“Thank you,” she said.
She wanted to say more but she could not find the words.
Sirens wailed in the distance, rising and falling above the whipping wind and the restless waves.
Jack switched his attention to Arizona. “Is this the man you saw coming out of the real estate office, AZ? The one who wanted a list of vacant rentals?”
“Nope, that’s not him,” Arizona said. She sounded very sure of herself. “That guy was a little older. Midthirties, I’d say. Moved well, like a man who kept himself in good shape. But he looked downright scruffy. Brown hair that was so long it touched his collar. Almost completely bald on top. Tortoiseshell glasses. Old gray parka and baggy jeans. But the boots looked new. And expensive.”
Winter stared at her. “You remember all those details about a man you saw leaving the real estate office?”
“A good memory for details was what you might call a job requirement in my old line of work,” Arizona said. “I paid attention because I didn’t like the look of the man. For one thing, those boots didn’t go with the rest of the getup.”
“I see,” Winter said, nonplussed.
Jack’s jaw tightened. “This is not good.”
“Nothing about this situation is good,” Winter said. “What, specifically, are you referring to?”
“The fact that this is not the same man AZ saw coming out of the real estate office a couple of days ago.”
“You’re right,” Arizona said. “This definitely complicates things.”
She and Jack exchanged somber, knowing looks.
“Whoa,” Winter said. “Just a minute here. What are you two talking about?”
“Later,” Jack said. “Before we get to that we need to have a real quick, real private conversation before the police arrive.”
“That sounds like you want us to get our stories straight,” Winter said.
“That’s the general idea,” Jack said.
“But why do we need to do that?” Winter asked. “It all looks straightforward to me. A stalker pursued me to Eclipse Bay and attacked me. My neighbor on the bluff interrupted the assault. There was a fight. Moseley was injured.”
“Doesn’t look that simple to me,” Jack said. “You left out the part about how you were so sure Moseley would not follow you to Eclipse Bay.”
There was a short, tense silence.
“It’s hard to explain,” Winter said finally.
“Try,” Jack said. “And make it fast. I need to know what I’m working with here.”
“He’s right,” Arizona said. “Better give us the facts.”
Winter thought about it for approximately one and a half seconds. What the hell. She was tired of keeping her secret from Jack and Arizona. Or maybe she was too unnerved by the violence to think clearly.
“You probably won’t believe me,” she said. “But the truth is that I’m a hypnotist. A very good one. Before I quit my job at the spa and left Cassidy Springs I did one last meditation session with Kendall Moseley. In the course of that session I put him into a trance and gave him a very strong post-hypnotic suggestion.”
Jack studied her. “You told him that he should not follow you?”
“I told him that he did not want to follow me,” Winter said. “But that kind of suggestion can wear off over time. It needs to be reinforced fairly often. I knew I wouldn’t be around to do the reinforcing, so as a backup, I implanted a post-hypnotic command—three words. The idea was that if I ever spoke them to him, he would go straight into a trance. I figured that, if he did attack me, the command would give me time to escape.”
Arizona whistled softly. “Looks like something went wrong with both the suggestion and the command.”
“Obviously the post-hypnotic suggestion wore off,” Winter said. She looked down at Moseley’s unmoving form. “Which surprises me, to be honest. It should have lasted longer. I really am a good hypnotist. The emergency backup command worked, at least long enough for me to get the knife away from him. I was questioning him, trying to find out how he had found me. But before I could get more than a couple of answers the lightning broke the trance. The next thing I knew, Jack was coming through the door and, well, here we are.”
Jack gave her a speculative look. “You really are a hypnotist?”
She nodded, not speaking. She could not tell if he believed her.
“I knew this was going to get complicated,” he said. “Okay, we don’t have time to go into details now. Pay attention because the cops will be here any minute. Whatever you do, you will not tell them that you hypnotized Moseley. Do you understand?”
“All right,” she said.
She breathed a sigh of relief. Trying to explain her ability never went well.
Arizona looked at Jack. “You’re thinking that maybe the guy who stopped in at the real estate office to get a list of vacant rentals was a friend of this man, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I think it’s a possibility. It would explain a few things.”
Winter glanced at Arizona and then back at Jack. “You two are losing me.”
“I’ll explain later,” Jack said. “Here’s how we’re going to play this. Winter, you tell the straight-up facts but you do not mention that you hypnotized Kendall Moseley or that you gave him any hypnotic commands.”
“Fine by me,” Winter said. “But why are you so concerned about keeping my hypnosis ability a secret? Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate it. But I seriously doubt that the cops would believe I’m much of a hypnotist. In this case they’d be right.”
To her surprise, it was Arizona who responded.
“The cops probably wouldn’t believe you,” she said. “The problem is that they’d put it into their report and once that happens there’s a real possibility that it will come back to haunt you.”
“How?” Winter said.
“Moseley is headed for a courtroom,” Jack said. “That means a jury. A halfway competent lawyer would be able to take your claim about being a good hypnotist and turn it against you.”
“But I failed,” Winter pointed out.
“Wouldn’t matter,” Arizona said.
“AZ is right,” Jack added. “Moseley’s lawyer could convince the jury that you tried to manipulate his client with hypnosis and that Moseley, therefore, was not responsible for his actions.”
“Yep,” Arizona said, “that’s exactly how it would go down.”
They might be paranoid but Arizona and Jack were probably right, Winter thought. Besides, it wasn’t as if she wanted to blab her secret to the authorities. Furthermore, considering how badly her skills had failed her, there wasn’t much point in claiming to be an expert hypnotist.
“Damn,” she said.
“All right,” Jack said, satisfied. “The three of us are on the same page here. We’re not going to mention the words hypnosis or hypnotic commands to the police.”
“Copy that,” Arizona said.
Jack looked at Winter.
“What about your family?” he asked. “Can we count on them to keep quiet about your ability?”
“Believe me, they won’t say a word about my talent for hypnosis. For years they’ve advised me to keep quiet about it. They’re not even in the country at the moment. They’re anthropologists and currently they’re in some jungle several thousand miles from here.”
Jack nodded, satisfied. “We’re good, then.”
The first vehicle arrived, lights flashing, sirens screaming. It slammed to a halt in front of the porch.
Jack went to the door to greet the police.
Winter looked at the blood-soaked towel she was holding against Moseley’s head.
“I told my boss this guy was going to be a problem,” she said with a sigh. “But he refused to believe me.”
Arizona peered down at Moseley. “Mind i
f I ask what you used as the hypnotic command that was supposed to put him into a trance? Professional curiosity.”
“The command was ‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’” Winter said.
Arizona nodded approvingly. “Always did like those stories.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kendall Moseley came awake to the beep of machines and a ferocious headache. He stirred and managed, barely, to open his eyes. The room was drenched in shadows. Lights blinked in the darkness. There was a needle in his arm. It was attached to an IV bag that hung from a steel pole beside the bed.
A woman dressed in a janitor’s uniform stood beside the bed. She was busy working on the IV line. Her gray hair was partially covered by a cap. The lower half of her face was concealed by a disposable mask that was secured with loops around her ears. It was the kind of mask hospital personnel used to protect against infection.
When Kendall looked closely he decided that the janitor’s eyes did not go with the gray hair and the stout frame. They were the eyes of a much younger woman.
“Hey,” he managed.
The janitor paused and glanced down at him.
“You really fucked up, didn’t you?” she said.
Her voice was low and throaty. Sexy. He had to concentrate to focus on what she said because it didn’t make any sense.
“Huh?” he said.
“I told the boss that you were damaged goods,” the janitor continued. She did not pause in her work on the IV line. “But he was obsessed with what he likes to call the six-degrees-of-separation aspect. He wanted more than just plausible deniability, you see. He wanted to make sure there was no way anyone would have any grounds to suspect that he might have been involved. My partner and I explained that the plan was just too damn complicated. But you know how it is with upper management. The CEO always says he wants your opinion but he doesn’t pay attention when you give it to him.”
Kendall struggled to clear his head but the pain made it impossible to think.
“Huh?” he said again because he couldn’t come up with anything else.
“Have to give the boss credit, though,” the janitor continued. “If you had been successful, there would have been no way Salinas and his other two sons could have traced Lancaster’s death back to the source. But now, thanks to you, we’re going to have to come up with a whole new strategy.”
Kendall focused on her hands. They were sheathed in thin medical examination gloves.
“What are you doing?” he said. He could barely get the words out.
“How much do you remember?” the janitor asked.
Kendall tried to think. Blurry memories surfaced. He had flown to Portland, Oregon. A car had been waiting for him. His destination had been programmed into the GPS. There had also been a note on the seat instructing him to check the trunk. Inside he had found a knife and a gun. He had followed the GPS to a small town on the coast.
“I found her,” he said, relieved to be able to recall that much. “I found the mind-fucking bitch.” He paused. “But something happened.”
“You had one job,” the janitor said. “You had everything you needed to do that job. You had the map. You had the tools that were required, including a knife and a gun. Meadows was alone in the house. How did you manage to screw up so badly? I know the boss will ask.”
“What boss? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where am I?”
“You’re in a hospital in a town about twenty miles away from the scene. Eclipse Bay is too small to support its own hospital. All they’ve got is a clinic, so the ambulance brought you here. That worked out well for us, though. No one asked any questions when I decided to play janitor. People never look twice at a janitor, you see.”
“You’re not really a janitor, are you?”
“No.”
Kendall groped for a call button but he couldn’t locate it.
“It’s just you and me, Moseley,” the janitor said. “True, the locals assigned a cop to keep an eye on you, but he’s busy drinking coffee and chatting with someone at the nurses’ station. We’ve got a little time here, so talk to me. What went wrong?”
Kendall started to get mad. The demanding note in the janitor’s voice aroused a frisson of the old, long-simmering anger. All his life women had tried to manipulate and control him. The scariest one of all was the bitch who had looked straight into his head and seen the weakness in him. He wanted to punish her; destroy her.
“I found her,” he said. “But she tricked me. And then he showed up.”
“Lancaster?”
“I don’t know his name. I remember him coming up the porch steps. That’s the last thing I can remember. I’m in a hospital?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why? What happened to me?”
“Judging by the conversation I overheard out in the hall, you and Lancaster fought. He won. You lost. You hit your head when you went down. Now you’re under arrest for breaking into the cottage and attacking Winter Meadows.”
Rage clouded Kendall’s brain. “That mind-fucking bitch tricked me.”
“How did Meadows trick you?”
“She did something to my brain. She tried to control me. That’s why I had to kill her. My friend understands. He explained everything.”
“Why would Meadows want to control you?”
“She thinks I’m weak,” Kendall said. “Women always make that mistake. I have to teach them a lesson.”
“Which you do by beating them so badly that they end up in the emergency room.”
“I have to teach them to treat me with respect.”
“You were supposed to do more than beat up Winter Meadows tonight. You were supposed to kill her.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I was going to gut her like a fish. That’s exactly what I’ll do as soon as I get out of here. She’s dangerous. My friend in the chat room told me the truth about her.”
The janitor removed the syringe that she had been using to inject something into the IV line. She looked down at Kendall.
“I have a message from your chat room friend,” she said.
For the first time since he had awakened in the hospital room, Kendall Moseley experienced a tiny flicker of relief.
“You know my friend?” he said.
“He’s my employer.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No surprise,” the janitor said. She glanced at her watch. “I’m going to have to run. Got a long drive ahead. I don’t have time to explain the full extent of your fuckup.”
“Stop talking to me like that. I’m not stupid.”
“A highly debatable claim.”
The janitor was a mind-fucking bitch, just like all the other women he had known. He tried to stay focused.
“What did my friend tell you?” he said.
The janitor had partially turned away from the bed. She paused.
“Your chat room friend made it clear that after tonight he would no longer require your services,” she said.
An icy blast of fear cascaded through Kendall Moseley. He tried to lever himself to an upright position but discovered he could not move. He was shackled to the bed.
“Who are you?” he rasped.
The janitor leaned over the bed. For the first time he saw the hot excitement in her eyes.
“You could say I’m from HR. I’m here to terminate your employment.”
He tried to protest but a dark fog was already coalescing in his head. He wanted to shout for help but he did not have enough strength.
“You can’t do anything to me,” he got out in a hoarse whisper. “My friend will protect me.”
“No, your friend will not protect you, because you failed. He doesn’t waste time on weak assets like you.”
Kendall had one last instant of clarity. His friend had betrayed him and now he was goi
ng to die—and all because of the bitch who had fucked with his mind.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The bored cop was still lounging against the nurses’ station, talking to the attractive, dark-haired woman sitting in front of a computer. He glanced down the hall at the janitor who had just left Moseley’s room but he immediately lost interest. He turned back to his cozy conversation and his unfinished coffee.
The janitor got behind her cart and leaned into it with a show of weary effort. She pushed it around a corner into another white-walled corridor. The monitors attached to Moseley would start pinging at the nurses’ station any second now.
It was unlikely that the cop and the nurse would remember the janitor who had cleaned Moseley’s room shortly before his death, but even if they did, the description would be very misleading. It was amazing what a wig of gray hair, a surgical mask and a heavily padded figure draped in oversized hospital scrubs could conceal.
The janitor trudged down the hall. When she reached the next intersection, she ducked into the women’s restroom and removed the janitor’s scrubs. She stuffed them into the small daypack she had concealed in the cart but she left the hospital mask in place. No one would question it in a medical setting.
Dressed in the trousers, ancient plaid flannel shirt, baseball cap and sneakers that she had worn earlier when she entered the hospital, she walked out the main entrance. The clerk at the front desk did not look up from his computer.
She cut through the mostly empty parking lot and crossed a quiet street. Devlin was waiting for her in the black SUV parked nearby. He fired up the engine when she emerged from the shadows. She opened the passenger-side door and slipped into the seat.
Devlin put the vehicle in gear and pulled away from the curb.
He had worked under a variety of names but these days he went by Devlin Knight. He thought it had a dashing ring to it. He was good-looking in an open, square-jawed, former-captain-of-the-high-school-football-team sort of way but not so good-looking as to be truly memorable. He kept himself in excellent shape and at thirty-five he still had a body that did justice to the sophisticated Italian designer clothes he favored.
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