When Erica awoke, there were voices in the other room, at least one of them sounded angry. She sat up in bed, looking around the room, wondering why she wasn’t in her usual sleeping shorts and tank. She tried to remember last night, but it was a blur, like she’d had too much wine to drink. There was a wine glass by the bed, though it was mostly full. She slipped into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, horrified by what she saw. Her eyes were red-rimmed, with dark shadows below. Her skin was blotchy. Had she been crying? She didn’t remember that, but then, she didn’t remember much of anything. Joann leaving, Eric staying; but then what? She needed – wanted – coffee, but she wasn’t ready to face whoever was in the outer room. She turned on the shower instead.
A great deal of hot water later, she emerged from the bathroom, still with no clearer memories of the night, but at least looking and feeling a little better. She dressed quietly, noticing that the door was just slightly ajar, like someone had peeked in to check on her. The voices in the outer room seemed even more animated. Erica tiptoed to the door in bare feet, listening.
“How the hell did we not know this?” That was Eric’s voice, and it was followed by the sound of papers being slapped down on a counter or table. Someone shushed him. “Do you have any idea what I did to her last night?” he exclaimed, not being shushed in the least.
“Eric, get over yourself,” Joann scolded. “It shouldn’t have been done, but it was. It’s no one’s fault. And more important, it’s given us some valuable information.”
“Sure, if we can ever get at it,” he replied bitterly.
“Time,” someone said softly. Erica thought it might be John. “These things move slow.”
“We don’t have time. She doesn’t have time. What if she doesn’t come back to us?”
You’re the one that’s been hounding her to remember,” Joann pointed out.
If I’d known what she was going to remember…” For a long moment, all Erica heard was the soft rattling of dishes and coffee mugs. She ventured to peek out the door. Eric was sitting at the dining table with his head in his hands. John was in the kitchen, fixing his coffee. Only Joann seemed to be aware of her, and she was staring, and trying not to seem to stare at the same time.
“I was just…” Eric started, but Joann interrupted him.
“Erica, how are you feeling?”
Eric’s head shot up and John spun around. All three of them were scrutinizing her. “What happened?” she asked softly.
“What do you remember?” Joann countered.
Erica shook her head stubbornly. “Tell me what happened,” she insisted. John brought her a cup of coffee and they all watched expectantly as she waited for him to offer the handle in such a way that their fingers wouldn’t touch. She took a sip of the coffee and stared at them, her exasperation obviously growing. She remained standing in the doorway, her only available exit strategy. “Tell me!” she repeated.
“I told you something about my youth and it seemed to trigger a memory for you,” Eric said. “It might not have been a real memory,” he added.
“What? Memory of what?”
“We can talk about that,” Joann said, “But with someone here who knows how to help you. Someone who can help you work through the memories.”
“No!” Erica exclaimed. “Then the nightmares will come back.” She took a step back as if someone had come too close, though John had returned to the kitchen and Eric and Joann had not moved.
“We’re not going to talk about any of that now, anyway, so come and sit down,” John said. “I’m making you some breakfast. Guaranteed to make you feel better.”
It did smell good and that warm, breakfasty temptation was drawing her out of the safe cocoon of the bedroom. She couldn’t help but notice out of the corner of her eye that Eric turned a pile of papers over on the table next to him, but John was extolling the virtues of his pancake and egg breakfast, so she continued on to the kitchen bar. She sat on one of the stools and watched as John refilled her coffee cup. Joann went around the counter, into the kitchen, undoubtedly getting in John’s way, but perhaps remembering what Erica had said about feeling more comfortable with the counter between them.
“Can you tell us what you do remember about your childhood?” Joann asked.
“You tell me what you’ve found out about Juan,” Erica bargained. “It’s Thursday. I’m supposed to be at the airport.”
Joann glanced over Erica’s shoulder at Eric, but he didn’t say anything. “Someone did show up at your apartment yesterday, around five in the morning. He didn’t stay. We think he had an infrared scope and easily discovered that no one was there.”
“And?” Erica prompted.
“We identified him as an ex-marine. He’s known to take contracts with a semi-legitimate mercenary-for-hire type business. They hire a lot of ex-military, mostly do security, bodyguards, move documents or valuables in and out of sketchy countries, that kind of thing. We think they’ve been involved in trying to rescue kidnap victims, things we’d really rather that civilians didn’t get involved in but don’t have a lot of control over when they’re working in foreign countries. Anyway, it sounds like he made a couple more passes last night to see if you were there.”
“Can’t you arrest him?”
“He hasn’t done anything illegal,” John said, putting a plate stacked with delicious looking food on it down in front of her. “That we know of,” he added with a shrug.
“And Juan?”
“That’s more complicated,” she admitted. “We found the ticket. It was purchased by an off-shore proxy in the Caribbean. It was for Dubai.”
“Dubai?”
“We didn’t find any visa applications in your name, so either he was planning on you ending up in a country that doesn’t require visas, or he’s planning on you assuming a false identity at some point. We haven’t discovered that yet. There was a connecting flight out of Atlanta. He may have set it up for somebody to contact you there and/or fly the rest of the way with you.”
“So I need to go to the airport, be on that flight, so you can find out.”
“No,” Eric snapped. “We need to lure him here, or have him send someone that we can actually trace back to him, presumably he would send someone closer to him that he would trust.”
Joann shot him a warning look. “We’re going to have an agent on the plane. Someone who looks like you. If they can pull it off, then we might find something out at the other end. If not, then we still have a chance to lure him in, or make him mad enough to get careless,” she explained calmly.
Erica shook her head. “The best chance you have is if I’m on that flight. You follow or you have Interpol meet it and grab him when he shows himself. If he comes here, you’ll never see him, and I’ll be dead.”
Joann shot Eric a look before he could say anything. “If Juan is smart, and he is, he’ll be holed up somewhere that extradition will be next to impossible. Erica, people have died. If he’s as high in the organization as we think, he could well be subject to the death penalty. Even a lot of our best allies won’t extradite if there is a chance of a death penalty. If Eric is right, and he will come after you, that’s the best chance we have for justice.”
“And my death penalty,” she muttered bitterly.
“Not happening,” Eric spat out behind her. “Get that through your head.”
Erica ignored him. “So why don’t you know how high he was in the organization? If you pulled in most of the ring, someone must be talking.”
“We’re working on it,” Joann assured her. “But they kept information extremely well compartmented. Like some of the terrorist organizations we’ve dealt with. There were cells with certain jobs in certain countries, and they knew hardly anything beyond that.”
“So the cheap bastard was rolling in his ill-gotten loot, and made me pay my own way to Spain last year,” she said with irritation.
“His cover as a photojournalist didn’t exactly make him rich. We might have tumbled to him earlier if he was spending money he shouldn’t have had,” Joann explained.
“You’re going to hurt my feelings if you don’t eat more of that breakfast,” John said, refilling her coffee cup.
“Your turn,” Joann said. “Tell us what you remember of your childhood.”
Erica shrugged uncomfortably. “Hardly anything. My foster parents told me I’d been in an accident and had amnesia.”
“This is when you were sixteen?”
She snorted softly. “Yeah, at least that’s how old they told me I was.”
“You didn’t like your foster parents?”
Erica suddenly began to concentrate on her food. “Like most, they were mainly in it for the money, but they were okay. I heard horror stories from other kids in the system. Frankly they left me alone for the most part, so that was fine by me.”
“You had to spend some time catching up on your school work?”
“Yeah. I guess I was in the hospital or something for a long time. I remember something about hiding books under the bed.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I got caught up and graduated by the time I was eighteen and got a scholarship to UW, so I was able to get a degree with only ten or twenty years of debt to pay off,” she added bitterly. “That was where I met Juan. He wasn’t a student, but he used the photography lab there, like some kind of adjunct to the department. I never got a clear explanation from him.”
“Do you remember anything else about your childhood?” Joann asked.
Erica’s brow furrowed and she turned even more concentration on her food, such that she cleaned the plate. “Kind of like snapshots of what might have been times with my mother. I really don’t know if they are real. They are mostly happy times, like playing at a beach, an amusement park, trick or treating. And playing school. A lot of playing school. Funny that I remember that but not real school, huh?”
“Do you remember your mother’s name?”
Erica shook her head. “Names have always confused me. Like my name. I’m sure Erica is not what the woman that I think was my mother used to call me. Maybe she had a pet name for me.”
“Honey?” Eric said suddenly.
“I told you not to call me that!” Erica snapped, turning toward him but not looking directly at him. When she turned back toward Joann, the agent was – as the saying goes – shooting daggers at Eric with her eyes.
Joann quickly recovered her calming, motherly persona. “Mothers are like that. They often have pet names for their children. I’m sure that’s all it was.”
“Your turn again,” Erica said. “What did you find out about me that you didn’t know before?”
Joann didn’t even try to hide the scowl she shot at Eric this time. Erica could see her searching for careful words. “The memories that Eric triggered last night led us to realize that we needed to pull your juvenile records…”
“I committed crimes as a kid?” Erica exclaimed.
“Not those kind of records,” Joann rushed to assure her. “The records about how you ended up in the foster system. We didn’t think they were relevant before, because it was years later when you met Juan and that’s what we were focused on.”
“But now they are relevant. Why?” she demanded.
Joann straightened and Erica realized she had no intention of revealing anything even before she spoke. “Number one, we don’t know if what you ‘seemed’ to remember last night was real, and number two, we do not want to cause the nightmares to recur.”
“Too late,” Erica muttered and spun on the stool to face Eric. “What did you tell me that triggered my memory?”
His eyes flicked briefly to the FBI agent and John. Erica realized he hadn’t told them or had glossed over whatever he had told her. “I will tell you,” he assured her. “But not until the FBI psychologist gets here.”
“No psychologists!” she shouted, jumping off the stool and stomping toward the bedroom. “I have survived everything on my own so far. I will continue to do so.” She slammed the bedroom door behind her and dove for the bed, burying her face in the soft comforter.
Sometime later, Joann came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, careful to keep distance between herself and Erica. “I know the guy they’re sending,” she said. “I’ve worked with him a bunch of times. He’s really good with childhood trauma.” She paused, hoping for a response. She knew Erica was awake, because her breathing was the rapid, pre-panic attack they’d all become familiar with. “Erica, you’ve survived, but you haven’t healed. You don’t really want to live the rest of your life this way, do you?”
“You’ve guaranteed it will be a short one,” Erica pointed out, her words muffled by the comforter. “So why should I spend what time I have left wracked by nightmares and terror?”
“You are not going to die,” Joann said sternly. “There will be at least three of us here with you all the time from now on. And the Seattle PD is putting more patrols on your apartment and this place. You’re the safest person in the city.”
“Why?” the muffled response was barely audible.
“Why?” Joann asked. “Because it’s that important.”
Erica finally rolled over. “I’m not stupid. If you took this ring down, if it was all but over, there’s no way that you and the police would be putting these resources into protecting little old me from someone who’s in hiding in another country. There’s something more going on and you’re not telling me.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Joann said. “An investigation sort of a secret. We have to be careful not to give witnesses information, because it can color their perceptions, their memories, and that can wreak havoc with their reliability as a witness in a trial.”
“Oh, please,” Erica drawled with exasperation. Abruptly, she stood from the bed and strode into the outer room. John was sitting on the couch with a tablet and looked up in surprise. Erica glanced at the table where the sheaf of papers and Eric had been. Both were gone, but Joann had said there were going to be three people here at all times. Erica turned toward the spare bedroom as Joann followed her in confusion. When Joann realized her destination, she tried to get around her to cut her off, but the FBI agent was petite and Erica was all long arms and legs. Joann was trying to respect her fear of closeness, so Erica made it to the door unchecked and pushed into the room. Eric was on the bed, shirtless, but still in his jeans. He had been asleep, or dozing, but was instantly awake, reaching for his gun on the bedside table even before rolling over to discover the source of the intrusion.
Erica studiously avoided looking at him or his gun as her eyes fell on the small desk in the room. There was a laptop open on the desk and beside it, the papers that Eric had earlier in the morning. Before either of them could stop her, she grabbed the papers and tried to speedread them. Unfortunately, there was a bunch of legalese and redactions, so she got basically nowhere before Eric was snatching them out of her hands. She reached for them, but he easily held them away.
“It’s my life. I have a right to know!” she insisted.
“And you will. When someone is here to help you understand,” Eric said.
Erica made a sound that was somewhere between a moan and a groan. Joann’s arm was around her waist, and she didn’t even seem to notice as the smaller woman pulled her gently but firmly back out of the room. Eric and Joann exchanged a worried glance as the door closed between them. Joann let go of Erica as soon as they were back in the hall. John was waiting at the end of the hall. “Can you get Erica some more coffee?” Joann asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “How about you? Want some more tea?”
“Yes, please. Let’s all sit at the table and talk.”
“Why?” Erica demanded. “Nobody will talk about what I want to talk about.”
When she didn’t move, Joann gently nudged her toward the main room. Again, she didn’t seem to notice the touch, but reluctantly started toward the room. She was moving slowly, and John met her at the entrance to the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee. Joann continued to direct her toward the table, mostly by blocking her route to the bedroom. Erica slouched wearily into a seat and studied the steam rising off her coffee.
“So you three will be here with me all the time?” she asked, not looking up from the cup.
“Us or somebody else,” Joann answered, “usually with someone using the extra bedroom.”
“What does your wife think of that?” Erica asked John with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“My wife understands that I work vice, just like Eric. That it requires unusual hours and difficult circumstances. She accepts that because she was raped once,” he said quietly. “She tells me all the time that anything I can do to prevent that from happening to someone else, has her unequivocal support.”
“I’m sorry,” Erica said shaking her head. “I’m frustrated so I’m lashing out.”
“Why are you frustrated?” Joann asked. “Seriously. I’m not being facetious or mocking you. What do you think is at the root of your frustration?”
“I don’t want to know about my past. Whatever happened is dark and ugly and painful. I know that, and from the way you all are acting, it’s even darker, uglier and more painful than I can guess. Why would I want to remember that? And then there’s Juan. I was stupid to fall in with him. I was stupid to stay with him. And now he’s going to kill me.”
“Why did you stay with him?” Joann asked, ignoring her constant theme of death.
“Because I figured he was the only guy that would put up with someone as fucked up as me.”
“Erica!” John scolded, apparently standing in for Eric.
“Why do you think he did that, put up with you?” Joann persisted.
“I think he liked that I was so fucked up I actually came harder the more brutal he was. That’s what I think!” She made to stand up and leave the table, but Joann reached out and grasped her wrist, noting again that she didn’t withdraw or even seem to notice.
“Erica, we’re your friends. We’re trying to help you. If there’s something at work here, some other reason he’s taken this intense interest in you, it might help us get him.”
“You know something?” she asked, pulling her wrist free, but making no further effort to leave the table.
Joann was obviously choosing her words carefully. “The other night, you kept asking why he wasn’t focused on hiding, why he was risking everything to contact you, bring you to him. Yet you were also convinced that he was going to come here to kill you. Eric thinks he’s obsessed with you. I’m not sure I buy that lust outweighs self-preservation. But I do think all of this indicates we need to explore why he is doing what he’s doing. Please, Erica, sit down. Talk to us. I know we get too pushy sometimes. Hazard of the occupation, but there’s a puzzle here that’s nagging at me, and I think you can help us talk it through, provide some missing pieces.”
“You know more than I do,” she complained, waving toward the back bedroom, but she sat and stared forlornly at her cup.
“Do you want a warmup?” John asked quietly.
“You must be the good cop, huh?” she asked, but with a sad smile.
He smiled warmly back. “I suck at being an asshole.” He took her cup and went around to the kitchen.
“Can you just kind of walk us through when you first met Juan?” Joann asked.
Erica closed her eyes wearily. “It was my last year of college. I was walking down campus to my next class. There was a quiz that day, so I was going over the chapter in my head. I felt like I was being watched, so I looked around.” She shrugged. “It was between classes and one of the main routes through campus, so there were lots of people everywhere. But then a few minutes later, this guy trots up beside me and says ‘You look familiar. Do we know each other?’ I figured it was just a line, so I barely looked at him, but he didn’t look familiar or sound familiar with that Spanish accent, so I just shook my head and walked faster.
“He kept up with me, though, and asked if I was in the photography department. I said no, then he asked if I worked off campus. I mean, it began to sound like he really was trying to place where he’d seen me, so I took another look. He wasn’t all that distinctive looking, and didn’t ring any bells for me. I figured he might have known me during any of the big blanks in my past, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to discuss that with him, so I just said no more emphatically and walked away. He quit following me and I didn’t think any more about it until the next day when I was on my way to that class and there he was again.
“So he stops in front of me and says ‘That must be it, we just have crossed paths at the same time often enough that I remembered.’ Well, that was sounding a whole lot like a line again, but before I could tell him to bug off, he just said ‘See you later,’ and walked off. There were a few more times where I’d see him and he’d wave, or say hi. I even checked and he did seem headed for the photography department, so…”
“And then?” Joann prompted.
Erica cradled the coffee mug John had brought back to her. “Maybe a couple of weeks later, he asked if he could take me to coffee after class. I told him I didn’t socialize. I was just trying to get through classes and get my degree.”
“You did it in three years, right?” John asked.
“Yeah, trying to keep the expense down.”
“Did he pressure you?” Joann asked.
“Not really. He just said something like ‘I hear ya,’ and went on his way. But then, when the holiday week came and we ran into each other on campus, I guess that should have raised alarm bells. I was there because I had no family to go home to. I had just come back from running on the Burke-Gilman Trail and was headed for my dorm. He said something about finishing up a project and asked me to coffee again. It seemed so innocent. I mean, we’d been running into each other for, like, four weeks and he hadn’t been pushy or rude or anything. So, I called my pod mates to let them know I was okay. A bunch of us from the foster system had hooked up, only a couple of them had any place to go for the holiday, and they worried incessantly when I ran on the trail. I told them where I was going, you know, just in case. Then we went to a coffee shop. It was very innocent. He told me then that he was a photojournalist and only loosely connected with the university. Told me about spending summers in Spain. He asked me about family and such, but I just told him I was a foster kid and didn’t like to talk about it. He totally accepted that and just asked me about school and what I wanted to do after graduation. Stuff like that.
“Then, afterward, he was walking me back to the dorm and he asked if he could take me out to dinner some time. That’s when I told him about my hang-up about being too close to another person. That I didn’t date. So, he says he’s got a cousin with the same thing and he totally gets it and promised he wouldn’t take me anywhere or do anything that would make me uncomfortable. And he stuck to that promise. For about four weeks. We went out a couple of times a week, usually to dinner or on a ferry ride, always uncrowded places. He was fun, and funny. It made me feel almost normal to actually go on a date, spend time with a guy. And he really was good about not getting too close, so when he did, by accident, a few times, it didn’t freak me out. I knew it would be okay in a minute. I mean, he never even tried to kiss me or talk about sex or anything. I guess that should have raised an alarm bell, too.
“Then during winter break, he asked me if I wanted to drive up to a relative’s cabin. It had snowed and he had promised to check on it. I didn’t remember getting to see snow much and it sounded like fun. He said he was borrowing a friend’s SUV with studded tires and chains and everything to be sure he’d be able to get in to the cabin and back out again with no problems.” She shrugged. “I said yes. I was convinced by then that he was a total gentleman.
“There was a cabin, in the middle of nowhere, and it had a bed… compete with leather bindings,” Erica rubbed her face, then held her head in her hands, the rest of her words muffled. “He said he could cure me, just the way his cousin had been cured. I tried to fight him. He grabbed me and tossed me onto the bed, but when he tried to undress me I kicked and hit him and ran for the door. I even made it outside, but the snow was too deep to run in.” She took a deep breath. “He had a Taser. I was back on the bed, naked and tied down before I could do much more than just flop around.”
“And that’s when he began touching you all over?” Joann asked.
Erica just nodded miserably. “He sat on me, and touched me, everywhere. I was screaming and crying for him to stop. And then I guess he got mad, because he came up with a leather strap from somewhere and started beating me with it.”
“Hang on a second,” Joann said. “You guess he got mad? Did he say anything to indicate he was mad?”
Erica thought about it a minute. “I think he said something like ‘Here, I’m sure you’ll like this a lot better.’ Like sarcasm, you know,” she said, though with a tinge of doubt.
“And then what happened?” Joann asked.
Erica’s hands dropped into her lap and her eyes followed them, watching as she tried to wipe them on her sweat pants. “I’m going to start some lunch,” John said suddenly, rising from the table.
When he was rattling about in the kitchen, Erica said softly, “I got aroused.” She didn’t doubt that he would still be able to hear her. The apartment wasn’t that big. But it just seemed easier with that bit of distance. “The more he hit me, the more aroused I became.”
“Did he say anything while he was hitting you?”
“I’m not sure,” she murmured. “I was begging him to… fuck me, in between screaming from the pain.”
“Did you mean it, or were you just saying it to get him to stop, trying to say what he wanted to hear.”
Erica wiped at her eyes. “I meant it. It was like the initial pain of the blow would keep me from coming, but the after effect would take me right back to the edge of orgasm, over and over again. I think he kept saying something like “Come, slut,” but I’m not sure. It was all mixed up in my mind. Then eventually he did fuck me and I… came so hard I blacked out. The next day, he did the same sort of thing, except on my back with a crop. That time, I did come while he was hitting me, and later, when he fucked me. After that, it became a game. He would see how close he could bring me with what implement, until I would be hoarse, begging to come, begging him to fuck me, begging him to hit me harder.” She shook her head, not even trying to wipe the tears now. “When he would show up at my apartment, I would grab my favorite crop and drop to my knees in front of him, begging him to use it on me. I’m so fucked up,” she whispered. “I thought I couldn’t come without pain.”
“Until Eric?” Joann asked and Erica looked up in horror, realizing she had betrayed him.
“He didn’t hurt me,” she whispered.
“But he did have sex with you,” Joann concluded.
“He showed me it didn’t have to hurt,” she pleaded. “Please don’t get him in trouble. He was only trying to help me.”
“In all the wrong ways,” Joann snapped, though still keeping her voice low.
Erica shook her head. “If he hadn’t, I don’t know if I could have accepted that what Juan did was wrong, when it felt so right and so… good. He made me feel like I was where I belonged, like I was the slut he called me. I don’t know if I could have done what I did on Skype the other night. I don’t know if I would have been strong enough.” Erica reached out and covered one of Joann’s hands with hers. Despite her training, Joann looked down in surprise and Erica’s eyes followed. She snatched her hand back, then seemed to shake herself. “Please, maybe it wasn’t ethical, but it was what I needed.”
The agent studied her for a long moment. “Eric isn’t our concern. Right now,” she added emphatically. “Juan is. So, tell me more.”
As if on cue, John came over with bowls of soup and a plate of crackers. “Chicken soup. Good for the soul. Except the chicken’s, of course. Do you ladies want anything to drink?”
“Just water,” Erica said, and Joann nodded in agreement. Erica continued her story as John settled back in his place at the table. “So that ‘relationship’ went on for about three months, then Juan had an assignment, some story about North Africa. He was in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. At least that’s what he told me, and he sent photos from time to time. Then he asked me to meet him in Spain, said he wanted to spend some time together and have me meet his grandparents. I flew to Madrid and got a room in the hotel where he was staying. He said his room was full of prints and proofs and his equipment, so it was better to have separate rooms.”
“Did you ever see his room?”
“No. The only extended time we spent together was when we drove to his grandparent’s place. It was a long day trip. Then I flew back and he came back maybe a month later. He was supposedly doing the finish work on his story for the next couple of months, then he was off again, to Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.” She shrugged. “That became the pattern, a few months here, a few months in some faraway place. Until this last time. First he wanted me to come to Paris, then, well you know the rest.”
“You told him you’d have to quit your job?” John said.
Erica dropped her eyes. “We have PTO at work. I took that week last year to go to Madrid, but there was a lot of other times I had to take…”
“When he put you in the hospital?” he asked.
“Yeah. The doctors wouldn’t let me go back for five days. And then there were the days when he got… carried away. I didn’t have any time left. And I have no seniority. This is a really good company to work for. When you come up in the foster care system, you learn never to throw any opportunity away. Except now here I am, not working. They’ve probably cut me loose already.”
“Don’t worry about that,” John assured her. “Can you tell us about the concussion? What set him off?”
“I don’t know,” Erica said with a faraway look in her eyes. “I mean, he was mad when he arrived at my apartment. Like, at me, but he was fine the night before.”
“What did he do?”
“He walked in and he hit me, umh, backhanded, I think it’s called. I fell on the floor, and he said something like, ‘Your little friend has screwed me for the last time.’ I had no idea who he was talking about. I was trying to scoot away from him and calm him down, so I was saying, ‘Just tell me who and I’ll fix it, I promise.'”
“And he said?” Joann prompted, when Erica seemed to become lost in thought.
“He said, ‘That weasley-assed accountant. You know who I’m talking about. The one that was smuggling you the books.'”
“And what did you say then?” Joann tried to rush the story along, but Erica was on a different tangent.
“The books I hid under my bed,” she said in wonder as the faint memory replayed in her mind. “School books. He brought me school books!”
“One memory at a time, Erica,” Joann cautioned. “Juan was mad about the accountant. What did you tell him?”
She came back to that discussion with obvious reluctance. “The only accountants I knew were at work. It didn’t seem like Juan would have anything to do with them. I was totally confused, but Juan seemed to think that I should know who he was talking about. I took a chance and said, ‘I’ll talk to him. I’ll get it all straightened out.’ Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say, because the next thing I know, he’s screaming at me, ‘Are you fucking him? Are you fucking that little weasel?’ He grabbed my tee shirt and yanked me to my feet, but the material tore and I fell back down. He acted like I’d done it on purpose. He pulled me to my feet by my hair and that’s about the last I remember. I woke up in the hospital. Juan was sitting by the bedside and there was a nurse gushing about how wonderful it was that my ‘brother’ had come all the way from Spain to be with me. The hospital staff seemed to think I’d been mugged and almost raped.”
“When was this?” John asked.
“Right before he left for Bosnia, Serbia, wherever he was this last time. He kept extending that trip, then called about Paris.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to someone at the hospital,” Joann said.
“Say what? I couldn’t remember what happened. Story of my life!” Erica suddenly looked over to the hall where Eric stood, listening. She had no idea how long he’d been there. John and Joann seemed just as surprised.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I thought you might like to go for a run.”
Erica stood up eagerly, but Joann protested. “That’s not on the protocols.”
Eric scowled. “None of this is. If they can stick us in a second floor apartment with only one exit and call it safe, they surely can’t argue with a quick run on Queen Ann hill.”
“I can follow in the car,” John offered.
“Put your running shoes on,” Eric said with a nod at her bare feet. “And a hoody would be nice.”
“Eric,” Joann said with a warning glare.
He simply gazed back at her until Erica had disappeared into the bedroom. “Would you rather she be obsessing about what’s going on at the airport?” he asked softly. “You know damn well that agent is not going to fool anyone. Not the contact Juan arranged, not anyone he’s got watching, not the security cameras he’s probably hacked. And not Erica. Which would you rather; a healthy, tiring run on one of Seattle’s more picturesque hills, or yet another panic attack? Besides, that psychologist of yours should be here in the next hour. If she comes in from a run, she’ll be relaxed and more open to talking with him.”
Joann sighed. “Keep her safe. And keep your hands off her.” Eric smiled and raised his hands in surrender.
“Scout’s honor,” he said. Erica came out of the bedroom just then and gave him a peculiar look but said nothing.
“We running?” she asked.
“It’s not Green Lake, but it will do. Come on. John, you following?”
“Be right there. Which way you heading?”
“West, toward the Sound.”
Eric took Erica’s arm and led her toward the door. She didn’t even flinch. Outside, she trotted eagerly down the stairs and began stretching when she reached the parking lot. “You’re very eager,” Eric commented.
Erica shrugged, turning her face toward the breeze blowing off the Sound. “Running makes me feel normal.” She pulled her hood up. Eric reached up and tucked a stray strand of hair under the fabric, letting his fingers linger against her cheek with a puzzled frown. She simply continued to watch a ferry in the bay that was just pulling out from the docks.
Eric smiled. “This is Seattle. I’m pretty sure normal is in the minority. You want to go uphill or downhill?”
“It’s all uphill or downhill,” she complained.
“I believe that’s why it’s called a hill,” he pointed out. “Let’s go this way,” he said, pointing to the west, which at least was less steep than the alternatives, angling up toward the crown of the hill. Erica started off at a slow pace and he easily fell into step beside her.
“Be nice if I had my music,” she grumbled.
“Want me to sing?” he offered.
“No! Please.” She glanced over at his teasing smile. “I have to tell you something.”
When she didn’t continue, he asked, “What?”
“I screwed up.”
He waited a moment. “We all do, sooner or later. Tell me about it.”
“I was telling Joann about Juan. When we first met. How he beat me with a strap.” She trailed off again. Eric glanced over at her and noticed the moisture gathering at the corner of her eye. He reached out and stopped her, then gave a signal to John, who had been following them in the car.
“You told me about that. Is there more? Did you remember something else?”
“Please don’t be mad,” she said, avoiding his eyes as she wiped her palms on her sweatpants yet again.
“Why would I be mad?” he asked with a puzzled frown.
“I was trying to tell her how fucked up I was.” His frown turned to a stern one, but he didn’t say anything, giving her time to continue. “I told her… I said ‘I had thought I couldn’t come without pain.'”
Eric nodded in understanding. “And she immediately realized I was the one who changed that thinking for you,” he concluded.
Erica nodded miserably, sneaking a peak at him and was surprised that he didn’t seem mad or angry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Erica, she’s a profiler. It’s her job to figure people out. Perps, victims, witnesses.” He reached over and raised her chin. “She figured it out long ago. You didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know.”
“But your job?”
“She’ll decide what she will and won’t report. I have no regrets, and I hope you don’t either. Now tell me how it is that I’m standing here, touching you, and you don’t even seem to notice.”
Erica took a quick step back, just realizing how close he was. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
“I do. It’s because you’re letting us in, opening up to us, beginning to share your secrets. It’s because you are beginning to trust us. That’s all. It really is that simple. And that hard all at the same time. Come on, if we don’t get moving, John’s going to fall asleep.”
Erica stared at him for a moment longer, then turned and began running up the hill. As the climb grew steeper, she had to keep reminding herself that the way back would be all downhill, but she pushed on, enjoying the fresh air and illusory sense of freedom the run was giving her. When she was finally ready to give in to the demands of her weary legs, even Eric seemed to be breathing a little harder, and she grinned to herself in triumph. All too soon, though, her home away from home was coming back into sight.
They returned to the apartment about an hour later. Joann was on the phone, but cut the conversation short. A man was sitting on the couch and stood as they entered. Erica glanced at him, then did a double-take, as she realized he must be the dreaded psychologist. “Oh, no,” she protested, heading for the bedroom door. But Eric was already there, blocking the way. “You planned this,” she accused.
“Yup,” he agreed. She scowled and headed for the apartment door, but John was just coming in, shutting it behind him and leaning against it. She swung around toward Eric again, glaring at him.
“Erica, I’m Doctor Maxwell Templar. Max. I’m not here to pick you apart and put you back together. I just want to talk. Let’s sit down.”
She kept her back to him, studiously ignoring him, staring angrily at Eric. She felt, rather than saw, the man approach her, and then his hand gripped her elbow. She gasped and whipped her arm out of his grip, spinning around at the same time. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled, her eyes meeting his unusual, almost teal colored irises. Erica gasped for a second time, and stumbled back into Eric’s arms, fainting under the onslaught of yet another memory.