A Perfect Life (19 page)

CHAPTER 31

The two-story brick building looked to be at least a century old, but it had been a well-tended century. Manicured boxwoods lined the bottom floor. Freshly painted shutters flanked every window. The front entrance was bright and welcoming.

Scott pushed a buzzer labeled C.

“Yes?”

“It's Scott.” The door clicked, and he pushed through into the central hallway. Apartments A and B were immediately inside the foyer, on his right and left. Scott continued down the hall, and the back right door swung open. Natalie stood in the doorway, her clothes casual now, her hair soft and loose.

As he approached, she tried a weak smile. “I was worried about you. Did you get something to eat?”

He shook his head as he stepped past her into the apartment. “Not yet. I needed to think
about . . . things.”

Natalie closed the door and turned to face him. “Like whether I was sending the cops to the Omelette Shop to arrest you?”

“Like whose e-mail address kept popping up at the hospital.”

“Have a seat.”

Scott could feel anger pushing blood into his face. He pushed back against emotions that had less to do with Natalie than almost anything else. But he wanted a name. “I need to know who Click was contacting in the psych ward at the hospital.”

Natalie circled around to an overstuffed chair and waved her hand at the sofa. Scott walked over and dropped onto soft cushions. Natalie sat down, crossed her ankles in the chair, and leaned forward. “Just so you'll know I'm right, let me quickly explain something.” Her eyes examined Scott's face, and the irritation registered. “I said
quickly.
It'll help. Okay?” She took a breath. “Like pretty much every company on earth, the hospital has a procedure for assigning e-mail addresses. You can't just let people choose whatever they want, like at home. It'd be chaos. So the hospital uses a combination of letters from the employee's name and a department code number. Specifically, we use the first four letters of the last name, followed by the department code, followed by the first letter of the employee's first name. Sounds complicated, but—”

Scott cut her off in midsentence. “It was . . . bill-thirteen-k at boston hospital dot com. If thirteen is the psychiatry department”—he stumbled as his mind tripped over the idea—“Click was writing to Kate Billings.” His eyes bounced around the room, then locked into Natalie's. “That's it, isn't it?”

Natalie nodded. “That's it, but what does it mean? Who is Kate Billings? She wasn't on my e-mail list because her name was automatically expunged when she terminated her employment at the hospital.”

“She was Patricia Hunter's private nurse.” Scott rose to his feet and walked around the room, stopping at a window overlooking a small courtyard. “I went to her for help. We slept together the night before she left Boston.” He turned to face Natalie. “After Mrs. Hunter's murder, Kate said she was too upset to continue at the hospital.”

“But apparently not too upset to boink you a couple of days later.”

“I thought it was about shared trauma.”

“For God's sake. What the hell are they teaching you guys over there at Harvard? Snap out of it. Most of the time, sex is just sex. Two people decide they want some and then come up with justifications for banging around like billy goats. With Kate, you just went to a bad person for help. She strung you along, then decided to take advantage of the situation and ride the baloney pony.” She shook her head. “Damn, Scott. How far are you into this woman? Does she know enough to have set you up for the Hunter woman's murder? Are you still in contact with her?” He didn't answer. “Well?”

A low chuckle started at the back of Scott's throat.

Natalie leaned forward again. “Are you all right? You're not flipping out on me, are you?”

A tired grin spread across his face. All he said was “Baloney pony?”

“Cute.” Natalie wasn't smiling. “There was one other e-mail to a separate address. r-e-y-n-thirteen-o-at-boshosp.”

“Right. I'd just found a second e-mail from Click to that address when you shoved me out of the way and logged off.”

“I could have left you there.”

“I'm not complaining. Just . . .” He picked up the e-mails and thumbed through the pages. “Here it is. Reyn13o. So it's another address in the psych department, and . . .” Scott's thoughts stumbled. “It's . . .” He stopped again to think. “If it were r-e-y-n-thirteen-p, that would be Phil Reynolds, the department head.” He looked at the e-mail again. Natalie let him look. This was going to be hard for him. Finally, he looked up at her. “It's Dr. Reynolds, isn't it?”

She nodded. “I already checked. The O is for Oscar.” She looked frightened. Her face had gone pale. “Oscar Phillip Reynolds.”

Scott looked back down at the e-mail. All he said was “Shit.”

Weak morning light floated through gauze curtains. Scott's whole body felt cramped. He tried to turn over, rolled off Natalie's sofa, and hit the carpet with a thud. A gravelly moan followed the fall. He gripped the edge of the coffee table and got to a sitting position.

He was rubbing his eyes, and considering the probability of achieving a full upright position, when Natalie's bedroom door opened. “You okay?”

“I'm alive.”

“Good to know.” Natalie walked into the living room and leaned down to click on a lamp. Her eyes moved over her rumpled guest, and she looked amused. “You've looked better. That I-didn't-shave-this-week beard went out with Wham!, by the way.”

Scott tried to smile. “It's part of my crafty disguise.”

“Umm.” She moved around the room, opening curtains and clicking on more lights. “Worked like a charm. Some guy you didn't even know recognized you from a picture on the nightly news. I'm going to make some breakfast. Go get a shower.” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out butter and a cardboard carton of eggs. “Go! And do yourself a favor: Shave the beard. By now the cops have a report you're wearing one, and”—she gave a theatrical shudder—“it makes you look like an extra on
Miami Vice
.”

Scott had been watching her move around the apartment. It had been a nice view. Now he pointed to her bedroom door. “Through there?”

Natalie smiled, and there was something in it to let Scott know that she approved of being watched. “Yes,” she said. “Through there. Hurry. Eggs'll be ready in ten minutes.”

Natalie's bed had the look of being made up by someone in a hurry. Scott walked through into the bathroom, where he found a marble-topped vanity overflowing with tubes of mascara, blue jars of Noxzema, and pastel disks of powder and blush and tinted, scented creams.

The place fairly reeked of girl. And Scott smiled at the calming normalcy of it.

Inside the shower, the full weight of Kate Billings's involvement began to settle over him. The thought of sleeping in her bed, of being inside her, turned Scott's stomach. He found himself literally shaking his head to clear the mental pictures of Kate smiling down at him, her round breasts bouncing wildly as she rode the baloney pony. He almost smiled at the perfection of Natalie's expression. It captured his and Kate's sexual encounter—at once ridiculous and crass.

Kate's involvement in setting him up explained a lot, but it raised a hell of a lot of questions at the same time. It explained how Click gained access to the hospital computer system, how the porno ended up on the psych department hard drive, and, most tellingly, how Click knew enough to frame him. Scott had no doubt that—somewhere between Kate's smile and her bare bouncing breasts—some poor slob in IT or human resources would have told her everything in Scott's personnel file. “No parents, no family. Gee, I don't know why you'd want his social security number, but here it is.”

Maybe it had been more complicated than that. Probably not. What had Click said in Budzik's warehouse? “Nothin' complicated about it.” Scott turned to let steaming water wash over his skull and face, and Click's words came back. “All we did was junk up some computers with porno, break into your cheap-ass crib a couple times, and rent that house out in the boondocks. Nothin' to it.”

Is it really that easy, he wondered, to ruin a person's life?

Reynolds fit in there somewhere. Could it be that someone of his stature would get involved in murder just for sex with a younger woman?

A draft of cool air cut through the steam. “Natalie?”

Scott's heart pumped harder. Someone moved in the bathroom. He pushed at his hair, yanked open the door, and stepped out with his fist raised.

Natalie screamed.

Scott reached for a towel. “What the hell are you doing?”

She held her hand over her heart. “Jeez. You've been in here forever, so I looked in to check on you. I was just gathering up your clothes. This”—she held up a wadded pile of clothing—“is no way to treat a suit.”

Scott wrapped the towel around his waist. “Why didn't you answer me?”

“Didn't hear you. Shower running, I guess.” Natalie nodded at the sink. “There's a fresh disposable razor there for you.” She smiled. “I see you've warmed up. I never really believed men when they said temperature made that much difference.”

“What are you talking about?”

Natalie turned to leave.

As she stepped through the door, Scott's face colored. All he said was “Oh.”

After shaving and brushing his hair, Scott stepped out into the bedroom. She'd taken his clothes. A set of blue doctor's scrubs was laid out on the bed. He dropped the towel and pulled them on.

Natalie was curled up on the living room sofa. She glanced up as he came in. “They fit okay?”

“Yeah. Perfect.” He examined her smiling face. “Old boyfriend?”

“Dated a doc last year.” She shrugged. “Too little time, too much ego.”

He nodded. “My clothes . . .”

“Your suit is hanging in my closet. You should steam it later in the bathroom. I threw your shirt and underwear in the wash with some things of mine.”

Scott walked over to sit on the sofa beside her. “Thank you.” He could see a plate of eggs and toast growing cold on the kitchen counter.

“No problem. You're a guest, and . . . well, you've been through hell. The least I could do was toss your clothes in the wash.”

“You've done a hell of a lot more than that.”

She turned to face him on the sofa, crossing her legs Indian style. Leaning forward, she said, “I've been thinking about that. Some guy recognized you at the hospital, right?” She didn't wait for an answer. “Saw you with the beard and shorter hair. Saw your new suit.”

“So much for the disguise.”

“Right, but . . . I think I'm gonna have a problem. The cops are eventually going to talk to the guy who said he saw you. When they do, somebody's very likely to realize that the guy's description of you in your disguise is identical to the description the cops have of the man I was”—she cleared her throat—“
caught with
in the help desk room.”

“But there's no way for them to prove anything. You can't be arrested for making out with a guy who resembles someone who may look like me. Problem is—”

“The problem is,” she interrupted, “I might not get arrested, but I can get fired. Forget for a minute that I have no name to go with my bare-assed beau—which will not make the cops happy—the hospital's not going to put up with an employee having sex in her office. Particularly one she shares with seven other people.”

“What about Jim Mardy? He nailed some nurse in front of a security camera. A guard finally turned on the intercom to tell Mardy he was on camera. Hell, everyone in the hospital knows that story, and Mardy's still on the fast track to chief resident.”

“Mardy's a physician. I'm a lowly computer jock.” She shook her head. “Different rules. And it's not worth debating. Look, I made a couple of calls while you were in the shower. Everything you say about this Kate Billings checks out. There's even been some gossip around the hospital.” She hesitated. “Some of it—to be honest—about you and her. But more than a few people thought her leaving was . . .” She struggled for the word.

“Opportune?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I guess the word is
uncharacteristic
. Apparently, Nurse Billings was not really known for her tender heart. People liked her—that's what my friend says—but the word is that she wasn't particularly emotional, and she didn't scare.

“I'm getting off point here. The bottom line is that I'm going to have a problem as soon as the cops get hold of whoever ID'd you. I won't get arrested. At least, I don't think they can do that. But I'm going to have a very uncomfortable meeting with my supervisor. And the cops are going to come see me. No way around that.”

Scott got to his feet. “I can't believe I didn't think of that.”

“We were both exhausted when we got here last night.”

“I need to get out of here, fast.”

“We.”

“Huh?” His mind was elsewhere, already planning a return to Click's neighborhood.

“I said ‘we.'
We
need to get out of here fast.”

Now she had his attention. “No way.”

“Scott . . .”

“No way in hell.” His voice rose. “This could screw up your whole life. Mine is probably already screwed. I'm just trying to stay out of jail. My future is already shit. Just forget—” A bell
ding-dong
ed somewhere in the apartment, and Scott stopped short.

“Someone's at the door out front. Hang on. It's probably nothing.” Natalie walked to the apartment door and pressed an intercom. “Yes?”

The voice came, full of static. “Police, Ms. Friedman. We have a warrant. The backyard is covered. We don't want to damage the door or upset your neighbors. Please open up.”

She glanced back at Scott, who sighed audibly then nodded. She pressed the entry buzzer.

Scott walked quickly across the room and took
Natalie's shoulders in his hands. He locked his eyes into hers. “Listen. I only have time to say this once. You knew I was a suspect in Patricia Hunter's murder. You did not know I was wanted by the police. Got that?
You didn't know.
”

She nodded.

“Good. I came to you in the hospital asking for help. You refused.”