Free His Best Friend's Baby by Janice Kay Johnson - His Best Friend's Baby

Arena. In fact, he had played to a sold-out crowd at the Key Arena. Then he partied with his band members and some groupies before heading for his room at the waterfront Edgewater Hotel with a cute blonde tucked against his side.
    Come two o’clock the next afternoon, the band members gathered in the lobby and the limo showed up to take them to the airport for their flight to Portland, where their next concert was scheduled. Only the rock star didn’t appear, and he didn’t answer the knock on his door. The concierge let one of the band members into the room, where he found their headliner dead on the king-size bed, a bullet through his temple.
    What was meant to look like a suicide wasn’t. Wrong angle for the path of the bullet, and wrong temple for a lefty. Murderers made stupid mistakes, lucky for the cops.
    Turned out the rock star was married to another rock star with an ego bigger than his. She’d been heard to say, “If I ever catch him with another woman, he’s dead.”
    Turned out also that he had a restraining order on a stalker, who happened to be in Seattle. For entirely innocent reasons, of course.
    The cute blonde who’d gone to his room with him had completely vanished. No one at the party knew her; they all thought she’d come with someone else.
    The case had all the makings of a thriller. Within days, Quinn had a camera in his face every time he turned around. His photo was in People magazine the following week. Mindy Fenton was far from his mind.
    Week two, the cute blonde’s corpse floated in with the tide. At least, a young blond woman, whose body had been in the Sound the right length of time, bumped up against a moored sailboat and scared the rich forty-year-old couple who had taken it out for a sail and were just tying up.
    The stalker, also young and blond, admitted to stalking, but claimed that in the wee hours she’d seen a second woman knock and enter the hotel room. She insisted that she’d then returned to her own hotel and gone to bed. A night clerk confirmed he’d seen her cross the lobby and get in the elevator. Apparently even stalkers needed sleep.
    The woman was undeniably crazy as well as grief-stricken. “I would never have hurt him!” she kept crying. “I love him.” When she realized her verb was wrong, that the obsession of her life was now past tense, a sob escaped her. “He loved me, too! I know he did! He needed to get out of being married to her .” Loathing was easy to read. “The other woman was so he’d divorce her. And then we could be together.”
    The restraining order?
    She made him get it.
    Right.
    But Quinn believed she hadn’t hurt the love of her life. Her faith in their future was still too solid. Stalkers didn’t kill until they were disillusioned and had to face the reality that the loved one would never be theirs.
    Quinn flew to San Francisco, where the rock-star wife had supposedly been the night her husband had been murdered. Funny thing was, no one could confirm her whereabouts. In fact, a maid at her hotel swore no one had slept in the bed on the night in question.
    Interestingly, the stalker had apparently bought two airline tickets to Seattle—one from Southwest Airlines on the same day the band had flown in to Seattle, and another on Alaska Airlines the day of the concert. That one had been bought at the counter just before the flight, too late for the purchaser to have checked baggage. The ticket seller remembered her because she’d cut it so close and because she looked vaguely familiar.
    “I assumed I’d waited on her when she flew Alaska in the past.”
    When Quinn showed her a photo of the stalker, she shook her head decisively. “No. That wasn’t her.” Cute blonde dredged out of the water brought an equally certain, “No.” When he produced a paparazzi photo of the wife trying to slip out to the grocery store or the gym without makeup, her hair back in a ponytail, she said, “Yes! Yes, that’s her.” Then her eyes