Beyond Suspicion (30 page)

•

Each breath carried Cindy more deeply into sleep, though it felt like something beyond the realm of sleep, a numbing paralysis that tingled all the way to the tips of her fingers. A simple effort to raise her heavy eyelids was enough to send the room spinning. A burning sensation tinged her nostrils. It wasn’t that she couldn’t remember what had happened. It had all just happened so fast, the moment she’d stepped into the master bathroom-the blur of motion behind her, the muscular arm around her waist, and the pungent rag that covered her mouth and nose. In a matter of moments, she felt limp. But she was battling it, refusing to be overpowered.

She’d managed to hear most of what Jack and Katrina were saying. The living room was down the hall from her, but sound traveled well in their little two-bedroom house, especially in the stillness of morning. She’d heard enough to know that it was time to dial 911. That was when she’d grabbed the cordless telephone on the nightstand and run into the bathroom. It was suddenly coming clearer to her now. The perfectly round hole that had been cut into the glass door that led to the solarium outside their bathroom. The ambush from behind her. And something else was coming back to her, too.

She seemed to recall that there had been no dial tone.

Yes, the phone was dead. That much she definitely recalled, and the fear that flourished in that brief, lucid moment gave her another kick of adrenaline. Part of her knew that she should have been completely unconscious by now, but she wouldn’t allow it. Instinct was taking over. It was an almost inexplicable, involuntary, high-gear response to the realization that someone had broken into their house and that Jack was with Katrina, completely unaware. He was in danger and she needed to help. She liked to think it was love that drove her, a kind of love she’d harbored for a long time, as long as she could remember. The feeling was familiar to her, but she was somehow finding it easier to associate that feeling with the distant past than with present events. She tried to resist whatever it was that was pulling her in that direction, fought off the effects of the drug. But she could feel her mind slipping. She found herself retreating to that time and place long ago, where she’d first been tempted to act on her impulse, the God-given instinct to protect a man she loved. Or at least to protect his name.

It had happened when she was nine years old, just two months after her father had committed suicide.

•

A grinding noise emerged from behind the bathroom door, the girls’ bathroom on the second floor. Cindy stepped out of her room and listened. It definitely wasn’t an electric hair dryer or anything else she’d ever heard coming out of the bathroom. She started down the hall and tried the door knob. The noise stopped.

“Go away!” her sister shouted.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Get out of here!”

The grinding noise was back. Cindy shrugged, then took a bobby pin from her ballerina-style bun and stuck it in the key hole. The lock clicked, and the door popped open.

Celeste grabbed the blender and screamed. “You idiot!”

Cindy was unfazed. She walked in and inspected the mess on the counter. “What are you making?”

“A milkshake. Now will you get out of here, please?”

“Can I have some?”

“No. But if you’re going to come in here, at least close the door.”

Cindy pushed the door shut, and Celeste locked it. Cindy leaned over the blender and smelled the concoction. “Yuck. It smells like fish.”

“Things that are good for you never smell good.”

“Is there really fish in there?”

“No, genius. It comes in a bottle.”

Cindy checked the label. “Is it really good for you?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s pour in some more,” she said as she tipped the bottle.

Her sister grabbed it, stopped her. “No. A little is good for you. Too much can kill you.”

“Kill you?”

“Yes. Too much is like poison.”

“What’s in it?”

“Medicine.”

“What kind of medicine?”

“None of your business.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“One of the high school girls. A senior.”

Cindy grabbed the bottle and read the label. “E-R-G-O. What are you taking that for?”

“I said, it’s none of your business.”

“Tell me or I’ll ask Mom.”

Celeste shot her an angry look and snatched the bottle back. “I’m taking it because I think I’m pregnant, okay?”

Cindy’s mouth fell open. “You were with a boy?”

“No.”

“Then how’d you get pregnant?”

Celeste lowered her eyes and said, “I’ve been having dreams.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“About Dad. He comes to me.”

Cindy felt her blood begin to boil. “And?”

“At night sometimes, I hear him outside my bedroom window. The leaves crunch every time he makes a step. Then I get up, but I’m not really awake. I can see myself walking down the hall, downstairs. I go to the back door and open it. I see nothing but these swirling leaves in the wind. But then suddenly he’s there, and I don’t know how, but I’m naked, and he’s there, like it used to be, and-”

“Stop it!”

“He pulls me on top of him, and-”

“Celeste, you’re a liar!”

“I’m not lying! You were just too young. He would have come for you too, if he hadn’t killed himself. He might still come.”

“Girls!”

They froze. Their mother was outside the door.

“What’s going on in there?”

Celeste went to the door and opened it a crack. “It’s okay, Mom.”

Cindy listened as her sister and mother talked it out through the slightly opened door. Celeste had turned her back on her sister, and Cindy felt a sudden urge to grab something and hit her over the back of the head, exactly the way she’d felt when Celeste had ruined their father’s graveside service with her lies. Cindy could even see it in her mind, Celeste falling to the floor all bloody and unconscious. Celeste and her false accusations. No one had ever spelled it out for her, but Cindy knew it was true: Celeste had driven their own father to suicide, taken him away from her.

Celeste was pleading with their mother, trying to assure her that they weren’t up to any mischief and that there was no reason for her to barge in. Cindy grabbed the bottle of ergo and took a good, long look at the label. She wasn’t sure what it was, but Celeste had given her all the information she needed. A little was medicine; a lot was poison. She glanced at the “milkshake” on the counter, and a thought came over her.

What might happen if she poured Celeste a little more?

•

“Welcome back,” the man said.

Cindy looked up into his cold, dark eyes. Her face was right in front of her, then gone, then back again. It was as if each blink of her eyes lasted several seconds. He put something beneath her nose, and she jerked back violently. Smelling salts, she realized. Slowly, she felt her body coming back to life.

“I need you to stand on your own two feet now,” he said as he pulled her up from the bathroom floor.

Her legs wobbled, and she braced her body against his.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’ll be fine in a few minutes. Unless you do something stupid.”

Cindy tried to speak, but her mouth couldn’t form words. He pried her jaws apart and shoved something long and cold into her mouth until it pressed against the back of her throat. She could taste metal. She could smell the powder from a gun that had been fired many times before. She saw the evil look in his eyes. It felt a lot like a place she’d been before, five years earlier, with a madman named Esteban-a place to which she’d never wanted to return. Her heart pounded, and she was suddenly alert.

“Nothing stupid, you hear me?”

Cindy nodded.

“Okay,” he said as he nudged her forward. “Let’s go.”

•

Nobody move,” said Yuri, his voice booming across the living room.

Katrina and Jack froze. Yuri had Cindy in front of him with a gun to her head, using her as a human shield. The fear in her eyes was more than Jack could handle.

“Let go of my wife!”

“Shut up!” said Yuri.

“Who are you?” said Jack.

“His name’s Yuri,” said Katrina. “What do you want?”

“I want you to do as you’re told.”

“I can’t do that.”

“So I heard. Did you really think I was foolish enough to send you here alone and not follow you? I heard everything you said.”

“Then you’re the man. I guess you’re just going to have to do Jack Swyteck yourself.”

He shoved the gun into Cindy’s cheek. “You’ll do as you’re told. Or I’ll kill his wife.”

“You’re going to kill her anyway.”

“Stop,” said Jack. “Let her go, Yuri, or whatever your name is. Then you and I can get in your car, and we’ll go to a nice quiet place in the woods. You can do whatever it is you need to do with me. Just let Cindy go.”

“Oh, aren’t you the hero?” he said, scoffing. Then his smile faded. “Down on the floor, Swyteck. Face-first.”

Jack didn’t move. Yuri tightened his grip on Cindy’s throat. Her eyes bulged, and she gasped audibly. “I said, get down!”

Jack lowered himself to the rug.

“Hands behind your head.”

Jack locked his fingers as commanded.

“Very good. Now, Katrina. Let’s do what we came here to do.”

She glared at Yuri, then glanced at Jack on the floor. The room was silent. Slowly, she reached inside her jacket and removed her.22.

“’Atta girl,” said Yuri. “Now move closer. Remember what I told you about the bullet in the brain. I want to see you use that.22 the way it’s supposed to be used.”

She crossed the living room, then stopped at the edge of the rug. She was close, but not so close that Jack could reach out and grab her ankle.

“Don’t do this, Katrina.”

“Put a sock in it, Swyteck,” said Yuri. “I’m trying to be a nice guy. I’m giving you the privilege of dying with the faint hope that I might actually let your wife live. One more word, and I’m taking that away from you.”

A tense silence fell over the room. Katrina could hear the sound of her own breathing.

Yuri narrowed his eyes and said, “Do it, Katrina.”

She could feel her palm sweating as she squeezed the handle of her gun and pointed the barrel in Jack’s direction.

“That’s it,” said Yuri.

She had one eye on Jack, the other on Yuri. Her finger caressed the trigger.

“Do it!”

Her hand was shaking, but her thoughts were coming clear. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“Stop stalling.”

“There are so many easier ways to do this.”

“This is the way I want to do it. Now pull the trigger!”

“Why? Why are you making
me
do it?”

“Because I can. Now shoot him!”

“Why? Why is it so important to you that
I
do it?”

“Don’t you dare disobey me. I know who you are, you little slut. Did you honestly think you could fool me?”

“What?”

“If I can get you to snip the hairs off your pussy and hand them over to me in a plastic bag, surely I can talk you into pulling the trigger. This is what you are. I know what you’re made of, and I own you. It’s like I used to say, remember? No decision we make is meaningless. We all determine our own fate. Now do as you’re told. Kill him!”

It was him, she realized, and the discovery cut to her core. Bits and pieces of information she’d gathered over the last few months had suggested that he was the man she’d been looking for, and now there was no denying it. Something snapped inside her, a fury sparked by the sickening reality of what drove this pervert. It was all about domination and control, from her friend Beatriz who was killed in his factory for refusing to give her body to him, to her own indignity of selling pubic clippings in a bag-and the truly unspeakable things she was forced to do at gunpoint when the clippings just weren’t enough. She couldn’t be certain that he’d murdered that woman with AIDS in Georgia, but only this creep was low enough to sell the blood of his victims.
We all determine our own fate.

She wheeled and fired a shot across the room. Muffled by a silencer, it whistled past Yuri and shattered the vase on the wall unit.

Yuri fired back, another muted volley. But this one found its mark. Katrina fell to the ground. A hot, wet explosion erupted beneath her jacket. Her gun fell to the floor, then she fell beside it.

“Cindy!” said Jack.

A final, deadly quiet shot hissed from Yuri’s pistol, and Jack went down behind the couch. Katrina tried to raise her head, and managed to get it an inch above the floor. Just enough to see Yuri ducking into the kitchen with his hostage in tow.

•

Jack kept moving, rolling from his hiding place behind the couch toward Katrina. Yuri’s bullet had torn a hole through a sofa cushion. On his hands and knees he snaked his way past the ottoman and found Katrina on a blood-soaked rug. She was lying on her back, grimacing with pain.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

Jack tugged at her neckline to expose the wound. It was just below the collarbone. “Didn’t hit a major organ. Just gotta stop the bleeding.”

“Pressure,” she said.

He grabbed a pillow from the couch and pressed it to the wound. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the cordless phone on the cocktail table. He grabbed it and hit talk. “Dead,” he said.

“I’m sure he cut the phone lines.”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“Not on me. You?”

“In the freakin’ kitchen. It’s in the battery charger.”

A voice boomed from the other side of the swinging door. “How’s everybody doing out there?”

“Fantastic,” said Jack. “You really know how to throw a party.”

Katrina grabbed his elbow, shushing him. “Don’t answer him. I’ll talk. Keep this between me and him.”

“It’s
not
between you and him. He’s got my wife.”

Yuri said, “Everybody stays put. If I hear a door open, a window slide, anything that remotely sounds like someone running for help, I put a bullet in this pretty head. And don’t even think about using a cell phone.”

Katrina replied, “Whatever you say, Yuri.” Then she looked at Jack and whispered, “So long as I keep him talking, you’ll know where he is. Is there another way into that kitchen, other than through the swinging doors?”

“Off the hallway to the bedrooms.”

“Good. That’s your entrance. If I keep him talking, he’ll be distracted. How good are you with a gun?”

He pulled his Smith amp; Wesson from under his sweatshirt. “Good enough to have shot you before you shot me.”

“I wasn’t going to shoot you,” she said.

“I know. That’s why I didn’t pull it.”

“Pulling it is one thing. Can you use it?”

“I carried a gun as a prosecutor. I’ve taken tons of target practice.”

“Then we’re in business.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“There is none. If I’m right about this guy, he’s Georgian, part of the
Kurganskaya.
Elite hitmen. Even the Italian Mafia uses them. He’s not going to let anyone walk out of here alive. So, you up for it or not?”

“Yeah. I’m in.”

“Good. You’ll have the advantage with the.38. Yuri’s shooting a.22. Smaller slugs, a little more erratic from a distance. That’s why he only winged me. You’re actually better off not getting too close.”

“How close do you think I should get?”

“You’ll get one shot. That’s all. Get close enough to make it count.”

Jack felt butterflies in his stomach. “All right. Let’s go.”

“Hey, Yuri,” she shouted. “This is pretty funny, isn’t it? After eight months of collecting blood for you, here I am, bleeding to death on the floor.”

Jack waited for answer, but none came. At Katrina’s signal, he started his crawl across the living room toward the main hallway.

“It was a good plan, Yuri. I thought it was especially clever the way you set up all those dummy viatical corporations. One for Jessie Merrill in Florida. One for Jody Falder in Georgia. Tell me something, though. Is there another victim for every single one of those companies you created?”

Jack kept moving across the oak floor, elbows and knees. He was trying to stay focused on his mission, play out the attack in his mind. But it was hard to ignore the things Katrina was saying.

“Every last one of them was going to die anyway,” said Yuri.

“Except for Jessie Merrill.”

“You think I killed her?”

“Seems exactly like the kind of person you’d love to kill. A young and beautiful woman who played you for a fool.”

Jack stopped. Katrina’s voice was growing weaker in the distance. He was within two meters of the hallway entrance to the kitchen. He waited for Yuri’s reply to gauge his distance from the target.

“Fuck you, Katrina.”

Short and sweet, but it was enough for Jack to guesstimate that Yuri was on the far side of the kitchen, near the two-way swinging door that led to the dining room.

“Touchy subject for you?” she said.

“Cut the crap, Katrina. I know what you’re trying to do.”

Silence fell over the entire house. Jack was inches away from making the turn into the kitchen. He grasped his revolver with both hands, drew his body into a crouch. He was at the ready.

“Swyteck!” said Yuri. “Where are you?”

The question sent Jack’s heart racing.

“Answer me,” said Yuri. “Reveal your position right now.”

Jack braced himself against the wall. He had to make a move. Charge in? Roll and shoot? He wasn’t sure. He said a five-second prayer.

“I’m going to count to three,” said Yuri. “If I don’t hear your voice, that’s how long your wife has left on this planet. One.”

Jack took a deep breath.

“Two. Th-”

Jack dived through the opening and took aim with his.38. In the blur that was his entrance, he caught sight of the swinging door flying open at the other end of the kitchen. Katrina rushed Yuri, screaming wildly to unnerve him, and Cindy screamed back. Yuri fired a shot, but it came just as Cindy was breaking free from his grasp. The bullet sailed wildly across the kitchen and took out the window over the sink. Cindy dived to the floor, and for a split second Yuri was standing in the center of the kitchen without his human shield.

Jack kept rolling to make himself a moving target. Yuri fired again but hit the oven door. Jack returned the fire, his.38 clapping like thunder in comparison to Yuri’s silenced projectiles. It happened fast, but it seemed like slow motion. The recoil of the revolver. The shot ringing out. The flash of powder from the end of the barrel. The look on Yuri’s face that changed in an instant. In what felt like the very same moment in time, Yuri was staring at Jack through the penetrating eyes of an assassin, and then the eyes were gone. His head snapped back in a blinding crimson blur.

Yuri fell to floor, a lifeless thud, blood oozing from his shattered eye socket.

Jack was momentarily frozen, until he could comprehend what he’d seen. Then he ran to Cindy. She was crying, crouched in the corner beside the refrigerator. Jack held her. She was shaking in his arms.

“Are you okay?”

Tears ran down her face, but she nodded.

Katrina groaned from the other side of the room. Jack rose and saw her lying on the floor. He rushed to her side. “Hang on, Katrina. I’m going to get help.”

“I’ll be okay. I think.”

“Cindy, my cell phone’s in the charger. Call 911. Hurry!”

Jack checked Katrina’s wound once more. It was still bleeding, but he sensed there was still time. If they were quick about it.

“Cindy, did you hear me?”

She didn’t answer.

He rose and started toward the phone, then froze. Cindy was standing in the center of the kitchen, visibly shaken, yet managing to point Yuri’s gun straight at her husband.

“Cindy, what are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice quaking. “This craziness. I can’t take it anymore. It’s all your fault.”

“Cindy, just give me the gun, okay?”

“Stay away from me!”

He stopped in his tracks. She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her sleeve, but she kept the gun pointed at his chest.

“Have you found your son yet?” she asked.

“What?”

“The son she gave you. She told me all about it herself.”

“When?”

“After you discovered that she’d scammed you. She called me.”

“For what?”

“She played that audiotape for me. The one of you two in bed.”

“You told me that it had come from the detectives.”

“It did. But by then I’d already heard it from the source.”

Jack winced, confused. She was starting to scare him. “Why did she play you the tape?”

“She wanted to tell me that she’d had your baby. And that you two were together again.”

“If she said that, she was lying.”

“Was she?”

Jack heard a gurgling noise behind him. Katrina was fading. “Cindy, give me the gun. We can work this out. This woman needs a doctor.”

Her voice grew louder, filled with emotion. “I don’t care what she needs, damn it! Can’t you just take ten seconds of your life and let it be about me?”

“She could die, can’t you see that?”

“She’s dying, you’re dying, we’re all dying. I’m sick of this, Jack. I swear, the only time I see love in your eyes is when I wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night or hear a strange noise outside my window and need you to hold me and tell me everything’s going to be okay.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Isn’t that what you really love about me?”

“No.”

“Liar! You love it that I
need
you. That’s all you love. So you and your Jessie Merrill can just burn in hell together. I don’t need you anymore.”

Jack couldn’t speak. He tried to make eye contact, but it was as if she were looking right through him. She was crying, but it didn’t seem like tears of sorrow. Just an outpouring of some pent-up emotion he’d never seen before.

“Cindy,” he said in a soft, even tone. “What did you do to Jessie?”

Her expression went cold, but she said nothing.

“Cindy, talk to me.”

A calmness washed over her. Jack no longer saw tears, and her body seemed to have stopped shaking. He watched the barrel of the gun as it turned away from him.

“That’s it. Give me the gun.”

It kept moving, first to one side, then up. Farther up. She glanced at Yuri’s body on the floor, then spoke in an empty voice. “It’s like the man said: We all determine our own fate.”

Jack watched in horror as she took aim at her own temple.

“No!” he cried as he lunged toward her. He fell with his full weight against her, taking her down, grabbing for the gun, trying to avert one more senseless tragedy. Somewhere in the tumble he felt her hand jerk forward.

The next thing he heard was the sickening, muffled sound of one final bullet blasting from the silencer.