Watching them come, she started to shiver. Her instincts screamed run, but Dan wasn’t moving. Her hold on his hand tightened, and in response his fingers curled tightly around hers, and he pulled her protectively close to his side. Breathing hard, heart racing, she leaned against his muscular warmth, clutching his hand as if it were a lifeline. Her eyes were all on the oncoming flashlights—until it occurred to her that Dan wasn’t moving or making any kind of potentially defensive preparations. Motionless as the thick tree trunks around them, he was just standing there watching the flashlights—and whoever was holding them—approach. His face could have been carved from stone.
“You know, don’t you? You know who they are.” Her eyes were wide as they met his. Her voice was shrill with the beginning of panic. She sucked in air, grabbed his arm, shook it. “Tell me the truth.”
“You don’t need to be afraid.” His voice was low and soothing. His arm encircled her waist, pulling her up against his chest. His hand came up to slide along her cheek. As she stared up at him, aghast, he dropped a quick, hard kiss on her mouth. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Trust me.”
“No,” she said, almost frantic now as she realized that the flashlights were only yards away. Her pulse pounded. Her stomach clenched. The taste of fear—sour as vinegar, as she had recently learned—was in her mouth. “I don’t.”
A single wild look around told her that she was almost out of time. She could see the tall, dark silhouettes of the men holding the flashlights now. Clearly, this was her last chance to run. She pushed at his chest in a desperate attempt to free herself, only to realize that he had her fast.
He wasn’t going to let her go.
“What are you doing?” she cried even as she struggled to free herself. Terror dried her throat, set her heart to pumping wildly. “Dan—”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said.
And then the men reached them, and it was too late.
When Katharine awoke the next morning, it was almost ten. She was feeling much better. Stronger, calmer, more at ease with herself and the world. Examining her reflection in the bathroom mirror of her room in the Embassy Suites Hotel, where Dan had driven her last night by mutual agreement after explaining to the two men from the sheriff’s department who’d been behind the flashlights in the woods that the burglar alarm had gone off by accident, she was even able to reassure herself that the reflection looking back at her was indeed her. Now she remembered the drastic diet that had whittled away her curves, remembered getting her teeth fixed and her hair colored and cut. She even remembered making weekly visits to Mystic Tan to keep herself from looking so unfashionably pale. If yesterday’s lapse had been some kind of weird amnesia, well, at least it had been temporary and easily cured.
A good night’s sleep had worked wonders. It had allowed her to see that her fears had been nothing more than the product of a blow to the head coupled with the terrible trauma she had suffered. Having a dear friend murdered in front of her in combination with being attacked and terrorized (twice) in her own home would be enough to send most anybody off the rails.
But now she was back, restored, whole. She could even breathe better through her nose, although she meant to keep the bandage across the bridge in place until it was thoroughly healed.
She showered, blew her hair dry, put on her usual makeup, got dressed in a turquoise tank and a pretty summer skirt that she retrieved from the duffel bag, and slid her feet into her elegant sandals. Straightening her ring, which was too loose because of her weight loss, she touched her ears to make sure the diamond studs were still in place. Then she fished her phone out of her purse and made a quick phone call. She got voicemail and left a message, then disconnected. The room came equipped with a tiny kitchenette, which included a coffeepot and packets of coffee. She made herself some.
Then, cup in hand, she sat down to wait.
It didn’t take long.
The knock on her door was sharp and imperative. Calmly she rose from the chair by the window, picked up her purse and the duffel bag, and crossed the small suite to the door. After a quick, careful look through the peephole, she opened the door and smiled at the two men waiting for her in the green-carpeted hallway. It was a good feeling to realize that she remembered them now. They were CIA case officers who, unlike most of those in the bloated Agency hierarchy, reported directly to Ed and acted, basically, as his errand boys. Her relationship with them was professional rather than friendly—she thought they might disapprove of the fact that she was sleeping with the boss—but she’d seen them on the average of several times a week for the past two years. Tom Starkey was closest to the door and, apparently, was the one who had done the knocking. In his early thirties, he was about six feet tall, broad-shouldered and fit in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, with a square-jawed, handsome face, a buzz cut that looked like it would be medium brown if it ever grew long enough to actually have a color, and a faint bulge beneath his jacket that, Katharine knew, was the shoulder-holstered pistol that he was never without. A couple of steps behind him stood George Bennett, maybe five years older and half an inch taller, with darker brown hair and a paler complexion but otherwise looking enough like Starkey to be his brother. It was the suits, Katharine thought, that made them look so much alike. Bennett was wearing a navy blue one, too, and a white shirt, although his tie had subtle stripes. Short-haired, well-built men in suits tended to lose their individuality if you saw enough of them.
Clearly, since that was the case with her, she’d been a resident of Alphabet Soup World for too long.
“Morning, Ms. Lawrence,” Starkey said, as politely as if he had not spent the past twenty-four hours searching frantically for her, which she knew, without anyone having to tell her, he had done. Ed would have been upset at her disappearance. When Ed got upset, Starkey and Bennett got busy. They had undoubtedly borne the brunt of his displeasure as well.
“Good morning,” she answered. Neither of them had so far cracked a smile, and she understood from that that she was far from being their favorite person at the moment. Well, so be it. She had done what, at the time, she’d felt she had to do.
Even though now she knew how unnecessary all that panic had been.
Starkey took the duffel bag from her and closed the door.
“This way,” Bennett said, and she followed him without even asking where they were going while Starkey brought up the rear. Because, the thing was, where they were going didn’t really matter. By coming back, by making that phone call, she had placed herself in Ed’s hands, and Starkey and Bennett were there as extensions of Ed. They were taking her where Ed had told them to take her, and she found she really didn’t need to know more than that.
Ed was her boyfriend. She could trust Ed.
Her room was on the third floor. They rode the elevator down, and then the pair of them waited like watchful nannies while she checked out.
“Mr. Barnes is in a meeting,” Starkey informed her as he settled her into the backseat of the big black Mercedes waiting beside one of the hotel’s side entrances. “He said to tell you he’ll be with you this evening.”
Katharine nodded, and he closed the door on her. He and Bennett got into the front seat. Starkey drove. The tires swished and the air-conditioning hummed, but besides that there was no other sound. None of them spoke as they pulled away from the hotel, which was an older specimen of the chain located in Garfield Heights, in the seedy section of Southeast Washington. The hotel was near the Navy Museum, which was a major tourist attraction, but it was surrounded by run-down apartment buildings, cheap ethnic restaurants, and discount stores, with a few pockets of restored older homes providing glimpses of the block-by-block revitalization that was under way.
She had chosen the hotel, she remembered, because it had allowed her to pay cash. Using her credit cards would have, she feared, brought Ed down on her within the hour. And she had needed the time to be alone, to think, to sleep.
The sleep had,
of course, done her a world of good. Her disordered thinking had completely gone away. She was herself again.
In minutes they were on the freeway heading into D.C. Looking toward the city, what Katharine saw was an ocean of gray: wave upon wave of concrete and steel. The skyline for as far as she could see was a staggered grid of buildings. Although it was not yet noon on Sunday, and Washington tended to be a churchgoing town (politicians, with voters to please back home, were big on public worship), traffic was heavy as usual, primarily because of all the tourists. As they crossed over the Anacostia River, Katharine looked down at its glassy green surface to see that the boats were out in force: small sailboats, colorful as songbirds, tacking in a zigzag pattern to catch any available breeze; cabin cruisers zipping along under their own power, trailing white ripples of wake; barges loaded with cargo, chugging steadily upstream. The sky was bright Tiffany blue. The clouds were white and feathery. The only trace of last night’s rain was the rise in the humidity. The heat was positively swampy, Katharine thought as Starkey pulled into an underground parking garage beneath one of the anonymous high-rise apartment buildings that were a feature of the central part of the city, found a spot, and parked. But she didn’t have long to experience it. They walked a few yards to an elevator, which whisked them skyward. They got out on the twelfth floor. It was a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor lined with widely spaced doors. When they reached the third door on the left, Starkey produced a key, unlocked it, and swung it open, gesturing to Katharine to precede him inside.
She did, walking into a small vestibule that opened onto a moderately sized living room. There was a big window wall opposite the entrance. The drapes were open, flooding the room with light. Besides that, the living room was basically a square box furnished with a big striped couch in shades of gold and cream and brown with matching gold tub chairs on either end. A landscape in a simple gilt frame hung over the couch, and a big plasma-screen TV dominated the wall opposite. Cream wall-to-wall carpet extended throughout the apartment, which had a single bedroom, a bath and a half, and a small but well-equipped kitchen with a dining alcove off it. Katharine saw all this as she followed Starkey, who was carrying the duffel bag, into the bedroom.
“Whose apartment is this?” Katharine asked as Starkey put the duffel bag down. “Is it Ed’s?”
He shrugged. Katharine realized that she wasn’t going to get an answer. If he even knew, he would consider it Ed’s business, to reveal or not as he chose. Starkey and Bennett were unimpeachably discreet—and unimpeachably loyal.
“There’s food in the kitchen,” Starkey said as he turned to go. “Or one of us can go get carryout, if you want. The thing is, Mr. Barnes told us that we weren’t to leave you alone.” He gave her a reproachful look. “We can’t protect you if we aren’t with you.”
Katharine nodded. She really didn’t want Starkey and Bennett as enemies, so she figured she better start mending fences. “I know. I understand.” She tried to inject some remorse into her tone, although it took a surprising amount of effort. Emotionally, she discovered, she was still feeling a little bit of a disconnect. “Look, I’m sorry I ditched you and Bennett at the hospital. I think, after everything that happened, I must have been a little bit out of my head.”
“It was a bad scene. Right at the beginning, we were afraid you’d been kidnapped. Until you called Mr. Barnes.”
“I never thought of that,” she said. When Starkey’s only response was a sour look, she gave it up and added, “You know what? I am hungry. And I don’t feel like cooking.”
“How about hamburgers? Or tacos?”
Actually, Starkey seemed a tad less unfriendly than before, so maybe her little speech had helped, Katharine decided. They often ate fast food around the office, where the hours tended to be long and the three of them were often among the last to leave, waiting as they were for Ed. Although they very rarely waited together. Starkey and Bennett had their sphere, and she had hers.
“Tacos,” Katharine voted, and Starkey nodded and left her alone.
After he came back with the food and they ate, Katharine returned to the bedroom, which was tastefully decorated with another gilt-framed landscape over the queen-size bed, and taupe walls and curtains. Curious, she opened the curtains to reveal a sweeping view of the apartment building across the street. Looking between it and the under-construction high-rise next to it, she caught a glimpse of the Convention Center, and that helped orient her. She was just off New York Avenue, probably on K or L Street. She didn’t know why, but it made her feel better to know approximately where she was.
She sat in the small gold velvet armchair beside the comfortable-looking bed with its gold spread, and pulled her phone out of her purse. In her mind burned a list of things she needed to do, and she mentally checked them off one by one as she did them. First she called Sue Driver, a mutual friend of hers and Lisa’s, and listened to her exclamations and condolences while begging off telling her anything on the grounds that it was too upsetting to talk about, before finally managing to ask when the funeral was to be. Armed with that information—it was scheduled for Tuesday—she called Cindy Parrent, the friend who was watching Muffy, and asked her if she could possibly keep the cat until Wednesday. Then she made arrangements to fly to Cleveland, Lisa’s hometown, the next day.
By that time, the pounding headache that she thought had vanished along with her irrational fears was back. Swallowing an Extra Strength Tylenol from her purse with a drink of water from the adjoining bathroom, she looked in on Starkey and Bennett—they were watching football in the living room and apparently having a good time, although their faces went carefully blank as soon as they spotted her in the doorway—and thought about taking a nap.
But the idea of falling asleep didn’t appeal to her. Sleep brought dreams with it, and some dreams, she thought vaguely, could be scary. Instead, she needed something to occupy her mind.
So she curled up in the armchair, picked up the remote from the chair beside it, and turned on the small TV tucked into the tall white armoire opposite the bed. CSI reruns were on the first channel that popped up. There was nothing graphic—yet—but the thought of watching an autopsy or worse made her stomach churn. Hurriedly, she started flipping through channels, and finally settled on Full House reruns. TV didn’t get much more mindless than that.
Despite her determination not to, she was just about to doze off in the armchair when the door to the bedroom was thrust forcefully open. Startled wide awake, she sat up abruptly as Ed, natty as always in a charcoal-gray designer suit, white shirt, and black tie, his black hair slicked carefully back, strode into the bedroom, stopped short at the sight of her, and planted his fists on his hips, a furious expression on his face.
17
"I’ve been going out of my mind worrying about you,” he yelled, while Katharine winced at both the blast of anger that was so loud it completely drowned out the TV and the idea that Starkey and Bennett were overhearing it. She could just picture them smirking in the next room: Ed took them to the figurative woodshed often enough. They would be glad it was her turn. “Where the hell have you been?”
Remember, Ed is always right. Anything to please Ed. Be submissive. Supportive. Agree with everything he says. Go along with anything he suggests. Your job is to keep him happy.
The parameters of her relationship with Ed spooled through her mind in an instant. She knew this relationship, knew that he was the dominant partner and she was very much subordinate. She had been following those rules for years. She could follow them a little longer.
Even if, somewhere deep inside, they made her just a little bit mad.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a conciliatory tone. He was still glaring at her, his heavy-lidded brown eyes dark with rage, his square jaw taut with it. “I didn’t mean to worry you. So much happened that . . . I guess I just freaked out.”
“You ran away from the hospital.” There was a wealth of anger in his tone. “Starkey and Bennett were on their
way up to you, and you just took off. Why would you do a thing like that?”
“It was because of the police. I just couldn’t handle talking to them right then. I . . . wasn’t thinking straight.”
He slammed the door behind him as she spoke and strode quickly toward her. It was amazing how threatening a five-foot-ten-inch, stockily built man could look when he was pissed, she thought. Her heart gave an unexpected lurch—I’m afraid of him—then quickly settled back into its normal, natural beat as the words You’re in love with him superseded her first instinctive reaction.
. . . in love with him; in love with him: The words formed an echo in her brain, beating in her head in tandem with her pulse, overwriting anything and everything else.
Smiling, she rose from the chair to meet him.
“Don’t run away from me again.” His tone was terse, but when she obediently shook her head no, some of the aggression left his expression. Reaching her, he caught her up in an embrace, wrapping his big arms around her, pressing his meaty lips to hers. He kissed her thoroughly if not all that expertly, but she responded with appropriate enthusiasm.
His tongue’s thick as a salami. He tastes sort of like salami, too.
The thought, with its accompanying surge of revulsion, was quickly swamped by a rush of others: He’s handsome, sexy; he’s been your boyfriend for more than a year; you’re in love with him.
. . . in love with him; in love with him.
Still, when he let her go, what she felt was relief.
Just to be safe, she sank back down in the chair. The bright glow of the late-afternoon sun was reflected off the dark windows of the building opposite, and the light pouring in through the window beside her was intense. It must have bothered Ed, because he cast an impatient look out the window, then moved, closing the curtains with a quick tug on the cord.
Obsession Page 21
