Haunting Rachel

by Kay Hooper

  How ironic, she thought dimly, that on the day she had discovered a lost gift from Tom she had also discovered she was beginning to love another man. A man she still wasn’t sure she trusted.

  “It doesn’t tell us much that’s new,” Nicholas said.

  “I know.” Adam shrugged. “But at least now we see that Walsh did owe Duncan five million. And that Duncan wasn’t easy in his mind about the loan. That jibes with what he told me.”

  “And no word yet from that P.I.?”

  “No. I checked, and he’s still out of town. He doesn’t have regular office help, and his landlady doesn’t care where he is because he paid for the month before he left.”

  “So we have no way of knowing if he did any looking into Jordan Walsh’s dealings.”

  “Not as far as I can see. I, uh, checked the office. His filing system is something of a mystery, but I couldn’t find anything on Duncan or Walsh. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. I didn’t have a lot of time.”

  “Did you find out if he had a security system before you picked his lock?”

  “I took a chance.”

  Nicholas shook his head and leaned back in his desk chair. “I just know I’m going to be bailing your ass out of jail before this is over.”

  “Think positive. Are you any closer with Walsh?”

  “Maybe. Finessing that guy is a lot like dancing with a tiger. One wrong step and the music stops for good.”

  “Rachel is going to ask me questions about him. I’m supposed to be finding out the answers from you.”

  “Tell her only as much as you have to—but keep it vague. Because we don’t know why Walsh would come after her, and we don’t know for sure that the loan Duncan made him has anything to do with it. The ultimate answer may still lie among Duncan’s private papers.”

  Adam sighed. “Well, there may be more information, but I think it’s doubtful. What else would he have?”

  “A copy of the P.I.’s report, if he made one?”

  “That’s a big if.”

  “Granted. But possible.”

  Adam nodded. “I’ll go back to Rachel’s tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, well, get some sleep tonight, will you? No offense, friend, but you’re looking a little ragged around the edges. You won’t be any good to Rachel if you don’t shut it down for a few hours.”

  “I will.”

  If the dreams will let me.

  “She has more lives than a cat.”

  “It’s that watchdog of hers. Get him out of the way, and—”

  “Never mind Delafield. I’m getting sick of this bullshit.”

  “She’s going through her father’s papers. Do you really want to take the chance that she won’t find something?”

  “I’m telling you, he didn’t know.”

  “And I’m telling you, he might have. Duncan Grant was no fool. If he knew, he would have left information or evidence behind. The risk of her finding and understanding it is too great.”

  “I’ve taken bigger chances.”

  “Well, I’m not willing to take this one. I’ve worked too long and too hard to see this thing fall apart now because of Rachel Grant. And I’m telling you to take care of the problem.”

  • • •

  Rachel was back inside the house with all the hallways and doors, and she didn’t like it.

  She wished she could find a safe place and just wait, but an overpowering urge she didn’t understand kept her moving. The hallways were illuminated only by sconces on the walls, and as she walked deeper into the house, the sconces became wrought iron and held candles, and they were fastened to walls of rough stone.

  It was getting cold, cold and damp.

  Dimly, Rachel could hear sounds, sounds she didn’t want to listen to. Something was hurt. Something was hurt, and it groaned and whimpered its pain. As badly as Rachel wanted to escape the sounds, they grew louder as she approached a door at the end of the hallway.

  It was a cold metal door, massive in size. A heavy padlock secured it. And there was a small access opening in the door, fastened only by a sliding bolt.

  The sounds came from inside.

  Groans. Whimpers. And something else, something terrible.

  Rachel wanted to turn around and leave. She wanted to run.

  She wanted badly to run.

  Completely against her will, she saw her trembling hand stretch slowly out toward the small access door. She could hear her own breathing, rapid and frightened, and beyond that the sounds from inside the cell.

  “No,” she whispered, “I don’t want to see. I don’t want to know.”

  “Open the door, Rachel.” Tom’s voice.

  “No.”

  “Open it and look inside.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You have to.”

  “No.”

  “You have to know where he’s been, Rachel. You have to understand.”

  “Please…”

  “Open the door.”

  She saw her fingers hesitate, then grasp the bolt and slowly draw it back until she could open the access door.

  “Don’t make me.” “Open the door.”

  Almost sobbing, she opened the access door.

  And cried out.

  They had hung him from a heavy beam across the ceiling, his wrists lashed together and stretched above his head, bearing his entire weight. His back was to the door, and he was stripped to the waist. Two men stood on either side of him, and one of them held a whip.

  That was the other sound Rachel had heard.

  As she stared in horror, the man with the whip used the entire strength of his arm to bring the whip across the back of his victim. A back already crisscrossed with bloody welts.

  A muffled groan.

  Rachel beat her hands on the door, crying out, “No! Stop! Stop hurting him!”

  One of the two men turned his face toward the door, but his face was a featureless mask, and his laugh was hollow.

  The man with the whip turned a matching mask toward her, then reached over and slowly turned his victim until he was facing the door.

  “No!” Rachel screamed.

  The Adam mask the tortured man wore was horribly crushed and bloody, almost unrecognizable. Scarlet dripped from underneath the mask, painting ghastly tracks down his throat and over his bruised chest

  “No! Adam!”

  One of the torturers laughed and reached out to his victim, his fingers curling into the eyeholes and the mouth hole of the mask as he jerked it away from the face beneath.

  “Look! Look what we’ve done to him!”

  But Rachel couldn’t look. She covered her face with her hands and screamed and screamed….

  The screams were only whimpers, but Rachel’s throat ached as though she had been crying out in agony for hours.

  She turned on the lamp on her nightstand and sat huddled against the headboard of her bed, shivering. It took a long time for her heartbeat to slow to its normal cadence, and even longer for the shivering to stop.

  It was two o’clock in the morning.

  The thought of going back to sleep was too awful to contemplate.

  Rachel got up and took a long, hot shower. It eased the lingering stiffness in her body and warmed her up so that when she got out, she felt almost human.

  And the only person in the world awake at this hour.

  The house was silent, and she wasn’t willing to risk waking Cam and Fiona by going downstairs. But it was a long time until morning. And she really didn’t want to think about that dream.

  She turned on her television to CNN, the volume low, then looked around her room for something else to occupy her mind for a few hours. She found her father’s datebook, and it took her a moment to remember that she’d brought it up days before, meaning to go through it when she had time.

  Now she had time.

  She curled up in a chair and began looking through the last year of her father’s life. All his appointments, professional and private. N
otes he’d jotted while on the phone. Addresses and phone numbers.

  It was hard for Rachel to turn the pages, to see his last days play out before her. She cried a little, her emotions closer to the surface than they had been in a long time. And then she got to the day of his death.

  And went cold.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  When he heard the knock on the door of his room, Adam was only mildly surprised, even though it was four A.M. Room service had delivered coffee and rolls an hour before, and all Adam thought as he went to glance through the security spyhole was that somebody downstairs was bored and had come to collect the tray.

  It wasn’t room service.

  Adam started to open the door, then stopped. He quickly unfastened the chain from around his neck and slid it and the locket into the front pocket of his pants. Not long out of the shower, the pants were all he was wearing.

  Then he opened the door. “Rachel, what in God’s name are you doing out this time of night? And alone, dammit—”

  “Sorry if I woke you,” she murmured.

  He didn’t like the stillness of her eyes. “I was up. Come in.”

  She did. “I remembered your room number, and—” She gasped.

  Realizing his back was to her as he closed the door, Adam turned around quickly. “Rachel—”

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “It wasn’t as bad as it looks.” He got a shirt from the closet and shrugged into it, leaving it unbuttoned. “Just scars, and those will fade away until they’re hardly visible. Eventually.”

  “How could they do that to you?”

  He said lightly, “They were the bad guys.”

  “Oh, Adam …”

  He took her hand and led her to the sofa in the small sitting area. “Here, sit down. Good thing the coffee’s still hot. Your hand’s like ice.”

  She sat there, her eyes never leaving him, and when he fixed the coffee the way she liked it, she accepted the cup and wrapped her hands around it. “I don’t understand people like that.”

  “Good.” He smiled.

  “They did that to you … for five years?”

  “No, most of it came in the first few months. After that they got bored with me. Besides, given the methods of the new government, there were plenty of prisoners coming in every day. I became a very small and unimportant target.” He sat down in the chair across from her, not daring to get any closer.

  “But why? Why did they want to hurt you like that?”

  Adam shook his head. “It was a brutal regime. All they knew was violence. They wanted to make sure I didn’t have any information that could benefit them. And … I had to be punished.”

  “For what?”

  “For doing what I’d been sent there to do. Getting those people and that equipment out of the country.”

  “It was your job.”

  “I never said they were fair, Rachel.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. I healed.”

  “Did you?”

  He managed another smile. “More or less. Rachel, what are you doing here? To come into the city this time of night, alone … What were you thinking?”

  She seemed to shake off her horror. Adam was glad. But he was also wary.

  “I was thinking I needed to ask you something,” Rachel said.

  “Something that couldn’t wait until morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you just call me?”

  “I needed to see your face when I asked. When you answered.”

  That watchful stillness was back in her eyes. It made him feel cold. He was afraid this was going to be bad. “Okay. You’re here. What’s your question?”

  Rachel leaned forward to set her cup on the coffee table between them. Her gaze never left his face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were with Dad the day he died?”

  He’d been right.

  It was bad.

  FOURTEEN

  ow did you find out?” Adam kept his voice level.

  “Dad’s datebook.”

  “And he’d noted a lunch appointment with me just a couple of hours before he and your mother got in that plane.”

  “Yes.” Rachel shook her head. “Why didn’t you tell me you were with him?”

  Adam drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Because … it might have led you to ask other questions I wasn’t ready to answer. I didn’t want to say anything until we had proof.”

  “Proof? Proof of what? And who is ‘We’?”

  Adam answered the last question. “Nick and me.”

  “Nick was with Dad that day?”

  “No. But he believed me when I went to him and told him what I suspected. What I knew. So we’ve been working together. Looking for proof.”

  Rachel sat back on the sofa and stared at him. “Proof of what?”

  “Proof that the plane crash wasn’t an accident.”

  “Dad’s plane? You’re saying you think somebody deliberately rigged it to crash?” She felt an icy chill sweep over her. “That somebody wanted to kill them?”

  “That somebody wanted to kill Duncan. Your mother wasn’t scheduled to fly with him that day. I don’t know why she was on the plane.”

  “She … sometimes went with him when she was in the mood,” Rachel murmured. “Adam—the FAA concluded that an electrical spark ignited fumes. That it was an accident.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why do you think it wasn’t?”

  “Because I was there, Rachel. At the airport when he took off, waiting for my own flight back home. Because I was able to see the wreckage a few days later, and I found something. The FAA investigator should have found the same thing, because it was fairly obvious. But his report stated that the crash was an accident. Maybe because he was inept, or maybe because he was corrupt. I don’t know —yet. But I found enough to convince me that Duncan’s plane was brought down deliberately.”

  “What? What did you find?”

  Adam leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at her steadily. “I know electronics. And even more than most pilots, I know what electronics are found on a plane. What I found didn’t belong there. The explosion destroyed most of it, but there were a few pieces of a device that must have been fixed to the altimeter. A kind of timer. That, and a package of explosives hidden near the fuel tank, must have caused the plane to explode when it reached a certain altitude.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure.”

  “I’m sure, Rachel. In my own mind I’m positive. And those pieces I found are being kept safe by your father’s mechanic out at the airport. He agrees with me. And he’ll testify. When we have more evidence.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  Adam hesitated. “Because while I could prove the plane was brought down, I was also fairly certain that the guilty party couldn’t be identified by what’s left of that timer. Going to the police would just alert him that he was under suspicion, and we’d never get him. I thought Nick and I stood a better chance on our own. It … isn’t the first time we’ve done this sort of thing, and I trust us more than I trust the cops.”

  Rachel was trying to let it sink in, let it make sense to her. “Why would anyone want Dad dead?”

  “That’s something we haven’t been able to find out.” Adam paused, then said, “At lunch that day, Duncan seemed preoccupied, unusually distant. So I asked him if anything was wrong. He said it was nothing, just that he was somewhat troubled by something he’d found out about a recent business venture—with a man named Walsh.”

  “Jordan Walsh?”

  “We think so. It’s the only clue Duncan offered, the only trail we had to follow.”

  “Then—you knew about him before we found Dad’s journal?”

  “We’ve been concentrating on him for months. The note about the loan just gave us a more concrete reason to suspect him.”

  “Adam, even if you had only suspici
ons, surely the police would be better able to investigate than you two. They must have more resources.”

  “Maybe. But sometimes belief counts for more. Rachel, Jordan Walsh has ties to the underworld. The police suspect, but can’t prove, that he was involved in more than a dozen murders during the past few years. They suspect, but can’t prove, that he ran a multimillion-dollar money-laundering operation for a New York crime syndicate.

  “And even though the police would no doubt investigate him on your father’s behalf, we don’t have enough proof to give their investigation the weight it deserves. If we go to them now, they’ll just have another unsolved homicide on their books—and Walsh will know we’re on to him.”

  “Adam, I don’t understand this. Jordan Walsh doesn’t sound like the kind of man my father would do business with.”

  He nodded. “We think the same thing. It’s the most puzzling question in all this. One thing—Walsh was operating out of D.C. when your father lent him that money, and his public reputation is clean. If Duncan had asked around, he wouldn’t have necessarily heard anything negative, not unless he dug really deep. And that note in his journal, about doing a favor for an old friend, might also explain it.”

  “You mean he might not have investigated Walsh until something made him uneasy after he’d already lent the money?”

  “Could be. He never asked Nick about Walsh, but that was very much in keeping with how he handled his private loans.” Adam paused, then went on. “Except in my case, when he was aware Nick had known me for years. But he might have used a P.I. unconnected with the bank—like that John Elliot we saw named in his notes—to investigate if he became uneasy.”

  Adam shrugged. “But we won’t know that unless and until we hear from Elliot. Assuming he knows anything.”

  “So all we know is that Dad loaned Walsh money at the request of an old friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who? What friend?”

  “I have no idea. Have you?”

  Rachel thought about it, but none of the names flitting through her head made sense. “Dad had lots of old friends. Here, in D.C.— all around the world. It’s a long list, Adam.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  Slowly, Rachel said, “But no matter who it was who recommended the loan, you believe that Jordan Walsh is responsible for Dad’s death.”