Cover Shot (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery Book 5) (21 page)

30
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The second shooter

I
ducked DonnaJo and Charlie both and sped across town to St. Vincent’s as soon as the judge adjourned for the afternoon. Alisha should’ve been at work for an hour and a half. Hopefully that was long enough for her to be able to get a break without catching anyone’s attention.

The beefy guys at the desk—still there a week later, and quite possibly a permanent fixture in the lobby—just nodded in my direction, and the sweet ladies in their candy stripes and matching red lipstick smiled and waved.

I stepped off the elevator and nearly walked into Goetze, who was talking to a tall, gray-haired doctor I remembered from the day of the shooting. I didn’t catch a word of what they were saying before Goetze fell silent, his wary eyes settling on me. I skipped mine right over him and smiled at the other doctor.

I turned for the nurse’s station and the two of them stepped onto the elevator. I didn’t need to turn around to know Goetze was glaring a hole through the back of my tank top. Not that I cared what a man like him thought of me, but I wanted information I was fairly sure he could get. In that respect, I was glad to see him. Maybe he was looking for dirt on Maynard’s work.

Alisha wasn’t behind the nurse’s station, nor was she in Amy’s room. I peeked into two others before my eyes settled on the door I’d watched the slight, quiet man move to and from in the past few days.

Alisha wasn’t in there, either, but he was kneeling next to the bed, holding an elderly woman’s hand to his forehead and sobbing what sounded like a plea or a prayer. I didn’t recognize the language.

His mother? She was still and silent, the beeping of the heart monitor and
whir-click
of the IV pump the only sounds in the room that weren’t coming from him.

I swallowed an onslaught of painful memories and stepped backward, pulling the door behind me.

“I’ve never seen anyone keep a vigil like that with a parent, and I’ve been here a long time.” Alisha’s voice came from behind me.

“I can relate,” I said. “My mom is a breast cancer survivor.”

She nodded. “How long?”

“Six years—well, seven next month.”

“Good odds.” She tried for a smile and managed more of a grimace.

I glanced around and dropped my voice. “I heard you were looking for me this morning?”

She nodded, tipping her head toward the door, then waving me toward the little break room.

The medical supplies and bottles from the closet had taken up residence on wire shelves, crowding the tiny kitchen. Alisha squeezed between the fridge and a shelf, looking behind every piece of furniture in the tiny room before she started to speak.

“Look, I know you’re writing this series on Tom and Amy and what led him to a breaking point,” she said. “I also know he’s probably going to prison from here, either way this works out. But it’s capital murder if he killed Stephanie, right?”

I nodded. “Possibly. Murder committed during the perpetration of another felony qualifies, but it would depend on the prosecutor.”

She sighed. “I want to protect them all,” she began, then stopped, turning huge, tear-filled eyes up at me. “Can I trust you?”

“Of course. The people are what make this job for me, Alisha. Not the headlines. I don’t want Tom to go to prison for something he didn’t do.”

She sniffled and nodded. I waited. She stared at the floor.

“He didn’t do it, did he?” I asked. “And you know it. I know it. I’m pretty sure my friend Detective White will buy it if we can come up with proof.”

A hitching breath in, and words spilled out. “I don’t want to give up Benny and his family, but maybe there’s a way we don’t have to?”

“I’ll do my level best.” My gut twinged. “Benny is the gentleman across the hall with the sick mother?”

“Their visas are out. They’re refugees, but getting the INS to recognize that gets harder every year, and they’ve run into a problem with a judge in California. He’s scheduled to be deported in six days.”

“What?” I fumbled for a notebook and started scribbling.

“They’d deport her too, but she’s too sick to move.”

My head spun. I had exactly no experience with the immigration service, but surely they wouldn’t send this man away from his dying mother. Even bureaucrats have mothers. And souls.

“I need you to slow down a touch. Tell me what’s going on. From the beginning.”

“Benny came here with his mother from Serbia about six years ago. They ran from the military, where service is forced on all men over eighteen, because he’d never signed up for the draft. His father and brother were killed in an accident and there was no one left to take care of his mother.”

I kept my head bent over my notes, catching every word, and nodded for her to go on.

“They had work visas, and they applied for asylum. But the application was denied. Benny married a young refugee woman and they have a child—a little girl.”

“She was born here?” I glanced up.

“In this building.”

“I didn’t think they could deport people if they had a family member who was a U.S. citizen.”

“They keep one parent with the child. Benny doesn’t want his wife separated from her, so she’s been naturalized.”

I sighed. Ship sailed.

“Why hasn’t he? Can’t he take a class or something?”

“It’s more difficult than the politicians would have you believe.”

“Why is that?”

“I haven’t exactly studied up on it, but he says the requirements are way beyond taking the class. That he tried many times and failed. And then they started with the hearings.”

“What hearings?”

“They sent him a court summons to go to Los Angeles—all the way on the other side of the country—to appear before a judge and plead his case. He bought a plane ticket and went. When he got there, they told him his hearing had been held the day before and he’d missed it, and he was scheduled for deportation.”

“He missed it?”

“They say he had the date wrong. He swears he didn’t, but he didn’t keep the letter, either.”

I put one hand to my forehead. “Okay.”

“Now his mother is sick, and he’s supposed to report to L.A. in a week to be sent home—I did read about that. Look it up. He’s facing years in a prison camp, and that’s if they don’t kill him. His mother is dying. I don’t want anyone to know he’s here. They have to find him to kick him out of the country, right?”

“There’s no one else we can talk to?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t begin to know who.”

“Let me see what I can find out.” In all my copious spare time. But what else was I going to do?

She smiled, gratitude oozing from every pore. “Thank you.”

“Sure. Can you tell me what the heck all this has to do with the Ellingers?”

She nodded. “Benny was hiding in the med room that day.”

“The one where the woman was shot?”

She nodded. “Behind two shelves in the corner. The police were gone before he came out. No one but Dr. Lessing and I saw him.”

Leaping. Louboutins.

I forgot to breathe. “Did he shoot her?”

“I’m not sure he’d know how to work a gun if you gave him one. He’s the nicest man. And he didn’t say anything—not to anyone—for days. I didn’t tell the police he was in there because I didn’t think he knew anything that would help. He said the door was open, and Stephanie was hiding behind it, peeking out around the corner. Then she got shot. And now I’m afraid they’ll arrest him for keeping quiet and the INS will send him off to prison or execution.” Her eyes welled with tears again.

I kept control of my voice, though I’m not sure how.

“But he does know something. What did he see?”

“Another man with a rifle. In the empty room across the hall.”

Jesus, was Aaron going to owe me.

“Did he recognize him?”

“No. But he took a picture with his phone. He didn’t think anyone would believe him, and he says he likes the Ellingers.”

I rolled my head back and shot a silent thank you to the heavens. “Did you recognize the shooter?”

“The picture is…not good.”

“But there was another gun on the floor.”

The impossible. Caught on camera. Thank God for cell phones. My brain whirred forward in twenty directions. From a phone, it should have a date and time stamp, and a GPS location. Aaron would have to admit Ellinger wasn’t guilty and find this other gunman. Other gunman who had a clear shot at the victim.

There were seventy hows and what-ifs zinging around my head. The stickiest ones: how’d he know where to be to get a clear shot? How’d he go unnoticed getting in and out? And how in the world did he know about Tom?

I tapped a foot and turned my attention back to Alisha.

“I need the photo.”

“You can’t tell the police where you got it.”

“Confidential source only.” If I played it right, I wouldn’t get tossed in a cell for obstruction. Probably.

She nodded and reached over to squeeze my hand. “Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“You’re willing to try, and I appreciate that.”

I squeezed back. “In that case, you’re welcome.”

I
t took fifteen minutes of back and forth with Benny’s limited English, but I left the hospital with a grainy, dark photo in my text messages—and a thousand pounds on my shoulders.

I wanted to help the Ellingers. Finally, I had something that would, at least a little. Hostages were better than murder, both in court and on Tom’s conscience.

And now there was this poor man who needed to stay here with his family. Alisha had dropped heavy doses of pleading into the conversation we had with him. He ran a successful restaurant, paid his taxes, took care of his family. But some spreadsheet somewhere said he had to leave, and whoever held the stay or go stamp couldn’t see the person for the paper.

Government makes very little sense to me a lot of the time.

First things first, Nichelle.

Six days.

The two murders were connected. Though someone had taken huge pains to make sure it didn’t look that way.

I’d stopped to ask Tom if anyone knew about his plans that day, but he was sleeping such that I wondered if he had a narcotics stash. I’d go back later.

Killer first. If I could untangle this mess, surely the INS would be little more than a bump in my morning.

I rushed to my desk and wrote up the trial day one, plus a follow on a serial flasher at a rest stop on the north side of town. I emailed both stories to Bob and dug a cable out of my desk to connect my phone to my laptop.

Pulling up the photo, I moved it to the computer, crossing my fingers under the desk as it loaded.

Dammit.

If anything, the image was grainier and harder to make out than it had been on Benny’s phone.

I stared at it ’til it blurred into a big black-brown blob, not sure even Larry’s wizardry could save my bacon this time.

“Worth a shot,” I muttered, copying the image file to a thumb drive and hopping up.

I found my favorite photographer in front of his bank of giant computer monitors, clicking through photos of a fall festival parade.

“Sometimes I wish cute kids and animals on the front page didn’t sell so damned many papers,” he said without turning around. “I get tired of having to hunt people down and get releases for the kids’ pictures. Used to be, people were excited to see their kid in the paper. Now they want to sue someone over every damned thing.”

“The times they have a-changed,” I said, stopping next to his chair. “Were you talking to me or the universe in general?”

“I can always hear you coming from the other side of the building. It’s the shoes.” He looked up and grinned. “You find out any more about our old friend Elizabeth?”

“Only that she’s not a murderer.”

“Why is it we’re not saying much about what’s going on here? The headline is usually the prize in this game, but you’ve had like three on this case in a whole week. Hell, you’re not even giving up the guy’s name. Charlie Lewis is running some bullshit every morning, and we’re sitting on information. Did Bob tell you to back off?”

“This whole thing is fishier than a trawler just back from a three-month salmon run,” I said, pulling out the thumb drive. “I’m not losing to Charlie, because she’s rehashing the same nothing over and over. I have the exclusives with the shooter and his family from inside the hospital, so Andrews is mostly staying in his office. I’m not printing a damned thing I don’t have to until I have it nailed down.”

“That’s a luxury you don’t get too often.”

“And I’m taking full advantage.”

“Hope you don’t get burned by some jackass on Twitter.”

“Girl Friday is the thing I’m worried about, but so far she has less than Charlie.” And from the increasingly hostile tone of her posts, she wasn’t happy about it.

“What’s on that thing? Picture of your murderer?” My eyes popped wide and Larry laughed. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Actually, I think it might be,” I said. “But it was taken with a crappy cell phone from far away in the half-darkness.”

He rolled his eyes so far I couldn’t see anything but white. “I was kidding, Nichelle.”

“One photo restore for all the marbles.” I waved the drive in his face. “Want to be the hero? I’ll interview you and everything.”

“Seeing my name in the paper isn’t the thrill it once was,” he said dryly, snatching the memory stick out of my hand. “But I do love a challenge.”

He pulled up the image. Aw, hell. It looked worse on his screen than it did on mine.

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

He spun the chair to face me.

“Sorry.”

He lifted his Generals cap and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “You’re lucky it’s a slow week and I like you so much.”

I patted his shoulder. “Thanks, Larry.”

“Don’t thank me yet. If I can do anything with this, it’ll be a miracle.” He turned in the chair and shook his head. “I can tell you right now, I’m not getting a face out of that.”

“Of course not.” Why would it be easy? I smiled. “I have utter faith.”

Larry chuckled. “Kinda sorry it wasn’t Elizabeth. Bob might’ve fought you for the
Telegraph’s
seat at the trial.”

I grinned. “Me too, but I just don’t see it. Whoever that is,” I gestured to the screen, “killed Stephanie Whitmire. Whoever killed her killed Maynard. I’m sure of it.”

“Why?”

“Money.”

He snorted. “What else is new?”

“Money or sex. Almost every time.”

With Elizabeth Herrington crossed off my suspect list, I was pretty sure this one was the former.

I was halfway to Carytown, thinking early arrival for this particular meeting could be a good thing, before I realized what I was missing.

Elizabeth planned Maynard’s funeral. If she didn’t kill him, she was my best in.

Way to catch up, Nichelle.

Clock check: creeping up on four.

I made an illegal U-turn on West Broad and sped toward the river.