Karen Robards

by Obsession

  Katharine’s stomach contracted. Her pulse raced. After the men from the sheriff’s department had gone, she and Dan had agreed that it was best that Dan be left out of the story of the day’s events entirely. Anyway, she knew that if Ed should learn that she had actually exchangeda heated kiss with her well-meaning neighbor, however befuddled her thinking had been at the time, he would go ballistic with jealousy. And the thought of Ed in a jealous rage made her shudder, not only for herselfbut for Dan. So for both their sakes, she already knew she was going to lie about much of the previous day’s odyssey, and even had what she was going to say all planned out. But still, the prospect of lying to Ed made her nervous.

  If he caught her at it, the consequences would be bad, she knew. The key, then, obviously, was to lie very, very well.

  “You know where I was: the hotel.” Her tone was utterlycalm and collected. “I called you from there.”

  His eyes never left her face. “How did you get there?”

  “You mean after I barely survived being attacked for a second time in my own home?” She deliberately threw that out there in hopes that it would distract him, and the conversation would thus move on to what was, as far as her telling the truth was concerned, solid ground. “I took the Metro.”

  “That simple, huh?” He shook his head. “I can’t believeStarkey and Bennett weren’t able to track you down. They must be losing it.” His face softened fractionallyas his eyes moved over her. His gaze touched on her bandaged nose, her bruised forehead, and she could see him registering that she truly had been hurt. “You’ve had a bad time, haven’t you? I’m glad you’re okay, babe. And I’m sorry about your friend. But our priority right now has to be to find these people.”

  She threw another distraction at him. “Do you have any leads?”

  Watching, she thought it was like shutters had slammed closed over his eyes. They went suddenly opaque.

  “A few,” he said evasively. “Believe me, I’ll find them. And when I do …”

  She shivered inwardly at the threat he left unfinished.Boyfriend or not, Ed had a ruthless, violent side that she, personally, wouldn’t want to run afoul of. With all the resources of the Agency at his disposal, she had no doubt at all that sooner or later he would run the perpetrators to earth. Then they might, or might not, actuallymake it alive into the justice system and eventuallyinto a courtroom. She was betting on the might not. Courtrooms were messy, public places where way too much sensitive material came out. She had little doubt that Ed’s preferred way of handling what he no doubt considered a private matter would probably be to make the offenders just disappear.

  As in, bang bang.

  “So walk me through what happened after you ran away from the hospital. Did you go straight back to the town house?” He was watching her carefully. His thick, black brows were almost touching over his nose.

  Katharine thought, He’s suspicious. And her heart began to pump a little harder.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get there?”

  She had to fight the desire to take a deep, steadying breath. The way he was watching, he would notice, she knew. And it would give too much away.

  “Taxi.” That was the lie she particularly hated to tell, because it could be checked. But it would take a while, if he even bothered. She hoped—no, prayed—that he wouldn’t bother. In any case, she would be flying to Cleveland early in the morning, and she was pretty sure he couldn’t check it before then. And then she would have a two-day respite before she had to face him again.

  “So you left the hospital, took a taxi to the town house, and got jumped by an unknown assailant who was looking for something, although you have no idea what.” His eyes narrowed. His jaw tightened. “Then you call me. You tell me what happened, you don’t tell me where you are, and you hang up on me. I’m not happy about that, babe.”

  Just like taking a deep breath, wetting her lips was probably out, too.

  “I’m sorry. I was scared and upset. I wasn’t thinking straight. And I called you today from the hotel, just like I said I would.”

  “You put me through a hell of a night.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  His eyes bored into hers. His lips pursed. That he was still angry with her was obvious. It was also obvious that her perceived transgressions weren’t the most pressing thing on his mind.

  “All right, I’m gonna let that go. For whatever stupid reason, you opted to go it alone, hopped on the Metro, and went to the hotel where Starkey and Bennett picked you up. Is that right?”

  Katharine looked him straight in the eyes. “Well, I rode around on the Metro for a while trying to think what to do, but otherwise that pretty much sums it up. You have to remember, I was upset.”

  “We found your car at the Bayou Room, by the way.” It was a nightclub on King Street in Alexandria. Good to know. “I know you’ll be relieved to know that it’s safely back in your garage. I assume you and your friend had too much to drink and took a taxi home from there?”

  Katharine nodded, although she really didn’t rememberthat part. But she did remember that she and Lisa had gotten pretty sloshed.

  “So then, since you didn’t have a car, how did you get from the town house to the Metro station?” He shot the question at her. He knew as well as she did that the chance of walking out the door and immediately hailing a taxi in Old Town was about as good as the chance of finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Basically,it wasn’t going to happen.

  But she was prepared. “I walked.”

  She could see him mentally calculating the distance between the town house and the nearest Metro station. It was, as she had already determined, a fairly long way but doable. From his expression, he came to the same conclusion.

  In other words, for now at least, her story had passed muster.

  “All right, get up.” His tone was brusque.

  She looked up at him in surprise.

  “Get up,” he said again. Reaching down, he slid a hand around her elbow and practically hauled her to her feet. “We’re going back to the town house now and you’re going to walk me through everything that happened.I want to hear every detail. I want to know every move those assholes made. I want you to tell me every word they said. Every word, do you hear me?”

  Katharine went cold all over at the prospect. Instinctively,she tried to pull free of the hand gripping her elbow. “Oh, no. Please. I just can’t face it right now. My head hurts and—”

  His face was hard as he looked at her. “You already cost me a day with your damned stupid stunt. I mean to find those jokers, and I mean to do it soon. I can’t let the trail grow any colder than it is already.”

  Go along with anything he suggests.

  She never wanted to see that town house again. But she quit trying to free herself. Instead, she deliberately relaxed the arm he was gripping way too hard and nodded.

  “Okay, Ed,” she said softly.

  The next few hours were torturous. With Starkey and Bennett in tow, they went to the town house. The décor still felt alien, Katharine registered as they walked inside,but at least it was a familiar kind of alien now and it didn’t freak her out. What did freak her out was that the scattered roses and broken vase were gone, and the entryway was once again pristine.

  Katharine found this so unnerving that she had to ask about it.

  Ed snorted. “I had people clean it up. Until I get a handle on what’s going on here, you think I’m going to leave things for the cops to go through? It was bad enough that our people got in here late the first time. The local yokels were already all over the place before our people came in and secured the scene. By that time, what we basically ended up doing was cleaning up after their investigation.” He cast a dark look at Starkey. “I’m not happy about that.”

  “We got here as quick as we got word,” Starkey protested.

  Ed snorted again.

  Glad to know that there was a logical explanation for the tow
n house’s uncanny ability to appear as if nothing bad had ever happened in it, Katharine reluctantly took Ed and the others on through to the kitchen and laundryroom. A few small bullet holes remained in the walls, although the bullets themselves had been removed.And there was a crease in one corner of the dryer that had come from a bullet, too, she knew. The back door had been replaced with a new one. When Ed theorized that the second intruder had come in through the previous door, which they had removed from its hinges and were going over in the lab with a fine-tooth comb because its lock had been broken, Katharine didn’t correct him, although she knew better. She only hoped Dan had not left fingerprints on it, or that his prints weren’t traceable. Leaving Dan out of this was way more important than setting the record straight.

  Katharine didn’t like to think what Ed’s reaction would be if he were to find out about Dan. It made her go cold inside.

  Every time she looked down at the kitchen floor, her headache spiked. At her first glimpse of it, her heart had started to pound: The tiles were indeed six-inch squares. But even as she walked Ed through the attack that had killed Lisa, told him everything she could remember, pointed out the place where she had crouched beside the dryer and the spot in front of the door where Lisa had died, she kept seeing in her mind’s eye the twelve-inchterra-cotta squares that she remembered from that night.

  The question that kept pounding away at her brain was: How could the floor have changed?

  It puzzled her so much that she even asked Ed, in what she hoped was an offhand manner, if the tiles had been replaced in the Saturday-morning cleanup, maybe because they were damaged or bloodstained?

  He looked at Starkey.

  “The tile wasn’t damaged, and there wasn’t that much blood. We just had it mopped,” Starkey said.

  Okay, time to let the subject drop. The thing was, though, mopping couldn’t change twelve-inch squares to six-inch ones, and that seemed to be what had happened here. But if worrying about it was going to provide her with the answer, it would already have happened, so she tried to force the discrepancy out of her mind. Despite her best efforts, though, it gnawed at her: The image of those twelve-inch squares just wouldn’t go away.

  That wasn’t the only thing that gnawed at her. Althoughdeep inside she remained convinced that the original attackers had been after something other than jewelry when they had been searching for the hidden safe, she never said so. Every time she went over what Lisa’s killers had said, what they had done, for Ed, she stuck to the fiction that she thought they had been lookingfor the safe for the valuable jewelry from the Post photo that was supposedly inside. Why? Instinct? She couldn’t have said for sure. All she knew was that some internal censor in her brain kept her from making her true opinion known. The other troublesome thing was, Ed knew. He knew they hadn’t been after jewelry. She could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. But he pretendedthat he thought the jewelry was the motivation for the attack.

  It was like they were both playing a game. Only he didn’t know she was playing. And she knew that she couldn’t let him find out.

  The thought that he might find out scared her.

  As far as the second attack was concerned, he seemed as genuinely baffled as she was.

  By the time ten o’clock rolled around, they had been at it for more than four hours, with only a short break for takeout Chinese. Katharine was exhausted and sick to her stomach. Her head pounded. She was emotionallywrung out, and cold to her soul.

  More than she had ever wanted anything in her life, she wanted to get away from that town house—and Ed. He was relentless, picking away at everything she said, wringing every tiny detail he could from her, then demandingmore.

  Finally, Ed finished with her, and she was able to go upstairs and pack some clothes to take with her to Cleveland. Even her closet had been semirestored—the clothes were hung up again, although haphazardly—so it didn’t take her long. Black was the order of the day, and she found a small garment bag hanging in the back of the closet to pack everything in. After that was done, she steeled herself and walked into the spare bedroom.

  The bed was made, the closets and drawers and bathroomemptied. Not a trace of Lisa remained. Standing there looking around the room where Lisa had gone to bed happy only two nights before, she knew she should be feeling a great wave of grief for her murdered friend. But she didn’t. What she felt was—empty.

  Her memory might be back, but her emotions were still on the fritz.

  But still, she meant to do what any loyal friend would do and see that Lisa’s belongings got safely home. Only there were no belongings there.

  “What happened to Lisa’s things?” she asked when she came downstairs again. The three men stood in the living room together, and from the look of it, Ed was giving the other two orders. Ed shut up and they all glanced around at her as she walked toward them with the garment bag hanging over her shoulder.

  It didn’t take a genius to realize that she wasn’t supposedto overhear.

  “I had them packed up and sent on to her family.” Ed nodded at Starkey, who took the garment bag from her. Ed hadn’t objected when she had told him that she meant to go to Lisa’s funeral, as long as she took Bennettwith her, as he had something he needed Starkey to do. Katharine hadn’t argued. She suspected that the reasonhe was so willing for her to go was to keep her from talking to the police, who were investigating Lisa’s murderand the break-ins, for as long as possible. Maybe even until they gave up on trying to talk to her, and the crimes got put on the back burner, which tended to happenfast around D.C., where there was so much crime. “I thought that would make it easier on you. You ready to go now?”

  Katharine nodded, and he slid a proprietary hand beneathher bare elbow. It was overwarm and a little sweaty, and when he rubbed the pad of his thumb caressinglyover her silky inner arm, her skin crawled. Still, she didn’t pull away, and his hand stayed where it was as he escorted her out the door and along the shadowywalk to the Mercedes, which was parked at the curb. Starkey and Bennett followed silently. It was a beautiful, warm summer night, with the star-studded sky and the fingernail moon reflected in the black waters of the Potomac. The ornate, historically correct streetlamp on the corner gave off a gaseous yellow glow. The soft murmur of the river was punctuated by the slap of small waves against the riverbank as a lighted dinner boat loaded down with tourists disappeared upstream. Strains of music and the sounds of revelry from the boat were still barely audible. All the nearby businesses were closed, which meant there was very little traffic. Only a few pedestrians strolled the sidewalks, most of them on the other side of the street as they branched out from the restaurants around Waterfront Park, which glowed faintly white in the distance from the strands of Christmas-tree lights that marked its entrance.

  As Starkey opened the rear door of the Mercedes for her, Katharine dared a quick glance at Dan’s town house: It was dark.

  Where is he? The question popped into her brain unbidden,and immediately her headache ratcheted up. She couldn’t think about Dan now. It was too dangerous.She had to concentrate on being with Ed.

  She slid into the back and scooted across the smooth leather seat, and Ed got in beside her. The inside of the car was dark and shadowy. Katharine caught a whiff of a cigarette aroma that she hadn’t noticed earlier, and realizedthat her sense of smell was coming back by degrees:Ed abhorred cigarettes, and if the smell had been at all strong, he would have refused to ride in the car.

  As Starkey—who was driving—and Bennett got into the front seat, Ed’s hand settled on her knee.

  Looking down at his fleshy hand with its pale, pudgy fingers, Katharine had to battle an urge to push it away.

  But she didn’t. She let it stay where it was, gritting her teeth as it lightly, almost absentmindedly caressed her knee.

  And thanked God that she was wearing a long skirt.

  They were headed, Katharine knew, back to the apartment, which Ed had told her the Agency sometimesused to house visito
rs. He hadn’t offered to take her home with him to his Embassy Row mansion, probablybecause he didn’t want to hand Sharon any more ammunition in his already tense divorce negotiations, and she was thankful for that. But when they pulled into the underground garage again and, instead of getting into his car, he rode the elevator up with the rest of them, Katharine began to get a bad feeling about his plans for the rest of the evening.

  She was his girlfriend. He probably meant to sleep with her. As she realized that, every muscle in her body went tense.

  18

  Desperately, Katharine tried to remember what sleeping with Ed was like. No luck. She could conjureup no memories of that at all.

  Probably a good thing.

  Still, she knew they had been sleeping together for thirteen months. More than a year. Clearly, she enjoyed sleeping with him, or she wouldn’t do it. Anyway, she was a big girl, right? How bad could it be?

  You got a Brazilian wax. Your sex life must rock.

  Her stomach knotted. A shiver of distaste ran down her spine. No matter how many positive thoughts crowded into her brain—You’re in love with him; he’s sexy; your job is to keep him happy—she kept rememberingthat salami taste.

  And those pudgy fingers.

  I can’t do it, she thought, panicking for real as, instead of entering the apartment with them, Starkey and Bennettstayed in the hall. Only Ed followed her inside.

  “Make me a drink, would you?” he asked, loosening his tie as he walked toward the couch. “Everything you need’s in the kitchen.”

  Katharine looked at his broad back in despair. His favorite drink was a martini, and she knew just how he liked it, but still she had to force herself to obey. Walkinginto the small galley kitchen, she realized that her hands were shaking. The cabinets were, indeed, well stocked. As she found what she needed, she watched out of the corner of her eye as Ed pulled off his tie and shrugged out of his coat. Clearly, he was getting comfortable,settling in for the long haul.

  Mind racing, she took as long as she possibly could to make the drink. Could she plead the age-old feminine excuse of a headache, which in her case had the advantageof being absolutely true? How about exhaustion? Bubonic plague, anyone?