Obsession (2 page)

“Some man called me tonight and said Keith’s going to lose his job because of me. He said if I don’t bring him copies of everything Keith has on some federal judge you guys are investigating, he’ll tell the people in charge of security clearances that I’m a”—and here his sister’s voice broke—“druggie.”

“Oh, shit,” Nick said, and dropped his hand to frown at the phone. That was their dirty little family secret, the one that he and Allison and her husband, Keith Clark—who also happened to be Nick’s boss, head of the FBI’s White Collar Crime Program—guarded like a leprechaun ’s pot of gold. If word of his sister’s proclivities—she was an alcoholic who never met a drug she didn’t like, although her high of choice was cocaine—got out, Keith would probably be fired. Can’t have a federal law enforcement officer whose wife made him vulnerable to blackmail, after all.

Oh, wait, here was the blackmail.

“Can you come? As soon as you get this message. I need you so much. I don’t know what to do. I know I shouldn’t be so weak about . . . about things, but . . . you know, I can’t help it. I’m scared, Nick. I’m so scared.”

The beep ending the message interrupted the sound of her quietly weeping into the phone.

“Goddamn
it, Allie.” Nick slammed his hand down on the fake butcher-block counter. The counter wasn’t all that sturdy—he’d been meaning to redo the kitchen since he’d bought the house five years earlier, but so far had never found the time—and everything on it jumped, including the water in the fishbowl. His two goldfish, Bill and Ted, gave him reproachful looks. Of course, the reproach in their little bulbous eyes could be because the box of fish food was sitting right there beside his hand, and he hadn’t yet made a move to feed them. Bill and Ted—who were still on the excellent adventure that had begun two years ago, when he had met them at a carnival where he’d very misguidedly taken a woman and her six-year-old son on a date, only to have the kid beg for the fish, which Nick had won after spending about forty dollars on Ping-Pong balls to throw at their bowl, after which his date (the mother) had said she wasn’t having nasty, smelly fish in her house and given them back to him, his lucky day—were sticklers like that. They wanted their two squares and a clean fishbowl. Other than that, they were dream roommates. They were quiet, they never had a bad day, and when he needed a listening ear, they were there.

As a reward for their patience, he pinched off some fish food, sprinkled it on top of the water, and as they greedily attacked the white flakes, he went back to the problem of his sister.

The first thing he did was try her cell phone. No answer. He considered calling her house, or his brother-in-law ’s cell, but if Allie hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell Keith yet, that could be problematic. The message was less than half an hour old, which was about right because his cell had fallen out of his pocket and gotten crushed in the surge to subdue the hostage taker about an hour ago. A night owl, Allie never went to bed before one at the earliest, which meant she was almost certainly still up—somewhere. Doing something. The possibilities sent a shiver down his spine.

“You are a pain in my ass,” he said to the absent Allie, and turned on his heel, heading back out of the house and getting into his car. He would drive to her house in Arlington, some fifteen minutes away, and if she hadn’t yet broken the bad news to Keith, he would stand by her while she did. If she had, if Keith was as livid as he was pretty sure Keith was going to be, he would stand by her through that, too.

Whatever it took. She was his sister.

Blood’s thicker than water.
He could almost hear his mother saying it as she stood swaying from too much booze in the doorway of one of the succession of trailers that had been their home when he and Allie were growing up. Usually when she said it she was sending him out after Allie, his beautiful, unstable, four-years-older sister whose own weakness for all kinds of chemical highs had manifested itself as early as middle school. He had been the stable one of the trio, the one who took a good, hard look at his hardscrabble life and vowed to do better, to circumvent an apparent family weakness for drugs and alcohol by not drinking, not getting high, not doing anything but working really hard, first for grades and later for money, so they could all have a better life. Unfortunately, his mother died while he was in college. But when he graduated, he kept his promise to himself: He took Allie, who’d already been through one husband, away from the squalid Georgia town in which they’d grown up, and moved her with him to Virginia, where he was just starting his career with the FBI.

For a while, things had been good for both of them. Buoyed by this opportunity for a new start, Allie had gotten a job and—as far as Nick knew, anyway—stayed clean. The thing about Allie was, when she wasn ’t high, she was a joy to be around, with a bright, effervescent personality that drew people to her like metal shavings to a magnet. She was also beautiful, a tall, slender, blue-eyed blonde with the delicate, elegant features of a model.

It was through Nick that Allie had met Keith, a fellow agent some years above Nick in the Bureau hierarchy. Nick had really, really hoped that their romance would be the saving of her. That because of her love for Keith, she would be able to leave her weaknesses behind. To his everlasting shame, he hadn’t told Keith a word about her problems. How could he? She was his sister.

That was some fifteen years ago. Keith was family now, and to his credit had never once said to Nick, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Because of course Allie, beautiful, fragile Allie, had worn down over the years. She had not been able to take the stresses of everyday life without what she called “a little help.” Sometimes she went on an alcohol binge, sometimes she went on a drug binge, sometimes she did both. But between them, Nick and Keith had always managed to get her straightened out, to keep things hushed up.

Just like he hoped—no,
prayed—
they would be able to do this time.

When he reached the upscale Washington, D.C., bedroom community of Arlington, it was nearing midnight. His sister lived on a quiet street with big houses and well-kept yards, overhung with hundred-year-old oaks. When Allie and Keith had bought the house, they’d planned on filling it with children. The children hadn’t happened so far, but Allie, at forty-one, had not quite given up hope.

At that time of night, the whole area should have been quiet and dark. But as soon as he turned into Allie’s street, he was struck by the lights, the sounds, the hubbub of activity that, he realized as he drove closer, was centered around his sister’s house.

“Oh, Jesus,” he breathed, as the lights resolved themselves into the flashing strobes of emergency vehicles—cop cars and an ambulance and even a fire truck parked with its wheels on the lawn, which his sister would consider a big no-no—and the sounds turned into sirens and the activity to emergency personnel and neighbors and God knew who else swarming in and around the house.

Which had every single light in the place on.

His mouth went dry. His pulse raced. His heart started slamming in his chest.

He parked on the lawn because it was the only space available, and never mind that it would piss Allie off, then jogged toward the front door. Just the glass storm door was closed. The imposing carved-wood front door was wide open, allowing access to anyone who chose to enter.

Nick entered. Two swift strides down the entry hall, and he turned right into the spacious, tastefully decorated living room. There were a couple of uniformed cops standing around, a few people he took for neighbors huddled together, talking quietly, and some official-looking types in coats and ties that he was too agitated to even try to identify. His gaze immediately found Keith, who was talking to another uniform. This was a woman who was making notes on some pages on a clipboard as Keith spoke. A sweeping glance as he bore down on his forty-five-year-old brother-in-law told Nick that Keith was wearing the same suit pants and white shirt he had worn to work that day, although he had lost the coat and tie. His thinning medium-brown hair was rumpled.

Something bad had happened, that much was obvious.

“Keith. Where’s Allie?” Nick asked without preamble as he got within speaking distance. His voice was loud, sharp. Everyone looked at him—the cop with the clipboard, the official types, assorted neighbors, his brother-in-law. Nick saw that Keith’s snub-nosed, square-jawed, usually florid face had lost every bit of its color. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed. The tip of his nose was red.

“Ohmigod, Nick,” Keith groaned and covered his face with his hands. His shoulders heaved. With the sick feeling of just having taken a punch to the gut, Nick realized he was crying.

“Where’s Allie?” It was a harsh demand. Panic flooded his system, making his fists clench, making him breathe too fast.

Keith sobbed. The cop with the clipboard and an official-looking type both moved toward Nick at the same time. From the expressions on their faces, he could feel bad news coming his way like a freight train.

But before they could get to him, he heard something else. The squeak-squeak-squeak of the wheels of a gurney. Nick pivoted and saw it being wheeled through the entry hall toward the door. There was a paramedic at either end maneuvering it. A white sheet covered it. Beneath the sheet, clearly, was a body.

A long, slender body.

Nick stopped breathing. He leaped for the gurney, ignoring Keith’s plea to him to stop, ignoring the voices and hands that reached out to stay him. Before anybody could react enough to prevent him from doing what he absolutely had to do, he was beside the gurney and twitching back a corner of the sheet.

Allie lay there, her blond hair falling back away from her face to puddle on the white sheet beneath her. Her eyes were wide and glassy and fixed, and so badly bloodshot that he could see the redness at a glance. Her skin was ashen, her parted lips purple. There was massive bruising on her neck. . . .

A wave of cold sweat broke over him.

“Allie.” His voice was hoarse. He knew, of course, that she wouldn’t answer. It was clear at a glance that she was dead.
“Allie.”

“Sir!” One of the paramedics, outraged, pulled the little bit of sheet Nick was clutching out of his suddenly nerveless hand, draping it back over Allie’s face. Then Keith reached him, along with the clipboard cop, hands on his shoulders, on his arms, restraining him, as the gurney started to roll again toward the door. Nick didn’t move. He couldn’t. He simply stood there and watched in stone-cold shock as his sister’s body was wheeled out into the night.

It could have been a minute or it could have been an hour that he stood there. In the first aftermath of the terrible blow he had been dealt, time ceased to have any meaning. But finally he was able to face the unbelievable truth, finally he was able to think, to move, a little, and he turned to his weeping brother-in-law, whose hand still rested on his shoulder.

“Keith . . .” His voice was a croak. “What the hell—”

“She hanged herself.” Keith sobbed mightily, then caught himself. “I came home and—oh my God, there she was. There was nothing I could do. She was already d-dead.”

Nick felt his chest tighten as if a giant hand were gripping and squeezing his heart. It hurt. God, it hurt. He could scarcely breathe. His ears were ringing. His head felt like it was about to explode.

Allie’s voice echoed through his mind:
I’m in bad trouble. . . .

He couldn’t tell Keith about it in front of a roomful of strangers.

“Come with me,” he said to Keith, and took him by the arm. There were people everywhere, the house was full of people, so he dragged his brother-in-law out the back door, out onto the stone patio with its built-in party kitchen where Allie had loved to entertain.

Recalling that, his heart bled.

“She called me,” he said to Keith when they were alone, and told him what Allie had said. The soft beauty of the night offered no comfort at all as he spoke. It was like a slap in the face in a way. How could stars still shine, how could flowers still perfume the air, with Allie dead?

“That’s why then.” Like himself, Keith seemed to be having trouble getting enough air. His shoulders were hunched, his head bowed. His voice was wheezy and thick. “God in heaven, Nick, that’s why she did it. Because some creep threatened to blackmail her.” He sucked in air. “Whoever he is, he’s not going to get away with it. We’re going to get him. And when we get him, we’re going to nail his ass to the wall.”

Nick pictured Allie’s gray face on that gurney, and felt his gut clench.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll find him. You can count on it. Whatever it takes.”

It was a vow to his sister rather than a promise to Keith.

Then the first sharp stab of true grief punched its way through the shock, and he walked away from Keith and the patio and into the dark, where he vomited in the grass.

1

As last thoughts before dying went, it lacked something, and Katharine Lawrence knew it. Still, there it was: Her kitchen floor was filthy.

Lying on her stomach on the hard, cold tiles with her wrists duct-taped together behind her back, she was up close and personal with the slick, smooth expanse of glazed twelve-inch terra-cotta squares in a way she had never been before. That meant there was no missing the greasy smears on the surface, as if something oily had been recently spilled and not so carefully wiped up. Plus, there were small, muddy paw prints—the flat, round face of her Himalayan cat, Muffy, flashed into her mind—along with some dried blackish droplets that smelled like barbecue sauce, and a random assortment of unidentifiable scuffs, stains, and dirt.

For God’s sake, didn’t she own a mop?

“I’m going to ask you one more time: Where is it?”

The question was growled with cold menace some three feet above her head by a tall, muscular man in a black ski mask who leaned over her prone form. It was punctuated by a ham-like fist twisting hurtfully in her hair. The resulting yank on her scalp was nothing compared to the shaft of pain that shot down her neck as he brutally jerked her head back so that he could see her face, which, when it was not contorted with fear as it was just at that moment, was considered just a slightly crooked nose shy of beautiful. His gun—a big silver pistol—jammed hard against her temple. The impact of metal on fragile bone made her wince. The mouth of the gun was hard and cold, like death itself.