Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (33 page)

Seventeen

Shirley gave the cab driver the transport voucher she’d received from the police department, along with a fifty-cent tip. She wasn’t feeling especially generous today—and even if she were, she couldn’t afford to be. The driver swore in Spanish at her as he drove off, but she didn’t care.

What a day! This morning she’d started out her day as a junior-level nurse in a big-city hospital with a dull, humdrum life and no romantic entanglements aside from the occasional one-night stand. Less than twelve hours later, she’d had the best sex of her life with a complex, mysterious man she cared deeply for, and yet didn’t understand at all. She’d had the rug pulled out from under her at her new job, and she was helping to investigate a murder mystery for the state of North Carolina.

Talk about rapid turnarounds.

Raleigh might not be Chicago or New York City, but when it came to keeping its inhabitants on their toes, this Southern metropolis was light-years ahead of the sleepy small town where she’d grown up.

Shirley was exhausted. Even if it was only nine-thirty, she was already about to call it a night. She just hoped she wouldn’t run into Ed or his bubbly blonde girlfriend in the hallway. She was in no mood for nostrings-attached sex tonight. She was in no mood for nostrings-attached sex ever again, in fact. As fun as that part of her life had been in recent months, Shirley had learned the hard way that getting busy with everything in pants eventually came with a price. An
emotional
price.

She’d jumped into bed with Dr. Randall Hamm today, expecting to come away with the sense of empowerment and elation all her past impromptu trysts had gotten her—but the exact opposite had happened. Instead of helping to satisfy her cravings—whether for sex or for the man himself—this afternoon’s encounter just made her want him all the more. The satisfaction her body had enjoyed just a few hours ago was short-lived; now she was as horny and on-edge as a frustrated teenage virgin. She wanted him, needed him, had to have him—now.

Only problem was, Dr. Randall Hamm was in jail.

Damn it. Today just wasn’t her day.

Shirley walked up her apartment building’s gravel driveway, rummaging in her handbag for her keys. They’d fallen all the way to the bottom of her purse, and she was so busy trying to dig them out that she didn’t notice that someone was waiting for her on the front stoop.

“Hello, Shirley,” a familiar male voice said. A voice that stopped her dead in her tracks.

Shirley looked up, and stared into Bob Watson’s haggard, unshaven face.

“
Bob?
What the—“ she sputtered. Suddenly she felt faint; she had to brace herself against one of the porch pillars to keep from falling over. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in prison!”

Bob shrugged. “They let me out early. Counted the time I did awaiting trial as time served. Budget cuts, you know. With the recession, the government can’t afford to keep people in jail.”

“Get out of here,” Shirley seethed. “Get out of here before I call the police.”

“I’m not breaking the law,” he retorted. “I’m just standing here in front of my own apartment building, minding my own business.

Shirley felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. “What?” she shrieked. “You
live
here?”

“Yup,” he said. “And why not? It’s a good location, and the rent’s cheap. ‘Sides, from what I hear from the neighbors, it’s a regular
Melrose Place
around here. Plenty of hot tail available whenever you want it.” He eyed her lasciviously. “So whattaya say, babe? Since you’re already givin’ it away for free to the neighbors, how ‘bout you an’ me head up to my place for old time’s sake? I’ve got a nice new waterbed.”

Shirley shivered with disgust, and choked down the bile in her throat as her stomach turned at the very thought of getting back into bed with the sleazy, slimy—not to mention
totally impotent
—Bob Watson. “If you think for one minute that I would even c
onsider
getting back together with you, you are beyond crazy.”

“I didn’t say anything ‘bout us getting back together babe,” Bob oozed, all slimy snake-oil salesman. “I’m just lookin’ for a quick roll in the sack. Then maybe you an’ me can talk about my latest business plan.”

Business plan?
Oh that’s just great
, Shirley mused to herself. What Bob Watson called business plans, the rest of the world called illegal scams. “I don’t think so, Bob. Now get out of my way. I need to get up to my apartment.”

Bob rooted his feet into the concrete. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, babe. If you want to get upstairs, you’ve gotta take me up there with you.”

Shirley ground her teeth. The audacity of this man was beyond the pale. What did she ever see in him, anyway? “Do you really want me to call the cops, Bob? Because I happen to be very good friends with a couple members of Raleigh’s finest.”

Bob laughed. “I highly doubt that,” he sneered. “You’re just as much as an ex-con as me, even if you used your fancy-dancy lawyer to buy your way outa jail. And now I hear you’re broke. Guess maybe that’s why you’re sleepin’ with everybody under the sun. You makin’ any money from that? Maybe you should.”

That did it. Shirley blew her stack. “You have no right to judge me, Bob! No right at all.” She put both hands to his chest and shoved so hard he toppled over. She dashed past him into the building and ran upstairs, cheeks burning and eyes smarting from humiliation. Damn it. Damn it all to hell. Not only had Ed blabbed the sordid details of their trysts to the whole universe, Bob Watson was now her neighbor, too.

There was absolutely no way she could keep living here. She would have to move. How, exactly, she had no idea. Bob was right—she
was
broke. She couldn’t afford to break her lease, couldn’t even afford to rent a moving van. But that was another matter for another time. Right now, she just had to get the hell out of there.

Shirley hastily packed an overnight bag and headed back outside. Thankfully, Bob had disappeared. Shirley walked to the corner, flagged a taxi, and asked the driver to take her to the nearest budget hotel.

Eighteen

Shirley sat wedged into the narrow, undersized bathtub in her $39.95 motel room at the Raleigh Budget Superlodge. The tiny tub was filled with lavender-scented suds from the bubble bath she’d brought with her from home, but the hot bath wasn’t comforting at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. She had cricks in her neck and back from wedging her body into far too small a space, and a splitting headache from the sound of throbbing bass and screeching rap music booming from the souped-up cars that drove through the hotel’s less-than-desirable neighborhood. The bathroom mirror was cracked, the tile was chipped and moldy. If Shirley had somewhere else to go, she would. But as the old saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers.

Even if the tiny bathroom was miserable, the motel room was worse. The whole reason Shirley had locked herself in the bathroom in the first place was to escape the sounds of the cheap one-night stands happening on the other side of her motel room’s thin paneled walls. From the sound of it, the room to her left contained a middle-aged couple doing the nasty up against a wall, and the room to her right housed a pair of young lovers just getting acquainted with each other. Under normal circumstances, the sound of overheard lovemaking would have turned Shirley on. But after all that had happened today, all it did was make her feel lonely and miserable.

Shirley’s cell phone sat perched on the side of the tub. Officer Reynolds had asked that she keep it turned on and close by at all times, in case they needed to notify her of any changes or developments in their ongoing investigation. She stared at the phone and mentally willed it to ring—not because she wanted to jump into her undercover work, but because she was desperate for any excuse to get the hell out of that hotel room.

To her shock, the phone rang almost immediately. She had it on the combo ring-vibrate setting, and the phone jumped around on the side of the tub enough that she barely had a chance to rescue it from falling into the tub. She glanced at the caller ID screen; it said “PRIVATE.”

Probably the cops
, she mused. “Hello?”

“Shirley, it’s Randall.”

Now she
did
drop the phone. “Shit!” She frantically fished it out and wiped off the bubbles with a washcloth, hoping it still worked. “Randall, are you still there?”
“Yes. What just happened? It sounded like you were underwater just now.”

“Umm, I was, sort of. Never mind. Why are you calling me? And how the hell did you get this number?”

“I uhhh, I got it from the police. They told me to call you.”

“What? Why?”

“I agreed to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for them dropping the obstruction charges. I didn’t want to, but my attorney told me it was the only way for this whole mess to blow over.”

Shirley jerked upright, sending hot water and suds spilling over the sides of the tiny bathtub. “What the hell? Last I heard, the cops were dragging you off in handcuffs! Now you’re
cooperating
with them? Jeez, Randall, I never know which way was is up with you, buddy.”

“Shirley—“

“And by the way, you’ve got a helluva lot of explaining to do. I really got put on the spot by the cops because they
assumed
that just because I was sleeping with you, I’d know everything about everything you’ve been up to lately. Which isn’t even close to the truth, as I’m sure you already know. Let me tell you something, mister. If you and I are going to have any kind of future together—whether personally or work-related—you need to start being straight with me. I’ll admit that the whole mystery-wrapped-in-enigma thing was kind of sexy at first, but now it’s just getting old. And furthermore—”

Randall sighed into the phone, making static. “Look, Shirley, I know you’re probably very confused. But if you’ll just let me explain a few things, I think we’ll be able to work everything out.”

Shirley paused to think. She was still pretty damn skeptical wherever Dr. Randall Hamm was concerned. Sure, the man was hot, and sure, he was by far the best lover she’d ever had. But that was no excuse for him putting her through the wringer like he had. What other man could single-handedly cause her to almost lose her job, get picked up by the police, and dragged into a covert operation all in the same day?

“Shirley, are you still there?”

“Yeah, I’m still here. So start explaining.”

Randall coughed. “Uh, it would probably be a lot easier if I explained in person. Where are you right now?”

As if on cue, the middle-aged couple next door started pounding themselves against the bathroom wall. Apparently they’d decided on a change of scenery. “Uhhh, I’m not sure if you’d want to be where I am right now,” she said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand in a futile attempt to muffle the sound of “YES! YES! OH BABY FUCK ME YES!” on the other side of the cheap plastic tile wall.

“Don’t be so sure. It’s probably best we meet in as low-profile place as possible. We don’t want anyone important to know we’re in cahoots on this investigation thing.”

“Wellll—“ Shirley glanced around the seedy bathroom, grabbed a threadbare towel from the rack and wrapped it around herself as she stepped out of the tub. “If it’s low-profile you’re looking for, then where I am right now is perfect. Though I wouldn’t bet on it being very safe. And we should probably be on the lookout for bedbugs.”

“Is that some kind of joke?” Randall asked. “You don’t live in a flophouse, do you?”

“No, I don’t
live
in one. But tonight I’m definitely
staying
in one, unfortunately.

“Why?”

“It’s kind of a long story. Why don’t you just come over and find out? I’m at the Raleigh Budget Superlodge, on the corner of Franklin Street and State Route 123.”

Randall whistled. “Wow, that
is
a bad part of town. I’ll be right over. And I’ll be packing heat, too, if you know what I mean.” He hung up.

Shirley giggled. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure what the last comment meant. Because given their recent history, when it came to Dr. Randall Hamm, “packing heat” could mean any number of things.

Nineteen

Randall showed up at Shirley’s cheap hotel room less than half an hour later. He arrived looking less like a hotshot doctor and a lot more like a golf pro in his tight-fitting red polo shirt that accentuated the outline of his pecs, pressed khakis that hugged his trime frame, and expensive white leather loafers. Shirley had changed out of her ratty sweats and into the one nice outfit she’d remembered to toss into her overnight bag—a light cotton sundress flicked with yellow sunflowers and matching yellow espadrilles.

When she opened the door to let him in, she couldn’t help but notice his lip curl up in distaste while he eyed the surroundings. “This place seems a little downmarket for you,” he commented, then looked her up and down. “Though you do help give it a little class. Nice dress.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t exactly afford the Ritz. I’m bankrupt, remember?”

Randall plopped down into one of the cracked vinyl chairs, taking care to wipe the seat clean first. “The affordability issue is perfectly understandable. But what I don’t understand is what you’re doing here in the first place. Don’t you have an apartment?”

Shirley sighed. “Yeah, but I can’t stay there right now.”

“Why not?”

“As I said on the phone, kind of a long story. We’ll get to that later. First things first. How about telling me what the hell is going on with
you?”

Randall snickered as he tucked into the black leather shoulder bag he’d brought with him. He pulled out a frosty bottle of vodka, two bottles of Coke, and two plastic cups. “Before I do, I think you and I could both use a drink. The vodka’s fresh from my freezer at home, and the Cokes are already cold. Which is good, because this doesn’t strike me as the type of hotel that has a decent ice machine.”

“They do have one, actually,” Shirley offered. “Down at the end of the, ahhh, hallway.” If you could call it that—the “hallway” was a concrete landing walled only by a very rickety metal railing. “But it doesn’t work. And it’s also pretty moldy.”

Randall poured the drinks, giving them both a double-shot of vodka. He handed her one glass, started sipping liberally from the other. “I originally wanted to do Cuba Librés, but I was fresh out of limes. And rum. Plus you can get drunk a lot faster on vodka, anyway.”

Shirley took a sip of her own drink, and winced at how strong it was. Even mixed with the Coke, the 180-proof vodka made her throat burn and her eyes water. “So what you’re about to say is bad enough to merit getting hammered, then?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Randall gulped down the rest of his drink, then poured himself another. “I brought enough libations to last us the whole night, so drink up.”

She gingerly took another sip of her drink and scorched the inside of her throat again. Lightweight that she was, there was no way she could match Randall drink for drink. And she had a nagging feeling she’d need to stay sober in order to fully grasp what he was about to tell her. “I’m all ears. So start talking.”

Randall took a deep breath, blew it out in an unbelievably sexy sigh that set Shirley’s crotch afire. Here they were, in a cheap motel room, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and about to share a pile of juicy secrets about a potential homicide in a big-city hospital.

It was only a matter of time before things got down and dirty.

But first things first. “I always wanted to be a doctor, ever since I was a kid,” Randall said. “Which was a good thing, since my parents were both physicians, and so was my paternal grandfather. So it was almost an expectation that I’d go into the family business, too. The only difference was, I came from a family of small-town doctors who specialized in general practice, just treating families. Giving kids their shots, treating the flu, setting the occasional broken bone. Ordinary, everyday stuff. My grandfather used to call it ‘ringworm and rheumatism’ medicine. But a small-town family practice was never what I was interested in. I wanted something bigger.”

Randall paused, took another sip of his drink. “When I graduated from medical school and told my parents I was going to skip the family medicine residency in favor of anesthesiology, they were heartbroken.”

Shirley gasped. “Why? Anesthesiology is one of the most respected specialties out there. And one of the highest paid. I’d think they’d have been proud of you.”

He scoffed. “Well, they weren’t.” My dad went so far as to say that anesthesiologists weren’t real doctors, just because they don’t form relationships with their patients. Which I’m sure as you know yourself, is kind of hard to do when your only contact with your patient is making them unconscious in the operating room. But I didn’t see that as a bad thing at all. As I’m sure you have probably figured out by now, dealing directly with people is not exactly my forte.”

Shirley laughed. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“When I did the Anesthesiology rotation in med school, it seemed like a dream come true. I’d struggled in all my other rotations, especially Pediatrics and General Practice, because I had a really hard time communicating with and relating to my patients. But in Anesthesiology, all my patients were asleep. Here was a way for me to be a doctor without having to emotionally connect with anyone. Sounds like a cop-out, I know. But it was a life-changing moment for me. I was beginning to think I didn’t have what it took to be a doctor, since I’ve always been sort of a loner.”

“That’s great you found your calling and everything,” Shirley quipped as she felt her body warm from the alcohol. “But what does all this have to do with what happened to Enola Higginbottom?”

“More than you might think,” Randall said. “I didn’t just want to make a break from my parents’ way of practicing medicine. I’ve always wanted to work in a big research hospital. I wanted the chance to work on the most up-to-date equipment, wanted to try out all the latest medications, wanted to see first-hand all the latest developments in surgery. Plus, I wanted to be anonymous. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle at a big research hospital. Nobody will remember your name, except maybe the few anesthesiology nerds who read your articles in medical journals. At a big hospital like this, I could immerse myself in my work, do what I needed to do, and then just fade into the background. Nobody would ever bother me. Or so I thought.”

“What do you mean?”

Randall took a long sip from his second drink, set it down on the Formica tabletop, stood up and started to pace. “Things actually went exactly that way for the first couple of years I was here. But then things started to change. In little ways, at first.”

“How?”

“Well, when I got close to thirty I finally started growing into my looks in a big way. And I’d started working out, too, so it wasn’t long before all the women around the hospital started noticing me. A
lot
.”

Shirley chuckled. “Hmm. Imagine that.”

“I couldn’t just fade into the background any more. And when the women started noticing me in a big way, ironically, so did the men. But not in the way you might think.”

“How so?”

“Guys from all over the place started coming to me for advice. On all sorts of things. Women, mostly. Not that I had a lot to offer there. But then I started getting asked all sorts of questions on medical topics. I became the hospital’s go-to guy on all things anesthesia. Then I started getting offers for research grants, studies, speaking engagements at conferences. And all because I was good-looking. It seemed fake to me, and totally undeserved. So I just withdrew into my shell even further.”

“Why?”

“I just wasn’t accustomed to that kind of attention. I’ve always felt most comfortable doing things alone, my own way. Even my charity work was done anonymously. I guess it’s just the way my brain is put together.” He paused, ran his finger around the damp edge of his highball glass that Shirley couldn’t help but find arousing. “But there was one offer that stood out among the rest. That one, I took up on.”

Shirley already had some idea where this might be heading. “Go on.”

“President Chalmers came to me one day and asked if I’d like to get involved in some special project research that would be quite lucrative for both me and the hospital. I was hesitant at first, but then he added that it was the type of research that could be conducted secretly. That raised some red flags with me, but I was still curious about what he meant, so I agreed to meet with him about it.

“This was about two years ago, shortly after Dr. Chalmers took over running the hospital. Like any hospital administrator, he’s ruthless about looking for new revenue streams for the hospital. So when he offered me a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new anesthesia study that was funded by a drug company, I was skeptical at first. The drug companies are notorious for funding so-called studies that are little more than expensive marketing tools for their drugs. But when I looked into it further, it seemed legit. I was allowed to set my own study parameters, and there was—supposedly—no pressure to publish study results that were favorable to the drug company. So I went ahead and signed on. In return I got a generous research budget, plus a pretty fat signing bonus. That’s how I made the down payment on my house, in fact. It seemed like any academic physician’s dream come true—at first.”

“Let me guess,” Shirley said, polishing off her drink. “There was a catch.”

“You betcha. It took me a while to figure that out, but after a couple of months doing the study, it was obvious. I got my first inkling of the problem when I turned over my first dataset to Dr. Chalmers, and he called me into his office, saying that it was problematic.”

“How so?”

Randall ran his fingers through his sandy hair. He seemed to be getting agitated. “Well, he didn’t exactly say that at first. He called me into his office, sat me down, offered me a drink of twelve-year-old scotch from his liquor cabinet. I honestly thought he’d called me in to congratulate me on a job well done. But that wasn’t the case at all. Once he knew I was comfortable, he threw the proverbial book at me. Apparently, he’d forwarded the dataset to the drug company, and they were furious about it.”

“Why?”

“Well, I discovered quite by accident over the course of my research that this expensive new anesthesia drug that we were being paid to study was no more effective than a cheap and widely available generic that had been around for years. So I of course reported that in my dataset. But the drug company wasn’t exactly happy about that. And neither was Dr. Chalmers. Turns out that the Higginbottom family owned a chunk of the company that manufactured the drug, and Chalmers was heavily invested as well.”

Shirley’s eyes widened. This must have been the sour investments that the cops had referred to back at the station. “Oh my. What a mess.”

“Yeah, no kidding. So it goes without saying that Dr. Chalmers ordered me to change the data.”

“What do you mean,
change
the data?”

“Chalmers basically told me to come up with a different set of data that was favorable to the drug company. To just make something up, in other words. I refused, of course. But he wasn’t too happy about that. He basically said that if I didn’t change the data, he was revoking the research grant. I said fine by me. Then he said I’d have to give the signing bonus back. I told him he’d have to sue me for it. That’s when he about blew a gasket.”

Now Shirley started having Joe Middleton flashbacks. Corrupt, manipulative hospital administrators? This was familiar territory, for sure. “Because in order to sue you, he’d have to go public with the fact he wanted you to rig the study.”

“That’s right, Shirley.” He grinned at her, and his eyes twinkled. “You know, you’ve really got a good head on your shoulders when it comes to this sort of thing.”

“Comes from my past life of crime,” she quipped. “So if you wouldn’t cooperate on rigging the drug study, what did Middleton do next? Find another scam?”

“Yep. One that would be a lot harder to track. It just so happened that one of my contacts at the ACLU clued me in to a new scam that was making the rounds among the sleazier hospital administrators—wrongful death insurance scams.”

Shirley frowned; she’d never heard of anything like that. “I didn’t even know that was possible. Aren’t hospitals usually the ones that get
sued
for wrongful death?”

Randall nodded. “Yeah, most of the time. But in North Carolina and a couple other states, hospitals can also
collect
on wrongful death insurance if they can prove that it was a result of a defective drug or piece of medical equipment. Sometimes it’s even possible to collect in the case of medical malpractice, if the doctor that does it isn’t employed by the hospital. The resulting monies are split between the patient’s family and the hospital. If you play your cards right, it’s a gold mine.”

Shivers ran up and down Shirley’s spine. Suddenly, Enola Higginbottom’s sudden death in the OR made a lot of sense. “You don’t mean—“

Randall sat down, took both of Shirley’s hands in his, squeezed them. “I do mean it, Shirley. Enola Higginbottom was murdered as part of Dr. Chalmers’ insurance scam. I’m almost sure of it. And he’s trying to pin the blame on me, when I think it’s almost certain that the surgeon who did the operation was responsible. I think he targeted her because he knew that she had a lot of enemies, along with a lot of wealth, so he figured it would be easy for him to get the police to suspect someone else besides him.”