to get a rental until we settle, and I can buy a new one.”
“Don’t worry about it for now,” Liam told her. “I’ll be driving you around until the threat to you is over.”
Fear and another emotion he didn’t quite recognize flickered in her eyes.
“Do you want to look at those tapes now?” she asked.
His phone buzzed with a text. Jacob. “Go get a shower first,” he said, knowing it would make her feel better. “I’ll check in with Jacob.”
“Okay, but I want to look at them with you. I might be able to help.”
“Good. You can tell me if anyone looks out of place.”
She dropped her purse onto the table by the door, while Liam searched and cleared the house, then she rushed into the hall and disappeared into her bedroom.
Liam crossed to the sliding glass doors and looked outside while he phoned Jacob. He explained about the man’s sudden death at Golden Gardens and the fact that he’d requested an autopsy.
“You suspect Mr. Brittles’s death is related to the threat against Peyton and her mother?” Jacob asked.
“I don’t know, but something’s going on, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.” He explained about seeing Miller Conrad at the hospital and his mother’s death.
“She’s going to be autopsied, too?” Jacob asked.
“At my request.” Liam swallowed. “I have security tapes from Golden Gardens to review,” he told Jacob. “If there was foul play, maybe it was caught on camera.”
“Let me know what you find,” Jacob said. “FYI, I have more on Herbert Brantley. He had a motorcycle wreck four years ago and suffered some serious injuries. HIPAA laws prevented me from obtaining his full medical history, but I did some digging around. Asked a couple of his neighbors. One of them says Herbert has a drug problem. Pills. He caught him stealing some of his daughter’s ADHD medication from his medicine cabinet.”
“Did he press charges?”
“No,” Jacob said. “Herbert begged him not to and promised to get help.”
“Did he?”
“There’s no record to prove it one way or the other,” Jacob said. “But again, getting medical records these days is not easy.” Jacob paused. “Anyway, knowing he stole drugs is enough to warrant bringing him in for questioning.”
Liam scrubbed a hand over his face as he tried to maneuver the pieces into a whole picture again. “So, if Herbert had a drug problem, he might have been desperate for money to feed his habit. That could mean he’d accepted money to kill Gloria Inman. But what about the three other patients, Edna Fouts, Lydia Corgin and Hilda Rogers? Does he have a connection to any of them and the facilities where they died?”
“He worked at Whistler Hospital,” Jacob said. “He wasn’t an employee at the other medical facilities, but with his training and the right clothing, he could easily have slipped in to a patient’s room unnoticed.”
True. “I’m aware we have limited hospital footage from the night of the fire, and Mrs. Inman’s death, but look through them again and see if he was there. And push the ME to rush her autopsy. If someone is killing seniors, we need to hurry.”
“Copy that.”
What that had to do with Gloria Inman or the fire, he didn’t know. “I’ll get back to you after I review the footage at Golden Gardens.”
He hung up, then set his laptop on the kitchen table and booted it up, anxious to see if Miller Conrad or Herbert Brantley showed up in the tapes.
Peyton had looked so vulnerable earlier. The only way to protect her was to uncover the truth.
No matter what it took.
* * *
THE WARM WATER felt heavenly on Peyton’s aching body and helped massage the tension from her shoulders. She scrubbed her skin and soaped her hair, desperate to wash away the dried blood from her forehead and the perspiration permeating her skin.
Although no amount of scrubbing could eliminate the fear seizing her chest. A chest bruised from an intentional car crash meant to take her life.
The water started to cool, and she turned off the spray, climbed out, dried off and wrapped her hair in a towel. She pulled on a clean pair of jeans and her favorite blue sweater, one that accentuated her eyes. Not that it mattered.
Liam had seen her at her worst. And he certainly wasn’t interested in her romantically.
If only things were different...
Sighing in frustration, she blew her hair dry, then brushed the waves over her shoulder and headed toward the door from her bedroom to the hall.