Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2)

by Brennan, Allison

  “I’ll think about it,” Riley said a moment later.

  “Call me. Whenever you want.”

  “I still made a mistake, Max. A big one. And I can’t even remember what it was.”

  “But you did it for the right reasons, and that makes all the difference,” Max said. “Is there anything you remember? Even if it doesn’t make sense.”

  “I keep having this dream. I don’t know if it’s real.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m at the courthouse and I run into this older guy. Not ancient, but older. And then I wake up.”

  “You spent a lot of time at the courthouse last week.”

  “And I think I really did run into someone. I was texting and walking in the hall. He teased me. That it was against the law to text and walk. And I think that’s all real, but I don’t know why I’m dreaming about it, or why I wake up scared.”

  Max took her hand. “Go home. Get better. Call me.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Max woke up early Tuesday morning, before the sun rose, and looked at Nick sleeping next to her.

  She’d fallen asleep on the couch in her office the night before while the six of them—Sally O’Hara had joined them shortly after Max got back from visiting Riley—went through Max’s investigations. Arthur had talked to her extensively, asking questions about what she remembered, what Duvall asked, how he asked it. Her memory was good, but there were holes. Things she couldn’t remember. She had a vague feeling of bugs on her skin, but she didn’t know if that was real or the drugs. She had felt pinpricks on her feet, her arms, but were they even real? And the rats … certainly they had been a hallucination.

  Marco was working with security at the courthouse to obtain a copy of all digital recordings for the week of Bachman’s trial. He didn’t find credence to Riley’s half-dream/half-memory, but Max did. It was worth looking into.

  The last thing she remembered Arthur saying before she dozed off was, “He’s jealous. In a deep, subconscious way. He has a deep envy for Max that directly connects to something she has that he doesn’t. It’s likely a combination of money and status.” He said more, but Max was exhausted, and she fell to sleep until Nick helped her down the half flight of stairs to her bedroom suite.

  She hadn’t dreamt all night, no nightmares, no memories. She was grateful, except that she woke at five in the morning and couldn’t go to back to sleep. But five hours was more than she usually had, and dreamless hours were coveted.

  “Hey,” Nick said.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.” She rolled over to face him. “I heard you tell David you rearranged your schedule. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I want to be here.”

  “When do you have to leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning.” He reached over and played with the ends of her hair. “Are you going to take some time off?”

  She smiled. “Is that an invitation?”

  “Always.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I owe you.”

  “You owe me nothing.”

  “I’m surprised Marco let you work with him.”

  “He doesn’t like me, but he respects me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Nick arched his eyebrows. “You’re not that naïve, Maxine.”

  “You knew I had a history with him.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I’ll give you the full disclosure if you want.”

  He kissed her. “As long as it’s in the past, I don’t need any explanation.”

  “Of course he’s the past. What did he tell you?”

  “It’s not what he said, it’s what I know. He’s in love with you.”

  She would have laughed, but it wasn’t funny. “No, Nick. He’s in love with who he wants me to be. Not with who I am.”

  “I guess I do have a question then. Why go back and forth with him for so long if there’s nothing there?”

  “You really want to do this?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. But I have a difficult ex-wife, a son, and I’m moving as soon as I find a job in whatever town Nancy settles in. She’s changed it on me twice already. It’s a common story, but complex at the same time. At least for me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Marco while I’m lying in bed with you. But I’ll say this—we’ve been through a lot together, and I’ll never forget that. I met him when I was twenty-two. He was the FBI agent in charge of Karen’s murder investigation, because I got the FBI involved when the Miami police refused to do what needed to be done. I still blame them for her killer walking.”

  “I read your book.”

  She almost smiled. “So you know. Because of that year, Marco and I will always be connected. And there have been some other things we’ve gone through which means that any man in my life is going to have to accept that Marco will be part of my life in some way. But the intimacy is over. I can’t—won’t—be the person he wants.” She paused. “He lied to me about something pretty big. It was related to an investigation we were both working. Different angles. I have a hard time with forgiveness.”

  “That is an understatement.”

  “I’m not an easy person, Nick.”

  “I knew that from the moment I met you. Maybe I need a little excitement in my life.”

  She reached over, put her hand around his neck, and pulled him in for a kiss. “I think I need a little excitement right now,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Max almost felt like herself when she walked into the Maximum Exposure offices late Tuesday morning. Other than the fact that it was nearly noon and she usually arrived before eight.

  David was at her side, which made the questions and well-wishes easier to address.

  Ben came up to her and spontaneously hugged her. It was a genuine emotion. He’d visited her briefly in the hospital, but she hadn’t seen him since Sunday. Through David, Max knew that Ben was working himself and the entire staff hard, analyzing her Maximum Exposure shows and articles while also assigning their best researcher, C. J., to Carter Duvall himself.

  “I have the main conference room set up,” Ben said. “It’s been a lot of work, but I’m impressed by our team and what we’ve accomplished.”

  Max followed Ben into the conference room. She agreed—the room had been transformed into a career summary of her life for the past two years.

  Ben had brought in enough corkboard to cover three walls. A time line, similar to the time line in her home office that she used for each individual case, was labeled across the top, starting with July 10, two years ago, her first Maximum Exposure show. They’d covered active missing persons cases, leading with a case she’d investigated in Colorado Springs about a college student who disappeared while on a camping trip.

  Each article she’d written or interview she’d done was attached to the corkboard with index cards as labels.

  Directly under the time line were the facts related to the current situation—when Cole Baker quit Greenhaven, when he moved to New York, details from his journal on where he’d watched her and when. Max shivered as she realized he’d been watching her on and off for nearly two years.

  Ben said, “We’re focusing heavily on the first six months of Maximum Exposure, plus we’ve gone back to your last book, because we promoted it heavily in our opening show and in the release month. The articles on the left you wrote directly or indirectly related to the show; the articles on the right were independent.”

  “Ben, I don’t know what to say. This is terrific.”

  “There’s only one problem,” Ben said. “Nothing jumps out at me that relates to any of these people. We’ve cross-referenced the names of anyone associated with these investigations to Duvall, Bachman, Baker, and Greenhaven itself—no crossovers. None. We’re expanding it to include family and close friends, but that’s harder to identify.”

  David held out a chair for her. “Off the foot, Max.”

  She sat. “Arthur Ullma
n said it’s personal, and it sounded very personal when Duvall talked to me. I took something from him. Have you looked into my finances? The Sterling-Revere Trust? Did my family do anything to him?”

  Ben sat down across from her. “Yes, the one thing I know better than television is money, so I had C. J. run Duvall’s financials first. Other than his house, he doesn’t have many assets. His salary is on par with others in the field, he receives a small supplement from royalties on his two books, he receives speaking fees several times a year.”

  “What did he do before Greenhaven that he could afford a house worth more than a million in Stamford?”

  “Family house. It was his grandparents’. He and his sister inherited it.”

  “Where’s his sister?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben admitted. “His parents are divorced, both remarried, I don’t know their status. His sister lives out of the area. We were focusing on more recent interests—the last two years.”

  “We should talk to his sister,” Max said.

  “I’ll find the information,” Ben said. “But you should know that everything we’re getting on this we’re also giving to the FBI. I agreed because Marco promised to share his information.”

  “And has he?” she asked. She was still irritated that he’d laid claim to her bed when he arrived. Though, she had to admit, he’d gone above and beyond in helping her. He always did, even when they weren’t together.

  “I believe so.”

  Marco stepped into the room. “Of course I have. And I have more.” He dumped a thick file on the conference table. “This is everything we have on Duvall from the day he was born. It’s all yours, Maxine. We’ve gone through it and nothing jumps out at us, so our analysts are digging into each section deeper. But you said something last night, that maybe because it’s personal you’ll see something that we might miss.”

  “Thank you,” Max said. She opened the file, while Marco talked to Ben about the shows she covered during the first three months Maximum Exposure aired. She half listened to how Marco had gone through the records of the “Killer Nurse” case in Miami—since that was the subject of her last book and it had been published two years ago—and there was no connection to Duvall, Bachman, or Baker. He had questions about her other investigations, but Max blocked him out as she flipped through Duvall’s background.

  The FBI was thorough. Duvall and his younger sister Diana had been born in Stamford, Connecticut. He was forty-five, she was forty-one. Their parents divorced when he was seven. The FBI had copies of the court records. It had been contentious because while they’d started off with a lot of family money, they’d hit rough times—when most other people were doing so well. They overextended, and the money became the root of their conflict. Both ended up with very little, and they’d sold the family home. The mother, Faith Duvall, moved in with her parents, taking the kids with her. The father, Bruce Duvall, remarried almost immediately to a wealthy socialite from Virginia, where he relocated. There had been allegations of adultery, but they hadn’t factored into the divorce settlement.

  Carter Duvall graduated college in Connecticut, but there wasn’t anything here about his high school years. “Where did Duvall live after his mother remarried?” she asked Marco. “In fact, there’s nothing here about his mother’s second marriage, but you said she’d remarried.”

  “Someone mentioned it,” he said. “It should be easy to find.”

  Ben said, “I’ll get C. J. on it. Connecticut?”

  “And neighboring states,” Max said.

  “See something?” Marco sat down next to her when Ben left.

  “No. But he was fixated on my past. What my mother did to me, how she lied to me, pulling things out from what I wrote in my journals, but wanting me to believe he figured me out from my books. There has to be a reason why he wanted to dredge up all that.”

  She skimmed his employment records. He’d spent most of his career at Greenhaven. He’d been employed as the staff psychiatrist at a juvenile detention facility in Staten Island prior to that, for seven years. The timing worked—college, medical school, Staten Island for seven years, then Greenhaven for nine years. There weren’t any breaks in his employment, at least officially.

  “You never talk about your early childhood,” Marco said.

  “I don’t want to now.”

  “It explains a lot.”

  She turned to him. “Marco, do not try to analyze me. I am exactly what I appear to be. I’ve never lied about my mother or not knowing who my father is or that my mother dumped me when I was ten. Just because I don’t talk about living like a nomad the first ten years of my life doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten or lied about it.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “You think you now have this insight into my personality that will somehow help you get me back into your bed. I haven’t changed. I’m not going to.”

  “We’ve never just been about sex.”

  “You lied to me, Marco. It wasn’t a lie of omission, it was a big fucking lie and I can’t forgive that.”

  “I did it to protect you and protect my investigation.”

  “You did it to protect your criminal informant in order to get a bigger fish. Don’t you dare say you lied to me to protect me. I don’t want that kind of protection.”

  “Then let me not lie to you. Nick isn’t going to stick around. He doesn’t have the staying power. His family is in California. He has a son. His priority will never be you.”

  Though Max knew Marco was simply jealous, the comment still stung.

  “I’m not competing with his son. And right now, I don’t care about priorities or where I fall in some mythical range. Don’t try to put a wedge between Nick and me because you think we’re going to get back together. The chances are this thing with Nick won’t work out—I don’t have a great track record as you love to point out.” She held up her hand to stop him from interrupting her. “But I still won’t be calling you.”

  He bristled and got up. Max hadn’t meant to sound so mean, but he’d pushed her, and that made her mad.

  She said, “I wish you would just accept my friendship and leave it at that.”

  She didn’t know if he heard her because he was already at the doorway. Then he turned around and said, “I want more.”

  “I don’t have more to give.”

  “Bullshit,” he said and left.

  Max stared out the lone window that hadn’t been covered up by corkboard. She wished Marco could understand. She wished she’d told him that she appreciated he’d come here for her. That she respected him and cared about him.

  But he’d said it himself: he’d lied to protect her and his case. And that would not stop. Max couldn’t live like that. She shouldn’t have to.

  She held people to a high standard, and yes, it went back to her mother. What didn’t? Her mother had shaped her into being who Max was today. Her mother, who couldn’t sit still. Who wasted money, going from princess to pauper in weeks, every single month for the first nine years and eleven months of Max’s life. Who’d left her for days at a time with “friends” when Max didn’t think her mother ever really knew most of those people, not well. Who hooked up with men like Perry and Victor for a month or two at a time, just because she was bored. Then she left Max … without telling her why.

  So yes, Max was who she was because of her past. Wasn’t everyone?

  Max realized she’d been looking at Duvall’s background check in the order it had been presented and, essentially, fact-checking from when he started college. But there were holes from his childhood. His mother’s remarriage. His childhood after the divorce until he went to college. What happened in those years?

  She got up and went down the hall to the research wing. The team had individual cubicles where they could all spin their chairs around and sit in the center for brainstorming. She liked the research team because they thought like she did and, in some ways, more i
nnovatively. And better, they knew how to get information as fast as—or faster than—she did.

  C. J. was deep into reading a document when she interrupted him. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I don’t have anything new—at least nothing that’s important.”

  “I need something very specific. I’d like his extended family. Aunts and uncles. Everything about his father’s second wife and his mother’s second husband.”

  “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

  “No. But he has a beef with me, and I think it goes back a long way. Maybe not me personally, but my family. And I can’t discount that it’s something completely benign, something he blew out of proportion.”

  C. J. looked up at her. “Nothing justifies what he’s done.”

  Her cell phone rang. “Just feed me the information as you get it. Thanks.”

  She stepped out and answered the unfamiliar number.

  “Maxine Revere.”

  “Hello, Ms. Revere?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Ava Raines. Do you remember me?”

  “Of course. What can I do for you?”

  “Um, I’m really confused right now. Ms. Golden told me what happened at the jail. That Adam Bachman killed himself. And I’m just … I don’t know. It’s like I don’t have anything to do. And she said the jury has been disbanded. I don’t even know if they would have kept him in jail.” She paused. “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

  “I understand. You don’t have closure, and you want to put this behind you.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “If you want my opinion, I think he was guilty, and his guilt ate him up. It’s likely the reason he killed himself. Either guilt or finally realizing he was going to spend the rest of his life locked behind bars.”