Dead Wrong (35 page)

There was no sign of Mara or anyone else when Annie reached the McCall cabin. Maybe they got a late start, or maybe they stopped for dinner, Annie thought as she parked near the mailbox, upon the side of which was neatly painted the number of the cabin. Two. It had been a joke between her and Mara, since mail was never delivered here. One went to the local post office to pick up mail. She and Mara used to leave little messages to each other in the box. Annie opened the box and looked in, but of course there was no message from her sister. Looking around, she spotted a dandelion in the grass. She picked it and put it in the box. If, on a whim, Mara should look, as Annie had just done, there’d be something inside.

Swinging her overnight bag onto her shoulder, Annie picked her way over the stones to the steps leading to the deck. The late afternoon sun had dropped down behind the house, casting shadows from the tall oaks that grew along the ridge out back. She paused, looking up at the cabin. Funny, but she’d never studied it in this light before. It looked dark, and maybe just a little foreboding.

Ridiculous.
She shook her head as she began to climb the steps.
Of course it looks dark. It’s late in the day, the sun is beginning to set, the place is empty, there are no lights on, and the drapes are all drawn. Tough to look cheery with all that going on.

Well,
she thought as she unlocked the front door,
I’ll pull back the drapes and turn on a few lights, maybe set a fire in the fireplace, so that at least this place won’t look so gloomy by the time Mara arrives. Whenever that will be . . .

She paused in the doorway, thinking that something, somehow, was different. From where she was standing she could see that all was as it had been the last time she had been there. Still, there was something in the air. . . .

Exactly.

Someone had been cooking with onions.

Frowning, she dropped her bag, preparing to go straight into the kitchen. She turned to close the door and found herself face-to-face with the last person in the world she’d expected to see.

“Oh!” She backed up quickly, one hand behind her searching for the doorknob.

“Don’t,” he said calmly. “Just . . . don’t. There’s nowhere for you to go, no one to hear you if you scream, and all you’re going to accomplish is to aggravate me, which you do not want to do. So . . . don’t.”

Annie’s mind all but froze. How could this be possible? How could he have known about this place?

“I want you to move over there, to the sofa, and sit.” He took her elbow to guide her, as if it were his home and she were his visitor. “Sit right here.”

He led her to the sofa and turned on the lamp that stood on the end table. The light glinted off the tip of the knife that he held in his right hand.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“The more important question is, who are you?” He gently pushed her onto the cushion and stood above her, looking down.

When she did not answer, he chuckled and with the knife, cut the strap of her shoulder bag. He reached in and took out her wallet.

“Anne Marie McCall,” he read aloud from her driver’s license. “There are magazines here with your name on them. You left the message on the answering machine. Was the message for Mara?”

Annie merely stared at him.

“Now, we’re going to establish a few rules here.” He leaned a little closer. “If I ask you a question, you answer. For one thing, it’s the polite thing to do.” Closer still, his harsh whisper raising the hairs on her forearms. “For another, I’ll cut off one of your fingers every time I have to repeat myself. Understand?”

“Yes. I understand.” She nodded, shaken.

“Good. Now I will ask you one more time, with the reminder that this is the only time you will ever get a second chance. Did you leave a message on the answering machine, and was the message for Mara Douglas?”

“Yes. To both.”

“Is she on her way?”

“I believe she is.”

“You believe. You don’t know for certain?”

“I was under the impression that she was driving up here today.” No need, Annie reasoned, to mention that Aidan would be accompanying Mara. There could be an advantage if her captor was unaware that Mara would not be arriving alone.

“But that wasn’t confirmed?”

“No. I couldn’t get through to her on her mobile phone. She sometimes forgets to recharge her battery. But I believe she will be along. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

“What are you to her?”

“I’m her sister.”

“Oh.” He nodded, a smile slowly crossing his face. “I’ve never had sisters before. Well, not at the same time, at least. Could be interesting . . . oh, now, don’t give me that look. You might enjoy it. Well, then again, maybe not . . .”

“How did you find this place?” she asked.

“The information was in a file in a desk drawer at your sister’s house. I figured if she was going to be lying low for a few days, she might come here. Good guess on my part, huh?”

“What do you want with her?”

“Let’s just say our paths were destined to cross.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He pondered the question. “Because I gave my word. And what is a man if he doesn’t keep his word?”

“Who did you give your word to?” she asked quietly.

“What difference does it make?” He glanced at her. “A deal is a deal, no matter who you make it with, right?”

“They know who you are, you know.”

“Oh?” He pulled over an ottoman and sat in front of her. “And how might they have figured that out?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet you do know, Miss McCall.” He opened her wallet again and flipped through it. Something caught his eye, and he smiled, holding up a credit card. “Or should I say Dr. McCall? What kind of a doctor are you, Dr. McCall?”

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Oh, well, shit, doesn’t that just figure?” Laughing, he snapped the wallet closed and tossed it back into her purse. “I finally get my own doctor to play doctor with, and here you’re a goddammed shrink. Well, shit, don’t that just beat all?”

“What do you have against psychiatrists?”

“Well, let’s put it this way. Over the course of my life, I’ve probably spent more time talking to your colleagues than you have.”

“And did it help?” she asked dryly.

Surprised at the remark, he looked at her for a long moment before laughing out loud.

“Well, apparently not, since . . . well, just look at your own circumstances.” He stood up and seemed to be considering something.

“Maybe you didn’t talk to the right person,” she said, still outwardly calm, though inside she was fighting back panic. How to get the knife from him? How to escape? Did he have a gun? How to warn Mara?

“I talked to more shrinks . . . I wasn’t kidding when I said that over the years, I probably knew more shrinks than you. There was the kiddie shrink, then the shrink the courts assigned. Then there was the school shrink, then the one my—” He paused, his face clouding over for a brief moment.

“The one your parents hired?” Annie tried to recall everything she had been told about Channing’s foster parents.

“It doesn’t matter,” he cut her off.

“Of course it does. They cared about you. And you cared enough about them to take their name.” She was going to have to gamble here.

He stared at her. “Now, how would you know all that?” He leaned down into her face. “How would you know about them?”

“Because my employer—that would be the Federal Bureau of Investigation—has developed a deep interest in you. As a matter of fact, they’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about you.”

“You’re FBI?”

“Yes.” She squared her shoulders. In for a dime, in for a dollar. She’d find out soon enough whether full disclosure had been a good idea.

“Well, well. What do you know? The surprises just keep coming fast and furious here, that’s a fact.” He laughed, a short, mirthless snort. “My luck just keeps getting better and better. Now, if worse came to worst, what do you think the FBI would give up for your safety?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, maybe I’ll just have to hold on to you for a while in case I need to find out. But it wasn’t nice of you to lie to me. To pretend that you didn’t know me. Lying isn’t nice.” He ran the knife along her jawline. “I think I’ll save your punishment for later. I want to think about it for a while.”

He gestured for her to stand. “But right now, I need you to come with me.”

“Where?”

“Downstairs. Come on. And please do not make this difficult for me. I’m just not in the mood to get pissed off right now.” He grabbed her arm and turned her around so that she was in front of him. He leaned into her body and whispered in her ear. “You give me a hard time, you’ll make it that much worse for her and for you, understand me? I’m bigger than you and much stronger. You will not overpower me. Unless, of course, you have a gun. Does the FBI give their shrinks guns, lady shrink?”

His hands roamed her body, top to bottom, groping and searching her pockets, her waistband, his breathing coming more and more unevenly.

“I don’t carry weapons,” she told him. “I’m a profiler.”

His hands stopped where they were. “A profiler? Like you see on TV?”

“Yes.”

“Well, hot damn. How ’bout that?” He gripped her upper arms and steered her in the direction of the basement steps. “Well, we can have some fun, you and I. I can tell you a secret or two from my past, and you can profile me.”

“Sounds like my idea of a good time.”

He opened the basement door and turned on the light, then forced her down the steps. At the bottom, he nodded at the room where he’d found the guns.

“Those your guns in there?” he asked, one hand on the door that lead into the garage.

“My grandfather’s,” she told him.

“He a hunter?”

“He was, when he was younger. Later in his life he did more collecting than shooting. When he died, my dad inherited the property, and he moved all the guns down here. He didn’t want them around us kids, didn’t want to look at them.”

“Oh, a real peace-i-fist, eh?”

“My dad was an academic, a math professor. He had no interest in hunting or in guns. He kept them because they had belonged to his father, but he never used any of them.”

“Worth a lot of money, some of ’em, you know that?”

“No,” she replied, though of course she did. She knew exactly what the collection was worth. She’d had a dealer offer her an impressive sum just two years ago, but had declined because Dylan had been delighted with the guns. She’d planned on giving the collection to him as a wedding present.

On their last long stay here, Dylan had spent days cleaning selected firearms, and had even purchased new ammunition for several of the old handguns that he’d had retrofitted. She wished she’d paid closer attention to which ones. She tried to remember which ones he’d taken out for target practice and where he’d left the newly purchased ammo.

“Here.” He motioned to her to precede him into the garage.

“Where are we going?”

“Just here, in the garage. I saw something down here that I need . . . yeah, there.” He took a length of coiled rope down from its hook on the wall and slid it onto his arm, up to the shoulder. “We can go on back upstairs now. You first.”

She eyed the rope and felt her knees weaken. Whatever he planned to do with it, it wasn’t going to be good for her.

“Go.” He nudged her. “And don’t try any of those FBI tricks. Remember that I still have a knife at your back.”

Once upstairs, he turned off the downstairs light and closed the door behind them.

“Into the living room,” he told her. “Stop. Stop there.”

He grabbed first one arm, then the other, and tied her wrists together behind her.

“Sit. There on the sofa, where you were before,” he instructed.

She sat, awkwardly, while he tied her feet at the ankle, sorely tempted to take her chances and kick him in the head. But he was, as he’d pointed out, bigger and stronger than she, and he was armed. By the time she’d decided that discretion was in truth the better part of valor, the point was moot. Channing was on his feet and her ankles were crossed and tied into that position.