Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “There . . . was a robbery.” She paused, wrestling with her memory banks, waiting for the voice on the other end of the phone to compute, for the speaker’s identity to flash into her mind.

  Nothing.

  All she got when she concentrated was a worsening of her headache. Maybe the hospital had her doped up, she thought hopefully, glancing at the IV, and made a mental note to ask as soon as she got off the phone. That would explain why so many things she knew she ought to know were missing in action.

  “What kind of robbery? Did they take anything? What’d they take?” There was a wealth of anxiety in the forceful voice on the other end of the phone.

  Okay, she was still blanking. Before she answered any questions, she felt that it was important to establish who she was talking to. After all, somebody had tried to kill her last night.

  For all she knew, it might even have been the person behind this authoritative voice on the other end of the phone.

  “Um, who is this?” she asked cautiously, her gaze resting on Dan. He had turned away from the bed and was examining some beige metal boxlike piece of medical equipment that stood unused on a stand beside the bed as he politely pretended not to listen.

  There was the briefest of pauses on the other end of the phone.

  “It’s me, Ed.” Impatience sharpened his voice. “Who the hell do you think? Katharine, did they take anything ?”

  Ed. Her boyfriend. Her divorcing, powerful lover. Of course.

  The disconcerting thing was, even now that she knew who he was, she didn’t recognize his voice at all.

  4

  "Ed,” she murmured, seeking to mentally cement his name to the growling voice. Instantly his image appeared in her mind’s eye: short, well-groomed black hair just starting to go gray; heavy-lidded brown eyes; meaty, triangular nose; full lips; a perpetually tan face with prominent cheekbones and a square jaw. He was a hair taller than five-ten, an attractive, muscular man who liked to work out and had a closet full of expensive designer suits. And, good lord, he sounded like he was used to people asking How high? when he said jump. Well, maybe he was just upset. She concentrated, trying to remember what he’d asked. Oh, yeah.

  “I don’t know what they actually took,” she said meticulously. “They were after jewelry.”

  “Jewelry?” He sounded dumbfounded.

  “That’s what they said. I think they must have seen the picture in the Post. You know, the one where I had on that set you . . .”

  “Yeah, I know,” he interrupted. The picture had caused him no end of trouble, too. He’d been with her in it, of course, with his arm around her, escorting her up some steps into the house. The magnificent necklace and bracelet and earrings she had been wearing had rightfully belonged to his wife, who was not yet his ex, and who had raised hell when she saw the paper. And, not incidentally, moved out of the house they were still sharing on a halfway-friendly basis and upped her financial demands. “What makes you think they were after jewelry?”

  “I . . . I . . . that’s what they said.” She took a deep breath, trying her best to remember, to keep it all together. “They shot Lisa. She’s dead.”

  There was the briefest of pauses.

  “I heard. That’s a hell of a thing.” Another pause, and she could almost sense him fighting to rein in his impatience. Clearly, Lisa’s murder was not, for him, the most important thing. Not that he knew Lisa. Unless her memory was failing her—well, it was, but still, she was pretty sure about this—he’d never even met Lisa. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Well . . .” she began, meaning to tell him that she wasn’t as okay as he seemed to think. But he interrupted before she could continue.

  “Katharine. Who were they?” There was an urgency to his tone that made her grip on the receiver tighten.

  “I . . . I don’t know. Burglars. Thugs. They—”

  He didn’t let her finish. “Could they have been working for somebody?”

  She didn’t understand. “What?”

  He gave an impatient tcch. “Do you think they were spooks?”

  Katharine blinked, still all at sea. Then his meaning hit her. He was talking spooks as in the dark side inhabitants of the Alphabet Soup World they inhabited: CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, NORAD, and at least a dozen more. Spooks as uttered by Ed meant covert operatives. The thought made her heart lurch. Her mind flashed back to the attack. Two men, dressed all in black, tall and muscular and all business, even when they were terrorizing her . . .

  A chill ran down her spine. She didn’t know why the possibility hadn’t occurred to her before.

  “I don’t know. M-maybe.”

  “Damn it to hell.” She could hear his teeth grinding. “What did they say? What did they do?”

  Her stomach knotted. Her pulse revved up. An upsurge of remembered fear tasted sour in her mouth. She wet her dry lips.

  “They said they wanted my jewelry. When I couldn’t give it to them, they beat me up, then they tried to kill me. They sh-shot Lisa dead.”

  “Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”

  Taking a deep breath, she did, although she gave him the edited version. She just didn’t like talking about it, she discovered. And some parts, like the details of how Lisa had died, were just too raw right now. She needed time to process what had happened herself before she spelled it out for anyone else.

  “Did they take anything? What did they take?”

  The tension vibrating in his voice ratcheted up her own burgeoning agitation.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see. They were in the den . . . they found the safe. You never—” Told me there was a hidden safe was what she meant to say, but he cut her off with an explosion of curses.

  “Did they get into it? Did they take anything? What did they take?” Ed practically screamed that last part, making her jump.

  Bully. The thought popped into her mind unbidden, surprising her with its cool detachment. Did he always yell like that? The unsettling thing was, she didn’t know.

  She did know she didn’t like being screamed at.

  “I don’t know.” The sudden chill she felt was reflected in her voice. How many times did she have to say it? Her fingers hurt from gripping the phone so hard, and she shifted the receiver into her other hand, flexing her cramped fingers as she continued. “What was in that safe, anyway? Was there jewelry?”

  She heard him inhale. The ensuing silence was as loud as a shout.

  “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “Along with some other things. Valuables. Cash. You know.”

  Yeah, she knew—knew that he was lying. It was there in his voice, plain as anything.

  Don’t call him on it. The warning sprang into her head as clearly as if she had heard someone say it aloud. Instinctively, she felt that her own interests would be best served by pretending to believe whatever he said.

  “I’m coming home,” he said abruptly, before she could reply. “Quick as I can get there. In the meantime, I’ll send some people to you in the hospital. They’ll watch over you. When you’re ready to leave, they’ll take you somewhere safe.”

  Somewhere safe . . . As his words sank in, her heart skipped a beat. That implied, unless she was mightily mistaken, that she wasn’t safe where she was.

  “Oh,” she answered faintly, and realized that the thought of seeing him in the flesh sent butterflies swooping through her stomach. And not the good kind of butterflies. Anxious butterflies. Fearful butterflies.

  “Love ya, babe,” he said, and hung up before she could reply.

  Katharine slowly pulled the receiver away from her ear. Her pulse raced, and looking down at her hand gripping the phone, she saw that her knuckles were white from holding on to it so hard.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She had forgotten Dan was there until he spoke. She glanced over to find that he was still standing a few feet away beside the medical equipment but was now openly watching her, and she wondered if her expression was as discomb
obulated as her thoughts.

  He was a doctor. She latched on to that thought like a drowning man to a branch. She could tell him about the apparent gaps in her memory, about the odd sense of disassociation she was experiencing, about how generally weird she felt. About Ed, and not recognizing his voice, and her conviction that she needed to do what he said or the consequences would be—well, unpleasant. Dan might be able to help her, to explain it to her, to make it all make sense somehow . . .

  Before she even had a chance to decide whether or not to say anything, a quick knock on the door made her jump and drove the issue temporarily out of her head.

  Oh my God, could this be Ed’s “people” already? The thought brought the hairs on the back of her neck to instant, prickling attention. Dan frowned, too, and glanced swiftly toward the door. Before either of them could get it together enough to reply, the knob turned and the door was thrust open.

  “Morning, Miss Lawrence.” Incongruously cheerful, a young black woman in green scrubs pushed a metal cart noisily through the door. “I just need to get a quick read on . . .” Her gaze fell on Dan, who had already turned back toward the bed and was grimacing sympathetically at Katharine. “Morning, Doctor.” She wheeled the cart up beside the bed, transferring her attention back to Katharine and continuing her first thought as if she had never interrupted it. “. . . your blood pressure. Could I have your arm, please?”

  Dan gave a small salute and mouthed See you as Katharine withdrew her arm from beneath the blanket and proffered it. By the time the nurse had the familiar black plastic sheath secured just above her elbow, he was gone.

  “Relax, this’ll just take a sec,” the nurse said as Katharine blindly watched the band inflate. Chill, she told herself, to no avail. Relaxing even a little bit just wasn’t in the cards at the moment. Her thoughts were in turmoil. She could feel her heart beating faster than normal. She felt jumpy, on edge, uncomfortable.

  Frightened.

  “Your blood pressure’s a little high.” Clucking disapproval, the nurse unwrapped her arm and tucked the cuff back into the cart. “You just rest for a while, and we’ll check it again. Breakfast’ll be around shortly.”

  “Thanks,” Katharine said, and watched the nurse and cart trundle back out the door. Even with the door closed again, she could hear the muffled rattle of the cart as it headed on its rounds. The hospital was clearly waking up. People were moving around out in the hall. She could hear footsteps, voices, laughter. Someone being paged over a PA system. The light around the edges of her door seemed brighter, as if the wattage in the area outside the door had been turned up. The light behind the closed curtains was brighter, too, as beyond their shielding folds the morning took hold and the sun inched its way up the sky. Even the hum of the air-conditioning seemed louder, as if it were gearing up to combat the coming heat of the day.

  A day that I’m lucky to be here to see.

  The thought scared her all over again. It also filled her with an indescribable sadness, both for herself and for Lisa. One alive, one dead.

  Why, why, why?

  She tried to think, to sort things out a little, to impose some kind of order on the chaos that was her mind. But her thoughts raced and the images she needed to try to put any kind of coherent picture together melted away like sugar in a cup of coffee.

  Giving up for the moment, she found the remote, turned on the TV—it was tuned to the Fox News Channel—and tried to follow the nurse’s advice and rest. It was impossible. Her mind was in such turmoil that nothing the talking heads on TV said registered. The bed was uncomfortable, the blanket scratchy, the air-conditioning far too cold. Her mouth was dry, her head ached badly, and she couldn’t breathe through her nose. And she still felt—weird. It was the only way to describe it.

  Something was wrong: That was the firm conviction she couldn’t get out of her mind. Something above and beyond the fact that she was in the hospital and Lisa was dead. Something—something—dear God, she didn’t know what exactly, but something—that made her feel all shaky inside even as she tried to figure out what it was.

  Ed’s on his way. The thought was meant to be comforting, but her body responded independently of her mind: Her breathing quickened; her heartbeat sped up; her muscles tensed.

  I don’t want to see him.

  The conviction of it surprised her. Had they had a fight? Not that she recalled, but . . . casting her mind back over her relationship with Ed was, she discovered, as impossible as everything else. Too much was missing. Only the bare bones were there, with the gaps between essential facts filled by blurry images that she couldn’t quite pull together into a comprehensible whole, no matter how hard she tried.

  I’m scared.

  The thought popped fully formed into her mind. The fact that she was thinking it scared her even more.

  Okay, she told herself firmly, get a grip here. It’s shock. It’s temporary. Just breathe.

  Of course, that was easier said than done when she was minus a functional nose. But still, she tried.

  Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. In—

  Quick, masculine footsteps in the hall outside her door broke her concentration. Her breath expelled in a snort that hurt her useless nose. Ignoring the instant electric jolt to her nose nerves, she froze, listening with mounting tension to the approaching footsteps. But they passed harmlessly on, and she sagged with relief. Then she started up the whole okay, breathe routine all over again.

  After a few minutes she had to accept that it was a waste of good air. Her tension didn’t abate one bit. Instead of finding comfort in the knowledge that people were going about their business in the hospital all around her, she found herself growing increasingly agitated by it. Who were these people? Did any of them mean her harm? That was pure paranoia and she knew it, but she couldn’t seem to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

  She moved restlessly, shifting positions in an effort to get comfortable, and the ring on her finger caught her eye. The sapphire was the size of one of her fingernails. The bright blue stone gleamed as she tilted her hand curiously toward the lamp; the diamond baguettes on either side sparkled. It looked almost impossibly glamorous on her hand, like nothing she could ever imagine herself owning—although her hand was glamorous, too. Staring down at her long, slim fingers, at her beautifully manicured, oval-tipped nails with their frosting of pretty pink polish, she felt like she was looking at a stranger’s hand. It did not seem possible that hers could be so soft and well kept.

  Almost cautiously, she touched the ring. The stone was hard and cold—and big and valuable. Clearly very valuable. She had bought it for herself. With money she had inherited. The knowledge popped into her head as a solid nugget of certainty. It gave her hope that the fog in her brain might be clearing away, but nothing else came. Not the name of the store she had bought it from, or the memory of actually purchasing it, or anything at all except those two small facts. As she probed her memory banks in a futile search for more, she anxiously twisted the ring around and around on her finger, then stopped when she realized something: The ring was loose. At least a size too large, and maybe more.

  Staring down at the ring, she realized that she was breathing in quick little pants now that dried her mouth and throat.

  Had she lost some weight lately? Her anxiety mounted as she realized she had no clue. Or had she never gotten around to getting the ring sized? Or did she just like to wear her jewelry loose? Any of those were possibilities. What made it frightening was that she just didn’t know. Quickly she raised her hands to the diamond studs in her ears: They were still there. Still big and cold and valuable.

  They didn’t feel like anything that could possibly belong to her.

  As she sat there fingering the heavy stones that were the size and approximate temperature of frozen peas against the soft warmth of her earlobes, images from the night before swirled through her mind like outtakes from a movie. A nightmarish shadow creeping through her dark bedroom. A hard knee in the small
of her back as her arms were wrenched behind her. A voice demanding Where is it? over and over again. Two men, tall, muscular, clad all in black, their faces hidden beneath knit masks . . .

  Spooks. As she saw them again in her mind’s eye, she wondered why she hadn’t instantly recognized them for what they were. The men who had broken into her apartment, who had killed Lisa and tried to kill her, were too fit, too well trained, too disciplined to be anything but cov-ops. Terror had probably kept her from connecting the dots at the time, but she saw it quite clearly now.

  And although she knew that they had been seeking jewelry, immensely valuable jewelry of the caliber she’d been wearing in that Post photo, knew it as in this is an incontrovertible fact, she could not actually remember them saying so.

  So how did she know? Good question. Too bad she didn’t have any other answer for it other than I just do.

  What she did remember was them asking, “Where’s the safe?”

  The thought that she knew something without being able to remember exactly how she knew it made her break out in a cold sweat.

  This is so not good.

  Her hands dropped away from her ears, and the ring caught the light. The seductive blue gleam of the stone captured her gaze.

  If confirmation of what she suspected was needed, there it was: Despite what she somehow “knew,” plain, old-fashioned common sense told her that the intruders had not been after jewelry. If they had been, no way would this ring, and her earrings, have escaped their eye. Ergo, they had been after something else, something that they thought was kept in that hidden safe that Ed had never bothered to mention to her.

  That Ed had deliberately not mentioned to her.

  Her heart skipped a beat.

  Ed knew what they were after, and he knew it wasn’t jewelry. She had heard it in his voice.

  Another flurry of loud footsteps outside in the hall made her suck in air and turn her face quickly toward the door. She tensed, waiting on tenterhooks, but they, too, passed on by.

  When they were gone she went limp with relief, then simply lay there for a moment, considering. She was keenly aware of the pounding of her pulse, the tightness in her chest, the knot in her stomach.