Mesmerizing Stranger

Chapter 12

“Well, darn, Cate.” Purdue sounded as easy and amiable as an old friend who’d just stopped by. “I hope you didn’t burn yourself.”

“You scared the wits out of me!” Instinctively, Cate bent down, brushing at where the hot coffee had splashed on her bare legs. But she barely felt the burning liquid. If anything, she felt suddenly cold from the inside out. Acid cold.

Sour cold.

So cold she could taste it in the very back of her throat.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Purdue took another step toward her. “I didn’t expect anyone to be in the building. There was no other car parked in front. Nothing but the usual security lights on that I could see when I first came in.”

“I’m parked in back.” Of all the insane things to talk about. She pushed at a coffee spot on her black dinner dress-as if that wasn’t an insane thing to worry about, too. Cripes, he was probably going to kill her. Who cared if she had a dry-cleaning bill? It was just…Purdue didn’t seem any more dangerous now than he had before.

He looked tired, of course. Travel tired. But he was wearing a crisp-enough white button-down shirt over jeans, labeled sandals; his hair was neatly brushed, his thin black glasses adding to his look of Ivy-League cool. His smile still had charm. His confidence still glowed.

He was still annoying.

He let out another quiet bark of a laugh. “I just can’t get over it. Of all the people I might have expected to find here, much less at five in the morning, it never crossed my mind that you might be one of them.”

“That certainly goes both ways. I thought you and Yale were on the same flight, not getting in for hours yet.”

“Yeah, that was the last plan…but I was willing to upgrade to first-class, just to get home sooner.”

“And after all that traveling, you came right to work, even in the middle of the night.”

He nodded. She figured out why she felt so cold now. His eyes, his gaze, centered on every movement she made, every expression on her face. But behind those black-framed glasses, his eyes seemed as blank as black ice. Of course, she might be cold for another reason.

Like being scared out of her wits.

“Naturally, I came here. I suspect the rest will show up as soon as they can conceivably get here. We’re all concerned about finding answers to our little lab mystery. Why don’t you sit down, Cate? You look as if you’re about to fall down anyway.”

Aw, hell. She was a lousy pretender, and sooner or later she was going to put her foot in her mouth, anyway, so might as well get it all over with. “You’re not here to look for answers,” she said. “You don’t need to do that. You already know the whole story-because it’s your story, isn’t it? You’re the one.”

He didn’t bother responding, just motioned to the mess of papers on the carpet in front of Fiske’s desk. “I take it that you’re the one who’s been putting all this stuff together.”

“Yes.” She wasn’t sure if he realized Harm was in the building. Surely, he couldn’t believe Harm would leave her here alone in the middle of the night? But…she’d turned off the light in Harm’s office. If Purdue had just been looking around, he wouldn’t have seen any other sign of life but her. In the one office he was the most interested in: Fiske’s.

“Well, you probably think you know a whole lot, then, don’t you? But you’d be wrong. It’s not what it looks like, Cate. I didn’t steal a damn thing.”

“Right. That’s why you’re here before daybreak. Because you were just trying to be helpful for the team.”

He met her eyes. “Look at me. Look at my face. I did not steal anything. That’s the truth.”

Silently, she studied him. Clearly, she was never going to make it as a judge because he looked as sincere as an innocent kid. He was a pain, yes, but as far as she could tell, he wasn’t lying. Still, even believing him, her stomach was suddenly twisting and her heart thumping a wild, petrified drumbeat. “All right,” she said.

“All those papers on the floor-I didn’t have time to really look at what you’ve been putting together there. But it doesn’t matter. No one will ever find proof that I stole anything. Because I didn’t.”

That sure sounded as if he were protesting too much, Cate thought, but she could hardly credit that judgment. Just then, she wasn’t sure she had enough judgment to wad a BB gun. The fluorescent overheads reflected on Purdue’s face, gave his skin a plaster cast. One second, her heart was screaming, Harm, for God’s sake, wake up and find me! and in the next second, she was scared witless that Purdue would quit talking-and definitely quit playing nice-if he knew Harm was here, so she didn’t want Harm awake at all.

So that was the thing. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t stop feeling creeped out. Couldn’t stop feeling keening sad that she’d never told Harm she loved him, and darn it, that she owed her sisters e-mails, and unless something brilliant happened-something she hadn’t thought of yet-she could well be dead before this was over and Purdue gotten away scot-free with even more than he already had.

“How did you get in?” she asked. “I thought this place was wired so secure that nothing and no one could get in.”

“It is. But I’m one of the few who have to get into the lab at all hours of the day and night. Naturally, Harm changed all the codes and security arrangements after the so-called theft. But it wasn’t hard to break into the new system. Harm…he’s got that military background, but overall, he just can’t seem to help thinking like an honest man.”

“Yeah, that’s a big fault of his,” Cate readily agreed.

“Where I have a scientist’s mind. I love puzzles. I love logic. Figuring out the new codes was no tougher than the New York Times Sunday crossword. Move aside, Cate.”

He didn’t have a gun-or any other weapon-in sight. But when he crouched down, his gaze darted from the papers she’d spread out to her face. Whatever he saw in those quick glances to the records she’d put together never changed the expression on his face. But he reached in his pocket and pulled out a book of matches.

She only had one button that couldn’t be pushed, that she had no defense for. And he just found it. “Wait,” she said.

“Just step back. How about if you sit in Fiske’s chair behind that big old comfortable desk. Relax. Nothing terrible is going to happen.” He straightened up, keeping his eyes on her face, and moved a few steps to locate the wastebasket under the desk. He dumped out its contents, then carried the basket to the center of the floor. “Cate. You’ve got a real skittery look in your eyes. Chill. You don’t want to make me do something we’d both regret. Nothing bad has to happen. To you, to me, to anyone.”

The wastebasket wasn’t a standard issue metal basket like offices usually had, but was leather, with gold-embossing. A gift someone had given Fiske, she thought. Which was very nice, except that the surface was a ton more flammable than a metal container. “There are a bunch more papers,” she said desperately.

Purdue, about to bend down to stuff papers in the basket, abruptly shot his head up. “Where?”

“All over.”

He made a sound of disbelief. “Yeah. Right. But just for the record, I really would like to know how you came across all this stuff. Where was it? It’s not as if I hadn’t looked before. Hell. We all looked. Lawyers looked. Cops looked. Everyone looked.”

But Cate suspected they’d all been looking for some kind of direct evidence to the cancer formula. She wouldn’t have been able to identify that if her life depended on it. All she’d been able to notice was the change in Fiske’s handwriting-the slant, the pressure of ink-that indicated Fiske was upset about something.

But she didn’t waste time telling Purdue that, because she couldn’t imagine he’d believe her. Until she saw his reaction to her collection of notes and papers, she hadn’t been all that positive she had anything that important besides.

“Purdue,” she said, “there are more records and papers all over, in different files and drawers and computer records. I’d just started looking and come up with this much.” She added quickly, “I could help you look for more.”

His hands shook, but it didn’t stop him from heaping all the records she’d collected into the leather wastebasket. Then he patted his pocket, looking for the book of matches again. His good-looking features seemed waxier by the minute. She couldn’t see madness or meanness in his face, but for certain there was exhaustion. Bone-deep exhaustion. End-of-his-rope exhaustion.

He was so tired she wasn’t sure what he’d do…or what he was capable of.

“Listen,” she said urgently, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why you did whatever you did. But I’m sure you had a good reason. If you explained to Harm what happened-”

“I didn’t steal anything! I told you that!”

“Okay, okay, take it easy.” She tried to remember how to breathe normally. “Tell me. How I can help you?”

Wrong question. Wrong, wrong, wrong question. She was used to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but sheesh. His jaw tightened as if it had suddenly been wired.

“You want to help me? You could have helped me by not being in this office. By not finding any of these records. By not being in the middle of this. I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt Fiske. I never wanted to hurt Dougal. It just got out of control. One mistake, and everywhere I turned, it multiplied. It got so messed up I didn’t know what to do, how to make it right again. How to make anything right again.”

“Tell me,” she said, and took a tiptoe-quiet step back toward the door. Something about his face, his expression, had changed. She was gut-scared now. Soul-scared. Any options she thought she had, Cate now figured were out the window. She only had one. To get out of there.

“My mother…I couldn’t do anything wrong in her eyes. But my dad was a real different story. Growing up, I couldn’t please him to save my life. Beat the hell out of me, any excuse he could think of. Only then I got a full scholarship to Purdue, and it all changed. It wasn’t just that I’d grown up, got too big to hit. It was more like…I’d gone to a place where he didn’t want to hurt me anymore. He got off on telling neighbors and friends that I was brilliant. Perfect. Turned into the ideal son. Doing something. Only I couldn’t live up to it. Who can be perfect all the time? It’s not like I went looking to screw up. It just happened. It was wrong, but it was just a stupid mistake. It just…it got out of hand so fast. Yale, he was right next to me, he didn’t know what was going on. He hasn’t got a brain. You’d think coming from Yale, he’d be the smart one, wouldn’t you?”

He seemed to expect her to agree with him, so she carefully nodded. “You’d think,” she echoed.

“Yeah. But he wasn’t. I was the smart one. And that was the thing. It could all have disappeared. No one would have figured it out. The formula really was gone, and it was going to be a mystery that no one could ever solve.”

“Purdue-please, please don’t do that-” She saw that he’d found the matchbook again, had flipped it open to snap off a match. “Don’t set a fire. Please.”

She didn’t tell him that her parents had died in a fire, that visions of those flames, her mom’s cries, her dad silhouetted in the dark window were in all her nightmares. She never told anyone, and she’d certainly never reveal such a vulnerable thing to him. But…she couldn’t breathe, looking at the book of matches.

Purdue glanced at her, diverted by her tone, but only for a couple seconds. “No reason to get your liver in an uproar. All I’m doing is burning these papers. They don’t prove anything. They just look like they prove something. They look like someone’s guilty of something.”

“And you’re not guilty,” she said, trying to appease him, to calm him.

“I’m not guilty of stealing. Just of making a mistake. That’s all it started out to be, a stupid mistake. I wish the old man, Dougal, hadn’t figured it out. But after that, I didn’t think anyone would get it. I could quit worrying. I was going to be right here, doing my job, nothing different for me. You’re right, though, Cate.”

“Right?”

“After I burn this round, I’ll keep looking for more papers. How far’d you get?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes seemed to be burned open on that matchbook, the match, his shaking fingers.

“Well, whatever else there could be still has to be in Fiske’s office. He was the only other one who figured it out. He cornered me on the boat. He still didn’t actually know what he’d found, but he knew it was wrong, knew some things hadn’t added up, knew it was about me. I wasn’t thinking about the peppermint, until you made those cookies. I saw how he loved ’em. It was a dentist who told me about this guy, how he’d burned up his throat just trying to make a toothache go away, took too much, didn’t know. I never wanted to hurt Fiske. I loved him, we all did. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I swear-”

“Purdue, please. Please don’t-”

He ignored her. Cate wasn’t positive he was even talking to her by then; he seemed to be muttering to himself. And she was only half listening, because she couldn’t hear him. All her concentration focused on him striking the match. It was an old restaurant book of matches. The first one didn’t spark.

He pulled another match from the book, tried again.

She saw the tiny flame…and flew. Flew at the flame, flew at him. She crashed a knee at the corner of the desk, saw the startled surprise in Purdue’s eyes, kept going.

The match flamed out, dropped, somewhere in the seconds when she dived on top of Purdue. They both tangled to the floor.

“Harm!” she screamed, but could barely get his name from her throat before Purdue reacted. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, tugged, wrenching every hair root on her head.

“Harm!” she screamed again.

Harm woke up with a jolt, for a moment disoriented by the dim room and crunchy leather couch beneath him. In an instant, of course, he recognized his office at the lab, and swung to his feet.

He could only think of one conceivable reason why he could possibly feel rested…

Cate had let him sleep.

Alarm hustled his heartbeat. She’d never really gotten it, that danger wasn’t like on TV where the bad guys always behaved in identifiable ways. Even good people could do unforgivable things if they were pushed to the wall. He’d known that forever. Just couldn’t nail which of the men had been pushed past the breaking point, no matter how hard he’d tried, and damn, but there was too little time left.

Rolling his shoulders to chase out some stiff kinks, he aimed first for the restroom and second for the coffee machine.

Five-ten, his watch claimed. She’d let him sleep for hours.

He figured he’d pour two fresh cups, one for her-even though he was going to yell at her when he delivered it.

And that was when he heard her muffled scream.

Both mugs clattered to the floor. He turned the corner at turbo speed, saw the door to Fiske’s office was closed, added up the bad news on instinct.

He backtracked, hit the security button just inside Arthur’s office-because it was the closest one-then sprinted toward Fiske’s. All the doors automatically locked when they were closed-yet another security measure he’d put in-but now it took him blasted, insanely long seconds to jab in the key code. He knew it, knew every key code in the whole damned place, but his usually terrific memory jammed up. Finally, finally, he heard the final click, then yanked at the doorknob.

He didn’t stop moving, didn’t have to, saw Cate’s body twisted half on, half under Purdue’s, and leaped in.

His hands clawed at Purdue’s shoulders, startling him, offering Harm a second’s advantage. It was all he needed. He yanked Purdue off, slammed him against the desk.

Cate yelped, scuttled out of the way, but it wasn’t over.

Something in Purdue sensed that he had nothing left to lose. Harm could see it in his eyes. He was desperate and cornered, and when he launched himself back at Harm, he went straight for the throat.

Harm twisted, went for a knee shot, but Purdue only gripped tighter, squeezed harder. Harm punched his weight into a roll, battered him back against the desk in a shattering head-knock, but Purdue still clawed tight around his neck. Harm saw red, then white, couldn’t find any air anywhere, anyhow.

But giving up wasn’t a choice. Giving up would have left Cate alone with a madman. That couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t happen. He twisted, stabbed, kicked. One of the kicks finally connected, because he heard Purdue gasp and loosen that nail-tight grip on his neck, just a little-but it was enough.

Harm jerked back, gasping for air and aiming a punch at the same time…only to see a picture frame crack on Purdue’s head. Glass shattered in a shower of tiny splinters. Purdue fell back, blood streaming from the gash on the side of his head.

Harm sank back, momentarily wrung out as much from relief as needing a minute to let his body recover. He wanted to laugh at the sight of Cate still bending over Purdue with the broken picture frame in her hands…but humor was really the last thing on his mind.

He met her eyes…and slowly lifted a hand.

She met his eyes…and slowly lowered a hand.

Their fingertips touched. Just the tips. The most basic communication that it was over, they’d both survived it, they were together. In that instant, in that crazily tender connection, Harm found a soul mate like he’d never imagined.

Then came the smiles. “Are you all right?”

Her hands were shaking. Her new black dinner dress had a sharp rip. A bruise was already coloring on her cheek and upper arm. But she answered the real question that mattered. “Fine. Ready to party,” Cate said. “You?”

“Couldn’t be better.” His throat felt raw-burned. His still couldn’t work up any volume in his voice, was starting to feel swelling in a knee and right hand. “Although I seem to be hearing sirens.”

The place was flooded with people by daybreak. Three carloads of police had showed up, along with an ambulance. Harm suspected that any high-level crime must be mighty rare in Cambridge, because everyone and his mother arrived to help, even if it was barely dawn on a Sunday morning.

Cate was separated from him for a while. He wasn’t sure who took her off or to where. The two ambulance medics seemed to think he needed some first aid-and for damn sure, Purdue did. The lead cop was a woman. She identified herself as Smythe, had some experienced life lines on her face, and came across as a one-woman army-efficient, cool, unshakeable. She pulled up a chair between him and Purdue.

“Something tells me this is too complicated to get any quick answers to,” she said.

“You’ve got that right. The bottom line is that Purdue-whose real name is John Henry Swisher-” Harm motioned to Purdue, who’d barely moved since the medic bent over him “-is a murderer, thief and embezzler. Although it’ll take a while to get it all laid out in black and white.”

For the first time, Purdue spoke. “Connolly. Harm. I need to talk you-alone.”

“You think? If I ever get you alone, you turkey, your face will never be that pretty again. You hurt Cate.”

“She jumped me. She was on top of me. She hit me with the picture frame. I didn’t do anything to her-”

“You pushed her off the top deck in Alaska. Did you forget that?”

The medic finished swabbing the side of Purdue’s face with something purple and started applying gauze. Purdue started to deny the accusation and swallowed instead.

Harm, never long on patience, jumped him-or almost did. The cool-eyed lieutenant’s face carefully got in his way. “I can do far more damage than you can,” Smythe promised him.

“You could also leave the room for just a couple of minutes.”

But Purdue wanted to keep talking. “Harm, whatever you think, at least let me set part of the record straight.”

Harm figured he was just going to hear excuses. He didn’t want to hear them. He was still seeing sick-red from mental instant replay of Cate struggling with the jerk, her eyes drenched with fear, her face pale with it. He didn’t doubt she’d jumped Purdue. He didn’t doubt she’d jump a bear-or a whale. Damn woman had more courage than an army.

But she wasn’t used to dealing with criminals.

Hell, none of them were. “There never was a formula, Harm. That’s the thing. The cure for pancreatic cancer-we never had it. We were close. We’re still close. Your uncle was so positive that we’d turned a corner, finally found the right track. Yale and I were here, night after night, doing trials…”

“Just spill it out,” Harm gruffed. All right, he couldn’t help but listen. And the lieutenant was certainly engaged. But since nothing was being recorded, nothing really counted-at least not in a court of law, where it mattered. So all Harm really wanted out of life right then was Cate. He wanted her in sight. Within touching range. Immediately. Nonstop for the next thirty years, give or take an extra thirty.

Still, Purdue was willing to confess. And for the sake of his uncle and everyone else involved in the lab, Harm really did want to find out whatever happened that turned this extraordinarily wonderful place into a nightmare.

“One of those nights, I was exhausted, really wiped, so I took a little something to stay awake,” Purdue admitted. The medic finished with the bandaging and started packing up the first-aid gear.

“You mean some kind of amphetamine?”

“Don’t tell me you never did anything in college,” Purdue defended.

“I never did anything in college,” Harm said. “Just go on with the damned story.”

“The thing was…I must have dropped some. I did drop some. Into the formula we were working on.”

Harm frowned, listening hard now. “How much? What exactly was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“The hell you don’t.”

“No. This is the thing. I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, it was morning, and Yale had just gotten to work, so had your uncle…and they were shaking me, waking me up, all excited, because the trial I was finishing up the night before had worked. Really worked. The results were everything we’d ever dreamed of. Only…I didn’t realize about the accidental addition into the formula until I got home, looked for my bottle, and there was nothing in it. The top was even gone, so I knew it had spilled.”

“Are you talking one pill, two, what?”

“It was a mix of different things. Several different things. I drove back to the lab immediately that same night. I looked everywhere. You know how things were locked up in that back lab. No one had been in there, not cleaning staff or anyone else. So if I could have found the pills…but I didn’t…because there was nothing to find. They’d become part of the formula. No one knew that but me, and I obviously couldn’t tell anyone.”

The lieutenant had clearly made a choice to stay silent, to let Purdue confess all he was willing to without distractions, but now she interjected. “What exactly are you talking about here? One specific amphetamine? Or a mix with cocaine or E or-?”

“It was a cocktail. A mix of different things. I’d gotten it before, from a friend I knew. A friend who’d given it to me before.”

“But you don’t know exactly what was in this cocktail?”

“No. I was exhausted that night. And after that…I just didn’t know what to do. It all just…exploded. Everybody was so happy with the success. Everybody believed we got the dream, a cure for one of the worst cancers there is. Everybody thinking we were all going to be rich. But because of it all, Dougal suddenly tripled the security on everything. Nobody worked alone on anything after that, even for short periods of time. The idea was to protect us all, make sure we were watching out for each other, not because he didn’t trust us to work alone. But by then, Dougal, he wanted everything exactly right, verifiably right, so there were two people on every procedure we did…”

Purdue raised stricken eyes to Harm. A boy’s lost eyes. “The work I did here…it was the best thing that ever happened to me. My father…growing up, he was meaner than a snake to me, to my mother. That never changed until I got into college. It’s not like I was still afraid of him after that. It was more like…I could taste the revenge. No one in the family had gone this far, certainly not him. He started telling everybody how good I was, how important-”

Harm shook his head impatiently. “That story would have worked on me-and I know my uncle would have listened. If you’d just come clean when this happened.”

“But I’m telling you why I couldn’t. No one knew. I was the only one, and it was just a mistake. I never intentionally did anything wrong to the work. In fact, I was part of the reason we’d gotten so far-”

“Only then my uncle died.” Harm knew the next sequence in the story.

“I had to get to that formula. I had to make it disappear. That’s all I wanted to do. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted it to disappear before someone discovered that the formula on paper would never work again. It wasn’t really stealing, Harm. I didn’t gain from it. I was just trying to make my mistake go away.”

Harm figured Purdue’d be happy to spew out more excuses until the cows came home. He interrupted with something that had preyed on his mind for weeks. “You killed my uncle.”

“No. No. That was accidental. Completely accidental. We were alone in the lab, early one morning. He was so happy. This was what he dreamed of, the only thing in life he really wanted, not for the money, but the cure. But he couldn’t understand why we’d been unable to duplicate the one perfect batch, you know? So that’s why we were in there so early…”

“And?”

“And…I thought I could tell him. At that point, I knew I had to tell him. He was suspecting that something was wrong. He was going to figure it out-he’d been involved in the trials and experiments for more years than any of us. He could see something was off, was analyzing, trying to pin it down…so I told him because I had to. I thought maybe even he’d understand. Only then…”

“You killed him.”

“I didn’t. He…just…fell to the ground. He started crying like a kid. Then he started holding his chest. He wasn’t that old, you know? I swear I didn’t actually realize he was having a heart attack-”

Harm listened for another ten minutes. But then he’d heard all he could take.