Razor Edge: Razor Trilogy Three (Razor Thriller Romance Novella Book 3) by Nadine Doolittle

Joel.”
    Carsten ducked his face. “So Joel still hasn’t turned up?”
    “No sign of him. Thank God, with this mess
going on. Lewis thinks it was a jealous ex-boyfriend who did it. Wilma has a
past it seems. So much for security checks. The guy
has served time for assault. They’ve sealed off her room to search for
evidence.”
    “Oh, well that is good to hear. Tragic for
the maid but I’m glad they don’t consider Joel a suspect. Or you or Miss
Dawson.”
    “They questioned Charlotte and me but Joel
is missing so he was never a suspect. And Charlotte and I were together at the
time of Wilma’s murder. We didn’t hear a thing. Neither did Marshall. The
killer must have got her to open the kitchen door for him.”
    Carsten mopped his brow. His ulcer flared; a boil of acid shot up his gut.
Wilma had the proxy—it could still be in her room. No hope of looking for it with
the police standing guard.
    “I can’t stay Daniel. I wish I could but I
have some pressing business at the office. I’ll let Rita know that you are tied
up for the day and have her reschedule your appointments. This is crazy.” Carsten shook his head. “Will you call Anastasia to let her
know before this news hits the wire, or do you want me to do it?”
    “Yes, call her if you don’t mind, Carsten . I can’t talk to her right now.”
    Carsten placed the call from the Mercedes. Anastasia had been getting cold
feet. Well, this should light a fire under them—Charlotte Dawson had spent the
night with Daniel. Carsten was offering her a chance
for revenge and to get rid of the violinist once and for all.
    Anastasia agreed to do what he asked. He
didn’t even have to sell her on it.
    At last, something was going right for a
change.

 
 

chapter seven
    ♫

 
    “JOEL RAZOR didn’t need to be locked in his
apartment,” Dr. Welland said. “Joel was already a
prisoner—he was trapped inside that apartment in his mind.”
    We were gathered in the library to give our
statements. Dr. Welland had been called in to discuss
Joel’s mental state. Although he was not considered a suspect, Detective Lewis
wanted to know more about hypnotic suggestion and how it could have worked to
lure him out of the apartment.
    “Joel had reached a point where he
genuinely wanted to free of his phobias. He recognized there was a great deal
of life he was missing on the outside. The biggest concern for him was the inability
to see buildings in their natural space, three dimensional, and this had become
important to him in his work. I used hypnotherapy and found him to be very
susceptible. It was not difficult to bring him into it deep state of
relaxation. In this state, I experimented with certain phrases that would
trigger the desire to leave the apartment and give him a sense of ease and
safety when he did.”
    “What were these triggers?” asked Lewis.
    “Well, that was the difficulty. In Joel’s
environment, he wouldn’t necessarily hear the phrases that I intended, and then
there was the risk that he would hear a certain phrase and it would happen at
an inappropriate time such as the middle of the night. However, I was aware
that during the day after he had finished his work at the drafting table, he
relaxed by playing the cello. So I chose a phrase of music. When he played this
music, he would have a sense of peace and safety about the outside.”
    “How does it work?”
    “Joel is a deeply regulated young man. I
put him under hypnosis and played the music, reinforcing the subconscious
message that he was safe, he was calm and he felt confident to leave the
apartment. Joel got up from the chair, still in a state of hypnosis, crossed
the room to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. At this point, I counted
him out of the hypnotic state and when he returned to his conscious self, he
saw where he was, standing in the hallway, which for him was a tremendous
breakthrough. We were both very pleased with results of the experiment.”
    “So