“Hello, Dr. Cross,” she said pleasantly as she moved by me toward my office.
Nina wore a hint of jasmine perfume that lingered in the air as I followed her. Inside, she shrugged off her trench coat, revealing a clingy black cashmere turtleneck sweater and snug matching slacks and heels. Gold earrings dangled from her earlobes.
When she sat, she looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes. “I must say, you lead an exciting life, Dr. Cross.”
“How’s that?”
She adjusted her position, crossed her legs, smiled, said, “Last night. Chad Winters and a Russian honcho?”
“Winters told you about the Russian?”
“It was all he talked about, how he and the Russian were tight.”
“He told us the Russian had been very sick.”
Nina studied me in amusement, as if she knew something I did not.
“The honcho was sick. But not his men. They come and go all the time. Chad’s seen them do it.”
“Okay?”
“They have disguises. Makeup. Latex prosthetics.”
“Why?”
“To fool the CIA. Chad says they’re watching the honcho and his men.”
I didn’t doubt it but said, “You’d swear to the FBI about that? What Dr. Winters told you?”
She gave me a look that suggested I was daft and said, “I do work for the Justice Department. If it helps, of course I’d swear.”
“I’ll have Mahoney — the agent you met last night — call you after we’re done.”
“Sure. After we’re done.”
“What am I going to find if I look into Winters?”
She paused. “I believe there was an issue with overprescribing pain meds that he managed to beat.”
I let that sink in. “Okay, can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable.”
Nina cocked her head. “You said this is a safe place. No judgments, right?”
“Correct,” I said. “Last night, before Special Agent Mahoney approached you, was I seeing Nina or Kaycee?”
The barest of smiles crossed her lips. “Guess.”
“Kaycee.”
“She hadn’t decided,” Nina said. “Kaycee, I mean. She hadn’t decided she wanted him. Winters.”
“Because?”
She laughed. “He’s easy. Kaycee stalked him a long time ago.”
“So no risk, no reward?”
“What’s the point to anything if there is no real challenge?” she said, and she shifted again so her sweater moved across her breasts.
“No danger?”
“From Chad? I suppose. There are rumors he’s into pain. Sexually.”
“But you enjoy the dangerous aspects of stalking men like Chad and seducing them.”
Nina tapped a fingernail against her lips and thought about that.
“Maybe,” she said. “But then again there’s always danger when you’re a woman venturing into the unknown.”
“You like the unknown.”
“I’m comfortable there, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Not wary?”
Nina shook her head, causing her ash-blond hair to come loose and fall gracefully across one shoulder. “No, Kaycee is oblivious, but I have a sense for creeps. And besides, as I said, I study them for quite a while before I make my move.”
“You do understand that some people might find a woman stalking men as disturbing as a man stalking women?”
“Would they? I suppose. But it’s not like I’m obsessive or violent. Ultimately, they have free will. The guy always has to make the final move in my little game.”
“You enjoy that moment, when they make the final move?”
“Very much so.”
“What do you feel right then?”
“Desire, of course.”
“Beyond desire?”
Nina twisted her chin slightly, gazed downward and diagonally a few moments, then met my eyes and said, “I guess I feel liberated, a primal woman in her essence.”
“No guilt. No remorse.”
“None,” she said firmly. “No boundaries. I am in the feminine and free.”
“Kaycee is, you mean,” I said.
“I know Kaycee’s spirit.”
“Is that the moment when you feel closest to love? When the man becomes the aggressor?”
“No. That’s later. During.”
“When he’s choking you?”
Nina’s eyes shimmered ever so slightly, as if she were replaying a memory.
“Not always,” she said at last. “But often enough.”
“Where did that come from? The choking?”
Nina frowned slightly. “Where? I don’t know. I think I read about it in a book, The Joy of Sex?”
“How old were you?”
“When?”
“When you read the book.”
Her frown deepened. “I... I can’t remember. In my teens?”
“And when did you first experiment with asphyxiation?”
She turned defensive. “What does this have to do with an inability to love?”
I held up both hands. “You’ve told me that the closest you come to feeling love is during rough sex when you’re choking to orgasm. I’m trying to understand why that turns you on so much.”
Nina looked past me. “I... I don’t know. I just tried it once, and it felt so good, I wanted to do it again. And again.”
“How old were you when you first tried it?”
She squinted, blinked, and then looked at me with slight puzzlement. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Sometime in law school, I think. There was a guy, Bill. We used to hook up, more for stress release than anything romantic. And I just asked him to do it, choke me, and he did, and the rest is history.”
I sat there, giving no response, aware of the clock ticking away and chewing on what she’d told me.
“Let’s change direction,” I said at last. “Tell me about life with your mother after your father died.”
Some of her billowing female essence seeped away. Her skin paled, and her face sagged, weary.
The alarm on my phone rang, ending the session.
Nina looked relieved, brightened, and then beamed at me. “Saved by the bell.”
“Saved by the bell.”
By the time the Justice Department attorney stood up from the chair, she was radiating the feminine again, from her smell to her beauty to her confidence as she put on her coat. Nina extended her hand. I took it, surprised at how delicate it was. She gazed at me with a sweet, intoxicating expression.
“Thank you, Dr. Cross,” she said softly. “Kaycee and I look forward to the next time we meet.”
Chapter 36
Around three in the afternoon, Martin Franks flipped the blinker on his pickup truck and turned right off a state route south of Charlottesville, Virginia. Franks headed west. On the pickup’s navigation screen, he saw that the road ahead climbed into rural, forested country, and he started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son.”
The ex — Special Forces operator liked this scenario. The rural ground. The woods. It brought back waking-dream images of the logger.
Places like abandoned farms, big tracts of timber, they tended to isolate people. That was always good, in Franks’s opinion. Fewer eyes meant more latitude in the games he liked to play.
Franks crossed a bridge above a stream lined with leafless hardwood trees. On the other side of the stream, he crossed a railroad track, and the road surface changed to hard-packed dirt and gravel.
Now it was up to chance, synchronicity, serendipity, three powers Franks was used to cultivating. Franks had once dated a beautiful young woman named Ella. She was his opposite in almost every sense, a pacifist given to hippie clothing who taught him the power of imagining what he wanted and then asking the universe for some sign that his vision was being seen and shared.
This unorthodox approach to life had saved Franks more than once when he was operating in Afghanistan. Every morning and every night on tour, he asked the universe for a warning if danger loomed.