What She Saw

by Sheila Lowe

  Squinting against the sudden glare, she scrambled to right herself. Without his Ray-Bans concealing them, the big man’s eyes had the cold detachment of a shark sizing up its prey. It took an extra second to recognize the other guy as Nate Farley. His name came to her before she connected it to the security guard who had caught her poking around at night outside BioNeutronics. Tonight, his buzz cut was hidden by a black watch cap similar to the one she had worn that night. He had swapped his guard uniform for a black long sleeve tee shirt and jungle stripe fatigue pants.

  The big man loomed over Jessica. His narrowed eyes held a threat that scared the hell out of her. “You gonna keep your mouth shut, or am I gonna have to gag you?”

  She shook her head. The adrenaline rush had subsided and her teeth were chattering. Wrapping her arms tight around her knees she tried to stop them from trembling. “You—you followed me from the lab,” she managed in a shaky voice.

  The man squatted in front of her, a false smile pasted on a face as grim as death. “Well, I had to know where you were staying so we could come and pay you this little visit. Imagine my surprise when you led me here.”

  “Wh-what do you want?”

  The friendly act fell away. “I want the files you stole.”

  The flash drive. Still on the kitchen counter in the takeout bag, hidden under the noodles. After the news Detective Jovanic and Claudia Rose had dropped on her, all thoughts of the smuggled files had vanished. Project 42 had lost its significance in the face of the fact that Jessica had just learned that she was the grieving mother of a little boy.

  Project 42 was significant to someone, though. Significant enough to send these thugs to break into her home and terrorize her in the middle of the night.

  Deny, deny, deny.

  Well, why not? She’d been denying her entire life for a while now. She tried for indignation. “What are you talking about? I haven’t stolen anything.”

  She could see the man evaluating her, taking her measure. He said, “When you downloaded privileged files an alarm was sent to Security. The network’s configured to do that, so don’t bother denying it.”

  “I didn’t download anything.” It was easy to sound convincing when she couldn’t remember having done it.

  The mountain straightened to his full height. His size, and the air of authority he wore, would put him in charge even if he never opened his mouth. He leveled a mean stare at her and his voice had the low rumble of thunder. “I’m warning you not to fuck with me, bitch.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Who are you?”

  The curt question took her aback. “You know who I am. Who sent you to break into my apartment?”

  The man raised a fist the size of a ham hock. Jessica recoiled into the crook of the armchair, waiting for the blow to strike. “I’m asking the questions here,” he snapped. “Now, you will shut your smart mouth and answer me.” For an endless moment he looked down at her, the flat eyes unreadable. Then, “I asked you who you are.”

  “I’m Jenna Marcott.”

  With the speed of a much less bulky man he reached down and smacked the side of her head with an open palm. “You are not Jenna Marcott.”

  Jessica’s hand flew to her ear, which was hot and stinging from the slap. Through a glaze of tears she saw Farley’s eyes bouncing around the room, assessing. Saw it the moment he spotted the zebra print purse on the dining table.

  In a few steps he had crossed the room. He emptied the contents onto the table and began pawing through her things. He grabbing her wallet. “She’s got two sets of ID, Mr. Bagshot,” he said, holding it aloft like a prize. “One in the Marcott name and an AKA—Jessica Mack, address in Escondido.”

  With a satisfied nod, the mountain, Bagshot, compressed his lips into a thin line. “Jessica Mack, is it? Okay, who sent you to BioNeutronics?”

  Jessica heard him, but his words meant nothing. He might as well have been speaking a foreign language. The familiar whistling in her head grew louder, drowned him out. A mesh of black spots began to form before her eyes and she began to fade.

  She was viewing a scene play out like a movie she’d seen before.

  Seated at her computer in the bedroom, yet watching from afar. Her blonde hair, longer than it was now, pulled into a ragged ponytail. Bagshot at the bedroom door, arms crossed. Another man, not Farley, behind her, bending to crook his arm around her throat. Her head jerked back, connecting with his nose. Red spray clouded the monitor, dripped on the keyboard tray.

  And she was back in the armchair, panting and queasy. Bagshot crouched in front of her as if genuflecting. “Hey, Jessica.” His breath reeked of too much coffee and too many cigarettes. “Hey! Where’d you go?”

  She turned her face away, but Bagshot grasped the arms of her chair and leaned in closer until his hawkish nose was inches from hers.

  “Answer me now, Jessica, who hired you?”

  Her stomach roiling, she closed her eyes. “Simon Lawrie hired me.”

  He smacked her again, harder this time. Her head snapped back and she cried out in pain.

  “Where are the files you took?” He gave her no time to reply before his knuckle connected with her cheekbone. When there was no crunch of breaking bones, Jessica understood that he had pulled his punch, that he was giving her just a taste of what was to come. She touched her hand to her bruised cheek. “What kind of asshole hits a chick half his size?”

  “The kind who’ll snap you in two if you don’t start cooperating.”

  “But I don’t know about any files. Beating me up isn’t going to change it.”

  Bagshot let out a sigh of exaggerated patience and nodded at Farley. “I guess we’re gonna have to do this the hard way.”

  Farley’s grin had nothing to do with humor. He took his time unsnapping a leather sheath on his belt, made a show of drawing out a wicked-looking knife.

  Light glinted off steel sharp enough to slit her throat in one quick swipe, clear through to the spinal cord. Keeping his eyes glued to Jessica’s face, watching her terror, he swiped the blade across her field of vision, coming close enough to her nose that she felt the swoosh of air.

  Her mind was racing. If she told them where the thumb drive was, would they let her go?

  She thought not. The crazy thing was, even if Bagshot was telling the truth and she was an industrial spy, she had no clue who she might be working for.

  Farley raised the knife, poised to strike.

  A few hours ago Jessica had hoped to die. Now, faced with the threat of the blade, she found that she wanted to live. She drew breath to blurt the truth, but before she could speak, Farley made an abrupt turn away from her and took two steps to the loveseat.

  He brought his arm down fast. The leather cushion ruptured with a soft pop as he ripped the knife from edge to edge. Farley stuck his hand in, ripping batting until the cushion sagged and the floor was covered in a drift of cotton clumps.

  “Please, stop,” Jessica whispered hoarsely. “You won’t find anything in there.”

  Bagshot grabbed her chin and wrenched her face up to look at him. “Where, then?”

  “Nowhere! You’ve made a mistake.”

  His lip curled in derision. “I expected more professionalism from someone like you. Or is this your first job?”

  “I’m not a spy!”

  “Okay, then, explain to me what you’ve been doing masquerading as Jenna Marcott and what you’re doing in her apartment?”

  “What—what are you talking about?”

  “You don’t seem to understand, Jessica. This isn’t something that’s going to be settled with lawyers and litigation. It’s not one of those situations where your principal gets sued and you walk away. The stakes in this game are way too high for that penny-ante crap.”

  “Please—I don’t know what you mean.”

  The look Bagshot flashed her held utter contempt, as if she had disappointed him. “You might look a lot like Jenna Marcott, but you’d better get this, Jessica
Mack: your mission is a failure. Your mission is scrubbed.” He turned to Farley. “Check under the tables. See if she’s got anything taped there.”

  “Yessir.”

  Farley tipped over the tables on either end of the loveseat and ran his meaty fingers inside the facings. Finding nothing, he knocked the small dining table onto its side with a clatter, scattering the contents of Jessica’s purse across the floor.

  “Goddamnit,” Bagshot snarled. “Are you fucking trying to wake up her neighbors?” He gave Farley the stink eye and ordered him to open the moving boxes still stacked in the corner. The boxes Jessica had instinctively avoided.

  Farley pulled down the top carton and sliced through the neatly striped packing tape with his knife. When he tipped it onto its side, college textbooks, novels, cookbooks tumbled out. Bagshot and Jessica looked on in silence as he ripped the covers off and checked the spine of each book.

  The second box held childhood keepsakes nested in newspaper cocoons. Farley systematically tore open each one. The first casualty was a crooked ceramic pot that appeared to be a first or second grade effort. It thudded against the tile, chips of blue glaze skittering across the floor.

  His boot heel ground a delicate china Belle figurine to little more than dust. He ripped off the arms of a well-loved old teddy bear; used his knife to slash a miniature satin and lace pillow sewn with the big stitches of a small hand. On and on, he went, damaging and destroying every item in the box, callously, and with obvious enjoyment.

  The remnants of a forgotten childhood—there was nothing she could do to save them. Left with an unutterable sadness, Jessica remembered none of these objects, but she accepted what they must have meant to her to have held on to them through the years.

  When Farley unearthed a box containing photo albums Jessica caught her breath. She wanted to beg him to spare them. Photographs would jog her memory if anything could. But she stayed silent, knowing her pleas would egg him on.

  Before he had a chance to wreak havoc on the photographs, Bagshot barked at him, “Let it go, we’ve wasted enough time here.” He clamped Jessica’s shoulder in a crushing grip. “Get your shoes on, Jessica Mack. You’re coming with us.”

  t w e n t y - t h r e e

  The two men hustled Jessica out of the apartment and around to the carport, where Bagshot’s Mercedes SUV was parked behind the Nissan.

  He had warned her before they left the apartment that he would make her regret it if she made the slightest noise. Her face throbbed where he’d struck her and she was in no hurry to test him. She was sure her neighbor, Zach, would come to her aid if she screamed for help, but fear of what they would do to him kept her silent.

  Farley opened the back door to the SUV and shoved her inside, then climbed in after her. “Don’t get any ideas,” he warned. “Kid locks.” His heavy arm pinned her against the seat as he reached across and rattled the door handle to prove his point. Up front, Bagshot’s muscular body filled the driver’s side. Catching the glare Jessica cast at him in the rear-view mirror, he reached over to the glove box and took out a thick plastic strap that was looped in the middle. “Hook her up.”

  “No! You don’t have to do that,” Jessica begged.

  Ignoring her plea, Bagshot tossed the strap over the seat to Farley. The security guard twisted her around with practiced skill and had her right wrist cuffed before she could finish her sentence. A half-second later both hands were locked behind her back.

  She cried out at the plastic digging into her flesh. “Where are you taking me, you sonofabitch?”

  “I think she needs a little something more,” Bagshot said.

  Farley peeled off his watch cap and reached over to pull it onto Jessica’s head.

  “No!” She tried to squirm away before the cap could touch her. Bagshot half-turned and his fist came over the seat. His knuckle caught the bridge of her nose.

  Pain hit between her eyes like a lightning strike. She was still trying to catch her breath when Farley finished pulling the knit cap over her head and covered her face with it. Blood trickled from her nose and slid down her upper lip, leaving a salty taste in her mouth. With her hands pinned behind her back there was nothing she could do about it.

  “You want that cap stuffed in your smart mouth?” Bagshot snarled. “Do you, bitch?” And when she was silent, “You’d better answer when I ask you a question.”

  “No.”

  “Then keep your fucking mouth shut and you might get out of this with all your teeth. Farley, get her out of sight.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  The security guard pushed her down until she was sprawled, half-kneeling on the floor, her face pressed into his groin. The watch cap was hot and itchy and smelled rancid. It made her want to retch.

  Her shoulders were already aching from the unnatural position and her nose was swollen. She wondered whether it was broken. Not that it would matter if they were going to kill her, and she was pretty sure they were.

  What did I stumble into?

  What the hell is Project 42?

  They came to a halt maybe fifteen minutes later and Farley removed the hand that had kept her face in his bulging crotch.

  Jessica wrenched herself as far away from him as the space in the backseat allowed. She heard the driver door open. The vehicle lifted as Bagshot exited.

  “C’mon, Jessica.” Farley’s voice.

  Her scalp was tingling and she could no longer feel her hands. Farley dragged her across the seat and out of the SUV into the chill night air. Blinded by the watch cap, she lurched, nearly falling. Heavy hands encircled her upper arm and caught her, set her on the crunch of gravel.

  She tried to see below the hem of the watch cap, but the wool had molded itself to her face and covered her mouth. She could not even see her own feet.

  In her head, she counted off thirty paces before they stopped walking and there was the click of a lock and the familiar swoosh of power doors. BioNeutronics?

  Another twenty feet, another stop. She heard the whir of an elevator and one of the men prodded her. The floor shook slightly as they climbed aboard. Definitely BioNeutronics. They began descend, then bumped to a soft landing and she heard the door slide open. Shoved forward, she had counted fifteen paces when she was jerked to a halt.

  A rougher shove sent her down on her knees. She tried to roll to one side but with her hands behind her back, the edge of her chin met the cement floor. Pain slammed through her body. Then her wrists were yanked up behind her and the plastic cuffs bit deeper into the flesh.

  She hung there suspended, sure that her arms would pop out of their sockets. One of the men cut the cuffs and the pressure on her wrists relaxed. She hit the floor again, the wind knocked out of her.

  A door slammed shut. Then, silence.

  A century or two passed while she lay curled in a ball on the unforgiving floor, her body begging for mercy. Gasping for air, moaning from the pain in her right knee. Shoulders aching. Hands numb from the restricted circulation. Chin throbbing. Nose bleeding again.

  Her swollen hands were as unwieldy as boxing gloves. She rubbed the backs against each other, then the palms. It took a while for the blood to begin recirculating. When the numbness began to wear off, the pins and needles started up, burning the nerve endings until she felt like screaming.

  Better to have burning nerve endings than the circulation cut off.

  Leave me the fuck alone!

  t w e n t y - f o u r

  Zebediah Gold opened the door to his guesthouse and ushered Claudia Rose inside. After they had shared a long hug, he pressed a kiss to her cheek and offered coffee.

  Following him to the kitchenette, she took a manila folder from her briefcase and perched on one of the two stools at the breakfast bar. “I’m glad you were free this morning.”

  Zebediah shot a grin at her as he went about the business of getting out coffee paraphernalia and pouring two steaming mugs. “I must admit I was amazed when you phoned at eight a.m. I d
idn’t think you knew time existed before ten.”

  Rolling her eyes, Claudia accepted the carton of soy milk he offered. “Let’s see you work half the night and get up perky at the crack of dawn.”

  “No need to be cranky, darling. I know what a dedicated worker you are.”

  “Zeb, I’m worried about Jenna. I mean Jessica. She looked so stricken when Joel read her the accident report. Well, of course she did. She didn’t even know she had a child, and we were telling her that she’d lost him.” She poured milk into her coffee. “We didn’t want to leave her like that, but she wouldn’t let us stay. I was hoping she’d call me last night, but she didn’t. Have you heard from her?”

  “No, and after you called me I phoned her. She didn’t pick up.” Gold took the stool next to Claudia and spooned several heaps of sugar into his coffee.

  “She’s been in such profound denial about the child’s death. After what she’s gone through this past week, I hope the news didn’t tip her over the edge.”

  Claudia stared at him, aghast. “You aren’t thinking she might have—harmed herself, are you?”

  “I think it’s more likely she might have blocked it all out again.”

  “You mean a whole new fugue state?”

  He nodded. “I don’t see her as suicidal, but...”

  “Should we call Ventura PD and ask them to do a welfare check?”

  “That would scare her even more. She has a thing about uniformed policemen. I’m thinking about driving up there later and see if she’ll talk to me. I’ve cleared my calendar for the afternoon.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “I don’t think so, darling. Right now, she would associate you with the bad news.”

  “All right, then let me show you what I found.”

  Zebediah took a sip of coffee and nodded. “I take it the handwriting samples were delivered from the client you worked for at the convention?”