by Carole Buck
Leigh turned off the engine, silencing the announcer in midsentence. She definitely wasn’t in the mood to hear about a manhunt for a murderer. She understood with bitter clarity that the world could be a cruel and dangerous place. But tonight she was going to shove that comprehension far, far to the back of her mind and revel in the security of loving and being loved.
Unbuckling her seat belt, she gathered up her purse with her right hand while fluffing her pale hair with her left. Although she’d done her best to restore her appearance before she’d finally managed to tear herself away from John, a quick glance in the rearview mirror told her that she’d only been partially successful. Despite her efforts, she still had a rather…uh…ravished look.
Andy was still too young to notice such things, thank heavens. His beloved baby-sitter was a different story. Leigh just hoped that the stamp of approval Nonna P. had seemed to bestow upon her relationship with John Gulliver had not been revoked.
She got out of the station wagon and shut the door. Squaring her shoulders, she inhaled deeply. The early-evening air was crisp and cold and carried the faint scent of woodsmoke. She expelled the breath she’d taken, then inhaled again. As she did so, her memory replayed a small piece of the Friday-night conversation she’d had with Donatella Pietra.
You’ve been alone for a long time, the older woman had observed.
I’ve had Andy, she’d responded, well aware of the blessing her little boy had been.
Nonna P. had smiled then, her homely features temporarily transfigured. A few moments later, her expression had changed. The light had faded from her face, taking with it the illusion of beauty. The imprint of age and an inarticulated grief had become brutally obvious.
Sometimes children aren’t enough, she’d said with painful simplicity.
Had Nonna’s comment been based on personal experience? Leigh wondered as she followed the snow-dusted walk that led from the driveway to the front door. She didn’t know. But if it had been, why had the older woman never spoken about being a mother? There had been dozens of opportunities for her to do so during the past two-plus years.
It was strange, she thought with a fleeting frown, opening her purse and fishing out her keys. Now that she stopped and looked back, she could recall at least a dozen instances when Donatella Pietra had sidestepped inquiries about her past. Her ploys seemed so obvious in retrospect. Yet, at the time…
All right! All right! Until this moment, she’d never paid much attention to the way Andy’s baby-sitter tended to pull back when a conversation turned intimate. Was it any wonder? She had trouble enough keeping track of her own evasions without adding the task of trying to catalog someone else’s.
She’d checked out Nonna’s references very thoroughly before hiring her, of course. She’d had no intention of entrusting her son to an unvetted stranger. But when it came to personal questions, she’d never pressed. It hadn’t seemed…right.
And the older woman had never pressed her, either. Friday’s conversation aside, she’d never been anything but the soul of discretion. She hadn’t even asked about Andy’s father!
Which was very odd, Leigh realized with a twinge of uneasiness, sliding her front-door key into the lock and turning it. Because Nonna was intensely curious about everything else in Andy’s young life. Witness her endless stream of questions about the accident at the preschool playground. So why had she never broached the issue of Andy’s paternity?
Leigh opened the front door and stepped inside. “Andy?”
No response.
“Nonna?” she tried again, the skin on the nape of her neck starting to prickle.
Still no response. The house seemed ominously still.
A game, she told herself firmly. Andy was playing some kind of game and he’d gotten his baby-sitter to go along with him. Any second now, he would pop out from behind a piece of furniture and yell “boo!” The more rattled she seemed in reaction, the more delighted he would be. He would probably suggest playing the same trick on John once he learned of his impending arrival.
“Andy?” she called, walking down the foyer. “It’s Mommy. I’ve got something to tell you, sweetie.”
She reached the entrance to the living room. The lights were off. She felt for the wall switch by the door and clicked them on. Then she gasped. Her purse fell from nerveless fingers, hitting the hardwood floor with a thud.
Her son was sprawled on the sofa like a rag doll. He wasn’t moving. From where she stood, he didn’t even appear to be breathing.
“A-Andy,” she choked out, rushing forward. She collapsed beside the sofa, feeling frantically for a pulse. “Oh, God. Andy.”
She found what she was searching for an unmercifully long second later. Although he seemed to be deeply—unnaturally—unconscious, her son was definitely alive.
And then it happened. An atavastic sense of horror swept through her. Her skin went clammy. Her blood threatened to clot in her veins while her breath congealed at the top of her throat.
There was someone else in the room.
She could feel it through her pores.
She could…smell it.
Please, God, she prayed silently. Please. Whatever this is. Whoever this is. Protect my little boy.
Still on her knees, Leigh McKay shifted around to confront the embodiment of a waking nightmare.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Suzanne,” said Anthony Stone, and leveled a handgun at the middle of her forehead.
* * *
John was halfway out the door when the phone on the nightstand started to ring. He was more than a little tempted to ignore the shrilling summons. He had a pizza to pick up!
Two pizzas, actually. One large with double pepperoni. One small with black olives and—ugh!—anchovies.
The possibility that the caller might be Leigh lured him back across the room. He snagged the receiver with his scarred right hand, raking the fingers of his left through his showerdampened hair. He’d decided it behooved him to be all scrubbed up when he petitioned for permission to marry Andy’s mother.
“Hello?”
“Gulliver?”
“Nordling?” Every instinct he had went on red alert in the space of a single heartbeat. “What’s wrong?”
“Anthony Stone’s escaped.”
John went rigid. He spat out a curse. “When? How?”
“Late yesterday. We’re still attempting to sort out exactly what happened. Two U.S. marshals and a, uh, member of my staff are missing.”
“A member of your staff?”
“The computer specialist I mentioned Saturday morning.”
Oh, Lord, John thought. Oh, sweet Lord in heaven.
“You mean the one who told you your damned data system was secure?” he demanded harshly. “The one who’s probably been poking around in every confidential file you’ve got?”
“Look, John, we haven’t been able to contact Ms. McKay-”
The man who’d once gone by the name Nicholas Marchand hung up. He knew what he had to do. He also knew he couldn’t accomplish it yammering on the phone.
Leigh moistened her swollen lower lip, watching her captor assessingly from beneath her lashes as he paced back and forth in front of her. She was in the eye of an emotional storm, possessed of a terrible kind of calm. Although she was nearly naked and bound hand and foot, she was beyond being afraid for herself. What fear she felt was for the little boy who was lying drugged on the sofa a scant ten feet away and for the man who might come stumbling in on this horror show at any moment.
John, she thought. Oh, God, John.
Whether Anthony Stone had been sane when he’d raped her five and a half years ago, she didn’t know. But he certainly was not sane now. To look into his eyes was to see a snake pit rather than a human soul.
He’d already admitted to having killed Saint Nick Marchand. He’d boasted with almost-salacious relish of having tampered with his car. He’d repeated in sickening detail from some accident report that he’d apparently
committed to memory.
“Wh-why?” she’d asked, trying to disguise the revulsion she’d felt.
“Because I hated him,” was all he’d said.
She took a deep breath, telling herself that she had to keep the insane dialogue she’d initiated going. She had to keep this monster…occupied.
“So…Donatella Pietra is your mother?” she questioned carefully, knowing that she was dealing with the human equivalent of nitroglycerin.
“She gave birth to me.” The tone of his response did not bode well for the fate of the woman he’d earlier claimed to have safely stashed somewhere upstairs.
“But she didn’t raise you.”
“She gave me away to some alcoholic second cousin and his slut of a wife. Then she went off on her own.”
“And your…father?”
Stone checked his stride, his gaze careering from her to Andy and back again. “Who the hell knows and who the hell cares?” he snarled, then resumed his predatory pacing.
Leigh breathed a silent prayer of thanks, realizing she’d come very close to touching off an explosion. After a second or two she shifted in her seat, testing the bonds that held her wrists. She thought there was a teeny more give than she’d felt the last time. She flexed her hands to keep the circulation going.
They were still in the living room. Stone had ordered her to strip down to her bra and panties, then lashed her to a chair with a combination of rope and duct tape. He’d hit her twice, raising a welt on her cheek the first time and splitting her bottom lip open the second. He’d seemed to savor the sight of her blood. He’d even dipped his head and tasted it.
He was determined to kill her. That much he’d made chillingly clear. And he’d been equally explicit about what he intended to do before he took her life.
Whether he would be able to follow through with his graphic plans for sexually abusing her—for “giving her what he knew she wanted,” in his twisted parlance—was a question mark. Although he’d rubbed against her body for several minutes after the second time he’d hit her, his flesh had remained flaccid.
Remembering the perverted pleasure he’d appeared to take in her struggles five and a half years ago, Leigh had forced herself to stay passive through the entire nauseating ordeal. And when it was over, she’d reverted to what seemed the only strategy open to her: getting him to talk.
It had been less difficult than she’d expected. So far, at least. Anthony Stone liked to run off at the mouth, especially about himself. What’s more, her five-plus years in the Witness Security Program had imbued her with a singular skill for priming other people’s verbal pumps.
She filled her lungs with a slow, cleansing breath, then released the air through her lips in a silent, steady stream. Eventually she asked, “How did you find me?
Stone smiled, plainly proud of his cleverness. “A computer nerd in the Justice Department had a little money problem a few years back. I helped him solve it. He asked how he could pay me back. I told him I wanted his bosses to think someone from the outside was messing with their confidential data files. No one was, of course. Not really. But people got worried anyway. So they called in a specialist.”
“Your…nerd.”
“Uh-huh. He tapped into everything I needed to locate you. He also found out I had a son.”
“And you sent Nonna to spy on me.”
Again, her captor stopped. His nostrils flared. His eyes flashed. “I sent her to watch over what’s mine.”
“Yes,” Leigh quickly concurred. “Of course.”
It wasn’t sufficient. He moved to her in three swift, savage strides, grabbed her shoulders in a bruising grip and shoved his face to within inches of her own.
“What’s mine!” he repeated, spraying spittle.
“Y-yes,” she managed. Bile rose in her throat; she swallowed it. “I…understand.”
A split second later his mood changed. He straightened, chuckling. The sound of his amusement made Leigh’s flesh crawl. Her stomach roiled.
“No, you don’t, Suzanne,” he contradicted, fingering the right strap of her bra, then slowly pulling it off her shoulder. The cup on that side sagged forward. She bit the inside of her cheek, willing herself to stay absolutely still as he began to trace the delicate upper swell of her breast. “But you sure as hell will.”
He punctuated this threat with a cruel pinch of her right nipple. Then he went back to pacing, chuckling to himself every few moments. Leigh watched him, gauging his mood, blanking out her anger and disgust as best she could.
After about a minute she resumed her line of questioning. “Why did she agree to do it?”
Stone gestured with the gun he was still holding. Leigh had recognized the model as soon as she’d seen it. A 9-mm automatic. It was very similar to the firearm she had locked away upstairs.
“Because I’m her bastard son,” he answered. “Because a few years back she got religion and decided she had to atone for the wrongs she’d done me. She read about me in the newspaper, you see. About my trial and all the awful things I supposedly did. She got in touch with my lawyer. I had him string her along. I figured she’d be useful.”
“I…see.”
“I played her the way I play everybody else. I told her I knew I was going to be in prison for the rest of my life. I told her I knew I deserved it. That I’d done wrong and I was sorry for it. She really ate that part up. My lawyer said she cried when she heard it and claimed she’d been sure I couldn’t be as bad as all the news stories made out. That’s when I snapped the trap. I told her I had a son. A son nobody knew about except me and his mother. I swore I could handle the time as long as somebody I trusted was out making sure my woman and my boy were all right. I swore I wanted them to have a good life without me.” His face contorted. “The stupid idiot bought it all. Every word of it. She believed me, Suzanne. She believed me so much, she actually thought I’d be happy to hear that you were screwing another man.”
John eased open the back door of Leigh’s home. He knew that Anthony Stone was inside. He knew it. He’d sensed the bastard’s presence the moment he’d spotted that pricey sedan parked down the road from the McKays’ driveway. The smashed lock on the door had simply confirmed his instincts.
Stone liked to break things. According to the records, he always had.
John moved noiselessly across the threshold and into the airy cream-and-yellow kitchen where the web of lies about his and Suzanne’s shared past had begun to unravel a little more than two days ago. His gut twisted as he heard the sound of an angry male voice coming from the front of the house. Although the words being said were impossible to make out, their tone was unmistakable.
A cold, killing rage settled like a cloak over him. He wished he’d brought a gun. Unfortunately, he’d turned his back on such things the day he’d quit the Justice Department.
He thought fleetingly of the firearm he’d been told was upstairs in Leigh’s bedroom. Maybe—
No, he decided. Too risky. Even assuming he could reach the second floor undetected, Andy had said the gun was in a locked box.
He looked around. His gaze settled on something that made him bare his teeth like a wolf. He moved to the counter to the left of the sink. Reaching across it, he plucked a knife from a magnetized rack on the wall.
It was the same knife Leigh had turned on him when he’d slipped and called her Suzanne.
“You brought this on yourself,” her captor said huskily, stroking the barrel of his pistol up and down Leigh’s throat. He jabbed it into the tender flesh beneath, her chin, forcing her face up toward his. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I never…meant…”
“Never meant what?” Another jab. “Never meant to open your legs to other men?”
“I was 1-lonely.”
“Lonely?” He withdrew the gun, his expression contemptuous. “You were a dog in heat, Suzanne. Anytime. Anywhere. Anybody.”
“No!”
He backhanded her, snapping her hea
d to the right. Agony detonated inside Leigh’s skull. She whimpered, struggling not to lose consciousness.
Stone leaned in close. He was smiling. “The first time I saw you in the dance club with Saint Nick, I had you pegged. And that night I gave you what you had coming—”
What alerted him, Leigh never knew. Maybe it was something she did. Because a heartbeat before he broke off his vicious recitation and whirled around, she shifted the focus of her pain-blurred gaze to a spot behind him.
She thought she must be hallucinating; that in the terror of the last few moments she’d lost her mind. Because what she saw was John Gulliver. He was holding a knife. The expression on his scarred face was implacable to the point of inhumanity.
Stone turned, the handgun coming up, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Leigh screamed. At the same time, she pitched her body to one side, somehow managing to rock the chair she was tied to up on two legs. She leaned hard straining against her bonds.
The chair tipped over, knocking into Stone. He staggered. The handgun went off, missing its intended target. A moment later, John was on him.
It was a fight to the death. Angry. Animalistic. Leigh couldn’t see much of it. But she could hear every blow. Every curse. Every grunt of pain.
Stone’s gun fell to the floor, sliding to within a few feet of her. She struggled wildly against the rope that restrained her wrists. If she could get just one hand…
She would grab the gun and kill him. Without hesitation. Without mercy.
John gave a cry of agony. A split second later Leigh heard the clatter of metal hitting wood. The knife, she thought despairingly. Oh, God. He’d lost the knife!
The battle went on. And on. Leigh wriggled and squirmed, trying frantically to free herself. The two men crashed into her. The combatants toppled over, grappling for advantage.
What happened next was never entirely clear to her. She thought she heard John say something about people returning from the dead. Whatever it was, it provoked a gibbered string of obscenities from Stone. He went completely mad.