Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2)

by Brennan, Allison

  Her body tingled, the ants spreading from her arm up her throat, as whatever drug he’d given her flowed hot through her veins. The blood rushed through her ears like running water.

  She tried to swallow, but had no moisture in her mouth.

  Her heart pounded, faster and faster until the pain made her gasp.

  She was going to overdose. Whatever they were feeding her was too much. Her body shook uncontrollably.

  “Shh,” the voice said. “Just breathe normally. This feeling will pass.”

  Thud. Thud. Thud thud thud thud.

  Faster and faster.

  Calm down, Max.

  She forced her breathing to slow as best as she could.

  “Good girl.”

  Asshole.

  The sound of metal against metal as something moved away.

  “We don’t need those right now.”

  She stretched, just a bit, and realized that he’d removed whatever sharp instruments had been under her feet. She refused to say thank you, though she was relieved.

  Her heart was still beating too fast and loud, but she focused on regulating her breathing.

  “Where to start,” he said lightly. “Let’s start at the beginning? Because that’s where your real fear comes from, doesn’t it? Being abandoned.”

  “You don’t know me.” Her words were thick off her tongue. Weak.

  “You think I’m talking about your mother leaving you with your grandparents. No. It started before then, didn’t it? When your mother would leave you for days. With friends, strangers, alone. You never knew if she would come back.”

  He could not know any of that. It was a guess.

  It’s the truth.

  “It’s classic, Maxine. You’re common. Fear of abandonment so you don’t make strong attachments. Keep everyone at arm’s length. Everything you write seeps in the emotion. But it goes even deeper, doesn’t it? It goes all the way back to the womb. To your conception. To the fact that you would do anything to find out who your father is. That everything you believed as a child has been proven a lie.”

  That voice.

  Everything you write.

  Not the words, but the tone. The familiarity.

  “You don’t care who you hurt, as long as you get the truth The all-mighty, all-powerful truth. You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass. You waltz into people’s lives, destroy them, and walk away as if you haven’t a care in the world.”

  She’d heard this voice recently. But where? If only she could think clearly! If only she could concentrate. But every time she tried to focus, her mind slipped. She had no other explanation. She’d be on the verge of remembering and then she’d feel dizzy and everything would disappear. It was like every few minutes she had to reteach herself how to think.

  He was talking to her about something she felt she should know, an event he kept talking around, and she couldn’t focus, couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.

  Betrayed. Destroyed. Stole. Ruined.

  You took from me. You destroyed my life.

  Every other word dropped off. Was that because of whatever they’d injected her with? Did she have a concussion? She strained to hear, but it was a mishmash of vitriol. Was he deliberately trying to drive her crazy?

  She didn’t know him … but she recognized the voice. He thought she’d destroyed his life and she had no idea why.

  That’s when she really started to be afraid.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It didn’t take NET’s tech team long to enhance the image of Max’s suspected kidnapper. Once David and Sally approved, they printed off several copies and e-mailed the digital image. Sally sent hers to the NYPD Missing Persons Unit; David sent his Marco.

  He didn’t want Ben to join him when he talked to Melinda at Fringe, but he couldn’t rid himself of the producer. He couldn’t articulate why he wanted to do this alone. Mostly, he didn’t want to make small talk. He didn’t want Ben—or anyone—to tell him that Max was fine, that she was probably following a lead. That there was a logical explanation.

  There was no logical explanation for what had happened. Max was in danger and David knew it. He was supposed to protect her, and he hadn’t done his job.

  Ultimately, he let Ben stick with him because Ben knew more people—and more important people—in New York than David did.

  Ben was the one who had hired David originally. David was paid by Maximum Exposure and had revamped the security for NET, the parent company owned by the Crossmans. His official title was chief of security, though he had a trusted person in charge of the day-to-day operations in the studio. In reality, David worked for Max and that was the way he liked it. He understood Max. He respected her. And she gave him space when he needed it.

  Ben had already started taking over, and he was out of his realm. Ben was a talker, a schmoozer, a mover and shaker; David was muscle with brains. And while Ben’s maneuvers were subtle, David had felt it in the conference room. He understood that Ben was worried about Max, but David couldn’t be concerned with Ben’s feelings.

  He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted answers.

  And Ben talked the entire drive to Fringe, working himself up into a near hysteria. David shut him out so he wouldn’t have to toss him from the car.

  “David! You’re not listening to me. This is important.”

  David pulled the car into a space a block from Fringe that only the best parallel parkers could access. He shut off the car, his left hand gripping the steering wheel tightly. “Lawson, you’re not helping. You’re panicking. I called Marco, Sally will take care of the local police alerts, but you know damn well that if the kidnapper turned off the GPS on the car and dumped Max’s phone that they aren’t going to be easy to find. The good news? She’s probably still alive. The bad news? We have no fucking idea where to start looking. The police will do their thing, and I will do mine, and you can either shut up and follow or walk back to the studio.”

  David got out of the car and slammed the door. He took a moment to breathe.

  Ultimately, his rage came from the fact that it was his job to protect Max and he hadn’t been able to. He might not be a traditional bodyguard, but he knew watching her ass came with the territory. He’d failed.

  It wasn’t the first time.

  He walked down the street. People got out of his way, though he barely noticed. Ben followed at a distance. David crossed the street and turned into Fringe. The restaurant was at the tail end of the lunch rush. He recognized the hostess from the other day when he’d been here with Max. “Is Melinda upstairs?”

  The hostess looked scared. He sometimes had that effect on people, the long, narrow scar on his cheek making him look more violent than he was. He tried to soften his expression, but the girl didn’t notice.

  “Melinda Sanchez has been helping with an investigation,” he said. He could pass for a cop, he figured he could play the role when needed.

  “Oh. Um. She doesn’t get on until four. But, um, she might be with her boyfriend at the theater.”

  David pulled out his cell phone, accessed Max’s contact list, and called Melinda. It went to voice mail. He sent her a text message.

  This is David Kane, Maxine Revere’s assistant. I have a photo of the guy we discussed the other night. I need you to look at it ASAP.

  The manager approached. “Is everything okay? Sir?” He looked from David to Ben who stood behind him.

  David showed him the picture. “Do you recognize this man?”

  “I don’t know. Are you with the police? We should go into the back room. This situation has been difficult for the club.”

  “Hasn’t seemed to affect your business,” David said, looking around at the packed dining room.

  “It does, but not in ways you might notice.” He led the way into the back where he had a small office. “Come in. It’s crowded. Sorry.” He started to clear off a chair.

  “I’m not sitting,” David said. He gave the manager his card
. “Melinda Sanchez gave us information that Adam Bachman had a regular visitor. I need to find out if this is the man. Look at the picture.”

  The manager did. “I don’t know. Really. I see a lot of people, and Adam has been gone for nearly a year. But I’ll call the bar manager.” He stepped out of his own office.

  Ben said, “Dammit, David, you know the expression you get more flies with honey?”

  He didn’t respond. Ben muttered something, but David tuned him out.

  Melinda responded to his text message.

  I’m at the Fifth Street Studio. A rehearsal hall near 47th.

  It was only a few blocks away. David replied.

  I’ll be there in five minutes.

  “You deal with these people.” David shoved an extra photo in Ben’s hand. “I’ll be back at the car in twenty minutes.”

  Ben started talking at his back, but David was already out of the room.

  The Fifth Street Studio was a small venue used primarily for children’s dance classes, David realized when he entered the building. Melinda was in the lobby. “Thanks for meeting here,” she said. “My boyfriend is fixing their sound system. I came to keep him company.”

  “We have a photo I’d like you to look at, see if you recognize the guy.”

  “The friend of Adam’s?”

  David nodded. He showed her the photo.

  She stared for two seconds. “That’s him.”

  “You’re certain.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Even without seeing his tats up close?”

  “I said yes. I’m positive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated. “We think he’s involved in a kidnapping. I can’t tell you more, but if you see him call me or the police immediately.” He handed her a card.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  “You remember something else?”

  “No, but if he’s kidnapping people like Adam did, it’s still going on, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “It wasn’t someone from Fringe? A tourist?”

  “No.” But Max had been in there with David the other night. Max had been to a lot of places. She must have gotten on his radar somewhere. At Fringe? Greenhaven? Queens?

  Adam Bachman agreed to the interview the day after the sodium hydroxide was found. Someone knew the police had found the tunnel. They knew that it was only a matter of time before the Palazzolos were discovered.

  Someone had been watching Max.

  * * *

  Sally called David to tell him she was canvassing the neighborhoods bordering the tunnel where they’d found the Palazzolos and their car. She had armed several cops with copies of the picture of the guy who’d kidnapped Max. David would have joined her, but he wanted to talk to D.A. Richard Milligan face-to-face. Fortunately, Ben remained silent during the drive to One Hogan Place, the criminal courthouse where Milligan had his offices. David nabbed the first parking space he saw even though it was three blocks away and got out immediately.

  “David, hold up,” Ben said, following him.

  “We need Milligan to confront Bachman.”

  “David, please.”

  David stopped walking and turned around. “We don’t have time to play nice. Milligan owes Max.”

  “You need to calm down. You look like you’re ready to kill someone.”

  David ignored the comment and continued toward the courthouse. But he took several deep breaths. He’d been a soldier for ten years. He needed to be more objective, and forget that it was his closest friend who was missing.

  His friendship with Max was odd—to him and to Max. David didn’t have many close friends, and that was fine with him. He wasn’t a friendly sort. He’d worked corporate security for a year after he left the military, then took the job with Maximum Exposure on a temporary assignment. But the temporary gig turned into full time, and now he couldn’t imagine going back to Wall Street to work for the suits. Working for Max gave him a purpose not unlike when he was an army Ranger. Max was dedicated and driven. She didn’t have to risk her life or spend eighty hours a week investigating cold cases. She was wealthy enough that she could travel the world, do nothing, live a life of leisure. But it wasn’t in her nature. David respected that.

  Maybe he did understand why he cared for her, more than just as a job. It was respect and an admiration that was born from watching her for so long. When they first met, he’d strongly disliked her. Hate might have been an accurate word. She was abrasive and far too independent. She didn’t like taking orders, even from him, the person hired to protect her from very real threats.

  But then he’d watched her with the parents of a murdered teenager, a cold case she’d solved because she risked her life and her reputation to uncover the truth about a corrupt sheriff in a small town. She’d sat with them, listened—really listened—and gave them the closure they so desperately needed in order to be parents to their surviving two children. She didn’t exploit their grief, but instead turned the story around to praise their dead son and highlight flaws in the system that prevented for years his killer coming to justice.

  She was demanding, arrogant, and judgmental. She was also compassionate, intelligent, and worked harder than anyone David knew.

  Her job had risks, and it was his job to minimize the risks while still giving her the freedom she required. And he’d failed. He’d bought into her partner theory, why hadn’t he recognized that her snooping put her on the killer’s radar? Had he subconsciously doubted her? He honestly hadn’t believed that she was a target.

  He blamed himself. And he blamed Riley Butler. If he’d gone with Max to Greenhaven, he would have picked up on potential threats because that’s what he did. Except he hadn’t gone because he thought it would end up being irrelevant.

  “We have an appointment with Richard,” Ben said, keeping up with David’s purposeful stride. “He’s expecting us, so you don’t have to bully your way in.”

  David didn’t respond. Ben was high-strung, a glad-hander, and often got under David’s skin. David would never mistake the positive aspects of Maximum Exposure as the driving force for Ben’s involvement. Ben used Max solely to gain ratings and more advertising revenue. He pushed her to work high-profile cases like the Bachman trial. This hadn’t been Max’s choice—not initially. It was the disappearance of the Palazzolos that spurred her involvement. Because when their three grown children had contacted her, Max was their last option. When she researched the disappearance of Jim and Sandy Palazzolo and developed the theory that they were connected to Adam Bachman, she agreed to cover the trial.

  If Ben had his way, Max would be hosting a weekly show instead of doing a monthly newsmagazine format. He’d push her to do more “sexy” cases—brutal, violent, controversial—instead of the cold cases Max preferred. Max had held firm, for the most part. But lately she’d been unsatisfied, contemplative, and questioning. David didn’t know if it had to do with what happened with her family in California six weeks ago, her breakup with Marco, or her new boyfriend Nick Santini. But she hadn’t been herself, and David wondered if he should have been more worried.

  Or maybe she’d been keeping something from him.

  They had to wait twenty minutes in Milligan’s exterior office. David stood with his back to the wall, his eyes surveying each person in the office, everyone who came in and went out, until finally Milligan’s secretary said the D.A. was ready for them. David was used to waiting. There was plenty of high tension waiting in the military.

  But he didn’t like waiting for a suit.

  Milligan was sitting at his desk, signing a stack of papers. An assistant stood next to him, taking the signed papers and putting them in the appropriate folder.

  “Ben,” Milligan said, “I told you and Maxine last night that I would help, but demanding a meeting now is not helping your case.”

  “Richard,” Ben said, “we need to talk to you alone.”

>   He finally looked up at Ben and David. “Do you understand how busy I am? Maxine acts like she’s the puppet master and I’m on her string. And now she sends you and her pit bull?”

  Neither Ben nor David said a word. A moment later, Milligan told his assistant to leave. She closed the door behind her.

  “Maxine is missing,” Ben said. “She was taken last night from the studio.” He put a folder on Milligan’s desk. “That’s a security photo of the man who took her. The driver assigned to her is also missing, the car they were driving is missing. No one has seen Max since eleven thirty-five last night.”

  Milligan looked at his watch. “Fifteen hours. Are you sure she isn’t—”

  David stepped forward and put his hands on Milligan’s desk. “This isn’t a game, Richard. This isn’t a joke or Max going off and doing her own thing. The car was supposed to take her home. It didn’t. Now Max, car, and driver are gone.” He opened the folder and pointed to the suspect. “This man took her. He has been seen at Fringe on several occasions talking to Adam Bachman, but hasn’t been seen there since Bachman was arrested last year. Max was looking into Bachman’s stay at a mental health facility near Hartford called Greenhaven, where she suspects he met this man, and now she’s missing. We need to talk to Bachman now.”

  Milligan stared at the photo, then at Horace Vance’s police report about his missing driver, the BOLO Sally issued on Max, and a brief statement by Melinda Sanchez.

  Quietly he said, “If this is what you think, I can’t deal for Max’s life.”

  “Talk to him. Talk to the detectives who worked his case. Find out what they might have overlooked,” Ben suggested. “They weren’t looking for a partner; now that we know Adam Bachman had one, maybe the evidence will look different.”

  “We don’t know that he had—”

  David slammed his fist on the desk so hard that everything on the surface jumped. He walked away before he hit something softer.

  Like Milligan’s jaw.

  Silence descended.

  Milligan said, “I’ll make some calls.”