that was. It was his doing that she was a prisoner here. ‘Is this your office?’ she asked. She remembered that Harris’s office was only a few blocks from the neuroscience center at Jefferson Hospital. On weekdays it was a bustling area. On Sundays you could park a Winnebago on the street with no problem.
Harris nodded. ‘This is my examining room. The office is closed on Sunday. There’s no one here. There’s no one in the whole building.’
Shelby closed her eyes. ‘How did you get me in here? Someone must have seen you.’
‘There’s a service elevator at the back of the building,’ he said. ‘It really wasn’t difficult. Look, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. After your call, I just knew I had to act quickly. I need some time to think. I didn’t know where else to take you.’
Shelby felt sick at heart, realizing she inadvertently let him know that she suspected him. Now, it seemed, all her effort was for nothing.
Harris fiddled with some apparatus on the examining table, and Shelby was startled to feel the table starting to rise at her waist. In a few moments, she was in a sitting-up position, though still securely strapped to the table, her hands pinned with cloth wraps.
‘There,’ he said, sitting down in a swivel chair opposite her. ‘It makes it easier to talk. I don’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt Chloe. You have to believe me. Things have spun completely out of control.’
Shelby gazed at him balefully. ‘My daughter thought the world of you,’ she said. ‘She admired you so much.’
Harris lowered his gaze.
‘How could you do this?’ Shelby asked. ‘You had her murdered.’
Harris’s face bunched up, almost as if he was experiencing pain. ‘How did you know? How did you find out? I mean, that 800 call was no shot in the dark. You already suspected me.’
Shelby felt a small, worthless feeling of satisfaction, to think that she had stumbled across the clues that led her to his terrible secret and he didn’t know how. She was not about to satisfy his curiosity. At least, not until he satisfied hers. ‘Why did you have my daughter killed?’ she asked.
‘Look, Shelby, you probably won’t believe me,’ said Harris. ‘But if it had just been about me, I wouldn’t have . . . I would never have hurt Chloe. She was a lovely girl. I was fond of her. But she was always a little bit jealous of Lianna. And a little vindictive, to tell the truth.’
Shelby stared at him. ‘You killed her because she was jealous of Lianna?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ said Harris. ‘And by the way, just to set the record straight, you were all too quick to assume that your daughter had gone through Lianna’s medical records to find out about Molly’s father. Chloe would never have done that. She was far too professional to do something like that. It would never have occurred to her. You should have realized that.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ said Shelby. ‘You’re defending my daughter to me. You bastard.’
‘I don’t blame you for being angry,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she pleaded. ‘Why did you have to . . .’ She couldn’t continue. Tears slid down her cheeks and fell on her shirt.
He sat on the swivel chair, frowning. His feet, in sturdy shoes, were planted on the floor, his arms folded across his chest. He looked, for all the world, like a doctor trying gently to reveal a difficult diagnosis to a patient.
He sighed. ‘A few weeks ago, a man named Norman Cook showed up at their house – Chloe and Rob’s house. He was Molly’s real father. He had come looking for Lianna, but he found Chloe, who was only too happy to listen. Imagine her surprise – Molly was not Rob’s child! She finally had something major on Lianna. Chloe gave Norman Cook our address. Told him how Lianna had left Rob and married me. After he left, she started thinking it over, and I guess she got a little worried. She showed up at my office determined to tell me all about it.’
Shelby shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t get it. None of you seemed to care that much about Molly’s real father. Why did Chloe have to die, just because she knew?’
Harris sighed. ‘Because by the time Chloe came to see me, Norman Cook was already dead. I had killed him.’
Shelby gasped. ‘You . . . Oh