Obsession (Southern Comfort) (40 page)

“Thank you.”  With another glance at Justin, she followed the woman out the door.

Jus
tin watched them go, having read the look on the nurse’s face, then leaned back against the wall. 

He wondered if Natasha Griffin would make it through the night.

KATHLEEN
shone her flashlight across the interior of the car.

“They already bagged everything from the glove
box and the console,” James said from behind her.  “And the trunk.”

“So I see.”

“Looks like there might be a ball of lint over there that they missed, though.  Maybe she’s a psychic, but instead of tea leaves she reads lint balls, and this particular one told her that Justin was in danger.”  He paused.  “After talking to the detective in charge, I’d actually be more inclined to put my faith in the lint ball.”

Kathleen paused, then looked at him over her shoulder.  “Are you always this big of a smartass?”

“Pretty much.”  His arms were crossed, a black scowl twisting his features.  Apparently he’d gotten into a verbal kerfuffle of some sort with the detective on the case, and there was no love lost on either side.  Since Kathleen strongly suspected that James’ surly disposition was a result of anxiety for his brother – not to mention the young woman whose blood still stained the floorboards in Justin’s front hall – she was inclined to cut him some slack.

Also, the detective hadn’t been especially forthcoming with regards to what they’d found in Natasha’s car.  Not
particularly impressed by the fact that Kathleen was a fellow cop, he hadn’t been willing to let her look at said evidence to see if anything stood out to her.

“That guy’s a douche.”

Because Kathleen was actually inclined to agree with him, she sighed and clicked off her flashlight.  “He’s just… territorial,” she said. 

James snorted to indicate his opinion on that.

When she turned, she found him staring at the blood smeared across the floorboards of the porch.  It gleamed black and menacing in the moonlight, like the slimy trail of some creature from the deepest bowels of Hell.

“It was pretty brave of you to leave the house and help Justin, considering there was an active shooter in the vicinity.”

“What, like I was going to leave him out there to fend for himself while the chick bled to death?”

“Some people might.”

“Some people are assholes.”

A corner of her mouth lifted. 
Then she clicked the light back on, and shone it along the ground, and into the tree line.  She looked back at the porch, judged the angle.  “That was either a lucky shot, or a skilled one.”

“Or a miss.”

When she turned around, James shrugged.  “Just something I was thinking about.  That maybe Justin was the target.  After all, Natasha said she had proof he was in danger.”

Feeling lightheaded, Kathleen briefly closed her eyes. 
Emotion wanted to let panic rise, but she shoved it ruthlessly aside in favor of logic.  “If he was the intended victim, then why didn’t the shooter take advantage of having him pinned down?  He’s not exactly a small target, and he was pretty exposed.”

“Especially when he threw himself bodily on top of Natasha.”

Very much as he’d done to her when the shooting had started in Jugs. 
Damn hero
, Kathleen thought, with a mixture of affection and frustration.

“But yeah,” James agreed.  “It doesn’t make much sense, I guess,
to think that he was the target this time.”

“
This time?” Kathleen repeated, growing interested.

“You know
what I mean.” He shrugged, looking a little uneasy.  “The stalking.” 

“Well,” she pointed out, “Mandy’s dead, so I think we can rule her out for this one.”

“Yeah, but…” he trailed off, then shook his head.  “Never mind.”

“You can’t tell a detective to
never mind. 
That just makes us
mind.
”

James visibly hesitated. 

“James.” Her tone held a warning.  “But
what
?”  

Justin’s little brother frowned, crossed his arms
again, then finally came to some sort of decision.  “I don’t think it was Mandy.  Who’s been stalking Justin, I mean.  Not unless she found a way to send mail from the great beyond, anyway.”

“Mail?”

James nodded.  “Yeah.  I turned it over to that douchebag that was here earlier, just in case it related to this somehow.” He nodded toward the bloodstained porch. “But Justin got something weird in the mail the other day, sent
after
Mandy killed herself.”

“What kind of weird are we talking about?”

“You know he’s gotten gifts, right?  The ornament all done up in fancy wrapping and the book in the frou-frou little bag. Well this time it was just a gift tag.”

“
A gift tag?”

“Yeah.  Sparkly little paper rectangle that said
A Gift For You.”

“But no gift.”

“None that we could find.  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but after the other things that’ve happened…” he shrugged. “This sort of creeped me out.  Because I don’t think whoever sent it simply overlooked the actual gift.  So what the hell did they intend to give him?”

“James,” she said
slowly, as in the back of her mind, something tried to click.  “What color was the sparkly paper?”

“
Uh, kind of… silvery, I guess.  What?” he said, grabbing Kathleen’s elbow when all the color drained from her face. 

Kathleen drew a stead
ying breath, then pulled her phone from her pocket.  “Let’s just say I’m a little creeped out, too.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

JAMES
pulled into the first parking space he found, not particularly caring that it was at the ass-end of the hospital parking lot.  Kathleen had gone into clam mode again after calling her partner and asking him to meet her, but not before making it perfectly clear that she wanted James to attach himself to his brother like a flea on a dog’s ass.  Obviously the gift tag thing had meant something to Kathleen, and whatever it meant had her concerned for Justin.

He’d tried to contact Corelli to see if he’d found out anything about that post office box, but hadn’t heard back from him yet. 

James was pretty much vibrating with repressed frustration.

Caffeine wasn’t going to help alleviate that, but he grabbed the insulated mugs that held another round of coffee for himself and Justin, since it looked to be a long night.  Apparently Natasha had survived the surgery but remained in critical condition, and Justin didn’t want to leave the hospital just yet.

Which meant that James couldn’t leave the hospital, either.

Of course,
he couldn’t stay at Justin’s house anyway, given the fact that it was a crime scene. 

So much for that relaxing stay at the beach while he figured out what to do with his life.

Wondering at the vagaries of fate, which had placed him in Charleston just as the eye of his brother’s personal storm was making landfall, he locked Justin’s truck and strode toward the door.

“Doctor Wellington?” cam
e a voice, seemingly from one of the thick, leafy bushes that softened the clinical feel of the hospital grounds.  James looked around, wondering if he’d somehow passed Justin without realizing it, but then he saw the woman waving her arm at him from where she sat on a bench, all but buried in the shrubbery.

James glanced over his shoulder, then down, realizing that he still wore the scrubs he’d changed into earlier.  Apparently, in the dim light, the woman had mistaken him for Justin.  He veered off toward her, prepared to disabuse her of that notion, when recognition kicked in. 

“Hey,” he said, a surprised smile on his face.  “It’s… wait, don’t tell me.  Shelley, right?”  He recognized her from Murphy’s – she’d waited on him several times – though her pretty, flirtatious countenance was drawn into lines of worry, her caramel-colored skin gone the color of ash.  “Hey,” he said again, concern replacing pleasure.  “Are you okay?”

She blinked at him, then stood up, rubbing her hands on the thighs of her jeans.  “Sorry,” she said, looking slightly embarrassed.  “I thought you were your brother.”

“Well, the scrubs don’t help.  We get that a lot, anyway, despite the fact that he’s older and a whole lot less fun.”

She smiled, though it faded quickly.  When she wrapped her arms around herself in an apparent attempt to
keep warm or to keep herself together – he was betting on the latter – he hesitated, then nodded toward the bench.  “Why don’t you sit back down?”

She stared
at the bench as if she’d never seen it before, and had no idea as to its intended purpose.  Stifling a sigh, James figured he’d lead by example.  He lowered himself, placed the two travel mugs between his feet and then patted the seat beside him. The metal still retained the faintest trace of warmth from her body. 

Shelley sat.  The
n she drew in a deep breath, expanding her lungs in such a way that James would have appreciated immensely under normal circumstances, but since she was clearly in some kind of distress, he forced himself to look away.

“Sorry,” she said again, then turned her head toward him.  “I’m in… shock, I guess.”

“What happened?” he asked again.

“My f-f-friend was shot.”  When her teeth started to chatter, James reached down for one of the travel mugs.  She appeared to need it more than he did.  “Here,” he said.  “
Hot coffee, with plenty of sugar.  I think you could use some.”

She shot him a glance
, then looked at the coffee a moment before accepting.  “God, that’s good,” she said, closing her eyes in pleasure after taking a sip.  “Thanks.”

“No problem.  I’m sorry about your friend.  What happened?”

This time the look she gave him held surprise.  “You don’t know?  I thought that was why you were here.”

“I’m here to see my brother.”  Then the pieces came together.  “Wait, Natasha Griffin is your friend?”

Shelley nodded, clutching the coffee mug like a lifeline.  “My roommate.  That’s how I met your brother – when he saved her life before.  I thought you knew.”

Now that she’d mentioned it, James thought he remembered her saying something about Jugs – the scene of the other shooting – the first time he’d met her.
  “Yeah, I just didn’t put it all together, I guess.  I’m sorry,” he said, looking over at her.  “I’m sure this has to be a shock, considering all you’ve both been through already.  Any more news on her condition?”

She shook her head, staring at the lid of the coffee.  “I don’t know.  I’ve been afraid to go in.  Natasha…” she took another deep breath.  “Natasha and I had a fight a couple days ago.  A pretty bad one.  The police,” she hesitated, then seemed to gather up her courage.  “The police asked me a bunch of questions.  About my car.  I came out of work one night and found the front bumper dented – like someone had backed out in the parking lot and hit it, you know?  But they said how my car had been involved in some kind of accident over in Mount Pleasant.  I mean, what?  How’s my car supposed to be
running people off the road while I’m working? Like it’s Christine or something?  If I hadn’t had a solid alibi, they probably would have arrested me.  But since dozens of people saw me in Murphy’s, they asked did anyone else have a spare key. And while the answer to that is no, Na-Natasha knew where I kept one.” 

She took another sip of coffee.  “So I had to ask her if she’d been borrowing my car without telling me, and one thing leading to another, it ended up with her walking out.  We’d been having some issues anyway, what with her overdosing and then trying to say as how she hadn’t done it herself and coming up with stories about drug dealers trying to kill her, and me, having some experience with addiction, tried to get her to just come clean, you know?  If she had a problem, we’d deal with it.”  She shook her head.  “And now she’s lying in there, another bullet in her, and I have to live with the fact that I didn’t believe her and that maybe the last words we had between us were hard.”

She blew out a breath, looked at James.  “Wow, did I just unload on you or what?”

“It’s okay,” he said, offering a reassuring smile even while his mind was working.

“You’re a good listener,” she said, then her eyes narrowed.  “Of course, so was that asshole the other night.”

“What asshole?
”

She waved a hand.  “Just some guy.  Came on to me in the Murphy’s parking lot, sweet talked me into having coffee with him, and now that I look back on it, managed to finagle a whole bunch of information out of me about the dent in my car.  Mighty suspicious timing, you ask me, since the cops questioned me not two days after.  Probably
undercover, hoping to trip me up or something,” she muttered.  “Jerk.”

“Uh,” James cleared his throat.  “Was this jerk about six feet, mid-thirties, dark hair and eyes?”