3rd Degree (Women's Murder Club 3)

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 fingers 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 nig

ht.

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 stunned hotel employees standing around, wondering what to do. I took the elevator up to the top floor, where Chin was waiting.

“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.”

“Works for me.” I sniffled.

“That, and this,” Chin said, producing a balled-up piece of paper that he picked up with latex gloves. “Found it in his mouth.”

It looked like some kind of crumpled business form.

A white embossed logo: Hopewell Health Care.

It was a statement of benefits. Some text filled in. As I started to read, my blood ran cold.