The Book Stops Here (22 page)

I had one more book segment to tape that night, so Derek and I headed for my dressing room, where I planned to do some quick research on the next book.

“Will you have that analyzed?” I asked when I noticed he was still carrying the coffee cup.

“Yes,” he said. “I smelled something other than coffee, as you did.”

“I smelled peanuts or peanut butter.”

“The most minute smear could’ve killed him.”

I frowned at the thought that Randy could’ve died tonight. “Someone must have dabbed some peanut butter in his cup. Or maybe they tossed some ground-up peanuts into the coffee itself.”

“Good point. I’ll check the coffee urn while you’re doing your appraisal.”

“The first time he told us about the stalker, he was so nervous about it,” I mused as I unlocked my dressing room door. “Now he’s pretending it’s nothing. An accident.”

“He’s afraid,” Derek suggested, following me into the room.

“He should be. This time was different.”

“Yes,” Derek said, adding ominously, “His stalker’s threats are escalating.”

“I agree.” I sat on the swivel chair. “Those other occurrences were creepy and scary, but this is life-and-death. It’s terribly real and he’s got to be more afraid than he’s letting on.”

•   •   •

I
held up the lovingly restored, leather-bound copy of
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman so the camera could get a closer shot of it. I explained how the book had been made at a bindery in England that had mass-produced thousands of well-made copies of
the classics during the fifties and sixties. There were countless numbers of similar volumes available online, although this copy, owned by a woman named Ruth, was in stellar condition. In the end, though, I was only able to quote her a value of two hundred dollars.

Ruth took the news with good grace.

I wrapped up the segment with a word of encouragement to both Ruth and the audience at home. “Not all the books on the show can be appraised for thousands of dollars. I consider myself lucky when I get to work with a simple, nicely bound book that has been well taken care of and will give someone years of quiet pleasure.”

Ruth admitted she’d been given the book by a friend who had inherited it from her mother. The friend couldn’t care less about it so she’d passed it on to Ruth.

“I didn’t pay a dime for it and I’ve enjoyed it immensely,” she said. “To be honest, knowing that it’s only worth two hundred dollars fills me with relief. Two hundred dollars is plenty for a little book like this. If it had been worth thousands of dollars, I wouldn’t feel comfortable having it in my house. Now I can continue to enjoy it and have peace of mind in the bargain.”

Her words reminded me of Stanley Frisch, the book owner who had been so shattered by the news that his Michael Connelly first editions were worth so much money.

When I’d first taken this job, the thought had never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t want to own a rare, valuable book. Now I was finding it was a common sentiment. Which made me wonder again why the people who felt that way would come on a show like this in the first place. If they didn’t want their treasures to be worth too much money, why find out either way?

Were they just looking for a fun new way to spend the day? Probably. I guessed I was taking it all too seriously.

Once Angie cleared us to go, Derek walked me back to the
dressing room, where he pulled a half-filled plastic ziplock bag from his pocket and placed it in his briefcase.

“What is that?”

“Coffee grounds from the caterer’s coffee urn,” he said.

“I’m glad you remembered.”

We packed up the rest of our things and headed out.

They were still taping the last segment and there were more crew members working than usual. Most of them were waiting to clean things up on our stage before starting in on their all-nighter next door.

Halfway to the stage door I stopped. “I forgot my raincoat. I have to get it back from Tish.”

Derek shrugged in resignation. “Let’s go find her.”

I glanced around but didn’t see her onstage, so I grabbed Angie as she walked by. “Have you seen Tish?”

“She went to the store, remember?”

“That was almost two hours ago.”

“Oh yeah.” She glanced around. “I haven’t seen her in a while and I’m getting hungry, now that you mention it. She probably snuck off to the prop room to visit Kenny.”

“I’ll go check.” I led Derek back around the scrim and we crossed to the adjoining studio where the prop room was located.

I knocked on the half-open door and saw Bruce, the head prop guy, look up. “Hey, girlie. What do you need?”

Bruce was a tall, good-looking, whip-thin black man. His speech was a colorful combination of fifties cool cat and eighties cool dude. He called most women girlie while all the men were bro.

I walked inside to ask about Tish and stopped suddenly. “Oh, my God.”

Huge papier-mâché puppets were hanging from the ceiling and stacked together along the back wall of the two-story-high prop room. There were at least twenty of them and they were
gigantic, nearly fifteen feet tall. Grotesque and misshapen creatures with human bodies and oversized animal heads, all grinning madly.

“Cat got your tongue, girlie?” Bruce asked, shaking me out of my transfixed state.

I pointed at the puppets. “What are those?”

“My in-laws,” he said, and cackled. “Nah, they’re puppets. You like? We used them for a Mardi Gras special a few years back and I couldn’t let them go. They’re cool, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Can I touch them?”

“Sure, sweet cheeks. They’re a little fragile, so be careful, but help yourself.”

“Brooklyn?”

I whipped around and saw Derek standing in the doorway. I’d completely forgotten what I was doing there.

“Puppets,” I said, pointing, before I realized how idiotic that sounded. I smiled at Bruce. “Sorry. I’ll come back another time to check out the puppets. Right now, we’re looking for Tish.”

He sat back in his big chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Tishy girl’s in here all the time, flirting with Kenny, but I haven’t seen her for a few hours. Did you check the control booth? She might be up there with the lighting director.”

Since Tish was the gaffer’s assistant, she worked closely with the lighting director and often took notes during the tapings.

“I’ll check. Thanks.” We ran upstairs to the control booth. It was a large room with a massive plate-glass window that looked out over the stage. Jane, the director, sat at a long console, surrounded by the tech crew that worked with her. She and the script supervisor, associate director, technical director, and lighting director all stared at a wall of monitors that showed every camera’s view, along with whatever graphic was about to come up.

Jane was on headset to the camera operators, the stage manager, and everyone in the booth. She told the cameras which shots
to take and she cued the technical director to cut between the shots, blending it all together with lighting and sound.

The audio man had his own soundproof booth behind them. There were a few tall stools along the back wall for the producers and guests to sit and watch the action.

Tish wasn’t up there.

I turned to Derek. “I guess we could leave, but I really don’t want to go without making sure she got back safely.”

“Let’s check downstairs again,” Derek said. “We’ll take one last turn around the stage. Maybe she’s back by now.” We walked down the stairs and took the shortcut behind the scrim until we got to the curtain break. The cameras and crew were gathered down at the opposite end of the studio, still taping the last segment on the kitchen set.

I glanced around and easily spied tall, good-looking Kenny, Tish’s boyfriend, standing back behind the kitchen set. Not wanting to disrupt the taping, Derek and I stood where we were for another three minutes until Angie called out, “We’re clear, people. That’s a wrap for this shoot, but anyone working on the Studio Two load-in, take a fifteen-minute break and then meet on the stage next door.”

“Let’s go talk to Kenny,” Derek said, and reached for my hand. We started across the stage when all of a sudden, a thunderous boom rang out.

The stage door had been flung open and had crashed against the wall, causing the loud noise.

Garth, the nice old janitor who had tried to help me lift the stage flats, stumbled through the open doorway in a daze, dripping wet. He flailed his arms and cried out at the top of his lungs, “She’s dead! She’s dead! Call the police!”

His voice cracked and he began to cough and hack miserably. One of the stagehands grabbed him and slapped him lightly on the back a few times.

“Call nine-one-one!” Derek shouted for the second time that night as he went racing across the stage and out the door. I grabbed my cell phone from my purse and made the call as I ran after him. I told the dispatcher that someone had been attacked outside the studio. I gave her the location and she paused briefly, then informed me that an ambulance would arrive in five minutes while the police would be there in two.

I tucked away my phone and dashed out to find Derek. The parking-lot lights were dimmed by the pouring rain, but I spotted Derek right away. He had just found Tish. She lay curled on the tarmac halfway across the lot, between a black SUV and the wall of the next building. Derek knelt next to her and gently pulled back the red raincoat hood. I leaned over him and could clearly see the blood that had trickled down her temple.

“Is she alive?” I asked, unwilling to accept that she might be dead. A siren began to wail in the distance.

“She’s breathing,” Derek said, looking up at me. “She’s unconscious, but she’s
alive.”

Chapter Thirteen

I watched the ambulance drive away, red lights and siren blazing. Kenny raced to his truck to follow it to the hospital. “I’ll be with her until they let me take her home.”

“Let us know how she’s doing,” Tom yelled, shielding his eyes from the rain.

“I’ll call you,” Kenny shouted, then slammed the truck door shut and drove out after the ambulance.

It was still pouring and I was soaked to the skin. I wrapped my trembling arms around my waist as cold and dread sent shivers throughout my system.

The police officers insisted that we all go inside. They had some questions to ask.

Despite the urge to jump in my car and escape, I walked with Derek as calmly as we could back into the studio.

Once we were wrangled onto the stage, Chuck and Florence, who worked in the Wardrobe Department, walked through the crowd, handing small white makeup towels to everyone to help blot some of the rain.

The officers took a cursory survey, asking for a show of hands from anyone who had seen something suspicious outside. Nobody
admitted seeing anything. We had all been working. Besides, it was raining. Who wanted to be out in that?

It occurred to me that it was too late to determine if someone had followed Tish outside—because they would have gotten wet.
Duh!
We could have checked everyone’s shoes and hair and coats and maybe discovered Tish’s attacker. But once Garth came in and broadcast the fact that Tish was hurt (or
dead
, as he had first reported), we’d all gone racing outside to see what had happened and ended up getting equally drenched.

So much for preserving evidence, if getting wet could be considered evidentiary. It was all beside the point, though, because Derek and I already
knew
who had assaulted Tish. We weren’t about to announce it to the gathered staff and crew, though.

The cops took down everyone’s names and phone numbers, and passed out their business cards, on the off chance that any of us recalled something significant.

“Was she robbed?” Todd asked. “She had a bunch of cash on her.”

“We can’t comment on that,” one cop said.

Derek whispered in my ear, “I didn’t find any money on her.”

I grimaced. Had Tish’s attacker stolen the money?

“So you’re saying she was robbed?” one of the women said, her voice high and shaky. “Shouldn’t we get more security for the parking lot?”

“She wasn’t robbed,” the officer said bluntly, in an obvious attempt to keep things calm. “But hiring more security wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

With that equivocal advice, the cop changed the subject and asked for a room to conduct interviews with a few of the witnesses. Namely, Derek and Garth.

“You can use one of the empty dressing rooms,” Bruce said, taking charge. “But first, can you just tell us if you found a bunch of cash on Tish? She went out to buy pizzas for the crew.”

“Ah,” the taller cop said. “Guess that’s why there’s a stack of pizza boxes in her car.”

There were a few muted sighs. It was hard to cheer for pizza when Tish was on her way to the hospital. The tall cop left with Bruce and two of his prop men to retrieve the food from Tish’s car.

The other cop tracked down Garth, who had first announced the bad news about Tish. He looked scared to death as he was led away.

So Tish hadn’t been robbed and that led some of the crew members to try to figure out why she’d been attacked. As if I didn’t know! It was because she was wearing my new red raincoat. She was attacked because someone thought she was me. And there could be only one person who would do that: Grizzly Jones.

And that was bad news.

I’d had a premonition earlier that day when I arrived at the studio. Now I knew my gut check had been right on. Grizzly must have given up waiting for me at the Hall of Justice and decided to drive over to the studio to watch for me until I arrived. I had to assume his brother had told him where I worked. He must’ve arrived at about the same time I had and seen me in my red raincoat.

Had Grizzly been lying in wait out there until he saw me leave the studio for the night? Had he mistaken Tish for me and attacked her with deadly force? I knew the answers to all of the above were yes.

Luckily, Tish had survived, but that just meant that Grizzly would try again.

Earlier, as we’d waited for the ambulance to arrive, Tish had regained consciousness briefly. Her eyelids had fluttered and she’d mumbled something incomprehensible.