Knock Off (21 page)

She looked tempted but said, “I can’t. The fifteenth is right around the corner and I’ve got two dozen more returns left to prepare.”

“My treat?”

She immediately cast me an accusatory glance. “You can’t afford to treat during a suspension. Save your money and my time. Just come right out and tell me what you actually need.”

“Twenty minutes,” I said, pulling the folder out of my purse.

“I can give you five.”

“I lost my job today,” I reminded her in a pathetic tone.

“I might have a killer after me. By the way, he struck again a little while ago.”

Jane perked right up. “What happened?”

“Someone pushed a juror down a flight of stairs.”

“This is scary stuff. I think you should tell Patrick to take you away until they catch this guy.”

“Step one is telling Patrick about all this, period.”

“He doesn’t know?”

“He did read about my arrest in the paper when he got home this morning.”

“Why didn’t you fill him in on all the other things?”

I shrugged. Truth was, I wasn’t sure why running into the safe haven of his arms wasn’t my first and only choice.

“He was on a flight. I’m seeing him later. I’ll tell him in person.”

Jane eyed me, openly suspicious. “What gives? I mean, I know you’ve been wavering on the whole Patrick thing, but I thought the big points in his favor were his kindness and his stability. Isn’t that exactly what you need right now?”

Lifting my hair off my neck, I held it while I stretched the stiff, tense muscles around my shoulders. “It is what I need,” I readily admitted. “I mean, I’m scared I might be blowing my whole relationship with him for . . .”

For what? A chance to have wild, meaningless, fabulous sex with Liam? The same Liam who is still boffing his ex and thus far hasn’t shown one iota of interest in me?

Dropping my hair, I raked it back into place with my fingers. “Ignore me. I’m just having a weird day. Weird week, weird month. Hell, weird everything.”

“Perhaps it’s time for you to admit that you aren’t Buffy the Jury-Killer Slayer?”

Smiling at her teasing, I couldn’t do anything else but agree. “It probably is, but until then, explain these to me.”

I handed her the envelope, and she pulled out the copies of Hall’s bank statements and other financial documents.

“How did you get these?”

“They fell from the sky,” I lied, not wanting to put Jane in any kind of ethically compromising position. While she looked at the pages, I took out my phone and hit the REDIAL button. Still no answer at the Rice residence. “Can you just tell me if there’s anything out of the ordinary about their spending habits?”

Jane peered at me over her glasses. “In five minutes?

No.”

“But, Jane? I—”

“It will take me a little longer than that.” Opening her desk drawer, she pulled out her purse—a really adorable Dooney and Bourke tassel bag that I hoped had a sister or a cousin who would find its way to the outlet store sometime soon. Jane handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “Nature’s Way Eatery is two blocks down. Grab me a tofu burger, add sprouts, hold the onion, and a bottle of water. Get yourself something, too. If I know you, you’ve had a gazil-lion cups of coffee and nothing else.”

“That really hurts, Jane.” I snatched the bill out of her
hand. “Here I am unemployed and you’re mocking my lack of food.”

“Bullshit. There is no correlation between your job status and your lousy eating habits. Your body is toxic from all the caffeine and sugar. Go.” She shooed me away with her hand. “You need a salad, some roughage, something with some nutritional value. Order something green.”

“Irish coffee?” I wondered softly when I was safely out of earshot. It fit the criteria. It has green sprinkles on the top.

Nature’s Way is the kind of place I normally cross the street to avoid. It’s always staffed by people who know their HDL, LDL, and BMI by rote. I didn’t know one DL

from the other and could care less. The only three-initials thing I care about is BMW, not BMI. The employees at Nature’s Way are always rail-thin, and most share the goal of someday running the New York City Marathon. They’re missing the whole point of visiting New York. You can put on ugly nylon shorts and pin a number to your shirt anywhere. New York was meant to be shopped.

The restaurant smelled like freshly mowed lawn. Something green was whirling in a blender while another machine sucked in a carrot and dripped out thick orange sludge. No way I would drink that. If I was truly meant to have carrot juice, the carrot would be capable of being squeezed without help from a two-hundred-pound juicer.

The menu was one of those blackboards that created a rainbow effect when the listings were handwritten each day. Food freaks are nutsy when it comes to freshness. Me, I like the occasional preservative. I want to know the cooties have been chemically and completely annihilated before I put anything in my mouth.

I placed Jane’s order, then hunted for something that didn’t sound too disgusting. I almost leapt for joy when I saw they had grilled portabella sandwiches. That would taste good even on the seven-grain, stone-ground, dry-as-dust roll.

I asked the counter person for a bottle of water for Jane and a Diet Coke for me. She was fine with the water, but blanched and lectured me on the evils of any beverage containing aspartame. I swear, her haughty attitude made me want to wait for her in the alley, wrestle her to the ground, and squirt a whole container of Cheez Whiz down her pristine throat.

Before the food—and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word—was ready, I called Dave Rice again. Still nothing but the chipper request to leave a message. I didn’t bother.

I thought about my earlier conversation with Liam.

Okay, I thought about Liam’s incredible body, then eventually got around to our last conversation and figured I should probably get my hands on a copy of the trial transcripts. If we really were going back to square one, I had to reread them and look over the exhibits entered into evidence.

I had a pretty good feeling that Sara Whitley had a copy, or if not, could get me one. Especially if she was, as I suspected, so sloshed she’d agree to almost anything. Not that I wanted to take advantage of a genteel drunk, but it was all for a good cause: saving my life, and my job. I gave her a call. One drink too late. Sara was so far inside the bottle she was pressed between the layers of glass. Trying to get anything out of her was useless. I’d try again in the morning.

I did have some of the exhibits. Well, Liv had them. I could get started there. I knew the overnight mail guy was always at her office by ten. I’d retrieve them and at least have something constructive to do in the morning other
than obsess over my mandatory meeting with Dr. and Mrs. Hall and/or wait for Liam and the cops to decide how and why the latest juror died.

Until my job-related spanking was over, I’d have nothing but time to read the trial transcripts. At least the complete numbing of my brain cells would distract me from my shopping suspension.

I returned to Jane’s carrying two white bags from Nature’s Way and a brown one from the liquor store where I’d stopped to get my soda. She dove into the food with a lot more gusto than I.

“Your change is in there, too,” I told her. “Thanks for . . .

dinner.”

She smiled. “Someday you’ll thank me for caring about your health.”

As I struggled to swallow the dry bite of sandwich, I knew today wasn’t that day. “So, anything hinky in Hall-ville?”

“What do you know about a five twenty-nine?”

“It’s one less than a five thirty?”

Jane grinned. “See this?” she said, laying some monthly statements in a row atop the other piles on her desk. She’d circled entries on four of the six statements. “A five twenty-nine is a limited-use custodial account that permits the designated trustee—”

“In English, please?”

“Someone’s been raiding the daughter’s college account.”

“Since when?”

“Early December.” She went on to explain, “A five twenty-nine is supposed to be used for college tuition and expenses. Making these cash withdrawals—that clearly weren’t legitimately being used for those purposes—racked up some hefty fines and penalties.”

“Where did the money go?”

“Impossible to know. The trustee—either Dr. Hall or his wife, they’re listed as either/or signatories—authorized the withdrawals, then had the money put into his business account. Then electronic payments were made from that account to the Hall’s personal account.”

“So he was blackmailing himself?”

She shook her head. “A day or so after the money fun-neled through his medical practice to his personal account, it was withdrawn. In cash.” She added, “The smart way.

No transaction ever exceeded ten thousand dollars, so no flags went up to the banks or the IRS.”

“How do I find out where the cash went?”

“Someone has to tell you. There’s no paper trail. Unless you can find the person who deposited the same cash amounts in roughly the same time periods. Then the Halls’

bank might be able to compare the serial numbers of their cash on hand to the cash deposited in the blackmailer’s account. It’s a long shot.”

My head hurt. “So, you’d have to know finances to know how to do this, right?”

“Maybe,” Jane hedged. “I mean, anyone with enough motivation could figure out how to do all this. It isn’t like the rules are secret.”

“But you’d have to know Hall had the five twenty—
whatever, though, right?”

She shook her head. “That’s what threw me. The Halls have several other accounts with more than enough money to cover the amounts taken from their daughter’s college fund. And they wouldn’t have been paying outra-geous penalties if they’d cashed out a few CDs or dipped into their money markets.”

Wrapping my half-eaten sandwich in its paper wrapper, I sipped my soda.

“What are you going to do?” Jane asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I need to find the blackmailer.”

“Any ideas who that is?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Nurse Callahan didn’t show up for work?” I asked the woman seated behind the information desk wearing a peach apron over her clothing with a big smiley face pinned above her brass nameplate.

“I believe she called in sick. Would you care to leave a message?”

How was I going to accuse the woman of blackmail if she didn’t have the decency to be where she was supposed to be? Helen Callahan was my best suspect. It explained almost everything. She was one of the nurses who’d treated Brad Whitley as well as his organ donor. She would have had access to the drugs that had shown up on the not yet complete lab tests. And she had worked with Dr. Hall for years, so she probably knew all his dirty little secrets.

The one thing it didn’t explain was the murders. Why would she need to kill jurors? I was still missing something. A big something.

I’d deviated from my original plan and raced to the hospital in hopes of catching the nurse early in her shift rather than waiting until its end. I scribbled my name and cell number on a message slip, handed it to the volunteer and walked back to my car. I didn’t think I’d get a call from Helen Callahan any time soon. Not if she was busy, off on a killing spree.

I had no way to track down the nurse, not without cold-calling about thirty numbers from the phone book. Hell, with my luck, she probably wasn’t even listed, which meant I could spend hours chasing my tail. And now I was late for my appointment with Harold Greene.

Maybe Liam would have better luck. I called him as soon as I was on the way to see the last male juror on the list. “Hello?” It was a sultry female voice.

“Um, hi. I’m sorry, I must have dialed incorrectly.”

“Hey, you’re that paralegal, right?” she said cheerily.

“Yes.”

“This is Ashley. We met the other night at the Blue Martini.”

“Hi.” I sounded so lame I cringed. Then I felt a surge of anger. Liam was supposed to be at the lab waiting on my results. I could even buy him stopping at the police station, checking on any details in the death of Daniel Summers.

But no way could I come up with a scenario that required the presence of the ex-wife.

“Finley, right? Oh, honey,” she said as she sighed heavily, “Liam told me about your day, about getting fired and everything. You must feel just terrible. Why don’t you come over here and join us? I’ve already done my thing on Liam, and he’s a whole new man. I’d be happy to do you, too.”

She wanted to “do” me? What does that mean? She’d
“done” Liam. I had a pretty good idea and a pretty vivid mental picture on that one.

“Finley, honey? Are you still there?”

“Yes. Yes I am. Thank you, Ashley, but I’m not comfortable with having you . . . do me. I’m not really into that.

When Liam can, have him give me a call. Okay?”

“He’s right here. Hang on.”

I wanted to snap the phone closed and pretend this conversation had never happened. Too late.

“Hi.”

I hate you, Liam McGarrity. “Yes, well, um.”

“You’re stammering.”

“I thought you were staying on top of things at the lab.”

But, no, you’ve been on top of your ex-wife, you so-not-divorced jackass.

“I’ve had a long day. I needed to relax, and Ash has incredible hands.”