Tall, Dark And Deadly. Suzanne Brockmann

      “Gina’s door is open,” Syd said.

      “Syd, let’s try to backtrack a few minutes,” Lana said. “Let’s go back to your car, after you’ve left the movie theater. You’re driving home.”

      “Why is her door open?” Syd asked, and Lana glanced at Lucky, shaking her head.

      “Her boyfriend must’ve left it open,” Syd continued. “Figures a guy can’t replace a fan belt also can’t manage to shut a door and…” She sat up suddenly, her eyes wide open. She was looking straight at Lucky, but through him, or in front of him, not at him. She didn’t see him. Instead, she saw something else, something he couldn’t see. “Oh, my God“

      Her hair was damp with perspiration, and she reached up with a shaking hand to push it away from her eyes.

      Lana leaned forward. “Sydney, let’s go back—”

      “Oh, my God, Gina! She’s in the corner of the living room, and her face is bleeding! Her eye’s swollen shut and…oh, God, oh, God. She wasn’t just beaten. Her clothes are torn and…” Her voice changed, calmer, more controlled. “Yes, I need the police to come here right away.” She recited the address as if she were talking on the telephone. “We’ll need an ambulance, too. And a policewoman, please. My neighbor’s been…raped.” Her voice broke, and she took a deep breath. “Gina, here’s your robe. I think it would be okay if you put it around yourself. Let me help you, hon…”

      “Sydney,” Lana said gently. “I’m going to bring you back now. It’s time to go.”

      “Go?” Syd’s voice cracked. “I can’t leave Gina. How could you even think that I could just leave Gina? God, it’s bad enough I have to pretend everything’s going to be okay. Look at her! Look at her!” She started to cry; deep, racking sobs that shook her entire body, a fountain of emotion brimming over and spilling down her cheeks. “What kind of monster could have done this to this girl? Look in her eyes—all of her hopes, her dreams, her life, they’re gone! And you know with that mother of hers, she’s going to live the rest of her life hiding from the world, too afraid ever to come back out again. And why? Because she left the window in the kitchen unlocked. She wasn’t careful, because nobody had bothered to warn any of us that this son of a bitch was out there! They knew, the police knew, but nobody said a single word!”

      Lucky couldn’t stop himself. He sat next to Sydney, and pulled her into his arms. “Oh, Syd, I’m sorry,” he said.

      But she pushed him away, curling into herself, turning into a small ball in the corner of the couch, completely inconsolable.

      Lucky looked at Lana helplessly.

      “Syd,” she said loudly. “I’m going to clap my hands twice, and you’re going to fall asleep. You’ll wake up in one minute, feeling completely refreshed. You won’t remember any of this.”

      Lana clapped her hands, and just like that, Syd’s body relaxed. The room was suddenly very silent.

      Lucky sat back, resting his head against the back of the couch. He drew in a deep breath and let it out with a whoosh. “I had no idea,” he said. Syd was always so strong, so in control…. He remembered that message he’d found on his answering machine last night when he’d gotten home. The way she hadn’t quite managed to hide the fear in her voice when she’d called him for help, thinking she was being followed by a stranger. You scared me to death, she’d told him, but he hadn’t really believed it until he’d heard that phone message.

      What else was she hiding?

      “She clearly considers her stake in this to be personal,” Lana said quietly. She stood up. “I think it would be better if you were in the waiting room when she wakes up.”

       CHAPTER SIX

      “WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Syd asked, following Luke down toward the beach.

      “I want to show you something,” he said.

      He’d been quiet ever since they’d left Lana Quinn’s office—not just quiet, but subdued. Introspective. Brooding.

      It made her nervous. What exactly had she said and done while under the hypnotist’s spell to make the ever-smiling Navy Ken brood?

      Syd had come out of the session feeling a little disoriented. At first she’d thought the hypnosis hadn’t worked, but then she’d realized that about half an hour had passed from the time she’d first sat down. A half hour of which she remembered nothing.

      To Syd’s disappointment, Lana told her she hadn’t got a clear look at the rapist’s unmasked face as he’d come down the stairs. They weren’t any closer to identifying the man.

      Luke O’Donlon hadn’t said a word to her. Not in Lana’s office, not in his truck as they’d headed back here to the base. He’d parked by the beach and gotten out, saying only, “Come on.”

      They stood now at the edge of the sand, watching the activity. And there was a great deal of activity on this beach, although there was nary a beach ball, a bikini-clad girl, a picnic basket or a colorful umbrella in sight.

      There were men on the beach, lots of men, dressed in long pants and combat boots despite the heat. One group ran down by the water at a pounding pace. The other group was split into smaller teams of six or seven, each of which wrestled a huge, heavy-looking, ungainly rubber raft toward the water, carrying it high above their heads while men with bullhorns shouted at them.

      “This is part of BUD/S,” Luke told her. “SEAL training. These men are SEAL candidates. If they make it through all the phases of this training, they’ll go on to join one of the teams.”

      Syd nodded. “I’ve read about this,” she said. “There’s a drop-out rate of something incredible, like fifty percent, right?”

      “Sometimes more.” He pointed down the beach toward the group of men that were running through the surf. “Those guys are in phase two, which is mostly diving instruction, along with additional PT. That particular class started with a hundred men and today they’re down to twenty-two. Most guys ring out in the first few days of phase one, which consists mostly of intense PT—that’s physical training.”

      “I’d kind of figured that out.”

      “Navyspeak contains a lot of shorthand,” he told her. “Let me know if you need anything explained.”

      Why was he being so nice? He could have managed to sound patronizing, but he just sounded…nice. “Thanks,” Syd managed.

      “Anyway, this class,” he pointed again to the beach, “is down to only twenty-two because they had a string of bad luck—some kind of stomach flu hit during the start of Hell Week, and a record number of men were evac-ed out.” He smiled, as if in fond memory. “If it was just a matter of barf and keep going, most of ‘em probably would’ve stayed in, but this flu came with a dangerously high fever. Medical wouldn’t let them stay. Those guys were rolled back to the next class—most of them are going through the first weeks of phase one again right now. To top that off, this particular class also just lost six men in the fallout from that diving accident. So their number’s low.”

      Syd watched the men who were running through the water—the candidates Luke had said were in the second phase of BUD/S training. “Somehow I was under the impression that the physical training ended after Hell Week.”

      Luke laughed. “Are you kidding? PT never ends. Being a SEAL is kind of like being a continuous work in progress. You always keep running—every day. You’ve got to be able to do consistent seven-and-a-half-minute miles tomorrow and next month—and next year. If you let it slip, your whole team suffers. See, a SEAL team can only move as fast as its slowest man when it’s moving as a unit.”

      He gestured toward the men still carrying the black rubber boats above