Stalking Steven Read online

  I put the phone down and leaned back in my chair.

  Nothing happened.

  I twiddled my thumbs.

  The phone still didn’t ring.

  I looked over at Edwina. She was curled into a circle. When she sensed my regard, she opened one eye and looked at me. Her stub of a tail gave a tentative wag. I smiled back. “Hi, sweetheart. I didn’t want anything. Go back to sleep.”

  She closed her eye again. I looked up at the ceiling.

  I can’t swear to it, but I think I was partially asleep when the phone rang. I’d been hauled out of bed early by Diana’s phone call this morning, and the office was quiet and warm. The dog was dozing, and all the various electronics made a soft sort of humming in the air, almost like the white noise you pay a lot of money for. Occasionally, Edwina snuffled. It was a very comforting sort of sound. Almost like sleeping next to David, who had been known to snore.

  At any rate, the phone rang. I jerked upright, and the reason I think I may have been asleep, is that there was a thin line of drool on my chin.

  I wiped it off with one hand as I reached for the phone with the other. Jaime Mendoza, the display said.

  I smiled. “Good afternoon, Detec—”

  “Save it,” Mendoza’s voice said. “I need you to come and meet me.”

  “Sure. Are you still in—” Franklin?

  “No,” Mendoza said. “Southern Hills Hospital. Room 316. Hurry.”

  He hung up before I could ask any more questions. I grabbed my purse and my jacket and ran.

  * * *

  Southern Hills Hospital sits, as you may have guessed, in the hills on the south side of town. Off Nolensville Road and Harding Place, to be exact. Not too far from Crieve Hall. I took the same exit I’d taken earlier, blew past the turnoff that would have taken me to Blackburn Drive, and barreled down Harding Place at a few miles above the speed limit. I screeched into the parking lot outside the hospital less than fifteen minutes after Mendoza called.

  I had spent the whole trip—when I wasn’t navigating turns and trying to avoid hitting, or being hit by, the other cars—mulling over what might be wrong.

  Maybe Araminta Tucker had had a heart attack? Maybe Mendoza’s gorgeousness had been too much for her, and she’d collapsed?

  Or maybe he had accused her of having had something to do with her sister-in-law’s murder, and a guilty conscience had brought on a medical issue?

  She was already in an assisted living facility, though. Surely they had a doctor on staff? And anyway, there were hospitals closer to Franklin, weren’t there? It was hard to imagine that they’d drive her all the way to Southern Hills if something was wrong.

  Unless she had Southern Hills written down as her hospital of choice. It was the hospital closest to where she’d been living before she went into assisted living.

  Or maybe it had nothing to do with Araminta Tucker. Maybe Mendoza had found Steven. Maybe Steven really had been kidnapped, and had escaped from his kidnappers, and been hurt in the process, and now he was in the hospital. Maybe the blonde had shot him.

  Or maybe it was Diana. Maybe she’d had an accident on her way to work. Or on her way to lunch. Or the bank. Or maybe the nutcase who had threatened to hurt her because he had to pay his ex-wife alimony had made good on his threat.

  Or Rachel. Maybe Rachel had gotten in a car accident on her way to the post office.

  Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I should have taken the damn letters to the mailbox myself…

  I slammed the car door behind me and locked it on the run. And hurried through the lobby to the elevator, where I hopped from foot to foot while I waited the hour and a half it took for it to make it down from the fourth floor. When I’d gotten inside, the elevator took its sweet time creaking up to three, and then hung there an eternity before it deigned to open the doors. I turned sideways and slithered through the opening while the doors were still moving.

  316 was to the right. I hustled down the hallway—not quite running, since I figured someone would try to stop me if I did, and then I’d have to waste valuable time arguing about why I was running in the hospital—and arrived outside 316 out of breath.

  The door was cracked an inch or two. From inside I could hear Mendoza’s voice, calm and even, and someone else’s croak, too faint for me to make out who it belonged to. There was the whooshing noise of machines, or maybe some of the whooshing was in my head.

  I pushed the door open and stuck my head through. And felt that same head go light and sort of fussy when I got a good look at what was going on.

  It was a single room with a single bed, with a single occupant in it. He was hooked up to wires and tubes and a machine that looked like it was helping him breathe. That was where most of the whooshing was coming from. And if it hadn’t been for the shock of red hair that stuck up—bright as fire against the white of the bandages and sheets—I would have had a hard time recognizing him.

  I made an involuntary squeak, and put a hand over my mouth to hide it. But it was too late. Zachary’s eyes cut my way, and Mendoza turned his head.

  “Oh.” He straightened. “You made good time.”

  “I think I probably broke a couple of traffic rules on the way here.” I slipped through the door and into the room. And took a couple of steps closer to the bed. “Zach. That looks painful.”

  Zachary made a noise that might have been an attempt at laughter, or maybe just agreement.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Is this because of the job I gave you last night?”

  “We were just getting to that,” Mendoza said, and turned back to the bed. “You OK for another couple of minutes?”

  Zachary nodded. Or moved his head a fraction of an inch on the pillow.

  “Would you recognize whoever did this to you?”

  Zachary shook his head. His free hand—the other was hooked up to a variety of tubes and wires—lifted to the top of his head and then moved down to his chin. To me it looked as if he was starting to do the sign of the cross, and I hadn’t even realized he was Catholic, which made me feel bad.

  Mendoza interpreted it differently. “They put something over your head?”

  “M-hm,” Zachary said.

  “Can you guess where you might have come across them? Or was it random?”

  Zach shook his head. “Nuh-uh.”

  “Not random?”

  Apparently not. He said something. I didn’t catch it, but Mendoza seemed to. “We’ll start there.”

  That sounded positive. We had somewhere to start. Although I had a feeling when he said ‘we,’ he didn’t mean me.

  Zachary said something else. I sharpened my ears. “Tat…”

  “Tattoo? Someone had a tattoo?”

  Mendoza gave me a look, one that said clearly, “Don’t try to help.” I arched my brows at him.

  “Tati,” Zach said. “—ana.”

  “Tatiana? There was a girl there named Tatiana?”

  He nodded. Leaning back, he looked exhausted. And Mendoza must have seen it, too. His voice gentled. “Should I talk to Tatiana? Or avoid her?”

  Zachary managed a shrug. The machine must not have liked it, because it whooshed harder for a second before it settled down again.

  “Not sure?” Mendoza said. “That’s OK. But it’s the place where Tatiana is?”

  Zachary nodded.

  “I’ll find it. And find who did this. And arrest him. Or them.”

  Zachary’s lips moved. There wasn’t any sound behind the word, and Mendoza had to bend closer to hear it. Under the circumstances, I had no problem keeping my eyes off his posterior—my attention was focused on Zachary—but my peripheral vision noticed, and approved of the movement.

  “Them?” Mendoza said. “Two? Three?”

  There’d been two. Mendoza nodded and straightened. “We’ll let you rest. I’ll be back later.”

  “Me, too,” I said, over Mendoza’s shoulder. Zach lifted a hand in a weak wave, but I think he was asleep before we’d close
d the door behind us.

  Outside in the hallway I refrained—barely—from grabbing Mendoza’s lapels and pushing him up against the wall so I could shake the answers I wanted out of him. Instead I folded my arms tightly across my midriff, the better to keep from assaulting him. “What happened?”

  “I was talking to Araminta Tucker,” Mendoza said, “when the hospital called. Zach was brought in earlier this morning. A shopkeeper on Thompson Lane discovered him in the alley behind a discount tobacco store when he came to work.”

  I opened my mouth, and he added, “He was interviewed. He has nothing to do with anything.”

  I closed my mouth again. And opened it. “Who interviewed him? You?”

  Mendoza shook his head. “He called 911. An ambulance showed up. And a squad car. The officers took a statement.”

  “And you read it?”

  “I spoke to them,” Mendoza said. “The shopkeeper is out of it.”

  Fine. “So Zachary was brought here. What was wrong with him?”

  “He’d been given a beating,” Mendoza said, something which had been pretty obvious from looking at Zach. Either that, or he’d fallen down a mountainside. But since we don’t have many of those around here, I’d assumed it was the second scenario.

  “And?”

  “It’s mostly just scrapes and bruises. I know he looks bad, but most of it’ll heal in a week with no after effects.”

  Mostly… “What’s the damage that won’t heal in a week?”

  “He has a couple of broken ribs,” Mendoza said. He sounded reluctant. “I’m guessing someone kicked him. More than once.”

  My stomach rebelled, and I swallowed. Hard. “And?”

  “One of the broken ribs punctured a lung.”

  “That’s why he has the machine that’s making the whooshing noise?”

  Mendoza nodded. “He’ll be breathing on his own by tomorrow, most likely.”

  “They’re keeping him until then, right?”

  He nodded. “He’ll be here a couple days, yeah. After that, we’ll have to figure something else out.”

  We would? “Won’t he be going home to his mother?”

  “She kicked him out,” Mendoza said. “Last week, when he quit his job at the Apex to go to work for you.”

  She had? “He didn’t say anything about that to me.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Mendoza said. “He’s been sleeping in your office or his car since then.”

  That explained the pizza box under the desk and the laundry in the backseat, anyway.

  And derailed my train of thought.

  “Have you put out a call for Zachary’s car? If we find it, maybe we’ll figure out where he was when this happened.”

  “It won’t be there anymore,” Mendoza said, “but yes, I have a call out for the car.”

  “Did he tell you anything helpful before I got there?”

  He shook his head. “I’d only been there a minute or two. After the ambulance picked him up and took him to the hospital, the doctors knocked him out and worked on him for a while. It wasn’t until he woke up this afternoon, and told them to call me, that I realized he was here.”

  “You didn’t get a call this morning?”

  “This morning,” Mendoza said, “nobody knew who he was. Whoever did this took his wallet with his identification.”

  “You called his mother, I assume?” She might have kicked him out, but she did deserve to know where he was.

  “The hospital did,” Mendoza said. “We don’t want him going home with her, though. Just in case these guys come back.”

  I guess we didn’t. Although if that was the case, we didn’t want him bunking in the office by himself, either. I might drive up one morning and find him dead. Or the place burned to the ground.

  “We have a couple days before we have to worry about it,” Mendoza said. “He has insurance, I assume?”

  He did. And I dreaded to think of the kind of money I was going to have to spend on this. Hospital stays don’t come cheap. But yes, he had insurance. So at least he didn’t have medical bills to worry about.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “I work on figuring out where he went last night and who he might have rubbed the wrong way to make them do this,” Mendoza said.

  I nodded. “I can help you with that. I’ll come with you.”

  “Not a chance,” Mendoza said.

  I put my hands on his hips. “You realize that this is a free country, right? You can’t stop me from going wherever I want to.”

  “I can put you in jail,” Mendoza said. “For interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duties.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  He arched his brows, and I added, “OK. Fine. You’d dare. But you won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you feel bad for me,” I said, and tried to look pitiful. It wasn’t very hard at all. “I sent him out last night. It’s my fault he got hurt. And I want to help you find who did this to him.”

  Mendoza hesitated. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

  “You’ll regret it if you don’t let me come along,” I said. “And maybe I’ll be useful. I can tell people I’m looking for my son. He looks enough like me to be.”

  “It’s the red hair,” Mendoza said. “Nothing else.”

  “It’s something. It’s more than you can say.”

  “I can show them my badge and tell them I’m the police.”

  “And see where that gets you,” I said. “We might learn more if people just think I’m a mother looking for my son. The ones who know something might not want to talk to the police.”

  Mendoza seemed to consider it. Since I had a point, he didn’t argue. “So who am I?” he asked instead. “Nobody’d believe that I’m Zach’s father.”

  No. He was too young. And besides, he and Zach looked nothing alike.

  “Friend of the family? Or maybe you can just be the cop I roped in to help me with this. You can roll your eyes at appropriate intervals over my insistence that my son would have come home last night, and wouldn’t have visited those kinds of establishments.”

  “You want me to pretend to think you’re an annoyance?”

  “I’m sure you can handle it,” I said. “It won’t be too much of a stretch.”

  When he didn’t seem to have an answer to that, or at least didn’t have an objection, I set off down the hall. “Let’s go.”

  Mendoza rolled his eyes—I’m sure of it—behind my back, but followed.

  Chapter 12

  We took Mendoza’s car. He insisted. I don’t know whether he was afraid of having me drive, or whether he just thought it was more appropriate to take the official car, but there it was.

  The first place we went was the alley behind the discount tobacco store. There was a couple of them on Thompson Lane, but Mendoza must know the address, because he drove straight to it.

  It wasn’t anything to look at. Just a paved stretch of blacktop lined by brick buildings on one side and bordered by a chain link fence on the other. On the far side of the fence was a field that at one time must have been host to some sort of building. Part of the foundation still stuck up between the tufts of dry grass and straw.

  The alley itself sported the usual array of trash cans and stacks of empty boxes. Behind one of the stores, a swarthy man with large ears was smoking. His eyes followed the path of the car as we rolled past, and I fought back a shiver.

  Mendoza glanced over. “Problem?”

  I figured, if I told him a random guy with a cigarette had given me a chill, he’d take that as proof that he shouldn’t have let me come. So I smiled brightly. “No.”

  Mendoza grunted and pulled the car to a stop. I opened my door and got out.

  There wasn’t much to see. The store was a low-slung one story, with a strong steel door on the back, and no windows, most likely to discourage anyone from trying to break in. Tobacco and beer are popular items.

 
; Mendoza nodded when I said so. “Safe spot to dump a body. Even if somebody’d been inside, they wouldn’t have been able to see anything.”

  No. I glanced around. “I don’t suppose there are cameras?”

  “Not in this part of town,” Mendoza said. And added, “I wish.”

  I wished, too. A camera might have shown us who left Zachary here.

  “You said this is a safe spot to dump a body.” Not that Zachary was a body. Although he had one. “Do you think the beating happened somewhere else?”

  “Most likely,” Mendoza said. He was looking around the alley with his hands on his hips. The gorgeous designer suit and polished shoes were in sharp contrast to our less than stellar surroundings. “Not enough blood for it to have happened here.”

  I suppressed another shiver. “You’d know.”

  He shot me a quick look. “It’s my job.”

  “That’s what I meant,” I said. “Although usually your victims are dead. Zachary isn’t.”

  He shook his head. “They weren’t trying to kill him. If they were, they’d have made sure he was dead before they dumped him.”

  “Bar brawl gone wrong?”

  “Not likely,” Mendoza said. “People who brawl in bars don’t generally cover each other’s heads with sacks before they whale in.”

  Perhaps not. I haven’t been in enough bar brawls to know. “What, then?”

  He shrugged. “They clearly wanted to make sure he couldn’t describe them. It looks more like punishment. Or maybe interrogation.”

  “What would anyone interrogate Zachary over?”

  “No idea,” Mendoza said. “The Russian girl?”

  Anastasia? Maybe. That’s the reason he’d been down here, in this part of town.

  I took a couple of steps back and looked up and down the alley. The guy with the cigarette was still there, and watching us. “Is there anywhere around here where he might have been? Before he ended up in the alley?”

  “Any number of places, I imagine,” Mendoza said.

  “Let me rephrase my question. When he left last night, it was to see whether he could find a place where the girl, Anastasia, might have worked. We talked about strip clubs, but I suppose there are other possibilities, too. Is there anything like that around here?”