LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Mariah. He closed his eyes briefly, praying that she was safe. She was due to be picked up at seven by a taxi that would take her off the island. He wasn't certain what time it was, but he knew it was close to seven. Please, God, let her be long gone....

  He felt Serena cuff one of his wrists, felt her weave the metal through the heavy wooden back of the chair and then cuff his other wrist.

  And then he felt her tug slightly at the hair growing at, the nape of his neck. She was cutting a lock – probably as some kind of sick keepsake. A souvenir. She probably had an entire collection of hair, and once he found it, it was going to be the evidence he needed to tie her to all of the murders.

  "I'm not going to let you keep that," he told her.

  She just laughed. "Are you sure you don't want that wine?" she asked. "It works as a painkiller, you know." She sat on the table, her gun in her lap, but too far away for him even to consider going for her.

  "I can't drink it by myself," he told her, willing her to get closer, to try to force-feed him that wine.

  But she laughed again. "You don't really think I'm going to let you spit it in my face, do you?" she scolded him. "This is a designer dress. No, I think we'll do this another way."

  She set the gun down on the table as she lifted one of the domed plate warmers. Instead of a roasted chicken, there was only a syringe lying there beside the parsley garnish.

  "Morphine," she told him. "It'll make your arm feel all better in, oh, about five minutes." She moved behind him, and he felt the cold steel barrel of her gun pressed tightly against the base of his head. "If you as much as move," she warned, "I'll shoot you."

  He felt her tug at his shirt, felt the sharp stab of the needle into his back. Dammit, he hadn't had a very good look at that syringe. He had no idea how much she'd given him. He suspected it would be enough to paralyze, but not enough to kill. She would want the pleasure of skewering him with her sharp little knife.

  "You'll have to forgive me for not disinfecting the area of injection," she told him. "But I think that stray germs are the least of your problems."

  Miller watched her walk around to the other side of the table. Backlit by the stormy sky, she looked entirely in her element.

  Five minutes, she said. In five minutes, he'd be stupid and drooling, just like all her other husbands had been. Or maybe he wouldn't be. Maybe be could hold on, tight the dizzying effects of the drug. Maybe he could make her believe he was weak and vulnerable. Maybe then she'd get close enough. Maybe she would let down her guard and he could overpower her....

  "Oh, by the way, I have a little surprise for you," she said. "I want to tell you about it before the morphine starts working. It won't be as much fun to tell you if you don't really understand what's happening." She paused. "Are you listening?"

  "I'm listening."

  Serena smiled. "I put a bomb in Mariah's basement. All those pesky photographs that she had – I got her negatives out of storage and realized she'd been lying to me. She'd taken quite a number of pictures of me without my knowing it. I put the negatives next to some extremely flammable chemicals in her darkroom. This way, they all go up in flames – photos, negatives...and photographer, too."

  Miller felt the cold fingers of death clutching at his heart. Mariah... "No."

  "Don't worry, darling, the morphine I've given you will ease the sting." Serena looked at her watch. "The timer's set for six-thirty. That's in another six minutes. From where you're sitting, you'll have an excellent view of the fire. Of course, by then you probably won't care."

  "Serena! God!" Miller's voice sounded harsh to his own ears. "Mariah doesn't know anything, I swear to you. Don't bring her into this."

  "Too late."

  "No, it's not. Call her. Call her and tell her to get out of the house. All you really want is to destroy those photos. You don't need to kill her!"

  "My, my, my. You do care, don't you? You should have thought of that before you came after me. Before you listened in on me and stalked me like some kind of wild animal."

  Her fingers tightened on the trigger of the gun and Miller nearly stopped breathing. Please, God, don't let her kill him now. Not yet. Not while there was still a chance that he could talk her into saving Mariah.

  Her face was taut with anger. "Did you really think you could outsmart me? Did you really think I wouldn't notice that my house was infested with hidden microphones – just like the ones you hid here!"

  "Mariah had nothing to do with that. Call her. Tell her to get out of there. Serena, she was your friend."

  Something shifted in Serena's face. "Four minutes," she said. "And I can't call her. The phone lines went down when the power went off." She smiled. "Come on, John. I want to hear you scream."

  Miller could feel a vein throbbing in his neck. It was an odd sensation, countered by a feeling of floating, of drowsiness, of numbness. God help him, the drug was kicking in.

  God, this was his worst nightmare happening all over again. Except this time, it wasn't Tony in a warehouse he wasn't going to be able to save. This time, it was Mariah, in a cottage where a killer had planted a bomb. This time he wouldn't hear her die. Instead, he'd see the flames that were devouring her. He'd see them over the tops of the trees.

  Rage blinded him, and he used it to fight the unbalancing effect of the drug as he strained at his handcuffs, praying Serena would step just a little bit closer....

  *

  That was funny. Mariah couldn't remember putting that box down here, next to her supply of chemicals. The box had B&W Photo Lab's familiar logo on the side, and she pulled it off the shelf and opened it, holding the candle up to illuminate what was inside.

  Negatives. The box was filled with dozens of plastic sleeves that held her negatives. That was weird. She'd been storing these over at the photo lab on the mainland. How on earth had they found their way back here? Who could have put the box on this lower shelf, where in the darkness she probably wouldn't have noticed it even with the power working and the overhead light turned on and...

  She held the candle up again and looked deeper into the darkness of the bottom shelf. What the heck...?

  She looked closer, then started backing away.

  Whatever was in there, it looked a hell of a lot like a bomb. Not that she'd ever seen a bomb before – not up close and personal like this. But it looked like the bombs she'd seen in movies – some kind of sticks of explosive tied together, hooked into an alarm clock that was ticking quietly....

  Mariah grabbed her candle and ran. She ran up the basement stairs, through the living room and out into the pouring rain. The candle went out the moment she burst through her front door, and she threw it down onto the lawn. She grabbed her bike from the side of the house and jumped on it, pedaling furiously down the driveway, taking a left to head toward town, toward the police station, toward somebody, anybody who might have some sort of idea why there was a bomb in her basement.

  The rain soaked her almost instantly, and the wind ripped at her hair and tore at her clothes. She had to squint hard, to squeeze her eyes nearly shut to see through the driving rain, but still she pedaled standing up, muscles straining.

  Somebody wanted to kill her. Somebody wanted to kill her.

  She hadn't gone more than a tenth of a mile before she saw car headlights up ahead. They weren't coming toward her, but rather, they were motionless, the light pointing crazily into the heavy underbrush that grew along the side of the road. As she drew closer, Mariah could see that the car had skidded off the road and slammed into a tree.

  There was no way she was going to stop. Someone had planted a bomb in her basement. Someone wanted her dead, and she wasn't going to stop until she reached the safety of the police station downtown.

  She would have gone past with a silent apology and a promise to herself to tell the police about the accident right away when she recognized the car. It was Daniel's car. And God, that was Daniel, still in the front seat, slumped over the steering wheel.

&
nbsp; Cursing, she braked to a stop and dropped her bike along the side of the road. She cursed louder still at the sting of the branches that whipped against her legs in the wind. She moved as quickly as she could through the sodden underbrush, and bracing herself for the worst, she jerked open the driver's-side door of the car.

  It looked as if the air bag had been inflated, and Daniel had somehow deflated it again. But he was resting his head against the steering wheel as if he had some kind of injury. Or as if he were drunk.

  The radio was on – some kind of a talk show or a dramatized broadcast – a man and a woman were talking. And what looked to be close to half a dozen large thermoses of coffee littered the floor, along with an empty doughnut shop bag.

  Mariah felt Daniel's neck for a pulse. It seemed uncommonly slow. But there was no sign of blood, no sign of any kind of injury. She touched the side of his face. "Daniel?" God, he was drunk. She smacked him lightly, then a little bit harder. "Daniel, wake up!"

  He roused slightly. "Mariah!" he said. "Gotta warn you! A bomb!"

  Mariah pulled back, aghast. "What did you say?"

  "FBI," he mumbled. "Me an' John. Tracking a killer. Gonna blow up Mariah."

  "Who's FBI?" Mariah was shocked. "You're FBI? You and..." John?

  "Gotta save John, too." Daniel was fighting to stay awake, but it was clearly a losing battle.

  "What's wrong with you?" Mariah shook him, feeling a flare of disbelief, of unreality. This couldn't be real, it couldn't be happening. "Are you drunk? What are you saying to me?"

  "Somethin' in the coffee," Daniel breathed. "Gotta get help, gotta save John."

  "Where is John?" Mariah asked, suddenly terribly, horribly afraid. Daniel's eyes were closed and she shook him again. "Dammit, where's John?"

  But he didn't answer.

  Something in the coffee. Someone had put something in his coffee – and a bomb in her basement.

  Soaked to the skin and sobbing with frustration, Mariah used all her strength to push Daniel over into the passenger seat. She climbed in behind the steering wheel and tried to start the car. Get help. Unable to drive from the effects of whatever the hell had been put in his coffee, Daniel had crashed his car as he'd tried to go get help. Or maybe not to get help. Maybe to warn her. Maybe he was coming to warn her about the bomb.

  Although how would he have known?

  She turned the key in the ignition and the engine almost turned over. Almost. She tried again, but this time it only wheezed and died.

  She tried again, but there was only silence. Silence, and those infernal radio talk show hosts talking and talking and talking and...

  "Less than a minute now," the woman's voice was saying. "Thirty seconds and Mariah and her stupid photographs will be nothing more than a smudge of smoke in the sky."

  "I'm going to kill you," the man's voice said. His speech was slightly slurred, slightly slow, slightly shaking with rage, but the voice was unmistakable. It was John. "I'm going to break free from this chair, and I'm going to kill you."

  And the woman's voice was Serena's.

  Mariah couldn't breathe.

  "Twenty seconds," Serena said. "Shall we count down together?"

  "No!" John said. "No!" It was a howl of rage and pain nearly identical to the cry Mariah had heard the night he'd had a nightmare when he'd slept on her couch.

  "Ten," Serena said. "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—"

  The explosion rocked the car as flaming bits of shingles and wood rained down around them, extinguished almost instantly by the deluge. Mariah looked back up the road. Where her cottage had been was roaring flames – the fire too big and too hot to be put out by the rain.

  "Oh, my God," she breathed.

  Over the radio, she could hear John, his voice little more than a keening cry. "No," he said over and over again. "No!"

  "Oh, please," Serena scoffed. "I know the morphine tends to make one overly emotional, but show a little backbone, won't you? I would've expected more from someone sent to catch me."

  Mariah's heart was in her throat. John thought she was dead.

  "I'm not dead," she said aloud, but, of course, he couldn't hear her.

  "Mariah..." he whispered. "Oh, God, Mariah..."

  "You really expect me to believe you cared that much about that great, huge cow of a woman?"

  "You bitch," Mariah exclaimed. "I am not a cow!"

  "You can stop the act," Serena continued. "I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to make me think that you're thoroughly anesthetized – totally helpless. You want me to come close enough so that you can try for me. What are you planning to do with your arms bound behind your back, John? Snap my neck with your legs?"

  "Mariah..." he breathed. "No..."

  John's arms were somehow tied. Serena had somehow managed to overpower him and tie him up. She'd given him morphine, too. That's what was making John's speech sound so slurred. Maybe Serena had put something similar in Daniel's coffee.

  "I think I'll wait another few minutes or so before I get too close," Serena said. "I don't care to have my neck snapped today."

  John took a deep, shuddering breath, then spoke softly, quietly. "Just do it, Serena," he said. "Just get out your stiletto and get it over with. Because I'm already dead. You killed me when you killed Mariah."

  "No!" It was Mariah who cried out this time. "Oh, God, no!"

  Whatever she was going to do, she had to do it fast. She tried to start the car again to no avail. She tried to rouse Daniel, but he was as unresponsive as the car's engine.

  FBI, he'd said. He and John were FBI.

  And FBI agents carried guns....

  Mariah searched through Daniel's pockets and through his clothes. It wasn't until she pushed him over and patted around his waist that she found what she was looking for. A gun, in some kind of holster at the small of his back.

  "I'm really sorry, but I think I need this," Mariah said to the unconscious man, as with shaking hands, she pulled his shirt free from his pants and drew out the gun. It was small and deadly looking, and warm to the touch from Daniel's body heat.

  She pushed open the car door and stepped out into the driving rain, pushing the gun into the back pocket of her shorts, praying that it had some kind of safety attachment that would keep her from shooting herself in the butt by mistake.

  She picked up her bike and pointed it back up the hill – away from town and the police. Her muscles strained as she started up the slight incline. She started to gather some real speed as she went past the still flaming ruins of her cottage.

  The neighboring house that lay between hers and Serena's was silent and empty, and the last of her hopes for getting help sank. There was no one home there. There was no way anyone could be home and not be out on the porch, or at least at the windows, watching the inferno next door.

  Still, Mariah kept pedaling up the hill. She didn't understand half of what was going on, but she knew one thing for damn sure. Serena wasn't going to kill John. Not if she had anything to say about it.

  Chapter 14

  "I never quit," Tony said sternly. "I confess I did a stupid thing, I got myself into a situation that there was no getting out of, but I spit at Domino as his boys were squeezing the triggers of their guns to blow me away."

  Miller's mouth was dry, his stomach queasy and his head felt as if it were floating a good twelve inches above his body. "Mariah's dead," he said. "She killed Mariah."

  "No talking," Serena said sharply. "No more talking!"

  Tony moved closer, lowering his voice. "You know, she's having some kind of ritualistic meal, getting into some kind of sicko trance while she's getting ready to skewer you, pal. And look at you. You've got your head on the table in a puddle of drool."

  "I don't care," Miller told him.

  It was amazing, actually. He had a bullet in his left arm, but it didn't hurt. He couldn't feel it. He couldn't feel anything. Nothing hurt. Nothing mattered. He honestly didn't care.

&
nbsp; "I can't believe it," Tony said. "This bitch killed Mariah, and you're going to let her get away with it? You're going to just quit? I don't know what happened in the past two years, baby, but you're not the John Miller I used to know."

  "I loved her," Miller said.

  "Yeah, right, maybe." Tony didn't sound convinced.

  "I told you to shut up!" Serena snapped.

  "I did," Miller insisted. "I loved her more than anything."

  "Not more than you love yourself," Tony pointed out. "If you did, you wouldn't quit. But you're scared because you know it's going to hurt you more than you can bear to wake up tomorrow morning and still be alive while Mariah's not. You want this bitch to shish-kebab you because Mariah's dead, because you couldn't save her, and because you can't deal with that."

  "Damn right I can't deal with that! God, every day for the rest of my life?"

  Serena clapped her hands together and the noise seemed to thunder around him. "I'm warning you!"

  Miller lifted his head, working hard to focus his eyes. "Go to hell," he snarled.

  "Attaboy," Tony murmured. "Get mad. Fight back."

  Mariah was dead. Mariah was dead. Christ, Mariah was dead.

  The pain of reality came stabbing through all of the layers of drug-induced numbness and apathy. Sweet, beautiful Mariah was gone forever, and Miller knew that Tony was right. As easy as it would be to quit, he couldn't do it. He couldn't just put his head down on the table and die.

  Not without making Serena pay.

  So instead, he put his head down on the table and waited for Serena to come closer.

  With his eyes opened and focused, Tony was gone. He was on his own here, without even his dreams and hallucinations to back him up. He tried to formulate a plan, tried to make his brain turn back into a brain again, rather than the soggy basket of wet laundry it had become.

  She would come close, and he would use every bit of strength he had left in his jell-o-like muscles, and he would...do something.