She paused in the doorway, thinking that something, somehow, was different. From where she was standing she could see that all was as it had been the last time she had been there. Still, there was something in the air. . . .
Exactly.
Someone had been cooking with onions.
Frowning, she dropped her bag, preparing to go straight into the kitchen. She turned to close the door and found herself face-to-face with the last person in the world she’d expected to see.
“Oh!” She backed up quickly, one hand behind her searching for the doorknob.
“Don’t,” he said calmly. “Just . . . don’t. There’s nowhere for you to go, no one to hear you if you scream, and all you’re going to accomplish is to aggravate me, which you do not want to do. So . . . don’t.”
Annie’s mind all but froze. How could this be possible? How could he have known about this place?
“I want you to move over there, to the sofa, and sit.” He took her elbow to guide her, as if it were his home and she were his visitor. “Sit right here.”
He led her to the sofa and turned on the lamp that stood on the end table. The light glinted off the tip of the knife that he held in his right hand.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The more important question is, who are you?” He gently pushed her onto the cushion and stood above her, looking down.
When she did not answer, he chuckled and with the knife, cut the strap of her shoulder bag. He reached in and took out her wallet.
“Anne Marie McCall,” he read aloud from her driver’s license. “There are magazines here with your name on them. You left the message on the answering machine. Was the message for Mara?”
Annie merely stared at him.
“Now, we’re going to establish a few rules here.” He leaned a little closer. “If I ask you a question, you answer. For one thing, it’s the polite thing to do.” Closer still, his harsh whisper raising the hairs on her forearms. “For another, I’ll cut off one of your fingers every time I have to repeat myself. Understand?”
“Yes. I understand.” She nodded, shaken.
“Good. Now I will ask you one more time, with the reminder that this is the only time you will ever get a second chance. Did you leave a message on the answering machine, and was the message for Mara Douglas?”
“Yes. To both.”
“Is she on her way?”
“I believe she is.”
“You believe. You don’t know for certain?”
“I was under the impression that she was driving up here today.” No need, Annie reasoned, to mention that Aidan would be accompanying Mara. There could be an advantage if her captor was unaware that Mara would not be arriving alone.
“But that wasn’t confirmed?”
“No. I couldn’t get through to her on her mobile phone. She sometimes forgets to recharge her battery. But I believe she will be along. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.”
“What are you to her?”
“I’m her sister.”
“Oh.” He nodded, a smile slowly crossing his face. “I’ve never had sisters before. Well, not at the same time, at least. Could be interesting . . . oh, now, don’t give me that look. You might enjoy it. Well, then again, maybe not . . .”
“How did you find this place?” she asked.
“The information was in a file in a desk drawer at your sister’s house. I figured if she was going to be lying low for a few days, she might come here. Good guess on my part, huh?”
“What do you want with her?”
“Let’s just say our paths were destined to cross.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He pondered the question. “Because I gave my word. And what is a man if he doesn’t keep his word?”
“Who did you give your word to?” she asked quietly.
“What difference does it make?” He glanced at her. “A deal is a deal, no matter who you make it with, right?”
“They know who you are, you know.”
“Oh?” He pulled over an ottoman and sat in front of her. “And how might they have figured that out?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet you do know, Miss McCall.” He opened her wallet again and flipped through it. Something caught his eye, and he smiled, holding up a credit card. “Or should I say Dr. McCall? What kind of a doctor are you, Dr. McCall?”
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
“Oh, well, shit, doesn’t that just figure?” Laughing, he snapped the wallet closed and tossed it back into her purse. “I finally get my own doctor to play doctor with, and here you’re a goddammed shrink. Well, shit, don’t that just beat all?”
“What do you have against psychiatrists?”
“Well, let’s put it this way. Over the course of my life, I’ve probably spent more time talking to your colleagues than you have.”
“And did it help?” she asked dryly.
Surprised at the remark, he looked at her for a long moment before laughing out loud.
“Well, apparently not, since . . . well, just look at your own circumstances.” He stood up and seemed to be considering something.
“Maybe you didn’t talk to the right person,” she said, still outwardly calm, though inside she was fighting back panic. How to get the knife from him? How to escape? Did he have a gun? How to warn Mara?
“I talked to more shrinks . . . I wasn’t kidding when I said that over the years, I probably knew more shrinks than you. There was the kiddie shrink, then the shrink the courts assigned. Then there was the school shrink, then the one my—” He paused, his face clouding over for a brief moment.
“The one your parents hired?” Annie tried to recall everything she had been told about Channing’s foster parents.
“It doesn’t matter,” he cut her off.
“Of course it does. They cared about you. And you cared enough about them to take their name.” She was going to have to gamble here.
He stared at her. “Now, how would you know all that?” He leaned down into her face. “How would you know about them?”
“Because my employer—that would be the Federal Bureau of Investigation—has developed a deep interest in you. As a matter of fact, they’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about you.”
“You’re FBI?”
“Yes.” She squared her shoulders. In for a dime, in for a dollar. She’d find out soon enough whether full disclosure had been a good idea.
“Well, well. What do you know? The surprises just keep coming fast and furious here, that’s a fact.” He laughed, a short, mirthless snort. “My luck just keeps getting better and better. Now, if worse came to worst, what do you think the FBI would give up for your safety?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, maybe I’ll just have to hold on to you for a while in case I need to find out. But it wasn’t nice of you to lie to me. To pretend that you didn’t know me. Lying isn’t nice.” He ran the knife along her jawline. “I think I’ll save your punishment for later. I want to think about it for a while.”
He gestured for her to stand. “But right now, I need you to come with me.”
“Where?”
“Downstairs. Come on. And please do not make this difficult for me. I’m just not in the mood to get pissed off right now.” He grabbed her arm and turned her around so that she was in front of him. He leaned into her body and whispered in her ear. “You give me a hard time, you’ll make it that much worse for her and for you, understand me? I’m bigger than you and much stronger. You will not overpower me. Unless, of course, you have a gun. Does the FBI give their shrinks guns, lady shrink?”
His hands roamed her body, top to bottom, groping and searching her pockets, her waistband, his breathing coming more and more unevenly.
“I don’t carry weapons,” she told him. “I’m a profiler.”
His hands stopped where they were. “A profiler? Like you see on TV?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hot damn. How ’bout that?” He gripped her upper arms and steered her in the direction of the basement steps. “Well, we can have some fun, you and I. I can tell you a secret or two from my past, and you can profile me.”
“Sounds like my idea of a good time.”
He opened the basement door and turned on the light, then forced her down the steps. At the bottom, he nodded at the room where he’d found the guns.
“Those your guns in there?” he asked, one hand on the door that lead into the garage.
“My grandfather’s,” she told him.
“He a hunter?”
“He was, when he was younger. Later in his life he did more collecting than shooting. When he died, my dad inherited the property, and he moved all the guns down here. He didn’t want them around us kids, didn’t want to look at them.”
“Oh, a real peace-i-fist, eh?”
“My dad was an academic, a math professor. He had no interest in hunting or in guns. He kept them because they had belonged to his father, but he never used any of them.”
“Worth a lot of money, some of ’em, you know that?”
“No,” she replied, though of course she did. She knew exactly what the collection was worth. She’d had a dealer offer her an impressive sum just two years ago, but had declined because Dylan had been delighted with the guns. She’d planned on giving the collection to him as a wedding present.
On their last long stay here, Dylan had spent days cleaning selected firearms, and had even purchased new ammunition for several of the old handguns that he’d had retrofitted. She wished she’d paid closer attention to which ones. She tried to remember which ones he’d taken out for target practice and where he’d left the newly purchased ammo.
“Here.” He motioned to her to precede him into the garage.
“Where are we going?”
“Just here, in the garage. I saw something down here that I need . . . yeah, there.” He took a length of coiled rope down from its hook on the wall and slid it onto his arm, up to the shoulder. “We can go on back upstairs now. You first.”
She eyed the rope and felt her knees weaken. Whatever he planned to do with it, it wasn’t going to be good for her.
“Go.” He nudged her. “And don’t try any of those FBI tricks. Remember that I still have a knife at your back.”
Once upstairs, he turned off the downstairs light and closed the door behind them.
“Into the living room,” he told her. “Stop. Stop there.”
He grabbed first one arm, then the other, and tied her wrists together behind her.
“Sit. There on the sofa, where you were before,” he instructed.
She sat, awkwardly, while he tied her feet at the ankle, sorely tempted to take her chances and kick him in the head. But he was, as he’d pointed out, bigger and stronger than she, and he was armed. By the time she’d decided that discretion was in truth the better part of valor, the point was moot. Channing was on his feet and her ankles were crossed and tied into that position.
“Just so that I can go about my business without wondering what you’re doing,” he told her as he cut away the unused portion of the rope with the knife.
“And what business would that be?”
“Waiting for your sister.” He went to the window and looked out. It was still light, but darkness would soon enough descend.
He needed a revised plan.
“Does she know that you’re here? That you were coming here?” he asked.
“No. I told you. I wasn’t able to contact her to let her know. I thought she was here, or on her way here. That’s why I left the message on the answering machine.”
“So you don’t know where she is now?”
“No.”
“What could have delayed her?”
“I have no idea.”
He paced for a moment in front of the fireplace. “Where are your car keys?”
“In my bag.”
He picked up the tan leather bag and sorted through it until he found the key ring. He tossed the keys back and forth in his hands for a minute, then, without a word, left the cabin, closing the door behind him.
Swell, she thought. He’s stealing my car and leaving me tied up here.
Nah. That’s not his style, she told herself. He’s looking for the upper hand. He’s hiding the car so Mara doesn’t know I’m here. So that she’ll walk into the dark house and he’ll grab her, just like he grabbed me. And there’s no way I can warn her.
But there’s Aidan. He doesn’t know about Aidan. . . .
She tried to stand, but with her arms behind her back and her ankles tied, she had difficulty getting up from the too-soft seat cushions. By the time she’d gotten herself to the edge of the sofa, his footsteps were on the stairs. She eased back into the position she was in when he left.
“Where’d you hide my car?” she asked casually. “I’m guessing down in that deep ravine. That’s where I’d leave it.”
“Smart, aren’t you?”
“I get by.”
He laughed. “You’re something, you know that? I don’t usually care much for blondes, but you’re something.”
“Your mother was blond, wasn’t she?” Annie couldn’t resist.
“Don’t go there, Dr. McCall.” His voice held a quiet threat. “You do not want to go there.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories.”
“You are pushing your luck, and you know it.” He went into the kitchen, and she heard him banging around.
Better to bang on a few pots than bang something off my head, she rationalized.
“I’ve made us some soup,” he said from the kitchen doorway, which was behind her, so she could not see him.
“Then you’re going to have to untie me if I’m going to eat.” And then maybe I can talk him into letting me go into the bathroom, and I can look in the closet and see if there’s anything there I can use as a weapon. I can break off a toothbrush so that it has a sharp end—
“If you’re hungry, I’ll feed you. But I won’t untie you.” He stood in front of her now. “You’ve had too much time to yourself, too much time to think of what you might do if you get a chance.”
“You’re pretty smart yourself,” she said wryly.
“Thanks,” he said as he pulled her to her feet. “See if you can hop on over to the table here . . .”
He pulled out the closest chair for her, and she fell into it awkwardly.
“Not my usual graceful self,” she told him.
“I’ll bet you are graceful.” He looked down at her. “Did you dance when you were little?”
“What?”
“When you were a little girl, did you take dancing lessons?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. You remind me of a girl who lived near us when I was in high school. She took dancing lessons. She was the first person I ever knew who I’d call graceful. Even when she walked, she . . . flowed.” His eyes clouded, remembering. “She was beautiful.”
“I guess you never hurt her, did you, Curtis?”
“Of course not,” he snapped back. “How could you even suggest such a thing?”
He pushed himself away from the table and went into the kitchen, leaving her alone, wondering if she should try to push his buttons. If she rattled him, would it prove to be advantageous or detrimental?
“Well, since we’re here, alone, with all of this time to kill, maybe we should use it to get to know each other,” Annie said when he came back holding a loaf of bread and a butter knife.
“Like what would you like to know, lady shrink?” He buttered a piece of bread and offered her a bite.
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I seem to have lost my appetite.”
“You might be sorry later. Never know where your next meal might be coming from, but, hey, suit yourself.” He grinned and took a bite of the bread. “Now, what were you going to ask me?”
“Was it your idea to change your name from Gibbons t
o Channing?”
He stopped chewing momentarily, then resumed, slowly, until the bread was paste and he finally swallowed.
“My foster parents suggested it. They wanted me to take their name.”
“No doubt to help you to put the past behind you. Very kind of them, very caring. They must be wonderful people.”
“Nicest people I ever met.” He nodded.
“I guess that’s why you left when you did.” Annie sat back to watch his face. “You must have felt all that churning inside and wanted to get away from them before it exploded. Were you afraid of hurting them?”
“I never would have lifted a finger against either one of them.”
“Then you just were afraid that they’d see what was inside you. Afraid that they’d recognize what you were becoming.”
He knocked the knife off the side of his plate. “It was just time to go, that’s all.”
“How old were you when you knew that something was growing inside you, Channing? How old were you when you realized that you were not like other people?” Her voice dropped, and she prayed he wouldn’t respond by slicing her throat. If she could keep him talking, keep him absorbed, she could keep his focus off Mara’s arrival, maybe take away a bit of his advantage.
He bit off another piece of bread, again chewing slowly, as if debating whether to respond or to discontinue the conversation altogether.
“I was always different, and I always knew it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel different from everyone else. But you being a shrink, you probably figured that out.”
She nodded as he spoke, as if to affirm his statement. “Did it start when Unger went to prison?”
“Nah.” He stirred his soup with his spoon. “Long before that. She started trading me to her johns for drugs . . . shit, for as far back as I can remember. The only time it stopped was when we lived with Al. He gave her whatever she wanted, so there was no need for her to put me out. That was the only time I was safe, when we lived with Al.”
“And then he went to prison. . . .”
“You know a lot, don’t you, lady shrink?” he said without looking at her. “Yeah, Al went off to prison. I have tried, all my life, to forgive him, but I just never could.”
“Forgive him for what? I thought you said you were safe with him.”
Dead Wrong Page 25