The Silent Widow

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

‘You …?’

Nikki’s eyes narrowed as she took in the familiar, hated figure of the bigoted detective who had made her life so intolerable these last few weeks. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you to wake up,’ Johnson said cheerfully, either missing her hostility or choosing to ignore it as he took a seat be

side her bed. ‘I hear you’re gonna keep your leg? That’s good news, Doc. You always did have great legs.’

Nikki scowled. Was there literally no circumstance in which this awful man could refrain from being sexist, or racist, or otherwise insulting?

‘You know, you’re a great-looking woman, but you’d look even better if you smiled once in a while,’ Johnson went on, adding insult to injury. ‘I mean, not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but I did save your life.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nikki sat up in bed, wincing at the pain in her leg as she moved. She loathed Detective Jonson, but her need to understand what had happened trumped her instinct to throw him out of the room. ‘How did you save my life? What happened back there?’

Now it was Johnson’s turn to sit up. Cocking his head to one side like a curious dog, he looked at her and said, ‘Seriously? You don’t remember?’

Nikki shook her head.

‘I remember some.’ She frowned in confusion. ‘I went there to meet Anne. She called me out in the desert. I remember seeing Willie Baden, dead, nailed to the wall like a piece of meat.’ Her face crumpled as the grotesque image came back to her.

‘What else?’ asked Johnson.

‘Two men came and took Anne away. Her husband was there. Luis Rodriguez. He’d beaten her. He made her call me.’

‘I wouldn’t waste too many tears on Anne Bateman, if I were you,’ Johnson said brusquely ‘Beaten or not, she must have known her old man planned to whack you when she lured you there.’

‘Luis tried to shoot me. Twice!’ Nikki became agitated as the memories rushed back to her. ‘He told me everything. How he’d murdered Charlotte Clancy and made Carter Berkeley watch. How Willie Baden had tried to cheat him, so he’d tortured and killed him too, and made Anne watch. How he hired Brandon to kill me. Then the lights went out, just as he fired his gun. That must have been when he shot me in the leg. I hit him – in the groin I think? – and I got away.’

Johnson nodded again.

Fiona stepped forward. ‘Try to keep yourself calm now, Dr Roberts. Your body’s been through enough shock. It’s important not to—’

‘I’m fine. I’m calm,’ said Nikki, waving away her objections like a horse dispatching a fly with an impatient flick of the tail. She needed to talk about this, needed to remember. It helped. ‘The first time the lights went out, and the second time … I was on the stairs?’

She looked to Johnson for confirmation. ‘Yup.’

‘Rodriguez was about to finish me off when Goodman showed up. He saved me.’ She looked at Johnson again. ‘He killed Rodriguez. Blew the top of his head right off.’

Fiona winced at this gruesome detail, but Johnson was unfazed. If anything, he seemed pleased Nikki remembered so vividly.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s right. And after that?’

Nikki looked pale. Then she started to shake. It was coming back to her: Goodman’s face, his mocking, vicious expression swam before her eyes.

‘After that I … I don’t remember.’

‘I think you do,’ Johnson persisted. ‘Goodman was going to shoot you next.’

‘No,’ Nikki shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have done that. I know he wouldn’t. He … we were friends.’

‘Friends like you and Brandon Grolsch, you mean?’ Detective Johnson laughed, but there was anger there too. Anger at Nikki’s willful blindness. ‘Lou Goodman was a liar and a fraud, and if I hadn’t killed him right then and there he would have sent your brains flying around that stairwell just like Rodriguez’s.’

‘NO!’ Nikki sat bolt upright. ‘That’s not right! That can’t be right!’

‘Sure it’s right,’ Johnson snapped. ‘Goodman had been in Rodriguez’s pay for at least two years, maybe longer. He grew up poor – he told you about that, didn’t he? He knew what it was like to lose everything. The only thing driving him since his dad’s suicide was the pursuit of money. Wealth. Security. Rodriguez offered him a fast track to millions of dollars and he grabbed it with both, greedy hands. But even that wasn’t enough. He wanted to run the show.’

‘You’re lying!’ Nikki wheezed, feeling suddenly dizzy.