Obsession (8 page)

“I . . . I don’t know. Burglars. Thugs. They—”

He didn’t let her finish. “Could they have been working for somebody?”

She didn’t understand. “What?”

He gave an impatient
tcch.
“Do you think they were spooks?”

Katharine blinked, still all at sea. Then his meaning hit her. He was talking spooks as in the dark side inhabitants of the Alphabet Soup World they inhabited: CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, NORAD, and at least a dozen more.
Spooks
as uttered by Ed meant covert operatives. The thought made her heart lurch. Her mind flashed back to the attack. Two men, dressed all in black, tall and muscular and all business, even when they were terrorizing her . . .

A chill ran down her spine. She didn’t know why the possibility hadn’t occurred to her before.

“I don’t know. M-maybe.”

“Damn it to hell.”
She could hear his teeth grinding. “What did they say? What did they do?”

Her stomach knotted. Her pulse revved up. An upsurge of remembered fear tasted sour in her mouth. She wet her dry lips.

“They said they wanted my jewelry. When I couldn’t give it to them, they beat me up, then they tried to kill me. They sh-shot Lisa
dead.”

“Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”

Taking a deep breath, she did, although she gave him the edited version. She just didn’t like talking about it, she discovered. And some parts, like the details of how Lisa had died, were just too raw right now. She needed time to process what had happened herself before she spelled it out for anyone else.

“Did they take anything? What did they take?”

The tension vibrating in his voice ratcheted up her own burgeoning agitation.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see. They were in the den . . . they found the safe. You never—”
Told me there was a hidden safe
was what she meant to say, but he cut her off with an explosion of curses.

“Did they get into it? Did they take anything?
What did they take?”
Ed practically screamed that last part, making her jump.

Bully.
The thought popped into her mind unbidden, surprising her with its cool detachment. Did he always yell like that? The unsettling thing was, she didn’t know.

She did know she didn’t like being screamed at.

“I don’t know.” The sudden chill she felt was reflected in her voice. How many times did she have to say it? Her fingers hurt from gripping the phone so hard, and she shifted the receiver into her other hand, flexing her cramped fingers as she continued. “What was in that safe, anyway?
Was
there jewelry?”

She heard him inhale. The ensuing silence was as loud as a shout.

“Yeah,” he said after a minute. “Along with some other things. Valuables. Cash. You know.”

Yeah, she knew—knew that he was lying. It was there in his voice, plain as anything.

Don’t call him on it.
The warning sprang into her head as clearly as if she had heard someone say it aloud. Instinctively, she felt that her own interests would be best served by pretending to believe whatever he said.

“I’m coming home,” he said abruptly, before she could reply. “Quick as I can get there. In the meantime, I’ll send some people to you in the hospital. They’ll watch over you. When you’re ready to leave, they’ll take you somewhere safe.”

Somewhere safe . . .
As his words sank in, her heart skipped a beat. That implied, unless she was mightily mistaken, that she wasn’t safe where she was.

“Oh,” she answered faintly, and realized that the thought of seeing him in the flesh sent butterflies swooping through her stomach. And not the good kind of butterflies.
Anxious
butterflies.
Fearful
butterflies.

“Love ya, babe,” he said, and hung up before she could reply.

Katharine slowly pulled the receiver away from her ear. Her pulse raced, and looking down at her hand gripping the phone, she saw that her knuckles were white from holding on to it so hard.

“Is everything all right?”

She had forgotten Dan was there until he spoke. She glanced over to find that he was still standing a few feet away beside the medical equipment but was now openly watching her, and she wondered if her expression was as discombobulated as her thoughts.

He was a doctor. She latched on to that thought like a drowning man to a branch. She could tell him about the apparent gaps in her memory, about the odd sense of disassociation she was experiencing, about how generally
weird
she felt. About Ed, and not recognizing his voice, and her conviction that she needed to do what he said or the consequences would be—well, unpleasant. Dan might be able to help her, to explain it to her, to make it all make sense somehow . . .

Before she even had a chance to decide whether or not to say anything, a quick knock on the door made her jump and drove the issue temporarily out of her head.

Oh my God, could this be Ed’s “people” already?
The thought brought the hairs on the back of her neck to instant, prickling attention. Dan frowned, too, and glanced swiftly toward the door. Before either of them could get it together enough to reply, the knob turned and the door was thrust open.

“Morning, Miss Lawrence.” Incongruously cheerful, a young black woman in green scrubs pushed a metal cart noisily through the door. “I just need to get a quick read on . . .” Her gaze fell on Dan, who had already turned back toward the bed and was grimacing sympathetically at Katharine. “Morning, Doctor.” She wheeled the cart up beside the bed, transferring her attention back to Katharine and continuing her first thought as if she had never interrupted it. “. . . your blood pressure. Could I have your arm, please?”

Dan gave a small salute and mouthed
See you
as Katharine withdrew her arm from beneath the blanket and proffered it. By the time the nurse had the familiar black plastic sheath secured just above her elbow, he was gone.

“Relax, this’ll just take a sec,” the nurse said as Katharine blindly watched the band inflate.
Chill,
she told herself, to no avail. Relaxing even a little bit just wasn’t in the cards at the moment. Her thoughts were in turmoil. She could feel her heart beating faster than normal. She felt jumpy, on edge, uncomfortable.

Frightened.

“Your blood pressure’s a little high.” Clucking disapproval, the nurse unwrapped her arm and tucked the cuff back into the cart. “You just rest for a while, and we’ll check it again. Breakfast’ll be around shortly.”

“Thanks,” Katharine said, and watched the nurse and cart trundle back out the door. Even with the door closed again, she could hear the muffled rattle of the cart as it headed on its rounds. The hospital was clearly waking up. People were moving around out in the hall. She could hear footsteps, voices, laughter. Someone being paged over a PA system. The light around the edges of her door seemed brighter, as if the wattage in the area outside the door had been turned up. The light behind the closed curtains was brighter, too, as beyond their shielding folds the morning took hold and the sun inched its way up the sky. Even the hum of the air-conditioning seemed louder, as if it were gearing up to combat the coming heat of the day.

The thought scared her all over again. It also filled her with an indescribable sadness, both for herself and for Lisa. One alive, one dead.

She tried to think, to sort things out a little, to impose some kind of order on the chaos that was her mind. But her thoughts raced and the images she needed to try to put any kind of coherent picture together melted away like sugar in a cup of coffee.

Giving up for the moment, she found the remote, turned on the TV—it was tuned to the Fox News Channel—and tried to follow the nurse’s advice and rest. It was impossible. Her mind was in such turmoil that nothing the talking heads on TV said registered. The bed was uncomfortable, the blanket scratchy, the air-conditioning far too cold. Her mouth was dry, her head ached badly, and she couldn’t breathe through her nose. And she still felt—weird. It was the only way to describe it.

Something was wrong: That was the firm conviction she couldn’t get out of her mind. Something above and beyond the fact that she was in the hospital and Lisa was dead. Something—something—dear God, she didn’t know what exactly, but
something—
that made her feel all shaky inside even as she tried to figure out what it was.

Ed’s on his way.
The thought was meant to be comforting, but her body responded independently of her mind: Her breathing quickened; her heartbeat sped up; her muscles tensed.

The conviction of it surprised her. Had they had a fight? Not that she recalled, but . . . casting her mind back over her relationship with Ed was, she discovered, as impossible as everything else. Too much was missing. Only the bare bones were there, with the gaps between essential facts filled by blurry images that she couldn’t quite pull together into a comprehensible whole, no matter how hard she tried.

The thought popped fully formed into her mind. The fact that she was thinking it scared her even more.

Okay,
she told herself firmly,
get a grip here. It’s shock. It’s temporary. Just breathe.

Of course, that was easier said than done when she was minus a functional nose. But still, she tried.

Quick, masculine footsteps in the hall outside her door broke her concentration. Her breath expelled in a snort that hurt her useless nose. Ignoring the instant electric jolt to her nose nerves, she froze, listening with mounting tension to the approaching footsteps. But they passed harmlessly on, and she sagged with relief. Then she started up the whole
okay, breathe
routine all over again.

After a few minutes she had to accept that it was a waste of good air. Her tension didn’t abate one bit. Instead of finding comfort in the knowledge that people were going about their business in the hospital all around her, she found herself growing increasingly agitated by it. Who were these people? Did any of them mean her harm? That was pure paranoia and she knew it, but she couldn’t seem to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

She moved restlessly, shifting positions in an effort to get comfortable, and the ring on her finger caught her eye. The sapphire was the size of one of her fingernails. The bright blue stone gleamed as she tilted her hand curiously toward the lamp; the diamond baguettes on either side sparkled. It looked almost impossibly glamorous on her hand, like nothing she could ever imagine herself owning—although her hand was glamorous, too. Staring down at her long, slim fingers, at her beautifully manicured, oval-tipped nails with their frosting of pretty pink polish, she felt like she was looking at a stranger’s hand. It did not seem possible that hers could be so soft and well kept.

Almost cautiously, she touched the ring. The stone was hard and cold—and big and valuable. Clearly very valuable. She had bought it for herself. With money she had inherited. The knowledge popped into her head as a solid nugget of certainty. It gave her hope that the fog in her brain might be clearing away, but nothing else came. Not the name of the store she had bought it from, or the memory of actually purchasing it, or anything at all except those two small facts. As she probed her memory banks in a futile search for more, she anxiously twisted the ring around and around on her finger, then stopped when she realized something: The ring was loose. At least a size too large, and maybe more.

Staring down at the ring, she realized that she was breathing in quick little pants now that dried her mouth and throat.

Had she lost some weight lately? Her anxiety mounted as she realized she had no clue. Or had she never gotten around to getting the ring sized? Or did she just like to wear her jewelry loose? Any of those were possibilities. What made it frightening was that she just didn’t know. Quickly she raised her hands to the diamond studs in her ears: They were still there. Still big and cold and valuable.

They didn’t feel like anything that could possibly belong to her.

As she sat there fingering the heavy stones that were the size and approximate temperature of frozen peas against the soft warmth of her earlobes, images from the night before swirled through her mind like outtakes from a movie. A nightmarish shadow creeping through her dark bedroom. A hard knee in the small of her back as her arms were wrenched behind her. A voice demanding
Where is it?
over and over again. Two men, tall, muscular, clad all in black, their faces hidden beneath knit masks . . .

Spooks. As she saw them again in her mind’s eye, she wondered why she hadn’t instantly recognized them for what they were. The men who had broken into her apartment, who had killed Lisa and tried to kill her, were too fit, too well trained, too disciplined to be anything but cov-ops. Terror had probably kept her from connecting the dots at the time, but she saw it quite clearly now.

And although she
knew
that they had been seeking jewelry, immensely valuable jewelry of the caliber she’d been wearing in that
Post
photo, knew it as in
this is an incontrovertible fact,
she could not actually remember them saying so.

So how did she know? Good question. Too bad she didn’t have any other answer for it other than
I just do.

What she did remember was them asking, “Where’s the safe?”

The thought that she knew something without being able to remember exactly how she knew it made her break out in a cold sweat.

Her hands dropped away from her ears, and the ring caught the light. The seductive blue gleam of the stone captured her gaze.

If confirmation of what she suspected was needed, there it was: Despite what she somehow “knew,” plain, old-fashioned common sense told her that the intruders had not been after jewelry. If they had been, no way would this ring, and her earrings, have escaped their eye. Ergo, they had been after something else, something that they thought was kept in that hidden safe that Ed had never bothered to mention to her.