“What day is this?”
“March 15.”
“What is your husband’s name?”
“I have no husband.”
Hampton turned to him and spoke, calling attention to his presence, but the woman did not move.
“As you can see, as I told you yesterday Mr. Jordan, she is completely out of touch with reality.”
“Not quite.” Richard stepped from his place in the shadows. The answers were wrong for the questions, but they were based in reality—a reality this so-called doctor would have discovered for himself had he ever attempted to help her. Wilbanks, the name under which she had been admitted, was her maiden name. October 27, though not her birthday, was her wedding day. And March 15 was the day his plane had crashed.
Richard walked to her chair and knelt in front of her, willing himself to think of nothing but her and the present moment. He braced his hands on the arms of the chair as he spoke softly.
“Lexi?”
She cocked her head at the sound of his voice and turned her eyes toward him.
“Do you remember me?”
He thought he saw a question in the flatness of her eyes. It was fleeting, and he couldn’t be sure whether he had seen it or imagined it, but she looked at him—at the irritation on his cheek where dermal abrasion had finally removed the last of the scars, at the angry red welts still showing on his hand as it rested on the chair arm.
“You came. Before.”
He let his breath out in a long, slow exhalation. “Yes. Yesterday.” And it had taken all his control not to carry her from this place at that time. All his control to pretend to agree with Hampton that she was where she needed to be. But he had sensed that pretense was necessary for her safety, and he had needed time to prepare for today.
“Would you like to go away with me?”
There. He saw it again, and it wasn’t his imagination. A question in her eyes. A ghost of a smile flitted across her features, softening the tight mask of her face.
“They won’t let you take me,” she said softly. “I’ll never be allowed to leave.”
His hands tightened on the chair arms, but he kept his voice low and controlled. “Yes. You will.”
He straightened and turned to face the man behind the desk. “Send for her things.”
Hampton also stood. Richard watched him warily. The man was cool, but not so cool as he wanted to appear. his hands were clenched at his sides. “Perhaps we should send her back to her room while we discuss this.”
“No.” Richard stepped to the desk. “She doesn’t leave my sight again until she walks out of here with me.” He picked up the folder on the desk. “And this.”
“No.”
“These are her records, aren’t they?” Richard asked, but he knew the answer. They were. At least a part of them. There probably were more, hidden somewhere.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“And they would be forwarded to the next physician as a matter of routine.”
Hampton’s hands clenched again. “Yes.”
“Then I see no problem,” Richard told him. “But if you don’t wish me to take them now, I’m sure you won’t object to my calling for a full-scale investigation of your hospital.”
Hampton attempted to stare him down, but when that failed, he turned to the intercom unit on his desk. He depressed the lever. “Alexandra is leaving us,” he said. “Bring her things to my office.”
“Doctor, I should—” The voice of the guardian of the outer office burst through the small speaker before it was muffled and then silenced. “Yes. Immediately,” she said in more subdued tones.
When the knock sounded on the door a few minutes later, Richard interposed and opened the door himself. He took the small package from the tight-featured, gray-faced woman and closed the door on her and the outer office.
He looked inside the package. A pair of dark blue lightweight wool slacks. A light blue mohair sweater. A wisp of a bra and matching briefs in ice blue. A pair of Italian sandals.
“Where are her rings?” Richard asked. “Her identification? The rest of her clothes?”
“That’s all,” Hampton told him. “She came with only the clothes she wore.”
Richard muttered an oath as he slammed the garments back into the package, but when he approached the woman in the chair, his actions and his voice were once again gentle. He touched her arm, and she looked up at him blankly.
“Let’s go, Lexi.”
She stood obediently and let him guide her across the room, through the doorway and into the outer office, while Hampton followed.
The outer office was full of men, as Richard had known it would be, and they were silent, as they had promised him. He turned to look at Hampton, who had paused at the doorway, visibly paler as he recognized the prosecuting attorney standing before his secretary’s desk.
“Dr. Wilford Hampton?” the prosecuting attorney asked, but it was a ritual question, requiring no response. “I have a search warrant for this hospital, and an order requiring you to allow your patients to be examined by an independent team of physicians.”
“Jordan!” Hampton’s voice broke. “You have the records. You said—”
Richard turned a cold smile on the man. “I lied. I wanted to kill you, Hampton, but men living in civilization no longer do that. Instead, I’ll break you. And if these men find what I think they will, I’ll take great pleasure in seeing you behind bars, where you will no longer be able to control your nefarious empire.”
One deputy detached himself from the throng, took the folder and package from Richard and led the way to the outer door. He opened it and waited while Richard guided Lexi, still obedient, unquestioning, an automaton who responded to the slightest pressure on her back, from the prison where she had been kept for the last seven months.
On the top step of the porch, in her first stubborn action since he had come for her, she stopped. He looked down at her. Unaware of him or of the official cars now cluttering the parking lot, she lifted her face to the sun and filled her lungs with the fresh October air. Then she waited, once again obedient, for him to direct her.
The uniformed chauffeur stood at attention by the open passenger door of the limousine as Richard guided Lexi to the car. Then in an act of consideration that Richard had not thought possible from a veritable stranger, he produced a folded blanket and handed it to Richard. Richard took it, unfolded it, draped it over Lexi’s thin shoulders and helped her into the car.
The man who had accompanied them from the clinic took his place in the front seat of the limo, and silently, powerfully, the automobile pulled away from the converted Georgian mansion, glided through now-open gates and sped on its way.
Lexi showed no interest in the interior of the car, or in the autumn scenery along the twenty-five-mile route into the heart of Boston. She sat quietly during the entire drive, not even looking up when the powerful automobile pulled to a stop in the alley outside the service entrance of a hotel.
Richard helped her from the car and looked down at her as she stood shivering beneath the blanket. Her shoes were only slippers, little more than scraps of inexpensive cotton fabric with flimsily reinforced soles. Swearing under his breath, he bent to take her in his arms. She stiffened but made no protest when he touched her.
“I’m going to carry you,” he told her. “Don’t be alarmed.”
But of course she wasn’t alarmed, he realized. She