Hostile Witness Read online

  Hostile Witness

  Hostile Witness

  A Kate Ford Mystery

  Leigh Adams

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by copyright The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-62953-199-1

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-62953-212-7

  ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-62953-659-0

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-62953-670-5

  Cover design by Jennifer Canzone

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  2 Park Avenue, 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10016

  First edition: February 2016

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  One

  A man stood in the middle of the road, just inside the perimeter, and there was something wrong with him.

  There was something wrong with him, but Kate’s head was throbbing so badly, she couldn’t begin to think of what it was.

  She tried all the things that she usually did when she found herself in this position and found, also as usual, that none of them worked. The man was wearing black, and even at this distance, she could see that his earlobes were overly extended, as if he had done something to them that stretched them out. Was that what was wrong with him? Maybe he’d had those thick rings in them and then had taken them out. She adjusted her sunglasses. It wasn’t a very bright day, but it didn’t matter. She snaked her hand into her bag and grabbed her healing stone.

  After checking to make sure there was no traffic on the road, Kate carefully pressed down on the brakes, then closed her eyes and counted to ten.

  When she opened her eyes again, she thought the man had disappeared. Then she saw him, another three feet along, heading for the open maw of the parking garage.

  That was wrong, too. This wasn’t a pedestrian area. There were no sidewalks. There was nowhere to walk here from, and if you did walk here from somewhere, you wouldn’t go through the garage entrance. You would go around to the side and enter the building at the front door.

  It had been a long drive in from home, made worse by the throbbing inside her skull that just would not quit. Everything around her looked sharper and more detailed than it should have. Everything hurt.

  The man was wearing a black suit that looked as if it cost five thousand dollars. His shirt was so white it caused glare. His tie was so black it looked painted on. Under the suit jacket was a vest, also black. Kate found herself wondering hysterically if the man was some kind of very expensive undertaker.

  The car swung left as if of its own volition. She had been driving by instinct. She hadn’t had to pay attention. Deep memory had been paying attention for her.

  She jerked her mind back to the task at hand and stopped at the gate to present her identification. The interior of the garage was dark, silent, and still. She climbed carefully up the levels until she found one that was nearly vacant and pulled into an empty space. Then she turned off the car and waited until the engine noises stopped.

  It was cool and dark in here. Nothing was moving. Nothing was happening.

  Kate closed her eyes and put her forehead down on the steering wheel. Her headache began to subside. Her nausea—nausea she hadn’t realized she had—began to subside, too. It was as if she’d been engulfed by a tide and the tide had turned and . . .

  Kate gave it up. She’d spent most of her adult life trying to describe these episodes to everybody from lovers to doctors and back again. It never worked. When she was in the middle of an episode, she could barely speak. When she was clear of them, she couldn’t really remember.

  She thought back to her son, Jack, and the crazy fight they’d had this morning. The fight should have set her off, but it hadn’t. Her head hadn’t started to throb until hours later, when a traffic light had switched from red to green so suddenly it had made her shudder.

  Kate took her keys out of the ignition and shoved them in her jacket pocket. She got out of the car, locked up, and looked around. The man had been walking toward the opening of the garage, but of course he hadn’t come up here, if he had ever existed at all.

  Two

  The Almador Corporation was one of those businesses that Kate used to make fun of when she was younger and that her son, Jack, made fun of now. Its premises were bland from the outside—but that was the problem, wasn’t it? They were too bland. There was no way to tell, from the building’s front elevation or from the parking garage entrance and exits, exactly what Almador did.

  Nor could you form much of an impression once you got into the building. There was an expanse of blank walls and doors with people’s names on them. The doors always seemed to be shut, even in the middle of the workday. Almador went out of its way to be as much like an evil corporation in some conspiracy theory movie as it possibly could.

  She ran up the steps to the sixth floor instead of taking the elevator.

  I am not wallowing, she told Jack inside her head. Then she pushed it all away. Things were always going to be a bit rocky with a teenage son, especially during puberty. It was bound to be worse when that son was a genius.

  Kate pushed through into room 601. The morning bustle had already subsided. Kate was always careful to get in fifteen minutes late, just to make sure the noise and distraction of people piling in didn’t set her off. Three of the assistants were plugging away at computer stations, all of them looking bored. Another one was fussing at the coffee maker, which was making the sounds a ferret would make if someone was strangling it.

  The assistant at the coffee maker looked up and said, “Hi, Kate. I don’t suppose I’m lucky enough that you don’t want coffee?”

  “Is there any alternative, Molly?” Kate asked.

  “Well,” Molly said, “there’s that ginseng stuff you brought in a few months ago. You left a mountain of the stuff in the cabinet.”

  “Ah, well. I’m just not sure it will give me that jolt . . .” Kate started unconvincingly.

  “Don’t bother,” Molly said. “I tried a cup once. It tasted like sawdust laced with cyanide.”

  “That would have quite a kick to it,” Kate said innocently.

  Molly snorted. “Go on in and get yourself set up for the day. I’ll bring you coffee as soon as I can figure out how to make this thing produce it.”

  Kate turned for her office. Kate’s office was also her perfect place. It wasn’t that she was consumed by work and nothing else. She might not be the housewife type—Jack’s father had had a lot to say about that—but she was much more concerned with the people close to her than she was with her client list.

  Unfortunately, the people close to her were like people everywhere: they moved around sudde
nly, they started speaking without warning, they dropped heavy objects on the floor, and they did all the things that just might set off an episode. Her office was the only place where she could control the influx of stimuli.

  She kept it dark. Only the computer screen glowed when she was there to see it. There were no lamps, and she always kept the overhead lights off.

  Now she sat down at her station and booted up. The familiar noises came and went without bothering her much. Her desk was clear. One would never leave work lying around at Almador. Every document in the place was either classified by the military or an industrial secret. Her bookshelf was full of manuals for computer design and repair, including one thick one that was supposed to have the fixes for all the worst malware in existence. It didn’t, but Kate did. There was also a smooth stone, polished until its surface looked like glass, sitting right in front of the malware book.

  Kate picked it up and began to stroke it, deliberately and with concentration. A friend of hers had given it to her a few years ago, saying it was the most soothing ritual imaginable, something that could erase any tension anywhere. You held it in your hand and rubbed it until all your tensions disappeared.

  Or they were supposed to.

  Her desktop was up. She logged in. There were more of the usual noises, which actually helped instead of hurt. Kate opened her work e-mail and found a long list of mostly useless nonsense—the cafeteria menu for the day; chipper notes from human resources on “how to have a safe and inclusive workspace” and “developing trust between management and workforce”; and five announcements of various drives for canned goods, hats and mittens, and just plain money that would be counted as part of an employee’s community involvement requirement.

  Down at the bottom, she found an e-mail from her father, the subject line in all caps:

  JACK UNUSUALLY UPSET THIS AM.

  Kate bit her lip.

  There was a careful, soft noise behind her. Kate swiveled in her chair to see Molly coming into the room with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand.

  “Hey,” Molly said.

  “That was faster than I expected.” Kate held out her hand to take the cup.

  Molly let the door snick closed behind her.

  “I had an incentive,” she said. “The office has been insane all morning. I’m going to be really happy when the trial gets started and there’s some actual news going around.”

  Kate took the coffee. “The trial starts when? Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” Molly confirmed.

  “And it’s all about the boss’s daughter,” Kate said. “Corporate must be losing its marbles.”

  “I heard that Hamilton and Chan aren’t speaking to each other at all,” Molly said. “Chan’s spraying emotion to the four winds, and Hamilton is being Hamilton, acting like emotions are for space aliens. You know how he hates publicity. This thing is going to run twenty-four-seven on cable news.”

  Kate took a long sip of her coffee and said, without thinking about whether or not it was a good idea, “I had something funny happen when I came in to work today.”

  “Funny?” Molly asked. “What kind of funny?”

  “I thought I saw a man walking on the road leading up to the parking garage. He was wearing the kind of suit Hamilton always wears. You know, costs the earth, has a vest.”

  Molly blinked. “A man. On the road near the parking garage.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But nobody walks there,” Molly said. “There isn’t even a sidewalk.”

  “I almost wondered if I was seeing things,” Kate said.

  Molly looked concerned. “Were you having one of your episodes? Do you think you were hallucinating?”

  “I was having one of my episodes,” Kate said, “but I’ve never in my life hallucinated anything. There’s probably some simple explanation.”

  “Maybe you were having a vision,” Molly said solemnly. “A lot of people who have second sight have a lot of trouble with, you know, headaches especially. I read about it—”

  “I don’t have second sight,” Kate said firmly. “Half the time, when I have those episodes, I don’t have any kind of sight at all.”

  Molly gave her one last long look, then turned and headed for the door. Kate had already turned back to her monitor when Molly stopped dead and said, “Oh, I forgot. Ballard wants to see you.”

  “See me?”

  “See you personally. In his actual office. He said as soon as you got in. I’m sorry. The coffee maker disaster swept it straight out of my mind. God only knows what he wants.”

  ***

  Kate Ford could remember, with perfect clarity, the very first time she’d had an episode. It was also the very first time she’d been scared out of her mind to the point of freezing solid. There she was, on a cold, cloudless day late October, lying on the bench her father had built between two trees in their backyard. She was nine years old, and she had nothing on her mind but her two best friends and Halloween coming up. She was thinking with all the seriousness of youth that her life would be ruined if her mother didn’t buy her the fairy princess costume that matched the ones Ann and Laurie would be wearing—that is, assuming Ann and Laurie could talk their mothers into the same thing, which Kate was sure they would.

  Kate was having one of the days when everything was too sharp and too detailed and too much in focus. It was something that had happened to her all her life and that she considered both annoying and—when she found out that it was unique to her—lucky. Her powers of observation had always been much better than most people’s. She could see and remember little things nobody else seemed to find important: the exact pattern on the brass buttons of Mr. Holliwell’s blazer, the way Robbie Bellini’s backpack bulged up near the top when he was stealing cartons of milk, the exact numbers Ann used for her locker combination.

  Actually, by that time, Kate knew the combinations to almost everybody’s locker in the entire fifth grade. She couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t stop herself from noticing. She couldn’t make herself forget. It was as if her head were some kind of camera with a zoom lens. It was a good thing she wasn’t interested in stealing other people’s stuff.

  There was only one real downside in all of this, and that was that Kate’s head would start to hurt if the detail catching went on too long. The obvious thing to do about that would be to turn it off when she started to get tired, but she couldn’t always turn it off. Sometimes she’d get thoroughly sick of the whole thing—who cared if Mr. Holliwell put pickles on his herring sandwich? Who cared what kind of sandwich he had at all? Then she’d close her eyes and count to twenty, and when she opened them again, the intensity of her focus would have subsided, and she would feel fine.

  The problem was that it didn’t always work that way. In fact, over time, Kate was finding herself with less and less control over the focus. She would be sitting in the middle of math class and her mind would start darting around the room, picking up random details and storing them. Tim Braves had bright-blue laces on his white sneakers. Carrie Holt was wearing black Mary Janes, and the strap of one of them had been broken and fixed very clumsily with duct tape. Louis Sanderson’s brown Oxfords were scuffed at the toes. Mrs. Jackson’s pumps were too big for her feet, so her heels kept slipping out of them when she walked across the classroom to write on the board.

  By the time the break came, Kate would know everything about everybody’s shoes and have no idea what the lesson had actually been about.

  That day on the bench, she was just calm about it. She was looking from one of the trees to the other. She went from one brown leaf to the next, registering differences, registering similarities, allowing her mind to laser in as closely as it wanted to. She wished the sky wasn’t turning that odd purple color.

  No, she thought. It wasn’t the sky that was turning that odd purple color. It was everything. Everything was bathed in a glow that was at first pale lavender, then violet, and then a deep purple that made it almost impos
sible to see.

  It was also getting very, very difficult to breathe. The air around her was deep purple, and the purple was getting into her lungs and restricting her breathing. There wasn’t any real air.

  She was panicking. She could feel it. Her entire body had gone rigid, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t make it move.

  She tried to wrench herself sideways. Nothing happened. She tried it again. She thought she felt her body move against the bench.

  And then there was a pain in her head as if somebody had thrust a knife through her skull.

  The pain went down and down to the base of her throat, and she couldn’t help herself. She wrenched one more desperate time.

  The next thing she knew, she was off the bench and on the ground and vomiting—vomiting and vomiting and vomiting in big convulsive heaves that just would not stop.

  Then purple turned to black and there was nothing.

  It took her nearly a week to figure out what had happened to her after she’d passed out. “Fainted” was what her mother kept calling it. She remembered the air going black, but the next thing she knew, she was in the emergency room at the hospital and the lights were too bright and sharp. All the noises were too loud, too, and her focus was in overdrive. She could read the manufacturer’s name etched on the side of a square metal box sitting on top of a wheeled wooden table. She could hear slippers shuffling against the floor in the corridor. She could see patterns in the overhead light.

  Her mother was there, pacing back and forth in the little curtained cubicle. Once in a while, a doctor or a nurse would come in and pull her mother outside, but, oddly enough, Kate couldn’t hear any of the details of that conversation at all.

  After a while, her father came. Her father and mother talked in whispers in the hall, and Kate couldn’t make that out, either. Then only her father came back in, and he brought one of the doctors.

  “Kate?” he said.