Fifth Victim (44 page)

He acknowledged my admission that I’d ignored his messages with a bitter quirk of his lips. ‘Your cell was switched off. I couldn’t reach you. I thought maybe you’d … decided to do something stupid.’

And maybe I had. I shied away from going there. It was a dark corner I would not look into.

‘Do away with myself, you mean?’ I asked dryly. ‘You really think, Parker, after all the shit I’ve been through, I’d take the easy way out now?’

He pulled up outside the entrance to the Embassy Suites and glanced over at me, his gaze coolly assessing.

‘It would have been the ultimate cruel irony, if you had,’ he said, and something in his voice sent my pulse buzzing, tightened my chest.

No. Oh, no
…

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘If you’d opened those emails, you’d know,’ he said. He paused, a wealth of conflicted emotions in his voice, his face. ‘Sean’s awake.’

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Parker and I flew back into New York by scheduled flight, landing at Newark late that same evening. On the journey, I’d asked him over and over for more details about Sean, but he knew little beyond the bare facts.

He told me that Sean’s brain activity had started to pick up on Friday afternoon, not long after I’d left the hospital. I wondered about the cause of that, whether the sound of a weapon being readied reached far deeper into his psyche than touch or smell could ever do. The memory of violence overcoming intimacy.

Parker received the call from the hospital not long after my text message came in. He’d tried to contact me, but my phone went straight to voicemail – hardly surprising as I’d switched it off before I left. When calling the apartment brought no response, Parker had Bill Rendelson check the airlines for a ticket in my name. Needless to say, there wasn’t one.

Though he’d reported all this in a matter-of-fact tone, I could tell that was the moment he’d begun seriously to worry. He’d sent his first email that night, and kept sending them, from his PDA at Sean’s bedside.

He relayed what the doctors had told him, that Sean seemed distressed, like a man trapped in a nightmare. His heart rate and temperature had soared, rapid eye movement increasing as he became more restless.

‘It was like watching someone clawing their way out of the grave,’ Parker said, his voice hollow. ‘Like he was fighting for his life.’

And I hadn’t been there, fighting alongside him.

Instead, I’d been out committing cold-blooded murder in his name.

Through Saturday, as I’d tracked Roy Neese through his normal daily subroutines in downtown Omaha, Sean had become increasingly lucid, and increasingly disturbed. It was soon apparent that he recognised nobody around him and remembered nothing of how he came to be shackled to a hospital bed in a strange country with his body wasted and his mind in fragments.

And I hadn’t been there to anchor him.

Now, as Erik Landers drove us in from the airport with blatant disregard for the posted speed limits, my heart was clenched tight in my chest. It didn’t matter how many hours I’d sat by Sean’s bedside during those three long months of his unconsciousness. All I knew – all
he
would know – was that I hadn’t been there at the moment he needed me most.

I was wracked with a faithless dismay, stripped to the bone by guilt and fear, that by not being the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes, the memory of what we had would be somehow squandered.

And I hadn’t been there to reinforce it in his mind.

‘How much does he remember?’ I demanded now. Alongside me, Landers dipped his eyes away from the road for a moment.

‘Bits and pieces, mainly. He thought he kinda remembered me.’ He gave a downturned smile. ‘Thought we’d served together in Kosovo.’

I swallowed. ‘And Parker? Did he remember him?’

And me? Does he remember me?

Landers’ gaze flicked to his boss, sitting in the rear seat, as if being asked to tell tales. ‘Well, he was more kinda hazy on that.’

‘They’re trying not to pressure him to remember anything, Charlie,’ Parker said gently. ‘It’s the last year or so that seems to be the worst affected – the biggest blank. The doctors reckon his longer-term memories are clearer.’

I twisted in my seat and exchanged a brief look with him.
He’ll remember you
, Parker’s eyes declared. I clung to that unspoken promise.

Landers dropped us outside the main entrance and I took the steps three at a time, galloped along familiar corridors with Parker at my shoulder. When I skidded to a halt outside the door to Sean’s room, the figure of his nurse, Nancy, appeared in my path.

‘Charlie!’ she said, her face anxious. ‘I—’

But I didn’t wait, ducking round her shoulder before she had a chance to give me an update.

For the first time, as I entered that room, Sean was half sitting up in his bed, eyes open and mostly clear. He turned to stare at us, slow and jerky, as if his neck would hardly support the weight of his head. I drank in the sight of him, greedy, needy.

All the way back from Nebraska, I’d prayed that I would not arrive and find all this had been a mistake, a false alarm. I had visions of walking in and finding him laid out as usual, those ridiculously long eyelashes fanning his cheeks, his body still and without animation.

Instead, there he was, shaky, weakened, but …
there
. And he would come back from this. We both would. I felt my eyes fill.

Sean’s own eyes were very dark, his pupils huge as though still adapting to the light. His gaze swept across Parker, at my elbow, without a hint of recognition, then settled clumsily on me and he went very still.

I took a step forwards, hardly aware that Nancy had followed us in, had laid a gentle restraining hand on my arm.

‘Charlie?’ Sean said, his voice raw and croaky and incredulous.

I gave him a shy smile. ‘Hi, Sean.’

He froze at the sound of my voice, a mix of frenzied emotions flashing across his face, chased on by a scowl. ‘What the fuck is she doing here? This some kind of joke?’ he demanded. His chest heaved with the effort of breath and he had to swallow between sentences, as though speech was still difficult after long disuse. And at the same time I realised his accent was more pronounced than it had been, the last time he’d spoken. Now it was more like it used to be. Back when I first knew him.

Back when
…

‘Sean—’ It was Nancy who went to his bedside, tried to calm him.

‘Get Foxcroft out of here. I don’t want to see her.’ He raked the nurse with a furious gaze, summoning up the energy with such effort it made him tremble. He turned on me with such intensity that I flinched in the face of it. ‘How could you think I’d ever want to see you again, after what you’ve done?’

EPILOGUE

‘It’s not that he doesn’t remember you, Charlie,’ Nancy said. ‘It’s just that he seems to remember you as … somebody else.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said dully. ‘That’s the problem.’

We were sitting in the small nursing station at the end of the corridor furthest away from Sean’s room. I’m not sure if that was for my benefit or for his.

Nancy was at her desk with the seat turned towards me. The space was small enough that our knees were almost touching. She sat hunched forwards in her uniform, forearms resting on her thighs and pain in her eyes. Parker stood leaning in the doorway, face closed down.

‘Who does he remember, Charlie?’ he asked quietly. ‘What happened between the two of you?’

I put my hands to my face, pressing my fingers together as if to hold the words inside. They could not stay that way for ever.

All kinds of guilty associations had bolted through my mind at Sean’s initial accusation before the last tattered shreds of sanity kicked in. No way could he know what I had just done. Not unless he’d been having an out-of-body experience. So, that meant …

I sat up, let my hands fall away and willed my eyes to dryness, like my throat. ‘He called me Foxcroft,’ I said. ‘That’s who I was when we first met – in the army. I volunteered and passed my selection course for Special Forces training,’ I added, for Nancy’s benefit. Parker had, after all, pored over my CV before he’d offered me a job alongside Sean. I glanced at him. His face still told me nothing.

‘As for what happened, well, let’s just say there was an element that didn’t approve of the fairer sex moving into that particular branch of the military,’ I went on, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice now. ‘And one night a group of them decided to demonstrate just how vulnerable female soldiers were. I—’

‘You don’t have to go through all this,’ Parker said tightly. ‘I know what they did to you, Charlie. Sean told me – some of it, anyways.’

I shook my head. ‘But not all of it. We were … involved, back then. Shouldn’t have been, of course. Sean was one of my training instructors. They posted him just before my … assault. By the time he came back, I’d been through court martial and I was well and truly out in the cold.’

‘Wait a moment, now,’ Nancy said, her own voice low with angry disbelief. ‘They attacked you, and
you
were the one who was court-martialled? Where’s the justice there?’

I shrugged. I’d long since run out of indignant rage at the way things had turned out. The scars still lingered, but they were deep beneath the surface, a blunt ache where once they’d been excruciating. The last thing I wanted to do was open them up to scrutiny again. ‘I tried to get in touch with him, while I was still in hospital, but the messages somehow never got through.’

And when he did finally hear about what had happened to me, he was given a very different version of events.

‘They told Sean I’d failed the course and when they tried to have me RTU’d – that’s “returned to unit” …’ I said quickly, seeing Nancy’s frown. I took a breath. ‘… well, that’s when they said I’d started shouting about him taking advantage of his position. I believe the current term for it is “command rape”.’

I heard Parker suck in a quiet breath. ‘That’s—’

‘An ugly situation,’ I agreed. ‘I thought he’d abandoned me by refusing to answer my calls, appear in my defence at the trial. He thought I’d dropped him in it to try and save my own skin.’

‘How long?’ Nancy asked eventually. ‘How long did it take before you both realised what had really happened?’

‘About four years,’ I said bleakly. ‘At the time, the press got hold of it and had a field day. Certain misogynist elements of the powers that be used it as the perfect PR exercise to keep women out of combat roles.’ They hadn’t been able to get rid of Sean so easily, so while I did my best to hide, they’d given him all the one-way missions, only to discover he was too bloody stubborn to die on the job.

‘So that’s when you changed your name,’ Parker said slowly, ‘From Foxcroft to Fox.’

‘Yeah, and it’s pretty clear that Charlie
Foxcroft
is who Sean remembers now.’ I gave them both a twisted smile. ‘The girl who betrayed his love, his trust, and then ruined his career along with her own.’

Nancy put her hand on my arm, fingers smoothing my sleeve. I stared down at them, noted the worn wedding ring.

‘He’ll remember the rest of it, Charlie,’ she said, but I heard the layer of doubt beneath the reassuring words. ‘Just give him a little time. He’ll remember.’ When I looked up I caught the frown, quickly masked.

On the other side of the room, Parker’s face was drawn, skin stretched tight across his bones. He loved me, I realised, but maybe it was the kind of love that only flourishes because it’s unrequited, and the worst thing that could happen was for it to be given free rein. In the stress of the past few weeks, it had never crossed either of our minds that Sean might wake and simply not want me anymore.

I killed for a man who doesn’t remember me except with hate. What does that make me?

Suddenly the years peeled back, leaving me stripped and alone and vulnerable. I looked up at the pair of them, utter despair in my voice.

‘What if he
doesn’t
remember?’

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copyright © 2011 by Zoë Sharp

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