Chapter 45
I
stare at the receipt a moment, pondering its significance. Why would Nelson need a nanny cam?
I manage to crawl out from under the desk without incurring further injury, and I place the receipt on the blotter and snap a picture of it. Then I start examining the office with a new, more critical eye. The first place I look is the bookcase, but as I’m shuffling volumes around it dawns on me that this isn’t the room Nelson would want to record in.
I grab my camera and head into the counseling room. Dried blood still covers the wall and couch, and the smell makes my breakfast churn threateningly. To distract myself, I focus on shooting as many pictures as I can. Even though Carla’s body is no longer here, I keep seeing it in my mind’s eye, lying on the sofa like a ragdoll, her hand on the floor filled with blood, the gun lying nearby.
And then it hits me: it was her right hand on the floor, the one affected by the stroke. Based on what I observed at her house, there is no way she could have used that hand to shoot herself. I make a verbal note of the fact for the recorder and a mental note to call Izzy when I’m done and fill him in.
I set the camera down on the table next to the stuffed chair and examine the rest of the room. I don’t see anything obvious that looks like a camera, or anything that might be hiding a camera. But then I realize I’m not sure what a nanny cam looks like so I head back into the office and boot up the computer on Nelson’s desk. I launch the Internet browser and type in the Web site that appears on the nanny cam receipt. Seconds later I’m looking at a page filled with cleverly designed mini-cameras.
I print the page off and carry it back into the counseling room with me. One by one I compare the items on the page with the items in the room. And it doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. I set the page aside and grab my camera again, this time shooting pictures of a part of the room I’d missed earlier: the ceiling.
I drag Nelson’s chair across the room until it’s positioned beneath the smoke detector. The cushion is too thickly stuffed to make for a solid foot base so I remove it and, in doing so, I find something crammed between it and the chair’s side: an elastic leg stocking. Something about the stocking niggles at my brain and I hold it up and stare at it a moment. But I’m too distracted by the smoke detector, so I toss the stocking over the back of the chair for later consideration.
When I climb up and peer more closely at the smoke detector, I can now see the lens hiding inside it. I’m about to try to pry the outside portion loose to get a better view when I remember how I’ve mucked things up in this investigation already. I decide it would be better to go outside to get Junior as a witness, and my cell phone so I can call Hurley.
As I climb down from the chair, I nearly fall when a female voice startles me.
“You just had to meddle, didn’t you?”
I jump onto the floor and spin around to find Jackie Nash standing in the doorway of the room. She is leaning against the doorjamb, one hand held behind her back, the other playing with her hair. Though her posturing is casual, the rest of her appearance is not. Her hair is mussed and wild looking, her eyes have an angry glint to them, and her mouth is pinched tight with fury. The scars on her face appear more vivid than usual and I can see that she’s not wearing her usual make-up.
“Jackie? What are you doing here? This is a crime scene. You shouldn’t be in here.”
“And yet here I am,” she says, flashing me a humorless smile.
That smile makes me cringe and the hairs on the back of my neck begin to crawl. “How did you get in? Where’s Junior?”
She shrugs. “Last time I saw him he was hanging on the back bumper of his car flirting with a bunch of women. So typical,” she chastises, shaking her head. “His type is always paying attention to the cute ones. They never notice me, unless it’s to pretend they don’t see my scars and aren’t laughing behind my back.”
“No one is laughing behind your back, Jackie.” Even as I say the words, I can hear how false they ring to my own ears. I’ve been witness to what she’s describing too many times.
“Sure they do,” she says. “I’ve gotten used to it over the years. I’d pretty much resigned myself to a lifetime of lonely spinster-hood, working at Dairy Airs until I die. But then Luke came along and everything changed.”
“I’m glad the counseling has helped you,” I tell her, fearing it hasn’t helped nearly enough.
She scoffs. “Counseling? Luke doesn’t give me counseling. He loves me. Unlike the other cretins out there, he’s able to see past all of this”—she thrusts the scarred side of her face toward me—“to the real me underneath it all.”
“You’re
dating
Luke Nelson?”
“Call it that if you want, but it’s something much more. We’re in love.”
I wince, not relishing the revelations I’m about to make. “Oh, Jackie, you don’t understand. Nelson was just leading you on.” I move toward her, thinking that a sympathetic hand on her shoulder might soften the blow. “The man is . . . sick. He’s got girlfriends in several different towns and—”
The hand behind Jackie’s back shoots forward and I realize why she had it hidden. She’s holding a knife, a really big knife. And it’s now pointed straight at me. I stop where I am, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.
“He doesn’t care about any of those other women,” Jackie says irritably. “They came after him. He told me all about them, how they hang all over him, begging him to sleep with them.” Her lip curls in disgust and she shakes her head sadly. “They are nothing more to him than an outlet for his needs. I’m the only one he truly loves. I’m the only one that really knows how to take care of his needs.”
Suddenly the relevance of the elastic stocking dawns on me. It’s the same type that Jackie would wear to help heal her wound grafts and scar revisions. She must have taken it off during a dalliance here in the office with Nelson.
I stare at her, unsure of what to do or say next. Judging from the crazed look in her eyes, a look I’ve seen plenty of times before on mental patients at the hospital, she is beyond reason. It also means she is highly unpredictable and very dangerous. And she’s blocking my only exit from the room.
Deciding that a dose of shocking reality is my only hope, I couch my next words carefully and try to keep my voice calm despite the fact that my insides are quaking. “You don’t understand, Jackie. There’s more to it than that. Luke Nelson is a rapist and a very ill man. He needs help.”
She shakes her head again, harder and faster. “
You
don’t understand. Luke just has special needs, that’s all. He explained it to me, how his sexual drive is higher than most and he has to find other outlets to get release. It’s not an emotional thing with those other women, only with me. I’m willing to let him get what he needs physically, as long as he comes back to me in the end.”
I stare at her, disbelieving. “He’s raping women, Jackie.”
“No, no, no. Those other women, they all slept with him of their own free will.”
“I’m not talking about the other women he was dating, Jackie. I’m talking about his patients. He’s been drugging them and then raping them. I have proof. He needs to be stopped.”
Jackie laughs, but it’s a brittle, humorless, ugly sound. “Yeah, that’s what that bitch Shannon said, too, when she found out. She said she had to report him because what he was doing was wrong.” She takes a few steps into the room, moving closer to me. The knife now hangs at her side, but I harbor no illusions about her ability to use it in a flash. “But I knew the real reason Shannon wanted to report him,” she goes on. “She was just jealous because she didn’t have the kind of relationship with Luke that I have. She wanted to ruin it for me, to take away my one chance at happiness.”
The significance of her words washes over me like an icy shower. Other facts crash together in my mind, suddenly making a horrifying sense. The blood type found in Shannon’s kitchen was the very rare B negative and I now recall that Jackie’s blood type is the same. We always had to make sure we had it on hand at the hospital whenever she came in for surgery. And I knew Jackie had mental and emotional problems because of all those times I cared for her in the ER during her breakdowns. I also recall Jackie’s incessant questions about how the investigation was going every time I saw her, and how nervously she behaved. I remember the spilt glasses of milk and the slices of cheesecake we found on Shannon’s kitchen table, which I now realize ruled Erik out. Per Jackie’s own words—obviously not realizing she was clearing him in the process—Erik is lactose intolerant.
I’m afraid to ask my next question but have to. “Did you kill Shannon?”
I half expect her to deny it but instead she says, “Of course I did. I had to get rid of her to keep Luke safe. And it would have worked, too, if you hadn’t gone and stuck your nose into things. It’s all your fault that that other woman figured everything out and came here yesterday. She caught me and Luke making love and then she tried to kill him. Darned near did, too. If I hadn’t wrestled the gun from her, she might have shot him a second time.”
“You killed Carla, too?”
“I had to, don’t you see? She came charging in here full of accusations that would have ruined everything. I had to shut her up for good. Luke and I decided we could pass it off as a suicide but you had to come back and keep on snooping. I knew you’d muck it all up. And now Luke is gone.” The tenor of her voice has risen to just shy of hysteria. “Where is he?” she asks shrilly. “Where did you make him go?”
“I have no idea,” I say, backpedaling. “He disappeared yesterday right after we questioned him.”
She moves closer and raises the knife, waving it in front of her like a blind man’s cane. “It’s all your fault,” she says, clearly angry. “Why couldn’t you just leave him alone? Why couldn’t you just leave
us
alone?”
I take another step back and feel the chair hit the back of my legs. My mind scrambles, trying to decide what to do next, trying to figure a way out of this mess. I remember the recorder nestled in my bra and decide I need to keep her talking. Junior Feller is parked right out front and if luck is on my side, he might come in to check on things. If not, at least I can record what Jackie says as evidence. Then my mind registers what the evidence will be used for—to help solve my murder—and I shudder.
“I don’t believe you killed Shannon,” I tell Jackie. “I don’t see how you could have.”
She smirks. “It was easy. She told me about the gun; in fact she asked me if I wanted to buy it. She said Erik had given it to her but it made her nervous having it around. At first I told her I wasn’t interested, but when she told me what she’d discovered about Luke, I changed my mind. I went over there under the pretense of looking at the gun to see if I wanted to buy it. And then I shot her.”
The flat tone of her voice as she admits this sends chills down my spine. How could I not have seen how disturbed she was before this?
Jackie says, “Since I knew Erik was the primary suspect, I took the gun with me when I went to the hospital with Mom for one of her radiation treatments. I had scheduled a mammogram for myself at the same time and it was easy to sneak the gun into a linen closet while I was in the X-ray department. I was careful to wipe it down so my fingerprints wouldn’t be on it, and I knew someone would find it eventually and assume the inevitable . . . that Erik had hidden it there.”
“That was very clever,” I say, hoping a little ego stroking might buy me some time.
“Well, it would have been if you’d just minded your own damned
bus
iness.”
She punctuates the sentence with a downward slash of her knife through the air. And then she starts toward me. Desperate and out of any other ideas, I decide to try a diversion. I purposefully shift my gaze over her shoulder toward the office door and look startled.
It works. Jackie whips around, wielding the knife in front of her, ready to strike at anyone or anything.
And then the most amazing thing happens. Hurley appears in the doorway, right in front of Jackie, right in front of the business end of that knife. Jackie shrieks like a harridan and lunges at him, plunging the knife into his chest.
Chapter 46
J
ackie drives the knife home with a bloodcurdling scream and then pulls it out again.
“No!” I yell. “Jackie, for God’s sake, no!”
Hurley lets out a little grunt, his eyes wide with surprise, and then slumps to the floor. I charge at Jackie’s back with a guttural growl and when I’m only a foot or two away, she hears me and starts to turn.
I ram her on her left side and the two of us fall to the floor, landing hard. Her right arm, with the knife in her hand, hits a floor lamp and the knife clatters to the floor, leaving a splatter trail of Hurley’s blood in its wake. I hear the breath leave Jackie’s lungs with a
whoomph.
I push myself off of her, scramble across the floor on my hands and knees, grab the knife, and then quickly roll onto my back, the knife in front of me, ready for Jackie to come at me. But she’s curled into a fetal position on the floor, crying.
I look beyond her to the doorway and my heart sinks. Hurley is sprawled in the doorway on his back, the left side of his shirtfront soaked with blood. I get up and hurry over to him, praying he’s still alive. Setting the knife on the floor, I quickly assess him, see that he’s breathing and conscious, and then rip his shirt open. The wound, an incision nearly an inch long and who knows how deep near his left shoulder, is oozing a steady flow of blood.
Hurley looks up at me and manages a weak smile. “I’ve fantasized about you ripping my shirt off, Winston, but I don’t think I’m quite up to it right now.” I smile despite how frightened I am for him. “What the hell happened?” he asks.
“Jackie stabbed you. She killed Shannon, Hurley. She’s crazy and I should have seen it. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”
His eyebrows arch. “How is it your fault?”
“She was coming toward me with the knife and I was trying to distract her. I made like there was someone behind her, hoping she would turn to look. And then suddenly you really were behind her. I didn’t know you were here.”
He coughs and the blood flow from his wound surges. I look around frantically for something to dampen it, and when I can’t find anything I take my blouse off and wad it up.
Hurley blinks hard several times and shakes his head. “There you go again . . . taking your clothes off.” He pauses and I notice his breathing is shallower. “Just . . . can’t . . . help . . . yourself . . . with me . . . can you?”
The words come out in weak, gasping breaths, ramping up my panic. I glance back at Jackie and see with relief that she’s still curled up and sobbing a few feet away. I push the wadded blouse harder against Hurley’s chest wound, making him wince and moan.
“I’m sorry, I know it hurts but I have to do it,” I tell him. “You’re bleeding pretty heavily.” He moans again and his eyes roll up in his head.
“Hurley, where is your cell phone?”
He doesn’t answer me and as his head lolls to the side I realize he has passed out. I feel my panic rising and push it back down.
“Damn it, Hurley, don’t you do this to me,” I mutter as I push down harder on the wound with one hand and then start frantically searching his pockets with the other. It’s not in his shirt or his pants. Finally I find it clipped to his belt behind his gun holster. With a shaking hand I manage to unclip it and dial 911.
“911 operator, do you have an emergency?”
“Yes, this is Mattie Winston with the medical examiner’s office. I need police and an ambulance right away. I’m with Detective Steve Hurley and he’s been stabbed.” Hurley’s face looks horribly pale and a lump forms in my throat. “Please hurry,” I plead, my voice cracking.
“Mattie? It’s Jeannie,” the operator says. Jeannie and I have a history; she’s been on duty every time I’ve had to call 911. She didn’t do very well the first time but that’s because she was new to the job and I gave her a challenging case. “Where are you?” Jeannie asks, her voice calm and efficient. She’s definitely gotten better.
My mind struggles to come up with the address but I can’t think of it. “It’s an office. Dr. Luke Nelson’s office. I don’t know the exact address but it’s in the strip mall on the corner of South and Nesbitt. Junior Feller is parked out front.”
“There’s an officer there?” Jeannie asks, sounding confused.
“He’s outside. I don’t think he knows what’s happened.”
“Hold on,” Jeannie says. She puts me on hold for a few seconds and then comes back on. “Junior’s coming in,” she says. “And I’ve dispatched an ambulance to your location.”
“Thanks, Jeannie,” I say and then suddenly Junior is there.
“Holy shit,” Junior says, taking in the scene. “What the hell happened?”
I drop Hurley’s phone and feel for a pulse. It’s there, but it’s fast and thready. I nod toward Jackie. “She stabbed Hurley. He needs an ambulance. She also killed Shannon Tolliver and Carla Andrusson.”
Junior looks momentarily confused. “She killed Shannon and Carla?” he echoes, moving closer to Jackie.
“She did. She confessed to me. She was having an affair with Nelson and apparently Shannon discovered what Nelson was doing and threatened to expose him. So Jackie killed her to shut her up and protect him. Here,” I say, pulling the recorder from between my breasts. “I think I got the whole thing on tape.”
Junior takes the recorder and drops it in his shirt pocket, then he walks over and cuffs Jackie. She puts up no resistance and he leaves her sobbing on the floor so he can come back to Hurley. He talks into his shoulder mike and then tells me, “The ambulance is almost here.”
This information is unnecessary since I can hear the siren close by but it reassures me just the same. “Hang in there, Hurley,” I whisper. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Is he?” Junior asks. “That looks bad.” He eyes the bloody blouse I’m holding, then I see his gaze shift briefly toward my chest.
“My jacket is in the other room. Can you get it for me?”
He fetches the jacket and briefly takes over wound dampening duties while I put it on. By the time I button it up I hear the ambulance siren out front and seconds later the EMTs come rushing in. Within minutes they have taken over the wound management, started an IV, and loaded Hurley onto a stretcher.
“I’m riding with you,” I tell the EMTs. Since my tone leaves no room for equivocation and the guys on the crew know me, they nod their assent. I follow them out to the rig and wait for them to load Hurley inside before I climb in.
We zip through town at a hefty pace with full lights and sirens. It’s a bumpy, rocky ride that leaves me gripping the bench seat and watching as Hurley’s IV sways back and forth.
“His blood pressure is pretty low,” one of the EMTs announces. “Eighty systolic.”
Panic rears its ugly head again and I struggle to keep it at bay. But it isn’t easy. Hurley’s color is nearly as white as the sheets and the amount of blood I can see on the chest dressing makes my throat tighten. Tears sting at my eyes and I swipe irritably at them. Then I take Hurley’s hand in mine and lean over close to his ear. “You better not die on me, Hurley,” I tell him as we hit another bump. “Because I think I’m falling in love with you.”