Obsession (28 page)

In minutes they were on the freeway heading into D.C. Looking toward the city, what Katharine saw was an ocean of gray: wave upon wave of concrete and steel. The skyline for as far as she could see was a staggered grid of buildings. Although it was not yet noon on Sunday, and Washington tended to be a churchgoing town (politicians, with voters to please back home, were big on public worship), traffic was heavy as usual, primarily because of all the tourists. As they crossed over the Anacostia River, Katharine looked down at its glassy green surface to see that the boats were out in force: small sailboats, colorful as songbirds, tacking in a zigzag pattern to catch any available breeze; cabin cruisers zipping along under their own power, trailing white ripples of wake; barges loaded with cargo, chugging steadily upstream. The sky was bright Tiffany blue. The clouds were white and feathery. The only trace of last night’s rain was the rise in the humidity. The heat was positively swampy, Katharine thought as Starkey pulled into an underground parking garage beneath one of the anonymous high-rise apartment buildings that were a feature of the central part of the city, found a spot, and parked. But she didn’t have long to experience it. They walked a few yards to an elevator, which whisked them skyward. They got out on the twelfth floor. It was a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor lined with widely spaced doors. When they reached the third door on the left, Starkey produced a key, unlocked it, and swung it open, gesturing to Katharine to precede him inside.

She did, walking into a small vestibule that opened onto a moderately sized living room. There was a big window wall opposite the entrance. The drapes were open, flooding the room with light. Besides that, the living room was basically a square box furnished with a big striped couch in shades of gold and cream and brown with matching gold tub chairs on either end. A landscape in a simple gilt frame hung over the couch, and a big plasma-screen TV dominated the wall opposite. Cream wall-to-wall carpet extended throughout the apartment, which had a single bedroom, a bath and a half, and a small but well-equipped kitchen with a dining alcove off it. Katharine saw all this as she followed Starkey, who was carrying the duffel bag, into the bedroom.

“Whose apartment is this?” Katharine asked as Starkey put the duffel bag down. “Is it Ed’s?”

He shrugged. Katharine realized that she wasn’t going to get an answer. If he even knew, he would consider it Ed’s business, to reveal or not as he chose. Starkey and Bennett were unimpeachably discreet—and unimpeachably loyal.

“There’s food in the kitchen,” Starkey said as he turned to go. “Or one of us can go get carryout, if you want. The thing is, Mr. Barnes told us that we weren’t to leave you alone.” He gave her a reproachful look. “We can’t protect you if we aren’t with you.”

Katharine nodded. She really didn’t want Starkey and Bennett as enemies, so she figured she better start mending fences. “I know. I understand.” She tried to inject some remorse into her tone, although it took a surprising amount of effort. Emotionally, she discovered, she was still feeling a little bit of a disconnect. “Look, I’m sorry I ditched you and Bennett at the hospital. I think, after everything that happened, I must have been a little bit out of my head.”

“It was a bad scene. Right at the beginning, we were afraid you’d been kidnapped. Until you called Mr. Barnes.”

“I never thought of that,” she said. When Starkey’s only response was a sour look, she gave it up and added, “You know what? I
am
hungry. And I don’t feel like cooking.”

“How about hamburgers? Or tacos?”

Actually, Starkey seemed a tad less unfriendly than before, so maybe her little speech had helped, Katharine decided. They often ate fast food around the office, where the hours tended to be long and the three of them were often among the last to leave, waiting as they were for Ed. Although they very rarely waited together. Starkey and Bennett had their sphere, and she had hers.

“Tacos,” Katharine voted, and Starkey nodded and left her alone.

After he came back with the food and they ate, Katharine returned to the bedroom, which was tastefully decorated with another gilt-framed landscape over the queen-size bed, and taupe walls and curtains. Curious, she opened the curtains to reveal a sweeping view of the apartment building across the street. Looking between it and the under-construction high-rise next to it, she caught a glimpse of the Convention Center, and that helped orient her. She was just off New York Avenue, probably on K or L Street. She didn’t know why, but it made her feel better to know approximately where she was.

She sat in the small gold velvet armchair beside the comfortable-looking bed with its gold spread, and pulled her phone out of her purse. In her mind burned a list of things she needed to do, and she mentally checked them off one by one as she did them. First she called Sue Driver, a mutual friend of hers and Lisa’s, and listened to her exclamations and condolences while begging off telling her anything on the grounds that it was too upsetting to talk about, before finally managing to ask when the funeral was to be. Armed with that information—it was scheduled for Tuesday—she called Cindy Parrent, the friend who was watching Muffy, and asked her if she could possibly keep the cat until Wednesday. Then she made arrangements to fly to Cleveland, Lisa’s hometown, the next day.

By that time, the pounding headache that she thought had vanished along with her irrational fears was back. Swallowing an Extra Strength Tylenol from her purse with a drink of water from the adjoining bathroom, she looked in on Starkey and Bennett—they were watching football in the living room and apparently having a good time, although their faces went carefully blank as soon as they spotted her in the doorway—and thought about taking a nap.

But the idea of falling asleep didn’t appeal to her. Sleep brought dreams with it, and some dreams, she thought vaguely, could be scary. Instead, she needed something to occupy her mind.

So she curled up in the armchair, picked up the remote from the chair beside it, and turned on the small TV tucked into the tall white armoire opposite the bed.
CSI
reruns were on the first channel that popped up. There was nothing graphic—yet—but the thought of watching an autopsy or worse made her stomach churn. Hurriedly, she started flipping through channels, and finally settled on
Full House
reruns. TV didn’t get much more mindless than that.

Despite her determination not to, she was just about to doze off in the armchair when the door to the bedroom was thrust forcefully open. Startled wide awake, she sat up abruptly as Ed, natty as always in a charcoal-gray designer suit, white shirt, and black tie, his black hair slicked carefully back, strode into the bedroom, stopped short at the sight of her, and planted his fists on his hips, a furious expression on his face.

17

"I’ve been going out of my mind worrying about you,” he yelled, while Katharine winced at both the blast of anger that was so loud it completely drowned out the TV and the idea that Starkey and Bennett were overhearing it. She could just picture them smirking in the next room: Ed took them to the figurative woodshed often enough. They would be glad it was her turn. “Where the hell have you been?”

The parameters of her relationship with Ed spooled through her mind in an instant. She knew this relationship, knew that he was the dominant partner and she was very much subordinate. She had been following those rules for years. She could follow them a little longer.

Even if, somewhere deep inside, they made her just a little bit mad.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a conciliatory tone. He was still glaring at her, his heavy-lidded brown eyes dark with rage, his square jaw taut with it. “I didn’t mean to worry you. So much happened that . . . I guess I just freaked out.”

“You ran away from the hospital.” There was a wealth of anger in his tone. “Starkey and Bennett were on their way up to you, and you just took off. Why would you do a thing like that?”

“It was because of the police. I just couldn’t handle talking to them right then. I . . . wasn’t thinking straight.”

He slammed the door behind him as she spoke and strode quickly toward her. It was amazing how threatening a five-foot-ten-inch, stockily built man could look when he was pissed, she thought. Her heart gave an unexpected lurch—
I’m afraid of him
—then quickly settled back into its normal, natural beat as the words
You’re in love with him
superseded her first instinctive reaction.

. . . in love with him; in love with him
: The words formed an echo in her brain, beating in her head in tandem with her pulse, overwriting anything and everything else.

Smiling, she rose from the chair to meet him.

“Don’t run away from me again.” His tone was terse, but when she obediently shook her head no, some of the aggression left his expression. Reaching her, he caught her up in an embrace, wrapping his big arms around her, pressing his meaty lips to hers. He kissed her thoroughly if not all that expertly, but she responded with appropriate enthusiasm.

The thought, with its accompanying surge of revulsion, was quickly swamped by a rush of others:
He’s handsome, sexy; he’s been your boyfriend for more than a year; you’re in love with him.

Still, when he let her go, what she felt was relief.

Just to be safe, she sank back down in the chair. The bright glow of the late-afternoon sun was reflected off the dark windows of the building opposite, and the light pouring in through the window beside her was intense. It must have bothered Ed, because he cast an impatient look out the window, then moved, closing the curtains with a quick tug on the cord.

Even as the curtains swished shut, Katharine was conscious of a vague feeling of—what? Vulnerability? Claustrophobia? Isolation? Something unpleasant and confining, as if she had been suddenly cut off from her last connection to the world.

A shiver ran down her spine. Now that the only illumination was the blue glow of the TV—Michelle was cracking the
Full House
family up, but Katharine was no longer even remotely interested—the room suddenly felt cold. Reaching out, she turned on the lamp beside the chair to combat the sudden gloom, then picked up the remote and clicked the TV off.

“So where the hell have you been?” Ed stood looking down at her, fists on hips again, a frown beetling his brow. He was looming above her, his posture intimidating.
Deliberately,
she thought.

Katharine’s stomach contracted. Her pulse raced. After the men from the sheriff’s department had gone, she and Dan had agreed that it was best that Dan be left out of the story of the day’s events entirely. Anyway, she knew that if Ed should learn that she had actually exchanged a heated kiss with her well-meaning neighbor, however befuddled her thinking had been at the time, he would go ballistic with jealousy. And the thought of Ed in a jealous rage made her shudder, not only for herself but for Dan. So for both their sakes, she already knew she was going to lie about much of the previous day’s odyssey, and even had what she was going to say all planned out. But still, the prospect of lying to Ed made her nervous.

If he caught her at it, the consequences would be bad, she knew. The key, then, obviously, was to lie very, very well.

“You know where I was: the hotel.” Her tone was utterly calm and collected. “I called you from there.”

His eyes never left her face. “How did you get there?”

“You mean after I barely survived being attacked for a second time in my own home?” She deliberately threw that out there in hopes that it would distract him, and the conversation would thus move on to what was, as far as her telling the truth was concerned, solid ground. “I took the Metro.”

“That simple, huh?” He shook his head. “I can’t believe Starkey and Bennett weren’t able to track you down. They must be losing it.” His face softened fractionally as his eyes moved over her. His gaze touched on her bandaged nose, her bruised forehead, and she could see him registering that she truly had been hurt. “You’ve had a bad time, haven’t you? I’m glad you’re okay, babe. And I’m sorry about your friend. But our priority right now has to be to find these people.”

She threw another distraction at him. “Do you have any leads?”

Watching, she thought it was like shutters had slammed closed over his eyes. They went suddenly opaque.

“A few,” he said evasively. “Believe me, I’ll find them. And when I do . . .”

She shivered inwardly at the threat he left unfinished. Boyfriend or not, Ed had a ruthless, violent side that she, personally, wouldn’t want to run afoul of. With all the resources of the Agency at his disposal, she had no doubt at all that sooner or later he would run the perpetrators to earth. Then they might, or might not, actually make it alive into the justice system and eventually into a courtroom. She was betting on the
might not.
Courtrooms were messy, public places where way too much sensitive material came out. She had little doubt that Ed’s preferred way of handling what he no doubt considered a private matter would probably be to make the offenders just disappear.

As in,
bang bang.

“So walk me through what happened after you ran away from the hospital. Did you go straight back to the town house?” He was watching her carefully. His thick, black brows were almost touching over his nose.

Katharine thought,
He’s suspicious.
And her heart began to pump a little harder.

“Yes.”

“How did you get there?”

She had to fight the desire to take a deep, steadying breath. The way he was watching, he would notice, she knew. And it would give too much away.