Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

“No danger?”

“From Chad? I suppose. There are rumors he’s into pain. Sexually.”

“But you enjoy the dangerous aspects of stalking men like Chad and seducing them.”

Nina tapped a fingernail against her lips and thought about that.

“Maybe,” she said. “But then again there’s always danger when you’re a woman venturing into the unknown.”

“You like the unknown.”

“I’m comfortable there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not wary?”

Nina shook her head, causing her ash-blond hair to come loose and fall gracefully across one shoulder. “No, Kaycee is oblivious, but I have a sense for creeps. And besides, as I said, I study them for quite a while before I make my move.”

“You do understand that some people might find a woman stalking men as disturbing as a man stalking women?”

“Would they? I suppose. But it’s not like I’m obsessive or violent. Ultimately, they have free will. The guy always has to make the final move in my little game.”

“You enjoy that moment, when they make the final move?”

“Very much so.”

“What do you feel right then?”

“Desire, of course.”

“Beyond desire?”

Nina twisted her chin slightly, gazed downward and diagonally a few moments, then met my eyes and said, “I guess I feel liberated, a primal woman in her essence.”

“No guilt. No remorse.”

“None,” she said firmly. “No boundaries. I am in the feminine and free.”

“Kaycee is, you mean,” I said.

“I know Kaycee’s spirit.”

“Is that the moment when you feel closest to love? When the man becomes the aggressor?”

“No. That’s later. During.”

“When he’s choking you?”

Nina’s eyes shimmered ever so slightly, as if she were replaying a memory.

“Not always,” she said at last. “But often enough.”

“Where did that come from? The choking?”

Nina frowned slightly. “Where? I don’t know. I think I read about it in a book, The Joy of Sex ?”

“How old were you?”

“When?”

“When you read the book.”

Her frown deepened. “I... I can’t remember. In my teens?”

“And when did you first experiment with asphyxiation?”

She turned defensive. “What does this have to do with an inability to love?”

I held up both hands. “You’ve told me that the closest you come to feeling love is during rough sex when you’re choking to orgasm. I’m trying to understand why that turns you on so much.”

Nina looked past me. “I... I don’t know. I just tried it once, and it felt so good, I wanted to do it again. And again.”

“How old were you when you first tried it?”

She squinted, blinked, and then looked at me with slight puzzlement. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Sometime in law school, I think. There was a guy, Bill. We used to hook up, more for stress release than anything romantic. And I just asked him to do it, choke me, and he did, and the rest is history.”

I sat there, giving no response, aware of the clock ticking away and chewing on what she’d told me.

“Let’s change direction,” I said at last. “Tell me about life with your mother after your father died.”

Some of her billowing female essence seeped away. Her skin paled, and her face sagged, weary.

The alarm on my phone rang, ending the session.

Nina looked relieved, brightened, and then beamed at me. “Saved by the bell.”

“Saved by the bell.”

By the time the Justice Department attorney stood up from the chair, she was radiating the feminine again, from her smell to her beauty to her confidence as she put on her coat. Nina extended her hand. I took it, surprised at how delicate it was. She gazed at me with a sweet, intoxicating expression.

“Thank you, Dr. Cross,” she said softly. “Kaycee and I look forward to the next time we meet.”

Around three in the afternoon, Martin Franks flipped the blinker on his pickup truck and turned right off a state route south of Charlottesville, Virginia. Franks headed west. On the pickup’s navigation screen, he saw that the road ahead climbed into rural, forested country, and he started to whistle “Carry On Wayward Son.”

The ex — Special Forces operator liked this scenario. The rural ground. The woods. It brought back waking-dream images of the logger.

Places like abandoned farms, big tracts of timber, they tended to isolate people. That was always good, in Franks’s opinion. Fewer eyes meant more latitude in the games he liked to play.

Franks crossed a bridge above a stream lined with leafless hardwood trees. On the other side of the stream, he crossed a railroad track, and the road surface changed to hard-packed dirt and gravel.

Now it was up to chance, synchronicity, serendipity, three powers Franks was used to cultivating. Franks had once dated a beautiful young woman named Ella. She was his opposite in almost every sense, a pacifist given to hippie clothing who taught him the power of imagining what he wanted and then asking the universe for some sign that his vision was being seen and shared.

This unorthodox approach to life had saved Franks more than once when he was operating in Afghanistan. Every morning and every night on tour, he asked the universe for a warning if danger loomed.

Twice, he had been on the verge of walking into a Taliban ambush. The first time, a kid goat scampered out of hiding, blatting as if a dog were after it.

The second time, Franks had seen vultures flying above a village they were about to enter.

Both times he’d halted his team and waited and watched. In the first case, he saw human movement among the rocks where the goat had run from, and in the second, he’d realized that the carrion birds were there because Taliban fighters had already killed enough civilians in the village to attract them.

“C’mon,” Franks said to the sky and the universe beyond. “Give me a sign here. Tell me I was right to come up this road. Show me a worthy opponent.”

He passed a bungalow in a clearing. A young woman was hanging sheets in a raw wind. Her bundled-up little child, a toddler, really, was booting a little soccer ball.

Franks passed. He had a rule about killing women for sport. He wouldn’t do it. Especially young moms with kids.

He drove on and passed a steel building that housed a machine shop and several smaller homes before hitting a long stretch of forest. He kept hoping he’d see a car or a truck pulled over, and tracks going off into the trees.

That would make things easier. He had a pang of guilt knowing that he shouldn’t have been there at all, that he should have stayed hunkered down at the Mandarin Oriental, focused on his task for the next, what, fifty-six hours?

Franks had found over the years, however, that the closer he got to a commercial job, the more he felt compelled to hunt on his own, almost as if he were—

A Virginia State Police cruiser was pulled off the road just ahead. The lights were on but not blinking. Franks slowed as he passed by and saw a big Asian, late thirties, early forties, with a thick neck holding a coffee cup and a sandwich.

Franks smiled, waved. The trooper lifted his cup.

Franks glanced in the rearview, thinking, What’s he doing way out here? So far from the highway?

And then an idea hatched in his head, and the questions didn’t matter. Whistling, he drove around a bend in the road and turned around. He took off his sunglasses, rolled down the window, put his hand out, waved again, and pulled to a stop opposite the cruiser.

The trooper acted slightly annoyed, but he set his coffee cup and sandwich down and lowered his window.