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.