good job in Chicago just because Claire’s life was falling apart.

She would need to give notice to Alexander and Pope. She should do that today. She got up, opened her desk drawer and searched for her nice lined paper. She found the paper
but realized that something else was missing.

Her passport.

She always kept it in this drawer. She’d seen it in there just a few weeks ago. She slipped off the sling so that she’d have use of both arms. She yanked out the drawer and dumped the contents on her bed. She rummaged through the items and came up empty.

They’d been robbed again.

How was that possible? Feeling ill,
she walked into Nadine’s room to see what might have been taken from there. Two minutes later, she tried to open Nadine’s closet doors but realized the folding door was caught on a suitcase. She pulled the bag out with some difficulty because it was heavy. What the heck?

She opened it. It was jammed full of clothes, almost everything Nadine had in her closet. Lying on top was a short, dark-haired
wig, styled almost exactly how Claire wore her hair.

She started to feel sick. The woman who’d pawned the stolen items had had short, dark hair.

And she realized there never had been a robbery. It had been Nadine.

She was sitting there on the floor, holding the horrible wig in her hands, when she heard her front door open. She threw the wig back into the suitcase, closed it, pushed
it back in the closet and ran for the door.

But Nadine was already inside.

She looked at Claire and then past her into Claire’s bedroom where the contents of her middle drawer still lay spread across her bed. Before Claire could even move, Nadine pulled her gun out of her purse.

“I didn’t expect you to be here until tonight,” Nadine said, her tone angry. “But I guess I can get an
early start.”

“Start?” Claire asked.

“I’m leaving the country. That wig and your passport are going to come in handy.”

“Nadine,” Claire said, trying not to choke on the tears that threatened. She was so scared. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can talk about it.” She needed to buy enough time to get the gun away from Nadine.

“Talk?” Nadine shook her head. “I’m in this so
deep and that damn boyfriend of yours isn’t going to ever let it go. I don’t have time to talk.” She waved her gun around and Claire’s stomach jumped. Nadine walked over and dumped the contents of Claire’s purse onto the bed. The award check floated out.

“Excellent,” Nadine said. “This is what I was hanging around for. Now, come on. We’re getting out of here. Move or I’ll shoot you now.”

Claire knew she wasn’t kidding. Nadine had already killed once and she would do it again.

“Where are we going?” Claire asked.

“Shut up,” Nadine said. “Get my suitcase. Come on, move.”

Claire picked up the heavy case and set it by the door. “No, you carry it,” Nadine said. “We’re going to walk out that door and down to my car.”

Claire opened the door just as the phone in
the apartment started ringing. Nadine pulled the door shut behind them. Their neighbor was just coming back from somewhere. The woman turned and looked at them, then at the suitcase.

“You two girls going on a trip?” she asked.

Claire heard Nadine suck in a breath. “Yes,” Claire said, forcing herself to sound normal. “To Saint Louis. Big game between the Cubs and the Cards.”

* * *

M
ARGARET
M
OORE
LED
S
AM
down to a small, windowless office. She cleared off a chair so that he could sit. “Nadine was discharged from our employ. She’s not welcome on the premises.”

“What did she do to get fired?”

“Theft. Narcotics. Are you familiar with fentanyl, Detective Vernelli?”

On the street pure fentanyl was a big-time favorite with addicts. “Some.”

“Well, in the
operating room, it’s used a great deal. However, we realized that we were missing a fairly large quantity. As part of our investigation, we asked Ms. Myer to take a drug test. She refused and we terminated her.”

“Could it possibly have been anyone else?”

“No. Our investigation proved that it was her. We do know she had some help. Not that you may be interested, but we fired a pharmacist
that same day. He admitted that he’d helped her. We’re also short significant amounts of Oxycontin. Evidently, they had some kind of relationship, although I believe it was short-lived.”

Relationship with a pharmacist. He needed to pay Fletcher Bird another visit.

But first, he needed to get Claire away from Nadine.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Detective
Vernelli,” she said, stopping him, “if it helps, I think she fooled a lot of people. We never had any indication that she was impaired.”

He’d worked with several functioning alcoholics and addicts, too. People got good at hiding the addiction. All he knew was that she was going to pay for giving Claire even one moment of grief. He left the office, dialing his cell phone as he walked. He slammed
it shut when Claire’s cell line rang and rang until it switched over to voice mail. “Call me, Claire. Right now,” he said. He ended the call and fumbled in his wallet for the card that had her office number. He dialed it. The receptionist answered and said that Claire hadn’t been in the office for several hours.

Next, he called the landline at her apartment. It rang and rang. He squeezed
the steering wheel and tried to think.

She’d been upset when she’d left the hospital. If she hadn’t gone back to work, where would she have gone? To his house? No. Shopping? He didn’t think so.

It only made sense that she’d have gone home. Maybe she was sleeping and couldn’t hear the phone? Maybe she heard it and didn’t intend to ever talk to him again?

Please, please, just be safe.

With few other options, he drove to her apartment building and ran up the three flights of stairs. He pounded on the door.

The neighbor from across the hall stuck her head out the door. “Keep it down,” she snarled. “I’m watching my shows.”

“I’m looking for Claire. Have you seen her?”

“Yeah. She left about five minutes ago. Both her and Nadine.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Yeah. Said they were going to Saint Louis to see the Cubs play.”

That didn’t make any sense. The season had been over for three weeks.

But Nadine probably didn’t know that. Claire had been trying to let someone know that there was something wrong.

Sam pulled out his cell and called his captain next. He needed help.

* * *

I
T
WAS
THE
SECOND
TIME
Claire had seen Nadine’s
gun. It was the first time it had been pointed at her. Nadine held it in her lap, the short, black barrel pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle, directly at Claire’s head.

She wished she could assume that Nadine wasn’t desperate enough to shoot her when she had control of the wheel. But she knew she couldn’t really assume anything about Nadine.

So while she should have been terrified,
she was really just numb. The woman who’d been her friend, her very best friend for years, had lied to her many times over.

“I think I deserve to know why,” she said.

“Just start the damn car,” Nadine ordered.

Claire turned the ignition key. Nadine reached for the heat control and turned it on high. Neither of them had on coats and the air was cold.

“Drive,” Nadine said, bringing
the gun an inch closer.

Claire checked her side mirror and pulled out.

“That way!” Nadine waved her hand, pointing to a street on Claire’s right.

“I thought you needed to go to the airport.”

Nadine didn’t answer her and Claire knew the truth. She wasn’t ever going to see the airport. Nadine wasn’t intending to let her live that long.

She turned as directed, buying time.
“Well?” she prompted.

Nadine turned to her, her normally pretty face red with anger. “My daddy isn’t rich like your daddy. He doesn’t have five or six companies. When I met Bobby—”

“Bobby?” Claire interrupted. “Who’s Bobby?”

“He’s a pharmacist. He made good money and had figured out a way to supplement his income. Between the two of us, we were able to take a lot of drugs. We used
some and sold the rest to people who were willing to pay a whole lot of money for what we had.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “We were a good team.”

“What went wrong, Nadine?” She slowed the car down a couple miles per hour and prayed Nadine wouldn’t notice.

“I got fired.”

“Why?”

“Because Bobby couldn’t keep his numbers straight and they figured out that there were
drugs missing. He got fired, too. So we were both out of a job with no hope of finding another one. Melrey had reported me to the state and my license was suspended.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Claire asked. “I would have helped.”

“I don’t need any handouts from my rich friend. I found a way. I met Sandy Bird at the gambling boat. She was bragging about her husband, the pharmacist.
The joke was on her because in less than two weeks he was sleeping with me. But he was so stupid. I only had to do it twice before I told him that I was going to tell his wife if he didn’t get me what I needed.”

Claire saw a group of construction workers on the side of the road. She deliberately let her eyes rest on the men. Distracted, Nadine looked, too. “Don’t even think about it,” she
warned. She leaned over just far enough to jab the gun into Claire’s side.

Claire kept driving, praying Nadine wouldn’t realize that in the second she’d looked away, Claire had turned on her emergency flashers. The soft clicks reverberated in her ears but with the heat billowing, she didn’t think Nadine could hear the noise. They drove for several more minutes, leaving behind the residential
area and entering a run-down industrial area filled with one-story, tin-sided buildings that appeared deserted.

“So you pretended we were robbed so that you could hock my things.”

“I needed money. I knew your daddy could buy you more.”

“You killed Sandy Bird.”

“I had to. How was I to know that Fletcher would be stupid enough to tell his wife about us? I don’t know why she cared
that he was sleeping around—he was a dud in bed. But she obviously was pissed. I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t going to shoot us. And if she didn’t, I figured it wasn’t going to be long before she said something that would make you realize she wasn’t some stranger.”

“But it didn’t stop there?” Claire asked.

“No.” Nadine waved her gun. “Pull in here.”

It was a gravel-and-dirt alley,
flanked on both sides by gray, windowless, metal buildings. “Get out,” Nadine ordered. Once they were both out of the vehicle, she motioned for Claire to keep walking. She had her gun pointed at Claire’s back.

“You’re never going to get away with this,” Claire said, her throat almost closing up with fear. She’d been so sure that someone would see her, would help her. But now it was just her
and Nadine. “Sam will figure it out.”

“If you hadn’t involved him,” Nadine said, her tone hard, “none of this would have happened. He had to keep trying to figure it out, asking questions, making people nervous. I had been so careful—never calling Fletcher at home or at work, never going to see him there. But I couldn’t be sure that at some point, if somebody kept digging hard enough, they
wouldn’t find a connection between the two of us. Sam Vernelli was ruining everything.”

“You made that call, the one about Tessa.”

Nadine swiped the back of her hand across her face. She was sweating. “I bought a homeless guy a steak dinner. That’s all it took to make sure your cop friend thought everything was connected to your sister’s murder.”

Claire swallowed hard and prayed
that she wouldn’t throw up. “I guess you probably wrote the note I got at work, too.”

“I thought it was a nice touch,” Nadine said, her tone sarcastic. “In there,” she instructed. She waved her gun at a long, one-story cement-and-metal structure that was missing part of the roof and most of its windows. She pushed Claire toward it. Claire stumbled, catching herself on one knee. She took her
time in getting up. She would not go inside that building. If Nadine wanted to kill her, she’d have to do it outside.

Claire stopped walking.

“Move,” Nadine screamed.

Claire turned and let loose with the ball of wet dirt and gravel that she’d picked up. It hit Nadine in the face just as Claire threw her body at the woman.

They rolled in the dirt, legs kicking, arms flailing.

Claire had the advantage of strength and surprise. And it didn’t matter that she had only one really good arm.

She had Nadine flat on her back, sitting on her stomach, when the first squad car pulled into the alley.

Sam’s car was thirty seconds behind. He ran toward her, pulled her tight into his body and rocked her in his strong arms.

He shook so hard that it seemed like the
ground was trembling. “Oh, Claire, sweetheart,” he said. He pulled back just enough to look at her face. “Are you hurt?”

She was covered with dirt and her blouse was torn, but all in all, she felt pretty darn good. She sucked in a deep breath. Life was wonderful.