Obsession (32 page)

Katharine realized that she was expected to just help herself.

She walked toward the cat, who waited until she had almost reached it to turn around and stalk away, tail held haughtily high. It led the way into the kitchen, which was small and cheerfully cluttered. Near the back door was a tan plastic pet crate: obviously Muffy’s carrier. Two small ceramic dishes nearby held dry cat food and water. A yellow bag of Meow Mix, its top rolled so that it was clear the bag was only about a quarter full, sat on top of the crate.

Katharine cleaned the dishes, then picked up the food and the cat carrier and placed them both on the counter. She put the dishes inside the carrier, which still left plenty of room for the cat. All things being equal, she decided not to take a chance on carrying Muffy outside in her arms, or letting him—her . . .

With a quick widening of her eyes, Katharine realized that she didn’t know whether the cat was a male or a female. Jesus, how could she forget a thing like that about her own pet? Her breathing came a little faster as she chalked up one more inexplicable hole in her memory.

Okay, so she had a cat of undetermined gender. That was not the point. The point was that she didn’t want to let Muffy ride loose in the car. There was too much potential for disaster.

With everything in readiness, she looked around for the cat.

Muffy was crouched under the oval-shaped maple table, looking up at her through the chair legs.

“Here, Muffy. Here, kitty.”

That earned her a disdainful swish of a tail. “Come on, Muffy,” she tried again, going down on all fours and stealthily—at least, she was trying to be stealthy, although with the cat watching her every move stealthy didn’t seem to be happening—scooting the chair Muffy was crouched behind out of the way. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

As soon as Katharine reached toward it, the cat bolted, hightailing it for the bedrooms, nails scrabbling over the hardwood floor in its haste.

“Dammit.”
Katharine stared after the cat. Clearly Muffy hadn’t been pining away with longing for its owner to come back.

“She’s probably under our bed,” Cindy’s husband called from the living room as Katharine got to her feet. “That’s where she goes when Sammy Lou here chases her.”

Katharine took a deep, calming breath.

“Thanks,” she called back.

She had learned two things, Katharine thought as she found the master bedroom and surveyed the large bed, under which her cat presumably lurked: Cindy’s daughter was named, or nicknamed, Sammy Lou, and Muffy was a she.

The bedroom had cream walls, oak furniture, and a rose-and-cream gingham spread over the king-size bed. It also had a dust ruffle that reached clear to the hardwood floor. Katharine had a thought, and closed the door behind her. Then, crossing to the bed, she dropped to her knees and lifted the simple white ruffle. Muffy was under there, all right, crouched right in the middle. Those blue eyes fixed on Katharine’s face, shining balefully at her through the under-the-bed gloom. Taking a stab at reading cat body language, she interpreted that look to mean that Muffy was not particularly pleased to see her.

Well, guess what? The feeling was starting to be mutual. If it hadn’t been for Starkey and Bennett out there waiting to see her emerge with her pet, she would have let the animal visit with Cindy’s family for a while longer.

But Starkey and Bennett were out there, which meant she needed the cat.

“Here, kitty,” Katharine tried again, infusing her voice with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. “Come here, Muffy.”

Muffy twitched her tail, but that was the only part of her that moved. Katharine extended an arm in her direction, saw that that wasn’t going to get the job done, cursed under her breath, and dropped to her stomach. Then, thankful for the hard smoothness of the floor, which made the job easier, she started sliding under the bed.

For the first time, she was truly glad she was now so skinny. Otherwise she wouldn’t have fit. The bed couldn’t have been much more than a foot off the floor.

Unmoving, eyes gleaming even brighter than the ring on Katharine’s hand, the cat watched her scoot toward it. Then, when she was within inches of being close enough to grab it, Muffy took off, scrambling for the far side of the bed.

“No,”
Katharine cried, and lunged after it like a crocodile after a duck. She caught it, too, her fingers raking through inches-thick fluff and hooking around—
yes, hooray!
—a collar that had been hidden in all that hair.

Muffy promptly turned around and hissed at her with all the venom of a cobra, and Katharine let the whole I-am-losing-my-mind thing go as she went eyeball to eyeball with a totally ticked-off cat.

“It’s okay, Muffy. Good girl, Muffy.”

Hiss or no hiss, Muffy wasn’t getting away. Luckily, the cat showed no propensity to actually attack. It made like a dust mop with claws, staying belly to the floor and trying to dig in for traction as Katharine grabbed hold with her other hand, too, and pulled the cat toward her. Keeping one set of fingers locked around the collar just in case, Katharine inched her way back out from under the bed, pulling Muffy, who dragged her claws over the wood every inch of the way, with her. Finally, they were both out from under the bed, and, grimacing at the necessity, she picked the cat up.

Muffy promptly hissed at her again.

There was an identification tag or something dangling from the collar, a longish gray plastic rectangle almost hidden in all that fur, and Katharine was tempted to check it out, to make sure her name was on the tag and she really was the cat’s owner.

Because Muffy seemed to remember her even less well than she remembered Muffy.

But she didn’t bother, because she knew already what the tag would say: Muffy was hers.

Apparently, they had some owner-cat bonding issues.

Sighing, Katharine tentatively petted the cat, who hissed right on cue, carried her to the kitchen, and stuffed—there was no other word for it, because Muffy resisted valiantly—her inside her carrier. Then, with Muffy glaring angrily out through the metal grate, she picked up the carrier—it was heavy—and the bag of cat food and headed toward the front door.

“You got everything?” Cindy’s husband asked as she walked back into the living room. He was whispering, because Sammy Lou had fallen asleep in his arms.

“Yes, thanks. And tell Cindy thanks,” Katharine said.

He nodded, and Katharine quietly let herself out the front door.

The first thing she saw was that it was full twilight now, with the kind of soft, gray dusk that happened only in summer. Lights had come on inside the houses. The smell of freshly cut grass hung in the air. Fireflies blinked like tiny white Christmas lights all up and down the block. Cicadas sang. Other insects whirred. Noisy children played hide-and-seek a couple yards over, and a woman stood on a porch toward the end of the block, yelling for somebody named Eric. Presumably, Katharine thought, a mother summoning her son home.

The second thing she saw was that the Mercedes was still parked in front of the house across the street.

Okay, time to come up with plan B.

Problem was, she couldn’t seem to think of anything right at the moment.

Eyeballing the black bulk of the waiting car, feeling Starkey and Bennett watching her although she couldn’t see them through the tinted windows, she warded off an attack of the shivers and quickly loaded Muffy and the cat food into the backseat before sliding into the driver ’s seat herself. Starting the car, turning on the lights, she reversed down the driveway, then headed for the top of Woodland Drive. From there she turned north toward Old Town.

She never made it. A car emerging from a side street pulled out in front of her just before she reached the next stop sign, the last one she would come to before entering the outskirts of Alexandria in fifteen minutes or so. From the stop sign on in, it was pure windy country road. Gorgeous during the day but, she had to admit, a little spooky at night. Of course, with Batman and Robin on her tail, at least she didn’t have to worry about random kooks and carjackers.

At first she didn’t notice the car in front of her particularly. What she did notice is that when she stopped behind it, waiting for whoever was driving it to look both ways at the stop sign and then proceed, it stayed put.

Besides that car and the Mercedes behind her, there was not another vehicle in sight. The intersection was clear, and yet the car—it was black or navy blue, some kind of large, dark sedan—didn’t move. It was full night now, and the warm lights of the subdivision had been left behind. Except for three sets of headlights stabbing through the darkness, illuminating grassy berms and a tangle of scrub trees and one another, the area was dark as pitch.

There was not, Katharine registered idly as she glanced around, trying to see what the holdup was, a moon tonight.

The explosion was so sudden, so shocking, so unexpected that Katharine screamed and jumped. Her heart leaped, and her head swiveled instinctively toward the source of the sound. She was just in time to watch round pellets of glass rain like a downpour of diamonds into her backseat.

Her back passenger-side window had just shattered. Katharine was still registering the seemingly impossible truth of that when a hand—a man’s hand, wide across the knuckles and tanned—and dark-suited arm thrust through the opening and pressed the button to unlock the front passenger-side door. Just as quick as that.

Her instincts screamed it, but it was too late. Even as she looked frantically forward, even as her leg muscles tightened in preparation for shifting from the brake to the gas and stomping that thing through the floor, she realized that the car in front of her had her blocked in.

In the same instant, the front passenger door opened and a man slid into the seat beside her, closing the door behind himself.

Starkey.

Her heart was just starting to ease off on its frantic thudding, and she was just getting ready to heave a sigh of relief when she saw that he had drawn his gun.

It was pointing at her.

Her jaw dropped. Her eyes rounded. She stared at him in disbelief.

“Mr. Barnes wants to see you,” he said.

20

"What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Katharine yelled. She slapped her palms against the steering wheel for emphasis. “You just broke my window!”

Starkey’s expression never changed. It was pure stone face from the moment he slipped in beside her. “I said, Mr. Barnes wants to see you.”

“Well, good for Mr. Barnes.” The car up ahead still wasn’t moving. Its taillights glowed at her through the darkness like a pair of evil red eyes. Not that it mattered: For the time being, they were going nowhere. “You can go ahead and get out now. You’re not riding with me. And I’m sending you a bill for the window.”

“I don’t think you understand the situation. Mr. Barnes told me to bring you to him. Any way I have to.” He made a small threatening gesture with the gun, which was black and business-like-looking and pointed straight at her in a very menacing way.

“Oh, you’re scaring me now.” She glared at him. “Get out of my car.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash of light, and even as she frowned at Starkey she realized that a man had gotten out of the passenger side of the dark sedan that was blocking her in and, in fact, was at that moment crossing in front of her car.

“You don’t want to drive, you can ride in the back with him.” Starkey nodded at the man who was by then looming up outside her window. She went cold all over as she realized that the car in front of them was there specifically to assist Starkey and Bennett in escorting her to Ed. Apparently, he was no longer prepared to take a chance on her giving them the slip. A single glance through the glass at the newcomer told Katharine that he was one more short-haired guy in a suit. She was really starting to hate the type. “And believe me, you don’t want to ride with him.”

The guy pecked on her window. Using the passenger-door controls, Starkey rolled it down. This guy was older than either Starkey or Bennett, in his late forties maybe, with a blunt-featured, heavy-jowled face that made her think of a bulldog.

“Everything under control?” he asked Starkey.

“Who are you?” Katharine demanded, determined not to lose control of the situation even though adrenaline was starting to race through her system and her pulse was starting to pound. This, she was beginning to feel, had the potential to be bad.

The man smiled at her, his eyes, which were small and brown, crinkling at the corners. Something about that smile made her skin crawl.

“Name’s Hendricks, Miss Lawrence. Carl Hendricks. Pleased to meet you.”

Katharine couldn’t say the same, but she did manage a curt nod.

“Drive or ride?” Starkey asked.

Okay, getting away from them didn’t seem to be a possibility at the moment. At least driving would give her some options.

“I’ll drive.”

Starkey nodded at Hendricks, who opened the back door, flooding the interior with light.

“What’s this?” He was talking about the cat carrier, which was in the seat behind Katharine.

“My cat,” she said, at the same time as Starkey said, “Cat.”

“I like cats. Oh, he’s a big one. Pretty, too.” Hendricks moved the carrier over to the adjoining seat. There was a crunch as it came to rest, and Katharine realized that it was now sitting on pebbles of glass. Hendricks got in and closed the door. The interior light went off again. “Hey, kitty. Nice kitty.”

Through the rearview mirror, Katharine saw him stick his fingers through the grate at the front of the carrier, presumably with the intention of petting the nice kitty. The response he got was a virulent hiss, and with a muttered curse, Hendricks quickly snatched back his hand.