Dangerous To Love

by Toni Anderson, Barbara Freethy, Dee Davis, Leslie A. Kelly, Cynthia Eden, J. Kenner, Meli Raine, Gwen Hernandez, Pamela Clare, Rachel Grant

  “Lex? I need you!” her boss said from the doorway of his office, crooking a finger at her.

  Rising, she saw by the quick narrowing of Stan’s eyes that he didn’t like her being called into Walter’s office. Walter Kirby, the editor of the paper, might have bowed under pressure and demoted Lexie, but he hadn’t fired her, and she remained his closest confidante on staff.

  Right now, though, he was frowning. But she didn’t worry. She had been good lately and hadn’t done a thing to jack up his blood pressure. Or to rescue her own savaged career. It had been hard, almost painful, but she’d let it all go. Journalistic fervor was well and good, but in this economy, so was being able to pay her rent.

  Besides, you were wrong; they’re all runaways. Just runaways.

  That didn’t help. No matter how many times she repeated the mantra in her mind, she never felt better about having given up on the poor kids whose story she’d tried so hard to tell.

  “’Scuse me, Miz ’Lexa,” a voice said.

  Lexie glanced up, seeing Kenny, the custodian, a middle-aged man who was unfortunately scarred from some long-ago accident. He was mopping the floor.

  “Whoops. Sorry,” she said.

  He ducked his head, not meeting her eye, as usual. He was very shy, probably because of the scars. So she always went out of her way to be kind to him.

  “S-okay. Just be careful. Wouldn’t want you to slip and fall. Somebody spilt coffee.”

  “Will do. Have a good day, Kenny.” She entered Walter’s office. “What’s up?”

  Shutting the door, Walter gestured toward one of the chairs fronting his overloaded desk. Lexie lowered herself into one, but didn’t prompt him. Walter always needed to bluster a bit before coming to the point. “Stubborn kids,” he mumbled as he walked around the desk and sat in his own well-worn chair. It emitted a groan as he leaned back.

  “Problems at home?”

  “Would it really have been too much to ask for one of my children to have been born without any estrogen?”

  She hid a smile. The lament was a frequent one. “Sorry.”

  “It’s hard to remember how sweet they looked when they were little, in their princess costumes. Now they do nothing but hold out their hands for money.”

  “You keep putting it there,” she pointed out.

  Walter continued as if she hadn’t said a word. “I should have quit after the twins were born. Or halfway through—after Jenny, before Taylor.”

  Taylor was younger than her identical twin sister, Jenny, by about fifteen minutes. To hear Walter tell it, she had recently segued from Sweet Valley High senior into Stephen King’s Carrie. Still, Lexie saw through the grousing. Walter was a marshmallow when it came to his girls. He adored all of them, from the seventeen-year-old twins to the thirteen-year-old baby.

  “She’ll snap out of it. Now that Ann-Marie is doing so much better, and she’s not afraid she’s going to lose her mom, Taylor will get over this rebellious kid thing.”

  A smile softened his features. Ann-Marie, Walter’s wife, had recently been pronounced in remission after a battle with lymphoma. Things were looking up for him—at least at home. At work was another story. After the scandal, he’d had to do some fast-talking to keep Lexie on staff. Even though he owned nearly half of the paper, he was the minority shareholder by 1%.

  “I got a call this morning from Chief Dunston.”

  “What a nice way to start the day.” Despite the flippant words, every cell in her body reacted. Her ears still stung from the insults she’d endured the last time she’d seen the chief.

  “I’ve had better.”

  She didn’t doubt it. The paper—and Lexie—were numbers one and two on the chief’s shit list. “So what’d Chief Dunce want? I haven’t done anything,” she insisted.

  “He wanted to remind me how much better it would be if you no longer worked here.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I reminded him how much better it would be if he had a set of balls.”

  She snickered. “Zing.”

  “It’s only the truth. Jack’s not bad a bad man, I don’t think, though he is a weak one.”

  Not knowing the man, she’d have to reserve judgment on that. “So what’s got him on the warpath again? You haven’t printed a single story accusing him of having no balls or speculating on whether a serial killer is operating right under his nose in, oh, a month, at least.”

  His eyes gleamed. Walter was a newsman through and through, even if he did live in a town of eighteen thousand where the biggest crime news usually involved sleazy jerks dealing drugs or addicts stealing money to buy them. For a little while, he’d relived his city desk days, joining Lexie in the thrill of chasing down what might have been the biggest story of their careers. Their failure had been as huge as their effort, but damn, what a ride.

  “Apparently Chief Dunston got a call yesterday from a woman who lives down in the Boro. She was calling about her teenage daughter, who disappeared earlier this week.”

  A jolt of almost electric fear shot through her. How could it not? Every journalistic bone in Lexie’s body had been sure, utterly certain, she’d been onto something, even if she’d been forced off the story. If this girl’s disappearance was anything like the others, her mother might as well give up hope right now of ever seeing her again. The Boro had become the Bermuda Triangle for poor young women who seemed to round the wrong corner and disappear forever.

  “Apparently she insists her daughter didn’t run away but was a victim of the Ghoul.”

  Lexie rolled her eyes. “The Ghoul. That’s so stupid. I didn’t come up with that, he did!”

  During a press conference in which he’d vivisected Lexie, the chief of police had accused her of searching for spooks, inventing a serial killer, whom he dubbed the Granville Ghoul. Ridiculing her speculations had helped discredit her. A little spiteful humor and two or three pieces of evidence and he’d succeeded in shutting her down completely.

  A thought suddenly made her frown in confusion. “Wait, why would the chief tip you off? Another missing girl sounds like the last thing he’d want us to know about!”

  “Actually, he didn’t tell me. I heard last night. Word is spreading throughout the schools and the girls were upset.” He shook his head, not liking anything to upset his daughters, despite how he griped about them. “As for Dunston, I think he was going for a preemptive strike. He suspects the mother is going to call you and wanted to make sure I had you under control.”

  Lexie lifted one brow at that word.

  Laughing, Walter held his hands up, palms out. “Hey, I would never dream of claiming such a thing. With four daughters, I know better than to think I control anything in my life except the amount of time I get to spend in the bathroom.”

  Lexie snorted. “With four daughters, I’m surprised you actually have your own bathroom.” Her laughter faded as did his. Then, as much as it pained her, Lexie gave him the reassurance she assumed he’d called her in here for. “It’s okay. If she calls, I’ll . . .”

  “You’ll hear her out.”

  Lexie hesitated, seeing a look of determined defiance on Walter’s face.

  “How many?” He slammed his hand down on the desk. “For God’s sake, how many young women can go missing without somebody other than you and me starting to wonder if there’s a darker reason for it than our police chief would like us to believe?”

  Lexie’s mouth dropped open. For weeks, she’d been tiptoeing around, remorseful, certain she’d let her boss down and had deserved the town’s scorn. She thought Walter wished he’d kept her on a shorter leash. The realization that he hadn’t shocked her into silence.

  “Lex, they wanted to shut you up. And I let them.”

  “What haven’t you told me?” she asked softly. “Something else happened. What is it?”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then cast a quick glance toward the door. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night? Ann-Marie and the
girls would love to see you.”

  She had been a frequent guest of the Kirbys before Ann-Marie’s illness. But she didn’t doubt why she was receiving this invitation. In the privacy of his house, Walter would tell her whatever it was that he was afraid to reveal here. “Sure. I’d love to see them, too.”

  “Of course, I can’t promise the kids will actually be around for long on a Friday night. Biggest game of the season, you know. Two hometown teams going head-to-head.”

  Taylor and Jenny would both be donning their cheerleading uniforms. Hundreds of kids and their parents would crowd the stadium of Granville High to roar for their football heroes. Given the usual tensions between the residents of the Boro and those in the north side of town, she could only imagine rumors of another disappearance would make things worse when Granville went up against Hoover High.

  “I suppose the missing girl went to Hoover. That’s where I’ll start . . .”

  Walter shook his head. “Not Hoover. She was from GHS. My daughters know her, Lex.” His throat worked as he swallowed, hard. “Jenny was one of the last people to see her. She’s the one who told me the girl was missing.”

  Wow. No wonder he was in a state about this. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “But it’s really interesting that she’s from the other school.”

  All of the other missing teens had gone to the “poor” high school, or they’d been dropouts. This was the first from the snooty side of town. No wonder the chief was panicking. North Granville was the only part of the area he seemed to give a damn about.

  “Here.” Walter reached into his desk and drew out a sheet of paper.

  “What’s this?” She took the paper, opened it, and read the name and address. Genuinely surprised, she asked, “You really want me to contact him?”

  “I don’t know that he’ll talk to you, but I think he might be able to help with this.”

  Huh. She had her doubts. But she wasn’t about to argue with her boss now that he’d given Lexie her journalistic legs back.

  Her heart thudded with excitement. All the scorn and the accusations that she’d been creating news, or seeing boogeymen, suddenly became irrelevant. Things had changed. Yet another girl had disappeared. And Walter had stumbled across something important. She knew it.

  “I don’t know how much of that supernatural stuff I believe, but there’s no doubt this guy is smart. Even if it’s just intuition, he comes up with some amazing insights.”

  She lifted a surprised brow. “You know him?”

  “Know of.”

  “Quite a rep he’s got.”

  “You should know better than anyone not to believe everything you read in the papers.”

  “Touché.”

  Lexie rose from her chair. “I appreciate your trust and your faith in me.”

  The big man waved off the humble thanks. “See what you can find and we’ll talk more tomorrow at dinner. Come around six thirty.”

  Suddenly thinking of his wife, who was recovering, but not yet healthy, she felt a stab of embarrassment. “I don’t want to put Ann-Marie to any trouble. How about I bring pizza?”

  He chuckled. “You really think my wife does the cooking? Puh-lease. Her meatloaf could be used in place of a cement block to hold a mafia hit man’s victim under water. I’m still chief cook and bottle washer these days. Ann-Marie’s strictly the supervisor.”

  His bluster didn’t fool her one bit. The tenderness in his voice and on his face when he talked about his family was something to behold.

  What a good man. The nicest, most decent one she knew. Again, Lexie had to acknowledge how blessed she’d been the day he’d hired her.

  “And listen to that mother if she calls,” he added softly.

  She nodded. Oh yeah, she’d take the call and listen very carefully.

  If that call didn’t come, she’d go one step further. She would do what she did best: dig around to find out which girl had missed school all week and go find the mother herself.

  For the first time in a month, she allowed herself to fully believe she hadn’t been wrong, hadn’t been the sleazy reporter making up juicy scandal. Deep down, she’d always known it. She just hadn’t allowed herself to think about it, knowing those thoughts would lead her to bitterness and more worry about things she knew were happening but was powerless to change.

  Now, the man she respected more than anybody else had given her his blessing to remember who she really was and what she did best.

  Lexie sought the truth. She almost always found it. And this time, she would not rest until every ugly secret in this town was brought out into the light.

  Thursday, 3:55 p.m.

  Although he’d done exactly what he’d set out to do—removing himself from anything resembling paranormal crime solving—Aidan McConnell couldn’t deny he was bored.

  Not working wasn’t a financial problem; he didn’t need the money, having made a lot over the years, with book royalties still coming in. But it meant he didn’t live on a schedule. There were no visits to crime scenes, no interviews with witnesses. No explorations of the lives of missing people, no careful touches of their hairbrushes, pillows, clothes, all in an effort to find out where they were—if they were still alive.

  His new house, which he’d bought for next to nothing, was old, but not in need of significant repair. He wasn’t involved in the local community, and he sure as hell wasn’t the type to have a cold one over the back fence with the neighbors.

  So, yeah. Although he’d never admit it to Julia or his former colleagues, after almost a year of solitude, he was going a little stir-crazy.

  Fortunately, though, as Julia had guessed, he’d found a way to keep himself busy and challenged. Online cold-case solving via standard investigation, and the occasional hack into police files, kept him mentally stimulated, at least. He also sometimes managed to make the cops look like idiots. That was a plus. Right now, having just figured out the murder of an elderly woman in Virginia Beach—obviously by her nephew—was gratifying, if very sad.

  He picked up his burner phone to call in an anonymous tip to the detective on the case, but was interrupted by a knock on the front door.

  “Hello? Is anybody home?” called a muffled voice from the front porch. The person didn’t wait for a response, knocking again and adding a sharp jab of the doorbell.

  Unused to visitors, Aidan froze for a second.

  “Please, it’s urgent!”

  Aidan hadn’t expected visitors, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t help if somebody got into an accident in front of his house. It was possible that’s why the person was knocking.

  Hoping it wasn’t too bad, he strode to the foyer and swept the door open.

  “Aidan McConnell?” the woman asked.

  She knew his name. Shit.

  He didn’t reply, taking a moment to assess his unexpected visitor. She was pretty. Very pretty. Looked to be in her late twenties. Her fine, dark-red hair was swept into a ponytail that brushed her shoulders, her cheeks a little pinkened by the strong autumn breeze that had turned his deep, covered porch into a wind tunnel. Of average height, she had to tilt her head back to meet his assessing stare.

  Her dark green eyes had quickly narrowed with determination when she’d seen him. The woman’s small jaw was thrust out a tiny bit, as if she’d been steeling herself for something, and the way she held her slim form—squared shoulders, stiff back, frown—indicated she knew he wasn’t going to want to speak to her.

  The car parked at the curb looked fairly new and undamaged. The hood wasn’t up nor were any of the tires visibly flat, so she wasn’t a stranded motorist in search of a phone. Of course, he’d already known that, since she’d called him by name.

  Her clothes—a Bulldogs hoodie, jeans, and sneakers—didn’t scream door-to-door salesperson, Bible-pusher, or census taker. Despite the backpack hanging off one shoulder, she was too old to be a student. She looked too casual to be a professional, yet too determined to be a neighbor.

&
nbsp; One thing left.

  Reporter.

  Aidan didn’t give it another thought. Reacting purely on instinct, he slammed the door right in her face.

  Surprisingly, the media bloodsucker didn’t waste one minute on being shocked or insulted. Instead, she immediately pounded on the door, using her fist this time. “Mr. McConnell, please, I just want to talk to you. My name’s Alexa Nolan. I’m a . . .”

  “I know what you are,” he called from inside. “And I know what you want. Get in your car and go back to Savannah. I have no comment.”

  “I’m not from Savannah.”

  National media? It seemed a bit much for a ghost like him from a year-old news story, but he wouldn’t put anything past some of those scandal-stirring shows, especially with Mrs. Remington’s suicide attempt.

  “Mr. McConnell?”

  “Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of and get a life, why don’t you?”

  “That hole would be right here. I’m with the Granville Daily Sun.”

  Oh, great. So much for trying to keep a low profile. The local yokels had jumped into the action, looking for a titillating headline. Fake Psychic Drives Mother to Attempt Suicide. It would probably appear in the weekend edition, below Mayor Hooks a Ten-Pound Catfish and above Congregation Sick After Eating Old Potato Salad.

  At least, that’s what he imagined the local paper would look like. He’d certainly never picked one up. Aidan didn’t read any papers or watch the news from within a hundred-mile radius of his current location, though he closely watched the crime reports in dozens of other major cities across the country. He especially avoided the rag from Savannah, and the dinky small-town ones that loved to fling innuendo while wearing the mantle of folksy human interest.

  “Please, I need help.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” he said. In his mind, just about everyone who chose her profession needed help—of the mental variety. “Try a shrink. Or a priest.”

  “Mr. McConnell?”