Obsession (3 page)

His eyes—hazel, close-set, with thick, black lashes that told her he was almost certainly dark-haired beneath the mask—were harder and colder.

As she met them, terror skittered down her spine like icy little mice feet. Her breathing quickened. Her heart, already thudding, accelerated until the pounding of her own pulse drowned out background sounds like the hum of the refrigerator, the soft hiss of the air-conditioning —and the quick footsteps of this guy’s partner, who was searching the place room by room.

“I told you: There isn’t one. It doesn’t exist, okay? Whatever you may have heard, it’s wrong.”

There was nothing else she could say, even though she knew already that he wasn’t going to believe her. He hadn’t believed her before; he wouldn’t believe her now. World without end.

His eyes darkened. His mouth, visible through a slit in the knit mask, thinned. Her stomach knotted with fear.

Would they kill her if they didn’t get what they wanted? The thought made her want to throw up.

Yes
was the despairing conclusion she reached as she considered the carefully calculated ferocity of the attack so far. There was a coldness to it, a purposefulness that told its own tale. She was as sure as it was possible to be that they—this man and his partner, both big, athletic guys dressed with eerie similarity in black T-shirts and sweatpants—had no intention whatsoever of letting her live.

Or Lisa either.

Lisa Abbott, her dear friend and former sorority sister, had, in the unluckiest of coincidences, selected this weekend to visit Washington, D.C., for the first time in the seven years since Katharine had moved there right out of college, armed with her spanking-new degree in political science and a head full of change-the-world ideals. Katharine had taken Muffy to a friend’s for the weekend—Lisa was allergic to cats—then picked Lisa up at Dulles just after five. They had been excited to be together again after so long, gabbing away a mile a minute as they filled each other in on what was going on in their lives. They had stopped for drinks at Le Bar in Georgetown, had dinner around the corner at Angelo ’s, then gone clubbing. By the time they arrived back here, at her elegant two-story town house in the historic Old Town section of the D.C. bedroom community of Alexandria, Virginia, it was after midnight and they both had been more than a little sloshed. They had toasted their reunion with one more glass of wine, then gone to bed, not so much totally exhausted as totally wasted.

That was then.

Now Katharine at least was stone-cold sober, and Lisa lay about three feet away, facedown on the embarrassingly dirty floor with her wrists and ankles bound with tape just as Katharine’s were. More duct tape covered Lisa’s mouth. The airy, wrought-iron base of the granite-topped kitchen island separated them, but they could still see each other because of the structure’s open design. Lisa’s shoulder-length auburn hair spilled over her face so that all Katharine had been able to see of her expression since she’d been flung there was the terrified glint of her brown eyes. Lisa’s silky yellow ankle-length nightgown was hiked to her knees, revealing the delicate trio of intertwined butterflies tattooed just above her left ankle. The ruffled hem fanned out around her tanned legs like the petals of some exotic flower. But at least the garment provided more coverage than Katharine’s own night attire of tiny pink satin boxers and a matching knit tank. Lisa was an inch taller at five-foot-eight. Katharine was the more slender of the two, but Lisa was just as sexy with her well-toned, athletic physique. As Kappa Delts, the two of them had cut quite a swath through the Ohio State University frat boys once upon a time.

Even as Katharine stared fearfully into the cold, hazel eyes boring into her own, she was conscious of the sobbing rasp of Lisa’s terrified breathing.

For four years we did practically everything together, and now that we’re finally back together again, we’re probably going to die together
was the mournful thought that slid through Katharine’s mind.
Oh, God, I don’t want to die. Not like this. We’re so young. Lisa just turned thirty, and I’m only twenty-nine. . . .

They had everything to live for. Everything.

“Last chance: Where is the damned safe?”

Katharine cleared her throat desperately. “Look, I told you. There is no safe. The jewelry isn’t here. It isn’t mine. It was borrow—”

Katharine swallowed the rest of what she was going to say as he let go of her hair, took a step back, thrust his gun in the back waistband of his pants, and kicked her in the ribs. The action was carefully calibrated: hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any real damage.

Still, pain exploded through the right side of her chest, expanding outward in an instant from where the toe of his black sneaker connected with her bones. Katharine would have screamed if the pain had allowed it. Instead, she gasped, then writhed. Tears stung her eyes, overflowed to spill down her cheeks. She could feel their hot, wet tracks against her skin.

It hurt so bad—bad enough to stop her breath and cause a cold sweat to break out on her forehead. Jagged splinters of pain shot like super-heated arrows into her organs, her muscles, her bones.

“So how’s about we get real now?” His tone was still more conversational than threatening as he loomed darkly over her. Nevertheless, it was the most chill-inducing sound she had ever heard. After a single terrified glance up at him, she scrunched her eyes shut and went very still. “Where’s the safe?”

Afraid to answer, Katharine did her best to block him out. She shrank into herself, shivering with pain and fear but otherwise not moving at all, feeling the prickle of perspiration as it sprang to life over her entire body. The ache in her side was still sharp enough to impair her breathing. Taking in careful little sips of air, she did her best to gather her wits. She was cold now, an icy, bone-deep cold that had nothing to do with the frigid tiles beneath her or the air-conditioning wafting over her sweat-dampened skin.

It was the cold of mortal fear.

The thing was, she was pretty sure that nothing she could say or do was going to make any difference in the end. But still she sought desperately to come up with anything, anything at all, that might turn the tide. . . .

“Answer me.”

His fist clenched in her hair again, and she opened her eyes and cried out. Sharp needles of distress stabbed into her scalp as he jerked her head back. Her neck felt as if it would break.

“Where’s the damned safe?”

He was close, frighteningly close, bending over her as he kept her head tilted up toward his and glared down into her face.

Their eyes met. The unmistakable menace in his drove fresh terror deep into her soul.

Her lips trembled. “There isn’t one.”

His eyes narrowed, hardened, until she couldn’t take that brutal gaze a second longer. Pressing her lips together, swallowing convulsively, she closed her eyes again. For a moment, as she struggled to get her breath back, to move past the pain, she did nothing more than hang limply from the hand still locked into her hair. Her scalp tingled and burned from the pressure of his grip. Her neck ached. But even the most torturous physical sensation was nothing compared to the burgeoning panic that dried her mouth and made her pulse pound like she’d just run for miles, and turned her breathing into ragged little gasps for air.

Even with her eyes closed, she could feel his unrelenting gaze on her face.

“You know, I’m getting tired of playing around. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, right now, how about I take a knife to your girlfriend there? Say, cut off a finger, or maybe her ear?”

Katharine’s eyes flew open and locked on Lisa, who had suddenly gone stiff and still as a concrete statue. She didn’t even seem to be breathing anymore, and Katharine might have thought her friend had fainted—except for the frightened flicker of her eyes.

“You wanna watch that? You wanna see her bleed? Is that what it’s going to take?”

Katharine sucked in air and found her voice again. Or at least a semblance of her voice. What emerged was low and shaky, sounding nothing at all like her usual brisk, Midwest-infused tone.

“No,” she whispered, sickened, her eyes never leaving Lisa. “Oh, no. Please. You’ve got to believe me, there isn’t anything....” Her voice caught as she saw Lisa start to shake. Fresh tears welled into her own eyes. Katharine had to force the rest out past the growing lump in her throat. “If there was a safe here, or any jewelry, or anything else of value that I could give you to make you go away, I’d tell you. I swear it.”

His eyes glinted ominously. His mouth pursed. His gaze slid slowly and deliberately over her features.

Katharine trembled.

“You know, you’re a real pretty girl. Maybe I should just leave your girlfriend alone, and start by carving my initials in your face instead.”

Her stomach cramped like a giant fist had just closed around it.

“No.” Her plea sounded pitiful even to her own ears. “No.”

His threat was all the more horrifying because it was uttered in such a low, untroubled tone. Everything that had happened had been nightmarishly quiet. Except for the single scared scream that had escaped her throat when he had first grabbed her, when she had opened her eyes one split second before he leaped on top of her to find a man creeping toward her bed through her darkened bedroom, there had been almost no noise. At least, no noise loud enough so that it was even remotely possible to hope that someone beyond these four walls might have heard and called the police.

She and Lisa, who had been sleeping in the town house’s second bedroom, had been dragged down the stairs into the kitchen, flung to the floor, and roughly bound. Rape had been Katharine’s immediate fear, but it hadn’t happened. Sexual assault seemed to be the furthest thing from these men’s minds.

What they were after, as they had made abundantly clear, was the contents of a safe that was supposedly concealed somewhere on the premises. In the safe, they seemed to expect to find hundreds of thousands of dollars ’ worth of jewelry. The normal burglar booty, like the plasma TV in the living room and the laptop in the den, didn’t seem to interest them. Likewise, they’d left the jewelry that the women wore untouched. They had ignored Lisa’s modest diamond pendant, and even Katharine’s far more valuable diamond ear studs and the big oval-cut sapphire ring she had given herself for her last birthday, which ranked right up there as one of her very favorite birthdays ever.

Since bringing them into the kitchen, they’d mostly left Lisa alone. It was Katharine whom they had terrorized, Katharine whom they had questioned, Katharine whom they had roughed up, all in an attempt to get her to reveal the location of that nonexistent (so far as she knew, anyway) safe.

The thing was, they had known her name from the beginning. After the first fog of blind panic had cleared enough to allow her to think, that had chilled her to the bone. Clearly this was no random home invasion; it had been targeted specifically at her and carefully planned, although she got the impression that Lisa’s presence had been a surprise to them. They had expected her to be alone.

From something else the thugs had said, she had gathered that they had seen the picture of her that had appeared last week in
The Washington Post,
the one that had caused her oceans of trouble even before this particular nightmare had begun, the one she hadn’t even been aware had been taken until it had shown up in the paper. In it, she was dressed in a slinky white Dior evening gown and weighted down with what was practically a king’s ransom’s worth of eye-popping jewels, on her way to a dinner party at the home of one of Washington ’s top lobbyists. Apparently, the thug rumor network had it that those unbelievably valuable jewels, as well as other items of comparable worth, were kept in that mythical hidden safe in her town house.

The jewelry she’d been wearing in the picture wasn’t even hers. It had been loaned to her for the occasion. Besides her ring and earrings, the only baubles she owned were the few little bits and pieces of nothing in the leather jewelry case on her dresser. Until late last fall, she had been living strictly on the salary of a federal government employee, which, if that needed translating, wasn’t much. Certainly not anywhere near enough to enable her to acquire the kind of bling they thought she had.

That was what she had tried to tell them. Unfortunately, they refused to believe her even though it was the absolute, gospel truth.

While the thug who now had his fist in her hair had done his best to pound information she didn’t have out of her, the other had gone on a rampage through her home. She had been beaten up to the sound of muffled thumps and thuds and crashes as the other man had torn the town house apart, flinging books from the shelves, snatching paintings from the walls, upending furniture, flipping over the expensive Oriental carpets that covered the highly polished hardwood floors. If her next-door neighbor, a doctor whose name escaped her mind at present, had been home, he might have heard something. But when she and Lisa had gotten home, the windows of his town house had been dark, and she knew that he was frequently away for the weekend. As for the junior congresswoman who lived in the town house on her other side, she was definitely back home in Minnesota until the end of August. There was a possibility that the lawyer couple who lived in the last of the row of four town houses might be at home—if they’d gone somewhere, they hadn’t told her, but then again, why would they?—but even if they were there, it didn’t seem to be doing anyone any good: So far, there had been no ringing telephone as a curious neighbor called to ask what was up with the middle-of-the-night commotion. Likewise, there had been no wailing sirens, no banging on the front door, no shouts to open up. As far as neighborly intervention was concerned, there was, in a word, nothing. If the doctor or the lawyers were indeed at home, they were clearly as oblivious to what was happening as the night-dark Potomac, which flowed sleepily past just across the cobbled street.