Scared Stiff (29 page)

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Authors: Annelise Ryan

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

BOOK: Scared Stiff
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“I doubt it, too,” Izzy agrees. “Especially since Hurley gave him the wrong number.”
I settle into the library, which is empty, and shut myself inside. I’m not sure if Hurley wanted me to know what he was doing when he gave out my number but the fact that I do has boosted my spirits considerably. Now all I have to do is decide whether or not to let him know that I know.
Putting those thoughts aside, I take out the recorder I retrieved from Carla and start playing it back. At first it seems pretty routine. I hear Nelson talking to Carla, offering her a cup of her favorite hot tea, and reviewing what they discussed at their last session. I feel a twinge of guilt, knowing how private this discussion is meant to be. Even though Carla has given me permission to listen to it, I still feel a little slimy doing so. Carla discusses the fact that she and her husband have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for several months, and when Nelson asks her how she feels about that, she offers up a one-word answer: “frustrated.”
Less than a minute later, just as I’m beginning to doubt my motives and hate myself for what I’m doing, the tone of the session takes a dramatic shift. Carla’s voice becomes slurred and muted. I hear Nelson call softly to her but her only response is a grunt. And then all I can hear are background noises; rustling, a sliding sound, a wet sound, heavy breathing, and more grunting. After a few minutes there is an odd, rhythmic noise followed by a distinctly male sound that is unmistakable.
I’m sitting on the edge of my seat now, my ear glued to the recorder. I start to feel ill and swallow hard, glad I haven’t eaten anything. The only sounds I can hear on the tape are more rustling and an occasional exertional type grunt. Then there are several minutes of relative silence where all I can hear are two people breathing.
Finally, some forty-five minutes into the session, I hear Nelson call to Carla again and this time she answers. Then they pick up their conversation where it left off.
I turn the recorder off and sit stunned for a moment, considering what I just heard. Suddenly Carla’s odd demeanor starts to make horrifying sense. I toss the recorder into my jacket pocket and quickly head for the parking lot.
Less than five minutes later I’m at Carla’s house but she doesn’t answer when I ring the bell. I peek through her garage windows and see that her car is gone. Frantic, I pull out my cell phone, ready to call Hurley. But before I can dial, the phone rings. It’s Izzy.
“Hello?” I answer impatiently.
“Where are you?” Izzy asks. He sounds a bit testy himself and I can’t say I blame him since I didn’t tell him I was leaving the office.
“I had an errand to run,” I say vaguely. “Sorry, I forgot to tell you.”
“Well, drop whatever you’re doing. We have a death to investigate and I figure you’ll want in on this one since it’s at the office of that shrink you dislike so much.”
Chapter 43
 
I
drive the hearse as fast as I can toward Luke Nelson’s office. I’m in a state of panic and kicking myself for believing Carla when she told me she hadn’t listened to the tape and not recognizing the meaning behind her mood change. Of course she listened to the tape. How could she not? I’d been a fool to believe her.
Now I fear she has killed Luke Nelson, and while I am no fan of the man, particularly after what I heard on the tape, I feel somewhat responsible.
The usual crowd of onlookers and emergency vehicles are already on the scene and the entrance to Nelson’s office is being guarded by a uniformed police officer. There are two ambulances parked out front. One of them is empty and I assume the EMTs are inside, but the crew for the other rig is lounging around outside their rig.
I pull in behind the loungers and as I get out of my car, one of the EMTs says, “You’re a bit premature, aren’t you?”
I know most of the EMTs in town from working at the hospital, but this guy is a new face. I give him a puzzled look and say, “Why do you say that? Isn’t there a death here?”
“Well, yeah,” he says in a manner that makes it clear
dumbass
should follow. I adore our local EMTs but this newbie clearly has a bit of an attitude. “But the ME’s office hasn’t even arrived yet so I don’t think they’re going to let you take the body.”
“I
am
the ME’s office,” I tell him, using my own
you nitwit
inflection.
He looks confused for a moment and glances from me to my car and then back to me again. And suddenly I understand. I keep forgetting that my car is now a hearse.
“That’s a little tasteless, isn’t it?” he says, nodding toward the car.
Newbie has picked the wrong time to screw with me. “You want to know what’s tasteless, buddy?” I snap at him. “Tasteless is hanging around a crime scene when you’re obviously not needed just so you can gawk at the dead bodies. Now why don’t you get your ass out of here? Your village is missing its idiot.”
Newbie looks stunned by my outburst, causing me a nanosecond of regret before my larger misgivings take priority. As Newbie backs away from me and climbs into his rig, Izzy pulls up and parks behind my hearse. My guilt over Carla must be apparent because as soon as Izzy gets out of his car, he says, “What’s wrong?”
“I think it may be my fault that Luke Nelson is dead,” I tell him sotto voce.
“He’s not,” he says, closing his car door and heading for Nelson’s office. This response is so far from what I expected, I’m rendered speechless. I fall in behind him and, because the length of my one stride equals nearly three of his and I’m so wildly distracted by all the questions racing through my mind, I nearly run him over twice along the way.
Even though I now have reason to believe the world would be a much better place if Nelson wasn’t in it, I’m relieved he isn’t dead. Not only because of my own guilt but because I want to see him suffer. Death would be much too easy an escape for him.
I start to relax a little when I realize I’ve jumped to some pretty incongruous conclusions about Carla. I assumed that if she wasn’t home, she would be here. But she could be anywhere. Maybe she didn’t listen to the tape after all. Maybe her strange attitude earlier really was due to a lack of sleep, like she said.
As we enter the office’s anteroom, I see Hurley standing just inside the far door that leads to Nelson’s office area, staring grimly into the room where Nelson sees his patients. Off in the corner to my left, three EMTs are huddled around someone in a chair. I push past Izzy, taking care to avoid the trail of bloody footprints I can see leading from the office into the anteroom, and take a stand beside Hurley, who acknowledges me with a quick glance. Then I look into the counseling room.
Reclined on the sofa is Carla Andrusson—at least I think it’s Carla since the build and distinctive hair color look like hers and the clothing matches what I saw her wearing earlier. But the face is unrecognizable, misshapen and covered with gore. There is blood everywhere—on the walls, the ceiling, the carpet, the sofa, the chair—and one of Carla’s arms is hanging off the sofa, her hand cupped on the floor, pooled with blood. Inches away from her hand lies a mean-looking gun, and a nasty, acrid smell that I now know is a combination of blood and gunpowder, permeates the air.
My initial instinct is to dash into the room and check her for vital signs. But I quickly realize it would be a waste of time. I feel sick as my hope that Carla had nothing to do with this shatters into pieces.
Izzy steps up beside us and takes in the scene.
Hurley turns to us as if to say something, but then hesitates, staring at me intently. “Are you okay?” he asks, looking concerned. Then he backs away from me. “You’re not going to puke on my shoes again, are you?”
I shake my head.
“What’s the story?” Izzy asks.
“According to the shrink, that’s Carla Andrusson, one of his patients. Apparently she busted in here carrying a gun and went off on the doc about the awful state of her marriage, and how hopeless her life was. Then she shot at the doc before turning the gun on herself.”
“She shot Nelson?” I ask.
Hurley nods.
“Where is he?”
Hurley gestures toward the anteroom and I step back to look out the way I came. I see now that the patient the EMTs are tending to is Luke Nelson. He looks pale and shaky, and there is a blood-soaked bandage around his left arm, but he appears otherwise fine.
Izzy says, “Well, I guess we best get to it.” He sets down his scene case and then dons a biohazard suit, goggles, and gloves. When he realizes I’m not dressing for duty he says, “You coming?”
“In a sec. I need to talk to Hurley first.”
As Izzy makes his way into the room, I turn and speak to Hurley in a low voice. “This is all my fault.”
“
Your
fault? How do you figure?”
“Carla was helping me with something and we . . . um . . . sort of discovered something about Nelson.”
“Such as?”
“You have to hear it.”
“Hear it?” Hurley says, looking confused. “From whom?”
I start to tell him but I’m interrupted by the sound of Nelson’s voice behind me.
“This is an awful thing,” he says. “Clearly I missed something. I didn’t think she was suicidal. I feel so responsible.”
I whirl around and find myself face-to-face with the creep. “Of course you’re responsible, you snake. What did you expect? You—”
I’m cut off when Hurley grabs my arm and pulls me back. “Mattie, what the hell?” he hisses.
At the same time, one of the EMTs says to Nelson, “Sir, you really need to go to the hospital to get checked out. Even though the bullet only grazed your arm, you might need a couple of stitches. And your blood pressure is extremely high. You need something to lower it.”
“A couple of deep slices across your throat ought to do it,” I toss out angrily.
“Damn it, Mattie,” Hurley says. He yanks me by the arm to the far corner of the room, positioning himself between me and Nelson. He grabs me by the shoulders using his body to block my view of the others, but I can hear the EMTs walking Nelson back out to the anteroom. Hurley turns and shuts the door behind them before shifting his focus back to me. “What the hell has gotten into you?” he asks. His tone is more concerned than angry but I can tell he is a little peeved.
When I look up at him, I manage to calm myself some, momentarily afloat in the serene blue depths of his eyes. His body is so close I can feel the heat radiating from him, and a part of me wants to collapse into him, have him wrap his arms around me, and just stay there. Forever. But I’m too sick with disgust, guilt, and sadness to do anything but sag against the wall beneath the weight of his hands.
“Nelson is a sick, perverted bastard,” I tell him. “He was drugging Carla Andrusson and having sex with her during her appointments without her knowing it. And if he was doing it to her, I’m betting he was doing it to others, too.”
Hurley’s eyebrows shoot up nearly to his hairline. “And you know this how, exactly?”
“I have it on tape.”
“You have videotape of Nelson having sex with drugged patients.” It isn’t a question, but rather a statement, made with more than an innuendo of skepticism. I’m not sure if his doubt is due to disbelief or shock, but either way, it’s partially justified.
“No, not videotape. It’s audio.”
Hurley closes his eyes and shakes his head as if he’s trying to rattle something in there loose. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he says, dropping his hands from my shoulders. I miss the warmth of them immediately. “You have a tape of the
sound
of Nelson having sex with a drugged patient?”
“Yes, with Carla.”
“How can you tell she’s drugged? And how can you be sure what you’re hearing is the sound of sex?” I start to answer but he doesn’t let me get a syllable out. “And even if you’re sure that’s what it is, how do you know it wasn’t consensual? How do we know who exactly is making the noises? Do they announce themselves on the tape? And just how the hell did you get your hands on something like that in the first place?”
I realize he’s going to be pissed when I tell him what I did. Worse yet, I’m afraid I might have compromised any case we have against Nelson since the tape likely can’t be used as legal evidence.
I see movement from the corner of my eye and see Izzy standing in the doorway to the counseling room eavesdropping on our discussion. And that’s when I wonder if my foolishness might also cost me my job.
Belatedly I see the ramifications of what I’ve done, and the very steep price I might have to pay for my dogged suspicions of Nelson and my half-baked plot to catch him out. Though it’s chump change compared to Carla’s cost. With this one single act I may have let a killer go free, ruined a handful of lives, and lost my job, Hurley’s respect, and Izzy’s friendship. I can tell tonight is going to be a two-carton session with Ben and Jerry.
I take the recorder out of my purse and hand it to Hurley. “I met with Carla Andrusson yesterday to talk with her about Nelson and his alibi. And in the course of doing that, I discovered that something about her sessions seemed wrong. Carla thought so too, though she didn’t know why. So I convinced her to take my recorder along in her purse. It taped her entire session.”
Hurley squeezes his eyes closed and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Why would you do that?” he asks. His question has the same ring to it my mother has when she asks me why I’m divorcing David: abject disappointment.
“I’ve had the sense all along that something is wrong with that guy,” I tell him. “And I was right. The tape proves it.”
“Not in any way we can use in court,” he counters. He looks at me with a pitiful expression that makes me want to cry. The last thing I want Hurley to feel for me is pity. “Did Carla listen to the tape before she handed it over to you?” he asks.
“She said she didn’t,” I tell him. “But in hindsight . . . well . . .”
There’s no need to complete the thought because the bloody scene in the next room says it all. I hang my head in shame and tears start to burn behind my eyeballs.
“What’s your verdict, Izzy?” Hurley asks.
At first I think he’s asking Izzy to pass judgment on me and my stupidity, and maybe he is. But judging from the answer, it’s obvious Izzy thinks Hurley is asking about Carla.
“Too soon to tell,” he says with a shrug. “The location and angle of the head wound and the stippling around it don’t rule out suicide. I’ll have to take a look at Nelson’s wounds to determine if that part of the story holds up, and of course I’ll know more once I complete my autopsy, but for now Nelson’s version of the events fits the evidence.”
“But there is one part of his story that doesn’t fit,” I say. “If Carla did listen to the tape and came here with a gun, I don’t think it was her marriage she was upset about.”
I take things a few steps further, desperate to redeem myself in any small way. “What if Shannon found out what he was doing? That would give him a motive to kill her. And if he was drugging his patients with something that allowed him to have sex with them without them knowing about it, he could also have left his office during any one of those appointments without the patients knowing. That negates his alibis.”
“What kind of drug would do that?” Hurley asks. “I would assume he’d need something that can be given orally.”
“On the tape I heard him offer Carla a cup of tea and it’s about fifteen minutes after that when her speech starts to slur.”
Izzy jumps in. “There are several hypnotics that are fast-acting and quickly processed that would produce short-term sedation and anterograde amnesia: midazolam, Zaleplon, ketamine, or GHB.”
Hurley considers this. “Can we test for those?”
Izzy grimaces. “You can, but it would have to be shortly after ingestion. Most of these drugs metabolize pretty quickly.” He looks at me. “When was Carla’s appointment?”

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