Then slowly he got to his feet. He stood on the roadside, surveying the darkness, dabbing distractedly at the film of sweat on his face.
She knew.
Or suspected, anyway.
But how? He’d done nothing to incriminate himself. He was sure he hadn’t.
Whatever the explanation, she was on to him somehow. And that meant she could not be allowed to live.
Despite his momentary lapse of resolve, it was obvious that to protect himself, he must kill her. He simply must.
“No.”
The word, torn out of him, was wafted away on the warm, dry breeze.
He would not.
Yet there was no alternative. Already, Erin knew too much. Now Annie, too, had learned part of the truth.
Neither could live. Both must die.
“No,” Gund said again, but his voice was softer this time, a whisper almost, and the desert did not hear.
43
Annie drove aimlessly for a half hour before conceding defeat. She’d lost her quarry. Gund’s van was gone.
She was certain she’d seen the Chevy swing west onto a dark side road. Yet by the time she turned the same corner a minute later, the van was lost to sight.
At first she’d thought Gund had pulled off into the desert. But the low, sparse scrub wouldn’t conceal the vehicle. And the land was flat—no hills or ridges to hide behind.
A mystery.
One thing was evident, though. Despite her precautions, Gund had realized he was being followed. And he had executed some sort of maneuver to shake off his pursuit.
His behavior was not that of an innocent person.
Besides—she thought restlessly as she guided the Miata down random roads, headlights sweeping yards of pitted asphalt—if he was innocent, if her suspicions were completely unfounded, then what was he doing out here in the gray wastes of the desert? Enjoying the scenery? In absolute darkness?
“Face reality,” she ordered herself, mildly startled to realize she’d expressed the thought aloud.
Harold Gund had kidnapped Erin. Was holding her prisoner someplace in the miles of undeveloped desert land.
If he’d paid a visit to Erin on his lunch break, which seemed likely, then he’d been able to drive from the shop to the hiding place and back in little more than an hour. That meant his hideaway probably was somewhere nearby, but where precisely, Annie couldn’t guess.
So what do I do now? she wondered bleakly as she picked up speed on a newer stretch of road, the warm night air whistling through the dashboard vents. Call Walker?
Sure, call Walker. Tell him she’d been playing Nancy Drew and was convinced her assistant at the flower shop was the kidnapper. Her evidence, stated objectively, was worthless. A bit of turquoise that could have come from anywhere. A van that dematerialized like a mirage. And as for Harold’s lie about the body shop—did she honestly think there was an employee anywhere who’d never fibbed to the boss in order to take an extended lunch break?
Walker wouldn’t listen to her. No way. Not without proof.
Well, what would constitute proof? Erin’s head on a plate? Or would Tucson P.D. insist on having the whole body, no missing parts, before opening an investigation?
“Quit it,” she whispered when she noticed that her hands had clamped on the wheel in a paralytic’s frozen clench.
This was just like her—to lose control, become hysterical, act like an idiot. Helpless Annie. Scatterbrained Annie who never could find her keys or organize her files or balance her checkbook. She’d depended on Erin to be her anchor, her rock of stability, but now ...
“Now Erin’s depending on me.” Her voice was a breathless murmur, swallowed by the engine hum.
Evidence. She needed evidence. Something to change Walker’s mind, get the police involved.
Gund’s apartment.
She knew his address.
He’d lived alone ever since his wife had died. If he’d ever had a wife. If he hadn’t been lying about that, too.
And tonight he was out. Wherever he’d been headed, he was unlikely to be back for hours.
She could drive there now. Break in, search the place—
Break in?
“Crazy,” she said with a clipped, nervous chuckle.
But it wasn’t crazy. Just desperate. There was a difference.
She spun the wheel, executed a sharp U-turn on the empty road, and sped north, toward the distant lights of town.
44
Erin stiffened, hearing the heavy, familiar tramp of footsteps above her head.
Reflexively she looked for the blindfold before remembering that it was gone. Oliver had removed it along with most of the other items in the room. He knew she had seen his face.
But she hadn’t seen it, she realized as the footfalls descended the cellar stairs. Not clearly enough to matter. She still couldn’t identify him in a lineup.
Could she convince him of that? Doubtful, but she had to try.
A key rattled in the lock. She turned away and stood facing the corner like a reprimanded child.
Behind her, the door sighed open, and the short hairs on her nape prickled.
“ ’Evening, Doc.”
The greeting was meant to sound casual, but his tone of voice was all wrong. Strained, tense.
She might be in even greater danger than she’d realized. If he were to slip into a fugue state, she would have no chance.
“Good evening,” she answered slowly.
“What’s so fascinating about that wall?”
“I need my blindfold.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You wouldn’t want me to see your face, would you?”
Footsteps. Crossing the room. Closer. Closer.
His shadow expanded on the unpainted bricks, devouring her own. He stopped directly at her back.
“You’ve already seen me,” he whispered.
From his voice, his tone, she tried to gauge his state of mind. He sounded angry, exhausted, yet still in control. Torn by conflict, fatigued by the effort of holding fast to the better part of himself.
She had no confidence in his ability to hold on indefinitely. At any moment the tension in his voice might bleed away, leaving only an affectless monotone.
“I never got a good look.” Her words were barely audible above the pumping of her heart. “Last night, in the arroyo, there was only starlight; you were a silhouette. And when you brought me here, I was barely conscious. I couldn’t even focus my eyes.”
“That’s probably true.”
She waited, feeling the pressure of a suppressed hope.
“But it doesn’t matter. You already know who I am.”
Her heart twisted.
“How could I possibly know that?” She wished her voice wouldn’t quaver.
He leaned nearer; she felt the tickle of his breath on her right ear. “You saw the ranch.”
She shut her eyes. “It’s just a ranch,” she said desperately, refusing to turn her head, refusing to see his face and seal her fate. “Horse ranch, I guess. Like a thousand others in Arizona. So what?”
“You know this place. Even if Lydia never brought you to see it, you would have come on your own. You and Annie.”
He’d mentioned Lydia. Pointless to continue her denials, but she tried anyway. “I’ve never been here. Really. And I didn’t see your face....”
The touch of his fingers on her chin startled a gasp out of her.
“You’re lying, Doc. That’s bad. Don’t you know that the doctor-patient relationship is built on trust?”
She couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak, not with his hand clinging lightly to her face, weightless as a scorpion.
“Look at me, Doc.”
“Please ...”
“Look at me.”
He tightened his grip, snapped her head sideways. Shock opened her eyes, and she saw him. She couldn’t help but see him.
“Say hello to your cousin, Doc,” he said, unsmiling. “Cousin Oliver
.”
Swallowing, she nodded.
He stepped back to give her a fuller view. Absently she noted the clothes he was wearing—canvas shoes, denim jeans, blue shirt, and an unbuttoned nylon jacket with a bulge in the side pocket.
Normal, she thought blankly. He looks normal. She could have passed him on the street and not even noticed him, not even suspected what he was.
He was a large man—of course she had known that—with wide shoulders and thick arms and a spreading waistline. She wasn’t surprised that he could carry her without strain, or that his footsteps shook the ceiling when he crossed the ranch’s living room.
She compared him with the boy in the remembered Kodachrome, the snapshot portrait of Oliver and Lincoln side by side on a dock. Time had done its work; there were few obvious similarities anymore.
The loose cascade of long blond hair was gone, in its place a few strawlike wisps on a balding scalp. The nose, sharp and narrow once, had been broken in a fight or fall. He was clean-shaven now, and his receding chin, partially disguised in the photo by a fine stubble of beard, was more obvious, multiplied by folds of fat blurring the transition between his jaw and neck.
For a long moment she went on staring, and he accepted her scrutiny, standing rigid, as if at attention.
“It is you,” she said finally, pointlessly.
“It’s me.”
“I never would have recognized you. Never.”
“I know. Annie sees me every day, and she hasn’t recognized me, either.”
“Annie ...?”
“I work for her. I’m her assistant.”
Erin’s knees unlocked, and she stumbled backward against the wall. The chain running from her ankle rasped on the floor.
Annie’s assistant. The new man, the one who’d replaced that teenager who was always late for work. Annie had mentioned him several times in passing. Harold something.
Gund. That was it. Harold Gund.
Erin had visited Annie’s shop several times in the past few months, yet she’d never met the new employee. He always seemed to find an excuse to stay out of sight.
“You avoided me whenever I dropped by,” she said slowly. “You were always in the back room or making a delivery or out to lunch.”
“A reasonable precaution, don’t you think? I didn’t want you remembering my voice later on. I couldn’t let you know your kidnapper’s identity.”
“But now,” she whispered, “I do know it.”
“Sadly, yes.”
“Which means you can’t let me go.”
His eyes closed briefly, registering his first hint of emotion—a flicker of regret. “Afraid not, Doc.”
“Is that why you came here? To end it? To ... kill me?”
A tremor rippled through the muscles of his cheek. “No. Not tonight. I won’t—I won’t—do it tonight.”
The violence of his reply was a window on the turmoil churning just below his placid surface. He drew a slow, calming breath.
“Not tonight,” he said again, more softly. “Not for a while. Days, weeks, whatever it takes. We’ll do the work. You’ll treat me. Cure me. Set me free. And then ...” His lower lip trembled briefly. “Then it will be goodbye. But not by fire.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a blue-barreled pistol.
“This way.” His voice was very small. “No pain. I promise. Quick and easy. You won’t even know, it’ll be so fast, so ... clean. You won’t even know.”
She said nothing.
“Let’s get started,” he added brusquely.
He turned away from her with a jerk of his shoulders and sat in the chair nearest the door. The gun fidgeted in his lap like a small, nervous dog.
Encumbered by the chain, she shuffled over to the facing chair. Her sore muscles protested as she seated herself, and the searing sunburn on her chest cried out at the scrape of her shirt.
For a moment, as they sat watching each other like wary animals, Erin was at a loss for anything to say. She’d had no time or inclination to prepare for a second session.
Then she remembered the list of unanswered questions she’d compiled only a short while earlier.
Risky to probe Oliver’s past when he was clearly on the edge of losing his grip. Even so, she would chance it.
Because she had to know, had to understand.
And because she had so little left to lose.
45
“You realize, of course,” she began casually, “you’re supposed to be dead.”
“I made it look as though I was.”
He sat stiffly in the chair, one hand on the gun, the other balled in a fist, his body language expressive of rigid self-restraint. It was as if his clenched muscles and locked joints formed a barrier against the wild surge of emotion swirling in him, a dam straining against floodwaters. She waited tensely for the first fatal cracks to appear.
“But your father,” she said softly. “He’s really dead, isn’t he?”
A brief incline of his head. “Yes.”
“You killed him.” Not a question.
“He deserved it.”
“Why?”
He didn’t reply at once. His hand stroked the pistol in his lap. Erin tried not to look at it, not to think of the explosive violence it contained.
“Lincoln Connor was a great guy,” he said finally, his voice low and bitter. “Everyone said so. Always smiling and joking, and so good with horses. Believed in discipline, though. People knew that. They heard stories about how he beat his son. Well, every kid needs to learn a lesson now and then, right? Only, the discipline my father imposed didn’t always stop with a beating. Sometimes he found other ways of hurting me.”
“What ways?”
“Two fingers up the rectum. Then three fingers.” The chair creaked as he shifted his weight, and she knew the sphincter muscles near the base of his spine were tightening involuntarily. “When I was old enough, big enough ... his fist. And then ... not his fist.”
She felt a pang of pity, not for the killer before her but for the small boy he had been. But of course it was no longer possible to separate the two. The hurt little boy still lived within this man, buried alive somewhere deep inside, and screaming, unheard.
But the women in the woods—they had screamed, too.
“What age were you when it started?” she asked.
“Little. Maybe four.”
“Did Lydia know?”
He shook his head slowly. “She never had a clue.”
“How could Lincoln keep it secret?”
“He did it only when she wasn’t around. Lydia was in charge of the ranch’s inventory; she was always going into town for supplies. Lincoln had no shortage of opportunities. And I never told. I was scared, ashamed. And ...”
“And what?”
“And so I ... kept the secret,” he finished lamely.
“That’s not what you started to say.” No reply. “You wanted to tell me something more.”
Tense silence ticked in the room. She knew it was crazy, suicidal, to push further on this point. So she wouldn’t, of course. She wouldn’t.
She did. “In our first session, there was a point when you thought I’d implied you were gay.”
“Hadn’t you?”
“No.”
“Then why raise the issue again?”
“I think you know why.”
He said nothing.
“You enjoyed it. What your father did.” Each word was a step forward into an unknown darkness strewn with lethal trip wires. “At least sometimes. At least a little bit. Didn’t you, Oliver?”
His right hand closed over the barrel of the gun, clutching it tight.
“You do think I’m queer,” he breathed.
“I haven’t said that.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Don’t bullshit me, you little whore.”
“Oliver—”
“You filth. Stinking filth.”
His hand was sliding down the gun barrel toward the h
andle, and she knew that when he reached it, he would lift the gun and shoot, shoot without thinking, shoot to kill.
“Oliver,” she said more sharply. “Stop it.”
His hand froze an inch from the checkered grip.
“I’m sorry if you heard me say something I didn’t mean to say.” She spoke softly, keeping her tone neutral and nondefensive. “It wasn’t my intention to suggest that you were homosexual. I hope you understand that.”
He seemed slightly mollified, but his hand remained on the gun. “Then what were you suggesting?”
“Only that you may still be afraid of something you felt with your father, years ago. An emotion or a physical sensation. A fleeting response, meaningless ... but it haunts you. I think that’s why you see sexual needs as threatening, dangerous—”
“But I don’t,” he cut in. “I’m not threatened. You’re on the wrong track. Sex doesn’t have anything to do with ... with anything.”
“You believe that, I’m sure. But it may not be true.”
“Are you saying I’m a liar?”
“I’m saying your true feelings are buried deep. So deep that you can’t find them, can’t acknowledge their reality.”
“That’s just stupid,” he whispered, but she heard doubt in his voice for the first time.
“Don’t fight me on this, Oliver,” she said. “Open up to me. Please.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment. Then slowly he lifted the gun, as if to remind her of its presence. A shade too ostentatiously, he slipped it back into the side pocket of his jacket.
“I thought we were talking about my father,” he said mildly.
She yielded, afraid to press any harder and see the pistol return. “How long did Lincoln continue to mistreat you?”
“Until I left home.”
“At eighteen?”
“Yes.”
“He was still abusing you at that age?”
“Not as often. But ... yes.”
“Did you leave because of Lincoln?”
“No. It was Lydia. She disowned me. Ordered me out of the house.”
Erin blinked, taken by surprise. “Lydia? But ... why?”
He fixed his stare on her. “That, you can’t know.”
Instinctively she understood that this was one territory she dared not explore, the one secret he would not share.
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