Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  Her eyes swung toward him. “What?”

  “Forget flying anywhere today. I have a cabin a couple of hours out of D.C. A fishing cabin. We could go there. You could take a shower, change your clothes, get some sleep. Maybe we could even try to figure this thing out. Then, if you still want to get out of Dodge, I could take you to the airport first thing tomorrow.”

  She stared at him. The prospect of a shower and sleep and some time to think was tempting. The thought of not being left on her own until she’d had the shower and sleep and some time to think was nothing short of dazzling.

  Wait. Be careful.

  “You’re putting yourself in terrible danger for me,” she said slowly, trying to put all the puzzle pieces together before she made a decision. Her eyes never left his face. “Why?”

  He glanced her way, met her gaze.

  “I’m a nice guy?” he offered with a flicker of a smile.

  Her lips compressed. The twinkling blue eyes, the wry curve of his lips—she knew them. She knew them.

  What she didn’t remember was in what context, exactly.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” Her tone was wary.

  This time, when he met her gaze, he wasn’t smiling at all.

  “You don’t, I guess,” he said. “But you can.”

  Maybe she wasn’t entirely convinced. But she was persuaded. Her gut trusted him. And Dan was all she had.

  “So, airport or not?” His eyes were on the road again. Traffic was heavy, stop-and-go, with lots of people entering and exiting the highway. Up ahead, a sign announced the turnoff to National. “Your call.”

  Tomorrow, after she’d showered and slept and thought, she would be in a much better place, much stronger physically and, hopefully, mentally, too. If she carried through with her plan now, there was the possibility that she would make a mistake from sheer exhaustion. It was even possible—and she felt a thrill of horror at the idea—that Ed might have seen through her lie about the hotel. He—or someone else, the someone who was behind one or both attacks, if it wasn’t Ed—might be one jump ahead of her and already have people watching the airport. Airports. Metro stations. Amtrak stations. Bus stations. All public transportation facilities. With her car missing—and maybe Ed or whoever had had something to do with that, too—public transportation was her only way out of town, and he would know that.

  Galloping paranoia? Maybe. But maybe not.

  In that case, though, the best way out of the city was by private car.

  Which she was in.

  “Not,” she said. “The cabin sounds good. Thanks.”

  “Not a problem.”

  He didn’t smile, but he did seem to relax slightly. Some of the tension left his shoulders. His grip on the wheel eased. His expression seemed lighter somehow. Katharine, too, felt a lessening of stress now that the decision was made. Taking a deep breath, she allowed her head to drop back against the seat—the warm leather supporting her tense neck felt amazing—closed her eyes, and tried to relax, too.

  Unfortunately, her mind refused to get with the program. It raced hither and yon, trying to make sense out of everything that had happened, then, when that proved impossible, trying to make sense out of something, anything.

  But she couldn’t.

  The thought formed out of nowhere, solidified, then twisted through her mind like a particularly nasty little worm: Was good-neighbor Dan just a little too good to be true?

  Her eyes popped open, and without lifting her head, she turned her gaze toward him. They were back on the expressway now, heading west on I-66, and traffic was humming along, heavy as usual. A semi went flying past, and she could feel the vibration of it shaking the SUV. Through the windows she could see blue sky bisected by the vapor trail of an airliner. Arlington National Cemetery went by on the left, and she realized that she recognized the grassy acres of trees and monuments instantly, even at speed and from a distance, even before the sign identifying it flashed into view. Funny that she should know things like where Arlington was, and that it was possible to hop on the Metro at Reagan National Airport and disappear, and even that this degree of traffic was normal for Saturday on this expressway, and yet know practically nothing else.

  Not about herself. Not about him.

  He’d said she could trust him. Of course, once upon a time Ted Bundy had probably told women the same thing.

  But nevertheless—sort of, kind of—she did.

  She thought.

  Maybe.

  “Okay, I’ll bite.” He glanced over at her, met her gaze—until that moment, she hadn’t known that she’d been staring at him, apparently like a frog at a fly—and frowned. “Want to tell me why you’re looking at me like I’ve suddenly grown two heads?”

  11

  "You’re not wearing your glasses.”

  The fact had just occurred to her. They were, she saw at a glance, folded into his shirt pocket. Without them, his slightly professorial air was lost. He looked less abstracted, and more like a man who could handle a little physical action.

  Which, under the circumstances, was probably a good thing, even if it was slightly disconcerting.

  “Oh.” Looking self-conscious, he patted his shirt pocket. “They’re here. I took them off when I was trying to slam my way into your house. Don’t worry, I don’t need them to drive. They’re mostly for close work.” He threw her a quick look, then pulled the glasses from his pocket and dropped them down into the pocket of the driver’s-side door. “Is that why you were staring at me?”

  “Actually,” she said in dulcet tones, “I didn’t realize I was. It must have been because I was just remembering the first time we met.”

  His brows went up. As he glanced her way again, she saw that he was now expressionless.

  “Were you, now?”

  She waited. His attention returned to the road. He didn’t say anything else. She frowned.

  “I was trying to think how long ago that was,” she prompted. She thought her casual tone was nicely done.

  He shrugged.

  Great. Now he turned into a man of few words.

  “How long ago was it?” she probed a little more pointedly.

  “A while.”

  “So tell me about it.” If there was a slight edge to her voice now, she couldn’t help it. She was tired and scared and hurting, and being subtle required a lot of effort. Plus, it didn’t appear to be working particularly well.

  He glanced her way again. This time he looked wary. “What? The first time we met? Why?”

  Because I need to know, dammit.

  “It’s like telephone, you know, the game where one person whispers something to another person, and then it goes on down the line, and by the end the story’s usually totally different?” Good one. She almost believed herself. “I want to see how well our memories match.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not kidding.” Okay, now she was sounding downright grim. Lighten up, girlfriend.

  “To tell you the truth, I have no idea.”

  She tried not to sound as outraged as she felt. “You don’t remember?”

  He looked a little guilty. “Hey, it’s been hectic all over lately. What, did I say or do something that’s etched into your consciousness for all time? If so, I apologize. ”

  “Never mind,” she said sulkily, and subsided into silence again.

  So much for plumbing the depths of his mind for clues about her past. Clearly it was going to be more complicated than she felt able to deal with just yet.

  “You know,” he said after a minute or two, “I’ve been thinking: Are you sure the man who jumped you today couldn’t have been just a garden-variety burglar? Maybe he heard what happened last night on, say, a police scanner or something, and thought your house would be empty in the aftermath and decided to seize an opportunity.”

  “I’m sure.” Her tone was sour.

  He glanced at her. “How? How can you be sure?”

  “I jus
t am.” She sighed. “He was wearing a suit, for one thing. An expensive suit, black or navy blue—it was kind of gloomy in there, and everything happened so fast, it’s hard to be sure of the exact color, but dark—with a white shirt and a dark tie. Not your typical burglar gear.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe dressing like that makes it easier to break into a house in a nice neighborhood without anyone suspecting what you’re up to. You’ve got to have another reason for thinking he was something besides a burglar. A nice suit by itself doesn ’t cut it. So, what else you got?”

  “He had a big silver gun just like those guys last night. He knew who I was. He was looking for something specific. Believe me, he was not a burglar.” Okay, she sounded testy. So sue her.

  “All right, he wasn’t a burglar.” Dan now seemed ready to accept her judgment on that. “Do you remember anything about him that would help you to identify him? Any identifying marks or scars, for example?”

  She shook her head. “None that I saw.”

  “You get a look at his eyes? What did they look like?”

  “They were dark. Really dark. Almost black. And kind of small.”

  “Race?”

  “I think he was white. Dark-complected but white. Or maybe Hispanic. Not black.”

  “Hair?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t see it. It was hidden by the ski mask.”

  “Size? How tall was he?”

  “Six feet, probably. And muscular. He was in good shape. Like the kind of guy who might work for Ed.”

  “You think he was CIA, huh? That’s reassuring.” Dan’s voice was dry. “Good to know we’ve got the Feds on our tail.”

  Hearing him say “we” and “our” didn’t really make her feel any safer, but it was vaguely comforting to see that as far as he was concerned, they were in whatever they were in together. At least, if they got caught, she wouldn’t have to die alone.

  Then something else occurred to her.

  “Wait a minute. How do you know Ed’s with the CIA?”

  He looked at her. “The Post photo, remember? The caption said he was, like, Director of Operations or something.”

  “Oh.”

  A beat passed.

  “You see anything else?” Dan asked. “What about his hands?”

  A vision of thick, dead, white fingers flashed into her mind. She barely kept herself from shuddering.

  “He was wearing gloves. Surgical gloves. Look, what does it matter? It’s over. He’s gone. And as far as I know, there’s no Facebook for spooks.”

  He shot her a glance. “Spooks?”

  She huffed out an impatient breath. “That’s what they call the covert-operations guys.”

  “You think this guy was one of them?” He paused, seeming to have a little trouble getting his tongue around what was coming next. “A spook?”

  Jeez, her head was hurting again. “Like I said, does it matter?”

  “Maybe. There’s a lot of traffic around us. No telling who’s in any of these vehicles. I just thought it would help if I could kind of eliminate people like that guy in the minivan there, say, from suspicion.”

  Katharine raised her head high enough to see a tan Dodge Caravan rattling along in the lane beside them. The driver, bald and pudgy, was looking in his rearview mirror as he yelled at the quartet of kids strapped into the back.

  “Him you can safely eliminate.” She let her head drop back down against the seat.

  “He was just an example. You see what I’m getting at here.”

  Reluctantly, she did. She had a feeling her heart would have picked up the pace again if she hadn’t been so totally wiped out.

  “You think we’re being followed?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. But I’ve been wrong before.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “So, you see anything else on this guy that struck you as memorable? What about his feet? What kind of shoes?”

  She had a momentary flashback to a kick slicing through the air.

  “Black,” she said. “Dress shoes.”

  In her mind’s eye, she was back beneath the kitchen island, fighting for her life as the foot flew past her face with scant inches to spare. It seemed so real suddenly that she could almost feel the breeze. At the time, noticing his footwear hadn’t been her primary focus. Plus, she’d gotten only a glimpse, but . . .

  She frowned. “There was something on the sole—a logo. It was round and—” Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Oh, my God. The floor. The floor’s wrong.”

  “What?” Dan looked at her with incomprehension.

  She barely noticed. Mentally, she was still there, clinging to the wrought iron, her right side battened down against unyielding terra-cotta tiles.

  “The tiles are wrong. They’re . . .” Her voice trailed off for a moment as rising panic threatened to choke her. “They’re too small.”

  “What?”

  Katharine didn’t even register that he had spoken. She was frantically replaying everything that had happened in the kitchen earlier today in her mind, and comparing it with what had happened there the previous night.

  Last night she had been nose to nose with a floor sadly in need of a mop. Beneath the grime, the terra-cotta tiles had been smooth, cold, and hard as brick. In her mind’s eye, she could see them perfectly: stone-colored grout lines marking out straight rows of twelve-inch squares.

  Today she had fallen on that same floor. She had scrambled across it on all fours. Her hand had been palm down across one of the tiles, her nails scratching against the stone-colored grout as the heel of her hand was abraded at the same time by the roughness of yet another line of grout. In other words, her hand had actually been longer than the tile. Because the tile itself couldn’t have been more than six inches square.

  Today, the entire kitchen floor had been a sea of smooth, cold, hard-as-brick six-inch terra-cotta squares.

  Her mouth dropped open in horror.

  “What?” he said, watching her. “What?”

  “The floor’s wrong.” Her voice was faint. The interior of the SUV seemed to be closing in around her like a big, black fist. She felt as if she were trapped, suffocating. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe. “The tiles have changed. How could the tiles have changed?”

  “What? You’re not making any sense.”

  “Something’s wrong.” She felt like she should be screaming the words, but instead her voice was barely audible. Her vision went all blurry; her heart began to thud. Her head throbbed like it would explode. “Oh, God, something’s really, really, wrong.”

  A wave of dizziness swamped her.

  For the tiles to have changed was impossible.

  “Just so you know, you’re starting to scare me here. You’ve gone white as a sheet. I need to know what you’re talking about if you don’t want to get rushed to the nearest emergency room, pronto.”

  Katharine got the impression that the Blazer was speeding up. Either he was putting the pedal to the metal, or the world outside the SUV had suddenly turned into a kaleidoscopic blur of color and sound. The hospital—he was threatening her with the hospital again. Still, she couldn’t get those six-inch terra-cotta tiles out of her mind. They were wrong, wrong, wrong . . .

  She sucked in air.

  Get a grip. Chill.

  “I don’t need a hospital.” She took another deep breath. “It’s just . . . oh my God, Dan, I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” he said dryly after a moment passed in which, busy trying to convince herself that she’d somehow gotten it wrong about the tiles, she didn’t say anything else. Katharine became vaguely aware of an abundance of green whizzing past the windows, and realized that the Blazer was banking around a steep turn that could only, from the amount of foliage surrounding them, be an exit.

  “No hospital.” Her voice was stronger. She tried to focus exclusively on the here and now. As far as the floor was concerned, her mind had to be playing t
ricks on her. She realized that. No way could the floor really have changed. But each image was so real. The twelve-inch tiles. The six-inch tiles. In the same kitchen, only hours apart. She almost moaned, but bit the sound back when she realized that it would probably send Dan over the edge.

  They were on a straightaway again. Katharine realized that they had left the interstate behind for an only slightly less busy four-lane highway. Clustered around the intersection where they found themselves was a collection of fast-food places, cheap motels, and gas stations.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as he pulled into a Stop-N-Go Mart that looked like a shoebox made of equal parts concrete blocks and glass. An ancient blue Ford pickup and a newer white Infiniti were at the pumps out front. A beefy farmer type complete with overalls did the honors for the pickup. A blond, stylish, fiftyish woman was filling the Infiniti. Both looked harmless. More cars were parked in front of the store. Their passengers were, presumably, inside.

  “We’re going to stop here for a few minutes and watch who comes off the expressway after us. And in the meantime, you’re going to talk to me and tell me what the hell is bothering you so much about a floor.”

  The Blazer pulled on around the store and stopped near the restrooms, which were located on the side of the building well away from the gas pumps. At the far edge of the pavement, back behind a trio of lurking Dumpsters, two empty picnic tables had been set up in the grassy strip between the parking lot and the Taco Bell next door. A raggedy-looking elm provided them with patchy shade.

  Dan turned off the engine and got out, slamming the door behind him. Then he came around to Katharine’s door and opened it. The all pervasive sound of traffic immediately filled her ears.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get out.”

  Complying, she discovered, wasn’t all that easy. With the best will in the world, she didn’t seem to be able to make her muscles work. When she simply looked up at him without doing anything else, he made an impatient sound under his breath, then leaned in and unfastened her seat belt for her. His upper arm brushed her breasts, and she was suddenly very aware of the contact, and of how firm his biceps were. Her brow knit; that tiny jolt of awareness was impossible to mistake for anything else—and the most disconcerting thing about it was that it felt so hauntingly familiar. He was close, so close she could see the texture of his bronzed skin and each individual hair in the stubble darkening his jaw, and a tiny, comma-shaped scar near the corner of his left eye. He must have felt the weight of her gaze, because he glanced at her and their eyes met. The reassuringly mild blue of his eyes was no longer quite so mild, she discovered, nor quite so reassuring. Instead, his eyes had taken on a glint that made them look harder and more purposeful.