Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2)

by Brennan, Allison

  Calls. Calls weren’t going to save Max.

  David turned around. “Let me talk to Bachman.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  Ben said, “Send David in with Charlene. Plausible deniability.”

  “I don’t operate that way.”

  “It’s better than finding Max’s dead body.”

  “Give me an hour, Ben. Stay by your phone. I will call you. I promise.”

  Ben nodded when all David wanted to do was pound heads. “Thank you,” Ben said.

  David walked out. They might not have an hour.

  * * *

  Max couldn’t stop shaking. Her heart raced, the pounding vibrated in her ears. She’d tried to control her body, but nothing she told herself worked.

  “You gave her too much,” a male voice said.

  “I know what I am doing, Cole,” the familiar voice said, angry.

  Max tried to concentrate on where she knew the man. She’d heard his voice, she just had to place it. The knowledge might save her life.

  Or, it might kill you. You’re blindfolded. Maybe they mean to let you go.

  Hardly.

  “Water,” she said before she could stop herself.

  “See?” the familiar voice said. “Exactly what we want. Maxine, I’ll give you water when you give me something. Answer a question.”

  She shouldn’t agree. Her head told her that. Her head, aching though it was, told her to resist giving this bastard anything that he wanted.

  But she was so thirsty escape wasn’t an option unless she could build up her strength. She needed something to keep going. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  She managed to nod.

  “Thank you. Your cooperation will make this all much easier for both of us.

  “I’ve researched you,” he continued, “simply by reading your words. I wondered why you picked the cases that you worked, and then I saw the pattern. Do you realize that every cold case you’ve worked takes place in a town your mother took you to?”

  What the hell was he talking about? Research? Her mother? Her head spun and she tried to focus on his words. To listen to his voice. To remember.

  “I see the confusion on your face, Maxine. All the clues are there. In the book you wrote about your poor friend Karen’s disappearance, you mentioned that you were in Miami when you were seven staying with family friends. We know that’s not true—your mother’s friends were not family friends—but it’s a honest lie. You might not have comprehended that your mother was a pathological liar.”

  What the hell was he talking about? Her mother? What did her mother have to do with any of this?

  “You mentioned in an article you wrote two years ago about the college student who was found dead in the Rocky Mountains that you’d stayed at the Broadmoor for a month when you were eight. I learned that your mother had a lover then by the name of Martin Flores. He was married, but kept your mother in a town house at the Broadmoor, most likely for sexual purposes. You didn’t mention that, but I can read between the lines.”

  She was shaking her head. He was wrong.

  Except he wasn’t. She remembered Martin Flores. She remembered the town house she’d lived in, and the sounds that came from her mother’s bedroom. She knew now that they were sounds of sex; then, she thought they were playing games. That’s what her mother had called it.

  “It’s all just fun and games, Maxie. Just ignore it.”

  “Your mother was a whore. You knew it then, you know it now. How many men had she been with? So many she didn’t know who your father was. But that’s not what she told you, is it? Because you’re a curious little bitch, and you just had to know. So she made something up, something that satisfied you until you found out she was a liar.”

  “How?” How did he know? She’d never hidden the fact that she didn’t know who her father was, but she’d never publicly discussed how her mother lied to her. How did this man know? Was she really that open in her writing? She would have known …

  “You investigated a disappearance five years ago in Jackson, Wyoming,” the man continued. “You mentioned that you’d been there once, in winter, snowed in when you were only six. You couldn’t remember much about the trip, but there was fear between the lines.”

  He was crazy. Certifiably a lunatic. Wyoming? Had she really written about going there when she was six? She couldn’t have. She didn’t remember.

  The drugs. You don’t remember because of the damn drugs they’re feeding you.

  Yet, she vaguely remembered that cabin. It was a blur, something that came to her when she was deep in sleep. A cabin that scared her, gave her nightmares that, when she woke, she couldn’t remember. Except for the quiet. The white. The cold.

  She’d been left alone because her mother went shopping with friends. A snowstorm came in and stranded her there. Her mother couldn’t get to her—at least that’s what Martha had told Max when she finally arrived days later.

  Max had never told anyone about that. Not Marco. Not David. She certainly hadn’t written about it. It was the nightmare that she didn’t completely believe was real.

  “I see you remember.”

  “No,” she squeaked.

  “You’re lying. Do you want the water?”

  Cold liquid brushed her lips. She involuntarily opened her mouth. A few drops moistened her tongue; then no more.

  “What do you want to know?” Her voice was hoarse.

  “Just tell me you remember.”

  She didn’t speak for several minutes, but felt his presence, his eagerness to hear her answer.

  He wanted to talk to her about her childhood? What the hell for? What was his game? She never voluntarily thought about the first ten years of her life. She’d never forgotten, but the memories now came only in dreams and nightmares.

  But if this is what he wanted, then she had to play the game. She needed water. She needed to regain her strength.

  She said, “I remember.”

  “I knew it!” He clapped his hands.

  “Water.”

  “Oh, please, it’s not going to be that easy.”

  Her body betrayed her. She was shaking again. The pain, the feeling of being so out of control of her own body, made her head spin. Fear crept in, no matter how much she told herself she couldn’t give in to what he wanted. The fear was there. She hated herself for being scared.

  “Was that time, that week you were left,” he whispered, “was that your earliest feeling of abandonment?”

  She needed to make something up. Anything to stay alive.

  “Yes.” She didn’t know if that was a lie or not. She didn’t remember. She didn’t want to remember.

  You live by the truth. How could you not want to remember something in your past? Have you been lying to yourself all this time? Are you a fraud, Maxine?

  She barely remembered that week. It was Christmas, a week before she turned six. Her mother left her, told her she was buying Christmas presents and would be very late getting back, but not to worry. There was plenty of food and water in the kitchen, just in case.

  “Stay inside, Maxie. I’ll be back before you wake up in the morning.”

  She’d left two days before Christmas. Left her alone. Max was okay with playing alone because she was used to it. And she had learned to read early, because of her mother. Martha Revere had been very well educated, loved books, loved museums and culture and made sure that Max saw everything.

  I’m giving you the world, Maxie. Every day, a new world.

  Every month they moved. Martha would get her paycheck, as she called it, on the first. Max later learned that it was her trust allowance. Feast and famine. Martha didn’t understand budgeting, and it didn’t take Max long to figure out she needed to save dollars here and there for when the month’s allowance ran out.

  You’re the luckiest girl on the planet, you know that?

  Whether her mother believed it or wanted to believe it, Max didn
’t know. But Max didn’t think she was lucky when she was left alone for nine days. Her mother said later it was a storm. That she couldn’t get back. But it wasn’t. It was Martha stuck because she had no money. She came back January 2, the day she got her paycheck because the banks were closed on the holiday. It was nine days, not a few days. Not a week.

  Her mother had left her alone for nine days.

  I’m so sorry, baby. I didn’t think I would be gone so long. Look what I got you!

  Max had cried. She wasn’t an emotional child, but she’d hugged her mother tightly, her whole body shaking. She couldn’t stop the tears. She’d never been so scared, so terrified, so worried that her mother wouldn’t come home.

  Don’t leave me, Mommy. Don’t leave me again.

  And Martha cried. Maybe she realized what she’d done, maybe she regretted it. She must have because for nearly four years she rarely left Max alone for more than an hour. And it was better, even if Max knew their life wasn’t normal.

  Until Martha left her at her grandparents the month before her tenth birthday. Max hadn’t seen her since.

  “Maxine, you’re not listening to me.”

  Had this bastard been talking to her while memories flooded her? Max didn’t want to be six again where the one thought in her head was that she would be alone for the rest of her life, trapped in a house she didn’t know. No one would find her. For nine days she came up with hundreds of scenarios about what had happened to her mother. And the fear—the deep, primal fear—that she would never know what happened to her. That she would die in this cabin because no one knew where she was. That her mother had left her because she never wanted her in the first place.

  She’d been an accident. Her mother had said that once. Not to Max, but to a friend.

  Max was supposed to be sleeping. But even as a child, she’d never slept well.

  “Fucking bastard,” she mumbled. She didn’t want to think about her mother. She didn’t want to think about any of this.

  He laughed. “That’s good! You’re making progress, Maxine. You’re remembering. Now you can recognize that everything you’ve done is because of that fateful week. Your life isn’t about Karen Richardson or your poor dead high school friend Lindy Ames or even your pathetic mother. It’s about you. Everything you’ve done is because of how you felt when you were six years old and alone.”

  It wasn’t true. Max barely remembered that time. This man was a lunatic.

  There was whispering. At least, Max thought it was whispering. Maybe it was ghosts in the air, calling to her. Telling her to close her eyes and give up.…

  Keep your head together, Maxine.

  “We need to go. I don’t know when we’ll return. Maybe never. But because I want to talk if I come back, I have a treat.”

  He poured water into her mouth. She coughed and gagged and then eagerly drank, hating herself for feeling grateful for the few ounces he fed her.

  Then he left without a word and she was alone.

  For the first time since she was six, Maxine cried.

  Chapter Twenty

  David checked with everyone at NET, touched bases with Sally O’Hara, spoke again to Vance at the car service, and skimmed all the files related to everything Max had been working on.

  And still Milligan didn’t call.

  David couldn’t think of anything else to do. He would’ve helped Sally canvass the areas in Brooklyn and Queens, but he didn’t want to be far from the D.A.’s office when Milligan finally called. Nothing popped out from Max’s notes. It was all stuff he knew—or he learned this morning—and he didn’t see what she’d stumbled upon that landed her on a killer’s radar.

  Maybe it wasn’t any one thing. Maybe it was a culmination of several things.

  Or maybe this had been part of Bachman’s sick plan from the beginning.

  “Milligan called,” Ben said, stopping by Max’s office where David sat at her computer reading recent e-mails one more time. “We’re to meet him at the Manhattan Detention Complex at four fifteen.”

  “It’s about time,” he grumbled. He shut down her computer and rose.

  Ben handed him a sandwich as they walked to the elevator. “Lara ordered out. Told me to tell you to eat.”

  David wasn’t hungry. But he ate half the sandwich in the elevator and tossed the other half in the trash before getting into the car.

  David and Ben were processed through the Manhattan Detention Complex and brought into a small conference room where Milligan was on his phone. He quickly hung up. “I haven’t been able to reach Bachman’s lawyer,” he said. “However, because Bachman signed a waiver to be interviewed by Maximum Exposure, I’m comfortable that I can let Mr. Kane speak with him.”

  “I don’t care about your red tape,” David said. “He has information that we need.”

  “The guard is bringing him in from holding. They’ll be in the interrogation room down the hall in a few minutes. I have to say, for the record, that I’m not comfortable with this.”

  “Of course you do,” David muttered.

  Ben stepped forward. “Richard. David. This is a difficult situation for all of us. We truly appreciate the delicacy of your position, Richard, and I can assure you that we will not abuse your trust.”

  Milligan didn’t look confident, and he said to David, “I look at you and see a man who would snap Bachman’s neck if he could get away with it. Stay on your side of the table, Mr. Kane.”

  “I won’t touch him,” David said.

  “And do not make him any promises relating to his sentencing or trial. I will not negotiate for a reduced sentence. I’m confident that the jury will come back Monday with a guilty verdict; Adam Bachman will spend the rest of his life in a jail cell for what he’s done. But how you run your show and what you promise him in the media? That’s up to you.”

  Ben said, “Thank you, Richard.”

  “I still don’t know what you hope to accomplish here,” Milligan said. “I don’t believe he’s going to say anything.”

  David said, “You could offer him immunity from prosecution for other crimes.”

  “Not without knowing what crimes, what evidence is out there, how many potential other victims there are. I have him on five murders.”

  “But I can.”

  The three men turned to face FBI Agent Marco Lopez.

  “Excuse me,” Milligan said, stepping forward. “Who are you?”

  “Supervisorial Special Agent Marco Lopez with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bring me up to speed.”

  “What?” Milligan looked blindsided and angry. No one in local government liked the feds coming in, especially without warning.

  “You said you’d be here tomorrow,” David said.

  Marco shook his head. “I thought about it for about five minutes and hopped on the first flight I could get out. I’ve already checked in with the New York field office and given them a briefing on the situation. I reviewed the security footage you sent, and ran the guy through our facial recognition program.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing yet, but it could take a few days.”

  “Agent Lopez,” Milligan said with barely restrained anger, “I’m District Attorney Richard Milligan. Our case is closed. The jury is deliberating. Bachman will be convicted.” Milligan seemed more concerned that a federal agent was stepping in to his case than with David talking to Bachman. “You can’t walk in to the middle of my case—”

  “I understand the complexities and I assure you I’m not going to touch your case. But if Adam Bachman had a partner, and that partner has Maxine, we need to find him now.”

  “If you talk to him, I have to get his attorney down here,” Milligan said. “We’ll be jeopardizing future charges if he says anything incriminating.”

  “You said you were confident the jury will return a guilty verdict,” Marco said. “There’s no going back on that.”

  “There’s an appeals process, there’s—”

  “I’ll
take the heat,” Marco interrupted. “I’m used to it whenever Maxine is involved.”

  Without waiting for an answer or argument, Marco turned to the guard. “Please take me to Bachman.”

  “I’m going to be in the observation room, Agent Lopez,” Milligan said. “Don’t screw this up.”

  David followed Marco. “I can’t let you in there,” Marco said. “I don’t know what deal you had with Milligan, but I’m doing this on my own.”

  David stared silently at Marco. Marco swore under his breath. “Shit, David, I can’t have you losing it.”

  David again said nothing. Marco thought he knew him, but he really didn’t.

  “I’m lead,” Marco said, relenting. He nodded to the guard to let them both into the room.

  Bachman was cuffed to the table. He had bags under his eyes. He looked like shit. Like a prisoner of war, David thought.

  “Mr. Bachman,” Marco said, “I’m Supervisory Special Agent Marco Lopez with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Where’s my lawyer?”

  “I’m not here to discuss your case. Nothing you say to me will be used against you. This interview is not being recorded.”

  Bachman looked skeptical.

  “Why are you here?” Bachman said to David. “You work for Maxine Revere. I want to talk to her. I only agreed to talk to her.”

  David stared at him so hard that Bachman turned away.

  Marco cleared his throat, “Mr. Bachman, I need to know the name and location of this man.”

  He put a photo of their suspect in front of Bachman. David watched him closely. The killer couldn’t hide his recognition.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “We have a witness who saw you with this man on several occasions at Fringe,” Marco said. “We know you know him. He’s wanted for felony kidnapping.”

  Bachman blinked rapidly. “What?”

  “If you were involved in a crime with this man, I can help you.”

  He laughed, but he sounded sick and weak. “I’m still going to prison for the rest of my life.”

  “Federal prisons are much nicer than state pens.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged. “I’ll be dead.”