At the top was written
'Are you crazy?' Patsy gasped.
Given the present location and context of their conversation, Harry had to laugh at her choice of words. 'Peter was nice enough to tell me exactly what you were worth. I'm leaving you a million… which you'll probably need to pay that slick lawyer of yours. He looks expensive. Now, I'll need cash or a certified check before I testify at your trial. Otherwise I'll have to share with the court my honest diagnosis about your condition.'
'You're blackmailing me!'
'I guess I am.'
'Why?'
'Because with this money I can afford to do some good. And help people who really need helping.' He nodded at the bill. 'I'd write that check pretty soon — they have the death penalty in New York now. Oh, and by the way, I'd lose that bit about the food being poisoned. Around here, you make a stink about meals, they'll just put you on a tube.' He picked up his attache case.
'Wait,' she begged. 'Don't leave! Let's talk about this!'
'Sorry.' Harry nodded at a wall clock. 'I see our time is up.'
Beautiful
He'd found her already.
Oh, no, she thought. Lord, no…
Eyes filling with tears of despair, wracked with nausea, the young woman sagged against the window frame as she stared through a crack in the blinds.
The battered Ford pickup — as gray as the turbulent Atlantic Ocean a few hundred yards up the road — eased to a stop in front of her house in this pretty neighborhood of Crowell, Massachusetts, north of Boston. This was the very truck she'd come to dread, the truck that regularly careened through her dreams, sometimes with its tires on fire, sometimes shooting blood from its tailpipe, sometimes piloted by an invisible driver bent on tearing her heart from her chest.
Oh, no…
The engine shut off and tapped as it cooled. The dusk light was failing and the interior of the pickup was dark but she knew the occupant was staring at her. In her mind she could see his features as clearly as if he were standing ten feet away in broad August sunlight. Kari Swanson knew he'd have that faint smile of impatience on his face, that he'd be tugging an earlobe marred with two piercings long ago infected and closed up, leaving an ugly scar. She knew his breathing would be labored.
Her own breath in panicked gasps, hands trembling, Kari drew back from the window. Crawling to the front hallway, she tore open the drawer of a small table and took out the pistol. She looked outside again.
The driver didn't approach the house. He simply played his ail-too familiar game: sitting in the front seat of his old junker and staring at her.
He'd found her already. Just one week after she'd moved here! He'd followed her over two thousand miles. All the efforts to cover her tracks had been futile.
The brief peace she'd enjoyed was gone.
David Dale had found her.
Kari — born Catherine Kelley Swanson — was a sensible, pleasant-mannered twenty-eight-year-old, who'd been raised in the Midwest by a loving family. She was a natural-born student with a cum laude degree to her name and plans for a Ph.D. Her career until the move here — fashion modeling — had provided her with both a large investment account and a chance to work regularly in such pampering locales as Paris, Cape Town, London, Rio, Bali and Bermuda. She drove a nice car, had always bought herself modest but comfortable houses and had provided her parents with a plump annuity.
A seemingly enviable life… and yet Kari Swanson had been forever plagued by a debilitating problem.
She was utterly beautiful.
She'd hit her full height — six feet — at seventeen and her weight hadn't varied more than a pound or so off its present mark of 121. Her hair was a shimmery, natural golden (yes, yes, you could see it flying in slow motion on many a shampoo commercial) and her skin had a flawless translucent eggshell tone that often left makeup artists with little to do at photo shoots but dab on the currently in-vogue lipstick and eye shadow.
That her spellbinding beauty could be a liability was a lesson she learned early. Young Cathy — she didn't become 'Kari' the supermodel until age twenty — longed for a normal teenhood but her appearance kept derailing that. She was drawn to the scholastic and artistic crowds in high school but they rejected her point-blank, assuming either that she was a flighty airhead or was mocking the gawky students in those circles.
On the other hand, she was fiercely courted by the cliqueish in-crowd of cheerleaders and athletes, few of whom she could stand. To her embarrassment she was regularly elected queen of various school pageants and dances, even when she refused to compete for the titles.
The dating situation was even more impossible. Most of the nice, interesting boys froze like rabbits in front of her and didn't have the courage to ask her out, assuming they'd be rejected. The jocks and studs relentlessly pursued her — though their motive, of course, was simply to be seen in public with the most beautiful girl in school or to bed her as a trophy lay (naturally none succeeded, but stinging rumors abounded; it seemed that the more adamant the rejection, the more the spurned boy bragged about his conquest).
Her four years at Stanford were virtually the same — modeling, schoolwork and hours of loneliness, interrupted by rare evenings and weekends with the few friends who didn't care what she looked like (tellingly, her first lover — a man she was still friendly with — was blind).
After graduation she'd hoped that life would be different, that the spell of her beauty wouldn't be as potent with those who were older and busy making their way in the world. How wrong that was… Men remained true to their dubious mission and, ignoring Kari the person, pursued her as greedily and thoughtlessly as ever. Women grew even more resentful of her than in school, as their figures changed, thanks to children and age and sedentary lives.
Kari threw herself into her modeling, easily getting assignments with Ford, Elite and the other top agencies. But her successful career created a curious irony. She was desperately lonely and yet she had no privacy. Simply because she was beautiful, complete strangers considered themselves intimate friends and constantly approached her in public or sent her long letters describing their intimate secrets, begging for advice and offering her their own opinions on what she should do with her life.
She grew to hate the simple activities that she'd enjoyed as a child — Christmas shopping, playing softball, fishing, jogging. A trip to the grocery store was often a horror; men would speed into line behind her at the checkout stand and flirt mercilessly. More than once she fled, leaving behind a full cart.
But she never felt any real terror until David Dale, the man in the gray pickup truck.
Kari had first noticed him in a crowd of onlookers when she was on a job for
People always watched photo shoots, of course. They were fascinated with physiques they would never have, with designer clothes that cost their monthly salary, with the gorgeous faces they'd seen gazing at them from newsstands around the country. But something had seemed different about this man. Something troubling.
Not just his massive size — well over six feet tall with huge legs and heavy thighs, long, dangling arms. What had bothered her was the way he'd looked at her through his chunky, out-of-fashion glasses — his expression had been one of familiarity.
