That morning’s show played out pretty much as planned. I interviewed a veterinarian who’d written a diet book for dogs and cats. I tried my damnedest to keep a paddleball going for at least ten paddles while the U.S. paddleball champion kept his ball bouncing throughout the whole segment, simultaneously offering his reasons why the sport should be considered for the Olympics. On the street, I talked to some nice folks from Utah who wanted to remind our viewers that it was one hundred sixty-two years ago that Mormons settled in their state. They also wanted to express their dismay at the way so many people seemed to approve of same-sex marriage while disapproving of polygamy. (But they had no comment one way or the other about same-sex polygamy.) And I did a human-interest chat with twin sisters who were celebrating their one hundredth birthday and were looking forward to a meeting later that morning at NBC with their “dream man,” Willard Scott.
From time to time throughout the show, the camera and I checked in on Mr. Turducken, with whom I’d finally connected. He was spending the morning demonstrating the creation of his namesake dish with a four-pound chicken stuffed into a five-pound duckling stuffed into a twenty-pound turkey. All deboned, of course. I had expressed my concern that certain stages of the turducken preparation might not be appreciated by viewers at breakfast, notably, those involving close-ups of the various birds in their boneless but very bloody repose. In high-def yet. This warning had gone unheeded, and by the time the show headed into the homestretch, with the turducken on its back, trussed up to keep from falling apart in the oven, the switchboard was aglow with complaints.
As he’d promised, A.W. had hovered just off camera during the two hours. When the network headed into the nine o’clock news, we headed to my dressing-room office.
He was saying something about checking on Bettina that I didn’t quite hear. I was too distracted by the familiar form of Detective Solomon slouching in my dressing-room doorway.
“Hiya, Blessing,” he said. “Miss me?”
“Not really,” I said. “Where’s your sidekick?”
“It’s our day off and he’s home with his family. Which is where I’d be if I had a family. Instead I’m talking to you, as suggested by Detective Hawkline. She mentioned threats.”
“Come on in,” I said, moving past him into the room.
“Messages,” Kiki said, thrusting a neat stack of little salmon-colored slips at me. She was at her desk, working on a personal laptop. “In case you’re wondering,” she said, “we’re missing the office computer. I’ve notified building security.”
“Oh, gee,” A.W. said. “We’ve got it. I’ll see about having it delivered back to you, maybe today.”
Solomon was intrigued by the conversation. “And who might you be?” he asked A.W.
I stuffed the message slips into a coat pocket and did the introductions.
“So you’re his bodyguard? The one who was at the hospital last night?” Solomon asked A.W.
“Yes, sir.”
Solomon studied A.W. briefly, then turned to me. “What’s up with your missing computer, Blessing?”
I knew what was up with it: It had been used to send the first kidnap note, and InterTec was checking it for prints, bugs, you name it. I definitely did not want Solomon to add kidnapping to my list of major crimes and was racking my brain to think of an alternative explanation when A.W. said, “We’re installing some of our software on it.”
That seemed to satisfy the detective. He anchored his butt on the arm of a plump green chair and asked, “So maybe if your associates here will give us some quality time alone, you can tell me about these threats you don’t believe I’ll take seriously.”
I told A.W. that I was in good hands. He helped Kiki gather her laptop and papers, and they left together. All that had taken about two or three minutes, which I used to remind myself about exactly which threats I should or should not mention. While I described the former, Solomon used a thin gold pen to scribble notes on a small pad that could have come from a hotel stationery kit.
“I don’t suppose you kept any of this stuff,” he said. “The napkin, or the message you got at the museum?”
“InterTec has ’em,” I said. “I think they checked them for prints, DNA, whatever.”
He seemed surprised. “Any results?”
“Not that I heard.”
“I’ll want to take a look at them.”
“I can probably arrange that,” I said. “You might want to check the Internet for a photo of my car being attacked in the Lincoln Tunnel. Just Google my name and hit Images.”
“Nothing I love more than cruising the Internet,” he said, “unless it’s getting my prostate checked.”
He put the pen and pad away, a gesture that was supposed to make me think the official part of his visit was over. “You mind telling me what that deal was at the hospital? The Hawk—er, Detective Hawkline—said she got the distinct feeling she was being played by everybody involved. Including you.”
I told him the same story I’d told Hawkline.
“You didn’t happen to mention to Hawkline that you and the dead guy, Parkhurst, were at that arson-murder scene together?”
“I don’t think I did.”
“Or the yarn you told me about him and Gallagher and a murdered Touchstone merc all having a night out together over in Afghanistan?”
“So you were paying attention,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. I pay attention. So when I hear that an ex–Touchstone employee got himself shot in the same basement as your bodyguard, I start wondering if there might not be some validity to that story of yours. Care to enlighten me further?”
“I’ve told you everything,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. He pushed himself off the chair. “Lemme tell you something, Blessing, I’m not slow and I’m not stupid. I make mistakes, and when I do I try to correct ’em. In all the years I’ve worn the shield, I’ve put the arm on maybe three hundred perps. I can only think of four or five times when a subject looked good for a crime but didn’t do it. I don’t know about you yet. In spite of all the weird bullshit piling up around Gallagher’s death, I still think you might have killed him. But I’m not gonna put on blinders and ignore evidence to the contrary. And I fucking well resent your suggesting otherwise to a fellow officer.”
I didn’t think I’d told Hawkline that he ignored evidence, but I apologized to him all the same.
On his way out, he said, “Detective Hawkline wanted me to tell you she’ll be calling you shortly.”
“Why?”
“The case she’s investigating.”
“I thought that was closed when Ted Parkhurst died,” I said.
“That was the old case. Her new one is Parkhurst. His heart attack wasn’t what you’d call natural. The M.E. found a tiny puncture on his upper back and a drug called clar, claramycin—something like that—in his bloodstream. Looks like whoever did it ripped the stuff from the hospital’s supply room.
“According to Detective Hawkline, everybody at the hospital that night is on her list. Including you, of course.”
He was trying to make me feel uneasy. And he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Not with talk about Ted being a murder victim. It was his use of the word “blinders” that did me in.