Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  Nick entered. Two swift strides down the entry hall, and he turned right into the spacious, tastefully decorated living room. There were a couple of uniformed cops standing around, a few people he took for neighbors huddled together, talking quietly, and some official-looking types in coats and ties that he was too agitated to even try to identify. His gaze immediately found Keith, who was talking to another uniform. This was a woman who was making notes on some pages on a clipboard as Keith spoke. A sweeping glance as he bore down on his forty-five-year-old brother-in-law told Nick that Keith was wearing the same suit pants and white shirt he had worn to work that day, although he had lost the coat and tie. His thinning medium-brown hair was rumpled.

  Something bad had happened, that much was obvious.

  “Keith. Where’s Allie?” Nick asked without preamble as he got within speaking distance. His voice was loud, sharp. Everyone looked at him—the cop with the clipboard, the official types, assorted neighbors, his brother-in-law. Nick saw that Keith’s snub-nosed, square-jawed, usually florid face had lost every bit of its color. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed. The tip of his nose was red.

  “Ohmigod, Nick,” Keith groaned and covered his face with his hands. His shoulders heaved. With the sick feeling of just having taken a punch to the gut, Nick realized he was crying.

  “Where’s Allie?” It was a harsh demand. Panic flooded his system, making his fists clench, making him breathe too fast.

  Keith sobbed. The cop with the clipboard and an official-looking type both moved toward Nick at the same time. From the expressions on their faces, he could feel bad news coming his way like a freight train.

  But before they could get to him, he heard something else. The squeak-squeak-squeak of the wheels of a gurney. Nick pivoted and saw it being wheeled through the entry hall toward the door. There was a paramedic at either end maneuvering it. A white sheet covered it. Beneath the sheet, clearly, was a body.

  A long, slender body.

  Nick stopped breathing. He leaped for the gurney, ignoring Keith’s plea to him to stop, ignoring the voices and hands that reached out to stay him. Before anybody could react enough to prevent him from doing what he absolutely had to do, he was beside the gurney and twitching back a corner of the sheet.

  Allie lay there, her blond hair falling back away from her face to puddle on the white sheet beneath her. Her eyes were wide and glassy and fixed, and so badly bloodshot that he could see the redness at a glance. Her skin was ashen, her parted lips purple. There was massive bruising on her neck. . . .

  A wave of cold sweat broke over him.

  “Allie.” His voice was hoarse. He knew, of course, that she wouldn’t answer. It was clear at a glance that she was dead. “Allie.”

  “Sir!” One of the paramedics, outraged, pulled the little bit of sheet Nick was clutching out of his suddenly nerveless hand, draping it back over Allie’s face. Then Keith reached him, along with the clipboard cop, hands on his shoulders, on his arms, restraining him, as the gurney started to roll again toward the door. Nick didn’t move. He couldn’t. He simply stood there and watched in stone-cold shock as his sister’s body was wheeled out into the night.

  It could have been a minute or it could have been an hour that he stood there. In the first aftermath of the terrible blow he had been dealt, time ceased to have any meaning. But finally he was able to face the unbelievable truth, finally he was able to think, to move, a little, and he turned to his weeping brother-in-law, whose hand still rested on his shoulder.

  “Keith . . .” His voice was a croak. “What the hell—”

  “She hanged herself.” Keith sobbed mightily, then caught himself. “I came home and—oh my God, there she was. There was nothing I could do. She was already d-dead.”

  Nick felt his chest tighten as if a giant hand were gripping and squeezing his heart. It hurt. God, it hurt. He could scarcely breathe. His ears were ringing. His head felt like it was about to explode.

  Allie’s voice echoed through his mind: I’m in bad trouble. . . .

  He couldn’t tell Keith about it in front of a roomful of strangers.

  “Come with me,” he said to Keith, and took him by the arm. There were people everywhere, the house was full of people, so he dragged his brother-in-law out the back door, out onto the stone patio with its built-in party kitchen where Allie had loved to entertain.

  Recalling that, his heart bled.

  “She called me,” he said to Keith when they were alone, and told him what Allie had said. The soft beauty of the night offered no comfort at all as he spoke. It was like a slap in the face in a way. How could stars still shine, how could flowers still perfume the air, with Allie dead?

  “That’s why then.” Like himself, Keith seemed to be having trouble getting enough air. His shoulders were hunched, his head bowed. His voice was wheezy and thick. “God in heaven, Nick, that’s why she did it. Because some creep threatened to blackmail her.” He sucked in air. “Whoever he is, he’s not going to get away with it. We’re going to get him. And when we get him, we’re going to nail his ass to the wall.”

  Nick pictured Allie’s gray face on that gurney, and felt his gut clench.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll find him. You can count on it. Whatever it takes.”

  It was a vow to his sister rather than a promise to Keith.

  Then the first sharp stab of true grief punched its way through the shock, and he walked away from Keith and the patio and into the dark, where he vomited in the grass.

  1

  July 29, 2006

  As last thoughts before dying went, it lacked something, and Katharine Lawrence knew it. Still, there it was: Her kitchen floor was filthy.

  Lying on her stomach on the hard, cold tiles with her wrists duct-taped together behind her back, she was up close and personal with the slick, smooth expanse of glazed twelve-inch terra-cotta squares in a way she had never been before. That meant there was no missing the greasy smears on the surface, as if something oily had been recently spilled and not so carefully wiped up. Plus, there were small, muddy paw prints—the flat, round face of her Himalayan cat, Muffy, flashed into her mind—along with some dried blackish droplets that smelled like barbecue sauce, and a random assortment of unidentifiable scuffs, stains, and dirt.

  For God’s sake, didn’t she own a mop?

  “I’m going to ask you one more time: Where is it?”

  The question was growled with cold menace some three feet above her head by a tall, muscular man in a black ski mask who leaned over her prone form. It was punctuated by a ham-like fist twisting hurtfully in her hair. The resulting yank on her scalp was nothing compared to the shaft of pain that shot down her neck as he brutally jerked her head back so that he could see her face, which, when it was not contorted with fear as it was just at that moment, was considered just a slightly crooked nose shy of beautiful. His gun—a big silver pistol—jammed hard against her temple. The impact of metal on fragile bone made her wince. The mouth of the gun was hard and cold, like death itself.

  His eyes—hazel, close-set, with thick, black lashes that told her he was almost certainly dark-haired beneath the mask—were harder and colder.

  As she met them, terror skittered down her spine like icy little mice feet. Her breathing quickened. Her heart, already thudding, accelerated until the pounding of her own pulse drowned out background sounds like the hum of the refrigerator, the soft hiss of the air-conditioning —and the quick footsteps of this guy’s partner, who was searching the place room by room.

  “I told you: There isn’t one. It doesn’t exist, okay? Whatever you may have heard, it’s wrong.”

  There was nothing else she could say, even though she knew already that he wasn’t going to believe her. He hadn’t believed her before; he wouldn’t believe her now. World without end.

  His eyes darkened. His mouth, visible through a slit in the knit mask, thinned. Her stomach knotted with fear.

  Would they kill her if they didn’
t get what they wanted? The thought made her want to throw up.

  Yes was the despairing conclusion she reached as she considered the carefully calculated ferocity of the attack so far. There was a coldness to it, a purposefulness that told its own tale. She was as sure as it was possible to be that they—this man and his partner, both big, athletic guys dressed with eerie similarity in black T-shirts and sweatpants—had no intention whatsoever of letting her live.

  Or Lisa either.

  Lisa Abbott, her dear friend and former sorority sister, had, in the unluckiest of coincidences, selected this weekend to visit Washington, D.C., for the first time in the seven years since Katharine had moved there right out of college, armed with her spanking-new degree in political science and a head full of change-the-world ideals. Katharine had taken Muffy to a friend’s for the weekend—Lisa was allergic to cats—then picked Lisa up at Dulles just after five. They had been excited to be together again after so long, gabbing away a mile a minute as they filled each other in on what was going on in their lives. They had stopped for drinks at Le Bar in Georgetown, had dinner around the corner at Angelo ’s, then gone clubbing. By the time they arrived back here, at her elegant two-story town house in the historic Old Town section of the D.C. bedroom community of Alexandria, Virginia, it was after midnight and they both had been more than a little sloshed. They had toasted their reunion with one more glass of wine, then gone to bed, not so much totally exhausted as totally wasted.

  That was then.

  Now Katharine at least was stone-cold sober, and Lisa lay about three feet away, facedown on the embarrassingly dirty floor with her wrists and ankles bound with tape just as Katharine’s were. More duct tape covered Lisa’s mouth. The airy, wrought-iron base of the granite-topped kitchen island separated them, but they could still see each other because of the structure’s open design. Lisa’s shoulder-length auburn hair spilled over her face so that all Katharine had been able to see of her expression since she’d been flung there was the terrified glint of her brown eyes. Lisa’s silky yellow ankle-length nightgown was hiked to her knees, revealing the delicate trio of intertwined butterflies tattooed just above her left ankle. The ruffled hem fanned out around her tanned legs like the petals of some exotic flower. But at least the garment provided more coverage than Katharine’s own night attire of tiny pink satin boxers and a matching knit tank. Lisa was an inch taller at five-foot-eight. Katharine was the more slender of the two, but Lisa was just as sexy with her well-toned, athletic physique. As Kappa Delts, the two of them had cut quite a swath through the Ohio State University frat boys once upon a time.

  Even as Katharine stared fearfully into the cold, hazel eyes boring into her own, she was conscious of the sobbing rasp of Lisa’s terrified breathing.

  For four years we did practically everything together, and now that we’re finally back together again, we’re probably going to die together was the mournful thought that slid through Katharine’s mind. Oh, God, I don’t want to die. Not like this. We’re so young. Lisa just turned thirty, and I’m only twenty-nine. . . .

  They had everything to live for. Everything.

  “Last chance: Where is the damned safe?”

  Katharine cleared her throat desperately. “Look, I told you. There is no safe. The jewelry isn’t here. It isn’t mine. It was borrow—”

  Katharine swallowed the rest of what she was going to say as he let go of her hair, took a step back, thrust his gun in the back waistband of his pants, and kicked her in the ribs. The action was carefully calibrated: hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any real damage.

  Still, pain exploded through the right side of her chest, expanding outward in an instant from where the toe of his black sneaker connected with her bones. Katharine would have screamed if the pain had allowed it. Instead, she gasped, then writhed. Tears stung her eyes, overflowed to spill down her cheeks. She could feel their hot, wet tracks against her skin.

  It hurt so bad—bad enough to stop her breath and cause a cold sweat to break out on her forehead. Jagged splinters of pain shot like super-heated arrows into her organs, her muscles, her bones.

  “So how’s about we get real now?” His tone was still more conversational than threatening as he loomed darkly over her. Nevertheless, it was the most chill-inducing sound she had ever heard. After a single terrified glance up at him, she scrunched her eyes shut and went very still. “Where’s the safe?”

  Afraid to answer, Katharine did her best to block him out. She shrank into herself, shivering with pain and fear but otherwise not moving at all, feeling the prickle of perspiration as it sprang to life over her entire body. The ache in her side was still sharp enough to impair her breathing. Taking in careful little sips of air, she did her best to gather her wits. She was cold now, an icy, bone-deep cold that had nothing to do with the frigid tiles beneath her or the air-conditioning wafting over her sweat-dampened skin.

  It was the cold of mortal fear.

  The thing was, she was pretty sure that nothing she could say or do was going to make any difference in the end. But still she sought desperately to come up with anything, anything at all, that might turn the tide. . . .

  “Answer me.”

  His fist clenched in her hair again, and she opened her eyes and cried out. Sharp needles of distress stabbed into her scalp as he jerked her head back. Her neck felt as if it would break.

  “Where’s the damned safe?”

  He was close, frighteningly close, bending over her as he kept her head tilted up toward his and glared down into her face.

  Their eyes met. The unmistakable menace in his drove fresh terror deep into her soul.

  Her lips trembled. “There isn’t one.”

  His eyes narrowed, hardened, until she couldn’t take that brutal gaze a second longer. Pressing her lips together, swallowing convulsively, she closed her eyes again. For a moment, as she struggled to get her breath back, to move past the pain, she did nothing more than hang limply from the hand still locked into her hair. Her scalp tingled and burned from the pressure of his grip. Her neck ached. But even the most torturous physical sensation was nothing compared to the burgeoning panic that dried her mouth and made her pulse pound like she’d just run for miles, and turned her breathing into ragged little gasps for air.

  Please, God, send help. . . .

  Even with her eyes closed, she could feel his unrelenting gaze on her face.

  “You know, I’m getting tired of playing around. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, right now, how about I take a knife to your girlfriend there? Say, cut off a finger, or maybe her ear?”

  Katharine’s eyes flew open and locked on Lisa, who had suddenly gone stiff and still as a concrete statue. She didn’t even seem to be breathing anymore, and Katharine might have thought her friend had fainted—except for the frightened flicker of her eyes.

  “You wanna watch that? You wanna see her bleed? Is that what it’s going to take?”

  Katharine sucked in air and found her voice again. Or at least a semblance of her voice. What emerged was low and shaky, sounding nothing at all like her usual brisk, Midwest-infused tone.

  “No,” she whispered, sickened, her eyes never leaving Lisa. “Oh, no. Please. You’ve got to believe me, there isn’t anything....” Her voice caught as she saw Lisa start to shake. Fresh tears welled into her own eyes. Katharine had to force the rest out past the growing lump in her throat. “If there was a safe here, or any jewelry, or anything else of value that I could give you to make you go away, I’d tell you. I swear it.”

  His eyes glinted ominously. His mouth pursed. His gaze slid slowly and deliberately over her features.

  Katharine trembled.

  “You know, you’re a real pretty girl. Maybe I should just leave your girlfriend alone, and start by carving my initials in your face instead.”

  Her stomach cramped like a giant fist had just closed around it.

  “No.” Her plea sounded pitiful even to her own ears. “
No.”

  His threat was all the more horrifying because it was uttered in such a low, untroubled tone. Everything that had happened had been nightmarishly quiet. Except for the single scared scream that had escaped her throat when he had first grabbed her, when she had opened her eyes one split second before he leaped on top of her to find a man creeping toward her bed through her darkened bedroom, there had been almost no noise. At least, no noise loud enough so that it was even remotely possible to hope that someone beyond these four walls might have heard and called the police.

  She and Lisa, who had been sleeping in the town house’s second bedroom, had been dragged down the stairs into the kitchen, flung to the floor, and roughly bound. Rape had been Katharine’s immediate fear, but it hadn’t happened. Sexual assault seemed to be the furthest thing from these men’s minds.

  What they were after, as they had made abundantly clear, was the contents of a safe that was supposedly concealed somewhere on the premises. In the safe, they seemed to expect to find hundreds of thousands of dollars ’ worth of jewelry. The normal burglar booty, like the plasma TV in the living room and the laptop in the den, didn’t seem to interest them. Likewise, they’d left the jewelry that the women wore untouched. They had ignored Lisa’s modest diamond pendant, and even Katharine’s far more valuable diamond ear studs and the big oval-cut sapphire ring she had given herself for her last birthday, which ranked right up there as one of her very favorite birthdays ever.

  Since bringing them into the kitchen, they’d mostly left Lisa alone. It was Katharine whom they had terrorized, Katharine whom they had questioned, Katharine whom they had roughed up, all in an attempt to get her to reveal the location of that nonexistent (so far as she knew, anyway) safe.

  The thing was, they had known her name from the beginning. After the first fog of blind panic had cleared enough to allow her to think, that had chilled her to the bone. Clearly this was no random home invasion; it had been targeted specifically at her and carefully planned, although she got the impression that Lisa’s presence had been a surprise to them. They had expected her to be alone.