What is prosopagnosia?
MADISON OPENED her eyes slowly. The lids seemed unusually heavy, as if they’d been glued shut. Her throat was parched and her tongue was like a wad of cotton. What was wrong?
She slowly became aware she was in a dark room. Then she remembered being in the subterranean garage at Holbrook Pharmaceuticals with Garrison. She’d smelled something funny, slightly sweet. Suddenly a rag covered her face and she’d melted into a soft blackness.
Oh my God! Garrison had done something to her. She realized her ankles and wrists were bound with tape. A wave of panic swept through her and left her trembling. Her heart kicked strong and fast but she was almost breathless.
Where was she? In the building somewhere? Her terrified brain tried to think but it was difficult. No. Garrison must have taken her somewhere. That’s why he’d lured her to the garage.
Unless she could pull off a miracle, she was as good as dead. Icy fear gripped her. Paul. Her mother. She loved them so much. She didn’t want to die. Tears stung her eyes as terrified images of the ways Erin and the other donor-conceived children had died filled her brain. Get a grip. Don’t you dare cry. It won’t help.
Suddenly, light flooded the room, blinding her. She squinted and through the slits of her eyes saw Garrison coming toward her. The smile that had deceived her so often was plastered across his face, bigger than ever. A Cheshire cat grin. She choked back a frightened cry, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing how terrified she was.
“Nice nap?”
“Where am I?”
“My place in the Keys.” He stood over Madison, studying her as if she were some rare specimen. “I told you I wanted to show you an experiment. Well, it’s here, not in the lab at Holbrook Pharmaceuticals.” He took a pocketknife and slit through the duct tape around her ankles, then yanked it off. He snapped the knife shut and returned it to his perfectly creased linen trousers.
The skin on her ankles burned, but that was the least of her problems. “Why? Why?”
“You really want to know?”
“Of course I do.” Madison swung her legs to the floor so she could sit up. She hated having him loom over her. She tried to appear calm but a spasmodic trembling in her chest made her feel weak. If she could get him talking, she might think of something or Paul might discover she was missing and start a search. A long shot, she decided. She’d told Rose Marie that she would be gone four hours. A quick glance at her watch told her it was one-thirty. No one would miss her until around three, if then.
She noticed her purse was on the nightstand, but there wasn’t anything in it that could save her. She couldn’t get to it anyway with bound hands. Her cell phone was off, otherwise it would send a signal and Paul could locate her using those radio waves. Assuming he was looking.
“You want answers? You got it. My father is a piece of shit. He never paid any attention to me or Savannah. Then I discovered the surgical glue. Did he help his only son? Hell, no. He stole my idea and made millions.
“He neglected his family like you wouldn’t believe. My mother had her charity work and Savannah but I had no one. No one. It wasn’t until my father became an old man that he spent time with us. Well, by then it was too late. Savannah had her own life, her own business, and I had mine.”
The bitterness in Garrison’s voice surprised her. He’d skillfully concealed his feelings with a caring tone all the other times he’d talked about his father. She’d foolishly believed Garrison loved his father the way she’d loved hers.
“I thought Wyatt backed another scientist who was further along with the surgical glue. It would have taken you years.” Why was she discussing this with a lunatic? To buy time; it was the only chance she had.
“If he’d thrown his resources behind me, my glue would have been ready in no time. Trust me, Wyatt Holbrook thinks only of himself.” Anger flared in Garrison’s eyes. “When my father became ill, I wasn’t one bit sorry. And I damn sure wasn’t sorry that my liver wasn’t compatible with his. What did he do when neither of his children were suitable donors? He went after the donor-conceived children. He never cared one bit about them until they were of use to him.”
“I can’t help your father. I’m not related. There’s no reason for you to do this.” She hated the pleading tone in her voice and doubted it would do any good with such an insane man, but her life was at stake.
“True, and that almost saved you.”
“Almost?”
“You had to wheedle the position at the foundation out of my father, didn’t you? You took my office on the executive floor. Did you really think I wanted to be shuffled aside to the lab?”
His sinister laugh caused a knot to instantly form in her chest. How could she have thought Garrison to be a kind man who loved his father? Was she so easily deceived?
“I didn’t wheedle anything. It was his idea, not mine.”
“If you say so. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“Did you kill Erin Wycoff?” If she was going to die, she wanted to know the truth about her best friend.
“Bingo.” He pointed a finger like a gun at her and fired. “She was a tough one. She put up a fight, but I finished her off. Keith Brooks Smith was another fighter. I hit him with a dose of chloroform the way I did you. He thrashed and kicked the wall. Damn near got me caught, but in the end, I prevailed.”
She was going to have to fight, too. That was her only option. Her eyes darted around the room. A guest bedroom, apparently. The mirrored closet doors reflected her image. Her lime-green linen dress appeared to have been wadded up like a ball of paper then smoothed out. It was hopelessly wrinkled. Her hair, always unruly, looked as if she’d been in a wind tunnel. She didn’t recognize the face in the mirror. It was almost as if she had prosopagnosia, a rare condition where a person didn’t recognize their own reflection. But this wasn’t a rare condition; it was fear.
Garrison had said something about showing her an experiment. That must mean he wasn’t going to kill her right here. She had some time and needed to think clearly. Don’t allow panic to muddle your brain.
“Come on.” He grabbed her arm. “You don’t want to miss my experiment, do you?”
She lashed out to kick him in the groin with both feet. She was unsteady and he was too quick. His hand clamped around her still-sore ankles and he yanked her off the bed. She landed on the wood floor, striking her tailbone. Pain shot up her spine and stars exploded in her head.
“You won’t get away with this.” Her voice cracked from the pain. “Paul will track you down. I promise.”
“He isn’t that smart.” He roughly hauled her to her feet. “Let’s go. The lab is in the garage.”
She screamed, screeching at the top of her lungs.
“Shut the fuck up. There’s no one to hear. Don’t you think I would put tape on your mouth if I had neighbors nearby? How stupid are you?”
Plenty stupid, she thought or she would have caught on to him.
PAUL SAT beside his father in the helicopter they’d rented and prayed his instincts were correct. His father had put together a backpack for each of them with a variety of supplies, while Paul had changed into spare jeans and a T-shirt that his father kept at the office. He’d needed tennis shoes. On the way to the airport, they’d stopped by a store, dashed in and bought shoes in Paul’s size without trying them on first.
“That’s Big Pine Key ahead,” the pilot told them through the headsets.
Almost to Key West, Paul thought, where my mother lives. Please, God, he silently prayed, don’t let me find my mother just to lose the woman I love. Don’t let me have guessed wrong about this.
Big Pine Key was one of the larger islands in the chain of small keys that trailed off the tip of the Florida peninsula from Key Largo to Key West. It had a few homes on it but it was mostly a wilderness of scrub pines and gumbo-limbo trees. Thickets of mangroves lined the banks of the island. Crocodiles preyed on the otters and raccoons. Occasionally, they downed a key deer. The miniature deer had become such a tourist attraction that when one appeared along the side of the road, people stopped to take pictures and traffic backed up for miles.
An aerial shot of Big Pine Key on Google Earth had shown them exactly where Garrison’s home was located. It was right on the water with a boat dock nearby. It wasn’t large. Three bedrooms and an oversize garage connected to the house. Paul’s father thought that might be where his laboratory was. If the asswipe even had a lab. Who knew what he really did out here?
His father tapped his shoulder and pointed to the laptop he’d brought with him. Paul couldn’t talk to his father over the noise of the engine. His headset only allowed communication with the pilot. The satellite that updated Google Earth had passed over the area again since they’d last looked. Now there was a black SUV parked in front of Garrison’s home.
Yes! Paul thought, silently congratulating himself. He’d been right. The maniac had brought her here for some reason that made sense to a deranged mind. But was she still alive?
A wave of apprehension coursed through him. What would he do if Madison was dead? His stomach clenched tight. He’d tear that bastard Garrison Holbrook apart with his bare hands.
They’d instructed the pilot to drop them off some distance from the house and not to fly anywhere near it. They didn’t want to alert Garrison. The chopper touched down, spooking a flock of birds that exploded out of the mangroves into the afternoon sky.
They hopped out and waved the pilot away. The chopper rose upward, leaving a swirl of dust in its wake. The put on their backpacks and ran through the thicket toward Garrison’s house.
“THIS IS MY LAB,” Garrison said, and there was no mistaking the pride in his voice.
The room had been converted from a four-car garage. It appeared to be as up-to-date as Holbrook Pharmaceuticals. Several computers lined the counter. One screen was running, numbers scrolling down with amazing speed. In one corner was a stainless-steel vat the size and shape of a bathtub. A faintly metallic smell hung in the air.
“I’m running a computer trial on a sea fungus I discovered,” he told Madison when he saw her looking at the computer. “It’s a fungus that could kill cancer in humans.”
“What about that bat saliva? Were you making it up?”
He smiled. Why hadn’t she detected the evil lurking behind his smile? “No, but you don’t know shit about science. You aren’t qualified to head a foundation. The saliva is already in advanced trials in Germany. It should be on the market next year.”
“Your father said neither you nor Savannah wanted to run the foundation.”
“The bastard never asked me.” Pure venom dripped from every word. “He assumed I wanted to continue with my own work. I do, but I intend to head that foundation. The prick wants to hand the foundation over to a half sibling who turns out not even to be related to him?” He shook his fist in her face. “Know how that makes me feel?”
“Why not just kill him? What on earth did you gain by killing innocent people?”
Again the twisted smile. “I like watching dear old Dad die day by day. Hope springs eternal, you know. He hoped you would be able to save him. Know what he told me? The old fart thought he saw himself in you. He was oh, so positive you were his child. I actually thought I had the biggest thrill when you told him that you weren’t his child. I believed it was better than killing you. Then you went after the job.”
“I swear I didn’t.” She barely recognized her own desperate voice.
“Doesn’t matter. Know what I learned about myself?”
She couldn’t imagine, didn’t want to know but if she stood a chance of surviving, she had to stall for as long as possible. She had absolute faith that Paul would figure this out and come after her. “What did you learn?”
He touched her chin with his index finger. “I enjoy killing. It’s a high that makes sex seem ordinary. Devising different ways of murdering people to elude the police gives me a major charge.”
Oh my God! She could only imagine what he had in store for her.
He nudged Madison forward. “Here’s what I wanted to show you. A very promising experiment.”
She took baby steps but soon she was standing in front of the stainless-steel tub. The metallic smell was wafting up from the red liquid. Beneath the surface was a stainless-steel mesh net. Her skin crawled as she looked at it. There was a piece of something submerged, just visible on the stainless netting.
“This is an enzyme made from the red tide. My discovery. It’s one hundred times more powerful than any man-made acid.” He pointed to the small black piece on the net. “Yesterday that was a hundred-and-twenty-pound German shepherd. Great dog. Adopted him from the pound.”
Her stomach, already churning with anxiety, heaved. She saw a dog like Aspen in the vat of something more powerful than—she wasn’t up on acids—lye. Tears stung her eyes until the vat swam through her field of vision.
“In another hour there will be nothing left. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Amazing thing about Neptune’s Treasure Chest, it keeps on surprising me. This solution dissolves everything—even teeth. There won’t be one trace of you left for your beloved Paul to find.”
Madison gagged on her own bile and brought her bound hands up to her face. She couldn’t imagine a more horrible death. Drowning in acid, then dissolving. Why hadn’t she told Paul she loved him when she had the chance? All the things she should have said streamed through her mind.
“The only things I’ve discovered that the red tide acid doesn’t destroy are stainless steel and Vaseline. Some things take time for it to dissolve, but it loves to eat people. Takes no time at all.”
“You don’t think I’m just getting in there, do you?”
“Of course not. I’m going to dose you with more chloroform and put you in the vat myself. I put you in the SUV, then hauled you into the house. No problem. But first I have to put on a full hazmat suit in case you splash. One drop of that acid will burn a hole in my clothes, my skin.”
Holding raw panic in check, she said, “Could I leave a message on my mother’s answering machine? I want to say goodbye and tell her how much I love her.”
His cackling laugh split the air. “You really think I’m stupid. You call your mommy from my phone. Later the police can hit star sixty-nine and get back to my phone.”
“No, no. I’m not underestimating you one bit. My cell phone is in my purse in the bedroom. I would use it. I would call the guesthouse and leave a message on that machine. She’d get it later.” Her voice cracked. “After I’m gone.”
He gazed at her with a sardonic expression that sent another chilling wave of panic through her. Madison knew she was minutes from an unbelievably gruesome death.
“Please let me call her,” she begged in a pathetic voice. “If you knew you were going to die, isn’t there someone you would want to say goodbye to?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“I love my mother. She suffered through my father’s death from cancer. She just came home. I haven’t seen—”
“All right! Shut your fucking mouth.” He grabbed her arm so hard that she almost cried out, but stopped herself in time. She had to make this one last call.
They trudged down to the bedroom. Garrison found her purse and pulled out the cell phone. He switched it on, saying, “What’s the number? I don’t know the guesthouse number.”
Madison told him the number. She’d been hoping he’d let her dial. She planned to call Paul’s cell and pretend she was speaking to her mother. She was going to get in Big Pine Key so he would know where to look. Not that she wouldn’t be half-dissolved when he arrived, but she didn’t want the bastard to get away with killing her.
Garrison handed Madison the ringing phone. Using both bound hands, she held it up to her ear. It kicked over to voice mail. “Mom, it’s me. I want to tell you—”
Ding-dong! The doorbell rang.