Kiss (29 page)

Within the hour she had settled into a La Quinta, parked behind the Denny’s next door, and sat on the end of the bed to read the sheet she had stolen from Dr. Harding’s file.

It was dated seven years earlier and appeared to be some kind of preemployment psych evaluation. Or maybe just the summary. Handwritten. Perhaps the notes that preceded the report.

Dr. Harding, in cryptic psych lingo, identified Wayne Spade as a young business professional with experience in international markets, primarily in Asia. There was no mention of a family history, just a glowing statement of his mental and emotional health.

Shauna read the document a second time, more carefully, and paused at this: “Detected some residual resentment re: indebtedness to TW, i.e., effacement of military record.”

TW. Trent Wilde?

Effacement of the records—the AWOL business? Trent had done Wayne some favor to cover that up, and now Wayne owed him?

She’d have to ponder that one.

At the bottom, Dr. Harding had written in red pen:
Approved for clearance.
Whatever that meant.

Shauna fell back onto the bed, lost in her indecision. Every trustworthy option but one had been stripped away.

And was Landon McAllister trustworthy? Or was he just another man who’d stooped below the most base moral standards to achieve high levels of power?

There was a time in her life when he would have intervened to save her from predicaments she’d dropped herself into. There was the time a classmate in high school stole a paper Shauna had written on
The Scarlet Letter
, then accused Shauna of plagiarizing her. The injustice of the accusation tilted Shauna into an uncharacteristic fit of violence—though she was no demure Hester Prynne, either—and she punched the girl in the arm hard enough to leave a mark.

She received an F on her paper and a week-long suspension. Landon had to pay a personal visit to the principal to prevent her from being expelled.

But he had believed her side of the story.

Shauna wondered what he would believe of this.

When had he stopped intervening? When would he have stopped Patrice from making her outrageous, slashing accusations and defended his own daughter?

Shauna couldn’t recall ever having felt so isolated.

And afraid.

She examined the disconnected puzzle pieces spread out on the table of her mind.

A botched murder attempt.

A dead photographer.

An estranged journalist.

A hovering killer.

A collection of cryptic e-mails.

An annual report.

She took a mental walk around the table and looked at the pieces from all angles. She sat at the table. She stood and leaned over it. She turned the pieces around.

Until there it was: the beginnings of plausible sense. Miguel Lopez had cracked a story that Wayne and Trent did not want the world to read. A story that could topple MMV? It had to be big. Corbin knew the story and had planned to tell her. Remind her. Against Miguel’s wishes? Miguel’s silence was making more and more sense.

Miguel understood what was at stake. The options were truth and death, or life in the shadows. And yet he’d chosen to hide within two hours of his old life. Why would he stay so close to danger?

And more questions, so obvious she wondered why she hadn’t asked them first: What was her involvement in all this? Why did Corbin need to tell her the story? Why did Wayne need to watch her so closely?

Because she already knew the secret. Somewhere, lost in the labyrinth of her mind, she knew.

The expanding light shone on several empty spaces in the puzzle. She knew which pieces fit here.

An argument with her father.

A violated trust on the part of her uncle.

An election year.

A record-breaking profit margin.

Shauna pinched the bridge of her nose and knew.

McAllister MediVista was funding her father’s campaign.

Perhaps not legally.

Somewhere in the pages of the annual report—
the problem is in the
profit-sharing structure . . . the subsidiary on page 72 has no public record—

The hotel phone rang, and Shauna gasped. Seven o’clock. She stared at the phone.

Who would call?

Wayne couldn’t have found her here.

She checked her cell phone. It was still turned off.

The phone rang a fourth time and Shauna moved to the blackout drapes, drawn across the window. She looked out, half expecting to see Wayne’s leering face on the other side of the glass.

She saw only parked cars. No wine-red truck.

The phone was still ringing. Nine? Ten? She’d lost count.

It was possible the last occupant had requested a wakeup call that hadn’t been disconnected yet.

It was . . . possible. At seven in the evening on a Tuesday.

Ridiculous.

Angered by her runaway fear, Shauna marched around the bed and snatched the phone off the base. She pressed the receiver to her ear but didn’t speak.

“This is the last time I let you out of my sight, babe.”

Wayne. Shauna dropped the handset and snatched up her purse. In two steps she’d reached the door. She couldn’t get it open. The dead bolt. She fumbled, threw it, and raced down the hall for the exit onto the rear lot. If Wayne had talked the concierge into ringing him through, he would be in the lobby.

How had he found her? Her car? She would have to find another way out of Corpus Christi.

Shauna hit the door running and burst through. From the corner of her eye she saw a form lunge, then a body hit hers. Arms seized her around the waist and lifted her off the ground. Her momentum caused them both to spin. She saw a black cell phone hit the sidewalk and skitter across the concrete.

She smelled Wayne, breathing hard in her ear. He chuckled, holding her an inch off the earth while she kicked out.

“Good to see you, Shauna.”

26

Trent greeted Shauna by opening the door wide for her at a hotel suite several miles away. “I’m glad you could make it, sweetheart.”

Wayne shoved her into the room. A seating arrangement of sofa, love seat, coffee table, and chair filled the center of the room. A poker table took up one corner, and a wet bar, one wall. In a second she registered overstated décor: three chandeliers, South Pacific blue carpet, filigreed picture frames, and heavy draperies.

Wayne crossed his arms and said, “It would help us to know exactly how much you’ve learned, Shauna.”

“I don’t understand,” she pleaded with Trent. They wouldn’t know yet that she knew about him.

“Considering that you’re not shocked to see me here, I’d say you do.”

She was an idiot! “You two haven’t exactly been telling me the truth yourselves.”

Wayne said, “Very little of anything I said to you was a lie. I tried to protect you—”

“You tried to kill me!”

Wayne’s eyebrows shot up. “Spoken like a woman whose mind has been playing tricks on her. I tried to
save
you. But you wouldn’t let me. You should have let me. You should have done what I said. Things would be so much more painless if you would take our advice.”

“And I told you she wouldn’t,” Trent said. “So now that you both have done things your way and made this situation far worse than it ever needed to be, we’re going to do it my way.”

“Uncle Trent—”

“Shauna.” He held up a hand in front of her face. “You know I love you like a daughter. But some values in this world stand higher than family.”

“Values like political power? Money? Greed?”

“Values like putting health within reach of the world.”

“At what expense? How dirty is the money that’s making this possible?”

“Shauna, sweetheart, calling it
dirty
is looking at the ethics from an upside-down perspective. Your world is so much more black-and-white than the one the rest of us live in. Maybe I can help you see things from a fresh point of view. Now, you know I would give my life for you. But I expect you to be willing to do the same when duty calls.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that Wayne and I expected more cooperation from you, after all our efforts, but we have been disappointed.”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“Accept what is, sweetheart. Don’t try to change it. Don’t try to reconstruct it or remember it.” He lifted his hand and stroked her hair. “We’ve gone to so much trouble for you.”

His touch chilled her.

“All I wanted was to believe I wasn’t the one who hurt Rudy.”

“What does it matter who did it?” Trent asked. “That’s what I mean, Shauna. Things are what they are. Knowing how it happened doesn’t change anything.”

“It would change what Landon thinks of me.”

Trent chuckled. “I doubt anything would change what your father thinks of you, my dear.”

“You have nothing to fear from me,” she whispered. “I honestly don’t remember anything, and what I’ve learned doesn’t make sense.”

“You’ve made plenty of sense to both of us over the last few days,” Trent said. “But maybe we’ve misunderstood. Why don’t you explain?”

She could not think of anything to say but the truth, and yet the truth was utterly unconvincing. She might say,
A journalist I knew dug up a story about
MMV, and you wanted it buried.
But then they would want to know how she learned about the journalist, if she didn’t remember him; how she figured out that there was a story. Anything she could explain would bring harm to Miguel. Even to Khai.

“First tell me why I don’t remember.”

Trent smiled. “MMV is a pharmaceutical research company come of age in an era where people are begging to forget their lives. They want to leave their pain behind them, Shauna, and they have been self-medicating with addictions that don’t really help. Now we have the real technology to make it possible. Considering what is available to you, I myself am stunned to see you running headlong into a past you could abandon.”

“I noticed you left your meds back at the house,” Wayne said.

“I didn’t have time to pack,” she spat. Would they force her to continue taking the pills? Would they continue to wipe out her recall?

“We gave you a clean slate,” Wayne said. “We gave you the opportunity to re-create the truth of your life. To believe whatever you wanted to. Do you know how many people
want
this and can’t have it yet? You could be a little more grateful.”

“You stole from me,” she said. But the accusation was weak and impotent.

“There you go again,” Trent said. He turned to Wayne. “We give and give and give, and she stands there and accuses us of stealing.”

“You stole from me, and from Rudy,” she said. “From Corbin, and from Miguel. And from who knows how many other people.”

“What I’m curious to know—for the sake of the drug trial reports, of course—is how you know about Miguel Lopez, seeing as you claim not to remember him.”

Heat flared in Shauna, not for having been cornered now, but for all she’d lost, and for all everyone else had lost at the hands of this god-sized ego that she’d once trusted.

“I can steal too,” she said.

“As can anyone,” said Trent.

“But I steal memories. Wayne’s memories told me about Miguel Lopez.”

The men exchanged glances. She leaned toward Trent’s face. “But Wayne won’t remember what they told me. Put that in your report.”

Using plastic ties, Wayne cuffed her to the pipe under the vanity sink.

“Is this really necessary?” she asked.

“Being nice to you didn’t work.”

“You didn’t mind getting a few kisses out of it though, did you?”

Wayne cinched the ties tighter than necessary to prevent her hands from slipping out. If she moved the wrong way, they might cut her skin.

He left, and she heard the low tones of Trent’s voice in the living area.

She imagined they pondered their most current dilemma. Certainly their lives would be simpler if she were dead, and yet neither man had spoken of killing her, and deep within her, she believed it was because they couldn’t—that something worse would befall them than the possible exposure of what she had pieced together so far.

Something that Miguel had engineered.

After all, her stolen memories weren’t exactly eyewitness testimony, and she couldn’t imagine how they would hold up in a court of law.

Also working in her favor was her claim about stealing memories. Wayne seemed easy enough to persuade, as if her explanation, wild though it was, struck right at the heart of his own questions about what was going on. Trent was the skeptic, and her suggestion was outrageous. Even so, she was pretty sure Trent saw her, at the very least, as a valuable test rat.

More frightening than the possibility of her death, however, was the likeli-hood of a fresh drug regimen. A stronger dose. How did this stuff work? Could she believe anything the bushy Dr. Carver had told her? After all, he was on Trent Wilde’s payroll. Was it possible for them to administer the drugs at any time, or only after a trauma? Did she have to be in a coma for it to work?

Or—and her mind darkened at this possibility—was it possible that her coma was drug induced in the first place?