Untouchable Read online

  “I doubt if it would have worked. Obsession is not particularly complicated, but it is powerful and very dangerous. I see a lot of it in my work.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Winter drank some coffee and lowered the mug. “Thank goodness the post-hypnotic command that put him straight into a trance was still effective, at least until the lightning strike.”

  Jack reached for the coffeepot and refilled his mug. “Mind if I ask you what is probably a rather personal question?”

  “Of course not. You could have been killed or badly injured tonight and it would have been my fault. You deserve some answers.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said, putting some steel into the words.

  She paused, the mug halfway to her lips.

  “Don’t do what?” she asked.

  “Don’t blame yourself for what happened tonight. It was not your fault.”

  Her jaw tightened. “Moseley came here because of me.”

  “He came here because he was a deranged individual. Here’s what you need to remember, Winter. We both could have been killed tonight but we survived. What’s more, we can both take credit for our survival. You stopped Moseley long enough for me to get a chance to take him down. We did it together.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out with control. “Okay. Congratulations on putting a positive spin on things, by the way.”

  “I’ve been studying with the best.”

  She managed a smile at that. “What was the personal question you wanted to ask?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But if you’re such a good hypnotist, why don’t you make your living using your ability? Why teach meditation instead?”

  “I think of meditation as a form of self-hypnosis.”

  She sounded defensive, he decided.

  “I never looked at it that way,” he said.

  Her mouth curved a little. “While we’re on the subject, how would you describe your lucid dreaming?”

  “Huh.” He thought about it. “Self-hypnosis?”

  “If it isn’t a form of self-hypnosis, it’s a very similar experience. The line between a hypnotic trance and the dream state is murky. Some researchers think there may not be a hard border; that a trance state is essentially a kind of dream state.”

  “But you don’t advertise yourself as a hypnotist. You don’t tell people that you can help them lose weight or stop smoking or get a promotion. You don’t promise them that you can cure their pain or anxiety.”

  Winter set the mug down, folded her arms on the table and contemplated him for a long moment.

  “The short answer is that it’s darned hard to make a living as a hypnotist,” she said. “Trust me, I come from a long line of failed hypnotists who had to find other ways to make a living.”

  “Failed hypnotists?”

  “They didn’t fail in the technical sense. But they mostly failed in the business sense.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because a lot of people treat hypnotists the same way they do fortune tellers, psychics, magicians and mentalists,” Winter said. “Some genuinely believe that there is such a thing as hypnosis, and it freaks them out. Some desperately want to believe it’s for real and that it can cure whatever ails them. Then there are those who want to prove to you that they absolutely cannot be hypnotized. And finally there are the people who are convinced that hypnosis is just a parlor trick and insist that you prove yourself to them. For the record, the last two types are particularly annoying.”

  “So finding clients who want to use hypnosis for legitimate reasons is something of a crapshoot.”

  “Yes, it is. Combine that with the disgruntled customers who can’t be helped with therapeutic hypnosis but who feel compelled to go online to voice their complaints, and you’ve got some serious problems with any business model that features hypnosis.”

  “I see.”

  “And last but not least, there are those who decide to sue the hypnotist because they think the practitioner took advantage of them while they were in a trance.”

  “I’m beginning to understand that it might be a tough way to make a living.”

  “Yep.” Winter reached for the coffeepot. “That’s why I’m trying to come up with a viable alternative. Meditation instruction.”

  He watched her refill her mug. “You said you came from a long line of failed hypnotists?”

  “The talent seems to run through the female side of my family.” Winter set the pot down. “I had a great-grandmother who gave demonstrations of mesmerism on the stage. The audiences loved it, but when she tried to use her abilities to treat people with various neuroses and anxiety issues, she got into trouble.”

  “What happened?”

  “One of her clients claimed that she had used her skills to cheat him out of his life savings. It wasn’t true, of course.”

  “Of course not.”

  Evidently reassured, Winter plowed on with her story. “The problem was that my great-grandmother had no way to prove her innocence. Then the local newspaper discovered that she had once worked in a carnival. The paper used the front page to label her a fraud and a huckster.”

  “I know how that feels,” Jack said.

  Winter’s brows shot up. “You do?”

  “The media and law enforcement are not always kind to those of us who do cold case work. When I first started out, I was accused of ruining lives and reputations by reopening old wounds. Other people said I was trying to get publicity for my books. The terms fraud and charlatan and con man were thrown around a lot. Then there were the reality TV people who wanted to turn old tragedies into entertainment. And don’t get me started on all the fake psychics who followed me around offering their assistance.”

  “Okay,” Winter said. “Now I see why you go out of your way to try to keep a low profile when you take a case.”

  “Who in your family besides your great-grandmother had problems trying to make a living as a hypnotist?”

  “My grandmother tried to market her skills to help people deal with chronic pain.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “Not well,” Winter said. “The problem was that the effects of her post-hypnotic suggestions wore off over time.”

  He frowned. “That’s true of any pain therapy. There is no single drug or technique that works for everyone, certainly not indefinitely.”

  “My grandmother did have some success, but she ran into trouble with the competition.”

  “Who was the competition?”

  “A well-respected doctor who practiced in the same town,” Winter said. “Initially he tried to take advantage of Grandma’s skills. He offered her a job in his office. She refused because she figured she would do better on her own. She was right—at least until he retaliated by smearing her reputation. He had a lot of friends on the city council. The result was that the chief of police came to her door one day and warned her that if she didn’t close down her office, he would arrest her for practicing medicine without a license.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “Grandma moved on, married and had a daughter—my mom. Grandpa divorced Grandma and disappeared. Grandma and Mom moved to Los Angeles and set up in business as lifestyle consultants. They did pretty well with that.”

  Jack smiled. “A very nice bit of repositioning in the marketplace.”

  “Yes, it was, at least for a while. Grandma did great. She and Mom were successful. Eventually Mom married and had me.”

  “You never told me what happened to your parents.”

  “My father died when I was just a baby,” Winter said. “I never knew him. Grandma and Mom were both killed in a car accident a few days before my fourteenth birthday.”

  “So that’s how you ended up in the foster care system,” he said.

  “Yes.”


  “That reminds me, are you going to try to get a hold of your foster parents and your sister to let them know what happened last night?”

  “As I told you, they’re in the field doing research on a very important project. I can leave a message for them at the headquarters of the foundation they work for, but it might be weeks before they get it. There’s nothing they can do anyway. They would just worry.”

  “You’re probably right. Still—”

  “The thing is, it’s over,” Winter said firmly.

  “Over?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “Moseley is no longer a problem. I’ve got to stay focused on saving my business.”

  “You’re worried about your business?”

  Winter’s jaw tightened. “After what happened tonight, it’s going to be a lot harder for me to build a successful career as a meditation instructor.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Who in their right mind will want to study meditation with a practitioner who was involved in the death of a former client? That doesn’t exactly have a positive vibe, does it?”

  He set his mug down hard on the table. “You were not involved in the death of a former client. You were attacked by one and barely escaped with your life. Regardless, Eclipse Bay is a very small town. The news of Kendall Moseley’s death won’t travel far.”

  “I wish I could believe that. But if this hits the Internet—which could easily happen—it might destroy me before I can get my business off the ground. Even if it doesn’t make a blip online now, there’s no telling when it will come back to haunt me in the future. I may need to think about changing my name.”

  He studied her in silence for a moment while he went deep, trying to come up with a positive spin for her situation. He wanted to reassure her, but the truth was, she might be right.

  “Damn,” he said instead.

  “My sentiments exactly.” She surprised him with a faint smile. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For not trying to sugarcoat the truth. For not saying something cheery and upbeat and totally fake.”

  “Yeah, well, for now we don’t really know how this will play out so don’t go full negative on me,” he said.

  “Wow. Is that your version of thinking positive? ‘Don’t go full negative’? That’s the best you can do?”

  “You need to cut me some slack here. I’m still new at the positive-thinking thing, remember?”

  “I will admit that sometimes it clashes with reality.” Winter picked up the coffeepot again and emptied it into her mug. “You know, I sure wish I’d had a chance to ask Moseley a few more questions. I’d really like to know exactly what overcame that hypnotic suggestion I gave him.”

  “You said yourself the hypnotic suggestion must have faded.”

  “Yes, but I’m wondering if it faded so quickly and so completely because someone assisted Moseley’s memory and maybe kick-started his old obsession with me.”

  For a second Jack just stared at her. The ping of awareness going off in his head was more like a code red alarm. He sat forward so quickly and with such force that Winter yelped in surprise and nearly dropped her mug.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked very softly.

  “It’s not the possibility that my hypnotic suggestion might have worn off that worries me,” she said earnestly. “I can live with that kind of failure. It’s the possibility that someone provoked Moseley and, in the process, encouraged him to remember his obsession with me that’s really freaking me out.”

  “You’re freaking me out, too. Damn it, why didn’t you tell me about this before, Winter?”

  “I needed some time to process something that could well have been a figment of Moseley’s imagination. He was delusional, after all. Who knows what the truth is? Besides, I really don’t want to believe that my old boss could have sunk so low as to sic a stalker on me in order to get revenge. But the more I think about it, the more I’ve got to wonder if maybe that’s exactly what happened.”

  Jack felt as if he had just plunged into a sea of ice.

  “What makes you believe that someone worked on Moseley and overcame your suggestion?” he asked very softly.

  “I had Moseley in a trance for a moment or two before that lightning strike ruined things for me. While he was under I asked him how he found me. He said a friend that he met in a chat room helped him.”

  “Maybe the man AZ saw picking up a list of empty cottages here in Eclipse Bay. That fits.”

  “Hang on, let’s not jump to conclusions here,” Winter said quickly. “What on earth makes you think there could be a connection between Kendall Moseley and a tourist who wanted a list of summer rentals?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I need to think about it.”

  Winter cleared her throat. “They say that you can find anyone these days.”

  “That’s not true,” Jack said. “My brothers and I have been looking for someone for a couple of decades and all we’ve ever found online are the footprints of a ghost. But let’s get back to Kendall Moseley. Was he good at navigating things online?”

  “I don’t think he was particularly tech savvy but it doesn’t take a lot of skills to get into a chat room.”

  “True,” Jack said. “And if Moseley was hanging out in certain chat rooms on a regular basis, it wouldn’t have been hard for someone to find him and go to work on his old obsession. Tell me about your ex-boss.”

  Winter shuddered. “Raleigh Forrester. He was really pissed at me when I told him I was going to quit if he didn’t stop insisting that I book appointments with Moseley.”

  “Do you really think this Raleigh Forrester would have wanted revenge just because you quit your job? That seems a little over-the-top.”

  “I’m afraid the situation was more complicated than it sounds,” Winter said. “Forrester was planning to sell the spa to a competitor. I was part of the deal, although I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think I mentioned that while I was at the Cassidy Springs Wellness Spa we got a lot of new corporate business,” Winter said.

  “I remember. Are you saying that new business was because of you?”

  “The corporate crowd loved my meditation seminars,” Winter said. “I was booked out for six months—really big events. The business was growing rapidly. Forrester’s chief competitor made a buyout offer. But the offer was contingent on me signing a three-year contract that included a non-compete clause. Forrester never bothered to tell me about that part until the day I told him I was leaving.”

  “What happened to the buyout?”

  “The deal fell through after I left. Forrester still owes me a month’s salary, by the way.”

  “So this Raleigh Forrester may have had a strong motive for revenge?”

  “Well, he had a motive,” Winter said. “But I’m not sure it was strong enough to make him send Moseley after me. Still, there was a lot of money involved. Do you think I should tell the police?”

  Jack thought about that for a moment. “Probably no point in talking to the cops. There’s nothing in the way of proof to give them, just speculation. Forrester will deny everything if he’s confronted.”

  “Why do I have the feeling that you’re not buying my theory of the crime?”

  “Your old boss may have been the chat room friend who aimed Kendall Moseley at you. It’s a logical assumption. But at this moment I am staring down the rabbit hole of a very personal conspiracy theory.”

  Winter put her mug aside, propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her folded hands.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “It’s a conspiracy theory that my brothers and my dad and I have kept alive for over two decades. We don’t talk about it much outside our family because it tends to make
people think we’re . . . unbalanced.”

  She did not appear to be nearly as astonished as she should have been. It was as if he had put into words something she had suspected all along; as if she had been waiting for him to drop the full weight of his past on her.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you, at least not until we knew each other better. I didn’t want to scare the daylights out of you.”

  “What could you tell me that would be more frightening than what I went through last night?”

  “I’m starting to wonder if I am the one who is responsible for the fact that you nearly got murdered last night.”

  She went very still. “Okay, I’ll admit that is a little scary.”

  “Trust me, if I’m right, things are going to get a lot scarier.”

  Winter watched him with her mysterious eyes. Maybe she was questioning the state of his mental health. That was probably a legitimate concern.

  “Who or what is at the other end of this rabbit hole?” she asked.

  “Quinton Zane.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  He needed fire.

  The man who had once been Quinton Zane stared at the two-foot-high glass statue of a phoenix displayed on a stone pedestal in the center of the room. He had to exert enormous self-control to overcome the desire to hurl it against the nearest wall.

  But the meaningless act of destruction would not be rational. It would not be helpful, and it sure as hell would not be smart. It might even make him look as if he lacked self-control. That was definitely not the image he needed to project. He was, after all, the brilliant Lucan Tazewell, the long-lost heir to the throne of Tazewell Global, and he was here to save the family business.

  He was currently starring in a carefully scripted narrative that featured him as the hero. He was the firstborn son of Grayson Fitzgerald Tazewell, founder of a financial empire that was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The firm’s precarious situation was the result of a series of failed investments and a few sizable loans from some very dubious—and dangerous—people. The money laundering, undertaken in a desperate effort to pull the company out of its death spiral, had not improved the situation.