Rise of the Notorious (36 page)

Grant nodded, acknowledging her point, while Linc just looked furious. “Damnit. If this was her, I will never forgive myself.”

He stalked off, leaving his siblings behind in the empty waiting room to wallow under the weight of this new revelation. Grant released a long, slow breath as he turned to face his sister.

“I’ll go call the detective, have her round up Jorja.” He placed both hands on Madison’s shoulders, leveling his gaze with hers. “Go see Wyatt. He should be out of surgery by now.”

“It’s probably time you told Quinn about the brakes,” Madison said curtly. “She deserves to know the truth.”

He sighed. “Yes, she does. After I call the detective, I’ll fill her in.”

He turned and left, cell phone already to his ear. She watched him disappear around the corner and scowled.

The urge to hunt down that damn actress and strangle her herself was overwhelming, but Madison fought it back like one does a rabid dog. She clawed the feeling from her system and focused instead on the task at hand.

She would go to Wyatt. The cops would question Jorja. And the truth would, at last, be revealed.

“Do you
know
who you are talking to?” Jorja hissed, blue eyes aflame as she stared Detective Tina Crawford directly in the eye.

Coolly indifferent to Jorja’s question, Tina continued. “We have reason to believe that you may be involved in the shooting earlier today in front of the Vasser Hotel.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Jorja crossed her arms, her low cut, red dress emphasizing the assets she’d made money from her entire life. She couldn’t believe she was sitting in a horrid, metal chair at the police station, being questioned like a common criminal. It was degrading and downright humiliating. Those bastards would be hearing from her lawyer. “I didn’t do
shit
.”

“The Vasser family believes otherwise. We have records of you making a phone call to Madison Vasser’s office recently. Ms. Vasser claims you were hostile.”

Jorja scoffed, rolling her eyes. “That bitch can rot. So we have a feud; I didn’t try to kill her.”

“Most of the eyewitnesses confirm that the shooter was a female. Can you think of any other woman, besides yourself, who may have a motive to shoot Ms. Vasser?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Tina’s face remained professionally detached as she jotted down a few notes in her pad. When she looked back up to Jorja, she tapped her pen on her palm thoughtfully. “Ms. Hale, where were you at 12 o’clock this afternoon?”

Panic noticeably flashed in Jorja’s eyes. “At my apartment. I only stay there when I’m in the city.”

“Why are you in the city, exactly?”

Jorja’s hands wrung together in her lap, but she let her earlier anger chase the icy edge of fear from her expression. “Does it matter? It’s not against the law to travel, is it?”

“I placed a phone call to your agent back in Los Angeles a few days ago. He says he hasn’t heard from you, and that you had no audition or engagement in the city that he knew of. He was actually quite worried about you.” Tina’s head tilted ever so slightly to the side, her calm blue eyes unflinching as she watched Jorja. She mentally stored away every blink, every twitch, every flare of temper and jolt of alarm, thinking to herself that the woman was showing all the signs of a guilty conscience. Whether she was feeling guilty over having attempted to shoot Madison Vasser or if it was something else entirely, Tina couldn’t be sure. But she was damn certain the woman was hiding something. “Do you have anything to say to that?”

Jorja’s cheeks flushed angrily, arrogance and temper getting the best of her. “I wanted to prove that Madison was responsible for my boyfriend’s death.”

“Win Vasser,” Tina confirmed, glancing down briefly at her notes. “He committed suicide.”

“Yeah, yeah, so he did. That doesn’t mean he
wanted
to. She drove him to it by keeping him locked up in that godforsaken room and for feeding him bad drugs. I told this to the other cops already, but they didn’t give a shit. She probably bought them off.”

“Did Win ever express a fear of his daughter to you? Give you reason to believe she may try to harm him?”

Jorja snarled, jumping on the statement. “Of course he did! He was terrified of her. I even saw her attack him at that fundraiser they had. Socked him right in the face. She had murder in her eyes, I’m telling you. She had wanted him dead ever since he went public with the little secret that she and Grandpa Vasser were hiding.”

Tina jotted down a few more notes. “The murder of Winston Vasser that Win witnessed when he was a child.”

“Yeah. Screwed poor Winnie up for life. And Queen Bitch couldn’t give a rat’s ass.” Jorja snorted scathingly. She stared at the metal table before her, eyes unseeing. “I even heard she’s been using Vicodin. That drug test was obviously faked. Eddie wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Eddie is the drug dealer?” Tina asked smoothly, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she quickly jotted down the name.

Jorja nodded. “Dumb Russian fool.”

“Is that where you purchased the drugs for Win?”

Jorja’s eyes widened in a sudden, wild flash as she realized she had said too much. “No!”

Tina flipped through her notepad absently, keeping her cool even as her adrenaline kicked into high gear. “The officers who questioned you following Win’s suicide noted in their report that you claimed not to know the dealer. Are you changing your story now?”

Jorja hesitated, her face a contorted mess of rage, fear, and shock. “So I knew him, sue me. I picked up the drugs for Win, but I thought it was just pot. I didn’t know it had hard shit mixed in.”

“But Eddie told you later on that he had sprayed the marijuana with PCP at Win’s request?” Tina pressed, leaning closer over the table toward Jorja.

Jorja’s lips curled. “No, he said Queen Bitch told him to do it. Apparently she picked up her daily dose of pills and mentioned that Win was looking for something that would make him jump out of a window or something like that. So he spiked the pot and handed it right over to me when I showed up.”

“He claims that Madison Vasser told him to tamper with the marijuana?”

“Yes,” Jorja snapped viciously.

“And when you found out that Madison was responsible, you set out to get rid of her in an attempt to avenge your lover’s death,” Tina began, pulse jumping as the pieces began to fall into place. “You went to the press on your own to try and point the finger at her without endangering yourself, and when that didn’t work, you acted as an anonymous informant to Senator Shaw, who played along with you and did his own stint with the press. When that still had no effect, you bumped up the stakes and anonymously accused Madison of being addicted to drugs
and
of knowing her grandfather’s murderous secret.”

“Wait one goddamn minute,” Jorja stammered, blinking uncontrollably as she tried to formulate an argument, her lips moving soundlessly. She managed a few words laced with frenzied heat. “I didn’t know that bitch knew about the murder before Win exposed the truth. That wasn’t me.”

Tina only continued, her voice still level even as her eyes sparked with knowledge and authority. “When that
still
didn’t work, when she outsmarted you and became a hero in the public eye, you had to change tactics, hit her where she would feel it. So you hired someone to kidnap her sister. You ordered in the ransom note that she be thrown in prison for what she had done, not because you wanted money, but because you wanted justice. Justice for Win. When she refused to listen yet again, you tampered with the brakes on Grant Vasser’s town car to send a message. Then you upped the stakes one last time when you decided to finally get rid of her yourself, so you went where you knew she routinely walked and you attempted to assassinate her.”

“This is outrageous!” Jorja’s eyes widened with panic as she gaped at the detective. “What the fuck are you saying? That I did all of this? I gave you the name of the dealer and suddenly
I’m
the one who kidnapped the girl and tried to kill people?”

Tina’s lips quirked up ever so slightly as she settled back in her chair, jotting down a few notes in her pad. She didn’t look up at Jorja as she spoke. “Right now, it’s all theory. A good one, in my opinion. If you confess now, I can ask the DA to go lenient on your sentence.”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong!” Jorja’s hands fluttered over her face, her breath heaving out in quick, shuddering rasps as she realized the tables had been violently turned on her. She could seriously go to prison.

Tina looked up from her writing and eyed Jorja with a cool stare. “Tell me where Kennedy Vasser is.”

Jorja started crying—heavy, gasping sobs that wracked her body and propelled tears from her eyes. She slammed her fists down upon the table in a sudden act of violence, her words hard to understand through her sobbing. “I want my lawyer. Call my goddamn lawyer!”

Tina merely rose to her feet and left the room, the door slamming with a hollow and desolate bang behind her.

Madison stood in
the sterile, white walled hallway outside Wyatt’s room in the hospital, her arms folded over her chest as she faced the detective. “So, it’s true then? She did it? All of it?”

“I can only prove some of it, not all. Not the important things,” Tina corrected, her demeanor detached and polite, her voice revealing none of her excitement, frustration, or eagerness. “She lawyered up, which means getting anything more out of her will be like pulling teeth unless she wants to confess.”

“What about the letters I’ve been receiving, did she send them?” Though Madison doubted the very words as they came out of her mouth, she still had to ask.

Tina frowned. “I didn’t get the chance to ask her, but I don’t see any reason why she
couldn’t
have sent them. She has a clear vendetta against you, a clear motive to want you out of the picture. Her alibi for her whereabouts during the shooting is shaky at best, and the simple fact that she withheld information from us the first time around paints her in a very bad light. We can hold her for obstructing justice on that alone for now until we can prove the rest of it. We’ll need to search her apartment for the pistol that was used.”

Madison nodded slowly, considering the detective’s words. “There’s one thing Jorja couldn’t have done. It’s not very important in light of everything else that has happened, but I think you should know.”

“What’s that?” Tina asked, pulling out her notepad so she could write it down.

Madison’s spine straightened. “Whoever it was who went to the press with the accusation that I knew my grandfather’s secret was a family member, one of only a few select men. I haven’t figured out who it is yet, but no one outside the family knew that secret except them.”

Tina eyed her thoughtfully. “Is Duke Vasser one of those men?”

Madison hesitated, her expression guarded and suspicious. “Yes, he is. Why?”

Tina made a quick notation and then closed her notebook. “Your brother Grant asked me to look into Duke right after the car accident. He wouldn’t tell me why he was suspicious, but I did as he asked.”

“And?”

“The only thing I could find out was that he rented a storage unit on the Lower East Side. Other than that, no strange phone calls from his suite here at the hotel and none of the hotel staff have seen him acting strangely—nothing.”