by Vicki Hinze
Gregory nearly puked. But no real damage had been done. Ben hadn’t overheard their exchange, thanks to a deep discussion about preserving local landmarks—the stated reason for the lawyer being in the village. Still, the urge to rip out Darla’s idiotic tongue had Gregory rushing to leave his opulent dining room.
Darla sat stiff and silent until Gregory disappeared beyond the dining room door and John engaged Hank on the subtleties of being diplomatic. Tuning them out and lowering her lashes, she scanned the table to be sure she had again become invisible and ignored by all.
Convinced she had, she lifted the lumped corner of her napkin and unveiled a small square of white paper. She read it and then tucked it into her beaded bag, its words echoing in her mind: OFFER REFUSED.
Gregory strode down the hallway without glancing at Paul Johnson. Mentioning a problem in the presence of guests? What was he thinking?
That faux pas would be dealt with shortly.
Gregory keyed in the code to unlock the door, then entered his private den. It was soundproof and swept for listening devices after anyone other than himself or Paul entered it, just to be safe. One didn’t accomplish all Gregory had accomplished the way he had accomplished it without careful planning and diligent execution of essential precautions.
His footfall soft on the plush carpet, Paul entered behind him. Gregory shut the double doors, then turned. Slight and stooped, Paul wasn’t a man’s man. He’d never in his life cast a fishing rod, thrown a football, or played any sport, and his idiosyncrasies made the odd habits of notorious eccentrics pale by comparison. That caused many to underestimate Paul and make the erroneous assumption that Gregory had hired him faute de mieux.
But there was no absence of someone better, and Gregory hadn’t underestimated anyone. Paul was a decade younger—just shy of twenty-five—but from their first meeting his skills, abilities, and assets had been evident and useful. The man was brilliant, resourceful, meticulous, deviously clever, ridiculously loyal, and he could make anything happen and never leave a trace. More important, he would, could, and had made unpleasant situations disappear for Gregory, and he kept his mouth shut. So Paul’s social skills were lacking. That was a minor annoyance and required only that Gregory exercise areas of restraint.
Gregory was a master at restraint—and well equipped at controlling all in his domain, including Paul Johnson.
He raised a warning hand. “Don’t ever do that again.”
Paul shifted his weight from foot to foot, swiped at his left temple. “I know I’m not supposed to interrupt when strangers—”
“Guests. They’re my guests, not strangers. I invited them to my home for dinner. Normal people do that.”
“Oh.” Paul didn’t seem to grasp the concept or to take offense at not being considered normal. “Guests.”
“Yes.” Now the man was twitching. The entire left side of his face went into a series of spasms that almost knocked his black-framed glasses off his nose. Before he went into a full spasmodic meltdown, Gregory diverted Paul’s attention with a question. “What is the problem?”
No answer.
Gregory swallowed hard, seeking patience. Upset, Paul would literally blank out. Under certain circumstances that trait could be an asset, but now wasn’t the time. “You came into the dining room and said we have a problem. What kind of problem is it?”
Comprehension dawned and Paul’s expression darkened, knitting his thick brows and bunching the skin between them into creases. “A big one, sir. You said if anything came up on this matter to inform you right away. Something has come up, so I’m informing you.”
No doubt Gregory had issued that directive, but he had issued similar instructions on various potential hazards. Without details, he couldn’t pinpoint this specific one. For the sake of efficiency and his growling stomach, he asked, “What exactly is the problem?”
“An anonymous phone call came in. No way to trace it—throwaway cell.” Paul walked over to the desk phone. “You need to hear it.”
The only anonymous calls he received were from Alik Demyan and related to NINA. True, some of those were enough to turn his hair gray, but anything else doing it was doubtful. Gregory reached for the speaker button.
“No!” Paul shifted his weight on his feet. “Pick it up, sir.”
“The room is soundproof, Paul.”
“Yes sir. But we always minimize risks. Especially when the house is full of strangers.” He caught himself. Squinted. Winced. “I meant, guests. The house is full of guests.”
Gregory lifted the receiver but paused to listen to Paul mutter, “The minute her aunt died, I knew there would be trouble. She just had to record that deed on the beach house.”
That deed had been instrumental in locating her. Gregory put two and two together. “So the subject rejected our purchase offer.”
“Yes sir.” Paul rubbed his neck. “If you’ll recall, I projected less than five percent odds of success.”
“Her advisor?”
“Ineffectual.” Paul adjusted the frame of his glasses at the bridge of his scrunched nose. “He hasn’t had much influence with her since she took over her own affairs.”
Couldn’t dispute that. Even he had been unable to locate her. Gregory stilled, considered his options.
“She won’t stay away now,” Paul projected. “The temptation will be too strong to resist.”
“Why? She hasn’t been back here even once.”
“But she knew her aunt was here. Now she’s not, and all the subject has left of her childhood is in that beach house.”
Gregory shrugged. “But it’s just a shack.”
“Not to her.” Paul peered over the tops of his glasses.
The subject was well off. She wasn’t homeless. Why would the shack mean anything to her?
“It’s all she has left of her family.”
“Ah, memories.” The light dawned. Foolish, sentimental dead weight.
Paul’s expression turned uncharacteristically tender. “I suspected she’d hidden to protect herself, but her refusing the purchase offer disputes that. She was protecting her aunt.”
“Now it all makes sense.” Gregory rubbed his lower lip. “She knows everything we feared she might know.”
“Maybe not all of it.” Paul seated his glasses at the bridge of his nose. “But more than we hoped.”
“And now, with her aunt gone, there’s less fear of reprisal.” A knot formed in Gregory’s chest. He paced from chair to desk. The subject wasn’t a fool. She had to know that tangling with him put her in lethal jeopardy. “Are you telling me she called here—herself?”
“No sir. That would be bad. This, I’m sorry to say, is worse.”
“Worse?” Gregory pressed in the code to recall the message from his service.
Tapping his fingers on the credenza, Paul grumbled, “I should have handled it, Mr. Chessman. Everything was a mess, and Edward and Harry just disappeared.”
Gregory should have allowed Paul to handle it. Unfortunately, three years ago Paul hadn’t yet proven himself, and Gregory elected to stick with the tried and true. The subject was a lightweight—or so he’d thought at the time. Everyone had underestimated her—him, his secret partner, Edward and Harry—everyone except Paul. And they all had done so on such a grand scale that Edward and Harry had botched things badly.
For weeks, Gregory had sweat bullets—until it became clear that the subject wasn’t going to make waves. Still, he found merit in avoiding loose ends. But the subject had evaded his associates and vanished. Worse, she had managed to keep vanishing. He’d spent three years living in fear that she would resurface and, now, it appeared she had.
And Paul claimed this message carried even worse news? There was no worse news.
“Go on, sir.” Paul motioned to the phone. “Listen to it. You’ll see what I mean.”
Gregory played the message. The voice had been modified—man or woman, he couldn’t tell—and what was said took two seconds to replay,
but the danger in it for him was timeless.
It was worse. It rocked Gregory’s entire world.
“Susan’s alive”
4
Do you know me?” Still holding pressure on her head wound, she stood at the receptionist’s desk inside Crossroads Crisis Center.
“I-I think my name is Susan.”
The young woman with spiky dark hair and chocolate brown eyes was caught off guard by the question. Her jaw dropped open and her gaze slid over to a painting on the wall. It hung above a long, narrow table that was home to two slim lamps and a burst of lilies.
The girl was out of her depth.
“Maybe you’d better get your boss.” Clyde stepped forward. “I tried to take her”—he motioned toward Susan—“to the hospital, but—”
“Thank you, but I can speak for myself, Mr. Parker.” Susan reached into her pocket, then pulled out a card, smudged with mud and dirt, and tried to wipe it clean. The dirt sprinkled on the countertop between her and the receptionist.
“Sorry.” She released the pressure on her head wound long enough to sweep the droppings into her hand. “My car was jacked and I was abducted and beaten.”
Blood gathered on her scalp, and Susan put the pressure back on her wound, then wiggled her elbow midair. “That’s how I got this gash in my head … I think. I’m not sure because I can’t remember much of anything, but—”
“Give her the short version,” Clyde suggested in a whisper close to Susan’s ear. “The girl’s confused, and she looks a little scared too.”
She did. A brass nameplate identified her. “Melanie, this card was in my pocket.” Susan flipped it over and frowned at more dirt smears. “See? Someone wrote ‘Susan’ on the back of it.” She tried to smile, but her lip was swollen and raw and her jaw was numb. It had to look more like a grimace. “When I saw the name written there, I remembered one of my abductors calling me Susan.” She shrugged. A hot arrow of pain shot through her shoulder, across her back.
“Just a moment, please.” Melanie bit her lips, lifted the phone receiver, and punched two buttons, her gaze darting back to the wall. “Mrs. Crane, Code One, front desk.”
Susan stiffened. “Code One?”
“Uh-oh.” Clyde leaned close again. “Codes are always bad news. I told you, you were scaring her.”
Susan turned to look at him and her gaze lighted on a painting hanging on the wall above the table. She gasped. “Look, Clyde. It’s me!” Transfixed, she walked over to the painting.
A short, sturdy woman rounded the corner at a good clip. Worry lined her face. Clyde intercepted her. “Glad you’re here, Peg.”
“We’re fully staffed every Saturday night,” she told Clyde. “Heavy traffic on Saturdays and holidays.”
“There’s no emergency.” He went on to explain the circumstances.
They knew each other, Susan realized. It couldn’t hurt to let him talk, and it could help her credibility.
A small gilded mirror hung in a grouping on the far wall. She rushed to it and examined her face. Swollen, bruised and distorted, dirty, but the resemblance was plain. She moved back to the painting and checked again. Reasonably pretty; chin-length blond hair—clean and coiffed, not strung with bits of leaves and grass; blue eyes—same shape and color; same chin and nose and neck. She gasped again. The cross. She was wearing the same cross!
Susan spun toward Clyde. “It really is me. I’m Susan.” She riveted her gaze back to the small brass placket mounted to its frame. “Susan Brandt.”
Clyde frowned. So did the woman beside him.
Susan’s skin crawled. “I know I’m a mess, but you can’t miss it. She’s me.” A nervous laugh escaped, then she glanced skyward. “God, thank You.”
She smoothed her pale hair back from her face. “I can’t tell you how unnerving it is not to remember.” Susan noticed something else written on the painting’s brass placket. Two dates.
Two.
Birth and …
She gasped and stared at the sober-faced woman beside Clyde. “I’m dead?”
“Mel,” the woman said, not looking away from Susan. “Get Doctors Talbot and Harper.”
Susan couldn’t move. She wanted to, tried to, but her feet seemed rooted to the tile floor. “I-I can’t be dead. How can that say I died three years ago?” She flipped up a hand, then thumped her chest with a fist. “I’m standing right here.”
“It’s going to be okay,” the woman said.
“Easy for you to say. No one is claiming you’re dead.”
“No one is claiming you are either,” the woman told her.
Susan grunted. “I’d have to disagree. Haven’t you seen that?” She pointed to the painting’s placket.
“You aren’t dead … ”
“Susan. My name is Susan.”
“Susan.” The woman stumbled over it. “You’re not dead.”
Susan stilled, not so sure. Too much was too weird. “Who are you?”
“Peggy Crane. Director here at Crossroads Crisis Center.” She started to step toward Susan but then stepped back next to Clyde. “Just stay calm, okay? From what Clyde says, you’ve been through a lot in a short period of time, but you are safe here. You’re safe, and we’re going to help you sort out everything.”
Tears burned the backs of Susan’s eyes and, having trouble catching her breath, she dragged in deep gulps. “But it says I’m dead—and I’m not dead.” She blinked hard. “I’m not.”
Peggy walked toward her. “Of course you aren’t.” Her calm seemed forced, but it still helped.
“So you know I’m Susan?”
Melanie passed Peggy a plastic container of wet wipes. She didn’t offer one to Susan. Was the receptionist worried about destroying evidence?
“At the moment,” Peggy said, “I’m not sure who you are, but we will find out. What I can tell you right now is that you’re not the woman in the painting.”
How could she say that? Even think that? “But—”
Peggy stopped in front of Susan and searched her face. “You look a lot like her. But you aren’t Susan Brandt. I know that for fact.”
Unable to believe it—her eyes weren’t lying to her—Susan glanced back at the painting, then again at Peggy Crane. “With all due respect, you are mistaken. I’m looking at myself.”
“No, you aren’t, and I’m not mistaken,” Peggy said. “Susan Brandt was my dear friend and she was shot dead.” Pain filled Peggy’s voice and leaked into her face. “I saw her body at the crime scene, in her casket, and I watched them lower her into the ground.”
A tear trailed down Susan’s cheek. “I’m so sorry.” That must have been horrible for Peggy. Maybe so horrible that she’d been wrong. That she’d seen what she expected to see and not what was actually there, before her eyes.
“Me too.” Peggy spoke with sincerity, seeing or sensing Susan’s doubt. “But truth is truth, and you are not that Susan.”
“How can you be certain?” She motioned between herself and the painting. “Look at us.”
“The resemblance is striking—I admit it. But there are differences and, remember, I stood at her husband’s side in the cemetery and watched him bury them both.” Peggy nodded. “No husband is apt to be mistaken about burying his wife and his son.”
While that served as sufficient proof for Peggy Crane, it didn’t for Susan. Mistaken identity happened all the time. To mothers and their own children even. If it could happen between a mother and child, it could happen between a husband and wife. It was possible.
“The abductors knew me. They called me Susan. I-I am Susan. And I am—” A hitch in her chest made her stutter. “I was a mother? A wife too?” Before she’d died, she had a family. A family. A deep yearning she didn’t understand yawned inside her like physical starvation. It weakened her knees and had her entire body trembling.
Peggy hedged. “Susan Brandt was a wife and mother.”
Her head went light. Filled with wonder, Susan glanced at Clyde. “I-I
had a family. A husband and a son … ” As the words left her mouth, the room began to spin; white spots formed before her eyes, and the air evaporated from the room. “And they think I’m … dead.”
She crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.
Sunday, October 11
Sunrise broke on the horizon.
Edward breathed in the brisk air and let the rush of wind over his face relax him. It had been a long two days.
“This is not cool.” Harry leaned against the fender of the red Jag and poured peroxide on the deep scratches Susan had clawed into his arm. He hissed in air through his teeth. “Yow!” He shot Edward a frown. “I shoulda smacked her harder.”
“Get over it, Harry. The woman scratched you. She didn’t put out your eye.”
“It hurts, man.”
“Yeah, well, right now she’s feeling a lot worse.”
“She should be feeling dead.” Harry tossed the empty brown bottle toward the trash drum, then opened a tube of ointment with his teeth and squirted it on the red lines streaking the back of his forearm. He squinted over at Edward. “They’re gonna come after us.”
“We expected that.” Edward looked through his dark sunglasses out onto the sun-streaked Gulf of Mexico. The water was emerald green and clear, and the air fresh, tangy with salt. He loved the view from the shore. “We’ll be okay if we stick with the plan.”
“Stick with the plan? She was supposed to be dead. She ain’t dead, Edward.” Harry lit a cigarette and exhaled a puff of smoke. “You think Chessman is going to let us live when his subject ain’t dead?” Harry grunted. “Noway.”
“We’re not the threat to him that she is.”
“Are you snorting dope again? We’re breathing. We can tie him to the first murder. We’re a huge threat.”
She’s worse.
“That don’t mean he’ll let us live, man.” Harry rocked his head back on his shoulders and closed his eyes, lifting his face to the sun. “You think he will, you’re making a big mistake. We’ll be running forever—at least until Chessman’s pit bull, Johnson, runs us down. Then we’ll be dead.”