Deciding that a dose of shocking reality is my only hope, I couch my next words carefully and try to keep my voice calm despite the fact that my insides are quaking. “You don’t understand, Jackie. There’s more to it than that. Luke Nelson is a rapist and a very ill man. He needs help.”
She shakes her head again, harder and faster. “You don’t understand. Luke just has special needs, that’s all. He explained it to me, how his sexual drive is higher than most and he has to find other outlets to get release. It’s not an emotional thing with those other women, only with me. I’m willing to let him get what he needs physically, as long as he comes back to me in the end.”
I stare at her, disbelieving. “He’s raping women, Jackie.”
“No, no, no. Those other women, they all slept with him of their own free will.”
“I’m not talking about the other women he was dating, Jackie. I’m talking about his patients. He’s been drugging them and then raping them. I have proof. He needs to be stopped.”
Jackie laughs, but it’s a brittle, humorless, ugly sound. “Yeah, that’s what that bitch Shannon said, too, when she found out. She said she had to report him because what he was doing was wrong.” She takes a few steps into the room, moving closer to me. The knife now hangs at her side, but I harbor no illusions about her ability to use it in a flash. “But I knew the real reason Shannon wanted to report him,” she goes on. “She was just jealous because she didn’t have the kind of relationship with Luke that I have. She wanted to ruin it for me, to take away my one chance at happiness.”
The significance of her words washes over me like an icy shower. Other facts crash together in my mind, suddenly making a horrifying sense. The blood type found in Shannon’s kitchen was the very rare B negative and I now recall that Jackie’s blood type is the same. We always had to make sure we had it on hand at the hospital whenever she came in for surgery. And I knew Jackie had mental and emotional problems because of all those times I cared for her in the ER during her breakdowns. I also recall Jackie’s incessant questions about how the investigation was going every time I saw her, and how nervously she behaved. I remember the spilt glasses of milk and the slices of cheesecake we found on Shannon’s kitchen table, which I now realize ruled Erik out. Per Jackie’s own words—obviously not realizing she was clearing him in the process—Erik is lactose intolerant.
I’m afraid to ask my next question but have to. “Did you kill Shannon?”
I half expect her to deny it but instead she says, “Of course I did. I had to get rid of her to keep Luke safe. And it would have worked, too, if you hadn’t gone and stuck your nose into things. It’s all your fault that that other woman figured everything out and came here yesterday. She caught me and Luke making love and then she tried to kill him. Darned near did, too. If I hadn’t wrestled the gun from her, she might have shot him a second time.”
“You killed Carla, too?”
“I had to, don’t you see? She came charging in here full of accusations that would have ruined everything. I had to shut her up for good. Luke and I decided we could pass it off as a suicide but you had to come back and keep on snooping. I knew you’d muck it all up. And now Luke is gone.” The tenor of her voice has risen to just shy of hysteria. “Where is he?” she asks shrilly. “Where did you make him go?”
“I have no idea,” I say, backpedaling. “He disappeared yesterday right after we questioned him.”
She moves closer and raises the knife, waving it in front of her like a blind man’s cane. “It’s all your fault,” she says, clearly angry. “Why couldn’t you just leave him alone? Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?”
I take another step back and feel the chair hit the back of my legs. My mind scrambles, trying to decide what to do next, trying to figure a way out of this mess. I remember the recorder nestled in my bra and decide I need to keep her talking. Junior Feller is parked right out front and if luck is on my side, he might come in to check on things. If not, at least I can record what Jackie says as evidence. Then my mind registers what the evidence will be used for—to help solve my murder—and I shudder.
“I don’t believe you killed Shannon,” I tell Jackie. “I don’t see how you could have.”
She smirks. “It was easy. She told me about the gun; in fact she asked me if I wanted to buy it. She said Erik had given it to her but it made her nervous having it around. At first I told her I wasn’t interested, but when she told me what she’d discovered about Luke, I changed my mind. I went over there under the pretense of looking at the gun to see if I wanted to buy it. And then I shot her.”
The flat tone of her voice as she admits this sends chills down my spine. How could I not have seen how disturbed she was before this?
Jackie says, “Since I knew Erik was the primary suspect, I took the gun with me when I went to the hospital with Mom for one of her radiation treatments. I had scheduled a mammogram for myself at the same time and it was easy to sneak the gun into a linen closet while I was in the X-ray department. I was careful to wipe it down so my fingerprints wouldn’t be on it, and I knew someone would find it eventually and assume the inevitable . . . that Erik had hidden it there.”
“That was very clever,” I say, hoping a little ego stroking might buy me some time.
“Well, it would have been if you’d just minded your own damned business.”
She punctuates the sentence with a downward slash of her knife through the air. And then she starts toward me. Desperate and out of any other ideas, I decide to try a diversion. I purposefully shift my gaze over her shoulder toward the office door and look startled.
It works. Jackie whips around, wielding the knife in front of her, ready to strike at anyone or anything.
And then the most amazing thing happens. Hurley appears in the doorway, right in front of Jackie, right in front of the business end of that knife. Jackie shrieks like a harridan and lunges at him, plunging the knife into his chest.
Chapter 46
Jackie drives the knife home with a bloodcurdling scream and then pulls it out again.
“No!” I yell. “Jackie, for God’s sake, no!”
Hurley lets out a little grunt, his eyes wide with surprise, and then slumps to the floor. I charge at Jackie’s back with a guttural growl and when I’m only a foot or two away, she hears me and starts to turn.
I ram her on her left side and the two of us fall to the floor, landing hard. Her right arm, with the knife in her hand, hits a floor lamp and the knife clatters to the floor, leaving a splatter trail of Hurley’s blood in its wake. I hear the breath leave Jackie’s lungs with a whoomph. I push myself off of her, scramble across the floor on my hands and knees, grab the knife, and then quickly roll onto my back, the knife in front of me, ready for Jackie to come at me. But she’s curled into a fetal position on the floor, crying.
I look beyond her to the doorway and my heart sinks. Hurley is sprawled in the doorway on his back, the left side of his shirtfront soaked with blood. I get up and hurry over to him, praying he’s still alive. Setting the knife on the floor, I quickly assess him, see that he’s breathing and conscious, and then rip his shirt open. The wound, an incision nearly an inch long and who knows how deep near his left shoulder, is oozing a steady flow of blood.
Hurley looks up at me and manages a weak smile. “I’ve fantasized about you ripping my shirt off, Winston, but I don’t think I’m quite up to it right now.” I smile despite how frightened I am for him. “What the hell happened?” he asks.