Chapter 29

“Lucia!” I yelled. “Lucia, I need to talk to you.” I said to Tucker, “You got this, right?” meaning Elvis and keeping his asthma at bay.

He nodded.

I sprinted down the hall after Lucia. She’d kicked off her heels so that she could run faster in her bare feet, with her stilettos and her purse clutched in her hands.

She overshot the stairs and hesitated at the elevators outside the nursing station, knowing I’d catch up to her within seconds, before any elevator made its ponderous way up.

I caught her arm and said, “I just want to talk.”

A petite blonde nurse was staring at us. She was about two seconds away from calling security.

I said, “We’re okay. Right, Lucia?”

She lowered her eyes. Her whole body shuddered. She was breathing fast, from the run, and tears seemed to glitter from under her false eyelashes, but then she nodded once.

I towed Lucia into the family room across from the nursing station, the same room where Elvis had crashed before we got him back to 9020. It was a teeny room with a couch on the left side of the room, a TV on the right side of the room, and a coffee table in between littered with outdated magazines. Not going to win any design awards, but it was blessedly empty and sort of private. I kept clasping her arm.

“Lucia, I figured out happened with Elvis on Hallowe’en,” I said, holding her eyes. “He’s allergic to bananas, which cross-reacts with a number of other compounds. I think neither of you knew he was also allergic to latex when you hooked up just before his first stunt.”

Lucia swiped her eyes. She licked her lips, straightened her spine, and told me, “Bullshit.”

I preferred to call it bluffing. I kept a hold of her arm and said quietly, “Is that what you told Hugo?”

She stood up. I stood up with her, but she was already yelling, “What do you know about Hugo?”

“He found out about you and Elvis,” I said.

Her neck flushed. She spat out, “That motherfucker. When did he have a chance to tell you? Did he send you a—” Her eyes narrowed. She studied me for a second.

I felt my own cheeks heat up. She was probably half a foot taller than me, and her pink acrylic nails alone should probably registered as weapons, but I figured she was unlikely to attack me right across from the nursing station with a nurse eyeballing our every move.

I slowly migrated toward the doorway, blocking her exit, while I stayed mum. Silence is powerful, they told us in medical school. You can sometimes learn more by listening than by bombarding patients with questions.

Archer had last seen Hugo at the hospital Saturday afternoon and heard from him in the evening. We’d found his remains on Tuesday. Lucia had obviously met up with Hugo sometime after the show, before he’d had a chance to contact anyone, including Archer with his “important information.” Maybe I could use that. “He said he had important information,” I said, neglecting to mention he’d wanted to hand the info to someone else.

She shook her head. “Is that why you wanted to go looking for him on Tuesday? Did you know already, and you were dragging me along for fun?” She snorted. “You little cunt.”

I flinched. I’ve never liked the c-word. Her eyes glittered in triumph, so I squared my shoulders and raised my voice. “I thought it was a good idea to get the police involved,” I said, not exactly lying. In general, I prefer to involve the boys and girls in blue. “Like I said, I don’t think you meant to hurt Elvis the first time. And I’m a doctor. I like that you used a condom. But didn’t you notice that he was short of breath and red in the face afterward?”

She laughed, low and ugly, and I realized how stupid that sounded. “You show me a guy who isn’t.”

At least she hadn’t denied getting hot and heavy with Elvis. “Right. So maybe he seemed a little sweaty, a little wheezy afterward, and you figured he was just, ah, impressed by your skill…”

“I know he was. That other girlfriend of his, the hippie? She didn’t even wax.”

Clearly a felony for a stripper. Sorry, exotic dancer. “And you left him to get dressed and ready for the show. How soon before did you…”

“Blow him?” Now that she’d confessed this much, she seemed to enjoy it. Her shoulders seemed to elevate and broaden, and she dropped herself into the couch, stretching out her legs, which even I had to admit looked pretty silken and shapely. “Maybe an hour before. Maybe even two hours. Hard to say.”

I cleared my throat. “Did he seem wheezy or agitated afterward?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I remember him using his puffer. Does that count?”

“Probably. He has asthma anyway, which can get triggered by colds, or allergies, or even anxiety.” She made a face, reminding me that I was slipping into doctor speak, so I tried to level down. “Did he have a rash? Was he scratching?”

“Well, he didn’t have a rash when he dropped trou. I can tell you that.” She licked her lips, which made me uncomfortable, so I tried to concentrate on her heavily mascara-ed eyes. “Even if he was scratching away, I would’ve thought it was the costume. I don’t really know the guy, and I was busy setting up for the stunt. He caught me while I loading stuff in the truck, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t, really, so I breezed past that part. “You brought the condom?”

She shrugged. “I was a Girl Scout. I come prepared.” She chuckled at her own joke.

Ugh. I switched gears. “I guess it was just bad luck that Hugo caught you.”

She sniffed. “He did it on purpose. He’s always following me around.”

“So he blackmailed you? Just you, not Elvis?”

She rolled her eyes and crossed her legs the other way, almost like Sharon Stone in that movie Tucker would know, but I’d only heard about by reputation. I refused to check if she was wearing panties. Lucia said, “I can’t speak for the Escape King, but he definitely blackmailed me.”

“With a video?”

She nodded warily.

“That’s illegal. You could have brought him to the police.”

She snorted and didn’t bother answering.

“So you decided to take matters in your own hands,” I stated.

She inspected her nails. She had a single rhinestone pressed into the back of each one. “Always do.”

“You skipped out on work and met him at his place on Saturday night. And you took care of him.”

Her head snapped up. “I just wanted the video. That was it.”

“Did he give it to you?”

Her upper lip curled. “Not without some trade.”

I figured that meant more sex, or money, or both. But I needed to know what happened to Hugo. My heart banged in my chest. I tried to swallow, even though my throat felt bone dry.

“I gave it to him. He deleted the video in front of me. I was so happy, I almost hugged the bastard. Then he told me he’d sent it to some remote back-up sites and he’d need some ‘ongoing trade’ to keep him from sending it to Archer.”

I heard a strangled noise behind me and shifted my head to the left. Sure enough, Archer had frozen about two steps short of the doorway. Lucia’s view of him was blocked by the wall, and maybe by me.

“So you took matters into your own hands again,” I said.

She all but batted her eyes at me. “That was an accident. I was trying to sweeten the deal, mellow him up with a little chemical romance, you know? And we went for it, but he was used to 25c, not 25i.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I assumed it was drugs. And I didn’t buy the accident angle. But I just listened. I heard the elevator bing and more footsteps arrive.

“I told him to go slow, but you think he listened to me? That big hog. He was down for the count, and I can’t say I was sorry. I was a little surprised not to hear from him for the next few days, but I figured he had other things on his mind.”

“Like finding his phone?” I asked softly.

She stood up again. This time, she didn’t have her claws out, but I felt the menace, like she was a dog with her ears drawn back and her teeth bared. I said, “You took his phone, right? After he passed out? To make sure that the video was gone. That’s what I would have done.”

I backed up then, into the hallway, where Archer stood, still shell-shocked, with two security guards flanking him, and let them handle her.