Three-Part Harmony (30 page)

Sure enough, as Dasha’s mind shifted beyond first impressions, she noticed a couple of discerning—and disturbing—elements about this place. Beyond the cabin, she heard only the wind in trees, some small creatures scampering, the tap of a woodpecker. She smelled pine and sap. A forest. And not a pretty, pseudowilderness-at-the-edge-of-town deal either. They weren’t in Atlanta anymore, Toto.

“Shit.” It sounded lonely and defeated, instead of the terror now beating her blood. “Crystal, why—” She shook her head, unable to voice the truth that teased, hideous and ugly, at the edge of her conscious. But she fought to force it out. “Is this—are you—”

“Have something you want to spit out? Or do you just want to shut up and keep still, as I’ve always preferred you?”

Though Crystal’s tone still dripped honey, Dasha was certain the woman meant to suffocate her remaining courage with it. And perhaps, a couple of weeks ago, Crystal would’ve succeeded. The Dasha of that time would’ve likely succumbed to the role of petrified kidnap victim and fought to bargain with Corso for her life. But not now. She’d confronted so much about herself in these last weeks, stripped clean of her pretenses and excuses for honesty, just as her body had been stripped by two of the most generous men she’d ever known. For the surrender of her body, she’d been given emotional and physical ecstasy beyond the bonds of words. And for the honesty of her spirit, she’d gotten even more. She’d gotten back her father.

She wasn’t about to let that go now. She wasn’t about to let either David or Kress down now.
Or Dad.

She leveled an unblinking glare at Crystal. “It was you, wasn’t it? You sent the text to everyone, back in Miami. You’d have the security clearance to get all the addresses, so you did. And then—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Crystal strode to the stove, lifted a lid on a pot, and stirred the savory-smelling stuff inside. “As if I have time to blast texts to all those idiots.” She flashed another demure smile. “I had Zack do it, of course. That’s what he’s there for.”

Dasha’s blood turned to ice. She thought about those terrifying hours, after the texts had hit everyone’s phones. The confusion in everyone’s eyes. The fear and the uncertainty, some even wondering if one of their own was responsible until she’d found the mutilated dove atop her suitcase, and they all realized only an outsider could be that sick.

“I don’t understand.”

“What?” Crystal rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. You do remember Zack, my personal assistant? Cute little hipster type, would do anything for me and your father?”

“No,” Dasha snapped. “I don’t understand…
why
.” She stared at the witch who stood there so serene again, brewing her damn stew…undoubtedly laced with arsenic. “I’ve done nothing to you. So why did you go through all that? Send the texts…and the dove…and what about the shooter at the mall? Did you sic Zack on him too?”

“I’m not a complete monster, Dasha.” She set the lid back on the pot with a hard
clang
. “Mr. Smith and his rifle were a fluke we didn’t expect. Granted, a fortuitous fluke, but—”

“A fluke?” She really struggled to breathe now. Her nervous system pulled a wild ride between the horrified ice and now an inferno of outrage. “A
fortuitous
fluke? People could’ve been killed. Do you understand that, you half-baked psycho-bitch?”

Crystal wheeled on her. The ladle in her hand became a gavel, pounding the counter. “I. Am. Not. A monster!” She grimaced at the stew spatter art she’d inflicted on her perfect pants. “Everything I did—
everything!—
was for your father. Damn you! Don’t you understand? I did it for the great politician he can become!”

“Really?” Dasha found her quiet sneer easy to achieve. “Enlighten me on that.”

“You stupid girl. As far as your star has risen, it amazes me you don’t get this.” Crystal crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. She stood right under the bear head.

Sometimes, irony did have a sense of humor.

“Fine.” The woman rolled her eyes and huffed. “Here’s your enlightenment, dear. The party came to your father about the possibility of the presidential bid. We’d only just started playing around with the idea. But we needed some publicity in Florida, something to see how your dad’s rep would track there.
You
happened to be in Florida, with your tour.” The woman’s flawless Revlon brows arched. “Yes. For once, you were in the right place at the right time.”

Dasha ignored the slam. “So you staged the texts and the stalker-style stuff, knowing it would land my name in the local press?” She gave a snort of her own now. “Okay, that’s a big stretch. The FBI told us they didn’t talk to anyone about the case. And I believe them.”

“And
we
wouldn’t have it any other way,” the woman assured, going velvet cool once more. “Controlling the information leaks is key on a project like this, n’est-ce pas,
cherie?”

Dasha didn’t give her the satisfaction of rising to the bait. Besides, the more Crystal relaxed, the more she turned back to the stove, which meant the opportunity to visually sweep the room for a means of escape. But damn, there weren’t a lot of possibilities. An idea occurred. Loosen the ropes by tipping herself over? Hop the chair backward to the large oak chest behind her, and hope one of those drawers contained cutlery?

She’d already noticed the hefty chopping knife on the counter. Its blade was littered with diced vegetables. Dasha swore that if Crystal tried another “darling” or “cherie” with her, she’d get that thing somehow and add the woman’s guts to the mess.

Crystal stirred her pot and continued. “Now, the fact that Ambrose Smith took it upon himself to expand the case so publicly…that was certainly an unexpected twist.” She actually chuckled then, shaking her head in wonderment. “Talk about accelerating the process!”

Dasha narrowed her eyes. “Nice to know nearly killing my bodyguard could help you out.”

“Dasha,” Crystal returned, “grow
up.
Do you know how many downloads your new song got after the incident at Lenox Square? Sentiment for you grew exponentially. And we had to bump the campaign announcement up by three weeks!”

The delight in the woman’s voice, like she was merely announcing the latest
American Idol
standings, made Dasha squirm. She shoved against her bonds, knowing what claustrophobics felt like for the first time in her life. It wasn’t just the ropes around her body. It was the place Crystal’s explanation led her to now, the question she had to ask, and the answer she did
not
want to hear.

“Okay, so all of this—” She rolled her head, indicating their surroundings and her ropes. “It’s another episode for the saga, right? Another gripping drama to somehow respark the campaign?”

Crystal went still and studied her closely. Too closely. And
way
too still. “Darling, thanks to you, there
isn’t
a campaign right now.” She tilted her head, looking troubled, as if delivering a hard life lesson to a small child. “And you see…that’s not acceptable. Not one single bit. I won’t let it be. I’ve worked entirely too hard to get this far.” She turned then, smooth as the cashmere encasing her body, to check her stew again. “So that really leaves me with no choice about our next actions, does it?”

Another breath. Another breath.
Dasha had to command it at herself, though she found it easier to obey if she summoned David’s and Kress’s voices, layering them over the words.
Breathe,
they echoed, the strength of their voices fusing with her lungs, her will.
Breathe.

“Okay,” she found the strength to say. “I’m going to ask again: What the
hell
do you mean?”

Crystal didn’t answer her this time. Instead, the woman’s head cocked the other way, sharp and birdlike. It was, Dasha realized, because she’d heard something. A car had just reached the cabin, rolling to a gravelly stop. A long stillness followed.

“Ah!” Crystal’s happy chime rang in the air like a gunshot. “Perfect. Just in time.”

“For what?”

Her voice was shrill with fear now, but she couldn’t hold it back anymore. Crystal’s mounting, manic joy conveyed the horrid truth, that this wasn’t a typical episode of
The Perils of Dasha
. This was a well-orchestrated plan, formed in the mind of a woman not used to getting “no” handed to her in the middle of a live CNN interview. A woman not used to
no
, period.

The front door of the cabin swung open, letting in blinding sunlight, warm late summer air, and the answer to Dasha’s question. First through the door was Zack, Crystal’s assistant, whom she recognized from the events of yesterday. The guy’s plaid mountain-man shirt and jeans were a far cry from the Brooks Brothers suit in which she’d first met him, though his haughty frown hadn’t changed an inch. Zack dragged in a second man, who also wore jeans. This guy’s outfit was topped with a T-shirt from Dasha’s first concert tour. At the moment, however, the prisoner’s biggest fashion pieces were shaking shoulders and unsteady steps, both worsened by the black cloth bag covering his head.

As soon as Zack shut the door, he yanked the bag off.

“What the fuck?” The oath was a contrast to the boy-band features that had been revealed. “What’re we doing
here
? This is my family’s stupid cabin, man!”

Zack backhanded the guy, a blow right across the face. Dasha winced. The poor kid couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty.

“Watch your language,” Zack ordered. “There are ladies present.”

“What’s this all about, asshole? You show up at my dorm, tell me I’ve won a contest to meet Dasha Moore, but then you make me wear this goddamn hoodlum thing, and now—”

The kid’s jaw fell open as his gaze fell on her. Dasha tried to give him a reassuring smile because she had a feeling what he’d go through next. Sure enough, Zack jerked the boy’s hands forward, cranked his wrists into a pair of handcuffs, then kneed him in the back, making him crumple to the floor between her and Crystal. The kid cried out, still half-furious, though terror rapidly took over and doused his voice to a whimper. She didn’t blame him one bit.

“Darling, I’m pleased to introduce Mr. Austin Taylor,” said Crystal. “He’s the one who’s already left a confession note in his dorm room about sending all those nasty texts to your show crew. And he’s about to send another round of texts too…this time with pictures, showing them all how he’s succeeded in killing you.”

“This has got to be a damn mistake.”

It was about the twenty-fifth time the senator muttered it. And about the twentieth time Kress followed it by exchanging a glance with David. His friend’s face conveyed exactly what it had the previous nineteen times.
You wanna deck him, or can I?

Kress longed to be tapped for that honor, but the circumstances, especially now, were the worst setting for it. They were surrounded by the finest ops guys on Kress’s team, at least twenty square miles of forest, and air that was maxed-out with anxiety. As a matter of fact, the only one who didn’t share their collective mindset of
holy crap
was the senator, AKA King Head-in-the-Sand. The idiot still believed a string of theories that read like a bad soap opera. Maybe Dasha was grabbed by a mansion employee gone rogue—which could be possible at five in the fucking morning. Or an exceptionally resourceful, wing-nut fan had done the deed—a lunatic they’d somehow missed during a sweeping, two-week investigation. After all the scenarios the man kept grasping, Kress wondered when Moore would throw an alien abduction into the mix.

The truth was more tragic than any of it. The senator, poor bastard, was doing everything to avoid the truth. That the woman he trusted the most had pulled the strings behind his daughter’s stalker nightmare—and now her disappearance too.

Kress just prayed, as he had countless times today, that they were in time to stop Corso from making Dasha vanish forever.

“Senator,” David responded then, locking Moore’s stare directly in his own, “you’re all for keeping an open mind, right? That’s all Agent Moridian and I are asking of you now.”

The senator gave Pennington a head-to-toe assessment. David didn’t surrender his stance. Kress had no idea if this was the first or the five hundredth time his friend had undergone the Papa-Bear-Protective thing from Moore, but David climbed a few more rungs of esteem in his book for the way he handled it now.

“Fine, David,” Moore finally muttered. “Fine. You’ve got the open mind. Now let’s get on with all this, shall—”

A harsh
zziippp
raked the air, almost sounding like a hummingbird on steroids. Kress stepped between the two men and slashed his hand in front of his throat, giving the command for silence. He recognized the
zip
as their greeting from Whitehurst, his number-one recon agent, signaling they now approached the location of Zack’s traced cell signal. Since they were at a blind spot about Crystal’s phone, they’d taken a stab and guessed their ninja from the mansion’s security tapes was in fact Zack, invited in on a cut of Crystal’s glory once Dasha was out of the way.

With a tap to the comm-pod at his ear, he opened the radio line. “Hey there, Tighty-Whitey,” he murmured to his friend.

“Glad you all could join us, Kress-Man,” said the recon agent. “We still have the ride-alongs, right?” He referred to David and the senator.

“Copy that,” Kress replied.

“No prob. Just advise how we alter the plan, then?”

“Not by a damn thing.” Kress cast a cautious glance around. “You just make sure we got the bogey first. But after that, you have my authorization to move in.”

They moved another fifty feet, and that was when a sizable vacation cabin appeared through the trees. The place looked like a magazine ad: wind chimes jingling in the breeze, the sunlight skittering across the roof, designer porch furniture, a gleaming black Escalade parked in front.

“License plate on the car checks out,” came Whitehurst’s voice over the line. “It’s the rental signed off to Zack Crean, two days ago.”