The Obsession

by Nora Roberts

  “What?”

  “I said I’m buying the grill.”

  Sauté some chicken breasts, she thought. Garlic, herbs, wine. Distracted, she turned to him. “The grill? Seriously, Xander.”

  “Grills are serious.”

  Now she did laugh. “I’d be the last one to say any cooking appliance or tool isn’t serious, which is why I’ve been researching and eliminating and considering online.”

  “Have you ever bought a grill before?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  It occurred to her he was thinking, and feeling, something other than grief. So she stretched it out. “You don’t know the features I want, the brand, the size. We’re having chicken, rice, mixed vegetables,” she decided.

  “You don’t buy a grill online any more than you buy a car online.”

  Because she felt better herself, she took another poke. “Have you ever bought a grill?”

  “Kevin has, twice, and I was with him both times. It’s the same thing.”

  She began to assemble her ingredients. “Well, there’s plenty of time to decide before summer.”

  “There’s your first wrong turn—well, second since the whole online deal. You get the right grill, you use it year-round, especially when you can put it right outside the kitchen like you can here.”

  She got a pot for the rice, put it on the stove, then came to the counter so she could face him while she minced garlic. “I had no idea you were so serious about outdoor grills. The things you learn.”

  “I’m buying the grill.”

  They’d see about that.

  “Do you know how to peel carrots?”

  Frowning, he took a slow sip of beer. “Probably.”

  She pulled carrots out of the fridge, got a peeler, pushed them to his side of the counter. “Good, peel these.”

  “I thought you scraped them off with a knife.”

  It was her turn for pity. “Sure, if you want to take all day and make a mess out of it. You just . . .” She picked up a carrot and peeler and demonstrated.

  “Okay, okay. I’ve got it.”

  Mason came back in to see Xander with a small pile of carrot peels, scowling at the carrot he worked on stripping. And his sister at the stove sautéing garlic.

  Pretty homey, he thought. Maybe Xander looked out of his milieu, but altogether, pretty homey.

  “Mason, do you remember how to floret a cauliflower?”

  “Um—”

  “Sure you do.”

  She handed him a knife, set the head on a cutting board.

  “I don’t even like cauliflower.” But he sat, comfortable now in an old Harvard Crimson T-shirt and jeans, and picked up the knife.

  “You do when it’s disguised with butter and herbs. It’s nice,” she said, “having line cooks.”

  “It’s like home.” Mason cut away the thick stem, sliced through the core from the bottom, pulled the head into two halves. “Back in New York, only you’re head chef instead of Harry.”

  “When they get here, I’ll abdicate, but only after he lets me show off. That gives me a couple of weeks to devise a show-off menu, outfit guest rooms, and hope Jenny can redo those dining room chairs.” She added chicken to the pan with a satisfying sizzle.

  “I’m going to try to be here. I should be able to work out of the Seattle office temporarily.”

  After a long beat of silence, Mason set the knife aside, picked up his wine. “Okay. I’m going to lay this out for you—as much as I can. While the ME will determine, it’s clear from the on-scene examination and the evidence gathered that Donna Lanier was abducted and killed by the same unsub as Marla Roth. You don’t need the details,” he added, and went back to the knife. “It’s my strong belief, shared by Chief Winston, that Lanier wasn’t his first choice. She was simply there. As with the first victim, she was held and killed at another location, then transported and dumped where she would be found quickly. He wants us to know he’s here, he’s hunting. He’s arrogant, enjoys both the attention and the fear he’s generating. He’s intelligent, organized, experienced.”

  “You mean he’s done this before,” Naomi replied. “That’s what you mean by experienced.”

  “Yeah. It’s unlikely a coincidence he took both victims on a Friday night, held them until Sunday. We can speculate he has his weekends free or has the privacy he needs during that time period.”

  “You still think he lives here.” Xander finished the last carrot, waited for a reply.

  “I can’t eliminate someone who lives in town, works in town, or works or lives in the area.”

  “Why?” Xander demanded. “We haven’t had any rapes or murders, nothing like this around here before.”

  “He may not have brought it home before. He may have taken a hitchhiker, a hiker, someone passing through, and buried or concealed the body. He may recently have acquired, through purchase, inheritance, divorce, a place he can use to do his work. So far, most of the rentals have been checked and eliminated. We’re also checking on seasonal workers, tenants, new residents, vacationers who’ve been in the area since the first victim was abducted. I’ll continue to research and analyze like crimes. If I find a pattern, if I find more, we’ll have the full resources of the FBI on this.

  “I’ve asked a contact I have at the BAU to look over the files, to check my profile, to see if I’m on the right track or if I’ve gone wrong. But whether or not the unsub lives and works here or happened upon this location, he’s still here. It’s gone too well for him to move on.”

  “Naomi fits his type.”

  “Xander.” Annoyed, she turned the chicken.

  “Yes, she does. I believe he has a type, and Naomi fits it. I trust her to take all reasonable precautions.”

  “I said I would.”

  “I love you, Naomi.”

  She sighed, hugely. “I love you, too, Mason.”

  “So even though I know you’re smart, you’re careful, and you can kick ass, I’m going to worry about you.”

  “I worry about you, Special Agent Carson. Especially since I know you can’t always take what civilians consider reasonable precautions.”

  “You could spend a couple weeks in Seattle,” Xander suggested. “Hang with your brother there, do some shopping or whatever, do some work. It’d give them a chance to do the floors in this place.”

  “First, Kevin and I have a schedule and the floors are dead last. Second and all the other numbers after that, I’m not leaving here to run off to Seattle so my baby brother can look out for me.”

  “You’ve got two years on me,” Mason objected. “That doesn’t make me baby brother. She won’t do it,” he added to Xander. “I walked through the conversation about it with her in my head, and always hit the same wall. But this might make you feel better about it. Did you tell him about the mugger, Naomi?”

  “I haven’t thought about that in years.” She picked up the wine, dumped some into the skillet, then trapped the steam with a lid and lowered the heat.

  “What mugger?”

  “In New York. Naomi was home on summer break from college, working at the restaurant. Decided to walk home one night.”

  “It was a nice night,” she added.

  “The mugger thought so, too. Anyway, this guy comes up on her—with a knife—wants her money and her watch, her earrings, her phone.”

  “I would have given it all to him, just like the uncles had impressed on both of us a million times.”

  “Maybe you would have.” Mason shrugged. “But the asshole figured he had a defenseless woman, a scared one. And a pretty one. So he copped a feel.”

  “And he smirked,” Naomi stated, and, remembering it all now, sneered.

  “She bruised his balls, broke his nose, and dislocated his shoulder, called nine-one-one. He was still on the ground moaning when the cops got there.”

  “He shouldn’t have grabbed my breast. He shouldn’t have touched me.”

  “You
broke his nose.” Purely fascinated by her, Xander studied those slim, almost elegant hands. “You like breaking noses.”

  “The nose is a quick and reliable target—offense and defense. I like yours.” She gathered up the carrots, the cauliflower, the broccoli she’d prepped herself, in a big strainer, and took them to the sink to wash. “So don’t piss me off.”

  “Just let me know if you’re not in the mood for me to cop a feel.”

  She laughed, then brought the carrots back to slice for steaming. “You’ll be the first. Excellent florets and carrot peeling. You’re both dismissed from duty if you want to take the dog out or whatever. You’ve got about thirty.”

  “Did you come over on your bike?” Mason asked Xander.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it.”

  “Sure.” Xander led the way out the back and around. “Just so you know, the landscape crew starts tomorrow. Early.”

  “Define early.”

  “By seven. Maybe a little before.”

  “As early as or earlier than the bang-and-clang crew inside. Oh well. I wanted to say I feel comfortable working out of Seattle, coming over a couple times a week, because you’re going to keep an eye on her. And I didn’t want to say that where she could hear me.”

  “I got that. I feel more comfortable knowing she can dislocate some asshole’s shoulder. And still.”

  “Still. I don’t know a goddamn thing about motorcycles.” Head angled, Mason studied it. “Except it looks impressive.”

  “Okay.”

  “Both women were taken in town, so I have to consider that, for now, as his hunting ground. But Naomi’s his type, and she shops and banks and has business in town. She’s the sort he looks for.”

  “I got that, too. I’m going to be here every night. We play this Friday at Loo’s. I’ll make sure she comes, and make sure Kevin and Jenny stick with her until we close.”

  “If I can be here, I will be. She’ll be careful, but I believe this guy works fast, takes his target quickly.”

  As he spoke, Mason studied the house as if looking for security breaches.

  “No defensive wounds on either victim. They didn’t have a chance to fight back. Anybody can be taken by surprise, even if they’re careful, even if they’ve studied martial arts and self-defense, so she’s going to have to deal with not having as much time alone as she likes for a while.”

  “She’s doing all right with people around.”

  “Better than she imagined she would, I’ll bet. She doesn’t know you’re in love with her.”

  Saying nothing, Xander held Mason’s steady gaze.

  “I’m going there because she’s the most important person in my world. We lived through a nightmare you never come all the way out of, because he’s sitting in a cell in West Virginia. Our mother wasn’t strong enough to keep living on the edge of that nightmare. Naomi found her—came home to pick something up on lunch break from school, and found her, already cold.”

  “I know—at least some of it. I looked up what I could after I figured out about Bowes. And I found the piece she wrote back then, for the New York Times. I didn’t want to hit a sore spot by accident, so I read what I could find. I’m sorry about your mother, man.”

  “It put another hole in Naomi. Me? Sure, I lived with it and through it, but I’m not the one who saw firsthand what our father had done. I’m not the one who helped pull a victim out of a hole in the ground and half carry her through the woods. I’m not the one who came home from school and found our mother dead by her own hand. Naomi has no degree of separation. And she might deny it—would,” he corrected, “but there’s a part of her that doesn’t see herself worthy of being loved.”

  “She’d be wrong about that.”

  “Yeah, she’d be wrong. We had counseling, we had the uncles, but no one else has those images of what our parents did, to themselves, to others, to us, in their head the way she does. So there’s a part of her that doesn’t think she’s capable of loving outside of me and the uncles, or worthy of being loved.”

  “Well.” Xander jerked a shoulder. “She’ll have to get used to it.”

  The simplicity, the carelessness of the remark, made Mason smile. “You’re good for her. That irritated me a little when I first came into it, saw that. I’m pretty much over that now.”

  “Did you run my background?”

  “Oh yeah, right off.”

  “I’d have thought less of you if you hadn’t. I’m never going to hurt her. That’s bullshit,” Xander said immediately. “Why do people say that? Of course I’ll end up hurting her. Everybody does or says something stupid or petty or acts like an asshole sometime and ends up hurting somebody else. What I mean is—”

  “I know what you mean, and I believe you. So, are we good?”

  “Yeah, we’re good.”

  Mason held out a hand; they shook.

  Then he studied the bike again. “How about you let me drive it?”

  Considering, Xander rocked back on his heels. “Have you ever been on a bike before—at the controls?”

  “No. But I’m an FBI agent, I should know how to drive a bike. Right? What if, in the pursuit of a criminal, I had to hop on a motorcycle, and due to lack of knowledge and experience, said criminal escaped justice? None of us would feel good about that.”

  Amused, Xander unclipped the helmet. “Okay.”

  “Really? Are you serious?” And beaming like a boy on Christmas morning, Mason took the helmet.

  “Sure. You wreck it, you pay for repairs. You end up needing the ER, dinner’s going to get cold. I can go with that.”

  “I don’t have a motorcycle license.”

  “You’re FBI.”

  “Damn fucking straight.” Delighted, Mason swung a leg over, settled. “Now what the hell do I do?”

  Before long, drawn by the revving engine and Mason’s war whoops, Naomi came out the front door.

  “Is that— Is Mason on your bike?”

  “Yeah.” Xander sat on the steps with the dog.

  “When did he learn to drive a motorcycle?”

  “Pretty much now.”

  “Oh, dear God. Get him off before he hurts himself.”

  “He’s fine, Mom.”

  She huffed. “Well, get him off because dinner’s ready.”

  “Done.”

  He got up as she went back in, and decided it was best all around that Mason waited until her back was turned to pop a wheelie.

  Her brother was a quick study.

  Twenty-five

  Her house was full of people and noisy tools and machines. Now her front yard was full of people and noisy tools and machines.

  She couldn’t defy her brother, Xander, and her own common sense and take off to the forest or down to the shoreline for quiet. For a couple of hours she made the best of it by taking pictures of what was essentially demo—just like the interior—while Lelo uprooted old woody shrubs and ugly tree stumps she’d simply stopped seeing with a massive chain attached to a massive tractor.

  The sounds of a wood chipper, of chain saws, of trucks, joined the sounds of nail guns and saws.

  Tag loved every minute.

  Eventually she escaped inside, popped in her earbuds, and drowned out most of it with music.