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national anthem to a stunned-looking audience of three who were probably afraid to walk out on him.
“Boris, come help me!”
He looked affronted. “I am not finished!”
“You are now.” I towed him out by the elbow and cupped my hand to his ear to make myself heard in the din. “I have to find Tommy Barry. Have you seen him?”
“Who is that?”
“The best man, the old guy with the shaved head? Help me look for him, Boris, please.”
He shrugged affably. “I forget second verse anyway.”
We searched the rest of the rooms, to no avail, and then Boris gestured at some steps in a far, dim corner. They led up to two more practice booths, but a chain was draped between the railings to keep tonight’s crowd off the Lab’s upper level. I remembered the barrier across the shorebird exhibit at the Aquarium, and groaned aloud.
“Tommy—”
Boris, sensing my urgency at last, forged ahead of me through the crowd like an icebreaker and flung the chain aside. We mounted the steps and checked the first room: empty. But the second room was dark, and when we pulled open the door, the shifting light from the party below faintly illuminated an overturned chair, a guitar dangling by its cord over the edge of an electronic keyboard—and the body of Tommy Barry.
He was sprawled facedown, halfway under the keyboard stand. His outflung hands were still, and between his shoulder blades, just barely discernible as a dim gleam against the matte black of his tuxedo jacket, was a patch of blood spreading darkly outwards from a large, ragged wound. The exit wound from a bullet.
Boris lifted the guitar away so I could crouch down and feel Tommy’s throat for a pulse. “I think…yes! He’s still alive. I’ll call—”
But I couldn’t call Rhonda, or the guards, because the walkie-talkie was in my purse and my stupid goddamn bloody purse was lost in the shuffle somewhere. “Boris, stay here. Try and stop the bleeding, and don’t let Corinne anywhere near him. I expect she’s left the building by now but—”
“Corinne did this?” His eyes were round. “Did she vant to merry him, too?”
But I was already halfway down the steps, and shouting out the request that no event planner ever, ever wants to utter: “Is there a doctor here? Anybody know if there’s a doctor here?”
The only response was alarm and perplexed confusion, so I pushed through the crowd and out to the atrium, heading for the little glass-walled balcony that hung over the Sky Church. Surely Travis would be able to communicate with Rhonda, and she could find a doctor and mobilize the guards and the police. I could see him in the gaps between the milling people, apparently giving a couple of guests a private tour of his electronic marvels.
As I toiled through the crowd and got closer, the two guests were revealed as Roger Talbot and the girl from the art department. Irrelevantly, some part of my mind groped for her name: Ruby? Jewel? Crystal, that was it. Crystal was a pocket Venus, five-one or so with short, feathery white-blonde hair, and she was gazing up at Roger with a different kind of high voltage in mind. The publisher, forgetting for the moment that the wall behind them was made of glass, had let one hand slip from Crystal’s waist down to her velvet-clad derriere. They jumped apart when I pushed open the door, calling out as I went.
“Travis, we need the police!” He looked at me—or was it past me?—with blank dismay. “Call Rhonda and—”
A scream, an anguished shriek of pain and outrage, froze me in my tracks. Roger and Crystal were staring past me at the person who had screamed. Slowly, with a dreamlike dread and yet certainty about who I would see, I turned around.
Corinne Campbell, with her lush figure straining against her rose satin gown, and a demented light shining in her aquamarine eyes, was pointing a wavering pistol at Roger Talbot’s head.
Chapter Thirty-Five
MY FEET HURT. I’D BEEN RUNNING AROUND ALL EVENING IN rose-pink dyed-silk stilettos instead of my usual comfy flats, and now I couldn’t sit down because I was stuck on a tiny balcony overhanging a fifty-foot drop with three other terrified people and a crazy lady with a gun, smack in the middle of somebody else’s love triangle, except one side of the triangle was already dead. Or would it be one angle?
This must be what hysteria feels like, I mused, as my thoughts rear-ended each other like