Obsession (35 page)

“In a minute.” Ed didn’t look at her. Everyone else in the room ignored her, too. “You have the video loaded, right?” He was talking to Pettinelli. “What do I have to do to play it?”

“Just hit this button,” Pettinelli said, and Ed walked around to the other side of the desk to look where he pointed, then nodded in comprehension.

“Thank you, Mr. Pettinelli.” Ed’s tone was dismissive. “You can go on home now.”

He gave Starkey a significant look and Starkey moved at last, opening the door.

“This way, Mr. Pettinelli,” Starkey said. “If you’ll get your things, we’ll walk you out to your car.”

Pettinelli hesitated, glancing at Katharine.

The words sprang into her mind, but they took too long to form and she ended up not saying them out loud. In any case, asking him to stay would do no good, she knew, and would only anger Ed. Panic was bubbling up inside her again, sharp and urgent enough to poke holes through the confusion she couldn’t seem to shake, and it quickened her breathing and made her heart race. There was something ominous, she knew, in the fact that she was still strapped to the chair while Pettinelli was told to leave.

But she couldn’t think of anything to do about it.

“Mr. Pettinelli,” Starkey said. Pettinelli turned and walked out of the room without so much as another glance at her. Starkey and Bennett followed, closing the door behind them so that she was left alone with Ed.

“I want out of this chair,” Katharine said, her voice louder and more insistent. She wasn’t screaming yet, but she soon would be. Not that it would do any good. Meeting Ed’s eyes, which were hard and flat as river stones, she felt her blood turn to ice in her veins and went still.

There was real menace in them. She’d seen him look that way before, but never at her.

“Watch.” He leaned over the computer and stabbed a button with his finger. The screen flickered to life.

It took Katharine all of about a second to realize what she was watching. The video was black-and-white, silent, and grainy but clear enough. There she was, dressed in Dottie’s oversized clothes, walking gingerly across the hospital parking lot in her too-tight shoes, stepping into the grass, face lighting up as she turned to the black Blazer that pulled into the exit road in front of her. Then she was hurrying toward it, hobbling a little, saying something to the man whose face was now clearly visible in the driver’s window—
Dan.

Even as she watched herself climb into the passenger seat and watched the Blazer drive away, her head started to swim again. Bits of memories, fragmented as pieces of torn photos, came spiraling to the surface. Nick scowling at her, Nick walking toward her, Nick smiling.

Nick. Not Dan.
But how did she know Nick?

“That came from a security camera at the hospital,” Ed said. She looked at him, her vision a little unfocused, still trying to sort fact from fiction and integrate the past with the present, and registered the anger in his face. His voice was silky-soft. Dangerously soft.

This was bad, she realized. Her heart lurched. Her stomach dropped clear to her toes. The sour taste of fear was sharp in her mouth. Her chest heaved as she took a deep breath.

He came toward her, gripped the arms of her chair, and pulled her around to face him. The blue caps popped off her fingers to hang dangling from their thin black wires. The chair’s casters squeaked over the smooth linoleum. Her heels dragged helplessly along. One of her shoes loosened, fell off. The seat rocked as the force of the forward motion pressed her back against the smooth leather. For a moment, one stupid, hopeful moment, she thought he was getting ready to unbuckle the restraints that held her to the chair.

Then he straightened.

“You lying bitch.”

Without warning, he backhanded her across the face. Pain exploded across her cheek. Her head rocked to the side under the force of the blow. She cried out in pain and shock. Her cheek stung. Her eyes watered. Her mouth fell open in disbelief.

“Ed—”

She got no further. He hit her again, slapping her face so hard that the chair went scooting sideways, causing her face to burn and ache, bringing more tears to her eyes, making her ears ring. She was helpless, unable to get up, unable to get away, unable even to lift a hand to ward off another blow.

“Why?” she cried, blinking up at him through welling tears. “What did I do?”

“Don’t play stupid with me.” He was breathing hard. Though her vision was hazy with tears, she saw that his face had turned scarlet with rage. “You sold me out, didn’t you? I knew there was somebody on my tail. I knew it. The signs were all there, these last couple of months. Things out of place, somebody logging on to my computer when I was out, the tinny sound the phone gets when somebody’s listening in. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. It was you all along, wasn’t it? You’re working as an informant for the goddamned FBI.”

“No!” Katharine shook her head, desperate to convince him of the truth. Fear tightened her stomach, her throat. “No, Ed, it’s not true! I—”

“Don’t lie to me.” He took a hasty step forward, grabbed the arms of her chair, and pulled her to him, sticking his face right in front of hers. His eyes were black with fury. His jaw worked with it. He was so angry he was practically spitting in her face. “What do they know? What did you give them?” His voice crescendoed until he was shouting in her face. “I want to know what you gave them.”

Her heart knocked against the walls of her chest. “Nothing. Nothing. I didn’t give them anything. It isn’t true.”

“How long have they known? How much do they know?” Veins bulged in his temples. His heavy brows met over the bridge of his nose. “Did you find out what I was doing and go to them, or did they come to you?”

“Neither.” Her voice was high-pitched, shaking. She was practically pushing the back of her head through the back of the chair in an effort to put as much distance between them as she could. “I didn’t sell you out, Ed, I swear to God.”

“They were trying to get enough on me to take me down before I knew anything was up, weren’t they? Thank God I found out in time.” He sucked in air through his teeth. “Were they the ones who broke into your house? So they could get their hands on the things I was keeping in the safe without me suspecting what was really going down?”

“
No.
” Katherine shook her head, desperate to convince him of it. “No, it’s not true. None of it’s true.”

But he didn’t believe her. “You traitorous bitch, don’t you know I have enough shit on everybody in the whole damned government to make this go away?
Poof,
like a puff of smoke. But it won’t go away for you. You’re going to tell me everything you gave them, everything you know, and then you’re going to die.”

He pushed her away from him abruptly, so that her chair went careening back until it crashed into the edge of the counter. As her head was flung forward by the jolt, Katharine grabbed onto the seat arms for balance, her eyes burning with tears that were brimming over now, her cheeks stinging, terror forming a huge, cold knot in her chest.

“Ed, you have to listen to me!” she cried even as he strode for the door. “I’m not working for the FBI! I’m not working for anybody! If somebody sold you out, it wasn’t me. I swear it
. I swear it.
”

“Hendricks,” he roared, sticking his head out into the hall, completely disregarding her words as he flung open the door. The man appeared almost instantly, leading Katharine to believe he had been lurking outside. He was puffing away on a cigarette, and the fact that Ed ignored it told her how absolutely beside himself he was: Ed hated anyone smoking around him. Behind Hendricks was his shadow, the other man whose name Katharine had never learned. Hendricks’s gaze slid over her as he entered the room, and he lowered the hand holding the cigarette to smirk at her.

Her heart pounded like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Her mouth was so dry she had to swallow before she could get another word out.

“Ed . . .” she begged. “Please listen.”

“I want to know everything she knows,” Ed said to Hendricks, ignoring her completely. “
Everything
. I’ll meet you at the Plantation in—what?—say, three hours. That should give you plenty of time.”

“Don’t imagine I’ll need a third of that.” Hendricks looked her over appraisingly.

“I didn’t do it,” Katharine cried, knowing time was running out. Adrenaline rushed like speed through her veins, and she jerked at her arms, trying to free them from the restraints without success. Every instinct she possessed screamed
run,
but there was nothing she could do. “I’m not working for the FBI.”

Ed turned to her, his expression savage.

“You know what Hendricks here does?” There was not one scrap of feeling for her in his eyes, she saw as their gazes locked. “He’s an independent contractor for us. His specialty is, he gets people to talk. Real tough guys beg for the chance to sell out their mother before he’s done with them.” His gaze swung to Hendricks. “What was it you did last week, Hendricks? Peel the skin off some guy’s face like it was a grape?” He looked at Katharine again as Hendricks nodded confirmation. “Did you know a person can still be alive with no skin on his face? And talk and cry and everything? Pretty gruesome, though.”

Katharine’s stomach turned inside out.

“Oh, God, Ed, no. Please. You’re making a mistake. It wasn’t me!”

Her frantic pleas fell on deaf ears. He was already walking out the door, only pausing to say “Three hours” over his shoulder to Hendricks, who nodded.

“Ed, no!” Katharine screamed, desperate. Her life was on the line, she knew. “Please, please listen!”

The door closed behind him with a click that reverberated loud as a gunshot through her head. Her heart pounded. Her pulse shot through the roof. She jerked vainly at her arms again and tried to open the lap restraint by heaving against it. The chair scooted across the floor, but the straps held.

She was trapped in the damned chair.

Her gaze shifted fearfully to Hendricks. She could feel tears tracking down her cheeks, the salt in them stinging the abused flesh.

Hendricks walked up to her, slowly, shaking his head, puffing away, his skin gleaming under the overhead light. A thin, gray finger of smoke floated behind him. The smell of the cigarette hung in the air.

“Well, good golly Miss Molly, who woulda thought we would end up like this, you and me?” he said to her in an affable tone. “It’s a shame, but there you are.”

As Hendricks reached her chair, the other man approached on her other side. He was probably in his forties, too, but he had hair, light brown, in a regulation military cut that did nothing for his round face and puffy blue eyes. His complexion was florid and he had a little goatee, and, all in all, looked almost as scary as Hendricks.

“Shame,” the second man echoed, his eyes running over her. She watched him warily. Her skin crawled at the expression on his face. She felt boneless suddenly, as if fear had turned all her muscles to jelly, and her heart threatened to beat its way out of her chest.

“This is Lutz,” Hendricks said by way of an introduction. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, contemplated the glowing tip for an instant, then put it down on the back of her hand and ground it out.

Katharine screamed.

Hendricks grinned as he lifted the cigarette away and flicked the spent butt into a waste can.

“She’s got a real girly scream. I like that,” he said to Lutz, tapping another cigarette out of the pack he pulled from his shirt pocket and lighting it. Sweating and gasping, sick from the burning pain in her arm, able to smell her own scorched flesh in the air, Katharine watched in terror as he put the fresh cigarette between his lips and took a drag.

“We ain’t done a woman in a while,” Lutz agreed.

Watching that glowing cigarette, Katharine panted and flinched and trembled.

She took a deep, shaky breath.

“Look.” Her voice was unsteady as she fought to regain some semblance of composure, of control. “You don’t have to hurt me. I’ll tell you anything you want to know right now.”

Hendricks took another deep drag on the cigarette, then pulled it out of his mouth.

“I know we don’t have to hurt you,” he said, and smiled at her. “But it’s fun.”

This time he moved slowly, grinning and watching her terrified face as he touched the cigarette to her arm just above her wrist, only inches from the first burn.

Katharine screamed again. The searing pain rocketed through her nerve endings to her brain. The scorching smell wafted to her nose. When he lifted the cigarette away at last, tears were streaming down her face.

“All right, let’s go,” Lutz said, sounding bored. “They’re probably waiting to turn out the lights.”

“That would be us,” Hendricks replied, but they both got to work unbuckling the straps holding Katharine to the chair.

When she summoned up the wherewithal to ease off her other shoe and get her feet solidly under her, when she would have exploded out of the chair, doing her best to break free of the two of them and bolt through the door even though she knew she had no chance, absolutely no chance, of making it, Hendricks forestalled her by grabbing her wrist just as the lap belt was undone, yanking her up out of the chair and at the same time twisting her arm hard behind her back.

The pain was excruciating.

“You give me trouble, I’ll break it,” he told her, and she believed him.

They frog-marched her out of the building, which now appeared to be deserted. On Hendricks’s say-so, Lutz turned out the lights behind them. When they emerged into the breezy warmth of the night, Katharine saw that the Mercedes was gone.