Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [125]
Caroline’s teachers were more difficult to hide from. They sent her to psychologists who wanted to probe the inner workings of her mind. She spit in their faces and left school. There was no scandal, no possibility of consequence, her father saw to that. Not out of love or concern; it was a knee-jerk response.
Finally, her parents, or what passed for them, woke from their self-inflicted torpor and insisted that she “get help.” After six months of planning, while remaining unresponsive to the shrinks’ various techniques, she vanished—completely, utterly, irrevocably. It had taken her that long to ensure that when her father sent his hired minions after her, they’d never be able to find her. She used computers to help her, erasing not only her tracks, but all trace of Caroline Lynette Carson.
Taroq had the endurance of a Tantric practitioner, but she knew how to bring him to his limit. The pounding was now so intense tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d had enough of this particular scenario, so she squeezed her inner muscles with such force that Taroq emitted a deep groan, despite his innate caution. She smiled at her pale reflection in the window, superimposed over the Syrian, all unknowing, as he sat, deep in the discussion of men, to which she was excluded.
She was still a teenager when she had found the Syrian. Or perhaps he had found her, it was difficult to say. The point was that they had discovered a common ground, a place where the chaos of life made sense to both of them. On the same wavelength, they began to work together—tentatively at first, each wary of the other. But, at length, there sprang up between them a working relationship of sorts. It was, by necessity, clandestine. Each for their own reasons, neither of them wanted the relationship known, and so it became their most closely guarded secret.
Then, either by accident or by design, someone found out about it and all hell had broken loose.
Behind her, Taroq spent himself, and with a flick of her hips and shoulders she shook him off her. His legs folded up beneath him and he slid down onto his haunches, leaning against her legs. Without either thought or emotion, she ran her fingers through the moist warmth of his thick hair.
“Habibi,” he said, still panting, “one of these days you will surely be the death of me.”
* * *
CHIEF DETECTIVE Heroe sat in her office, for the fifteenth time poring over report after report on the three murders and the disappearance of Agent Naomi Wilde, which she believed to be the fourth murder. Her gut told her that all four were connected, and yet, she could find no tangible evidence to link them. She’d sent her people out to interview all of Warren’s friends and associates. She herself had run down his public history on government databases and had scrutinized every file on his hard drive at work. A more squeaky-clean individual would be hard to find.
This same crew was now in the process of running down all of Naomi Wilde’s friends and associates. Grabbing her coat and pocketbook, Heroe left the office, went down to her car, and took off. She was due to interview Wilde’s sister in less than an hour from now, but she doubted that would lead anywhere. The woman’s husband had just left her and she was a basket case.
She weighed the merits of making another unannounced visit to M. Bob Evrette at Middle Bay Bancorp before or after she hauled Andrew Gunn’s ass in for questioning. The forensics detail she had