by Virna DePaul
He and Cara were only meant to be temporary, but the thought of her quitting and permanently walking away from him made him want to punch someone again.
Suddenly his thoughts became clear. He’d focus on figuring out who was gunning for them and protecting her from any further harm. He’d figure out his confusing feelings for Cara. But he wanted Cara close by while he did so.
He picked up his phone and dialed a number. “Hey, Lee, what do you have for me?”
“Cara Michal used her credit card to book a flight to Buffalo that leaves on Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.” Lee gave him the flight information and Branden wrote it down. “Then she used it to book a room at the Falls Resort, also in Buffalo. You want me to keep Howe on her?”
“Keep him on her until she gets on the plane. I’ll take over from there.”
“Figured that might be the case.”
“Thanks, Lee. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“No problem, boss.”
Branden hung up and then he made another call. This one was to a travel agent that he used for all of his travel needs. She always took his calls no matter what time of day or night it was. He paid her handsomely for it.
“Hi, Branden.”
“Hi, Greta, I need a favor. I want to go to Buffalo and I want to leave on Wednesday from JFK and I want to be on Transamerica flight number 714.”
Greta laughed. “That’s very specific,” she said.
“Can you do it?”
“Of course I can,” she said.
“One other thing, can you upgrade seat S11 to first class?”
“Absolutely. Where are you staying?”
He gave her the name of the hotel and thanked her again. He hung up knowing how pissed Cara was going to be when she saw him on that flight.
He’d just have to make sure she got over it.
Chapter Twenty-three
Tuesday morning, Cara dressed and ate yogurt while standing by her living room window, looking absently at the ongoing construction across the street. The entire building was shrouded in black netting by now, the scaffold barely visible between it and the building’s walls.
They could be adding a new facade. It was the quickest way to revamp an older building and turn it around for sale or rental. But the constant din told her otherwise—maybe it was being gutted and turned into lofts. Cara wasn’t actually sure if it was originally office or residential space. The building had just been there, solid as a mountain, rather nondescript with not much in the way of architectural ornamentation.
Her phone, which was on the kitchen table next to her laptop, buzzed with an incoming text. After finalizing her vacation plans, Cara had stayed offline. She was too afraid the video of her and Branden would pop up everywhere, or that she’d discover another version, one that its creator had done more with, gotten really down and dirty, turned her into a flaming whore for his own delectation.
She didn’t actually need the laptop that much. She had her smartphone to read and send email. When it buzzed again, she put her yogurt cup down and picked it up. It was vibrating with a text from Iris marked Urgent. Cara tapped the little screen.
Sox had six!
The kittens. She was glad she’d delivered the scarf thing ahead of time. She responded. Great. Bet she’s glad it’s over. How cute are they?
Another vibration. Unbelievably cute. All different colors. Mama doing well. Iris attached a snapshot of the plump little fur balls lined up at the milk bar.
Awwww.
Iris texted back. I spell it awwwesome. K, gotta go. Cute neighbor Fred’s here.
Ah. Cute neighbor guy had a name now—Fred.
Cara would have liked to see the kittens but didn’t want to be a third wheel. Besides, she had a lot to do already what with visiting Glenn and her mom.
She set the phone down. She’d already arranged to rent a car, and when she walked to pick it up, the beautiful spring day should have cheered her. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
She stopped to see Glenn first. He was happy to see her, and they played Scrabble for a couple of hours. She didn’t tell him she was going away, just that she’d see him soon. If he needed her, she’d be able to get to him and she didn’t want him to worry or get upset.
After visiting Glenn, she drove to her mom’s.
“It’s good to see you, honey. Come on in. The place is a mess. Sorry.”
It always was. A sign of depression, probably, but Cara had long ago given up on trying to get her mother into counseling, or on an antidepressant. Cara cleared off a seat next to the one her mother always used at the cluttered dining room table.
“Maybe you can help me. I got this budget book.” It had been left open on the table. Her mother sat when she did and smoothed the mostly blank pages before she picked up a pen from a desk organizer engraved with her married name, Janine Finch.
“Nice.” Cara saw no reason to point out that similar books could be found under the heaps of stuff with no more than a page or two filled in before they were abandoned.
Her mom took the rubber band off a wad of unopened household bills. “First I have to sort these out so I can begin to track expenses.”
That was a step in the right direction, a new one for her mother. Cara sucked it up and took on the task without criticizing. “Okay. Done.”
Janine gave her a wan smile. “Not yet. There’s more where those came from.” She nudged a plastic crate out from under the tablecloth, crammed with more papers, more unopened bills, outdated flyers, and junk mail.
Cara allowed herself an inward sigh. She was here, she would help. But the atmosphere of defeat and depression she always felt in her mother’s house seemed heavier and more oppressive today. The autumn wind rattled the closed windows. She wanted to fling them open and let the chilly wind blow away the dust that had long since settled over the clutter everywhere. But she stayed put and kept working.
The crate was emptied of its contents in another hour and the filled-up columns in the budget book ran to several pages. The final tally was discouraging. Cara couldn’t put a positive spin on those numbers.
“What am I going to do?” Her mother’s voice was weary, as if the reality of her situation was more than she could bear. She glanced once more at the book, then closed it.
“I’ll think of something.”
Her mother sighed, reaching across the table to retrieve a faded velvet box. “I have jewelry that I don’t wear anymore. The place down the street buys gold for cash.”
“Please don’t sell anything Daddy wore.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Cara.” Her mother raised the lid on the box, looking at the jumbled contents. “There’s his signet ring. You can have it now if you want. And the old pocket watch that belonged to your grandfather. Take both.” She lifted them from the box and held them up.
Cara accepted the offering in silence. Her mother must have searched hard for the velvet box, which Cara vaguely remembered had once held a set of silver spoons. It had been a very long time since Cara had seen the ring or the watch. Her mother had put Hank Finch’s effects away long ago. God only knew what had made her find them again.
“There’s that hideous bracelet from my cousin,” her mother said, breaking the spell. “She never liked the damn thing, so she gave it to me. I can’t say I’m sentimental about it.” She lifted it out and let it dangle from a finger. “Fourteen karat. And it’s heavy. That takes care of the next heating bill, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose so. Just don’t sell anything Daddy gave you, either.”
Her mother rubbed the wedding band she’d never removed. “I never have and I never will.”
“Thanks for these.” Cara tucked the signet ring and watch into her purse. “I don’t really have anything that was specifically his.”
“Now you do.”
“Were they in the attic with his things?”
“No. I’d put them away for safekeeping. Then couldn’t find them, of course. So I turned the house
upside down. Can’t you tell?”
“Not really,” Cara answered honestly. “It looks about the same as it always does.”
“Ungrateful child you are.” But there was a gleam of laughter in her mother’s eye. “So…Everything’s planned for your trip?”
“Yes. All set.”
“What if something happens to Glenn while you’re gone?” Her mother’s voice quavered a bit.
“Then they’ll call, Mom. Iris is going to be checking in with you and Glenn while I’m gone. I need this time away.”
“I know, honey. You work so hard. I’m sorry, I just worry…”
Cara leaned over and gave her mother a hug. “I know, but don’t, okay? I will come back refreshed and renewed and everything will be fine. Glenn is in good hands, and Iris will take care of anything you need while I’m gone.”
“Okay, honey,” her mother said. “Do you mind if I take a nap before we eat?”
“Of course not. Get some rest and then we’ll go someplace fun.”
While her mother napped, Cara tried to read and just relax, but her mind kept wandering to work and Branden.
Eventually she put the book down. Having her father’s ring and grandfather’s watch made her want to see some more of her dad’s old things.
She climbed the pull-down stairs into the attic and found the boxes of things she and her mother had packed up and brought from the other house after her father had died. When she was younger, she’d come up here and sit next to the boxes and think about him, but she hadn’t had the strength to go through them.
Now she felt compelled to. She figured going through her father’s things would give her strength and ground her in her decision to leave Branden and D&M behind. After all, she and her mother had started anew after her father’s scandal. Her father hadn’t had that chance, but if he’d lived, Cara liked to think that he’d have done whatever he could to move on.
She sat down on the floor and began going through the boxes. She found his things from college, and his commendations from work. There were photos of him graduating high school. He looked so young and hopeful…it broke Cara’s heart that his life had been cut so short.
She pulled out a stack of paperwork; in it was his high school diploma, his college diploma, a copy of his degree from his business school, and some paperwork from his job with the city that must have been put into one of the wrong boxes.
One of the papers was a spreadsheet printed out on the city’s letterhead. It was a graph that had been charted with red, blue, and green lines. The right side was a list of employee benefit funds and the top was a list of years. Across the bottom were monetary figures. The chart spanned the five years before her father was arrested. It had a date on the bottom indicating when it was printed off of Excel. That day had been a week before her father had been arrested.
Cara felt a tickle of excitement in the pit of her belly. Her father had been accused of embezzling from the city’s pension fund. Could this document have had something to do with that? Had he been looking into it? But if he had, why wouldn’t he have said so? Perhaps he had been looking into it but hadn’t come up with anything definitive. There was certainly nothing on the graph, as far as Cara could see, to exonerate him or incriminate Davies any further.
Cara tucked the graph safely into one of the file folders and took it downstairs with her. When she got back from vacation, she’d go through the rest of these boxes.
—
As Cara drove home, heavy clouds obscured the highest buildings in the Manhattan skyline as she headed west over the bridge. The signet ring was too big for her but she wore it anyway, on her thumb. She had a gold chain somewhere she could slide it onto. The pocket watch needed repair—did anyone still repair watches? Whatever the cost, it would be worth it to her. Her father had treasured the old timepiece, opening the engraved gold lid for her when she was very small so she could hear it tick.
New tech just didn’t have that kind of old-timey magic. She dropped off the car at the rental place below street level in a parking garage and walked the few blocks home, still full after eating most of her entrée at the diner.
Her apartment was sunk in shadow that the hall light slashed into—she had forgotten to turn on a lamp before her departure. Cara moved swiftly across the living room and switched on a light. The warm illumination made the ordinary furniture look welcoming and chased away the gloom outside. She’d forgotten to lower the blinds, too.
It seemed like too much trouble to do it now. Besides, the construction workers were long gone. The black-shrouded building across the street was virtually invisible.
She took off the signet ring and set it next to the pocket watch on the table that held her closed laptop. That seemed ordinary again, a neutral object with no power to hurt her.
She still wasn’t tempted to open it and watch a movie or anything that was streamed. She could do that on her smartphone if she squinted and turned the volume way up. An hour or so of a rom-com would kill the time between now and crawling under the covers.
Cara wandered into her bedroom and put on the pajamas she’d left on the floor, then settled in on the couch.
She had a text from Iris. Check out our kittycam. Live from the laundry room.
Cara grinned when she saw the link and clicked on it. The blurry image resolved into a tangle of six small fur balls. The returning mother cat stepped back into the box and bumped the kittycam. A black blur filled the screen. Cara waited. Apparently Socks was actually sitting on the lens.
“Okay. I get the message. You want to be alone.”
Cara gave up and sent Iris a text to that effect, not expecting a reply. None came. She puttered around her apartment, leafing through a few magazines she’d read before, bored after a while. Then her eye caught her laptop.
Fuck it. What were the chances of another sex tape arriving at the exact second she went online?
Cara ignored the odds and booted up. She browsed the news, shopping sites, tomorrow’s weather—there was nothing of interest. Sometimes the Internet was only good for making you sleepy. She yawned, about to shut down the laptop again, waiting for the hard drive to cooperate when a voice stopped her cold.
Just a voice. Not a tape. It was robotic, without an accent of any kind, without inflection. Obviously male, on the deep side. She guessed it had been digitally altered from the first words she heard.
“Hello, Cara.”
She looked around, instinctively making sure that there was no one in the apartment. The voice seemed too resonant for her laptop’s small speakers.
“No need to look for me. I’m not far away.”
The chilling statement was not reassuring. It was terrifying.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Maybe it was better not to respond, not to engage at all, but she couldn’t help herself.
“No one you know.” The monotone voice gave equal emphasis to each word. “But I know you. What you want. Who you want. You can’t have him, Cara. Not for real.”
“Are—are you real?”
She suddenly wanted to keep the robot talking. There was a hint of something familiar in the altered voice. She couldn’t place it. Cara strained to hear.
“I used to be a real man. Strong. Respected. Not anymore.”
Whatever he might mean by that didn’t matter. She picked up on the sullen self-pity underlying the carefully chosen words.
Skip the psychoanalysis, she told herself. Keep him talking. She stretched out a hand toward her smartphone. Maybe she could record this weird conversation. The little light above the camera lens in her laptop shell wasn’t on. The robot wasn’t watching her.
“Who do you think I want? Branden?”
“You can’t have him,” the voice insisted. “Not for real. All you’ll ever be to him is a good fuck. That’s why I make the tapes for you, Cara. So you can see what you are to him. So the world can see what you are. Branden Duke’s lay. His big hands all over you. Feeling you. Bare-assed slut. You two like
to play a little rough. He gets you hot, doesn’t he. Doesn’t he.”
The voice-altering software apparently didn’t allow for question marks.
“Yes.” She grabbed her phone, looking away from the laptop, desperately trying to find the record function. Was that it? The microphone icon? Cara tapped it without knowing for sure whether she’d guessed right. “Is there more? Do you have another tape for me?”
“Yeah.” The single word burst from the speakers, edged with ominous roughness. The beast was straining at his chain.
The laptop screen exploded with obscene images, each erasing the other at strobe speed, a shifting kaleidoscope view of dark acts and hidden desires. Cara could not be sure that the woman she saw tied to a chair was herself or that the hooded man in leather leggings and strapped boots was Branden.
The ugly show went on for several more seconds. It was all about anger. Humiliation. Punishment. The strong against the weak. There was no pleasure in it. Just a soul-consuming, self-degrading lust that overwhelmed all else. She couldn’t watch. Cara raised her hand to slam the laptop shut when the voice spoke again.
“You can make it stop forever, Cara.” There was a fractional change in the tone. The voice was less robotic. Faintly coaxing. “Branden has to meet with me. You have to make him do it. By himself. You can’t watch what happens. Just get him there.”
She heard herself whisper. “How?”
“We will talk again. But first I want to show you that I’m real. Look out the window.”
And be shot at? No way. She went sideways off her chair to the floor and crawled under the window.
“You look sexy on all fours. I want you like that, Cara.”
Oh, God—was he watching her?
“Yes, Cara. I can see you. The camera light doesn’t have to be on for me to see you. You don’t know much about hacking, do you.”
The robot was back, droning again. But she caught a tinge of pride in his icy voice. She was in shock. He could see her. She’d read about such a thing before. The ability to hack into someone’s computer and observe them without so much as a video light to give you away. She just figured that was something the FBI did, not your everyday stalker. But she should have known that given the CGI-enhanced videos he’d produced, this guy wasn’t an average anything.
