Born to Die - Lisa Jackson [7]
“In your dreams.” It was their morning joke. Every once in a while Kacey did surprise him with some outrageous, over-the-top coffee drink, but not today.
“How will I get through another minute?” He splayed one hand over his chest and looked to the ceiling, as if for holy inspiration.
“It’ll be tough, but you’ll manage,” she said. “Soldier on, okay?”
“I’ll try.” His smile, a quick slash of white against his tanned skin, was infectious. No wonder half the single women in the county were interested. Dropping the Oscar-worthy pose, he turned serious. All local GP again. “So did you take a look at Amelia Hornsby’s chart?” Martin knew the names of the family members of nearly everyone who stepped into the clinic. Amelia was an eight-year-old who had been through several rounds of antibiotics to fight a throat infection that just wouldn’t go away.
Randy Yates, a male nurse just out of school, stuck his head into the door. “Hey, Docs, time to rock ’n’ roll,” he said, flashing a quick grin. His brown hair was shaved nearly to his skull, leaving little more than stubble over the top of his head, but he made up for it with a neatly trimmed goatee. “I’ve got exam one, two, and four ready to go. Vitals taken.”
“I’ll take Mrs. Whitaker,” Martin said.
Kacey checked the chart on exam room two. Elmer Grimes. “I’m in two,” she said and opened the door to her first patient.
Detective Jonas Hayes of the LAPD wasn’t buying the setup. He hadn’t last night, when he’d responded to the call to Shelly Bonaventure’s apartment, and he didn’t today, as he sat at his desk and clicked through the images of the crime scene on his computer. This morning the department was buzzing, phones ringing, conversations drifting from one desk to the next, footsteps shuffling, computer keys clicking, and somewhere a printer was clunking out copies.
Hayes took a swallow of his coffee, a cup he’d picked up at the Starbucks a few streets down, as he worked his way through the statements collected the night before. Again. He had perused them all around four in the morning and now was reading them more slowly five hours later.
Last night, from the minute he’d stepped through Shelly Bonaventure’s front door, he’d been hit by the sensation that everything wasn’t as it was portrayed. He felt as if the crime scene had been staged à la Marilyn Monroe some fifty years earlier. Half a century later there were still conspiracy theories and the question of murder still hung over Marilyn’s grave. He didn’t want the same controversy to be a part of Shelly Bonaventure’s death. Not on his watch.
And the crime scene just hadn’t felt right last night.
Still didn’t.
And that, in and of itself, was odd. A man of science, Hayes believed in cold, hard facts. He wasn’t big into gut feelings or hunches. He believed that the truth of a crime was found in evidence.
But this case was different.
For one thing, he didn’t believe that Shelly, no matter what her mental state, would call 9-1-1 while stark naked. If she’d had enough sense to make the call, then why not put on a robe at the very least? Was this a ploy for publicity? Did being nude ramp up the curiosity factor? Had she wanted to die sensationally?
Then where the hell was the suicide note?
Rubbing the back of his neck, he felt a craving for a smoke, but he’d given up cigarettes years before at Delilah’s urging. God, he missed them. Almost as much as he missed her.
Scowling, he turned his thoughts back to the case. He expected, when the tox report came in, to find a concoction of pills and booze in her bloodstream. Xanax, if she’d taken her own meds. A bottle of the sedative had been right there on her nightstand, not in the medicine chest with the rest of her prescriptions. Only three pills were left in the vial, and according to the label, the prescription had been filled only last Saturday.
It was obvious she’d OD’d.
So, why was he not buying the pat suicide