3rd Degree

To her relief, the caller ID said it was an assistant D.A. from Sacramento. He was calling back on getting a witness cleared out of a state pen. She let it go to her voice mail.

She closed the heavy brief. This was the last time, she vowed. She would start by telling Lindsay. It hurt her not to be honest with her. Lindsay thought Steve was a prick anyway. She was no fool.

As she was stuffing her briefcase, the phone rang again. This time it had that special ring, cutting right through her.

Don’t answer, Jill. She was already halfway out the door. But something made her look at the digital screen. The familiar number lit up. Jill felt her mouth go dry. Slowly, she picked up the receiver. “Bernhardt,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

“Working late again, hon?” Steve’s voice cut through her. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, sounding almost hurt, “I’d think you were afraid to come home.”

Chapter 24

That night, George Bengosian got lucky.

Short and balding, with a large flattened nose, Bengosian had realized early in his residency that he had no flair for urology and found his true calling stringing together failing regional insurers into giant HMOs. He also realized he wasn’t the type who could charm a beautiful woman with his profit projections and silly industry jokes—certainly not this sexy analyst at the Bank of America Health Care Conference.

It was as if he were living someone else’s dream. Mimi was mesmerized by him, and now they were on the way to his suite. “The penthouse, wait until you see the view,” he teased.

George giddily traced the outline of her bra as he opened the door to his suite at the Clift; he was imagining her perky tits jiggling in front of him, and those mooning eyes staring into his. This was what having your picture in the a

“Give me just a second,” Mimi said, pinching his arm and heading into the powder room.

“Not too long,” George said with a pout.

In clumsy haste, he ripped the wrapping off a bottle of Roederer that had come complimentary with the suite and poured out two glasses. His fifty-four-year-old cock flopped around in his pants like a cod in a catch basket. In the morning he had to be back in the jet, off to a meeting of the Illinois Senate Health Care Committee, which he already knew had been swayed into looking the other way while he dropped the poorest individual accounts and highest risks from his enrollment. One hundred forty thousand families out of the plan, and all of it accretive to the bottom line!

Mimi came back from the powder room, and she looked better than ever. George handed her a glass.

“To you,” he said. “Well, to both of us. To tonight.”

“To Hopewell.” Mimi flashed a smile and clinked glasses.

“Hey, want to try something?” She put her hand on his wrist. “This is guaranteed to make your projections rock-solid firm.” She produced a vial from her purse. “Just stick out your tongue.”

George did as he was told, and she dribbled out two drops.

Bitter. The taste was so sharp, it almost made him jump. “Can’t they make these things in cherry flavor?”

“One more.” Her smile was dazzling. “Just to make sure you’re ready for me. For us.”

George stuck out his tongue again. His heart was beating out of control.

Mimi dribbled out another drop. Then her smile changed. Colder. She squeezed him by the cheeks, turned the entire vial upside down.

George’s mouth filled with the liquid. He tried to spit it out, but she threw his head back and he swallowed. His eyes popped. “What the hell?”

“It’s toxic,” Mimi said, tossing the empty vial back into her purse. “Very special poison for a very special guy. The first drop would be enough to kill you in a few hours. You just swallowed enough to waste San Francisco.”

George’s champagne glass dropped and shattered on the floor. He tried to spit the ingested liquid back out. This bitch must be insane. She must be screwing with him. But then a violent pain shook his abdomen.

“This is from all those people you’ve spent your life fucking, Mr. Bengosian. No one you’ve ever met, just families who had no choice in life but to count on you. On Hopewell. Felicia Brown? She died of treatable melanoma. Thomas Ortiz? Name ring a bell? It would to your risk-management team. He shot himself trying to pay off his son’s brain tumor. We call it ‘cleaning the coffers.’ Isn’t that what you say, Mr. B?”

Suddenly his stomach began to wrench. A viscous froth built up in his mouth. He spit it out, all over his shirt, but it was as if sharp, clawing angers were tearing at the lining of his gut. He knew what was taking place. Pulmonary edema. Instant organ failure. Yell for help, he told himself. Get to the door. But his legs gave out, crumbling beneath him.

Mimi was standing there, watching him with a mocking grin. He reached out in her direction. He wanted to hit her, squeeze her throat, crush the life out of her. But he couldn’t move.

“Please …” This was no joke.

She knelt over him. “How does it feel to have your coffers cleaned, Mr. Bengosian? Now be a dear and open your mouth one more time. Open wide!”

With all his might George tried to suck air into his lungs, but there was nothing. His jaw fell open. His tongue had swelled to a monstrous size. Mimi held a blue piece of paper in front of his face. At least he thought it was blue—but his eyes were refractive and glassy and weren’t registering colors very well. In the blurry outline he saw Hopewell’s logo.

She crumpled the paper into a ball and shoved it in his mouth. “Thanks for thinking of Hopewell, but as the form says, coverage is denied!”

Chapter 25

My cell phone was beeping.

It was the middle of the night. I shot up and blinked at the clock. Shit, 4 A.M.

Groggily, I fumbled for the phone, trying to read the number on the screen. It was Paul Chin’s. “Hey, Paul, what’s going on?” I mumbled.

“Sorry, LT, I’m at the Clift Hotel. I’m thinking you better come on down.”

“You find something?” A four-in-the-morning question? Four-in-the-morning calls meant only one thing.

“Yeah. I think the Lightower bombing just got a bit more complicated.”

Eight minutes later—jeans and a tank thrown on, and a few purposeful brushes through my hair—I was in the Explorer, bounding down Vermont on the way to Seventh, top hat flashing through the quiet night.

Three black-and-whites along with a morgue van were crowded around the hotel’s bright new entrance. The Clift was one of the city’s great old hotels and had just undergone a fancy renovation. I badged my way past the cops at the front, gawking at the lavish ostrich-hide couch and bulls’ horns on the wall, a few stu

“The vic’s name is George Bengosian. Health-care bigwig,” Paul Chin explained as he led me into the penthouse suite. “Prepare yourself. I’m not kidding.”

I looked at the body, propped upright against the leg of a conference table in the lavishly appointed room.

The color of Bengosian’s skin had turned a hypoxic green-yellow, the consistency of jelly. His eyes were wrenched open like mangled gear sockets. Mucus, or some sort of viscous orange fluid, ran out of his nose and had caked grotesquely on his chin.

“What the hell did he do,” I muttered to the med tech leaning over him, “get into a life-sucking contest with an alien?”

The tech looked totally mystified. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“You’re sure this is a homicide?” I turned to Chin.

“Front desk got a call, two forty-five A.M.,” he said with a shrug, “from outside the hotel. Said there was some garbage that needed to be picked up in the penthouse.”