Two minutes. In two minutes, it would be seven thirty.
What was going to happen at seven thirty?
They … insist their names are never listed on any record.
Like you, Ms. Lenslow.
The airline company has no direct connection with the Averys.
She sent a box of “after-dinner chocolates.”
The mountains below looming dark and hard … and waiting.
“No!” She threw her champagne glass to the floor and jumped to her feet. “No, you bitch. It’s not going to happen.”
She ran to the door of the cockpit. She was aware of the Korean couple staring at her with startled expressions. Mark Telfer, the flight attendant, was running down the aisle toward her as she tried to jerk open the cockpit door.
“You’ve got to land!” she screamed as she pounded on the door. “Let me in. This can’t happen to me.”
“Go back to your seat,” the flight attendant said soothingly. “Have some more champagne. I’ll ask the pilot to come out and talk to you.”
“Too late. You fool, it’s too late. Those damn chocolates. It has to be—”
She screamed.
Because precisely at seven thirty, the Learjet exploded into flaming shards of metal and hurtled into the Rocky Mountains below.
* * *
“I’VE TALKED TO EVERYONE at the hospital who could have any access to special info,” Newell said several hours later as he poured coffee into Beth’s cup. “As far as anyone knows, Pierce has done a flit with his luscious lady.”
“He’s gone?” Beth shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe it. Those last months at the hospital I’d watch him whenever he was anywhere around me. Before that, the drugs made him only a hazy figure to me. He liked what he did. He liked the power and everyone’s deferring to him. I don’t think he’d walk away from it.”
“I don’t, either,” Joe said. “But where the hell is he?”
“But I was told one other interesting thing when I was checking,” Newell said. “The woman who was impersonating Beth is no longer occupying the room where she was quarantined. Before they left the hospital, Stella Lenslow gave an order, supposedly from Pierce, that the woman be moved back to the ward where she evidently was before Pierce pulled the switch.”
“Why didn’t Pierce give the order?”
Newell shrugged. “He’d already gone to the car. It didn’t ring true to me, either.”
“I don’t like it,” Joe said flatly. “Even if he was going to leave the area, why pull the phony patient and leave the suspicion that Beth was still on the loose?” He was channel flipping through the news channels. “They’ve checked the local airports for his car and didn’t find it. No Pierce. No Stella Lenslow.”
“Maybe not Stella.” Eve came into the kitchen from the living room where she’d been monitoring the other set. “But they’ve just found Harry Pierce. Turn on Fox.”
Joe switched to the station to see a shot of a BMW wrapped around a telephone pole. Police and ambulance trucks surrounded the vehicle. “Pierce? Where is this supposed to be?”
“A northern suburb,” Eve said. “He’s dead.”
“Suspects?”
“They don’t even know if it’s murder. It may take days for the medical examiner to determine it,” Eve said. “No obvious lethal wounds.” She paused. “But also no broken bones that they can determine.”
“Dead,” Beth said dully. “Another one.”
“Be happy,” Newell said. “No, don’t be happy. It would have been better if they’d stuffed him into a prison to rot like he did you.”
“Dammit, I wanted him alive.” Joe got to his feet. “Hell, everyone who could testify to Beth’s sanity is being sent to the morgue.” He headed for the door. “I’m going out there to see if I can find out anything more.”
“Like what?” Eve asked.
“Like where’s Stella Lenslow and does she have any evidence that can help.” His lips tightened. “And if there’s anything in that wreck of a car that could prove what a lying son of a bitch Pierce is to the Santa Barbara Police, even though he had them in his pocket. We need something fast.”
“Why? What’s suddenly put you on edge?”
“The deaths are piling up, and we have to stop worrying about Beth’s being thrown back into the hospital and start worrying about her being arrested for murder. It’s a little too convenient that a mental patient’s two doctors have shown up dead when she’s still wandering around loose.”
My God, he was right. First Gelber, now Pierce, Eve thought. Not only convenient, but chilling.
“I’ll see if I can find anything to use to deflect