Behind Closed Doors
Shannon McKenna
Copyright © 2002 by Shannon McKenna
All rights reserved.
Prologue
The dream never changed. Her father's sailboat was drifting slowly away from the shore. The clouds were growing darker. Gusts of wind whipped the dark water into a white-capped froth that sloshed up over her feet. Dread lay in her belly, as heavy as a cold stone. She watched the boat drift farther and farther. Lightning flashed. Thunder.
Then she was standing with her father in front of a tall black marble obelisk. His arm was around her shoulders, and his handsome face was pale and grim. He pointed to the obelisk. She realized that it was a tombstone.
A jolt of fear reverberated through her. It was his tombstone.
She leaned closer to read his name and the dates of his birth and death. The grooves in the marble seemed wet and dark. More than wet, they were dripping with dark liquid. It oozed out and snaked down the pale surface of the marble in long, tangled crimson rivulets. Blood.
Horrified, she looked back up at her father, but he was nolonger her father. He had become her Uncle Victor, his cold eyes an electric silver gray, his teeth white and oddly sharp looking. And his heavy, muscular arm was around her shoulders, tightening until she thought her lungs would burst.
She woke up gasping for breath, a scream trapped in her aching throat, and stared wild-eyed into the dark. Trying to breathe, trying to make her hammering heart calm down.
Wondering how long it would take for the dream to drive her mad.
Chapter I
Nine forty-six P.M. Almost time.
The monitor glowed an eerie blue in the darkened room, but the mosaic of windows on the screen remained stubbornly dark. Seth Mackey glanced at his watch and drummed his fingers against the desktop. Her schedule never varied. She should be home any minute.
There were more important things for him to do. He had hundreds of hours of audio and video to filter, and even with Jean’s jazzed-up digital signal processor filters, it still took time to run the analyses. He should at least be watching the beacon displays, or checking the other surveillance sites. Anything but this.
Still he stared at the screen, trying to rationalize away the buzz of hot excitement in his body. The hundreds of hours of digital video footage that he had on file for her wouldn't do the trick. He needed her live, in real time.
Like a junkie needed his fix.
He spat out a curse at the passing thought, negating it. He didn't need anything, not anymore. Since Jesse's death, he'd reinvented himself. He was as cool and detached as a cyborg. His heart rate did not vary, his palms did not sweat. His goal was sharp and clear. It shone in the darkness of his interior landscape, as brilliant as a guiding star. The plan to destroy Victor Lazar and Kurt Novak was the first thing that had aroused Seth's interest in the ten months since they had murdered his brother Jesse. It had rendered him a miracle of single-minded concentration—until three weeks ago.
The woman who was about to walk into the rooms monitored by the screen in front of him was the second thing.
The light and motion activated camera monitoring her garage flicked to life. He tried to ignore the way his heart rate spiked, and glanced at his watch. 9:51. She'd been at the office since 7 A.M. He had watched her on the cameras he had planted at the Lazar Import & Export corporate office, too, of course, but it wasn't the same. He liked having her all to himself.
The car pulled in, the headlights went out. She sat slumped in the car for so long that the camera switched itself off and the window went dark. He cursed through his teeth and made a mental note to himself to reprogram the default from three minutes to ten as he typed in the command that activated the infrared mode. Her image reappeared, a glowing, unearthly green. She sat there for two more minutes staring blankly into the dark garage before she finally got out. The second two cameras snapped on dutifully as she unlocked the door and headed for the kitchen. She ran herself a glass of water, took off the horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed her eyes, clutching the sink for balance. She tilted back her head to drink, exposing her slender, soft looking white throat.
She must be trying to toughen up her look with the glasses. She'd failed, in a big way. The camera he had hidden in the stove clock framed her pale face, her stubborn jaw, the shadows under her eyes.
He zoomed in on her eyes. The straight, winging brows and curling lashes were dramatically dark against her pale skin. He would have taken her for a bleached blonde if he didn't have damn good reason to know that her blond curls were absolutely for real. She closed her eyes. The sweep of her lashes was shadowy against the delicate curve of her cheekbones. Her mascara was smudged She looked exhausted.
Being Lazar's new sex toy must be more strenuous than she had bargained for. He wondered how she'd gotten embroiled with him. Whether she was in too deep to ever get out Most people who got involved with Lazar soon found they were in over their heads. By then, of course, it was too late.
There was no objective reason for him to continue to monitor her. Hacking into her personnel file had revealed that Lazar Import & Export had hired her a month ago as an executive assistant. Had it not been for the fact that she was living in Lazar's ex-mistress's house she might never have come to his attention at all. Lazar's visits to that house had warranted surveillance, and they had been watching it for months.
But Lazar didn't visit the blonde, or at least he hadn't yet. She came straight home from the office every night, stopping only to get groceries or pick up her dry cleaning. The transponder he had planted in her car confirmed that she never varied her route. Weekly phone calls to her mother revealed only that the woman had no clue about her daughter's latest career move, which was perfectly understandable. A young woman kept for pleasure by a filthy rich criminal might well choose to hide the knowledge from her family. She knew no one in Seattle, went nowhere, had no social life that he could discern.
Kind of like himself.
Her big, haunted eyes were silver gray, the irises ringed with indigo. He studied the magnified image, disquieted. She looked... God, sweet was the word that came to mind, even though it made him wince. He had never before felt any moral qualms about spying on people. When he was a kid reading comic books, he'd picked out his superhero mutation of choice right away. X-ray eyes won, hands down. It was the perfect mutation for a paranoid guy like him. Knowledge was power, and power was good. He'd built a lucrative career on that philosophy. Jesse used to tease him about it.
He shoved that thought away fast, before it could bite him.
He had to stay cool and detached. Cyborg man. It was a name for a comic book superhero. He'd always liked those mutant guys in the classic comic books. They were all tormented, depressed and alienated. He could relate to that. He'd watched Montserrat, Lazar's former mistress, with ice-cold detachment Watching her writhe in bed with Lazar had left him unmoved, even a little repulsed. Never once had he felt guilty.
But then again, Montserrat was a professional. He could read it in her sinuous, calculated body language. She wore a mask all the time, when she was fucking Lazar; even when she was alone.