Skin Deep Page 19

“The more the merrier,” Wheeler said. “How so very nice to see you here, Siobhan. And I see you’ve brought a friend.”

  “Craig Barnett, attorney at law,” he said.

  “A private eye and a lawyer. Sounds like a team ready to do some investigating and suing.”

  She was trying a little too hard to be cool, which was good. Because it meant she was actually nervous, if not about me, then about something else.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, Ms. Park,” I said.

  Cleo Park paused in her dainty mastication of a baby carrot and slowly turned to me. In person, her beauty made me suck in my breath a tiny bit. She’d be stunning without any help, but with the flawless makeup and jet-black straight hair that shone and swayed like a shampoo commercial, she was jacked up to eleven. It was like looking at a very bright light: I could only stare for so long. How the hell was she almost fifty?

  “Uh-huh,” she said. That voice. I’d seen countless photos on the internet but hardly any videos, and in them she’d been silent, and now I knew why. Her Minnie-Mouse-on-helium squeal made Kim Kardashian sound like Lauren Bacall. Cleopatra wasn’t so perfect after all.

  “And you must be Dr. Christine Collins,” I said. She looked just like the photo on the Llewellyn faculty page.

  “Somebody’s been doing her homework,” Wheeler said to me.

  Collins was about to say something but stopped and glanced at her boss, Wheeler. At which point she must’ve seen something I didn’t see, because she averted my eyes and stared down at her food instead. Nicely trained.

  “Just doing my job,” I said. “And you must be Grace. I saw you at the Odd-Even basketball game. I hear you have an impressive outside jumper.”

  Now it was Grace’s turn to play the part of Collins, and her mother to play Wheeler. Except it wasn’t exactly the same. Grace wasn’t asking for permission here but rather seeking its sadder counterpart, approval. It was a glance that might have lasted not even a second, but I’d gone through it myself as a teenager enough times to recognize it. Did Cleo not think much of her daughter’s on-court skills? No surprise there.

  Wheeler took her knife and sliced off a chunk of chicken breast. She shook out a few grains of salt from the shaker into the palm of her hand and turned it over, sprinkling it on the glistening white meat. It looked quite good, so I had myself some chicken, too.

  “Will you be tailing us 24/7 while we’re here? That’s the proper term, right, tail?”

  “Or you can save me some time and energy by telling me all the interesting things you’ll be doing,” I said.

  “I don’t feel so good,” Grace said to her mother.

  “In your mind or in your body?” Cleo asked. An odd question, but then again, she was an odd woman.

  “Body,” Grace said. “My stomach.”

  Cleo rose, and everyone else followed. They were all just going to leave their trays on the table.

  “Don’t be rude. You bus your own trays here,” I said.

  Cleo leveled a look at me, her pissed-off model pose, I guess.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” she squeaked.

  She turned and left. Wheeler instructed the guards to clear the table, which made them my very best friends. They clinked the dishes and cups so hard that I thought they’d crack them, but the Krishna dishware was tougher than they looked. After much clatter, they were gone, too, and it was just me and Craig at the table with lots of people looking at us.

  “That was a very noir moment,” Craig said.

  “I try my best to please the public.”

  “Ugggggggggh!” came a sound from behind me.

  I turned around and saw an older man grab his belly. Someone asked him if he was okay as he slumped on the table in agony.

  “What the hell is going on?” Craig asked, but I couldn’t quite tell him, either, because the searing pain from my own stomach brought tears to my eyes. “Siobhan? Are you okay?”

  I was not.

  62

  Having never delivered a child, I couldn’t say with certainty that what I was now feeling was akin to giving birth, but lord, it had to be pretty close. At first it was like my intestines were tying themselves into a knot, but now it was like there was a knife deep in my gut, stabbing me from the inside out. The cramps came in waves and were so intense that I feared I’d black out.

  “I think I just peed a little,” I said, writhing in Craig’s car.

  I vaguely recalled Craig almost carrying me, but just when that happened was a mystery. Time had lost meaning. Craig was driving as fast as he could to the hospital, darting in and out of this two-lane road.

  “We’re almost there,” he said, and we were. There were ten cars ahead of us and probably a hundred behind us.

  “Hold on,” Craig said, and his SUV bucked like a horse as we crested a curb, climbed on the grass, and bumped over the flower bed to become the fourth car in line, right behind two ambulances that were unloading a pair of grunting, flailing Krishna diners.

  A nurse with a wheelchair rolled up right by my window. She opened the door and loaded me in.

  “Please park your car in the lot, sir,” the nurse told Craig. “I’ve got her.”

  Craig said something to me before he left, but I hardly heard it through my own anguish.

  “My name is Dolores. You’re cramping?”

  I nodded. I concentrated on breathing, in and out, in and out. Small, shallow breaths because stretching my stomach in any way brought sharp jabs to my sides. Dolores rolled me through the automatic glass doors of the ER entrance and into a nightmare. The lobby of the hospital had turned into a torture chamber, dozens of people moaning in distress.

  “You’re doing great. A few have lost consciousness from the pain, so things could be worse, believe it or not.”

  “I’m back,” Craig said, out of breath. He crouched down and held my hand. With his other hand, he gave Dolores my driver’s license and insurance card, and she took it over to the desk.

  Everybody was wearing the same lanyard Craig and I were, the Krishna barcode that let us into the dining hall.

  “It has to be the food,” I said. “But you’re not affected.”

  “I didn’t get the chicken, just the fake stuff,” Craig said.

  Behind us, we heard a piercing shriek. It came from Cleo Park, whose entourage looked like they had also gotten whatever this was, all but one of the guards, who had his hands full trying to shepherd everyone through.

  “Nice to see the rich and famous didn’t get a pass,” I said.

  “Rotten meat? Salmonella?”

  “Can’t imagine either of those would work as quickly as this.”

  Dolores returned with a clipboard and my IDs, which she handed back to Craig. “Okay, Siobhan O’Brien. Let me just say I never would’ve guessed your name if I had a million tries.”

  “I get that a lot,” I said.

  “You can come, too,” she told Craig as she took a hold of my wheelchair. “I can use the help.”

  Dolores wheeled me through a set of automatic doors and hurried down the corridor that was full of belly-aching patients.

  “How many so far?” I asked.

  “You’re number seventeen, but it looks like there’s another dozen behind you. And who knows how many more after that.”

  Dolores brought me to a bright, ballroom-sized space, each bed sectioned off by circular green curtains. It looked like a makeshift job, which it probably was since they usually didn’t have to treat so many people at once. There were steady groans coming from someone to my right, though not as bad as some I’d heard on the way in.

  “We’re trying to keep the affected in groups of similar distress,” she said. “This is the five group, on a pain scale from one to ten.”

  “Thank you,” I said. When I tried to get up from the wheelchair, I felt a stitch in my lower stomach that made me immediately fall back into my seat.

  “Let me,” C
raig said.

  “Let us,” Dolores said. “The last thing we need is for you to throw your back out.”

  Together, they lifted me off and placed me in bed, which was cold and hard. Or maybe I was the one who was cold and hard.

  She took my temperature. “You’re one degree lower than when you first came in, but still at 101.”

  A doctor with a stethoscope around his neck rushed in. She looked young enough to be a kid playing doctor, but there was nothing kidlike about her demeanor.

  “I’m Dr. Novakovic. Please open your eyes real wide so I can shine this light into it?” I did as I was told. “Resistance to dilation, that’s good. Nausea and cramps, but I bet no diarrhea?”

  “At least not yet.”

  “Consider yourself lucky—you might be with the half that won’t have it.”

  “Food poisoning?” I asked.

  “Too early to tell.”

  “When do you think you’ll know?”

  “What are you, the food police?”

  “Actually,” Craig said, “she’s a private investigator.”

  Novakovic took a look at my chart. “Siobhan O’Brien?”

  “You should see me Riverdance.”

  “While drinking a pint of Guinness, no doubt. For now, Dolores will IV less exciting fluids into you to dilute the toxicity in your system. You won’t be doing any gumshoeing if you don’t get better.” She turned away and was on her way out.

  “I’ll call you later and you’ll let me know what you find out?”

  Novakovic didn’t reply, but at least she knew she’d be hearing from me.

  Just watching Dolores’s expertise and efficiency at doing her job—the effortless insertion of the needle into my arm, the practiced pitch of the solution onto the metal hook above the bed, turning on the flow of the liquid with a quick flick of her thumb, all these actions happening in an uninterrupted flow that was downright orchestral—made me feel better, and I told her so.

  “Aww, that’s sweet,” she said. “Though you’re probably improving because your body is working through whatever it was that got to you. Now I gotta make my other rounds, but I’ll be back in half an hour to check on you.”

  Craig, meanwhile, had found a folding chair. He slid the curtain closed and took a seat by my side. There were still groans and complaints aplenty around us, but their collective volume was softening.

  “Is this the sort of thing that I should expect,” he asked, “hanging out with you?”

  “At least you won’t get bored.”

  “What do your spidey senses tell you about what happened?”

  “You know, it was real easy for me to get to the Krishna kitchen earlier today. Took a while before anybody even noticed me. Wouldn’t be hard for someone to come down and do something to the food.”

  “Maybe someone that everyone knew already.”

  “An inside job is always more likely than not. And even though Krishna is all about peace and tranquility, there’s cracks and bumps underneath those cushy yoga mats.” I told Craig about meeting Dharma on my run and the soapbox speech he’d delivered.

  “But poisoning people…I mean that’s a pretty serious crime. Like somebody’s going to jail.”

  “You’ve certainly seen your share of people doing terrible things in your line of work.”

  Craig shook his head. “Not personally. I don’t take on criminal cases. That’s for…wait, what are you doing?”

  Getting up still smarted, but not like before. I unplugged the IV drip from my arm.

  “Grace Park,” I said. “She just passed by.”

  Craig turned around and peeked through the small opening in the curtains. “You saw her through that?”

  “It’s one of my super powers. Come on, help me to my feet.” Grace was heading to the back of the room, beelining for the restroom sign.

  He wanted me to stay put, but I had to do what I had to do. This was my best chance to finally talk to that girl, and I wasn’t going to let a sore tummy get in my way.

  “Let me come,” Craig said.

  “I’d rather not attract any more attention.”

  I navigated past the nurses and orderlies who rushed past me. Through the thicket of human traffic, I saw Grace as she indeed slipped into the women’s bathroom. No bodyguards followed her in. I went in after her, and my luck was riding high because I only saw one set of feet in the stall. In the corner of the bathroom was a yellow plastic sign that read “IN MAINTENANCE – PLEASE WAIT.” I took it out and propped it up outside the door. Then I kicked in the little rubber door stop from the inside to keep the door from opening.

  You proud of me, Ed? I learned from watching you.

  63

  Silence, then a flush. I might have avoided the diarrhea part of the bug, but Grace wasn’t as lucky. The metal door opened and there she was, her face drained of color and her eyes sunken in. The harsh fluorescent lights above made her look a bit like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies. Grace probably had half a foot and twenty pounds on me, but in her present condition, she wasn’t getting past me by force.

  “Excuse me,” she whispered. She had an IV bag that she rolled next to her. She shuffled to the sink and washed her hands, then leaned against it for support. I pulled down three sheets of paper towels and held them out to her.

  “You obviously ate a lot more chicken than I did,” I said.

  “That’s all…wait, you’re that detective woman who was sitting at the end of our table.”

  “You’re going answer a few questions. Then you can go back to your bed.”

  I watched for her reaction. Using my authoritative voice, I was playing the role of a no-nonsense hardass. I wasn’t entirely sure this was going to work, since Grace was a girl who’d been brought up in a life of privilege and protection. I couldn’t imagine many people talked to her like this. Except, my gut told me, her parents—that moment at the dinner table, that forlorn look she bestowed on her mother when I’d brought up basketball.

  “All right,” she said. “Can I sit on the toilet? Because I don’t think I can stand for much longer.”

  I nodded. Grace held onto her IV post and gently lowered herself onto the toilet. She might have stood six feet, but right now, she looked like an overgrown child. I felt terrible for doing this to her, but there was another girl who was missing, who could be in an even worse situation.

  “Where’s Penny Sykes?”

  I didn’t think it was possible for Grace to slump any further, but somehow she managed it. In a voice so small that I asked her to repeat it, she said, “Mama said she was here. But she’s not.”

  “Your mother? Why would your mother know?”

  Grace laughed emptily. “There’s nothing Mama doesn’t know.”

  “Did your mother take Penny somewhere?”

  She leaned her head against the stall and closed her eyes. Her words fell quickly, rushed, as if they were falling out of her.

  “Me and Christopher, we tried to help her. We did help her, I know we did. God, she was so mad, so angry, but it wasn’t our fault, none of it. Everybody wants what they want, right? She wanted Christopher so she got what she wanted there, too. Oh, if only I could go back to that first week. I would go back to the three of us, sitting in my dorm room, playing cards and sipping peach schnapps—it was terrible, but it was all we could get our hands on. Everything was so simple.”

  There was a very loud bang on the bathroom door.

  “Open up!”

  Grace’s eyelids fluttered open.

  “You better get that,” she said.

  “No worries,” I said. “Somebody else will get it.”

  “Oh good,” Grace said.

  Another bang, even louder, most likely a very large boot against the door. The rubber door stopper held, for now.

  “I just want to sleep,” Grace said.

  “You can, if you just answer one more question. What were you and Chri
stopher and Penny doing together?”

  “I told you already, we were helping! Helping Penny get rid of her problem. Getting Mama the new blood so she can be beautiful and young and love me. Helping Christopher’s parents so they could stay. Saving, saving them all.”

  The next bang was so loud that I instinctively put my hands around my ears. The entire doorframe, which was made of metal, shook; dust and debris fell around the seams.

  “Are Christopher’s parents going somewhere?” I asked, but she must’ve not even heard the question because she started to break down.

  “I told him what to do with the condom…okay? Jesus. That was me, that was my idea, maybe it wasn’t…”

  The door swung open. The guard wasn’t so dumb after all, I thought, as I saw him put away his credit card which he used to push out the rubber stopper under the door. He came right for me, shoved me hard enough that I banged my shoulder against the paper towel holder and fell to the floor. He was rearing back to kick me but I pointed at the stall. Lucky for me, Grace was stumbling out and he had to hurry to catch her.

  “You’re gonna answer for this,” he barked at me.

  “That’s enough,” Craig, who had snuck in behind the guard, said. “You better not lay a hand on her, hombre.”

  The guard glared at us then hurried out of the bathroom with Grace and her IV pole in his arms.

  Craig helped me up.

  “Jesus, are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  “It’s fine, I’m fine,” I said. “He was just doing his job, and I was doing mine.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to take her prisoner in the bathroom.”

  “Sort of happened on the spot, hombre.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. Just blurted it out.”

  “It’s kind of adorable.”

  We made our way back to my bed. It was good to lie down again, though I was feeling a lot better than even just half an hour ago. Except now my shoulder hurt a bit.

  “So did she spill any beans?” Craig asked.

  “You could say. She was borderline delirious, I don’t know how much of it made sense.”