Fatal Distraction Read online

  “Good bye, Oliver. Have a good journey. I’ll take care of Helen.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 4:00 a.m.

  HELEN FLOATED BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS and slumber, too cold to sleep soundly and too tired to awaken. The hospital television set was on, volume muted, casting a blue glow over her room. She opened her eyes briefly to check the time on the screen before drifting back into a state of semi-consciousness.

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. The scrambled eggs and toast she’d consumed had long ago metabolized. She was hungry. Really hungry. She burrowed deeper under the light covers, still cold. Her shoulders bunched together and she inserted her icy hands between her legs. She still wore the lightweight green cotton scrubs she’d borrowed earlier. Her feet were bare, her toes numb with cold. She rubbed them together to warm up as best she could and went back to sleep.

  A while later, she ignored the need to urinate because it was simply too cold to get out of bed. She noticed her entire body was shaking and her nose was chilled. She opened her eyes to check the time on the television screen and closed them again when she realized it was still the middle of the night. She dozed again.

  Flashing lights on the television screen awakened her twenty minutes later. Her uncomfortably full bladder pressed her to do something about the situation this time. She pulled the thin cotton blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her when she stood, wincing at the painful burn on her arm. She slipped her feet into the terry slippers. They felt so warm she decided to wear them back to bed.

  When she returned from the bathroom, standing before the mirror in the dim light from the television in the other room, she saw her face for the first time since the fire. Old makeup streaked her cheeks, mascara smeared around her eyes and ran down to her chin. The butterfly bandages, the stitches, makeup and soot all combined to create a Halloween horror mask. She bent over and threw several splashes of water on her face to clean off the mess as best she could. When she dried her face with the towel and looked again, she saw the remnants of a much younger Helen.

  “Where did you go, anyway?” she said to her younger counterpart in the mirror. “I’ll bet you didn’t expect your life to work out like this, did you?”

  When young Helen didn’t reply, she wrapped herself up in the blanket again and walked like a geisha to the door.

  Frank Temple was sitting in a chair outside her door. He had leaned the chair back against the wall and his head had fallen over to the side in sleep. His mouth was open slightly. A small stream of drool ran down the side of his lips.

  Poor Frank. She hadn’t the heart to wake him. He’d had as exhausting a day as she had. If she woke him up and sent him somewhere to sleep, he’d only refuse to leave and lose more shut-eye in the process. She left her door open to avoid awakening him by closing it.

  Still bleary and so, so tired, she half-closed her eyelids as she waddled in the blanket’s cocoon down the corridor to check on Oliver before she went back to sleep.

  Her foggy brain registered the agent who’d been watching Oliver’s room talking with one of the young nurses on the other side of the nursing station. She was not alarmed. It was six o’clock in the morning and the hospital would normally be bustling, but it seemed all the patients were asleep, as she should be.

  Helen reached Oliver’s room and noticed the drapes were pulled for privacy and peace. They’d explained that Oliver’s coma didn’t necessarily mean he had been “resting” earlier. Maybe he’d found a more peaceful sleep.

  When she reached his closed door, she turned the knob silently and pushed inward instead of pulling the door toward her. The door rattled, but didn’t open. She tried twice more before she realized her mistake. She pulled the door open and left it open as she stepped into Oliver’s room, still half asleep.

  Helen shuffled toward the bed, moving around the various machines and tubes that were all, one way or another, hooked up to Oliver.

  At the bedside, her back to the glass wall and the door she’d entered moments before, eyelids heavy, brain fuzzy, Helen reached out to hold Oliver’s hand. She squeezed hard, as she’d done earlier in the night.

  “Hi, honey,” she whispered drowsily. “Are you sleeping?” She closed her eyes and leaned over to kiss him.

  She missed. Feeling foolish, Helen opened her eyes. What she saw jolted her into full awareness.

  Oliver’s body shook all over. His arms and legs jerked as if he were being electrocuted.

  Seizure, Helen’s sluggish brain told her.

  She dropped her blanket and ran into the corridor.

  “Help! Help!” It was all she could think of to scream. It was enough. The nurse and deputy, followed by an alarmed Frank Temple, came running.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dentonville, Florida

  Friday 6:34 a.m.

  JESS AWAKENED FROM A LIGHT SLEEP as Mike pulled the SUV into Vivian Ward’s driveway. The dashboard clock read 6:34 a.m., two hours of what passed for sleep in the passenger seat. It had left her groggy.

  As if reading her thoughts, Mike handed her a paper cup of hot coffee. She lifted it gratefully and took a sip of the steaming liquid.

  Mike leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “You’re aging me pretty fast with this schedule. Any chance I can get a nap while you talk to Mrs. Ward?”

  “Sure,” she said. “No prob.”

  Jess hadn’t told Mike why they came to Vivian’s home. No lights were on inside the modest house that Jess could see. The garage door was closed. Perhaps Vivian wasn’t here, although her night shift ended an hour ago.

  Jess looked around at the quiet neighborhood full of pastel stucco homes with jalousie windows. Florida ranch style, their developers called them back in the 1960s. Subdivisions all over Florida were full of them, but most of the middle-class families who’d proudly purchased them back then had moved on. Today’s residents tended to be good people who didn’t buy their cars in high-end dealerships or shop at designer stores in luxury malls. People like Vivian Ward.

  Tommy Taylor would remain this neighborhood’s most infamous resident until his execution at six o’clock tonight, less than twelve hours away. He would be awake by now, if he’d slept at all after last night’s “last meal.” His mother would have been allowed to visit yesterday and maybe again this morning, if she’d wanted to come. He’d shower and dress in clean prison clothes, then eat his breakfast. After that, he’d be visited by the prison pastor or the minister from his mother’s church.

  The witnesses would gather in place by 5 p.m. Jess had intended to be one of them, and if the execution actually took place, she would be there. If she could bear it. And so would Vivian Ward. Both had received permission to witness Taylor’s death.

  Jess felt the impossible weight of Tommy Taylor’s life riding on her shoulders. Her errand was hopeless. Arnold Ward had done everything in his power, including sacrificing his own life, to make sure his sons’ killer would be executed today. Vivian Ward would do no less. Jess knew it in every sinew of her body because, in Vivian’s situation, she almost surely would have done the same.

  The crazy thing was that less than twenty-four hours ago, she would have been fine with that result, satisfied with it. Even now, she didn’t truly believe that there was any physical evidence that could or would exonerate Taylor. The case against him was as near air-tight as any death penalty case she’d ever worked on, and she’d been doing this job for years.

  But she had to be dead certain, if only to know if an unknown killer walked free.

  She took a deep breath. “Sleep tight, Mike. I’ll be back soon.” She grabbed up her bag, recorder and other paraphernalia and exited the car, closing the door behind her as quietly as possible.

  It was Friday morning, still dark. She hoped most people would be in bed even if they didn’t work nights like Vivian did. Jess made her way over the broken sidewalk and up to
the front stoop. She reached out and pressed the button for the doorbell.

  After a few moments, she pressed the button again. Then, a third time. Jess didn’t hear the bell ring, but she could hear a noisy window air conditioner running somewhere, so maybe the bell worked. Or maybe it didn’t. Vivian didn’t come to the door.

  With a final look up and down the street, Jess pulled the storm door open and rapped on the inside wooden door with her knuckles, at first moderately and when Vivian didn’t appear, harder.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Jess said aloud. She reached down to the doorknob and turned. She pushed the unlocked door open and reeled when the odor of stale cigarettes assaulted her. She turned her head to get a breath of somewhat fresher air and then peered into the darkened living room. It was so black inside that she couldn’t see a thing.

  Great. Now I’m breaking and entering.

  Jess felt around the inside of the doorframe for a light switch and when she found one, she flipped it. A weak light bulb in a yellowed fixture slightly illuminated the entry way.

  She pulled her note pad out of her bag, located Vivian’s home phone number, and used her cell phone to place the call. She heard the false ring tone through the receiver followed by the actual ringing phone in the house. She counted fifteen rings, twenty, twenty-five. “Come on, Vivian. Answer the phone.” After thirty-five rings, she disconnected and dropped the phone into her pocket, her eyes watering from the odor of old cigarette smoke. Seeing the kitchen straight ahead, she found another light switch, but when she flipped it, nothing happened. A cat ran past her, startling Jess badly.

  By the time Jess turned on the overhead lights in the kitchen, she was shaking like an addict in detox. She leaned back against the kitchen wall and took several deep breaths to calm herself, nearly gagging on the stench. She looked around at the messiest room she’d ever seen in her life.

  Dishes were piled everywhere. Newspapers, food wrappers and used paper towels littered the counter tops. Brown grocery bags lined the walls, overflowing with trash. The cat litter was full and the cat had been using the surrounding floor space, too. There was only one ash tray, located on the round maple wood table in the middle of the room, and it overflowed with ash and butts, covering the playing card layout of a losing solitaire game that could have lain there for an hour or a year.

  “Vivian? Are you here?” Jess called as she walked down the narrow hallway toward the three bedrooms she was sure the house possessed. All of the doors were open. Jess turned on the lights in the bathroom, the bedroom that had been the daughters’, the bedroom that had belonged to the sons, and finally, at the back of the house away from the street, the master bedroom. All of the rooms were empty of people but packed to the ceiling with junk. The stench back here suggested more than a few dead mice under the debris.

  Jess strode back through the kitchen and opened the door to the attached garage. She flipped on the light and saw what by this time she fully expected to see. Aside from the abnormal clutter she’d found everywhere, the space was empty.

  In an odd way, Jess found the house’s deterioration comforting. Maybe Vivian really was crazy. Maybe the physical evidence she claimed didn’t exist. Maybe Tommy Taylor’s execution should go forward as scheduled.

  She considered the scene, attempting to formulate a plan. If there was any physical evidence to be found here, Jess would never locate it in the time she had left without Vivian’s help, even if she knew what she was looking for and where to look.

  Before she could begin even the most hopeless search, a red flashing light reflected hectically around the room, followed by the blurt of a siren from the police car in the driveway that had just blocked her exit.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dentonville, Florida

  Friday Noon

  EVERYTHING WAS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE, Jess thought.

  She and Mike sat neglected in the jail cell where the local cops had stashed them after finding Jess in Vivian Ward’s house. Jess wondered if Vivian might have been arrested by now, too, if they thought her complicit in Arnold’s car bombing of the Governor’s mansion yesterday.

  Mike slept, mouth open, snoring softly, oblivious to the number of unwashed bodies that must have lain on his cot’s mattress before him. A vivid bruise caused by his injury in yesterday’s explosion darkened his right orbital socket and spread like spilt red wine onto his cheek. Somehow, the black eye made him seem older, less innocent.

  Despite the whiff of antiseptic and the spotless floor, Jess imagined millions of dust mites and other disgusting creatures scurrying about within her own cot’s stuffing that pasted her eyelids open. She craved sleep, envied Mike’s ability to catch rest whenever the opportunity arose, but couldn’t succumb.

  One of Vivian Ward’s neighbors, who also should have been sleeping, had called the local sheriff when he observed her breaking into Vivian’s house. Seemed the local community watched over and cared for their own. No surprise, given that the subdivision had spawned Tommy Taylor. Also, thieves had been known to rob bereaved families blind while they were attending funerals or attending to the final resting of loved ones. Whenever a death was publicized, as Arnold Ward’s had been, responsible neighborhoods assigned someone in the community to watch the survivors’ homes for intruders–something Jess knew perfectly well, but had forgotten.

  Jess had explained that she knew Vivian, claimed that they’d had an appointment. Vivian was expecting her. There must be some reason why Vivian wasn’t home. Maybe she’d been injured or something.

  The officers didn’t have a contact number for Vivian, couldn’t confirm Jess’s story, and weren’t interested in her explanations. She was breaking the law. Upholding the law was one thing, Jess thought, but they seemed unnecessarily dedicated to the job in light of the circumstances. Surely, even small town officers had more significant crimes to enforce than her stepping into Vivian’s house. Another reason she thought the picture was out of whack.

  As a last resort, Jess had tried a strategy that had worked before. She produced her identification, explained her victim’s-rights work to show she was on the same side of the criminal justice system that they were, and offered to return to face charges next week if they released her. Surprisingly, they refused.

  Strike three and here she was.

  That was almost six hours ago. She’d spent part of the time thinking about Peter, but she wasn’t allowed to check her tip lines or her web sites. She’d intended to call her Colorado investigator, but she couldn’t do that from jail, either.

  Even her request for one phone call had been denied, which seemed wrong as well. Vivian Ward could easily resolve the situation. Where was Vivian?

  Jess had been mulling things over in her sleep-deprived mind, but she couldn’t work everything out. No matter how she analyzed what she knew, the picture remained fragmented.

  The black clock on the wall above the exit door mocked her. She could almost hear its second hand jumping one second at a time, counting down to Taylor’s execution. The Crawford murder case would cease to exist in six hours, along with its alleged perpetrator, and Jess still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to interfere in the process or let it continue.

  When the door below the clock opened, she stared, incredulous. David Manson walked into the cell block, hands stuffed into his pockets. He stood outside the cell, rocking back and forth on his feet, smirking, sardonic. “Well, well. Look who they’ve got locked up in here. None other than the notorious avenger. Fancy meeting you here.”

  His stance, his tone, his mere being suffused her with a kind of energy born of the outrage he inspired. David Manson was the one who should be locked up. That he walked free while she sat in jail infuriated her nearly beyond reason.

  She forced herself to stay seated, leaned her head back against the block wall, and appeared unconcerned, even bored. “I’m flattered that you’d come so far to rescue me, David, but I already have a lawyer on the way.”

  He snorted
. “Nice try. Even if you did have a lawyer on the way, he couldn’t help you until Monday after you’re arraigned and your bail’s set.”

  “That might be true if I’d been formally arrested and booked, but I wasn’t.”

  “Hang out here and wait, then. I, on the other hand, have a lawyer here that can get you released now. If you want.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  The pieces of the puzzle shuffled and the real picture fell into place as last. Not only was it ugly, it smelled rotten as hell. Now she understood why she’d been detained without actually being arrested, and why it had taken Manson so long to get here.

  Manson had followed her, then called the cops, arranged it all to keep her out of the way while he searched Vivian’s house. If he’d found what he was looking for, they’d have charged her and she’d have spent the weekend in jail, out of Manson’s way. Since he hadn’t found what he wanted, he needed her help. Hard to believe he’d have any influence with the local cop shop, but he obviously knew someone who did.

  Someday, she’d make him pay.

  Jess stood, stretched like a cat. She walked over to Mike and nudged him awake. “Get up, Mike. Time to go.” He opened his eyes and, to his credit, followed her lead.

  Then she turned to Manson. “Open the door, David. If you didn’t need me, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He hesitated a few moments, then called to the deputy to release them. Once her keys and personal possessions had been returned and the three of them rejoined outside in the fresh air and sunshine, Jess told Manson, “You must have stepped in the cat litter in Vivian Ward’s kitchen, David. You smell like crap.”

  He scowled, but refused to rise to the bait. “Where’s the evidence that old bat told you about?”

  Mike got behind the wheel of the SUV. Jess stood with the passenger door open, tempted to hop in and leave Manson standing alone in another parking lot. “Not only do you smell bad, you’ve got no heart at all. I gather you didn’t find Vivian, then, either?”