by Kay Hooper
Ben thought she cared for him. He thought that given her past and almost pathological reluctance to allow anyone even the most casual of physical contact, she would have been unable to accept him as her lover if she had not cared. If she had not trusted him at least partly. But he also knew that Cassie’s past experiences with the dark violence of too many male minds made it almost impossible for her to completely trust a man, especially when she could not read him.
His damned walls.
She would not commit herself to him until she was sure of him, and his walls made that impossible. Even if he managed to pull the walls down, Ben wasn’t sure it would bring Cassie to his side and his life for good. She had been alone for a long time, had convinced herself that being alone was the best way for her. Would she—could she—change her life so drastically by accepting him and all the people and responsibilities he would bring with him?
He didn’t know.
Ben arranged his features to express pleasant companionship and went into the living room. “You abandoned me,” he accused Cassie lightly.
She smiled. “I got hungry, sorry. Spaghetti. I hope you like it.”
“Love it.” He wanted to touch her but forced himself not to make his need for her so damned obvious. “What are you doing in here?”
“Packing away this stuff.”
“I thought you were going to read the journals.”
Cassie sent him a glance he couldn’t interpret to save his life, and murmured, “Sometimes it’s best not to know how things turn out.”
“Are we talking about Alexandra?”
She looked at the journal in her hand, then added it to the other stuff in the box. “Of course.”
He didn’t think so but accepted what she said, wary of pushing her when she seemed so elusive. “Well, you can always read them later.”
“Yes. Later.” Cassie closed the box, then looked at him, smiling. “The sauce should be ready if you are.”
“I’m ready.”
He moved very carefully, wary of the dog’s keen ears even with the noise of sleet and wind. Caution told him to stay back, but he wanted to get closer, close enough to see inside.
So cozy in there. A nice fire in the fireplace. Lights and the appetizing aroma of good food making the kitchen warm and snug. Quiet voices that were comfortable with each other and yet aware, the edges of their words blurred with longing, with hope and uncertainty and fear.
They were completely wrapped up in each other.
They were oblivious of his watching eyes.
He stood outside, his collar turned up and hat pulled low to protect his face from the stinging sleet. It was cold. The ground was frozen, and his feet were cold inside the thin shoes. But he remained where he was for a long time, watching.
She hadn’t understood. All his work, and she hadn’t understood.
Hadn’t understood he had done it all for her.
But she would.
Soon.
MARCH 2, 1999
“So much for time off,” Ben said, knotting his tie as Cassie lay in bed, watching him. “Trust Judge Hayes to make me come back to work.”
“Well, he’s right,” she said. “Now that Mike Shaw has a lawyer, and most of the evidence has been collected from his house, it’s time for you to go to work.”
“Do you have to be so reasonable?” Ben came to sit on the edge of the bed, smiling down at her. “I’m being driven out of a very warm bed on a very cold morning, and I intend to bitch about it.”
She reached up to touch his face in one of those hesitant little gestures that always stopped his heart. “The warm bed will be here waiting for you when you get back. That is—”
“Oh, I’m definitely coming back,” he assured her.
“For lunch if I can manage it. By five if I can’t. Either way, I’ll bring takeout. Any preferences?”
“No. I’m easy to please.”
“Yes,” he said, bending to kiss her, “you are. Try to go back to sleep, love. I’ll take Max out and feed him before I leave. See you later.”
Cassie listened to the faint sounds of his leaving, then curled up with her arms wrapped around his pillow and breathed in the faint scent of him that clung to the linen. Already he was marking his presence in her life. Her bed smelled of him, and the scent of his aftershave lingered in the room. His toiletries were on the bathroom counter beside hers. One of his shirts lay across the chair in the corner.
Something permanent?
She shied away from thinking about that because it was so astonishing and potentially wonderful—and she didn’t trust the possibility of it. Her life had taught her that wonderful things simply did not happen to her, and she had learned to eye happy surprises with suspicion.
There was always a catch.
But until she discovered what that was, Cassie just wanted to enjoy the moment, to luxuriate in contentment. She was in a warm bed where a warm man had lain beside her all night, and every muscle in her body was blissfully weary.
He was a very… passionate man.
Smiling to herself as she remembered that passion, Cassie drifted off to sleep.
When the ringing woke her, she thought it was her alarm, and peered at the nightstand resentfully. But then the phone rang again, and she pulled herself across the bed to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Cassie, will you please tell Ben to get his ass over here?” Matt requested in a harassed voice. “That damned defense lawyer made some phone calls on his way here, and now I’m hip-deep in the media. The national media. I don’t want to talk to them, that’s Ben’s job, dammit.”
She reached to turn the clock toward her, and a cold hand closed around her heart. “Matt… he left here more than two hours ago.”
TWENTY
There was a long silence, and then Matt said carefully, “The roads are a mess. Maybe he stopped to pull somebody out of a ditch. He has chains in that Jeep of his, and a winch. That’s probably it. I’ll send a patrol car out that way.”
“He would have called. He would have called one of us.”
“Maybe he hasn’t had time. Don’t make yourself crazy before we know if there’s a reason.”
Cassie’s throat was so dry, she could hardly swallow. “I’m coming to town,” she said.
“Cassie, listen to me. I wasn’t kidding about the media. There are three news vans parked in front of the station, and the place is crawling with press. You do not want to be here.”
“Matt—”
“You stay put. I’ll check it out and call you the minute I know something.”
“Hurry,” she whispered. “Please hurry.”
For an endless hour Cassie paced the floor and bit her nails, her imagination going wild. Even though she knew it would be impossible, she tried to reach out to Ben, telling herself it simply wasn’t conceivable that something could have happened to him without her knowing about it. She would have felt it, surely.
All she felt was terror, and it was all hers.
When Matt’s cruiser pulled up in her driveway, Cassie knew the news would be bad. Numb with dread, she went out onto the porch to meet Matt and Bishop, and their faces told her that her instincts were right.
“He’s not dead,” she said.
“No, he’s not dead. At least—we don’t think so.” Matt took her arm and led her back into the house, and the physical contact made her acutely aware of his worry.
Cassie sat down on the sofa, staring from one man to the other. “What do you mean, you don’t think so?”
Matt sat down beside her. “We found the Jeep but not Ben. It looks like he stopped to clear a fallen tree from the road. Idiot. The Jeep could have made it over easily. He was thinking about whoever came along behind him.”
“I don’t understand,” Cassie said. “If he wasn’t with the Jeep, then where is he? What happened?”
From his position on his feet near the fireplace, Bishop said, “There were tire tracks showing another vehicle came
up behind his. And that tree didn’t come down naturally.”
“You mean—some kind of trap?”
Matt nodded. “We think so, Cassie. It looks like someone else stopped, ostensibly to help Ben. Then grabbed him, probably after knocking him out. There’s—We found a little blood at the scene.” Quickly he went on. “I have some of my people crawling all over the scene, and I sent for the tracking dogs, but I’m not expecting them to pick up much of a trail. Back at the station they’re pulling files and cross-checking to see if we can come up with anybody who might have had an especially strong grudge against Ben.”
Cassie tried to concentrate. “Who? Who would have done something like this?”
“Like any other prosecutor and former judge, Ben’s made his share of enemies, and while any of them might have run him off the road, setting a trap like this is way beyond what I’d expect. This was… I don’t know… personal somehow.” Matt exchanged a glance with Bishop, then said, “We found something on the front seat of the Jeep.”
“What?”
Matt reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a single red rose, painstakingly fashioned from tissue paper.
“Oh, my God,” Cassie whispered.
The headache had lessened to no more than a dull throb, and the blood had dried on the side of his face, but Ben still felt lousy. Every time he turned his head too fast, dizziness swept over him and nausea churned in his stomach, and shouting a few times in the vain hope somebody other than his captor would hear had earned him nothing except more pain and queasiness. Cold and stiff, he kept flexing his fingers in the hope of warding off total numbness and in the effort to loosen the ropes binding his wrists to the arms of the chair where he sat.
He had studied every inch of the room, and there wasn’t much to see. It was mostly barren, the two windows heavily curtained, the ancient carpet on the floor stained and threadbare. One other chair sat by the closed door. There was a fireplace where a low fire burned and took the edge off the chill; the only other light came from an incongruously elegant torchère between the windows.
So all he could say for sure about where he was being held was that there was some electricity, even if it wasn’t being wasted on heat. That and his present position told him his captor wasn’t much concerned about the well-being of his hostage. The iron chair Ben was tied to was dead center in the room and bolted to the floor, and several attempts had convinced him it would take more than muscle to budge it. He was glad his wrists were tied to each arm of the chair rather than behind his back, but if the position was more comfortable, it didn’t provide extra leverage to dislodge the chair.
He thought he had loosened the ropes a bit though. Unless that was only wishful thinking.
The initial shock of finding himself helpless had finally passed, and he was left with anger and bewilderment; fear, he thought, would undoubtedly come later. What occupied his mind in those first long minutes of silence was the question of who hated him enough to do this.
He had a hazy memory of stopping the Jeep to clear away a tree fallen across the road, but nothing beyond that. He could only assume that someone had come up behind him and hit him with something heavy.
But who?
He had put away a few people in his time, but Ben couldn’t think of anyone with a resentment powerful enough to arrange his kidnapping. The timing also struck him as extremely odd; with virtually everyone in the county overwhelmingly relieved by the capture of a serial killer, who would be concentrating on old grudges?
He kept working to loosen the ropes, taking advantage of being alone in the room because he had a fair idea that wouldn’t last long. And it didn’t.
When the man walked into the room a few minutes later, pushing some kind of rolling cart covered with a white cloth, Ben’s first realization was that he was a total stranger. He was a medium-sized man on the wiry side, not particularly tall or particularly powerful in appearance, with straight hair-colored hair and the pasty skin of someone who didn’t spend much time outdoors. The only unusual physical characteristic Ben noticed was that he had incongruously large hands and feet, both of which lent him a slightly ludicrous air. His features were regular, even pleasant, and he wore a small half-smile.
It was the smile that made Ben suddenly, acutely, aware of the chill in the room.
“Hello, Judge. That’s what they call you, isn’t it? Judge?” His voice was deep, the tone amiable.
“Some do.” All his instincts told Ben to hold on to both his wits and his temper, to keep his body relaxed and his own voice calm. But the hair on the back of his neck was standing straight out.
“Oh, I think most do. And I think you like it.”
“What do I call you?” Ben asked.
The man smiled, revealing even white teeth. “What is that thing you see on T-shirts everywhere these days? Bob’s wife, Bob’s boss, Bob’s brother. Just call me Bob.”
“Okay, Bob. Should I know what it is I’ve done to piss you off?”
“Should—but don’t.” He got the chair that was by the door and placed it in front of Ben a few feet away, beside the covered cart, and sat down. The picture of relaxed interest, he clasped his big hands together in his lap and continued to smile pleasantly at his captive.
“Do we play a guessing game?”
“Bob” shook his head. “Oh, I’m quite willing to tell you, Judge. That’s the whole point of this, after all. No one should ever die without knowing why.”
“So tell me.”
“The oldest male game in the world, Judge. Rivalry.”
“I see. So what are we competing for?”
“Why, for her, of course. For Cassie.”
Ben controlled the urge to lunge at the other man, and kept his voice cool. “And here I thought all I had to worry about was an FBI agent.”
Bob’s smile widened. “Bishop? Neither of us has to worry about him, not where Cassie’s concerned. He’s not in love with her. He likes to believe he understands her, but he doesn’t really. I’m the only one who really understands Cassie.”
That his captor knew Bishop was bad enough; the caressing way his voice dropped whenever he said Cassie’s name was beginning to make Ben’s skin crawl. “What gives you this special insight?” he asked.
“It’s very simple, Judge. I understand Cassie because, unlike you or Bishop or any other man in her life, I’m a part of her. I’ve been inside her head for years.”
Matt said, “Bishop had much the same reaction and refused to explain. So why don’t you? What does this paper flower mean to both of you?”
Cassie swallowed hard and forced herself to remain calm. “It started… more than four years ago. The L.A. police called me in on a series of murders. It was unusual because the killer hit all age groups, from little girls to elderly women, and all races. The victims had nothing in common except that they were female. He killed them in different ways, tortured some but not others, hid some bodies while leaving others out in the open so they could be easily found. It seemed to be almost a game to him to keep everybody guessing. The FBI profiler they called in was tearing his hair out.”
“So the police called you in,” Matt said. “And?”
“He always left a paper rose on his victim’s body, and I used that to connect with him. I tapped into him pretty easily just as he was stalking his next victim. The police were able to save the girl, but the killer slipped away in the confusion. And vanished.”
“You mean he stopped killing?”
Cassie nodded. “For a while, at least that’s what the police believe. It was more than six months later when three more bodies turned up, each left with one of his trademark paper roses. Again I was able to tap into his mind, and again he managed to slip away. For the next couple of years he’d suddenly go active, kill two or three times, then vanish before anybody could get close. Including me. There was no pattern we could fix on, no way we could anticipate when and where he’d begin killing again
. Then…”
“Then?”
It was Bishop who took up the story, his voice cool. “Then he killed a series of children in rapid succession, and the entire city was going crazy. Finally, and for the first time, the killer left behind more than a rose. He left a fingerprint. The police were able to identify him as one Conrad Vasek, an escaped mental patient with the distinction of having terrified every doctor forced to try treating him in the twenty years since he was committed at the age of twelve.”
Matt said, “And they had no luck finding him even though they knew who he was.”
“None. The man was acknowledged as a twisted genius, psychopathic since birth but brilliant. And he loved games.” Bishop’s gaze shifted to Cassie. “Especially new ones.”
“You weren’t there,” Cassie murmured, staring down at the rose.
“I heard about it afterward,” Bishop said. He looked at Matt. “Just about the time Vasek killed an elderly woman and then a teenager, word leaked out to the press that the L.A. police were trying to track him using a psychic. Vasek must have seen it as a challenge. He grabbed a little girl but didn’t kill her right away. Instead, when Cassie connected to him, he led the police a long and merry chase and then was somehow able to distract Cassie just long enough.”
“I misinterpreted what I saw,” Cassie said. “Sent the police the wrong way. When they found the little girl, her body was still warm.”
“And you got the blame?” Matt demanded incredulously.
“I blamed myself. And it was… just too much. I couldn’t handle it anymore. That’s when I left L.A. and came here.”
Softly Bishop said, “I wonder how long it took Vasek to find you.”
Cassie stared at him, with dawning understanding. “Of course,” she whispered. “That’s why the light was falling from two different directions when I tried to reach Mike Shaw. That’s how Mike was able to push me out with such strength, to block me for so long even though he isn’t telepathic. Because it wasn’t him. Somehow Vasek was linked to Mike’s mind, controlling him. Vasek was controlling him all along.”