DIAGNOSIS: ATTRACTION (8 page)

At least for now,
he said.

What do you mean?

As you pointed out, our abilities got stronger after we made love. I think that we can make everything we do stronger—if we practice.

Practice making love?
she teased again, and he knew she was making an effort to lighten the situation.

That, too.

They joined up again and walked down a trail through the woods.

“It’s so peaceful here. I hate the idea of destroying anything.”

They came to a footbridge across a stream, where large rocks poked up through the water.

“Let’s just see if we can do something to a rock,” he suggested.

“How?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

She leaned on the rail, looking downstream, then pointed to a large boulder sticking above the water line. “We can aim for that one. And we don’t want to work against each other. I think it might be best if one of us focuses on the rock and the other one tries to add power to the focus.”

“That sounds right.”

* * *

O
VER
A
THOUSAND
miles away in New Orleans, a man named Harold Goddard hunched over his computer. He was retired now, but once he’d worked for the Howell Institute, a D.C. think tank that had funded some very interesting projects over the years—like undetectable chemical weapons and torture methods that left no marks on those being interrogated.

Bill Wellington had been the director of the institute, and Harold had worked closely with him. Wellington had died in an explosion at a secret research lab in Houma, Louisiana, and that had raised Harold’s interest.

The lab had been owned by Dr. Douglas Solomon, who’d run one of Wellington’s pet projects, thirty some years ago. Only it hadn’t quite panned out the way they’d hoped. Not one to double down on a bet, Wellington had pulled the doctor’s funding, and Solomon had gone underground with a bunch of different experiments.

Had the two men kept in contact over the years? Or had Wellington found out something about the doctor’s most recent activities? Harold might never find the answer to that question because Solomon and Wellington had both been killed when the doctor’s hidden research facility had blown up. The authorities had concluded that the cause was a gas leak. Harold had his doubts—especially in light of subsequent events.

The lab explosion had gotten him interested in Solomon again.

He’d gone poking into old records from the clinic and had come up with a list of very interesting people—all of whose mothers had had the doctor’s special treatments.

Over the past few months, Harold had brought a number of them together. Several men and women had ended up dead in bed together—apparently from cerebral vascular accidents. And then two of them, Craig Branson and Stephanie Swift, had vanished into thin air—after some very alarming incidents. Incidents that had made Harold cautious about approaching other people on the list.

Now here was one of the names—Matthew Delano, currently AWOL from his job as a house physician at Memorial Hospital in Baltimore and wanted for questioning in a murder investigation.

Harold scanned the article, noting that Dr. Delano had treated a female patient with amnesia. One of the nurses on the unit had volunteered to take Jane Doe home and had been shot to death in her own laundry room. By Delano and the woman? Or by someone else?

That was an interesting question, and one that gave Harold pause. His men had gotten caught in the cross fire when Branson had kidnapped Swift from the fortified plantation of her fiancé, John Reynard, just before the wedding ceremony.

And now here was another dangerous situation in the making, starting with the murder of the Good Samaritan nurse. Harold was tempted to send someone up to Baltimore to investigate, but perhaps it was prudent to stay away from the couple. Maybe it was best to keep tabs on the situation and make a decision later.

Yet it was hard to simply drop the chance for another experiment. He thought back over what had happened at the Reynard estate. Was there some way to protect himself from Delano and the woman—to prevent what had happened before?

* * *

E
LIZABETH
TURNED
TO
M
ATT
.
“Let me try to do the focusing.”

“Because you still have a lot of memory gaps, and you want to be effective at something?”

“You read me so well.”

“We already know you’re effective at cooking.”

“I’m not going to do in our enemies with a soufflé.”

“You can make a soufflé?”

She considered the question. “Maybe not. I think I’m into more prosaic dishes—like last night’s chili.” The statement stopped her. “A lot has happened since last night,” she murmured.

“Yes. And I also think we’re stalling about trying out our powers.”

“Right.”

Cutting off the extraneous conversation, she looked at the rock she’d picked, thinking of a laser beam.

Or maybe lightning. And I’ll try to lend a power assist
.

She narrowed her eyes, concentrating—trying to do something that she had no idea how to accomplish.

Matt moved in back of her, pressing close and clasping his hands around her waist, making himself part of her.

She could feel energy flowing between them, gathering strength. It was a wonderful sensation, if she could only figure out how to use it.

Raising her hand, she stretched it toward the rock, imagining beams of power coming out of her fingers.

And suddenly, to her surprise, there was a flash of light that streaked out toward the rock. Lightning crawled across the surface, and the water around it crackled and boiled.

She heard Matt make a strangled exclamation.

“You didn’t think we could do it,” she accused, “and you hid that from me.”

“You think it was the wrong thing to do?” he challenged.

“No. I might not have tried if I’d known you were waffling.”

“Right.” He stroked his hand along her arm. “Hiding our thoughts is another skill we need to practice.”

“Uh-huh.”
For a whole lot of reasons,
she thought and knew he’d caught the silent comment.

She turned back to the rock, focusing on delivering another blast. This time it was easier, and the damage was more severe. She saw small chips of stone fly up into the air and land in the water. But she noticed that Matt’s earlier observation was right. Blasting something took energy.

“Let’s switch roles,” she suggested.

He agreed, and they changed places, with her behind him clasping his waist and peeking around him to watch the rock. At the same time she tried to send him the kind of energy that he’d sent her.

She was tired, and it wasn’t easy to do, but she finally felt the flow of power from her to him.

A stream of fire shot from his hand, and the rock blasted apart. She pulled him down, ducking behind the bridge rail as shards of stone flew into the air.

“Nice,” she said.

“But dangerous. We need to figure out how to regulate the power,” he answered.

“Can we bring it down to a little sizzle?” She pointed to another target, a tree stump that had gotten lodged in the water between two boulders. “Try to just tap it,” she said. “Maybe you don’t need me to do that.”

Matt focused on the stump, and she felt him concentrating. After a few seconds, she saw sparks striking the surface of the bark.

“Nice,” she said again. “If it were a person, I wonder how it would feel.”

“Discomfort? Disorientation?”

They stayed on the bridge, leaning against the rail, both of them marveling at what they’d been doing. A few days ago, such an ability would have been unthinkable. It was empowering to realize what they could do together, but it didn’t solve Elizabeth’s basic problem.

“Let’s go back to where we started,” she said.
Memories.

She turned so that she faced him. He wrapped her in his arms, and she leaned into him, closing her eyes as she tried to grab on to something from her past.

She knew Matt was keeping the exchange directed away from himself, trying to help her dig out nuggets from her past.

The easiest memories to reach were from her childhood. And not all of them were bad. She remembered being enchanted by a trip to the zoo with her parents. She remembered a trip to Disney World where she’d insisted on riding the Space Mountain roller coaster. She remembered being the best girl basketball player in her high school class. And then she remembered the time she had missed a shot and lost a playoff game for the team.

Matt rubbed her arm. “Don’t focus on that.”

“I felt horrible. I had finally found something that made me valuable to the other kids, and I blew it.”

“We all have stuff like that.”

The next picture that came to her knocked the breath from her lungs. It was like when Matt had hypnotized her. She saw young women huddled together. Only now she felt their fear and knew that she was the only one who could save them from a horrible fate.

Chapter Eight

Who are they?
Matt asked.

“I don’t know,” she almost shouted in her frustration as the mental image faded. “But they’re depending on me, and I have to help them.”

“Okay,” he answered, giving her his full support. “But how do we do it?”

“First I have to figure out who they are—and where they are.” She swallowed hard. “And I think there might be something at my house that tells me.”

He gave her a long look. “You think it’s safe to go to your house? You might not know why those men were chasing you, but it’s a given that they know your name. Now that you’ve escaped from them twice, they probably have your house staked out—hoping you’ll come back.”

“I know that.” She dragged in a frustrated breath and let it out. “But I think I have to. I mean, I can’t just keep running away. I have to figure out what’s going on.”

“
Inconvenient,” he answered in a dry voice that might have fooled her if she hadn’t already learned a lot about him.

“I probably have records on my computer.”

“And somebody probably already got to them—after the car accident, when you were out of commission.”

She nodded, hating that they were in this bind. She needed to know more about herself, and she knew she couldn’t do it alone. She also knew that Matt was following her thought processes.

“We have your address, and we can get there.”

“We’ll go back there, but we have to be cautious,” he said.

It was instructive to see the way he thought as they drove toward Arbutus, a middle-class community, where her house was located. He stopped at a drugstore and bought them both Orioles baseball caps, which they pulled down low to hide their faces. He also bought two Orioles T-shirts. Hers was oversize, and hung far down her arms and body, but it certainly created a different look for her. A roll of duct tape completed his purchases.

When they’d returned to his car and she’d put the shirt over her clothing, he said, “Lie down in the back.”

She didn’t have to ask why. She knew he wanted anyone watching to think that a lone man was driving through the neighborhood.

Prone on the backseat, she couldn’t see any details of the passing scenery, but that didn’t matter because she didn’t remember the details, anyway.

“I just drove past your house,” he informed her.

“What’s it look like?”

“It’s a two-story. An older home with a porch and new vinyl siding. The front yard is nicely planted, and there’s a man sitting in a car across the street, keeping an eye on the place.”

“Great.”

“It’s the thug who killed Polly.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, Lord.”

“We expected him or someone like him.”

“Too bad we can’t tell the cops he’s here.”

“Yeah. But it would just be his word against ours. And I have the feeling he’d lawyer up and get out before we could blink.”

She nodded, then said, “He was alone when he came to Polly’s, but he’s not going to make that mistake again. I’m sure there’s another guy out back.”

“And we can’t drive up the alley, because we could get trapped.”

“Right.”

He turned the corner and parked near the end of the alley. They both got out, walking back. She didn’t even know which house she lived in, and it was strange to have Matt be the one to direct her.

He pointed. “Your place is about halfway down.”

The yards were about thirty feet deep, all of them with three-foot-high chain-link fences.

She spotted the other man when they were about twenty yards away. He was sitting on her back steps, partly screened by low bushes.

We have to get close enough and disable him before he can alert his friend out front.

I don’t suppose you remember who lives in the house next door.

Sorry. But in this neighborhood, they’re probably at work.

Let’s hope.

Before they turned in at the house to the right of hers, they planned their attack. As they walked toward the back door, Elizabeth could see the guy on her back steps flick them a look, but apparently he didn’t recognize either one of them.

When they reached the door, Matt pretended to get out his keys. She pressed close to him, giving him energy as he raised his arm toward the intruder on her back steps.

Is this going to work? I mean, he’s not a rock in a stream.

We’ll find out.

She felt Matt gathering power, then sending a bolt of energy toward the man on her back steps. It made the guy go rigid, then slump to the side. Matt was already charging down the steps and vaulting the fence into her yard.

Instead of continuing with the superhero route, he socked the guy in the jaw, then took the gun from his shoulder holster, checked that the safety was on, and stuffed the weapon into the waistband of his jeans, under his Orioles T-shirt.

She helped pull the thug into the bushes, where they taped his hands and feet together and slapped a piece of tape over his mouth. They also took his cell phone and wallet.

Matt took the battery out of the phone, then pawed through the wallet. The guy had a wad of cash, but no identification.

“The money will come in handy,” Matt said, as he stuffed the bills into his own pocket. “Do you keep a key to the back door somewhere?”

“I wish I knew. Maybe a neighbor has a key, but I don’t recall.”

She pushed aside a flowerpot and moved a couple of large rocks but saw nothing.

“We may have to break in.” Matt climbed the steps and tried her door. When it turned out to be unlocked, she drew in a sharp breath.

“Obviously the bad guys have been inside and didn’t bother to lock up. Stay here until I make sure nobody’s inside.”

He drew the gun and held it in both hands. Before stepping inside, he studied the threshold, looking for trip wires, then cautiously entered.

Matt had asked her to wait for his all clear, but as she stood with her heart pounding in her chest, she knew she couldn’t make herself stay outside. This was her house—an important key to understanding herself. And really, would the bad guys have someone in here, when they already had a man at the front and back?

When Matt saw she was following him, he made a rough sound, but he didn’t order her out.

“Wait downstairs while I go up.”

“Okay.”

Again, waiting was hard.

All clear,
he told her as he came down the stairs.

But I see from your thoughts that it’s a mess up there.

Sorry.

She had expected it from what she saw on the first floor. As she looked around, she grappled with mixed reactions. She was anxious to see the place where she lived. Apparently her taste ran to the whimsical, with touches like bright cloths on horizontal surfaces and ethnic pottery—not much like that sober black jacket and slacks she’d been wearing when she had had the accident. It seemed she liked to kick back when she got into her own environment.

But at the same time she was thinking about her taste, she was taking in the destruction. Someone had been through the house, searching and not caring what kind of mess they left.

She hurried to her office, which was a long, narrow room at the side of the house, and gasped when she saw her computer. The screen lay smashed on the floor and the processor had been taken apart, presumably to remove the hard drive.

The room was divided into two sections by a bank of filing cabinets. Behind them was an area she’d blocked off as a storage closet where she’d piled cardboard boxes purchased from an office supply store. From the mess on the floor she gathered that some had held old tax information and financial records, while others were for books and storage of out-of-season clothing. After looking at the area behind the cabinets, she walked through the main part of the office, where files and papers lay all over the floor.

As she looked toward the stairs, she was suddenly able to picture her cozy bedroom. She’d painted it blue and white, and continued the theme with the curtains and bedspread. She knew it was better not to go up and look at the mess, and better not to go up there and get trapped.

With a grimace, she returned to the kitchen, picked up a set of measuring spoons from the floor and looked around. Oak cabinets. Ceramic tile on the floor and some kind of fake stone on the countertops. The room looked like it had been renovated in the past five years, but it was as wrecked as the office. Cabinet doors hung open, and food had been emptied out, as though someone had thought she might hide important information in a cereal box.

Matt joined her.

“Sorry. It looks like they would have found anything of value.”

“Maybe not,” she muttered.

The searchers had taken apart all the obvious places, but was she clever enough to have thought of somewhere they wouldn’t have considered?

Like, would she have hidden something in a box of tampons? Probably not, because every spy knew that old trick.

After returning to the office, she looked around and saw a bulletin board. Excitement leaped inside her when she saw several name tags from conferences hanging on pins.

“I’m a social worker,” she breathed.

“Looks like it.”

She swallowed hard. “I guess we have that in common—taking jobs where we could help people, because that was the only way we could connect.”

“Yeah.”

She picked up a framed diploma from the floor. “And I have a master’s degree from the University of Maryland.”

“Which might mean you grew up in the area—or not. It could be that they had the kind of program you were looking for.”

Matt walked into the closet area. When she heard him open the window, she poked her head around the filing cabinets.

“What are you doing?”

“What I learned to do in Africa. Making sure there’s an alternative exit if we need it.”

* * *

G
ARY
S
OUTHWELL
LOOKED
at his watch. He and Hank Patterson had been staking out Elizabeth Forester’s house since he’d gotten his new orders from Mr. Lang. They were supposed to check in with each other every half hour, and Patterson hadn’t phoned. Which was unsettling because the man had been punctual as clockwork until this time.

Southwell clicked the phone one more time, trying to get his partner. Finally he gave up and wondered what he should do. Not call Lang. His boss was already annoyed by their lack of progress in apprehending Elizabeth Forester. The woman had determination—and grit. He’d give her that. And apparently she’d found a guy who wasn’t going to leave her twisting in the wind.

Had they known each other before she landed in the hospital or what? If not, it was shocking that the doctor was laying his life on the line for a woman he’d met only a few days ago. Gary sure wouldn’t do it. He laughed. Or for any other broad. They simply weren’t worth it.

He slipped out of the car where he’d been sitting for hours and looked around as he stretched, then started down the block, glancing back at the house before turning the corner. If Forester and the doctor were in there, he was giving them the chance to get out the front, but on balance, he had to risk it.

In the alley, he hurried to the back door, where Patterson was supposed to be stationed. He wasn’t there, but as Gary approached the house, he heard a muffled sound of distress in the bushes. When he cautiously approached, he found his partner lying on the ground, taped hand and foot.

Gary pulled the tape off his mouth. “What the hell happened to you?”

“They got the drop on me.”

“You mean Elizabeth and that doctor?”

“Yeah,” Patterson said as Gary freed his partner’s wrists and started working on his legs.

Patterson shook his hands and kicked his feet to get the circulation going.

“What happened, exactly?”

“I’m not sure. It was like...” He stopped and glanced at Gary. “Like they hurled a thunderbolt or something at me.”

“That’s impossible. Maybe they had a Taser gun.”

Patterson considered the idea. “I don’t know what it was. I’m just sayin’, be damned careful if you get near them.”

“Were you unconscious?”

“Maybe for a little while.”

“Okay,” Gary muttered, wondering what they were going to do now and thinking about that five-minute window when he’d left his post and headed back here—to find Patterson.

Could they have gotten away while his partner was out?

“Did you see them leave?” Gary asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then we’d better assume they saw me out front, which means they wouldn’t go out that way.” Gary glanced at Patterson. “You steady on your feet?”

“Steady enough to kill those bastards.”

“Waste the guy. The boss wants to do the woman himself.”

“You mean do her—then kill her?”

“Yeah.”

* * *

I
N
THE
OFFICE
, Elizabeth picked up some of the papers scattered on the floor and thumbed through them. “These are records of some of my clients.”

After righting the desk chair, she sat down and started to read one of the cases. “This woman was living in a flophouse in Baltimore. It looks like she came into the country illegally.”

“I know you want to understand what you were doing, but I think you don’t have time to read cases now.”

She gave him an exasperated look. “They could be clues to what was going on—when those thugs tried to grab me after the accident.”

“Maybe you can take some with you. We’ve got to get out of here pretty fast.”

She nodded but didn’t move.

“There’s got to be something here,” she murmured as she looked around the shambles that had been her office. “Something they missed.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugged. “I just do. And maybe you can help me figure it out.”

Standing, she reached for Matt. Pulling him close, she molded her body against his as they stood in the middle of the mess. His arms stroked up and down her back, and as she held on to him, she felt the familiar merging of their minds that had so quickly become necessary to her existence.