by Janet Dailey
He watched the broadcast, mentally filling in the inevitable blanks. Project 25, his current assignment, involved developing relational matrixes for ground intelligence gathered on multiple fronts. It just might get the GIs and the generals out of there and back home sooner than anyone seemed to think. However, it didn’t qualify Linc as a hero, local or otherwise.
Which was okay. Being more or less invisible suited him fine.
Linc got up and switched off the report, tossing the remote onto the bed. It slid off, landing on the formalwear that still lay sprawled on the floor like a body outline at a crime scene. He reached down to grab it, and gathered up the clothes while he was at it, slinging them over the back of a chair.
Enough housekeeping. He needed to check in—that wasn’t optional. Project 25 personnel had some leeway in terms of where they worked, and face time wasn’t that high a priority. Still, everyone’s hours and output got tracked, and he wasn’t exempt from performance reviews.
He’d brought in a laptop from his car, a good one that looked ordinary but wasn’t. He kept it stashed inside a hidden compartment under the backseat, along with a specialized toolkit that held a lot of useful gizmos.
One was a bug sweeper. Not for the kind of bugs that went splat on the windshield. He would need it to check Kenzie’s rental car and his own. Twice a day.
Linc tapped the side of the laptop cover. It opened at a touch, keyed to his fingerprint. Anyone else trying to use it would trigger a failsafe self-destruct.
Checking the encryption out of habit, Linc logged in at a workplace about a hundred miles to the north and joined a bull session at the digital water cooler for several minutes. Then he settled down, ready to immerse himself in work.
Out of habit, he glanced at his cell phone. The small screen showed black. He didn’t check the call log, not expecting Kenzie to check in. For one thing, she prided herself on not seeming weak, which was a word that didn’t describe her at all.
He pushed the phone aside, not noticing that it had gone dead.
Kenzie was still in her rented car when her own cell rang and she snatched it up, pulling over again. Not Linc. One of the Corellis.
Christine’s mother sounded weary as she said hello and gave Kenzie an update. Dr. Asher had discussed the latest round of tests and assured them that their daughter, though still unconscious, was doing relatively well.
Kenzie heard the doubt in Mrs. Corelli’s voice on that score.
“Anyway, dear, how are you?”
She managed not to blurt out what had just happened, though the Corellis would have to know, and soon.
“Oh—okay, I guess. I think I got all the paperwork.”
“Good. I’ll look at it tomorrow. Thanks so much for all your help.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Kenzie said quickly, “are you staying at Christine’s apartment tonight?” She had no idea how to forestall either of the Corellis if the answer was yes.
There was a pause on the other end. “No,” Mrs. Corelli said finally. “Being in her place with all her things, remembering how happy she was there, just hurts. That was Christine before the accident.”
Kenzie swallowed hard. “I understand.”
“I’m going to my sister’s house instead. Alf will bed down on the cot in the hospital room.”
So neither of them would be going back to Christine’s apartment tonight. That was a relief.
She wanted desperately to talk to Linc about how to tell them. He had damn well better return her call or show up at her place per her message. If he wasn’t quick about it, she’d be gone for good when he got there.
A strange sensation of calm descended on her as she drove the rest of the way. She didn’t recognize it as shock. Her perceptions felt heightened, her nerves stretched taut.
Kenzie scanned the parking lot behind her building. There were no cars she didn’t recognize. Even so, she was on the alert until she was safely behind her own door.
Once inside, she dumped the purse stuffed with documents and ran to the closet. In a frenzy, Kenzie yanked open the sliding door, dragging out the nylon-web tote bags she’d bought at a dollar store.
Preferred by homeless people everywhere, she thought, raging inwardly. She was now one of them. She threw a bulky jacket into one and several pairs of sneakers into another, then pulled out her wheeled carry-on to fill that too.
A knock at the door stopped her cold. Kenzie straightened without responding, trying to think of a weapon—hammer, wine bottle, anything that she could reach in time to whack the stalker with. A plastic hanger wasn’t going to do it.
She stayed where she was, listening. The doorknob didn’t start to turn. The locks didn’t rattle. There was no slasher-movie creak of the hinges. But that didn’t mean she was safe.
“Hey. It’s Linc.” His deep voice made her breath catch. Her blood flowed again, warming her.
She walked noiselessly to the door and looked through the peephole. Fast and from the side, just in case.
It was Linc. Kenzie opened the door and stood there.
“Got your message. Sorry it wasn’t sooner—my phone wasn’t charged and I didn’t notice.”
“Brilliant.”
“Yeah, well, I do stupid things. Anyway, I chose the come-on-over option,” he said lightly. “We need to talk about some stuff.” He glanced down at the filled nylon bags and open but empty carry-on behind her. “What are you doing?”
“Packing.”
The curt answer seemed to startle him and he looked at her curiously. “Oh.”
Her relief at seeing him opened up the floodgates to a whole lot of other feelings. One was anger. With him, even though she knew it was irrational. If he’d gone with her in the first place, picked up when she’d called afterward—don’t, she told herself. He couldn’t read her mind. He didn’t know about the man with the burning eyes.
Linc kept his tone casual. “Want to tell me where you’re going?”
Actually, she didn’t. Right now she wanted to crawl into an armor-plated bunker and keep her head down. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here. I just came from Christine’s apartment.”
“So you said. Did her mother call you there?” He looked at her intently. “Tell me right now if Christine took a turn for the worse.”
“No. I talked to Mrs. Corelli on the way home. According to the doctors, Christine is doing somewhat better. But her mom didn’t sound that sure.”
“Why not?”
“Probably because she’s too exhausted to think straight,” Kenzie answered bluntly. “She’s going to stay with her sister tonight instead of at Christine’s apartment.”
“Sounds like a plan.” He looked at her warily. “Back to you. Are you all right?”
“Not exactly,” she answered in a monotone. “I have to get out of here. Now.” The last word hung in the air.
“Okay.”
He took a slow step toward her as if he intended to touch her and she took three fast steps back.
Confusion clouded his gaze.
She forced her breathing into a nice, slow pace. Linc stayed silent.
He looked around at her immaculate apartment, analyzing every object in it with his eyes, searching for something that he couldn’t find.
“Something bad happened. You won’t say what and I can’t see it.” He studied her, from head to toe, almost clinically. “And you look the same but I think you’re in shock.”
“Why?”
“You tell me. Wait a sec. I’m going to sit over here”—he took an armchair across the room and pointed to the couch—“and you can sit over there, and when you’re ready, then tell me.”
“Go to hell.” She was trembling.
“That’s a start. Now sit down. Give it to me. Both barrels.”
“Where were you? What were you doing?” There was a thread of panic in her voice.
“I drove all the way home to Clearston to get my car and my work laptop. On the way back I stopped for barbecue—�
�
“Of course. Barbecue does dissolve brain cells. That is a scientific fact.”
He thought he detected a fractional softening. Maybe not. Either way, it didn’t seem like the time to ask her if she’d seen the Frank Branigan coverage on the local station.
“Kenzie, you must have really wanted to talk to me. I’m here. I’m listening.”
She finally sat down, clenching and unclenching her hands. “There’s not much to say. I went to Christine’s, found her stuff. Then—” In a raw voice, she told him every detail she could remember of her brief time in the apartment, ending with the terrifying face on the screen.
When she was done, Linc nodded soberly. “Got it. And now you want to get out of here.”
“Yeah. I do. I’m not waiting for Mr. Evil Eyes to knock on my door or show up on my laptop screen.”
He leaned forward, his hands clasped in front of him. “Christine’s laptop is still there, right?”
She swore. “I was thinking of taking it. But I slammed it shut and left it on the floor.”
“I’ll go back for it tomorrow,” he said.
“What for, Linc?”
He smiled slightly. “Because I don’t want someone else to take it. Does that make sense to you?”
“Nothing is making sense right now.”
He raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Just trying to think this through. I hate to see you on the run.”
“I don’t see an alternative.”
“Kenzie, this is your home.” He waved a hand at the amber living room.
“Those are walls and that is paint,” she snapped. “It comes in a can. The hardware store has lots of it.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Linc, home is where you feel safe. Right now I don’t. Not anywhere.”
“I hear you.”
“It’s not a big deal to just go, you know. Don’t forget I’m an army brat. Pick up, pack up, and start over—I did it all my life with my mom and dad.”
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Dial it down, okay? I’m on your side. All the way. I just wish I lived closer to Ridgewood. You could—”
“Oh no,” she burst out. “I’m not going to leave the Corellis to deal with everything at the hospital and—what? Stay with you at the motel?”
“I didn’t ask you to,” Linc said in a reasonable tone. His comment seemed to irk her. She got up again, walking quickly around the apartment.
He watched her for a while. Her restless, almost instinctive movements reminded him of a sleek, nervous cat. Not a housecat, though. Something more like an ocelot. Or a smallish panther. His nature-show thoughts were interrupted by her whizzing by to grab more stuff out of a closet. She slammed open the sliding door so fast it bounced off the track.
She actually didn’t have that much stuff, he noticed. And what she had was organized to the nth degree.
“Slow down,” he said in a measured tone.
“I can’t. I get kind of hyper when my friends and my life are in danger. I’m funny that way.”
Linc got up. He kept his distance. The shock waves were still hitting her. They’d come and go. And eventually wear off, but maybe not tonight. He could deal. He was fairly sure she couldn’t do him any serious damage.
“Make yourself useful,” she said curtly. “You can box up the blender and the stacked plates. Get started.”
A blender. The china. She was irrational, no doubt about it. But he still didn’t like being ordered around. “You eat off plates?” he responded. “You mean someone just doesn’t poke meat through the bars at sundown?” Maybe a joke would get through to her. If not, he was in for it.
Kenzie stopped in her tracks and dropped the box she was holding to the floor. Faster than he could imagine, her hand came up—and he felt a stinging sensation in his cheek before he realized that she’d slapped him.
Gently but quickly Linc grabbed her wrist on the way down. “Don’t do that again,” he said pleasantly. “I’m not the enemy. Get that straight.”
Kenzie broke free with a tremendous effort. She stood there for a few seconds, rubbing her wrist and breathing hard. “If you’re here to help, I guess I could be a little more grateful,” she said at last.
Linc suppressed a faint smile. “Fine with me. Just remember I can take you in a fair fight.”
“Maybe.” She picked up the box and shoved it at him. “Put this in the car.”
He took it and set it by the door. “How about here?”
Kenzie stopped rushing around and gave him an odd look. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Yeah. Tearing out the door with half of what you own is not a good idea. You have to calm down.”
“I can’t.” She glanced at the random belongings she’d already stuffed into the nylon bags as if she had no idea how they’d gotten there.
“Then pack what you need for a couple of nights, no more than that, and I’ll come up with a plan.”
Kenzie stared at him. “Excuse me? Did I ask you to take charge?”
“No.”
“Next you’ll be telling me where I should go. Got any ideas?”
“Not yet.”
She poked him in the chest. “Then don’t distract me and don’t get in my damn way.”
“Kenzie, you’re too scared to think straight.”
“No, I’m not,” she said in a clipped voice. “Stop lecturing me. Get out of here. Just get out.”
“I’m not leaving you alone.”
She brushed past him and Linc caught her arm.
“Let go,” she snapped, twisting out of his hold.
He tried another tack. “At some point, we should contact Lieutenant Warren. You canceled that appointment with him, right?”
“I did, and I told him I’d call soon.”
“Okay. You’re in no shape to do it now, but when you can—”
Kenzie turned to face him. “What good will it do?”
“Look, I don’t know what he’s going to say and neither do you, but he has to know about this. Just call the nice policeman.” Linc was losing patience. “Let someone help you. It doesn’t have to be me.”
“I told you I didn’t get a screen grab and I don’t really remember what the guy looked like,” she burst out.
“Even so. Kenzie, if you could just settle down—”
She waved away what he was going to say and drew in a shaky breath. “The face I saw—that’s gone.”
She pressed her lips together, hard. The brilliant shimmer of tears in her eyes told Linc how afraid she was for her friend. And herself.
Linc chose his next words carefully. “You might remember more about him than you think. Trust me on that.”
She shook her head. He didn’t know which statement she was saying no to.
“While it’s still fresh in your mind—when you’re ready—if you could describe exactly what happened again and I could ask a few questions—”
Kenzie closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “Oh hell. Go ahead.”
“I don’t think it was a coincidence that he was onscreen when you got back to the laptop,” Linc began. “You said you were waiting for it to shut down by itself, right?”
“Yeah. It didn’t. Tell me why.”
“Probably because he’d gained remote access to the hard drive. My guess is, he was watching you through the webcam with the on light shut off.”
“What a fun game. Red light, green light. Kenzie gets stalked.”
He looked at her steadily. “That’s right.”
She fell silent for several moments. “Was he far away?”
“It’s possible to activate a webcam or control a hard drive from thousands of miles away or right next door. It’s not that complicated.”
She shuddered.
“Draw a circle on a mental map. I just did. Everything is happening within a fifty-mile radius. He’s not in another country. He’s here.”
“Do you think he followed me to Christine’s apart
ment?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
Linc explained it as simply as he could. “He didn’t have to break down the door. All he had to do was hack into her laptop, and there’s a million ways to do that. He knew the second you opened it.”
“It fell on the floor. I actually didn’t open it.”
“He got lucky with that. But he did know you were there. He could have been in a car on the street. How would you know if you weren’t looking for him?”
“I was, though. Right and left.”
“Look, it’s clear to me even at this stage that this guy is good at his game.”
Kenzie’s eyes flashed with angry fire. “That laptop has Christine’s whole life in it, just about. Photos, web bookmarks, browser history, her documents—can he get into everything?”
“Yeah. Most likely he already has. Which is another reason I want to get it back and look at it, run some scans. I should be able to find a few digital footprints.”
Kenzie raised a hand to her neck and slowly rubbed the tense muscles. “Do you think he followed me here?”
“Definitely a possibility and no big deal for him. It’s safe to say that he knows where you live.”
She straightened and walked away from him. “I kept checking my rearview mirror on the way home and I took different streets. I didn’t see anyone behind me.”
“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.”
“True.” She sank into an upholstered chair and clutched the padded armrests, drumming her fingers on the taut material.
“Getting back to what we were talking about—what exactly did you do with the laptop? Before you ran out, I mean.”
“I slammed it shut and left it on the floor.”
Linc frowned. “So it’s in standby mode.”
“What of it?” she asked. “I’m not going to give him a second chance to trap me.”
Linc nodded in agreement. “Good. Me neither.”
She cleared her throat. “Hey, you can be my hero.” He didn’t miss the ironic edge in the comment. “And by the way, I assume you have a gun.”
Linc knew that was about as close as Kenzie would come to actually asking him for help. “I do.”
