Deadly Rich Read Online Free PDF

the doorknob. It turned. She gave a push inward. The room was empty.
    She went to the door directly opposite. She knocked. “Oona?”
    No answer. She tried the handle. The door swung inward. The room was empty.
    She went to the next door and rapped sharply. “Oona—are you in there?”
    She felt the first stirrings of concern. The doorknob turned and she pushed the door open. A flash of green whooshed up in front of her face.
    She recoiled.
    A dress left hanging on a hook was trembling in the air current from the open door. She saw it was green linen—not the dress Oona had been trying on.
    A green linen belt had been thrown across the seat of a chair, and a woman was leaning toward it.
    “Excuse me,” Leigh said, and when the woman refused to acknowledge her, she realized she had apologized to her own reflection.
    She went to the last door.
    The sounds of voices and bells floated in from the main floor—luxuriously muted as if they’d had to pass through layers of lamb’s wool and silk.
    “Oona!” With one rap she gripped the handle and pushed.
    She stood staring at a trash basket with a botany print wrapped around it, filled with sheets of pink tissue paper. Resting in a nested indentation on the tissue were three pins with fat heads.
    Damn Oona , she thought. This can’t be — there’s no way out of here except the fire exit or through the boutique —
    She stepped back into the corridor. Her eye went again to the first changing room with its half-open door. She realized now that she hadn’t actually looked in that room or in the one next to it—she had assumed that with their doors ajar they had to be empty.
    She went to the nearest half-open door. “Oona?”
    “ GET AN AMBULANCE .”
    Ms. Hansen’s eyes swung up and around as though she’d been slapped. “I beg your pardon?”
    Leigh seized the telephone from the counter and thrust the receiver at Ms. Hansen. She felt her voice grow teeth. “Get an ambulance this minute, or I will sue the ass off this store.”

FOUR
    “T HEN YOU BOTH WERE WITH Oona Aldrich when she was killed?” Lieutenant Detective Vincent Cardozo was saying.
    He was sitting in a borrowed doctor’s office on the second story of Lexington Hospital, questioning two very pale, very shocked-looking women who had just lived through one of the worst experiences that New York City could offer.
    Leigh Baker answered “Yes” at the exact moment that Tori Sandberg said “No.”
    Nervous glances flicked between the women. It seemed to Cardozo that the glances appointed Tori Sandberg spokesperson.
    “All three of us went together to the boutique.” Tori Sandberg held herself upright, spine straight, her back not touching the chair. “Oona took a dress into the changing room, and we were waiting for her to come out. It got to be an awfully long wait, and Leigh went to see what had happened.”
    Cardozo glanced toward Leigh Baker. “Then it was you who found Mrs. Aldrich after the attack.”
    Leigh Baker nodded.
    It occurred to Cardozo that he was questioning one woman who had been a world-famous movie star, who perhaps still was, and another who as a magazine editor enjoyed national recognition and, within the bounds of New York, fame. Yet these were no enameled faces of celebrity. Fear had broken through.
    “Was Mrs. Aldrich dead or alive?” Cardozo said.
    “Oona was still alive,” Leigh Baker said. “Barely.” The sofa had two seats, but she had positioned herself at the end farthest from Cardozo, sitting forward, taking up barely half a cushion. Her wavy chestnut hair had been cut long, and a lock had fallen across her face. She pushed it aside. Her deep green eyes gazed at him. “I saw a pulse in her neck.”
    Cardozo, writing in his notebook, made a note of the pulse in the neck. “I’d like you both to think back carefully. At any time before or during the period that Mrs. Aldrich was changing her dress, did either of you see anyone else go into those changing