God's Eye (28 page)

After a few minutes he put on his jacket and tugged the sleeves straight. Making his way into the hallway, he stopped at Lisa’s desk and leaned over her just a little. It was obvious from the way she pulled back that she didn’t like it, but in a moment she wouldn’t remember that part anyway.

His finger reached out and touched hers, making that all-important contact, and he told her he was going out to lunch, he’d be back later. But he walked down the hall knowing that Lisa wouldn’t expect him back at all that day, and that she wouldn’t find his absence at all unusual.

Now, if he could just find Katharine.

•  •  •

“No! That’s just not possible!” Katharine heard her voice rise, but it didn’t hit anywhere near the decibel level she wanted. Her body needed to screech like twisting metal. She wanted to let it all out, to rail against the utter wrongness of what she was hearing, but years of training worked against her. By force of will she was able to remain fairly calm, given the circumstances.

“But that’s what the police say, baby.” Her father stated. The added “baby” was an indicator that he knew she was stressed. That would be as much as he offered. There would be no other comfort forthcoming, just the one word that only she would recognize as the acknowledgement that it was.

“But I saw her last week.” Katharine sucked in air. Her back stayed rigid, and only someone right next to her would have caught that. Not that it mattered. She was alone in her apartment, holed up for another day after Margot had asked her those stupid questions. No, she hadn’t been held hostage in the air high above her own bed. No, she hadn’t seen the walls move, and she hadn’t had any flying hallucinations pecking at her–which was a damn shame, because that was often merely due to rye mold, so, no, of course she didn’t have that problem. But she did have a new man in her life, a very charismatic one.

And that nasty little bit of information had plagued her all the way up until her father dropped this bomb on her. Katharine was still fighting it. “Okay,
I
didn’t actually see Mary, but we have video of her, coming and going from the office. Call the security guys.” At last she seemed to break some ground here, and her father replied, “I seem to remember something about that. I’ll check with them. It would be really disturbing if we found video like that.”

If? If?
She wanted to scream it. What did he mean
If?
He was the one who sent her to get the footage in the first place.

But he hung up quickly, off to make the call to surveillance. Well, he’d set Sharon to the task anyway. But surely within a short while they’d have proof to take to the police and all this would be righted.

Katharine sighed again at the thought of her ruined day of rest. She’d taken the day off to recover from yesterday, but she wouldn’t be able to take tomorrow off to recover from today. At least in a little while she’d hear that the tapes were in the coroner’s hands and all would be resolved. Because there was no way Mary Wayne had been dead for over two weeks when they found her.

Yes, the smell had been really bad and the body had already started decaying, but that didn’t mean two weeks. They really should fire that coroner, and maybe they would after the tapes proved him wrong. Part of her wanted to hop online and look up decay rates, just to add further fuel to her righteous fire, but a more sensible part of her realized that was a can of worms she really didn’t want to open.

With a few deep breaths she sat back down on the couch and steadied her nerves.

Then she stood back up and paced for a few minutes.

She tried to eat something, but nothing would go down, not carrots or crackers or soda. And when she couldn’t even get herself to eat a frozen Thin Mint from the last Girl Scout cookie sale, she realized none of it was working.

Finally she gave up, picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Margot?”

•  •  •

Katharine fought her racing heart. Her day of rest was now a complete bust. In fact, she was more worked up than she’d been yesterday. She hadn’t told Zachary about following Mary Wayne, so he didn’t know anything. Not that she had wanted to talk to the charismatic new man in her life. Still, she couldn’t reconcile the idea that the beautiful Zachary could be a demon.

Betty in payroll remembered Katharine coming in and asking about Mary Wayne, and she remembered her answer. But did she remember actually seeing Mary over the past two weeks? Well, things were just so busy, Betty really couldn’t be sure.

Katharine was nearly willing to let someone try some illegal interrogation techniques to
make
her remember.

Her father and Uncle Toran both told the police they had turned the whole matter over to Katharine. They said they knew Katharine had been sent to look for Ms. Wayne, but they didn’t remember what Katharine had found out. So, no, they couldn’t say whether Mary Wayne had been around in the past few weeks. Jeff Grason in security was out with a bad flu and no one had talked to him.

Katharine wasn’t about to pick up the phone and check with him; she was growing ever more certain Mr. Grason would claim to have the mysterious fuzzy memory disease everyone else seemed to have caught.

So she sat on her couch and sucked in deep, bracing lungfuls of air. It didn’t really brace her for anything, or stop her arms from quaking with fury. But she kept at it, hoping to inhale some zen on one of these breaths.

She hadn’t told Margot anything about Mary Wayne other than the basics–she’d been looking for a thief, she and Allistair had gone to see her at her house, and they’d found the woman dead–well, shredded. So all Margot could do was corroborate that Katharine had been telling ongoing tales of seeing a woman who was already dead.

Patricia Sange, the PI, could only produce paperwork showing the accounting evidence of Mary’s fraud. There were apparently no photos, and Ms. Sange hadn’t actually seen Mary, even though Katharine had thought the woman had been tailing her, but even she couldn’t remember for sure.

And then there was Allistair. Allistair had gone hunting for Mary Wayne himself. As Katharine’s sidekick, he had searched out the woman, too. But Katharine couldn’t get him to return her phone calls. It was like he had vanished now too.

Worst–by far–the video data had all been erased. It was standard company policy to erase data after a week if there hadn’t been anything reported. And nothing was reported. There was no record of Katharine’s visits with Jeff Grason or any of the other security guys. All the evidence was just gone. All simply disappeared, with easy, practical explanations.

The deep breathing wasn’t working, so Katharine practically threw herself backward onto the couch. Staring at the ceiling, she decided maybe she didn’t want to know if Allistair remembered seeing Mary Wayne. He would be the only one left to say she wasn’t clinically insane. And at this point it was beginning to look prudent to keep her mouth shut.

•  •  •

Allistair watched as the colors turned the corner. Dread rolled off Katharine in waves, and as usual, her emotions reached the room long before she did.

The feelings themselves didn’t swamp him, not unless he touched her. But even from a distance he could always sense her–her emotions had a habit of sneaking under his skin in a way that was certainly wrong but that he wasn’t certain he disliked.

Today she was edgy. A subtle shimmer of nerves laced itself in with the concern, and he seemed to get a hint that it was all about him.

Cool and collected on the outside, she gathered her messages from Lisa and came in as she would have any other day–as if she hadn’t just disappeared two days ago and was only now reappearing without dropping a clue about what had happened. If he’d been human, he would have thought she didn’t even realize she’d been gone.

She said hello to him with a warmth that resembled her usual greeting, but the colors around her revealed the emotion to be entirely fake. Then she hung her jacket on the back of her chair. Without paying him any more attention than that, she got to work.

He took a few deep breaths while he perused his own computer screen. He felt edgy now too, although he wasn’t sure if it was caused by Katharine’s presence or his own knowledge.

It was a full hour later before she decided to speak to him. In that hour he had amassed and hidden a good bundle of work to cover for any upcoming days he might need to miss. He’d even found a potential investment out of the pile he’d been assigned to sort through–a pesticide company with new methodologies and stronger chemicals that would produce higher crop yields in South America, where the standards weren’t so strict. So at least the time hadn’t gone wasted.

“Allistair?”

Everything except the anxiety radiating off her looked calm and casual. “What?”

“Did you follow up on the Australian gem mine?” “Of course.”

For the next twenty minutes he kept up the pretense of a work-based conversation. He told her that Light & Geryon had invested heavily in the mine despite her written rebuttal to the original proposal. Apparently the information she had dug up about the movement of money in and around the mining company only made it look better to the investors.

Then he sat back and watched her quietly seethe. He didn’t have to wonder what it would do to her to know that her argument against the abuse she’d found had only pushed her father’s company toward it. She couldn’t hide anything from him. Besides, the company would be hers one day. The question was, would she get fed up enough to leave before her father signed it over?

The anger only slowed her in her tracks for a moment before she righted herself and went back to her original goal. “I was wondering if you heard what the coroner said about Mary Wayne.”

Not sure if what she said was a real question, Allistair just shook his head like he didn’t know exactly what she meant.

Sure enough, she spelled it out. “The coroner said she’d been dead for two weeks when we found her.”

“Huh.” He tried to look impressed.

“Did you think she’d been dead that long?”

He wanted to laugh, but kept his voice even. “What do I know about that sort of thing? The average guy on the street could come up to me and tell me my assumptions about how long she’d been dead were all wrong, and I’d have to believe him. Do you know anything about forensics?”

“Well, no.”

He cut off the “but” that was clearly perched on the end of her tongue. “Why do you seem to doubt that she was?”

There, she’d have to say something. He’d know in just a moment.

“I thought I saw her here in the week right before we found her. Didn’t you?”

He shook his head. Not with his human eyes he hadn’t. He moved the subject just a little left of center. “I thought you couldn’t get a hold of her. Aren’t there tapes? Or discs, or however they store that kind of info these days?”

She shook her head, clearly bothered by it. “I thought there might be too, but it’s all been wiped.”

The fact that she’d checked on the footage meant she believed Mary Wayne had been here. He nodded in sympathy.

She turned to him, once again looking calm and collected. “I also thought people said she’d been in at work.” Katharine shrugged.

Allistair rolled his shoulders and looked to one side, as if he had to think about it. “I don’t really remember. What people?”

Her eyes darted away as she threw his own words right back at him. “I don’t really remember.”

Liar.

Well, that made two of them.

She settled herself behind her desk and aimed her eyes at her computer screen.

With the conversation clearly over, Allistair went back to randomly clicking the keys on his keyboard. In his mind, he made a list. Katharine was denying the fact that things had been turned upside down. She’d seen Mary on video days after the time of death the coroner had given. She had seen plenty of records and had a handful of eyewitnesses who placed Mary at work on those last days before they’d found her, mutilated, in the beautiful house.

And yet she was beginning to believe that her own perception was wrong. That things were right because of something as simple and wrong as the number of people who professed them as truth. She was being swayed from her own beliefs.

Allistair was disappointed in Katharine.

Her failings would become his failings. And he couldn’t afford to fail.

Katharine was proving to be as weak as she had been when he’d started with her. Though her eyes had been pried open, in often painful ways, her backbone hadn’t gotten any sturdier. And if he was going to get somewhere with this, he would have to take what she wouldn’t give him voluntarily.

In the end, he would need her permission. He would have to back her into a corner to give it, because if she turned herself over to Zachary first, he’d have hell to pay. But before he could claim her permission, he had a few other vital pieces to collect first.

The easiest to get would be her breath.

•  •  •

Katharine washed the coffee mug instead of just setting it in the sink like usual. Anything to keep her hands busy. Anything to keep from interacting more with Zachary, to keep from looking at him, from touching him. Having him this close made that difficult at best.

Her voice was a little unsteady, and she hoped he would believe it was due to the subject matter. “It’s just that all that time we were looking for her, she was dead on her couch.”

The image itself sent cold fingers walking up her spine. But the addition of the man at her back chilled her more.

She didn’t like the way he had talked her into spending the evening with him. She felt manipulated–pushed even–when he’d made it sound like she was the one who was off base if she didn’t want to invite him in. Yet she still wanted him, still had to keep her hands busy to keep them away from him. Margot’s words rang in her head. Was Zachary her demon?

“Weren’t there tapes?”

The factual question caught her off guard, and she turned, not sure whether she felt safer looking at him or having him behind her. “They were erased.”