Target: Alex Cross (Alex Cross #26) - James Patterson Page 0,35
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.”
CHAPTER
36
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.