Drop Dead Gorgeous (Blair Mallory #2)

Chapter Twenty-five

E ven though logically the stalker couldn’t know where I was, I still looked around very carefully when I left Sticks and Stones. All clear. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to see a white Chevrolet again without feeling an automatic twinge of panic, which, when you think about it, would be a major pain in the ass. As Wyatt had mentioned, there are thousands and thousands of white Chevrolets. I could be in a permanent twinge.

I needed something hot to drink for my throat, and I needed fabric for my gown. And, damn it, I still needed to call the phone and cable companies—no, damn it, I’d probably have to go in person, to prove my identity, since I didn’t have the account numbers. I also still had to go shopping for clothes. And my boots! My blue boots! They would be returned as undeliverable, but I wanted them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my order number because all of that had burned up with the condo, so I couldn’t even contact Zappos and have them redirected.

I brightened. I could order another pair, though, from Wyatt’s computer.

Siana called while I was on the way to my next-favorite mall. “Mom said you couldn’t talk at all. Tap the phone once if that’s true.”

“It was true yesterday,” I whispered.

“I heard that! How do you feel?”

“Better.” I looked for a McDonald’s. A cup of coffee would improve things even more.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not yet.” Right now I was still at the stage where I had to handle it all.

“Do you have any idea who set the fire?”

“I saw her face,” I managed to croak, “and she’s familiar, but I can’t place her.”

Logical Siana said, “Well, since all of this started recently, she has to relate somehow to one of the places you’ve been recently. Start thinking of them, and eventually something will click.”

“That’s what I thought, but I’ve gone over and over my routine, and I can’t place her anywhere.”

“Then it’s someplace that isn’t part of your normal routine.”

I thought about that while I plowed through stores in the mall. This had all started at the other mall, where I had gone into a lot of stores. Was that where I’d seen her? I tried to remember something unusual happening in any of the stores, that would have caused her face to stick in my mind like that. The idea distracted me while I tried on shoes, and that’s just not right, because buying shoes is one of the great joys of life. I should have been able to devote my full attention to the ritual.

I didn’t try to replace my entire wardrobe in one fell swoop—that would have been impossible—but I did try to cover all possible needs: work clothes, play clothes, dressy clothes. I definitely splurged on new underwear sets, because that’s one of my weaknesses, too. Between what had been cut off me in hospitals and what I’d lost in the fire…

My breath literally caught in my chest.

The hospital. That was where I’d seen her.

She was the nurse with the bad dye job who had chatted with me for such a long time, while she kept ripping bandages off my scrapes. Then I’d been in so much pain from the concussion that it hadn’t really registered at the time, but she’d been unnecessarily rough with those bandages, as if she’d been trying to hurt me.

Her hair had been that ugly brown then, and very blond when I’d seen her in the crowd at the fire scene, but it was the same woman. Maybe blond was her normal color, and the bad dye job was because she’d hastily dyed her hair that very morning, as a disguise. A disguise from what? I hadn’t known her from Adam’s house cat then. But for some reason she hadn’t wanted me to see her with blond hair.

In that case, why would she then bleach her hair? Why not leave it the ugly flat brown?

I grabbed my cell phone and checked the service; there was only one bar, so I gathered my purchases and made a beeline for the nearest exit. As soon as I stepped out into the sunshine the number of bars went to three, and a second later to four. I punched in Wyatt’s cell number.

“Are you all right?” he barked as a greeting, in the middle of the second ring.

“I remember her,” I said as loudly and clearly as I could, because there was a lot of noise around me, with traffic passing by. My voice croaked horribly, breaking in the middle of the words, then losing volume entirely. “She’s a nurse at the hospital .”

“Say again, I couldn’t understand you. Did you say hospital?”

I tried again, this time in the loudest whisper I could manage. At least my voice didn’t break when I whispered. “She’s a nurse at the hospital.”

“One of the nurses? You’re sure?”

“Yes,” I whispered emphatically. “Not in the ER, on the floor. She came into my room, chatted, ripped my bandages off—”

“Blair, where are you?” he interrupted.

“Mall. Different one.” Now I had to think the incident at the other mall had been happenstance, because that was before I’d met Nurse Nutcase.

“Come to the station, right now. We need a description, more to go on than we have so far, and I can barely understand you. I’ll meet you there.”

The Fates were against me. It was absolutely not meant for me to find material for my wedding gown, to get my errands accomplished, or to get Sally and Jazz back together. On the other hand, not getting killed certainly had to be a priority.

In my need to get cell service, I’d gone out the nearest exit instead of the one where I’d entered, so I went back into the mall and walked to the other end. When I entered the parking deck, once again I found myself checking for white Chevrolets. I started to get angry with myself, then realized she was still out there; I couldn’t afford to assume there was no way she could find me. There was always a way, if she was determined enough.

I drove to the police department, took the elevator up. Wyatt was in his office, the door open. He was on the phone, but looked up and saw me, waved me in. He also beckoned to Forester, who came in, too, and closed the door behind him. Wyatt got off the phone, then turned that green laser look on me. “Start at the beginning.”

I took a deep breath. “I finally placed her. She’s a floor nurse at the hospital. She came into my room, was really friendly, chatted for a while, but she kept ripping my bandages off, and she was really rough doing it.”

He looked angry, his jaw working a little. “Did anyone else see her?”

“Siana was there.”

“Describe her.”

“About my age, maybe a little older. It was hard to tell. Very pretty, with greenish hazel eyes. Brown hair, but it was a bad dye job. She must have bleached the dye out afterward, which is really hard to do, and that threw me off when she turned up at the fire scene as a blonde.”

“How tall?”

I swallowed to ease my throat. “I don’t know. I was lying down, so I don’t have a frame of reference. But she was slim, built really well. And she…” I started to say she had really long eyelashes but an elusive picture was trying to form in my mind, another face swimming into focus. I gasped. “I saw her in the fabric shop, too, after I got out of the hospital. I thought she looked familiar then. But her hair was different that time, too. It was red, I think, a dark red.” She had been following me around, and not just in a Chevrolet. Glancing at Wyatt, I knew from his grim expression that the same thought had occurred to him.

“Wigs,” said Forester.

Wyatt nodded. “That’s what it sounds like.”

“The blond hair could have been a wig,” I said. “It was covered with a hood so I couldn’t tell. But the brown hair in the hospital wasn’t a wig, it was her hair, and it was dyed. Trust me.” My whisper was going; I started coughing at the end of that speech. The laryngitis was something else I could lay at her door, and though it was minor in comparison to burning my condo, not being able to talk was a pain in the ass. If I needed to scream or something, I’d be S.O.L. When you think of the situations in which you might need to scream, having a voice suddenly becomes more important.

“I’ll contact the hospital,” said Forester, “see if we can get photos of everyone who was working—when?”

“First shift, last Friday,” supplied Wyatt. “Fourth floor, neurological wing.”

“We might not need a warrant,” said Forester, but without much hope. “But this hospital tends to get pissy on privacy issues.”

“I get pissy on attempted murder issues,” said Wyatt, his tone icy.

I wondered what he could do if the hospital administration balked at providing photos without first being served with a warrant, then remembered that, courtesy of his previous celebrity status, he could pick up the phone and talk to the governor anytime he wanted. Wyatt could affect fund-raising, appointments, any number of aspects that were pertinent to a hospital. Way cool.

Forester left to get on the phone with the hospital and Wyatt turned his attention back to me. “Was the first time you saw her while you were in the hospital?”

“So far as I know.”

“Can you think of anything you said that might have set her off, anything she said that can give us any idea what’s going on here?”

I thought back over the conversation and shook my head. “I mentioned I was getting married in less than a month and didn’t have time for a concussion. She said something about when she was planning her own wedding, how crazy the last month was. She asked if I liked your mother, said it must be nice to have a mother-in-law you liked, from which I gathered she doesn’t like hers. She thought I’d been in a motorcycle accident, because of the road rash. Just…conversation. I said I was hungry and she said she’d have a tray sent up, but she never did. That’s it. She was very friendly.” I did some more coughing, and looked around for a pad to write on. I’d strained my throat enough. If I kept this up, I’d be right back where I’d started.

“That’s all the questions,” he said, getting up and coming around the desk to haul me to my feet, his arms closing around me. “Rest your throat. We’ll get her now; that’s the lead we’ve been needing.”

“It just makes no sense,” I whispered. “I don’t know her.”

“Stalkers don’t make sense, period. They form illogical obsessions in an instant, and a lot of times the victim has done nothing more than be polite. It isn’t your fault, and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it. It’s a personality disorder. If she changes her appearance that often, then she’s looking for something, and you’re probably everything she wants to be and isn’t.”

That was a pretty neat psychological assessment. I was impressed. “Hey, you’re not just another pretty face,” I said, looking up at him. “And everyone says football players are dumb.”

He laughed and patted my butt, though his hand probably lingered too long for it to qualify as an actual pat. At the quick knock on his door, though, he dropped his hand and stepped away.

Forester popped his head in, a frown knitting his forehead. “I talked to the floor supervisor,” he reported. “She said there’s no one answering that description on her floor at all.”

Wyatt frowned, rubbing his bottom lip as he thought. “Could have been someone from the ER who saw Blair when she was brought in, took a little side trip up to see her. There should be security film of the hallways, almost every hospital has that now.”

“I’ll get in touch with hospital security and see what I can do.”

“How much trouble will that be?” I asked Wyatt when Forester had gone back to his phone.

His smile was thin. “Depends on what kind of day the chief of security is having. Depends on whether hospital rules say he has to clear this with the administrator before letting us see the film. Depends on whether the administrator is having a dick-head day. If he is, then it depends on whether or not we can find a judge to sign a warrant, which can be a little iffy on a Friday afternoon, and especially iffy if the hospital administrator plays golf with a few of the judges.”

Good God. And he’d wanted to be a cop.

“Do I need to stay?”

“No, you can go do your thing. I know how to get in touch with you. Just be careful.”

I nodded my understanding. As I rode down in the elevator I sighed. I was tired of looking for white Chevrolets, and anyway, if she were smart, which she appeared to be, why wouldn’t she swap up her vehicles? Renting a car wasn’t difficult. For all I knew she could be in a blue Chevrolet by now.

A chill went down my back.

Or a beige Buick.

Or even a white Taurus.

I’d let myself be blinded by the idea that I’d recognize her by what she was driving. She could be driving anything. She could have been following me all morning, and I wouldn’t have known it because I’d been looking for the wrong color car.

She could be anywhere.