Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  They stepped into what looked like a modern office. Down here the walls were a smooth beige drywall; the floor was covered with plush gray wall-to-wall carpet. A quartet of beige-and-gray metal desks marched in a row against the wall opposite the door. Each was outfitted with its own computer and telephone, and had a comfortable-looking desk chair pulled up to it. A fake rubber plant—at least, Katharine thought it was fake; it looked way too shiny and healthy to be real—stretched toward the acoustic-tiled ceiling in the far corner, beside a door that led into some inner offices. A large framed map of the earth took pride of place on the wall through which they had entered. Beneath it was a long couch in bright Carolina blue, with a coffee table complete with magazines in front of it.

  Katharine was just noticing that the air-conditioning worked almost too well—at least, she preferred to think that the goose bumps that were prickling to life along her arms were caused by the air-conditioning—and that the rattling from the fan upstairs was faint but still audible, when, at the far end of the room, the door to what was apparently an inner office opened and Ed stepped out.

  Her heart lurched. Her throat closed up. Her hands started to curl into fists at her sides until she became aware of the involuntary movement and stopped it.

  She might be afraid of Ed, but she wasn’t stupid enough to let him know it.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, just as if they were meeting under the most ordinary of circumstances, as he walked toward her. “Sorry I had to bring you all the way out here.”

  He was minus his suit jacket, but everything else—white shirt, long-sleeved despite the heat, red power tie, navy pin-striped pants—was immaculate. His black hair was perfectly groomed, and he looked as wide awake as if it were eleven a.m. rather than p.m.

  “Was kidnapping me really necessary?” Deliberately keeping it light despite the fact that her pulse was racing and every nerve ending she possessed was screaming, she smiled at him as he approached and accepted the peck he dropped on her cheek with apparent equanimity. “Starkey”—she cast Starkey, who was standing just slightly behind her, his hands clasped in front of him now, a reproachful look—“broke the window on my car.”

  “We’ll get it fixed.” Ed looked at Starkey, who remained impassive, slid a glance over the other three men, and wrapped a hand around Katharine’s elbow, drawing her with him as he started back the way he had come. The touch of that moist, meaty hand almost made her shudder. It took iron control not to. “See, I need your help. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Okay, Ed seemed fine. As far as she could tell, he wasn ’t angry, he wasn’t menacing, he wasn’t hostile. So why did her heart threaten to pound its way out of her chest?

  The only answer she could come up with was instinct.

  The door led into a narrow hallway that ran the length of the building. Doors opened off it. Ed opened the second door to the right and stood back to allow her to precede him inside.

  It was a gentlemanly gesture, and she might have felt more favorably about it if she’d had any real choice.

  Her first impression of the room she walked into was that it was some kind of a lab. It was small with a dark gray linoleum floor, and it smelled faintly of alcohol. The walls were white, the lighting stark and recessed. Long stainless-steel counters ran along three sides of the room. There was medical equipment—a tray with syringes and gauze, a box of surgical gloves, small labeled vials of liquid—and stacks of files and a computer on the counters. Two bright-blue molded plastic chairs were pushed neatly beneath them. Another computer sat on a desk in the middle of the room. There were two comfortable-looking black leather office chairs, one on either side of the desk.

  A man rose from the chair behind the desk and came toward them. He was a small guy, not much taller than she was herself, and wiry. Early fifties maybe. His gray hair was cut close to his head, and his eyes were gray, too, behind a pair of bifocals. His features were delicate, his pale skin wrinkled. He was wearing black pants and a white open-necked shirt with a blue doctor’s smock zipped up over it.

  “I’m Gene Pettinelli,” he said, nodding at Katharine. “I’ll be doing the testing.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Testing?” Instinctively, she looked over her shoulder at Ed. He had closed the door behind him, she saw. Of the four men who had followed them down the hall, only Starkey and Bennett had entered the room in their wake. They were now positioned behind Ed on either side of the door. Hendricks and the other man were probably waiting in the hall.

  “I’ve got some pictures I want you to look at,” Ed said. “It may be that some of the assholes who broke into your town house are among them.”

  Pettinelli was gently leading her toward the chair behind the desk.

  She kept casting alarmed glances back at Ed. “But . . . I didn’t see their faces. I wouldn’t recognize their pictures if I saw them. I—”

  “If you would just sit here,” Pettinelli interrupted politely, pulling the chair behind the desk out for her.

  Without thinking about it, Katharine sat. Every bit of her attention was focused on Ed, who was watching her with his fists on his hips and an inscrutable expression on his face. Looking at pictures didn’t sound bad—not nearly as bad as what she had been expecting—but something about the setup, the atmosphere, the smell, something was giving her the willies.

  “You probably saw more than you think,” Ed said. “Little details that you wouldn’t consciously remember, maybe.”

  “Pardon me,” Pettinelli murmured, leaning in front of her. Katharine only realized that the chair came equipped with a seat belt and he was fastening it around her when she heard the click.

  “Wh-what?” she stuttered, looking down in disbelief at the webbed black belt that was now clasped around her waist. Bullets of adrenaline shot through her system. “What is this? What are you doing?” Her eyes were huge as they flew to meet Ed’s. Her voice sharpened with the beginnings of panic. “Ed . . . ?”

  “Pettinelli here is going to test your body’s reactions to some pictures.” Ed spoke as if what was happening was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Even if you don’t consciously remember something, your body may well respond to a familiar stimuli in a telling way,” Pettinelli said.

  Her arms were on the armrests. Glancing down, she was just in time to watch as he fastened a pair of webbed restraints around her forearm, one near the elbow and one near the wrist. Her arm was thus secured to the chair.

  It wasn’t uncomfortable, but . . .

  “No.” Her eyes shot back to Ed’s face as she sheltered her left arm protectively in her lap, hunching her shoulders forward, glaring at him. “No, I don’t want to do this. I’d rather just look at the pictures normally first, and then—”

  “This is quicker.” Ed’s expression never changed. His eyes as they met hers held no affection for her, no sympathy, no softness of any kind. “And more accurate.”

  “If you would just put your other arm on this armrest, ” Pettinelli said. He reached out to grasp her wrist, his fingers cool, his hold very tentative and respectful. A heartbeat passed in which Katharine realized that she had no choice, none whatsoever. Her arm was going to be strapped to that chair with her cooperation or without it. Taking a deep breath, trying to control the panic that curled through her stomach and tightened her throat, she gritted her teeth and let Pettinelli do what he would with her arm.

  “This won’t hurt,” he promised her as he slipped little blue rubber cups on the ends of the ring, index, and pointer fingers on her right hand. Thin, black wires ran from the cups to a black metal machine that rested beside the computer on the desk. He scuttled around to the other side, sat down, and spoke to her across it. “I’ll just show you some pictures on the computer screen, and you tell me whether any of them look familiar. And your body will tell me, too, of course.”

  Ed stood behind Pettinelli, arms folded over his chest, watching her with a frown on his face. Katharine c
ould no longer even look at him. Her damp palms curled around the edge of the armrests. It took every ounce of willpower she could summon to keep her cool.

  She had no choice but to go through with this.

  Breathe, she ordered herself fiercely.

  Slowly, rhythmically, she did. Inhale, exhale . . .

  “Here we go,” Pettinelli said. “Don’t talk unless you recognize someone. Just look.”

  The screen, which had been dark, came to life. There were pictures of men on it, head shots with their names typed under them. At first glance she thought they might be mug shots. Then she realized that they had been taken from what looked like ID badges from Alphabet Soup World. Six to a row, five rows per screen. Call it spook-a-vision.

  She scanned the first screen, then the second, without consciously recognizing anyone. Gradually, she started to relax; all this drama had been in aid of this exercise in pointlessness. The intruders had been wearing masks and all she had seen were their eyes, as she had explained to Ed so many times that she had lost count. Under the circumstances, the head shots were useless. She would have had an easier time identifying them from statistics like height, weight, and build.

  When she finally did come to a head shot she recognized, it was right in middle of the third screen and she was so used to scanning quickly through the pictures that she nearly skimmed right over it. But even as her eyes started to slide past, the familiar face registered on her brain. Blinking, she looked again.

  There in front of her was a picture of Dan. His hair was cut ruthlessly short, there were no glasses anywhere in sight, and he was minus the Malibu tan.

  But there was no mistaking him.

  The only thing was, the caption under his picture read Special Agent Nick Houston, FBI.

  Even as she looked at it, her head began to hurt.

  21

  "There! We got something! You recognize somebody? ” Pettinelli was so excited he was practically bouncing in his chair. Glancing around, he said to Ed, “We got something!”

  The screen wavered before her eyes. Her headache turned into a splitting pain that felt like it was cleaving through her brain. She felt dizzy, disoriented. Trying to focus her eyes made her stomach roil, so she gave up and closed them. Letting her head drop back to rest against the back of the chair, she took deep breaths as cold sweat broke over her in a rolling wave.

  Not Dan. Nick . . .

  “Who? Who is it?” Ed was beside her, grabbing her upper arm, shaking her. “Tell me who it is.”

  My God, she thought with a quick rush of panic that cut right through the horrible pounding in her head, she had to think. Her own reaction as much as the machine had given her away. She couldn’t tell them, though, not the truth. She summarily rejected the possibility. Every instinct she possessed urged her to protect Dan—no, Nick.

  Nick . . .

  The headache was so bad it was making her sick.

  “Which one?” Ed demanded, his face so close to hers she could feel the heat of his breath on her cheek. His fingers dug painfully into her arm. “Which one?”

  Opening her eyes required a huge amount of effort, but she did it. The room swam, and she found herself briefly blinking at half a dozen computers floating in a fuzzy circle above the desk. Then she sucked in air, gritted her teeth, and clutched the ends of the armrests so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

  The revolving computers coalesced into one sleek, gray machine sitting solidly on the desktop.

  “I think—him,” she said, and instinctively started to point, although with her arms strapped to the chair, pointing wasn’t going to happen, as she quickly discovered. “Fourth row, second picture from the left.”

  Sorry, she said mentally to the guy, who was a square-jawed military-looking type with an aquiline nose and a dark crew cut. He was identified under his picture as Special Investigator Frank Rizzo, DOD.

  “Him?” Ed had turned to face the screen and now tapped Special Investigator Rizzo’s picture.

  “I can’t be sure,” she temporized, doing her best to ignore the fogginess clouding her brain. She didn’t want to be responsible for anything horrible befalling a—as far as she knew—perfectly innocent man, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do but point out someone. “But . . . the eyes look familiar.” She let her head drop back against the chair again, and closed her eyes. Her heart thumped against her ribs. Her pulse raced. Her head pounded. “Oh, God, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  This had the virtue of being perfectly true—nerves had her stomach churning like a washing machine—as well as providing an urgent reason for them to release her. After all, they wouldn’t want her to upchuck all over their chair, would they?

  “Okay, show her the rest,” Ed said.

  “I need to take a break.” Katharine opened her eyes and clutched the ends of the armrests, trying to stay cool and focused for long enough to at least persuade them to let her get out of that chair. The knowledge that she was trapped in it was starting to give her claustrophobia, big-time. She feared she was going to totally wig out if they didn’t let her go soon. “Please. I’m going to throw up.”

  Every time she thought about Nick—Yes, Nick, that fit, he wasn’t Doctor Dan, he was FBI agent Nick—she got an attack of what felt like vertigo that was so bad she literally thought she might pass out. She couldn’t process what she had just discovered, not here, not hooked up to this damned machine, not with the eyes of Ed and Pettinelli and Starkey and Bennett all focused on her.

  “Later.” Ed’s tone was dismissive as his gaze shifted back to the computer. “Look at the screen.”

  “Please,” Katharine said again, and she thought Pettinelli might have thrown her a sympathetic glance, but she couldn’t be sure because her attention was focused on Ed, who clearly had no sympathy for her at all.

  He glanced at her and his eyes narrowed.

  “Look at the screen,” he barked, and she did, because it didn’t seem like she had any other choice if she ever wanted to get out of that chair. She looked while her stomach churned and her head pounded and nausea threatened, but the machine didn’t register anything through four more screens of head shots because she didn’t see anyone else she knew.

  Why is Nick masquerading as Dan? The question swirled relentlessly through her brain, making her temples pound and causing shooting pains behind her eyes that made staring at the computer screen positively painful, without finding any sort of workable answer.

  “That’s it,” Pettinelli said when the screen went dark again. She blinked, relieved. He, too, sounded glad that it was over. He stood up, his fingertips resting on the desk. “That’s all of them.”

  “Can you please let me out of this chair?” Katharine asked through stiff lips. Her muscles felt weak and shaky, and she thought they might need more blood circulating through them. She was still a little dizzy, a little disoriented, and she clutched the arms of the chair for dear life.

  “In a minute.” Ed didn’t look at her. Everyone else in the room ignored her, too. “You have the video loaded, right?” He was talking to Pettinelli. “What do I have to do to play it?”

  “Just hit this button,” Pettinelli said, and Ed walked around to the other side of the desk to look where he pointed, then nodded in comprehension.

  “Thank you, Mr. Pettinelli.” Ed’s tone was dismissive. “You can go on home now.”

  He gave Starkey a significant look and Starkey moved at last, opening the door.

  “This way, Mr. Pettinelli,” Starkey said. “If you’ll get your things, we’ll walk you out to your car.”

  Pettinelli hesitated, glancing at Katharine.

  Don’t leave me.

  The words sprang into her mind, but they took too long to form and she ended up not saying them out loud. In any case, asking him to stay would do no good, she knew, and would only anger Ed. Panic was bubbling up inside her again, sharp and urgent enough to poke holes through the confusion she couldn’t seem to shake, and it q
uickened her breathing and made her heart race. There was something ominous, she knew, in the fact that she was still strapped to the chair while Pettinelli was told to leave.

  But she couldn’t think of anything to do about it.

  “Mr. Pettinelli,” Starkey said. Pettinelli turned and walked out of the room without so much as another glance at her. Starkey and Bennett followed, closing the door behind them so that she was left alone with Ed.

  “I want out of this chair,” Katharine said, her voice louder and more insistent. She wasn’t screaming yet, but she soon would be. Not that it would do any good. Meeting Ed’s eyes, which were hard and flat as river stones, she felt her blood turn to ice in her veins and went still.

  There was real menace in them. She’d seen him look that way before, but never at her.

  “Watch.” He leaned over the computer and stabbed a button with his finger. The screen flickered to life.

  It took Katharine all of about a second to realize what she was watching. The video was black-and-white, silent, and grainy but clear enough. There she was, dressed in Dottie’s oversized clothes, walking gingerly across the hospital parking lot in her too-tight shoes, stepping into the grass, face lighting up as she turned to the black Blazer that pulled into the exit road in front of her. Then she was hurrying toward it, hobbling a little, saying something to the man whose face was now clearly visible in the driver’s window—Dan.

  No, Nick. Unmistakably Nick.

  Even as she watched herself climb into the passenger seat and watched the Blazer drive away, her head started to swim again. Bits of memories, fragmented as pieces of torn photos, came spiraling to the surface. Nick scowling at her, Nick walking toward her, Nick smiling.

  Nick. Not Dan. But how did she know Nick?