Obsession (7 page)

Just . . . weird. Sort of like the rest of her.

“Washington Hospital.”

She absorbed that as she lifted a questing hand to her nose—her arms were bare, and she realized that she was wearing a blue hospital gown and a blue hospital gown
only
beneath the tan blanket and white sheets that covered her to her armpits—and discovered a bandage taped across it.

“My nose.” Careful to keep a light touch, she felt the bandage, which pretty much covered her whole nose. Jeez, beneath the plastic the thing felt as big and shapeless as a baked potato. She only hoped there was a whole lot of gauze padding to account for most of the bulk.

“You got it smashed up pretty good.” He seemed to be carefully studying her face. Then his eyes met hers again. “Not to worry, though. Once the swelling goes down, it should be good as new.”

“When will that be?”

He shrugged. “A week or so, maybe. I’m more concerned about the blow to your head. How’s that feeling? ”

“I have a headache,” she admitted.

“I’m not surprised. Other than your nose and the bump on your head, though, you don’t have any significant injuries. Everything else is just random assorted scrapes and bruises. You’re going to be just fine.”

“You work here?” It seemed to her that she should know the answer to that. She knew his name, that he was her neighbor and a doctor. But she also felt like there was this big treasure trove of knowledge about him lurking somewhere in her subconscious that she couldn’t quite access. She probably did know. She probably had Googled him or something once upon a time. After all, whether she had a boyfriend or not, she was only human. And he was cute.

“Sometimes. Not today, though. I’m here strictly because of you. When I got home last night, the first thing I heard was you screaming your head off. I ran up from the garage to see what was going on just as you came flying through the window. The police arrived about the same time, and an ambulance a few minutes after that. They loaded you up, and I came on into the hospital to make sure they were treating you right.”

“Oh. Thanks.” She thought that over for a minute. “You probably saved my life last night.”

“Not a problem. That’s what we good neighbors do.” He smiled at her. It was a quick, wry smile that riveted her gaze. This she definitely remembered. She had seen him smile like that before. Had it set her heart to fluttering? Try as she might, she couldn’t quite remember. But it was unmistakably familiar.

He continued, “In case you’re wondering, you should probably be getting out of here soon, maybe even as soon as later today.”

“Today?” To her dismay, she drew a blank there, too. What day was it, anyway? Anxiously, she realized she couldn’t recall. Here was something she
definitely
should know—the date—but she didn’t. The thought that she didn’t know things she should was starting to really worry her. “Which is . . . ?”

“Saturday, July twenty-ninth.” He glanced at his watch. “Six-forty-seven a.m.”

The specter of a clock reading one-fourteen in glowing red numbers on a black background flashed into her mind, and she shuddered reflexively. She had the uneasy feeling that she was moving closer to some of that hidden knowledge, and that maybe she didn’t want to go there after all. Whatever this thing was, she pictured it as something dark and immense and ugly hovering just out of the reach of her consciousness, like a middle-of-the-night monster a little kid just knew without looking was under his bed.

“Cold?” Dan asked, and picked up her wrist to check her pulse. It was only as she felt the warmth of his fingers against her skin that she realized that she was, indeed, cold. Freezing, in fact.

“A little,” she said.

He released her wrist without comment and pulled another tan blanket, which had apparently been folded at the foot of the bed, over her, stretching it all the way up to her neck and tucking it in so that her arms and shoulders were covered.

"Better?” he asked.

“Yes.” The blanket was scratchy against the bare skin of her arms and neck, where it was pulled past the sheet, but the extra layer was welcome. “Thank you.”

He gave a nod of acknowledgment.

There was no avoiding it any longer. For the sake of her own sanity, she had to know what was waiting for her there in the dark.

Her stomach tightened. She took a steadying breath. Her eyes met his. “So what happened? Last night? Why am I in the hospital?”

His expression changed ever so subtly. There was, she thought, a kind of wariness in the way he looked at her. The caution was subtle, but there.
Great.
She knew already that she wasn’t going to like what she was getting ready to hear, and his expression just made her doubly sure. Her pulse accelerated with dread.

“You don’t remember?” he asked.

She thought. And shook her head.

“Nothing?”

She frowned.

“Take your time,” he said, watching her. “Relax. It’ll come to you when you’re ready.”

She thought some more. Just as he promised, after a moment the fog began to clear and the images slowly began to crystallize in her brain. Terrible images. Frightening images. Even as they remained tantalizingly shadowy, her pulse began to race.

“There was a robbery—at my house. Some men broke in.” Her mouth was dry from breathing through it, and she had to swallow before she could continue. “Two men, in black ski masks. They had guns.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. His eyes never left her face. “What else do you remember?”

She had to concentrate hard to recover more details. It wasn’t easy with her head throbbing and breathing an effort and the fog just waiting to descend again.

“They were after . . . some jewelry, which I didn’t even have. I was asleep, and then I woke up, and there was a man in my bedroom . . .” Her heart lurched, her stomach clenched, and her eyes widened with horror. “Oh my God! Lisa!”

Her gaze locked with his, silently asking him the question she couldn’t bear to put into words. Before he even opened his mouth to reply, she knew from his expression that the news was bad.

“Is that your friend who was visiting?” He was stalling, she could tell, trying to gauge the impact of the truth on her.

She nodded as the terrible coldness that was raising goose bumps on her skin started to creep through her insides, too. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

His eyes darkened, and she thought she saw a flicker of some emotion—sympathy for her?—there.

“Yeah, she is. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, God. Oh my God.”

Even though she realized that she had known, somewhere deep inside, about Lisa all along, his confirmation hit her like a fist to the solar plexus. Sucking in air through her mouth, she wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes as a great wave of dizziness broke over her. Her ears rang. Her throat tightened. Her pulse galloped. Lisa was dead. Lisa, bright, bold, always-smiling Lisa, had been horribly murdered right before her eyes.

She remembered everything now. She wished she didn’t.

Tensing, Katharine waited for the tsunami of grief she knew was going to hit. She could feel it rushing toward her, feel the darkness of it, the weight. Then, suddenly, before it could reach her, she felt—different. Strange. As if she were suddenly far away, as if the awfulness of what had happened had been muted, as if it were now somehow coming to her over a great distance. She felt disassociated from the reality of it, as if it were a story she had seen on the evening news and was vaguely sad about but that really had no connection to her at all.

Yikes.
Her thought processes might be a little warped at present, but they were not so warped that she didn’t recognize that the way she was feeling—or, rather, not feeling—was wrong.

Abnormal, even.

She forced herself to open her eyes.

“Did she make it to the hospital?” Her voice was a croak. Even as she asked, ghastly images replayed in her mind: the two of them in the laundry room, the bullet slamming into Lisa, Lisa being thrown against the door ... Yes, she remembered, all right. She just couldn’t
feel
it. Not like she should.

His lips compressed. She could tell he didn’t like what he had to say. “No. She was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“I can’t believe it happened.” Despite the hideously graphic quality of the pictures in her head, her voice was surprisingly steady. She
knew
what had happened, knew the horror of it, knew that she had suffered a terrible trauma and a grievous loss, but once again that curious detachment intervened before her emotions could fully engage.

You’re in shock,
she told herself firmly. The realization was almost a relief. It explained so much. Shock was only to be expected. Shock was the norm in a situation like this. Shock would go away.

“It shouldn’t have happened.” Dan’s voice had hardened, and his expression was grim. When their eyes met, he seemed to check for an instant at whatever he saw in hers, then added in a milder tone, “Hey, the reason we pay so much rent is because our neighborhood is supposed to be safe.”

"Yes,” she agreed.

The phone by the bed rang, making her jump.

Instead of answering, she frowned, hesitated, and automatically glanced at Dan.
Should I pick up?
Fortunately for her own dignity, she didn’t ask the question aloud.

What is wrong with you?
she demanded of herself even as the thing continued to ring and she reached for it.
Of course you should answer it. It’s your damned phone. You don’t need permission.

Clearly the ordeal she’d been through had totally scrambled her wits.

“Hello?” she said into the receiver.

“Katharine? Is that you?” a voice boomed in her ear.

It was masculine, and forceful, and something about the intonation told her that the speaker knew—or at least thought he knew—her well. Without waiting for her to reply, he continued, “What the hell happened?”

Unfortunately, the voice didn’t ring a bell.

“There . . . was a robbery.” She paused, wrestling with her memory banks, waiting for the voice on the other end of the phone to compute, for the speaker’s identity to flash into her mind.

All she got when she concentrated was a worsening of her headache. Maybe the hospital had her doped up, she thought hopefully, glancing at the IV, and made a mental note to ask as soon as she got off the phone. That would explain why so many things she knew she ought to know were missing in action.

“What kind of robbery? Did they take anything? What’d they take?” There was a wealth of anxiety in the forceful voice on the other end of the phone.

Okay, she was still blanking. Before she answered any questions, she felt that it was important to establish who she was talking to. After all,
somebody
had tried to kill her last night.

For all she knew, it might even have been the person behind this authoritative voice on the other end of the phone.

“Um, who is this?” she asked cautiously, her gaze resting on Dan. He had turned away from the bed and was examining some beige metal boxlike piece of medical equipment that stood unused on a stand beside the bed as he politely pretended not to listen.

There was the briefest of pauses on the other end of the phone.

“It’s me, Ed.” Impatience sharpened his voice. “Who the hell do you think? Katharine,
did they take anything
?”

Ed. Her boyfriend. Her divorcing, powerful lover. Of course.

The disconcerting thing was, even now that she knew who he was, she didn’t recognize his voice at all.

4

"Ed,” she murmured, seeking to mentally cement his name to the growling voice. Instantly his image appeared in her mind’s eye: short, well-groomed black hair just starting to go gray; heavy-lidded brown eyes; meaty, triangular nose; full lips; a perpetually tan face with prominent cheekbones and a square jaw. He was a hair taller than five-ten, an attractive, muscular man who liked to work out and had a closet full of expensive designer suits. And, good lord, he sounded like he was used to people asking
How high?
when he said
jump.
Well, maybe he was just upset. She concentrated, trying to remember what he’d asked.
Oh, yeah.

“I don’t know what they actually
took,”
she said meticulously. “They were after jewelry.”

“Jewelry?” He sounded dumbfounded.

“That’s what they said. I think they must have seen the picture in the
Post.
You know, the one where I had on that set you . . .”

“Yeah, I know,” he interrupted. The picture had caused him no end of trouble, too. He’d been with her in it, of course, with his arm around her, escorting her up some steps into the house. The magnificent necklace and bracelet and earrings she had been wearing had rightfully belonged to his wife, who was not yet his ex, and who had raised hell when she saw the paper. And, not incidentally, moved out of the house they were still sharing on a halfway-friendly basis and upped her financial demands. “What makes you think they were after jewelry?”

“I . . . I . . . that’s what they said.” She took a deep breath, trying her best to remember, to keep it all together. “They shot Lisa. She’s dead.”

There was the briefest of pauses.

“I heard. That’s a hell of a thing.” Another pause, and she could almost sense him fighting to rein in his impatience. Clearly, Lisa’s murder was not, for him, the most important thing. Not that he knew Lisa. Unless her memory was failing her—well, it was, but still, she was pretty sure about this—he’d never even met Lisa. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Well . . .” she began, meaning to tell him that she wasn’t as okay as he seemed to think. But he interrupted before she could continue.

“Katharine. Who were they?” There was an urgency to his tone that made her grip on the receiver tighten.