Free Wicked Lies by Lisa Jackson, Nancy Bush Page B

tell me you could speak for Ocean Park?” she demanded, glaring at Adderley.
    “How was I to know you would make this a circus sideshow?” he spit back. “You call this reporting? It’s inflammatory and pointless!”
    “Why do I get the feeling you wanted to see your pretty mug on camera until the tough questions started, Doctor? ”
    Adderley marched away, and Harrison strolled outside and past Pauline’s decamping group. She saw him again and frowned. This time, he let her get a good look.
    “You’re the scourge of the Portland Ledger, ” she said with a snap of her fingers. “Frost.”
    “Kirby,” he responded.
    “What are you doing here? Sniffing for another story? You could just make one up again.”
    “You’re doing fine on your own in that regard,” he said with a half smile.
    “Yeah. Well.” She shrugged. “The real story was at Halo Valley. We’re just following up, and that asshole acted like he was the boss. What I’d really like is someone with a soul who might look good on camera, and who could offer up some real information, or at the very least, an opinion.”
    Pauline’s cameraman suddenly stepped forward and leaned toward her ear. “Wanna grab her?” he suggested.
    Harrison turned, and they both noticed the slim, dark-haired woman in the uniform who had just locked her vehicle and was heading toward them through the pools of radiance from the sodium-vapor lights, her steps slowing as she saw the TV crew. She seemed undecided.
    “She’s gonna boge out and go toward the ER,” the cameraman said.
    “Not if I can help it!” Pauline was already on the hunt again, her mic held in front of her like an AK-47. “Turn your goddamn camera back on, Darrell!”

CHAPTER 6
    L aura’s thoughts were filled with chaotic visions of her future. What would she do with a baby? What did that mean for her relationship with Byron?
    How can I save my baby? How can I save her from Justice?
    Okay, maybe the baby wasn’t a girl, but in Laura’s family lineage and history, female births outdistanced male births by a ratio of eight to two. And, for some inexplicable reason—or maybe just part of her family’s odd and twisted past—the male children who survived birth tended to die before they reached adulthood.
    So, in Laura’s mind this child, the one she’d learned of only a few hours earlier, was a girl.
    She parked her green Outback, locked the doors, and stepped into the night air, the wind grabbing at her with chilly fingers, just as an ambulance screamed into the drive that led to the ER. She turned from the sound and focused in on the news crew, their collective heads following the ambulance. She had seen them as she drove up but hadn’t really thought that they might approach her. But as they turned from the ambulance’s trajectory, they looked her way.
    Damn.
    She thought of Justice . . . and the news cameras . . . and her own face on television screens across the region . . . and the chill that ran through her was bone deep. No. Way.
    “Excuse me!” Pauline Kirby herself was walking so fast Laura’s way, it was almost a run.
    It was all Laura could do to stifle her own urge to race away. She held her ground and watched in trepidation as Pauline pushed her microphone in front of her nose and the cameraman’s lights blinded her. Turning her face away, she said, “I can’t answer your questions.”
    “I’m just looking for information on the unfortunate victims of Justice Turnbull’s horrifying rage, your security guard, Conrad Weiser, and Dr. Maurice Zellman.”
    Out of the corner of her eye, Laura saw a figure, shadowed by the cameras, move forward toward her. “Information on any patient at Ocean Park Hospital is confidential.” She shifted away. With any luck, they would have no reason to put her on television.
    “But they were brought here by ambulance, and they’ve been through surgery.”
    “I’m sorry. I can’t talk about any of our patients. I have to go.” She was