The Accused (16 page)

“What about Detective Breaux? Should we tell him what we found?”

“I don’t think computer hacking is something we should admit to a detective, even one who’s on our side. But I will tell him what you told me about the scanned backup. He can check with the firm and legally acquire the information.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

They rose from their chairs and walked back across the street to the hospital, where they made their way to the third floor. Alaina waved at the trauma nurse who was on duty at the desk and they turned down the hallway to the right to go to Emily’s room.

Carter froze for a moment, then hurried down the hall, pointing at the empty guard’s chair in front of Emily’s door. Alaina’s pulse quickened and she stepped up her pace to a jog to keep up with his long strides.

Just as they reached Emily’s room, the monitors attached to Emily set off their alarms. Alaina burst into the hospital room right in front of Carter and drew up short at the sight of Kurt McGraw standing right next to Emily’s bed.

Chapter Sixteen

“What the hell are you doing?” Alaina yelled as she raced over to the hospital bed.

Kurt’s eyes widened and he took a step back from the bed. “Nothing, I swear. I hadn’t even said a word and then everything went off.”

The trauma nurse rushed into the room and ordered them all out. A harried doctor pushed past them as they exited the room and gathered in the hallway.

“Where is the guard?” Carter demanded.

Kurt put his hands up in a defensive manner, clearly cluing in on Carter’s anger. “There was no one here when I came up. I swear.”

A groan sounded in the room behind them and they looked over as the guard stumbled against the doorway, clutching his head with his hands.

“What happened?” Carter asked.

The guard slumped back down in his chair. “There was a doctor. He asked me to help him move something in this room, but when I got in here, he clocked me with something heavy.”

“A doctor?” Alaina stared at the guard. “Why in the world would a doctor do something like that?”

Carter’s expression was grim. “They wouldn’t, but if someone wanted an opportunity to get at Emily, all they had to do was snag a set of scrubs from the lockers and say they were a doctor.” He looked up at Kurt.

“I swear, it wasn’t me!” Kurt said. “I don’t even know that man.”

“But you knew he was guarding Emily. With him out of the way, you had a clear shot at her.”

Kurt paled, his mind finally wrapping around the enormity of Carter’s implication. “You’ve got it all wrong. I came to the hospital to see someone I’m dating. I thought I’d check on Emily before I left. There was no guard in that chair.”

“Uh-huh.” Carter tapped the guard on the shoulder. “Does this man look like the doctor who clocked you?”

The guard looked up at Kurt and squinted, then sighed. “I don’t remember. My memory’s all hazy. Maybe?”

Alaina shook her head. “That won’t do us any good.”

“Jeez, Alaina!” Kurt stared at her. “You can’t possibly think I did this. I like Emily. Why would I want to hurt her?”

“Someone did. They hurt her last night and came back today to finish the job.”

Before Kurt could reply, the trauma nurse came out of Emily’s room.

“How is she?” Alaina asked.

“We’ve gotten her stabilized, but she was injected with something that affected her heart. We won’t know more until we finish running tests.” Her expression hardened. “In the meantime, I need all of you to exit this floor. We’re restricting access to medical personnel only.”

“There may be a problem with that,” Carter said and explained what had happened to the guard.

The nurse’s eyes widened. “I’ll call hospital security and have them check the video and lock all the stairwells on the inside. If anyone wants to get down these halls, they’ll have to get past me.”

Carter nodded. “I’m going to call Detective Breaux. He’s in charge of Emily’s case and he’ll need to get another guard out here—two, if I can talk him into it.”

“I appreciate that,” she said, “but I’m still going to need you all to leave. The more people milling around, the more chance someone can slip through.”

They all trailed down the hall to the elevator and went down to the first floor. As they stepped into the lobby, Detective Breaux rushed through the door.

“What happened?”

Carter gave him a rundown of the events. Detective Breaux listened intently and gave Kurt a long once-over when the story turned to his part. When Carter finished, Detective Breaux looked at Kurt.

“I’ll start with you,” the detective said. “We can talk in the cafeteria.” He looked at Carter. “And I’ll call for another guard. The captain can’t argue the necessity after this.”

“Do you need anything else from us?” Carter asked.

“Not at the moment. Will you be in town much longer?”

“We weren’t planning on it,” Carter replied.

Detective Breaux nodded. “If you need to get back home, that’s fine. I can take your statements over the phone and have you sign them later.”

Kurt, who’d grown more frustrated under the scrutiny, finally blurted out, “Why do they get to leave? You’re making me stay. Why aren’t they suspects?”

Detective Breaux narrowed his eyes. “They aren’t suspects because Carter is a sheriff and is aiding me in this investigation.”

Kurt’s eyes widened and he glanced at Carter. “You’re a sheriff?”

“Yes,” Carter replied.

Kurt glanced at Alaina, then back at Carter, and Alaina knew he wanted to ask what she’d done to rank a sheriff as an escort. But for once, he was wisely holding his tongue.

She studied Kurt for a moment—his stiff posture, the slight flush at the base of his neck, the way his fingers pulled at the bottom of his suit jacket. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Kurt wasn’t being wise at all.

Maybe he was scared.

* * *

A
LAINA
WAS
SILENT
as they crossed the parking lot to Carter’s truck, and he wondered what was going through her mind. If it was anything like his own, so much was whirling through there that she couldn’t gain focus on any one thing. Given Alaina’s friendship with Emily and her own personal risk, she should be on the verge of cracking, but that was the last thing he needed. What he needed was for her to stay strong and alert.

They hopped in the truck and he started the engine and turned on the air-conditioning. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She didn’t respond immediately and he could see it took a second for her to process his question. Wherever she was in her head, it was miles away from here.

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t think I’m all right at all. What is going on, Carter? None of this makes sense.”

She threw up her hands in frustration. “Every hour that passes, we add another layer to the puzzle, but all of them are foggy and none of them fit together. I’m beginning to think they’re not related at all—that we have several different things happening and we’re trying to force them to fit because then one answer would fix it all. Maybe it’s just not that simple.”

“Maybe it’s not, but our process would be the same whether everything is related or not.”

“I guess,” she said, sounding totally defeated.

Carter struggled to find something to say to make things better, but for the first time in his life, he was at a complete loss. He didn’t have the words to comfort her and he cared too much to walk away.

“Would you like to go by your place while we’re in Baton Rouge?” he asked. “I noticed you didn’t bring a lot of stuff with you. Maybe you want to pick up a few things?”

She perked up a little. “It would be nice to have more work clothes and some books. I always bought them thinking I’d get around to reading but never had the time.”

“Well, you do now. Point me in the right direction and we’ll make a stop before heading back to Calais.”

She gave him a small smile. “Thanks. I know you’re trying to make me feel better. It’s working. Maybe that will make
you
feel better.”

He smiled. “Maybe.”

She directed him downtown to a high-rise condominium complex. Carter studied the complex as she entered her security code and they walked through the foyer to the elevators. The construction was fairly new and high-end. Marble floors, antique tables with crystal displayed and a giant painting hung in the entry.

It didn’t surprise him. Alaina was an up-and-coming attorney with the best firm in the city. Her home would reflect her status and, likely, a nice salary. For some reason, this bothered him.

Maybe it was because her home was one more indicator that Alaina LeBeau was not a good fit for him or his life. He’d be the first to admit that he grew bored sometimes with the slower pace of Calais, but he loved the town and had no desire to return to the city. The politics, lack of personnel and lack of funding were constant struggles for any large police department, and those things had grown to frustrate him so much that he could no longer effectively do his job.

He needed to be where he felt he could make a difference. In Calais, he spent more time chasing poachers and drunks than murderers, but that was okay, and it served the citizens of the town he’d sworn to protect. In Calais, everything he did mattered. In New Orleans, it seemed nothing he did mattered.

They exited the elevator on the tenth floor and walked down a wide hallway all the way to the end, where Alaina unlocked the door of a corner unit. But as soon as she pushed the door open, Carter knew things were very wrong.

A small cry escaped her before she stumbled back into him. Over her shoulder he could clearly see what caused her reaction. He put his hands on her shoulders and eased by her and into the condo.

Pictures had been torn off the walls. Her furniture slashed, the contents spilling out onto the floor. From his vantage point, he could see into the kitchen and the story was the same—the drawers had been pulled from their slots, every cabinet open and the contents of both strewn across the floor.

Alaina stepped next to him and stared at the damage. Her face was pale and she brought one shaky hand up to her mouth. She shuffled one foot forward and it connected with a broken lamp. She reached over, but before she could lift the lamp, he stopped her.

“Don’t touch anything. He probably didn’t leave prints, but the forensics team needs to try anyway.”

She straightened back up. “One more useless puzzle piece.”

She backed away and walked out of the condo. He stared after her, unable to think of a single word of comfort. He was simply all out.

* * *

A
FTER
SPENDING
an exhausting two hours with the police and building security, then another trying to put her condo back to any semblance of normal, Alaina was more than ready to return to Calais. Wire on stairs and creepy specters were starting to seem tame in comparison to the things happening in Baton Rouge.

The forensics team had lifted prints, but Alaina would bet anything that when the results were in, the prints would belong only to her and those invited into her home. Despite an extensive review of all the contents, she’d been unable to find a single item missing even though jewelry of reasonable value was in clear boxes in the top drawer of her dresser. Nor had any of the electronics been touched.

It seemed as if whoever had broken in only wanted to create a mess, perhaps hoping to make her stressed or anxious—no one was sure. Unlike the vandalism on Everett’s car, the perpetrator left no note behind this time, so they were left to only speculation. The day had exhausted Alaina to the point that even conjecture was beyond her maxed-out mind.

They’d just climbed into Carter’s truck when his cell phone rang. He answered the call, then frowned. Alaina felt her heart drop, unsure she could take more bad news.

“We’ll be there in five minutes,” he said and hung up the phone.

“Emily?” All she could manage was the name, but she knew Carter would understand the question.

“No. They’ve found Steven Adams. He’s at the police station right now for questioning. Detective Breaux wants us to listen in on the interrogation—see if anything sticks out to you.”

Alaina let out a breath of relief that nothing more had transpired with Emily. “Do you think he could be behind it all?”

Carter frowned. “I wish I could say yes, but apparently, his alibi is tight for the time Emily was attacked this morning.”

“Alibis can be paid for.”

“He was in the drunk tank on the north side of the city until this afternoon.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking but not as polite.”

“Another dead end. If he was in the drunk tank last night, he couldn’t have been breaking windows at the big mansion of horror in Calais either.”

“No.” Carter turned onto the boulevard and glanced over at her, frowning. “How well do you know Kurt McGraw? I know you worked with him, but what do you know about him other than his job?”

She shrugged. “He’s the spoiled, only child hailing from a family of Ivy League–educated career politicians, most of whom are raging drunks and unapologetic cheaters. The firm spends a lot of gratis time making deals to get them off drunk driving convictions or to cheaply rid them of wives they wish to trade in on a newer model.”

“They sound like lovely people. Is Kurt carrying on the drunken political tradition?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s got the drunken part down—he seems to be mentally stuck in frat boy mode even though college was years ago. He’s made no noise about politics as of yet, but I’m sure his family will push for it as soon as one of them wants to retire.”

“You said he got the promotion you should have—what was that about?”

She gave him a quick rundown of the situation.

“So Kurt’s family connections and the Warren case were used to pass you over?”

“That pretty much sums it up.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Thanks, but I think it might have been the best thing for me.”

“Really? Why?”

“If I’m being honest with myself, I haven’t been satisfied with my work for a long time, but if I’d gotten the partnership, I would never have left. This way, I can take some time and figure out what I really want to do.”

“And then the inheritance dropped in your lap.”

She nodded. “It seemed like a good opportunity to close myself away from the rush of the city, relax until I grew bored and do a lot of quiet contemplation on my future.”

“Ha. How’s that working out for you?”

“Yeah, well...I guess if I think about it all, it’s still the best thing. Look how easily someone got to Emily and broke into my condo. In Baton Rouge, I’d have been an easy target. At least Calais throws some curveballs.”

She looked over at him and smiled. “And in Calais, I have you instead of an overworked, spread-too-thin department.”

He frowned. “I talked to the forensics team when you were going over the contents of your bedroom. They were going to do a more thorough check, but there doesn’t appear to be any signs of a break-in.”

She sucked in a breath. “How is that possible? They don’t think I trashed my own home, do they? Besides, there are security pads everywhere. How could someone even get in the building and up to my floor without knowing the codes?”