“Why would you ask that?”

“Did you?”

On his way back, he dragged a chair from the small dining table and placed it no more than two feet away from the one in which she was sitting. Straddling it backward, he folded his arms over the back of it. “You tell me.”

Britt Shelley, Miss Calm, Cool, and Collected when in front of a television camera, was remarkably composed facing her kidnapper, too. Oh, she was afraid, no doubt about that. But she was putting up a good front. He had to give her high marks for not going hysterical the moment she recognized him, which she’d done almost immediately. Although his appearance had changed, she’d placed him. His face anyway.

“Do you remember my name?”

She nodded.

“You should.”

It was she who had hammered the last nail into the coffin of his reputation. She’d sealed his fate but good. No telling how many other reputations she had demolished since then. Should he be flattered that she remembered him out of so many? Probably not. Maybe she never forgot the faces and names of the people she destroyed.

“I remember you, Mr. Gannon.”

“From five years ago. But your memory can’t account for hours of time night before last. Or so you say.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Sounds like an awfully convenient case of amnesia.”

He could see that she was plotting the best way to handle him. He could almost follow her thought processes as she considered one tactic and then discarded it in favor of another.

She said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, if you’ll take the tape off my hands and feet.”

So, she’d decided to try to bargain. “No deal. Tell me what happened in Jay’s place that night.”

“If you’ll remove-”

“Tell me what happened in Jay’s place that night.”

“Don’t you think I wish I could?”

So much for her bargaining scheme. It gave way to shouting and frustration. Fear, maybe. He saw a tear pick up light in the corner of her eye, which left him unmoved. He’d been looking for it, expecting it.

“You could have saved yourself the dramatic kidnapping, Mr. Gannon. And the gasoline to and from Charleston, and the jail time you’re going to serve for this, because it’s going to yield nothing. I’m blank, completely blank on what happened after Jay and I got to his town house.”

She looked at him imploringly, tilting her head at an angle that looked defenseless, blinking until the tear slipped over her lower lid and rolled down her cheek. “Free my hands and feet. Please.”

Bargaining to frustration to tearful appeal in under sixty seconds. The lady had talent. “No.”

“I’ll tell you anything I can,” she said. “I promise. But I’m very uncomfortable. Please.”

“No.”

She nodded toward his open front door. “Where would I go? I don’t even know where I am.”

“Tell me what happened at Jay’s place.”

Her head dropped forward, sending a curtain of pale hair over each shoulder. She remained that way for several seconds, then raised her head and said emphatically, “I can’t remember.”

Defiance now. She must have read a how-to book. “Tell me what you do remember.”

For a full minute, maybe more, they stared across the narrow space separating them. In person, with her face clean and her hair loose, she looked younger than she did on TV. Smaller, too. Her eyes were blue, her gaze steady and guileless, which he knew she must use to her advantage in front of the camera as well as away from it.

The earnestness in her gaze didn’t work on him, though. He was immune. She must have sensed that, because she was the first to relent. She didn’t break their stare, but she took a swift little breath. “I arrived…No, let me back up. I went to The Wheelhouse at Jay’s invitation.”

She told him that Jay had called her earlier that day, inviting her to join him for a drink, saying he needed to talk to her about something. “He didn’t say what. Only that it was important.”

She spoke without emotion, almost by rote. He figured she’d been over this with the police a dozen times already.

“It wasn’t like he was asking me for a date,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him in months. Hadn’t talked to him on the telephone. This was the first contact we’d had in a long time. I said, ‘Sure, that would be great.’ He said seven o’clock. I arrived right on time.” She paused for a breath, then asked, “Have you ever been to The Wheelhouse?”

“This evening.”

“This evening? You stopped off for a drink before breaking into my house and kidnapping me? Although I suppose felony could be thirsty work.”

Ignoring that, he said, “The Wheelhouse didn’t open for business until after I’d left Charleston, so I’d never been there. I wanted to see the layout of the place.”

“What for?”

“Which table did you sit at?”

“Far corner.”

“Right-hand side as you enter? By the window?”

She shook her head. “Left-hand side.”

“Okay.”

While he was fixing that image in his head, she asked, “How did you know where I lived?”

“I followed you there.”

“Today?”

“Five years ago.”

He could tell that made her uneasy. She shifted slightly in her seat but didn’t comment.

“I knew you’d have an alarm system,” he went on. “I also knew that the back door going into the kitchen is probably the one you most frequently use and figured that it would have a delay on it. So I picked the lock.”

“You know how to pick locks?”

“The alarm started beeping. I counted on having at least a minute and a half before the actual alarm went off. Most people set the delay for even longer, but I figured I had at least ninety seconds to get you to punch in the code. I also figured that a single woman, living alone, would have a remote-control panel within reach of her bed.”

“How did you know I was single and living alone?”

“Jay never dated married women.”

She left that alone, saying instead, “Ninety seconds for you to find my bedroom and force me to turn off the alarm. That’s not much time. You were awfully sure of my compliance.”

“I counted on you being scared.”

“I was. Out of my wits.”

“So my hunch was right.”

“What if I hadn’t been scared?” she asked. “What if I’d had a gun at my bedside instead of a remote? I could have killed you.”

He glanced around his cabin for effect, then came back to her. “I don’t have anything to lose.”

That, too, made her uneasy. Her eyes drifted away, then back. “Can’t you please release my feet? Just my feet?”

He shook his head.

“They’re numb.”

“According to the newspaper,” he said, “The Wheelhouse was crowded that night.”

After a mutinous pause, which didn’t faze him, she continued, describing to him the usual happy-hour bar scene. “The place was packed, but I spotted Jay as soon as I came in. I went-”

“Wait. Were there people at the bar? That’s where I sat today. There are twenty or more barstools.”

“People were standing three deep behind the stools.”

“How many bartenders?”

“I didn’t count.”

“How many cocktail waitresses?”

“A few. Several. Four, five, half a dozen. I don’t know.”

“But all of them were busy.”

“Extremely. There was noisy chatter, loud music, people-”

“Did you ask a hostess if Jay was there yet?”

“There wasn’t anyone at the hostess stand. I told you I spotted him.”

“So you didn’t announce your arrival in any way?”

“No.”

“Did anyone approach you?”

“No.”

“Did you attract anyone’s notice?”

“No.”

He looked her straight in the eye, then deliberately dropped his gaze to her chest, and lower, to her bare thighs. He let his eyes linger there for a noticeable time before lifting them back to her face and silently communicating that he found it hard to believe no one had noticed her.

She squirmed under his gaze. “Look, I’ve been over this time and again with the police. Nothing unusual happened. Nothing.”