Mesmerizing Stranger

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-”