Cassidy and the Princess Read online

  The rose and ribbon had produced no leads so far. At least, though, they had gotten help now that a “celebrity” was involved. Detectives had checked the hospital florist and all the other florists in the area, but no one had purchased red roses. Cassidy had expected as much. After the first killing, they’d conducted an extensive search of florists, only to be told haughtily that it was of a type sold to grocery stores.

  The ribbon, too, was a brand found in every drug and grocery store.

  So they hadn’t expected to find a knife. Their killer didn’t make mistakes.

  “Either he took it with him or came back for it,” Manny said, as the last of the afternoon sun faded away, leaving dusk. It was eight. “I’ve got to go home,” he said, “or Janie will divorce me.”

  “It’s been a long night and day,” Cassidy said. “You go. I’ll call Miss Merrick.”

  After his partner left, he called Marise Merrick’s room. He’d feared the mother would pick up the phone. Instead, he heard the slightly slurred words of Miss Merrick. He silently cursed himself. He should have realized she would be asleep.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you,” he said.

  “That’s all right.”

  “Is your fiancé with you?”

  “He will be. He and Mother went out to get something to eat.”

  “I’ll be there with the artist at eight in the morning.

  “That’s fine.”

  A silence.

  “Well, good night, then.” He hung up before he made any more of a fool of himself.

  At least someone would be with her tonight.

  Marise chased her mother and Paul out after they returned from supper, convincing them to return to their hotel. She feigned exhaustion; most of all, she needed breathing room.

  The last time she’d wanted breathing room she’d nearly been killed. But she felt safe in this lighted hospital with attendants checking on her frequently, and she wanted to be by herself. She needed to think, particularly about Paul. She’d felt suffocated today when she’d heard her mother and Paul making decisions for her.

  How long had she permitted that?

  It had been insulting that she’d not even been consulted about their decision to slip her out of Atlanta, that they had turned away the police who’d wanted to help her and the other victims.

  She was twenty-four years old and had been self-supporting since she was eighteen, when she’d turned professional. She made good money these past years since rules had loosened and the line between amateur and professional had disappeared. Between competitions, she and Paul were featured in ice spectaculars throughout the country. But she’d always felt she owed allegiance to her mother.

  She had, after all, been responsible for her mother losing her husband and first-born child. And had spent her life trying to make up for it.

  Her thoughts went to the detective who had been in earlier. He’d filled the room with restless energy. There had also been a rough kindness he tried to hide, and that made her want to help him. Help herself. She wanted her assailant found and convicted. She’d tried to suppress her anger, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, but it was deep inside her. Boiling. It wouldn’t go away until her attacker was in prison.

  She still felt his hands on her, felt his hot breath against her face. She shivered with moments of terror revisited. Four other women dead. She could have been one of them.

  That realization only added to her growing dissatisfaction with her life. She knew now that she couldn’t marry Paul. She liked him tremendously. You couldn’t skate in pairs for five years without liking each other. Each became attuned to the other, intuitive even of the other’s feelings. Paul, though sometimes possessive, was usually aware of hers. In many ways, they were a good match.

  But though she liked him, she simply didn’t love him.

  And neither, she feared, did she love skating the way she once had. She wanted a house of her own. A life of her own. Not one dictated by others. But how to break away without breaking her mother?

  A nurse came in to check Marise’s vital signs. When she left, closing the door behind her, Marise turned off her light and closed her eyes.

  She woke to fear. To panic. The room was dark but the odor was there. The cloying odor she remembered. She reached for the call button. A hand stopped her, pushing it off the bed. Another stuffed something in her mouth.

  He was on the side of the bed with the table. The other side’s gate was down. She’d asked Paul to lower it since she was a restless sleeper and often threw out her legs during the night. Now she thanked God she had.

  She struggled fiercely against his hold, and he hit her across the face. She stopped moving immediately as if stunned. Would it work again? She’d read that men like him liked to bully women. Liked the fear. She would let him feel hers.

  She heard him exclaim, “Bitch.” One of his hands left her for a moment. Then in the dim light, she saw a needle and his face. A surgical mask hid the lower half. She willed herself to stay still even as the gag was pressed deeper into her mouth. But though he leaned his body over hers to pin it, one of her arms was free.

  With one desperate movement, she grasped a pitcher from the bedside stand and swung it at his head. Then she threw all her weight into turning and tumbling off the bed. His hand sought to halt her, but the momentum carried her crashing to the floor with a sheet twisted around her body. She drew her arms around her head to protect it and relaxed her body so the actual impact was minor. She screamed and rolled under the bed, hoping the attacker would be momentarily trapped by the table. Frantically, she searched for the call button that had fallen on the floor. She screamed again.

  She heard a muffled curse, then the sound of a door opening. No retreating footsteps. Her assailant must have been wearing tennis shoes of some kind.

  The light went on. She heard a worried voice. She rolled from beneath the bed. A woman in a jacket populated by cartoon figures leaned over her. “What…on earth…?”

  Marise tried to keep her voice steady. “Someone…was here. He had a needle. It was the man who attacked me the night before last.”

  The nurse grabbed the phone. “Security. Room 414 immediately.” Then she leaned back down, looking first at Marise’s bandaged head, then at the rest of her. “I don’t think you should move until a doctor sees you.” She reached for the phone again and called for a doctor on duty.

  “I’m all right,” Marise said. “But will you please call Detective MacKay at the Atlanta Police Department. I think his number is on the table…” She suddenly realized she wanted the detective more than she wanted Paul. Or her mother.

  She got to her feet, disregarding the nurse, and sat on the bed. She saw a needle in the corner of her room and shuddered. Her entire body trembled. Delayed reaction. She used to do that when she first started in competition. She would skate, then nervousness would seize her as she sat waiting for her marks, knowing how much her mother lived for that judgment.

  The nurse saw her hands, too. Instead of saying anything, she made the call to the police department, just as a security guard came into the room.

  Marise answered questions over and over again. A doctor came in, checked her and left.

  She only wanted one person, though. She didn’t know why. She only knew it was so.

  Cassidy knew he should go home. But he couldn’t let the case go.

  Instead he poured over the reports on the killings, then every word Marise Merrick had said. If only she could produce a description for the police artist.

  He looked at the clock. Eleven-thirty. He needed to leave and get some sleep or he wouldn’t be any good tomorrow. He hadn’t gotten any sleep last night. Yet his thoughts kept turning to his only witness.

  Only. He sat back in his chair. Damn. He should have asked for a police guard. Not that there had been anything in the news about her. Both the Merricks, and he and Manny, had wanted to keep this out of the media. Her mother had even asked the business office to admit her daug
hter under another name.

  She should be safe enough.

  Except that he had a gnawing feeling in his gut. He should have asked for protection.

  Cassidy told himself he was foolish. And yet…

  He looked at his watch. Then he called his captain at home. “I think we should have someone at the hospital with last night’s victim,” he said. “Can you authorize a protective detail?”

  A silence. Then the captain said, “You think she’s in danger?”

  “Her family is with her. But yes. If the perp finds out where she is, or who she is, I think he might try again. We were able to keep it from the news, but…I just have a feeling about this.”

  “It will take a little time.”

  “I’ll go on over,” Cassidy replied.

  “You haven’t had any sleep in two days.”

  “I’ve gone longer. And this is the first lead we’ve had. I want him.”

  “We all want him. Get off the phone, Cassidy, and I’ll make the arrangements.”

  Cassidy put down the receiver. The gnawing didn’t go away. He grabbed his jacket and went outside. He took his own car; getting a police vehicle would take longer. He broke every speed limit.

  He looked at the car clock. Twelve now. Probably time for the shift change at the hospital. His foot pressed down on the gas pedal.

  The cell phone rang. He took it with one hand while keeping the other on the wheel. A nurse told him Miss Merrick had been attacked.

  Cassidy screeched to a stop in front of the hospital. He put an Official Business card on the dashboard, then rushed inside.

  He waited impatiently for the elevator to take him to the fourth floor, then hurried down the corridor. The door to her room was open and a nurse was beside her bed. A uniformed security guard looked uncertain but put a hand on his holstered revolver as Cassidy entered.

  Marise Merrick was pale as she sat in the bed. She gave him a wisp of a smile as he entered. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  He felt an almost uncontrollable anger, mostly aimed at himself. He should have made sure she was protected before he left.

  How had anyone known she was here?

  Her attacker might know she needed medical help. And this would be the most likely place because of its proximity to the attack and because of its trauma department. But how would he obtain the number of her room? Her mother had asked that she be admitted under another name to avoid the press.

  Unless he was a cop. Or someone here at the hospital who heard rumors of a celebrity patient. He knew the grapevine at hospitals was fast. He filed all of those possibilities.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought someone would be here with you.”

  “I know,” she said. “You called and asked. But I wanted them to leave…”

  “I should have requested uniforms,” he interrupted. “Or stayed myself. We would have had…him.”

  “He wouldn’t have come in if he’d seen someone,” she said. Then her brows crinkled in a frown. “How did you get here so fast?”

  “I was already on the way. I had a feeling…”

  Their gazes met. Cassidy felt as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer.

  The security guard looked at him curiously.

  He realized he must be gaping. He pulled out his badge. “Detective MacKay with the Atlanta P.D.,” he said. “Has anything been touched or moved?”

  The nurse hovering nearby shook her head. “Nothing except the telephone. I used it to call Security. He…left a needle.” She motioned to the corner of the room where the needle lay. Cassidy could tell it was still filled with some substance. He looked around. The nurse handed him a glove before he could ask for it.

  “The…he had on gloves like those,” Marise Merrick said in an unsteady voice.

  Cassidy pulled on the glove and leaned down and gingerly picked up the needle. He could guess what was in it. Potassium, probably. The right dosage could stop the heart almost immediately. The assailant had taken a chance. A big one. He must be afraid that she knew far more than she did.

  “Did you see any more of him than you did before?”

  She shook her head. “The room was dark. He wore a surgeon’s mask.”

  “Perhaps some of the hospital staff did,” he said. But he wasn’t hopeful. The attacker obviously timed his attack during the change of shifts. Anyone could have slipped by the nurses’ station. Again, he blamed himself for not anticipating this.

  And then there was the nagging conviction that had firmed in his mind. The killer obviously thought Marise Merrick was a danger to him. That meant she would continue to be in great danger.

  “Would you like your fiancé here?” he asked, more to stop his own troubling feelings than because he wanted the man around.

  “He’s not my fiancé,” she said quietly.

  Cassidy felt the oddest sense of relief. “He said…”

  “He asked me. I didn’t give him an answer. That’s why I wandered outside last night. I needed some distance.”

  She was answering the question she hadn’t been able to answer before, not with Paul Richards in the room. Her blue eyes were late-evening blue, a rich dark color he’d never seen before. Her long hair had been plaited into a braid that fell across her shoulder.

  He was aware of an attraction so strong he could barely restrain himself from reaching out to her. More puzzling was the sense that he knew her. That they had met previously, though he knew they had not. The air between them was thick yet compelling, as if he was being pulled toward her by some invisible force.

  He struggled against it. “How…”

  “I fell on the floor. I’m used to falling,” she said with that quirky little smile that had accompanied her admission yesterday that she’d kicked her attacker in a vulnerable place.

  “Like you have strong legs,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “I want you to teach self-defense classes to some people I know,” he said. Then he realized he was suppositioning that she would be here in Atlanta longer than a day or so. And he could also see in his mind the implausibility of the princess teaching hookers how to disable a killer.

  “You’re smiling, Detective,” she said as if astounded at that possibility.

  Well, he was. He couldn’t remember smiling since his wife had left him two years ago.

  Snap out of it, Cassidy. She’s a victim, nothing more. And not only was she a victim, but she was one he’d failed to protect.

  “I’m just impressed with your abilities, Miss Merrick.”

  “Marise,” she corrected him.

  He’d seen the name written down. It sounded like poetry on her lips. But that was none of his affair. He tried, instead, to concentrate on the business at hand.

  “Was there anything, anything at all that struck you about the…attacker?”

  “His odor,” she said. “I woke and smelled it.”

  He remembered her mentioning that before. “You said it was almost sweet.”

  Her nose twitched slightly as if she was trying to remember.

  “Cologne?” he asked.

  “If it was, it was very bad cologne,” she said. “It was more like…medicinal.”

  “Cloying?”

  “Sharper than that.”

  He had been impressed by her before, and now that image was reenforced. She was reacting analytically, objectively weighing what must have been a terrifying experience.

  “Any other impressions?”

  “No,” she said. “The room was too dark.”

  He was already cataloging facts in his mind. Hospital gloves. Location. Until her attack, no one realized that the proximity of the hospital was important. The area was not one of the city’s best, and the hospital had not been the center of the attacks, more on the edge of a perimeter of approximately two miles. Now it assumed new significance. The attacker knew where to find her and that the change of shifts would be the best time to enter unnoticed. And now the surgical mask
and medicinal smell.

  She hadn’t described the odor that way before. He’d been thinking that the attacker might be a hustler, a pimp, who got off on terrifying and killing women. He and Manny had been operating on that theory, especially since the deaths had involved prostitutes. The guy might even have been trying to start a protection racket among the working girls.

  But Marise’s information introduced an entirely new possibility. Someone outside the world of prostitution. Someone involved in medicine. And now, he suspected, their perp would go into hiding for a while.

  Unless he had another chance at Marise Merrick.

  “What are you thinking, Detective?” Her soft voice broke through his stream of consciousness.

  “I’m thinking that I want you to leave this hospital,” he said.

  “What about the police artist?”

  “What did you see that night?”

  “A blur. An impression of heaviness. Bulk. Longish hair.”

  “You know how a police artist works?”

  “I do watch television occasionally.”

  “He’ll flash part of faces—eyes, foreheads, chins, et cetera. If anything looks familiar, he’ll start constructing a face.”

  “I didn’t see enough for that.”

  Cassidy didn’t say anything for a moment, then wondered out loud. “But obviously he doesn’t know that.”

  “Which is why…he returned tonight,” she finished.

  “Yes.”

  “You believe he might try again.” It was a statement, not a question. Her eyes were even bluer, if that were possible. Deeper. And inaccessible.

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  “And if I leave the city?”

  “Not as likely, but possible.”

  “What can I do?”

  Her eyes were impossibly large. Fear was there. But so was reason. Again, he wondered about his first impression. Why had she seemed so compliant to those around her when now there didn’t seem a hesitant bone in her body. Two different women. Would it be different when her mother and partner returned? He was oddly pleased that she hadn’t asked him—or apparently anyone on the hospital staff—to call them.