Her response was immediate. “Yes, okay.”
“No argument?”
She shook her head. “No, this is too important.”
“Yes, it is.”
She grabbed her purse from her drawer and was heading toward the door, where he stood waiting, when her fax machine began to buzz.
“Do you need to see what that is, or can it wait until we get back?” he asked.
“It’s probably just an advertisement,” she said, but she had already turned around and was circling the desk to get to the fax machine. “It is so rare to get a fax these days. Everything’s sent through e-mail.”
She glanced over her shoulder to see if he was irritated that she was making him wait. He was busy buttoning the collar of his shirt and didn’t appear out of sorts over the delay.
“Do you mind? It will only take a minute. The cover sheet’s coming through.”
“No problem.” He was looking for his tie now.
“It’s on the floor by the sofa.”
“What is?” he asked.
“The tie you’re looking for. It fell out of your suit pocket.”
“Thanks.”
He headed back to the sofa. She turned to the machine. The cover sheet had dropped into the tray below. The sender line was blank, but there was something written on the subject line. She couldn’t quite make it out. She picked the sheet up and turned toward the light. A cold chill raced down her spine as she read the three words scrawled across the line: Your Murder List.
“Murder List? Oh, God…”
It suddenly all clicked. She inhaled sharply and took a step back as though that simple action would separate her from the truth.
She shook her head. “No… it couldn’t be… it’s just not possible…”
Alec heard the panic in her voice. He gently pried the cover sheet out of her hand just as the fax machine began to hum again. Page two was slowly coming through.
Regan had been so stunned by the heading on the top of the page that she missed the message, written in what looked like chicken scratches, on the bottom. Alec read it out loud: “Sorry, I can’t take credit for this one. I was too late. She was already in the mortuary. Had herself a fatal heart attack, but I went ahead and marked her off your list anyway.”
Alec was on the phone to Wincott by the time Regan held up the second page. He rattled off the fax number. “Everything else is blocked out.”
“We’re on it,” Wincott said. “I’ll see you back at the station.” He was shouting to his partner as he hung up.
Alec turned to Regan. “Murder List? What the hell is a murder list?”
She didn’t immediately answer. She was anxiously gripping her hands together as she continued to wait for the machine to spit the page out. It seemed to be taking forever.
And there it was.
Oh, God, another picture, this one of a woman lying on what looked like a metal slab. Her ashen face was peaceful in death.
It took Regan several seconds to remember where she’d seen the woman before.
“This can’t be happening.”
“Tell me,” he demanded.
“I know this woman,” she said. “She works at Dickerson’s Bath Shop on Michigan Avenue. I stopped in there a couple of weeks ago to buy a bottle of body lotion. She’s a saleswoman.”
Her knees felt as though they were going to buckle on her. She fell back against the desk and took a deep breath. Her mind was reeling.
“She was wearing a name tag… Ms. Patsy.”
“You remembered her name?”
She nodded. “She was rude, terribly rude. She was probably just having a bad day, and it was wrong of me to judge her so harshly. And now she’s dead.”
That much was pretty obvious. “Are you going to get sick?” Alec was already looking around for a trash can.
“No, no. This is all my fault.”
“How could this be your fault? If what this maniac says is true, she died of a heart attack.”
She was barely listening to him. Oh, God, what had she done? What had she done?
“Regan?”
She took another deep breath. “You read the note. He said he was too late, that she was already dead. It’s obvious to me he went after her to kill her.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
Her face was turning gray. Alec was becoming concerned she might pass out on him now. He stepped closer just in case so he could catch her if she collapsed.
“No, but I put her on the list.”
His head snapped back. “You what?”
“The murder list… it’s mine.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Regan was a little surprised he didn’t put handcuffs on her and read her her rights. Actually, Detective Buchanan took the news well, considering that she surely now was his number one suspect.
He was quite good at hiding his reactions. Had she not been looking into his eyes, she wouldn’t have noticed his attitude had hardened toward her.
She was too shaken to care what the detective thought about her. She was scared and worried and didn’t like feeling that way at all. She checked the time, calculated that Henry would be back at his desk in about fifteen minutes, and left him a note explaining where she was going. She also instructed him to call Sam Baldwin, the in-house attorney who, with an overworked staff of three other full-time attorneys, handled all the legal problems involving the Hamilton Hotels and/or any of the Madisons. Spencer jokingly referred to the attorneys as Walker’s personal team, since he was the family member who most often needed their expertise. Sam would be shocked to hear it was Regan who now needed him.
She rode in the detective’s car to the police station, and on the way she tried to explain all about the spontaneous exercise Dr. Shields had had the registrants do during the reception.
He was weaving in and out of traffic, narrowly missing one car after another. The man drove like a maniac, and she felt it was her duty as a concerned citizen to tell him so.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “You’re Walker Madison’s sister, aren’t you? If anyone drives like a maniac, it’s your brother.” He paused to think about what she had been telling him and then asked, “What did you mean when you said the bodyguard was still watching you? Had something happened earlier that got his attention?”
“No,” she answered. “But from the minute I walked into the room, he locked in on me. It was really strange. I hadn’t done anything to draw his attention, but he wouldn’t stop staring at me.”
Alec didn’t think it was strange at all. Rude, maybe, but not strange. Hell, he himself was having trouble not staring. The bodyguard was a man, and Regan Madison was a very beautiful woman.
“I can prove all of this happened,” she said.
He glanced at her. “Prove what?”
“That I’m not making this up… the exercise, I mean. Sophie taped it. She had a recorder in her purse, and she sat close to Shields. You can listen to it.”
“Yes, I will.”
“And just so you understand, I didn’t have any intention of doing the exercise, but then Shields said that, when time was up, we all had to hold up our lists, and he was going to walk around the room to see if we’d all written names. I decided then I’d let him know what I thought of him. He posed the question, after all, and he told us that if the world would be a better place without certain people in it, then put their names down.”
“His name was on your list?”
“Yes.”
“How many names did you write on your notepad?”
“Six… no, five.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, there were five names.” She prayed to god she was right.
“Okay, so Shields was one, and the Patsy woman, and Detective Sweeney,” he said. “Who are the other two?”
“The bodyguards.”
“Ah.”
“I’m not normally so bloodthirsty.”