She was having trouble catching her breath, as if the towel had been thrown back over her head and she was once again suffocating from the weight of it. For a moment Kate was afraid she would choke, but then she pressed her hands against her rib cage and drew in a deep, calming breath. Dammit, her attacker had wanted to terrify her to the point that she wouldn’t be able to respond rationally. She wasn’t going to let him win that battle twice.
“He did everything in his power to convince me he was my father. That’s what the towel was about, that’s why it had to be pitch black.”
“But you heard him speak!” Luke gathered her back into his arms, stroking his hands gently up and down her spine. “You’d have recognized if it wasn’t Ron’s voice, sweetheart. Nobody could have fooled you into believing it was your father talking to you if it wasn’t. You know Ron too well to be deceived.”
“But I didn’t hear him speak. That’s the whole point. Whoever it was never spoke out loud. He only whispered.”
“You never mentioned that before.”
“Didn’t I? I should have, because it bothered me a lot. In some ways, it made the whole experience more frightening, because the whispering combined with the towel over my head made everything feel disconnected from reality. That’s how the attacker was able to convince me he was my dad. He claimed to be my father and I took his word for it because there was nothing else to hang on to. But I never recognized his voice because I never heard it.”
“Katie-love, are you sure you’re not recollecting something that isn’t true?”
“I’m sure. I’m a hundred percent sure.” She moved away from the comfort of his arms so that she could look straight into his eyes. “Luke, you have to believe me about this. I’m not retrofitting the facts to fit my wishes. I’ve finally realized why that assault has felt so disorienting ever since it happened. Part of me always rejected the idea that my father was the man attacking me.”
“You were the person who went through it, so you know what happened.” Luke leaned back against the pillows, taking her with him and tucking her head against his shoulder as they talked. “Then I guess the next question is obvious. If it wasn’t Ron invading your home on Monday night, then are you sure it was Ron who phoned you while we were in Virginia? Were those threats whispered, too?”
“No, they weren’t.” She shook her head. “He spoke in his regular voice and it was definitely my father.”
Luke frowned. “Doesn’t it strike you as very strange that your father called and threatened you while we were in Virginia, but then somebody else, pretending to be Ron, invaded your house as soon as we got back to Chicago? Are Ron and somebody else both threatening you?”
“It’s very strange, I agree, but that’s what must have happened. I’d recognize Dad’s voice anywhere and it was unmistakable. I’m positive…” Her voice died away again, lost in a jumble of speculation.
“You’re positive of what? What did you just think of?” Luke asked. He rolled over, propping himself on his elbow so that he could see her more clearly. “Kate, your whole expression just changed. What is it?”
“Wait, don’t talk. I have to remember.” She rubbed her forehead, desperately trying to pull up an accurate memory of everything her father had said during his phone call.
Looking for me is a fool’s errand…. Be smart, for once in your life…. If you should happen to find me, you’ll regret it. The ugly snippets all surfaced on demand, etched unpleasantly into her subconscious.
Be smart, for once in your life. It was her father who had spoken those words, she was sure of it, and he had sounded as if he was repeating a frequent complaint. Yet now that she was thinking rationally instead of wallowing in self-pity, she realized that from the time of her earliest childhood memories until the day he disappeared, her father had never once hinted that he considered her dumb. The opposite was true, in fact. His nickname for her as a little kid had been smarty-pants, and he’d been lavish in praising her academic success in high school and equally lavish in praising her creative skills when she attended culinary school.
Her father had concluded his phone call with his chilling warning that he wasn’t offering a threat, but a certified Ron Raven promise. Their conversation had ended right there because he’d cut her off as soon as she tried to speak to him. His call had been a monologue, albeit a short one, with no greeting and no goodbyes.
“Kate, talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“He never said my name.” She heard the confusion in her own voice, which mimicked the bewilderment churning in her gut. “When I tried to talk to him, he ended the call. My father never responded directly to anything I said.”
Luke’s expression was grim. “Precisely what are you suggesting, Kate? Spell it out for me.”
The last of the haze shrouding her thoughts vanished and she could finally speak with confidence. “Okay, here’s what I think. It was definitely my father speaking—but I don’t believe he was speaking to me. I believe I was listening to a recording, a snippet from a longer conversation that somebody replayed to terrorize me. Yes, it was my father who made those threats, but not to me. He made them to somebody else. And that somebody took advantage of an earlier conversation when he wanted to frighten me.”
“Holy Mother of God.” Luke expelled a long, slow breath.
She gave a tight smile. “My thoughts exactly.”
Luke ran his hand through his hair, leaving the short strands standing upright. He looked like a comic book parody of a man in shock, Kate thought, and she felt pretty much the same.
“Somebody is going to a hell of a lot of trouble to make it appear your father will kill you if you continue to search for him.”
“Yes.” Her brain tumbled in chaos; her body felt uncoordinated. “Who is doing this to me, Luke? Who could be so unspeakably cruel?”
“I sure as hell wish I knew the answer to that. More to the point, why is he doing it? What is he trying to achieve?”
“There must be a rational motive. It can’t be a crazy stalker. It’s too much of a coincidence that he’s making these threats at the same time as we’re on the brink of making contact with my father.”
“I agree. Obviously, the phone call was made by somebody who doesn’t want your father to be found. And he followed up with a personal visit to reinforce his message that you should stop looking for Ron Raven.”
“It’s not true that the attacker doesn’t want my father to be found.” Kate got out of bed and started to pace, too restless to remain in one place. “He just doesn’t want me to find my father.”
“How do you reach that conclusion?”
“Because of the message my father delivered in Virginia,” she said. “We don’t know who my father was talking to in that recording, but we know he was demanding that someone should stop looking for him. Logically, if my father was ordering someone to back off, that same someone must have been searching long enough for Dad to have noticed.”
“Well, that insight narrows the field of suspects right down,” Luke said with heavy sarcasm. “As far as I can see, half the people who knew Ron Raven are anxious to find him—chiefly so that they can kill him.”
She and Luke stared at each other, the impact of his statement hitting them both at the same time. He had intended to be sarcastic, but his comment was quite possibly true, Kate reflected grimly. Somebody was desperate to find her father in order to kill him.
She bit back a bubble of hysterical laughter. When Luke had walked into the bedroom shortly after midnight, she’d considered her father a violent criminal. She’d been impatient for tomorrow to arrive so that they could confront him, tie him up if need be and bundle him off to the nearest police station. Now she was worried about how to keep him safe from a would-be murderer. The revolution in her emotions was leaving her dizzy.
“I need to identify the man who attacked me,” she said, perching on the edge of the bed before jumping up and resuming her pacing. “I really need to know who�
��s doing this. I may be angry as hell with my father, but I don’t want anyone to kill him.” She smiled wanly. “Except maybe me.”
“We can’t narrow the list of suspects by looking for motives,” Luke said. “There are way too many people who have reasons to kill Ron. But we can sure narrow the list by considering how many men there are who could gain access to your house without needing to break any locks or smash any windows.”
“In other words, we’re looking for somebody who has a key.”
“Exactly.”
Kate considered Luke’s point with surprising calm. In comparison to believing that her father intended to murder her, almost any other possibility was a major improvement.
“My father had a key, which is another reason I believed he was the person who’d attacked me. I knew he had a way to get into the house. You had a key, but you mailed it back to me after we broke up. My mother has one.” She shrugged. “There’s nobody else.”
“Nobody else has a key that you’ve given him,” Luke corrected. “There could be a lot of people who have been able to make copies of the keys owned by your father, or even your mother for that matter. Let’s change the definition slightly. We’re looking for a man able to obtain a copy of your house key who also knew you were back from Virginia. Who do we know that fits the description?”
“Nobody. I went straight from the airport to my mother’s house, and as soon as I’d filled Mom in on everything we found out in Virginia, I came home. Mom said she’d pass on all the news to Uncle Paul, so I didn’t call anyone, or speak to anyone.”
Luke stood and captured her hand, halting her march up and down. “Listen to what you’ve just said, sweetheart. You went straight from the airport to your mother’s house, and she called your uncle. Your uncle, who was Ron’s business partner and presumably had almost unlimited access to your father’s keys and your mother’s, too. Your uncle, who already knew which flight you were planning to take home from Virginia. Your uncle, who has been aware of every move the two of us have made ever since this investigation started—because we’ve been calling him on a regular basis to keep him informed, for Christ’s sake!”
Kate stared at him, speechless. “Uncle Paul?” she said, when she could finally speak. “You think Uncle Paul attacked me?” She intended to protest against Luke’s conclusions, but almost as soon as she uttered her uncle’s name, she experienced a sickening realization that Luke was right. There was no more likely suspect than her uncle.
“Paul is far and away the most logical suspect,” Luke said, echoing her thoughts. “He could make copies of the keys to this house more easily than anyone else. As for the phone call when we were in Virginia, he’s one of the few people in the world who knew which hotel we were staying in.”
“Because I’d told him,” she said bitterly.
“Yes. And it’s just occurred to me…if Ron wasn’t responsible for the attack on you, it answers the question your mother keeps asking about how he managed to track your movements so accurately. He didn’t. We weren’t followed. We weren’t monitored. We were personally keeping your attacker informed!”
“Mom was right to be puzzled.” The details of the attack, which had never seemed rational when she believed it was perpetrated by her father, suddenly made sense.
“That’s why Paul had to ensure my bedroom was pitch-black before he came into the room. I know him so well that I’d have needed only a quick glimpse in order to identify him. That’s why he got rid of the clock—even the glow from the digital numbers might have been enough. It’s why he used one of my own towels to blindfold me. He knew he would have to move in really close to tie me up and whisper his threats. He must have been afraid I would recognize the feel of him, or even his smell. With my bath towel over my head, I was breathing in the scent of my own shower gel, totally blocking my impressions of the outside world.”
Luke’s mouth turned down. “Paul is not only cruel, he sounds like a pretty sick puppy to me. You could have been tied and blindfolded for days.”
“Actually, he wasn’t planning to leave me tied up indefinitely. Remember how he called me first thing on Tuesday morning? He’d already contacted the bakery and that gave him a valid excuse to call the house and check on me. If I hadn’t managed to escape under my own steam, I bet he planned to play the hero and come rushing to the rescue.”
“Hypocritical asshole.” Luke put his arm around her shoulders, shielding her from the ugliness of what they were contemplating. “Want to make a guess at the reasons Paul might be so desperate to find your father that he was reduced to attacking you?”
“Specifically, I haven’t the smallest clue. In general?” Kate shrugged. “He and Ron were partners in Raven Enterprises. That leaves plenty of scope for double-crossing and betrayal.”
“Yeah, I guess it does. If Ron Raven had no problems screwing over his two wives and three children, he’d presumably have even less trouble screwing over his business partner. I can think of a ton of reasons why Paul might be frantic to find his former partner—all of them with dollar signs attached.”
More puzzles began to unlock. “My uncle has always claimed that Dad left Raven Enterprises in great financial shape, barring a few trivial cash-flow problems mostly caused because of the lawyers putting holds on various parts of the business. But how would we know if he’s telling the truth? It’s a private partnership and Paul’s in complete control of all the records.”
“In fact, if your father cleaned out the company accounts before he disappeared, that would explain why Paul is so anxious to find him.” Energized by their insights, Luke joined her in pacing. “When Ron made the start-up loan for my first restaurant, he flat-out stated that he was the person with a nose for sniffing out potentially exciting deals and the person who had the final say as to which projects would go ahead and which wouldn’t. Paul was just the guy who handled legal and financial matters. In other words, Paul was never much more than an in-house accountant. Without Ron there to guide him, Paul might easily have made a couple of terrible investments and left himself seriously strapped for cash.”
“And if Dad cleaned out the company coffers, it would explain why Paul went looking for my father as soon as he was reported missing,” Kate said. “If the money was gone, Paul would have cause to suspect right from the start that my father had faked his own death and was taking money from Raven Enterprises to fund his new life.”
She paused for a moment, her flow of insights grinding to a halt. “Still, despite all the motives Paul might have for needing to find my father, I don’t understand what he expected to achieve by threatening me.”
Luke hesitated. “There’s one reason that occurred to me….” His voice tailed away.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t try to shield me, Luke. My family has come to the very edge of disaster because we all avoid telling one another even vaguely unpleasant truths. I can cope with harsh facts a lot better than tactful silences.” She sent him a tiny smile. “Don’t fall into bad Fairfax family habits before you’re even a member of the family.”
“You’re right and I’m sorry. It’s just that my thoughts were gruesome—”
“I can handle gruesome. Trust me, it would be hard for you to come up with any scenario that’s more gruesome than believing your father is willing to kill you if you get in his way.”
“Okay, here’s a possible motive for Paul’s attack. If you had been found dead or injured before we had this conversation, your mother and I would have had a prime suspect to hand over to the police.”
“My father,” Kate said flatly.
Luke nodded. “Until ten minutes ago, if anything had happened to you, I’d have been on the front lines demanding the cops find Ron Raven and throw him in prison for murder. After all, I believed Ron had viciously assaulted you and threatened your life on two separate occasions. If you were hurt or killed, it would have been inevitable for me to assume he’d made good on his threats.”
“In other words, you’re
suggesting Paul is impersonating my father to provide himself with an alibi for my murder.”
Luke tilted his head in bleak acknowledgment. “It would be a brilliant piece of misdirection to have everyone out there hunting for your father, wouldn’t it?”
Kate considered for a few moments, but however hard she thought, she couldn’t see why her uncle would want her dead. “What reason does Paul have for killing me?” she asked. “The two of us have no links beyond the accident of birth, no business dealings, no shared secrets. He’s not going to inherit my money, even if I had any. Killing me doesn’t achieve a darn thing from Paul’s point of view. No financial gain, no release from an unhappy relationship, nothing.”
“It gets your father arrested for committing murder! That’s a pretty good revenge.”
“If Paul wants to see Dad behind bars, he doesn’t have to kill me to achieve his goal. It’s already pretty much guaranteed Dad will be arrested as soon as we find him. The moment we can present proof that he’s alive, the cops will go after him, no holds barred. He faked his own death, he committed bigamy, he defrauded the First Bank of Fairfax of three million bucks, and Lord knows how many other offenses there are to pin on him. And the cops are going to be totally pissed that he managed to deceive them about Castellano, so there will be a personal vengeance angle, too. Dad isn’t going to get off the hook.”
“Murder is going to earn Ron a much longer sentence than bigamy and fraud.”
“True, but I can’t believe Paul would risk killing me in the vague hope that my father would spend twenty-five years locked up instead of ten. Not to mention the fact that Dad might never be convicted of my murder. What if he has an iron-clad alibi for the time of my death?”
“If you’re right, then we’re left with no reason for Paul to threaten you,” Luke said.
“Perhaps we’re being too subtle, too twisted.” Kate shook her head, running her fingers through her hair, combing it into place as if that might somehow help to reduce the chaos inside. “Paul ordered me to stop looking for my father. Why not assume he meant what he said?”
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