Gold Medal Murder Read online

  A sick feeling welled up in my stomach, as though I’d just been punched. I started to jog along the road. I just hoped this neighborhood had taxis…

  CHAPTER 8

  MAKING THE CUT

  NANCY

  “Well, that was quite the surprise!”

  Bess still couldn’t get over running into Joe and Frank here in LA. It was all she could talk about since we’d dropped them off.

  “I mean, it’s like you can’t leave River Heights without running into them. They are, like, everywhere. Not that I’m complaining. They’re both so cute! And so funny. And—”

  “And so on a case, remember? Just like we are.”

  “Yeah. The case of the supercute brothers!”

  I had to laugh at that. She was right, the Hardys were a great pair. And it was exciting to be working on a case with them again. I tried not to think about how the last time we all hung out, we also all almost died. In fact, pretty much every time I saw Frank and Joe, I ended up dangling from something or with a gun pointed at my head. They sure knew how to party.

  After I’d found Joe by the sound equipment, I’d told Lexi that we were going to go “catch up with some old friends.” I didn’t want to mention ATAC to her. They tried to keep that a secret. Besides, she’d been too busy calming down Scott to pay much attention to me. I told her we’d meet up with her in a few hours. I figured we still had some time to talk to some of the athletes before we went looking for her.

  By the time we got back to the Olympic Arena, almost all of the journalists were gone. The main competition area was closed, and the athletes were all training in the various sub-complexes. We pinned on the passes that Lexi had given us—little Olympic-torch-shaped badges. They worked like magic. There was nowhere, it seemed, where we weren’t allowed to go.

  We passed a group of American athletes, easily picked out by their red, white, and blue tracksuits, and Bess tried to make conversation.

  “Hi there!” she said, her smile beaming.

  There were a few nods, but most of the athletes just kept talking to one another.

  “My wind sprints are totally lagging today. My coach is going to kill me.”

  “I hear you. That guy from Ghana was right behind me on the one hundred meter. I’ve got to cut one-tenth off my time before the games start.”

  I noticed one woman standing slightly off by herself, and tried to talk to her.

  “So, what do you play?”

  “Play?” She looked at me as though I’d asked her to massage my feet.

  “Yeah, like, what sport do you play?”

  “This is the Olympics. We’re the top athletes in the world. We don’t ‘play’ at anything. We compete. I run relays.”

  “Oh, well. That’s nice,” I mumbled. The woman walked away from me with a snort. I didn’t even get her name. I spotted Bess standing by herself a few feet away and hurried over to join her, my cheeks burning.

  “This might be harder than I thought,” Bess said.

  “Yeah. I think I just insulted someone.”

  “That’s better than I’ve done—no one will even talk to me!”

  “Even if they did, how do you work ‘are you being threatened?’ into a casual conversation?”

  “We need some sort of gimmick.”

  We stood there thinking for a few minutes. I stared out across the auditorium. A few hundred feet away, a journalist was interviewing the same woman I had just spoken to. She was talking and laughing. How did they do it?

  Then it came to me.

  “We’ll tell them we’re journalists! And we’re doing a report on jealousy among star athletes. That way, we’ve got a reason to talk to them.”

  “Great idea!” Bess pulled a small notebook out of her pocket. “This way, I can even take notes without looking suspicious.”

  With our new plan, we began to work the room. A few of the athletes still wouldn’t talk to us, but many of them seemed eager to talk to the press. It made sense. The more publicity they got, the more likely they were to get sponsorship deals, and that’s where the real money was. They might have competed for the love of the sport, but they had to make money somehow.

  Very quickly, though, we ran into a new problem: Nearly everyone had a story of being threatened or getting hate mail. Like Lexi had said, it was part of the life of any public figure. Most of them thought it was pretty funny. A few seemed upset that people would spend that much time thinking terrible things about people they didn’t even know. But no one seemed particularly upset or scared or freaked out when we asked.

  We worked our way slowly around the training facility. Suddenly, Bess grabbed my arm and squealed.

  “Look! It’s the Ryan twins.” She pointed to two dark-haired, powerfully built guys off to our right. Both were classically handsome, with piercing eyes and warm, smiling faces. “I’m totally going to interview them.”

  I watched as she ran over to them. Even at a distance, I could see them smiling at her. It looked like her dream was finally coming true.

  With Bess off interviewing the Ryan twins, I looked around for another athlete to talk to. Near me, one of the female swimmers was toweling off.

  “Hi there! I’m Nancy.” I held out my hand.

  “Isabelle Helene,” she said. She grabbed my hand in hers. She had a powerful handshake. She was a good four inches taller than I was. She was one of the older athletes in the room, probably in her early thirties. She had a regal look to her, one part beautiful, one part proud. As she pulled off her swim cap, her long, chestnut brown hair tumbled down her shoulders.

  “I’m doing an article for Sporting Monthly,” I began saying. I had no idea if there really was a Sporting Monthly magazine, but there were so many journalists crawling around I figured no one else would know either. “We’re looking into jealousy in the world of high-powered athletes.”

  Isabelle’s mouth twisted into a tight grimace.

  “What are you insinuating? You journalists and your rumormongering. I have nothing to say.”

  She turned away from me sharply and strode off. She wasn’t the first athlete to give us the cold shoulder, but she was definitely one of the rudest. I hoped she slipped in her own puddles!

  Bess bounced back over a few minutes later, eager to tell me everything the Ryan twins had said to her, including their favorite colors, foods, and places to travel.

  “Any threats or anything?”

  “A few obsessive fans—not me—but nothing like what Lexi and Scott have been experiencing. You get anything from that woman?”

  “Just a whole lot of attitude. But it seems pretty clear that whatever is going on, they’re targeting Lexi and Scott specifically.”

  “Yeah. Speaking of which, it looks like Lexi is about to have a practice match. Want to go watch?”

  Bess pointed across the gym, where Lexi was getting into her fencing suit. I hesitated for a moment. It didn’t seem like anyone else was being threatened, but we hadn’t talked to all of the athletes yet, so we couldn’t know for sure. But I was curious to see Lexi fence with another person at her skill level, someone who could give her a real run for her money.

  “Sure, let’s check it out.”

  Lexi fenced with the saber, which is one of the three blades used in modern fencing—the others being the foil and the epee. Saber is the one that’s most like the sword fighting you see in movies. You can strike with the edge of the blade, as well as the point. It’s what Lexi was teaching me, since it was the most likely to come in handy if I ever got in a sword fight, which given my life, isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.

  “Fencing, as a sport, has quite the prestigious history,” I whispered to Bess as Lexi and her opponent suited up. “The first recorded use of the term ‘fence’ is in William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. It is one of only four sports to be in every modern Olympics.”

  The small audience that had gathered around the fencing mats grew quiet as the two women took their places. The starting pose of
fencing looked almost like ballet: one leg back, foot pointing to the side, the front arm raised, weapon ready.

  “En garde!” yelled one of the coaches.

  For a moment, no one moved. No one even seemed to breathe. Then it began. The two fencers were lunging at each other, twisting, slashing, stabbing. The blades flickered so fast they were nearly invisible. The sharp sound of metal-on-metal echoed throughout the arena. They danced back and forth across the mats rapidly. At first, Lexi was being forced back toward the edge of the mats, which was dangerous, because stepping off the mats could make you lose. But she quickly recovered, and drove her opponent backward.

  Step by step, Lexi seemed to be winning. Her opponent was definitely on the defensive. In a few seconds, it seemed Lexi would make the first point of the game, by striking her opponent with either the point or the edge of the blade—saber fencing allowed you to do either.

  But suddenly her opponent made a risky move, a full-out lunge, throwing herself directly at Lexi. If she missed, or if Lexi parried her blade, she would be left entirely open and be unable to defend herself. But she didn’t miss. The point of her saber got Lexi in the leg.

  And Lexi screamed. Not a sound of surprise or frustration, but one of pain. As I watched dumbfounded, blood blossomed on her all-white fencing costume. Something had gone horribly wrong.

  “Lexi!” I yelled. Bess and I stood up and ran toward her side. Her opponent was standing there in total shock, not moving, her blade still sticking in Lexi’s leg. In fact, no one seemed to be moving. Everyone was so surprised.

  Everyone except Lexi’s dad, who beat us to her side. She was on the ground now, clutching her leg, moaning in pain. But instead of helping her, Lexi’s dad turned on the teammate who had been her opponent.

  “What did you do? How could you be so stupid!” He was screaming at her, as though she had done this on purpose. Even with what little fencing experience I had, I knew that with a proper fencing sword, there was no way you could break the skin, no matter how hard you lunged. Someone had tampered with the equipment.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Oh, God. Is she okay?” The girl had taken off her mask, and was apologizing in between sobs.

  I knelt down by Lexi’s side.

  “Lexi, listen to me. I have some first aid training. Is it okay if I look at the wound?”

  Lexi nodded, her face pale. She’d bitten down on her lower lip to keep herself from moaning.

  “Bess, give me my bag, and go find a doctor.” They had to have one on call for emergencies. In fact, why weren’t they here already? This was feeling more and more suspicious by the second.

  Bess handed me my bag and took off at a run. I opened the bag and pulled out my handy little medic kit. I pulled on a pair of latex gloves, to keep from getting blood on my skin or any germs from my hands in the wound.

  “The puncture is small,” I said half to Lexi and half to myself. “But it’s deep. I think it’s going to need stitches. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  I fished a tiny pair of shears out of my medic kit.

  “I don’t want to remove the sword, because you’ll bleed more. But I’m going to cut it, so we can move you without it pulling or getting caught on things. This might hurt a little. Take my hand, and squeeze as hard as you need to. Ready?”

  I cut the sword about an inch away from where it entered Lexi’s leg. Then I had someone hand me a bottle of water and a cup. I poured clean water over the wound to wash it and placed gauze around the tiny remains of the sword to stabilize it. Finally, I taped the cup over it, so that nothing would touch it while we moved Lexi.

  Suddenly, Bess was at my side.

  “The doctor is busy with some sort of emergency at the pool. He’ll be here as soon as he can.”

  I felt my jaw set in anger. That wasn’t good enough.

  “Well, then we’re just going to have to take her to the hospital ourselves,” I said, through gritted teeth. “And the police.”

  “No!”

  This was the first word Lexi had spoken since she’d been stabbed.

  “Are you all right?” I looked down to see if I had missed anything, if something was still hurting her.

  “We can’t go to the police. My dad…” Her eyes cut over to where her father stood, still screaming at her teammate. “If he found out about the threats, he’d… I don’t even know what he would do. Please, just say it was an accident. You can figure this out, Nancy, I know you can.”

  I hesitated. She had every right to keep this a secret, but I worried that it might put her in even greater danger. Maybe I couldn’t tell her father, or the police—but there were two people who needed to know. With one arm under her shoulder to help Lexi stand, I pulled out my cell phone and texted Joe and Frank.

  CHAPTER 9

  TWO KILLERS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE?

  FRANK

  “We’re nearly there!” George yelled to me as we raced through the streets of downtown LA. She had her smart phone out and was reading the directions to the Good Samaritan Hospital from the screen. “Take a left at the next corner.” It wasn’t that far away, and given LA’s traffic, we figured we’d make better time on foot.

  We arrived, out of breath, outside of the wide white expanse of the hospital, just as a taxi pulled in.

  “Wait for me!” Joe yelled. He threw some money at the cabbie, and together we all ran into the lobby. We nearly flew up the steps to Lexi’s room.

  Lexi lay on the bed, her eyes half-closed. Between the exhaustion and the painkillers they had her on, she wasn’t fully conscious. There was a bandage wrapped around her left leg, but she didn’t look too bad. Nancy and Bess were sitting in two chairs on either side of the room, half comforting Lexi, half guarding her. A curtain ran down the middle of the room, cutting it in two.

  “Poor Lexi!” George murmured.

  “What’s going on?” Lexi mumbled, her eyes still closed.

  “Gang’s all here,” said Nancy. “It’s a party.” She stood up and stepped away from the bed. In a hushed voice, she explained what had happened.

  “How is she?” I asked when Nancy was done.

  “She’ll be all right. The wound wasn’t too deep. The doctors said she needs to take tomorrow off, but she can go back to training after that. But take a look at this.”

  Nancy pulled a plastic sandwich bag out of her pocket. Inside was a small piece of metal.

  “The doctors let me keep it. It’s the tip of the saber Lexi’s opponent was wielding.”

  She passed it around to us.

  “What about it?” I asked. Clearly, it was the tip of the sword that had injured Lexi, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to see in it.

  “Whoever did this was smart. I looked at the rest of the sword while I was giving Lexi first aid. They hadn’t tampered with most of it—if they’d sharpened the edge or anything, an experienced fencer would have noticed the weight difference. All they did was sharpen the point the tiniest bit. Not enough so that you’d feel the difference if you were just holding it—”

  “But enough to make it dangerous,” Joe finished.

  “Not just dangerous,” Nancy replied. “Lethal. If that strike had been in her chest, the doctors said it could have punctured a lung.”

  A commotion had begun in the hall while Nancy was talking. It got louder and louder, until soon, a recognizable voice was screaming outside of the door.

  “I don’t care who you are! She’s my daughter, and I am going to see her!”

  David Adams shoved the door so hard it slammed into the wall. An gray-haired nurse with a stern face trailed after him.

  “Sir, your daughter needs rest! And you are being belligerent.”

  “You don’t know what my daughter needs! You incompetents! If she can’t compete tomorrow, I will sue you!”

  “Dad?”

  Lexi’s voice drifted up weakly from the bed. Mr. Adams shot the nurse one last dirty look, and then rushed to her side.

  “Hey sweeti
e, don’t worry. Daddy’s here. It’s going to be okay. We’ll have you back in training in no time.”

  “My leg hurts.”

  “You were injured by that stupid teammate of yours. I handled her. But you’ve got to be more careful, sweetheart. The Olympics are only days away. You need to be in top form. This is what you’ve been training up to for years.”

  “It was an accident, Dad. It wasn’t her fault.”

  “Well, it was someone’s fault! And I plan on finding out whose. They’ll be hearing from our lawyers.”

  “Lexi!”

  Everyone turned as Scott rushed through the door. His manager, Lee, followed closed behind. Scott was out of breath, and from the redness around his eyes, it looked as though he’d been crying. I slipped quickly behind the curtain that separated Lexi’s half of the room from the other half. Luckily, she didn’t have a roommate. I couldn’t be spotted here—this deep cover thing was difficult!

  “Scott!” A smile spread on Lexi’s face, and she held her hand out toward him.

  “Are you all right? No one could tell me what happened. There was an accident in the pool—Isabelle slipped and hit her head, and the doctor and I were trying to help her—and then next thing I knew people were telling me you’d been rushed to the hospital.”

  He rushed toward her bedside, but Mr. Adams got between them.

  “You!” His voice had returned to its usual four million decibels. He put his hand on Scott’s shoulder and shoved him backward. “I’m sure this is your fault. If Lexi wasn’t so busy mooning over you, that girl would never have gotten through her guard, and she wouldn’t be here, in the hospital, bleeding!”

  From behind the curtain, I watched as Nancy and Joe ran over and grabbed Mr. Adams from either side. He looked like he was about to punch Scott in the face!

  “Dad, calm down! This isn’t Scott’s fault!”

  “Yes it is! He’s been nothing but trouble since you two met! It’s his fault you finished third in the women’s World Championships—keeping you up all night on the telephone, distracting you from your training.”

  As David ranted and raved, the door to the hospital room opened. I tried to signal to Joe, but I couldn’t get his attention. A camera peeped in through the gap in the door. The press! This was the last thing Scott needed. But I couldn’t do anything from where I was.