Free Diva Las Vegas by Eileen Davidson Page B

the doctor was, or anything about the medication I didn’t already know—or you didn’t get from the pharmacist. It was a waste.”
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “Finish your cake.”
     
    After we left the restaurant, we walked arm in arm to my car.
    “Hey, how’s it going with your new boss?” I asked.
    Jakes used to have a female captain he said had a thing for him. When he turned her down, she started giving him hell. She had also never liked me. But she had been replaced a month ago by a man named Campbell.
    “Campbell’s okay,” he said. “I worked with him before, a long time ago when we were both detectives.”
    “And now he’s a captain.”
    “I know,” he said. “And I’m still a detective. I like being a detective.”
    “So you’ve told me.”
    One of the many things I’d learned about Jakes was that he didn’t like bosses and didn’t want to be a boss. I understood that this was a choice on his part, not a lack of ambition.
    “So, what will you do now?” I asked.
    “Talk to the ME; try to get that Vegas doctor on the phone. What are you going to do with the rest of your day?” he asked.
    “Some shopping, pick up Sarah from school, make dinner . . . you know, mom and housewife stuff.”
    “You’re no housewife.”
    “I was.”
    “Miss it?”
    “No,” I said, “Because I was married to that bastard—” I stopped short.
    “You want to talk about Randy?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Want me to go find him and throw him a beating?”
    “Yes,” I said. Then, “No.”
    I leaned into him.
    “I just can’t believe he would sue for custody and be taken seriously by any court.”
    “As far as I can tell, he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”
    I shook my head. “This is crazy.”
    “Why don’t you wait and see whether he really does it?” Jakes said. “Then we can decide what to do.”
    “We?” I asked.
    “Yes,” he said, “we.”

Chapter 20
    I did some shopping for incidentals—lipstick, eye shadow, mascara; the kind of shopping a woman can do on automatic pilot—all the while thinking of Shana and plastic surgery. I was wishing she had some family or friends I could talk to, but that didn’t seem to be the case. And if she’d had someone to confide in, why would she have come to me?
    I had studied the dates on the prescription bottles several times. We knew the dates of the three were the same, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
    While I sat parked in front of Sarah’s school, waiting for her to be dismissed, I took out the bottles and checked them again. They were all from last year. I took out my cell phone and called Jakes.
    “Miss me already?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said, “but I also have a question.”
    “What is it?”
    “Did you ask the pharmacist when Shana first filled her prescriptions?”
    “Yeah, I did. Hold on.” I knew he was taking out his notebook. I kept my eyes on the front door of the school. I recognized some of the children coming out, so I knew Sarah was on her way. I opened the car door, preparing to get out.
    “Here,” he said, and read me the dates. They were the same as the dates on the bottles in my hands.
    “These bottles have that same date, and they’re not empty,” I said. “Looks like she never renewed the prescriptions.”
    “She never used them up?” he said. “Maybe she didn’t need them.”
    “She didn’t strike me as someone who had a high pain threshold,” I said.
    “Maybe she was a quick healer.”
    “What did the ME have to say?” I asked.
    I could hear paper, like he was opening the ME’s report.
    “He found scars on her breasts,” he said. “You know, consistent with incisions for breast implants.”
    “Not a surprise.”
    “And he found saline implants, size thirty-eight double-D.”
    “Ouch.”
    “Okay, but here’s a surprise,” he said. “He found something odd about the skin around her eyes.”
    “What do you mean, odd ?”
    “He said the flesh around her eyes