A Profiler's Case for Seduction(82)

All he wanted to do now was get to the hospital as quickly as possible and be there when Dora opened her eyes. He needed to assure himself that she was going to pull through and that the nightmare that had struck the small town of Vengeance, Texas, and her was finally over.

* * *

Dora awoke in a hospital bed alone in the room. The ache in her muscles competed with the pounding of her head. But she was safe. She was alive.

She turned her head slightly toward the window in the room, noticing by the sun that it was apparently afternoon. She’d been unconscious for the entire night and most of the day.

Flashes of memories of the night before played in her mind, the heaviness of the helmet on her head, the horror of finding herself on a stake in the center of the fire pit. Flames licking closer and the smoke choking and Mark appearing like an avenging wraith in the dark, it was all like a dream.

But it hadn’t been a dream. It had been a nightmare orchestrated by the sister she’d admired and her assistant. Melinda had not only taught courses about sociopaths, she was one.

Mark. Dora jerked up, a hand on the side of her pounding head as she searched for a button that would summon the nurse. Was Mark okay? He had been instrumental in saving her, but at what cost to himself? Was he here in this same hospital burned half to death by his heroic efforts?

Before she could find the button to summon a nurse, a tall older man walked into the room and introduced himself as Special Agent Richard Sinclair. Dora knew he was not only Mark’s superior but also his friend.

“Mark?” she asked before he could say anything else. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine.” Richard pulled up a chair next to her bed as she slumped back against the pillows. “He was here with you all night and I finally pulled him out of here and sent him back to Dallas to debrief and file his reports. I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you when he finishes up there.”

Dora nodded, although she had a feeling she wouldn’t be hearing from Mark again. He was back in his space now, the place where he belonged. She remembered that he’d planned time for his daughter the next day and by then he’d recognize that there was nothing for him here in Vengeance.

“If you’re feeling up to it, I’ve got some follow-up questions to ask you about what happened to you last night,” Richard said.

She nodded and for the next half hour she and Richard went over everything she could remember from the moment Ben had stepped into her house the day before until she’d opened her eyes just before Richard had arrived.

Their conversation was interrupted once by a doctor who stepped in to check on her and confirmed that she had been drugged with a heavy dose of tranquilizers administered through a needle. The doctor proclaimed her ready for release and Richard offered to take her home.

An hour later Dora sat in Richard’s passenger seat as he drove her from the hospital to her house. Although the doctor had assured Dora that she’d slept off the effects of the drugs, a bone weariness made her want nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep for hours...for days.

Her sister had tried to kill her and Mark was gone. She looked at Richard and still tried to make sense of everything that had happened. “Melinda killed those three men?”

Richard nodded. “Along with Ben’s help.”

“But why?” Somehow she needed to make sense of this.

Richard didn’t reply until he’d parked at her curb. He shut off the engine and turned to look at her, a hint of compassion in his eyes. “I believe she orchestrated her own kidnapping and then the murders because she could and for little other reason. She got a kick out of watching all of us scramble around like headless ants, unable to figure out the pieces to put the puzzle together.”

“How did Mark know I was in the fire pit? That I was going to be burned to death?”

A smile curved Richard’s lips. “Because he’s a special man and somehow he managed to get into Melinda’s head and anticipate what her next move might be.”

Dora shifted her gaze out the front window. “She and Ben left cards on the other victims. Was there a card for me?” She turned back to look at Richard, who frowned. “There was, wasn’t there. What did it say?”

“Melinda had a card in her pocket that said ‘failure.’ We believe she intended to place it on you sometime after the fire went out and before anyone realized that the effigy was a murder victim.”

Failure. She waited for the word to find purchase in her heart, for her to embrace what her sister had apparently believed about her. She waited for the fracture of self-confidence to occur, and when it didn’t, she knew that she had truly moved away from her past.