Veil of Fear

by Judi Lind

  Not wanting to further provoke him, Trace held up his hands, palms forward, and advanced slowly. “Hey, man, don’t freak out. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you.”

  Lester shook his head forcefully. “I don’t want to talk to you. Go away. Why can’t you people leave me alone?”

  Perplexed, Trace studied the frenzied man who was huddled against the wall, his fingers scrabbling at the faded plaster. Despite Bob Newland’s assertion that Mark Lester and Mary had once been lovers, it was hard—no, impossible—to believe Mary had ever been involved with this bundle of neuroses. In fact, the more Trace became entangled in this situation, the more he was certain that Bob Newland had totally misjudged Mary Wilder.

  The problem now, however, was to try to figure out what had Lester so spooked. First he had to get him calmed down enough to converse with him.

  “Come on, buddy. Take it easy. I just want to talk to you. Can’t we go inside for a minute?”

  Lester’s eyes were wild, as if he had just been zapped by a stun gun. “No! Go away, I told you. Just leave me—” He broke off suddenly, and stared over Trace’s shoulder. “Mary! Wh-what are you doing here?”

  Trace swiveled his head and saw Mary slowly coming toward them. Her eyes were moist and filled with compassion. When she reached them, she said only, “Trace.”

  The single word reverberated with meaning. With one syllable, she’d managed to convey her empathy for Mark Lester and her disappointment in Trace. Clearly, she thought that Trace had already physically intimidated her friend.

  Trace blew out a long, frustrated breath. Now wasn’t the time to correct Mary’s misinterpretation. The best thing he could do to minimize the tension was to let Mary try and smooth things over. Wordlessly, he stepped aside and allowed her to approach the other man.

  Mary stepped between them and laid a hand on Lester’s shoulder. For an instant, Trace felt a flare of jealousy at the tenderness in her voice.

  Suddenly, Mary gasped. “Mark? My God, what happened to your face?” With infinite gentleness, her fingertips brushed his pale skin, lightly touching the largest bruise at the base of his cheekbone.

  Mark jerked away, as if her touch burned. Trace could sympathize with the man; he, too, had been seared by her touch.

  “I’m okay,” Lester muttered in an obvious attempt to regain some of his composure.

  Mary shoved her hands into her jeans pockets. “Please, Mark. Come inside and talk to us.”

  He shot a nervous glance at Trace. “Not him. I don’t want to talk to him.”

  Mary’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “Do you two know each other?”

  “No,” Lester said. “But I’ve met his kind before. They’re all alike. I don’t want to talk to him.”

  Mary shook her head. “No, it’s all right. He’s with me.”

  “With you?”

  “Yes. I promise, no one’s going to hurt you. Can we go inside now?”

  Looking at Mary with the blind trust of a puppy, Lester hesitated for a long moment, then nodded.

  Trace stood back and allowed them to precede him down the hall. He watched with an odd, gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach as Mary draped a protective arm around the man’s thin waist. Lester’s gait was still uneasy and Trace could see the muscles twitching in his neck.

  This guy was a real fruitcake. Mary was wrong about him, really wrong. Mark Lester was a walking time bomb. Trace only hoped they could defuse him before Mary was injured in the explosion when he finally went off.

  Trace deliberately trailed behind as they trooped into Lester’s stuffy apartment. It was a small efficiency unit, dark and Spartan. The utilitarian furniture was cheap rental quality.

  Mary went over to the single window in the living room, pulled open the blinds and raised the sash. The late-afternoon sunlight did little to ease the gloom in the depressing studio, but the fresh air helped dispel the mustiness that pervaded the tiny apartment. Trace looked around at the thick layer of dust that coated every surface. Housekeeping wasn’t Lester’s strong suit.

  In fact, judging by his home, it didn’t appear that Mark Lester had any kind of life at all. There were no throw pillows on the sofa, no mementos topped the table or bookcase. The only item of a personal nature in the entire apartment was a framed candid photograph of Mary on the stand beside the rumpled single bed.

  A sign of Lester’s obsession or merely a reminder of what might have been?

  While Trace was deciding the best way to approach Lester, Mary surprised him by taking control. She sat down on the sofa and patted the spot beside her. “Here, Mark. Let’s you and I talk.”

  Trace leaned against the wall next to the refrigerator and smiled in appreciation. Mary was instinctively handling the situation just right, turning an interrogation into a friendly chat. Trace slid into the shadow of the fridge, knowing her efforts would be more productive if he stayed in the background.

  After Lester had lowered himself onto the edge of the couch, Mary said, “Now tell me what happened to your face.”

  “I fell. Down the stairs.”

  Trace didn’t buy the feeble explanation. Lester had taken one glance at his official-looking identification card and bolted. Obviously, the man had run afoul of the law in the not too distant past.

  Mary, however, seemed to accept Lester’s story at face value. “You poor thing. Did you go to the hospital? You might have broken your cheekbone. It looks pretty swollen.”

  “I went to the health office at school. The nurse said it was just bruised.”

  “Still, it must really hurt.”

  He seemed to bask in her sympathy for a moment. “A little. What really burns me up, though, is that they won’t let me wait on tables till the bruising’s gone. I have to work in the kitchen.”

  “That’s too bad.” Mary paused as if to marshal her strategy. In a more thoughtful tone, she started, “Mark, we have to talk to you about...about some things that have been happening to me lately.”

  “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it.”

  “Do what?” Trace asked mildly.

  The other man’s head snapped up. It was clear from his startled expression that he’d forgotten Trace was in the room. “I didn’t follow her around,” he muttered.

  Mary drew in a sharp breath. She looked up, exchanging a quick, knowing glance with Trace. Her eyes were so expressive, he could read her hurt and disappointment from across the room. Obviously, her faith in Lester’s innocence was being sorely tested.

  Reflexively, she eased a few inches away from Lester and returned her thoughtful gaze to the man’s haunted features. “No one mentioned I’ve been followed, Mark. How did you know?”

  “I, uh, guessed.”

  That did it. Trace had held back as long as he could. Not only was this jerk a liar, he was really lousy at it. With a few long resolute strides, Trace crossed the distance between them. He reached down and grabbed a handful of Lester’s shirt and pulled the man to his feet.

  “Listen, you slime-bag. I don’t have the time or the patience for any more of your garbage. You didn’t guess anything.”

  “Trace!” Mary jumped to her feet and glared at him. “Stop it! You’re hurting him.”

  Shaking his head, Trace did his best to ignore the stricken look on her face. “Not yet I’m not. But I’ll gladly rearrange the other side of his face if he doesn’t start telling us the truth.”

  “I won’t let you touch him,” she insisted.

  “Mary, this guy’s just pulling your chain. But he’s going to talk to me, aren’t you, buddy? And he’s going to tell me the truth.”

  “If you hit him, there’s no difference between you and the fiend who’s been stalking me.”

  Her glacial tone poured over Trace like a bucket of ice water. Never had the differences between the advantaged world Mary had so recently come to inhabit and his own been more obvious. In the genteel world of state dinners and symphonies at Kennedy Center, people didn’t resolv
e their problems with their fists. But in Trace’s world, talking rarely accomplished a damned thing.

  Not that he wished Mary a life of coping with Washington’s mean streets, but he was a little disappointed that she’d been so easily absorbed into the realm of the privileged.

  As she continued to challenge him with her accusing eyes, Trace felt more and more like the human gutter-trash that was usually his quarry. Trace suddenly saw how Mary and her friends viewed people like him. He was nothing more than an exterminator hired to eliminate the filthy pests and vermin that swarmed in their garbage. But they didn’t want to actually see him do the dirty work.

  His new awareness boiled inside him and erupted in a spasm of rage. Opening his fist, Trace used the flat of his hand to push Lester back down onto the sofa. Slowly shifting his gaze to Mary, he said, “If you don’t want to see this, then maybe you’d better wait outside. Otherwise, sit down and keep quiet.”

  Mary blanched at the harshness of his words. Folding her arms across her chest in a determined manner, she lowered herself onto the sofa beside Lester. “You’ll have to hit me first.”

  Trace’s eyes blinked in disbelief. This weirdo had been following her and plaguing her for days, and she still sided with him. Either Trace had been wrong and she was still carrying a torch for this guy, or...or he just didn’t understand women.

  What did it matter, anyway? When Mark Lester confessed and was safely behind bars, Mary wouldn’t be Trace’s problem any longer. Let Regent have her; they deserved each other. Deliberately shifting his attention to Lester, he continued, “All right, playtime’s over. Now start talking. What the hell do you think you’re doing following Mary around?”

  Mark jerked his head up. “I told you! I’ve never followed her. Never.”

  “So that was just a lucky guess?”

  Mark lowered his eyes and picked at the nubby weave of the sofa. “No. That’s what...they said before. Why won’t anybody believe me?”

  Mary reached over and cupped his hand. “I believe you, Mark.” She looked up at Trace’s snarl of disgust. “Well, I do.”

  Lester yanked his hand from beneath Mary’s grasp. “Sure you believe me, Mary. Sure you do! That’s why you had your boyfriend pay those—those two hired thugs to come over here and threaten to kill me unless I stayed away from you. Now that you’re all high-and-mighty, you don’t want to be bothered with the little peons from your past.”

  Mary’s hand flew to her throat. “That’s not true! Why, I would never—I mean, Jonathan wouldn’t—” She broke off and looked up at Trace, her cocoa brown eyes even darker with pain.

  Trace took a slow ten-count under his breath. Despite his own frustration with Mary, every fiber of his being wanted to throttle this skinny creep for taking his twisted rage out on her. But the guy had raised an interesting point. “Did either of these men actually tell you they were sent by Jonathan Regent?”

  Lester thought for a long moment then slowly shook his head. “No, not in so many words. But who else would want me to stay away from Mary? I would never do anything to hurt her. I... I loved her.”

  Loved. As in the past tense. In the course of his job, Trace had all too often witnessed the destruction that sometimes ensued when love deteriorated into hate.

  He shot a quick, compassionate glance at Mary. Her shoulders drooped and her head was bowed in response to Lester’s pronouncement. She looked shell-shocked. Once again Trace wondered what her true relationship had been with Mark Lester. More important, why did it matter to Trace so much?

  Not wanting to deal with his own confused feelings, Trace once again addressed Lester. “All right, let’s start again. You’re as innocent as a sacrificial lamb. So how did you know Mary was being followed?”

  “I already explained that. They told me.”

  “Who?” Mary and Trace chorused.

  “The two men who were here before.”

  “Oh, yeah, the mysterious thugs,” Trace sneered. “When were they here? What did they want?”

  “Last week. I don’t remember which day. They said they had a warning for me.” Mark rubbed his bruised face with quaking fingers.

  “Did they do that to you?” Mary asked softly.

  He didn’t respond but the quick ducking of his head was answer enough. His fingers went back to their anxious plucking of fibers from the couch.

  Trace paced in front of the cheap coffee table for a full minute as he tried to make sense of Lester’s story. Despite the man’s distraught mental condition, Trace could almost accept that Mark Lester believed his own tale. Almost.

  Trace paused in his pacing and looked down at the agitated man. “Okay, let’s give it one more shot. I’ll make it real simple this time. Last week, two men came to see you, is that right?”

  Lester nodded.

  “And they accused you of following Mary?”

  He nodded again.

  “Then what? They just beat the stuffing out of you and left?”

  Lester’s dry, brittle laugh contained no humor. “I guess you could say that.”

  Mary reached out as if to pat his hand again but stopped herself at the last minute. Catching Trace’s warning frown, she thrust out her chin in defiance and asked quietly, “What did those men look like?”

  Lester shot her a dark glance. “Big. Real big. Like gangsters.”

  Trace leaned over until his face was only inches from Lester’s. “Come on, Lester. Do you really expect us to believe that two Mafia types showed up out of the blue and beat you up on Mary’s behalf?”

  “I didn’t say they were Mafia types. They were just big...thugs.”

  “Do you think you could identify these ‘thugs’?” Trace asked as he straightened up again.

  “No! They said they’d kill me if I told anyone.”

  “Kill you!” Mary exclaimed. “Because of me? But...but that doesn’t make any sense.”

  She turned to Trace, her eyes glinting with confusion.

  Trace shrugged. She was right. None of this made any sense. Was the man completely delusional or was his bizarre story the truth?

  They continued to question Lester for a few more minutes, but it soon became apparent that he had already told them all he could—or would. He denied any knowledge of the threatening note Mary had received. And when asked about the tampered-with chocolates, his bewilderment was so convincing that Trace figured the man deserved an Oscar for best actor if he wasn’t telling the truth.

  Catching Mary’s eye, Trace signaled her that it was time to leave. They wouldn’t get any more out of Lester today.

  She rose slowly to her feet. Turning her back to Trace, she gazed down at the man who had sunk into the corner of the sofa, blatantly ignoring her. “Mark? We’re leaving now.”

  “Good,” he mumbled into his chest.

  Her shoulders heaved and a soft sob escaped into the still atmosphere. “Why are you so angry at me, Mark? We were friends. Good friends.”

  “Sure,” he said bitterly, at last looking up. His facial expression was blank, his eyes strangely empty. “Have your people call mine. We’ll do lunch.” He immediately dropped his gaze, focusing once again on picking at the upholstery fabric.

  With a slow, sorrowful shake of her head, she whispered “goodbye” and moved to stand beside Trace. He cupped her elbow and led the way to the apartment door, where he paused.

  Mark Lester continued to stare sullenly into nothingness. Trace waited until the man looked up. Speaking quietly, but with authority, Trace said, “One last thing. If you have been hanging around Ms. Wilder, I’d strongly advise you to stop. Now. Do you understand me?”

  Lester said nothing. Yet Trace knew he’d never forget the bitter eyes of the man who nodded mutely in response. Eyes filled with pure hatred. Was Lester’s animosity directed against Mary or his assailants? If they even existed.

  One thing was certain: it didn’t really matter whether Lester had had a run-in with the local cops, been roughed up by a pair of wise guys or if h
e’d in fact fallen down a flight of stairs. Mark Lester was a man on the edge. The most dangerous kind of all.

  * * *

  MARY KEPT her troubled thoughts to herself while Trace cut a swath through the congested traffic clogging Route 50. Showing his intimate knowledge of area back streets, he bypassed the more heavily traveled bridge nearby, and made a circuitous loop around the city, crossing the Potomac on the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge in a more direct route to Georgetown.

  Normally, Mary was enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of the centuries-old architecture, but today her interest sagged beneath the weight of the afternoon’s disconcerting events.

  She’d never seen Mark so...so peculiar before. True, he’d always been a sensitive man, given to mood swings and bouts of depression. But this manic animosity was a side of him she’d never suspected he possessed. Mark was the first friend Mary had made after moving to the capitol area. And though she rarely saw him anymore, he’d remained her best friend. Until today.

  Then there was Trace.

  She’d been totally unprepared for that streak of violence he’d exhibited with Mark. The raw, almost savage way he’d grabbed Mark by the shirt, and his brusque unrelenting questions had left her awed and almost frightened.

  Mary realized anew that her small-town childhood had left her ill-prepared for the reality of city life. Since leaving her parents’ peaceful and isolated home on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Michigan, she’d felt as if she’d fallen into a caldron of brutality and harshness. Her first few weeks of working in the District had introduced Mary to poverty, drugs, homelessness and street crime.

  Then Jonathan had walked into the small bookstore where she worked, and Mary’s life had changed overnight. It had been so easy to be swept up by Jonathan. Not only was he wealthy, handsome and powerful, he’d treated Mary with a gentle courtliness that had made her feel cherished and protected from the violent world around her.

  Jonathan had introduced her to a life-style she’d only read about. Skiing trips to Aspen, glamorous embassy parties, weekends on Nantucket. Once, they’d even dined at the White House.