Obsession Falls

by Christina Dodd

  Two minutes later, Taylor heard a faint snore. She really, really hated this guy. She was crammed under the desk in a bathrobe, getting chilled. Her foot kept cramping. And the ignorant jackass snored on the bed as if he owned the place. If she was in charge of security, he would be kicking shit down the street.

  Five minutes. Ten minutes. Her wrist hurt. She tightened the Ace bandage. She stretched out her leg to ease the cramp, then tucked it back in. Fifteen minutes. She tried to arrange the bathrobe to cover more of her legs and closed her eyes. Twenty …

  From the door, Gary said, “What the hell?”

  She jumped so hard she bumped her head on the desktop.

  Thank God Logan jumped, too. “You son of a bitch! You scared me to death.”

  “Quick draw on the gun. Now put it away.” Gary sounded breathless.

  “Sorry, but you shouldn’t have scared me. Ever since that woman tried to murder that kid and then she disappeared, I’ve been nervous.” The bed creaked.

  I did not try to murder that kid.

  “You didn’t look nervous to me.” Legs walked past. “You looked asleep.”

  “Tough night last night.” Logan yawned. “My three-year-old is having nightmares, and when he does that, no one sleeps. One of the women at day care was talking about Taylor Summers in front of the kids. Can you believe how stupid that is? Now half the kids in town are scared to death about the Taylor boogeyman, who steals children and shuts them in the trunk, and the other half are egging them on with stories about how she’s going to get them.”

  “She’s dead,” Gary said.

  A pause. “Sheriff doesn’t think so.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  You’re kidding.

  Logan lowered his voice. “You can’t tell anybody this. It’s top-secret stuff. I was sworn to secrecy.”

  “You know I won’t.”

  You lying assholes. But she strained to listen.

  “Sheriff didn’t get called to the car explosion until after the scene was cleaned up. His deputy, Otis Sincoe, and I went to high school together, and Otis said Sheriff thinks that rich guy tampered with the evidence. Apparently, the rich guy has a thing about talking to her himself and getting the whole story.”

  Would Kennedy McManus listen? Or would he blindly take revenge?

  Logan finished, “He hired trackers, you know.”

  “So that Taylor Summers bitch is still alive?” Gary sounded eager, incredulous, hopeful.

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe. The rich guy pulled the trackers, so they must figure she’s dead.”

  “Rough out there in the mountains at night.”

  “Yep.” More yawning, some walking back and forth in front of the bed—Taylor figured Logan was straightening the comforter—while Logan said, “My mother and her mother were friends when the Summers were married, and after the big kidnapping/escape/explosion, Mom called to offer her condolences. Mrs. Summers said she felt terrible that she’d let Taylor’s father drag Taylor into the mountains, just the two of them. She figures he was abusing her, that’s why Taylor was so warped.”

  Taylor wanted to get up then. She wanted to tell them her father had never abused her. The abuse had been from her mother: the constant nagging, the subtle undermining, the resolve to make Taylor into a carbon copy of the prima donna beauty queen that Kimberly Summers Huddlestone had been and was.

  But Logan was sleep-deprived, he had a gun, he would be thrilled to bring her in.

  “That’s rough, but it doesn’t mean she had to become a killer,” Gary said.

  “Exactly. Mrs. Summers is going to be on Dr. Phil, though.”

  Taylor cringed.

  The two men walked toward the door.

  Logan said, “So, you checked the whole house? Did you find anything?”

  “Nothing.” Gary sounded disappointed.

  “We’ll kill the interior motion sensors.”

  Yes! Kill the sensors.

  Logan continued, “Brian is sending a technician out here first thing in the morning to find the electrocuted mouse and fix the damage.”

  “Electrocuted mouse. Okay. Makes sense.” Gary sounded relieved. “Now, tell me more about this Summers chick. What else did your mother find out?”

  Their voices faded as the two men headed out to turn off the sensors. Then the car outside started up, and they were gone.

  She shivered there for another ten minutes. Then she emerged and checked the front door, to make sure it was locked, and the drive to make sure they were gone.

  She had to search this house, find the equipment and food she needed, and get out fast. Get out before tomorrow when the security technician came back.

  And right now, she did not dare contact anyone. Not until she’d investigated every possibility, not until she’d considered every possible response.

  She had to save herself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Owning a successful business had taught Taylor to prioritize. So now, she turned on the computer and checked the weather report. A cold winter for the area. Great.

  Next, she Googled how to pick a lock.

  She learned with the right tools and a lot of patience, picking a lock was relatively simple. So simple, in fact, that she would never feel safe behind a locked door again. All she needed were lock picks and a small tension wrench, or she could substitute paper clips or bobby pins, and a small Allen wrench filed down at the end or a flathead screwdriver.

  She rummaged through the desk and found paper clips and bobby pins and a cheap flathead screwdriver. Obviously, Mrs. Renner liked to be prepared.

  Taylor printed out the information on the lock-picking, cleared the history, and shut down the computer. Picking up the Renners’ photo again, she considered the daughter, Cissie. This girl was a midget in a land of giants. She had issues. Best of all, she was approximately Taylor’s size.

  Fine. Taylor went off in search of the daughter’s room. She knew when she found it; the bedroom was trashed. Except it wasn’t. That was the way the kid kept it. The open dresser drawers had barfed clothes all over the floor.

  Cissie was nothing if not predictable. Taylor, meet Miss Rebellious Out of Place Teenager … who reminds you of you at that age.

  A narrow path led to the closet. There Taylor found and acquired a worn backpack, tossed in the darkest corner, a heavy coat, tossed in the other corner, a pair of heavy socks, smelly and balled up and tossed on a shelf, a knit hat, tossed in a tangled pile of computer cords, a pair of ski pants, tossed in the …

  Taylor knew from looking at the bedroom that the girl was so disorganized, the items wouldn’t be so much missed as assumed displaced. Scoldings might follow, but for Taylor, these items were necessary winter wear.

  Taylor dressed herself from the skin out, minus a bra since Cissie had not blossomed where Taylor had filled out. Tucked on the upper shelf, she found a faded Disney princesses sleeping bag. In severe conditions, it was never going to keep her warm, but she would take it until she found something better.

  Although Taylor assured herself Cissie wouldn’t get in trouble for the missing items, she still felt guilty, so she removed and cleaned the three milk glasses with mold in the bottom and the bowl of rotting green food matter. She refilled a glass with mints and stashed it in the bookcase headboard. She discovered and again covered the well-read copy of Twilight hidden under a pile of dirty clothes. No point in betraying the girl’s secret obsession with the ultimate teen romance, or the passionate, scribbled love notes in the margins.

  Taylor packed her extra clothing acquisitions into the backpack and turned away from Cissie’s room. And on second thought, turned back.

  The kid had something Taylor might need.

  At the back of Cissie’s suspiciously well-kept sock drawer, she found what she wanted: a clear baggie filled with weed, two rolled joints, papers, and a lighter. Taylor had first thought to let the kid keep her stash. After all, how much trouble could the girl get into up here where no one but t
he stars could see her smoke it?

  But no matter how desperately Taylor wanted to avoid the idea, she knew that up there, in the mountains, she might hurt herself. She might need a painkiller, and aspirin wouldn’t cut it.

  So she stole Cissie’s marijuana, knowing full-well Cissie would wonder if her brother had taken it, or her parents, and were tormenting her by saying nothing … or whether an intruder had sneaked in through the broken window and stolen only things from Cissie’s room. In any case, Taylor figured Cissie couldn’t complain.

  Now Taylor searched for camping gear. What she really needed, and did not find, was dried rations, a rated-for-cold sleeping bag, and a handheld can opener. But this family was into skiing and snowshoeing, not camping. So from the linen closet, she took a down blanket. From the pantry she chose fruit roll-ups, whole grain crackers, and pop-top cans of tuna. From the package kept in the file drawer in the desk, she took one unlined legal-sized tablet.

  She had managed to hang on to her drawing pencils and sharpener in her waist pack. She could make lists, jot down her thoughts, maybe take a few minutes to draw something …

  Immediately, the memory of Dash and Hernandez pulling that child out of the trunk slammed into her mind, and she doubled over in fear. When she opened her eyes, she had to bring her racing heart under control, had to unclench her fists, had to bring herself back up into sitting position. No matter how well she pretended she was dealing with her trauma, the truth was … she was ruled by terror. The memory of Dash chasing her, shooting at her, dominated her nightmares. At night, the fall into the midnight cave replayed again and again.

  She wiped tears from her eyes. She had no time for a breakdown. She had to care for herself. No one else would do so.

  When she had obtained all she dared, she stashed Cissie’s backpack by the French doors in the master bedroom—if necessary, she would escape that way with her hard-won supplies—and returned to the Internet for some hint of Dash’s employer. She looked for men with the first name of Jimmy or Jim or James who were associated with Dash, and found two—his uncle, James Roberts, and the football player Jimmy Baldwin. Roberts was retired military, living in Chicago with his wife of thirty years. Baldwin was fervently Christian. Neither of them seemed likely to employ a hit man, or to inspire the kind of awe and fear Jimmy inspired in both Dash and Hernandez. But what did she know? What kind of man would employ a hit man? She’d seen the movies. She’d read the books. But in real life? She had absolutely no idea.

  She researched Kennedy McManus and found quite a lot … and yet so little.

  He was a media darling: tall, handsome, square-jawed, unsmiling. Yet although speculation ran rampant, he guarded his privacy zealously, and after Taylor had waded through speculation and innuendo, all she had was the cold, bare facts of his life.

  With his younger sister, Tabitha, he had been removed from his parents’ care when he was ten and she was two. They had been put into foster care, sometimes together, sometimes apart. They lived through years in the system, years when his past, and hers, was unknown and unremarked. But his forte was data analysis, and he had emerged from high school with a scholarship to MIT. He had moved smoothly into college life, had created Empire of Fire, a complex role-playing game that required intensive, quick analysis to play and to win.

  When McManus graduated, he sold the game for a lot of money, and used the capital to finance his own data analysis company. From all accounts, McManus was intolerant of any kind of crime for any reason. He was a shark, cruising through the business waters, tracking down industrial spies, exposing embezzlers, and doing God knew what for the U.S. government. No wonder this Jimmy person hated Kennedy McManus. Somehow, in some business dealings, McManus had probably ripped the man to shreds.

  But how Jimmy had managed to find and kidnap McManus’s nephew, Taylor did not understand. She could discover little about the family; only that Tabitha had been about eighteen when McManus assumed guardianship of her and her two-year-old son, Miles, and they were seldom seen in public.

  McManus was thirty-two and unmarried. He never had taken the plunge, nor were his carnal affairs publicized in any way. Yet no one speculated on his sexuality; he was heterosexual, obsessively discreet about his partners, and charismatic, with blue eyes fringed by black lashes, thick black hair, and the bulk of a WWE wrestler. Although Taylor stared with fascination at his picture for a long, long time, she had no desire to sleep with him.

  If she had to have a man permanently in her life, she knew what she wanted: a man who would love her more than his job, put her first above his friends and family, respect her as a partner, not as decoration or a convenience.

  But more than that, she wanted a man who could sweep her away with desire, with passion, with craving, who cared nothing about the proper way to make love, and everything about the rhythm of sex. She wanted lust. She wanted unbridled sexuality. She demanded a man who could—no, would—dance with her past reason, past need, and over the cliff into ecstasy.

  Her fiancés had failed to fulfill those requirements. But she had met a few guys like that. Trouble was, they weren’t much for her other requisite: fidelity. She expected it from her man; she would give it to him in return.

  To the artist’s discerning eye—and she flattered herself that at least she had that—Kennedy McManus’s character was clear. Passion? No. He held contempt for passion, for flights of fancy, for desperate yearning and wild obsession. His cold gaze could cut glass. His chest was too rock-hard to cradle a woman’s head. His grim expression forgave nothing. He reminded her of Dash: ruthless, uninterested, single-minded … selfish.

  The nephew, Miles McManus, was home and safe, and she felt sorry for the kid. Hopefully his mother had welcomed him with joy and gratitude, but Taylor could not imagine Kennedy welcoming the child, holding him close, shedding a tear of joy over his return.

  Scary guy, Kennedy McManus. She did not want to contact him.

  But although she would look for another way out of this mess, she feared a meeting with Kennedy was in her future.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In San Francisco, in the executive suite of McManus Enterprises, Kennedy McManus sat at his desk, staring at the monitor mounted on the wall where a montage of Taylor Summers photographs stared back at him.

  Where was the woman?

  When Miles was kidnapped from his school and his phone found in a Dumpster outside the Oakland airport, Kennedy didn’t call the police or the FBI. Instead, he had sat down and examined the event as reported by the children and staff. He had deduced who on the inside had cooperated with the criminals, and called Helen Allen into his office. Within an hour, she had confessed all she knew.

  A man who somehow knew her financial need had contacted her and offered her twenty-five thousand dollars to deliver Miles to him. The stranger was tall and handsome, and he said he was the child’s father; he had sworn all he wanted to do was see his kid. Helen Allen had told Miles about the man, told him his father wanted to meet him, and Miles had gone with her. Just like that.

  The child whom Kennedy had so carefully instructed on what to believe, whom to trust, had gotten in the car and traveled to the Oakland airport because he so badly wanted to know his father.

  Kennedy and Tabitha had assured Miles his father was dead.

  Apparently Miles had not believed them.

  And Miles was right: his father was very much alive, in east L.A., living on the streets, selling drugs, taking drugs …

  Even now, Kennedy didn’t know how much of Miles’s action was foolishness, how much was blind hope, and how much was defiance of Kennedy’s directives. But the results had been disastrous, and led both Miles and Kennedy to a rugged roadside in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.

  When Kennedy arrived in the helicopter with his security team, Ramon Hernandez had been headed for the black Mercedes, keys in hand. When he saw Kennedy, Hernandez pulled a pistol and started shooting.

  Kennedy had dropped him with a gunshot t
o the leg. At the same time, one of his team shot and killed Hernandez before he could be questioned.

  Kennedy had not been pleased. Kennedy had looked into his employee’s background, but saw no sign he had profited from the move. Nevertheless, he had been removed from Kennedy’s security and put into a more innocuous position.

  The team had at once begun to examine the evidence, to try to construct the state of affairs.

  Miles’s school necktie was wrapped around the inside of the trunk latch—a clear signal he had been there.

  But the boy was nowhere to be seen.

  The trackers on the team pointed to the skidding footprints through the meadow.

  Miles was alone and moving fast, running for his life.

  So Kennedy went looking for his nephew. With one tracker ahead and one tracker behind, he followed the steep trail of broken branches up the side of the mountain, calling, bellowing, for Miles.

  Kennedy had not come this far to lose him now.

  After a half mile, Miles came careening out of the brush and flung himself into Kennedy’s arms. Kennedy’s relief exploded in affection—he fell to his knees and hugged Miles—then exasperation—he took Miles by the shoulders and shook him, and told him never to do anything so foolish again—then hugged him once more.

  And guilt gnawed at him.

  Kennedy’s father had died in a prison ward in the hospital. Kennedy’s mother was in prison. Although he made sure they had had, and his mother continued to have, the best of care, all Kennedy had in this world was Tabitha and this boy. They were his to care for, and he had failed them both.

  It would not happen again.

  They got back down the mountain to the helicopter, and found one of the trackers examining the other side of the road. She said, “There was another person here.”

  Miles’s face was streaked with tears and snot, dirt and blood and vomit, but when Kennedy looked at him, he straightened like a soldier and said, “Yes! He was a long-armed, mean gorilla asshole, and I hope you kill him, too.”