“You’ll be going home in the dark.”
Unease snaked up her spine. “I left inside and outside lights on. I won’t be late. I should be home by seven-thirty or eight. The last thing that happened…” Oh, Lord, Tito was listening. She didn’t want Tito to know about the rabbit. “That was in the morning.” She didn’t want to admit she’d rather not spend the whole evening at home alone.
Duncan had a few more things to say about her carelessness where her personal safety was concerned, then at last, scowling, closed her door while she was still midword arguing.
Jerk.
“What did you mean, ‘the last thing’?” Tito asked anxiously.
“Oh. Um. It was like the broken windshield, only less destructive.” Except to the rabbit, who was dead. “Somebody seems to be playing mean tricks on me.”
“They didn’t break a window at your house?”
“No. Whoever it was left me a, well, a message on my doormat.” She summoned a smile for his benefit. “Nothing you need to worry about, Tito. Don’t kids play practical jokes on each other that aren’t always funny?”
His face twitched as if a few electrical impulses had gone astray, and he ducked his head but finally bobbed it. “Yes.” He was quiet until she had made the turn out onto the main road.
Tito might not have noticed that Duncan’s black SUV loomed directly behind them. By chance? Jane almost snorted at that.
“You don’t know who’s doing it?” The words burst from the boy, betraying an intensity and anxiety that made her turn her head and study his face briefly before she once again had to pay attention to the road.
Tito couldn’t be responsible for the things that had happened…? Relief flooded her on the heels of that foolishness. Of course not. She’d picked him up and driven him to McDonald’s the night her windshield was smashed. He’d been with her every minute. And the rabbit… How would he have gotten away from his sister’s scrutiny on a school morning, across town and then home or to school with no bloodstains to betray him? Besides, she liked Tito. She couldn’t imagine him doing that to some poor animal.
But was he smart enough to wonder about his father? Had he, too, thought about the fact that Hector had arrived late to McDonald’s and come in soaking wet? It hadn’t occurred to Tito then, Jane thought; he’d gone off to the movie happily with Hector. But later, especially if Hector expressed some anger at Jane for the way she insulted his honor, his ability to care for his family.... It was possible.
She changed the subject and chattered away about school and Lupe and his two nieces and nephew until she dropped him off.
Jane hadn’t told Duncan she was driving all the way to Bellingham for dinner with her friends. Austin taught psychology at Western Washington University and his wife, Susan, worked with United Way. Austin had been Jane’s friend from college; they’d dated a couple of times, given that up as a lost cause and settled for being good friends. Susan and she had become even better friends.
Over dinner, she told them about the dead rabbit on her doorstep and all the rest, although she kept her tone light. Icky, it implied, but I’m not scared.
Before her eyes, Austin clicked into professional mode. “Jane, you took Psychology in college. This kind of stalker can be exceedingly dangerous.”
“Surely not a stalker,” she objected. “It’s not like I have a relationship with this…person. Whoever he is obviously doesn’t imagine that I’m his in any romantic sense.”
Austin was shaking his head. “This guy—and shakes are good it is a man—is obsessed with you. Doesn’t have to be romantic. The obsession is the meaningful part.”
The scary part, too, it seemed. Austin had quite a lot to say about stalkers. She began, with exasperation, to think he was as bad as Duncan. Susan wasn’t much help, since she worked with a woman who’d been stalked and terrorized by an ex-boyfriend.
Wasn’t dinner with friends supposed to be relaxing?
By the time she said good-night, Jane didn’t feel very relaxed at all. At this time of evening, I-5 was surprisingly lonely heading south. In this twisty, mountainous, wooded stretch, the freeway shrank to two lanes each, north and southbound. Dusk turned into dark as she drove. Her tension, subdued for most of the day, crept out of hiding and tightened her, muscle by muscle. By the time she left the freeway for the even-darker, even-lonelier drive east toward Stimson, she felt as if she hadn’t worked out in months and had foolishly tried to make up for the lack. She was knotted, taut, heading toward will-I-be-able-to-get-out-of-bed-tomorrow stiffness.
Pulling into her own driveway, watching her garage door lift silently, she realized she was scared.
Would she be less scared if she’d come straight home at five-thirty and spent the evening, as she had the last two, trying to avoid casting any shadow as she passed windows, afraid to turn on the TV for fear she wouldn’t hear breaking glass or the clunk of a door lock being breached?
Monday the security system was to be installed. Only tonight and one more night. Thank God.
The garage was bare of anything that didn’t belong. After pressing the button on the remote, she watched in the rearview mirror as the door closed in its torturously slow way. Nobody had slipped inside. She relaxed marginally. Safe, so far.
She sat there for an embarrassing length of time, reluctant to get out of her locked car. If only Duncan was here to walk through the house with her. She thought she could survive being alone again, if only he were here now.
Well, he wasn’t. And she wasn’t about to call and beg him to come.
Finally she got out, purse clutched in one hand, her pepper spray in the other. She closed the car door behind her as quietly as she could—as if someone in the house wouldn’t have heard the garage door opening and closing, a voice in her head mocked. The house was truly silent when she let herself in. The hum of the refrigerator turning itself on made her jump. She walked through the downstairs, leaving her purse on a table and picking up the fireplace poker. Two weapons now: poker and pepper spray. She’d read somewhere that pepper spray could madden an attacker instead of stopping him. No, no. Please don’t let that be true.
Not until she’d flung open closet doors and verified that they were empty did she begin to relax. She didn’t quite have the nerve to throw open the front door to see if anything was on the porch.
It was still early to go to bed. But…I have to look up there. Can’t sit down and read, or make myself a cup of tea, until I’ve checked under beds. Under my piles of shoes. That was supposed to make her smile, and didn’t. Until I know for sure that I’m alone.
She was less frightened, though, as she started upstairs. Honestly, why would somebody lie in wait for her there instead of downstairs? Right behind the door she had to open to come in from the garage, for example?
Her house was really a story and a half. Upstairs consisted only of a guest bedroom, her bedroom and a bathroom. Guest bedroom first—like the downstairs, it was clearly untouched. She made sure her back wasn’t to the door to the hall when she stooped to look under the bed and quietly slid open the closet door. Bathroom, then; she could see through clear glass into the shower, thank goodness. No Alfred Hitchcock scene here.
Jane did wish she’d left her bedroom door completely ajar and not open only a few inches, the way it was. Why she’d half closed it that morning, she couldn’t imagine.
For some reason her heart had once again begun to beat harder, faster. She’d shut the bedroom door last night when she went to bed and braced a chair however uselessly under the knob. But when she went downstairs, come morning? She’d set aside the chair, pulled the door open and… She couldn’t remember.
The hand holding the iron fireplace poker high was shaking. So was the one clutching the spray, the hand she used to nudge the door open.
The first thing she saw was the shards of her chair. Then her bed, the bright matelassé coverlet slashed into ribbons. The vicious, ugly words written in blood on the wall above the bed.
DUNCAN KEPT HER ON THE LINE as he drove with screaming siren and flashing lights through dark residential streets. Right before he tore out of his house he’d used his landline to call Niall, who would approach Jane’s from the other direction. Maybe a patrol unit would already be there; Duncan didn’t know.
“Keep talking,” he said urgently into the phone. “Let me know you’re all right.”
“I am.” Shuddering breath. “I don’t think anyone’s here, Duncan. He would have come out of the bedroom, wouldn’t he?”
Yeah. Of course he would have. Duncan didn’t say, I wonder how long he waited for you. Because this creep hadn’t had any way of knowing Jane had plans this evening, had he?
Red dripping, still wet… Probably paint, she had concluded earlier. Like before. But he’d been able to hear the doubt in her voice. This paint was…thicker, she said, and he’d have sworn he heard her teeth chatter, too.
The house was a beacon again tonight, lit top to bottom. Duncan slammed to a stop in her driveway, cut the siren but left the lights flashing and ran for her front door. She opened it before he got there. He took the steps in two strides and Jane leaped into his arms. She was shaking, or he was. Probably both.
He heard a siren and chose to wait there, on the front porch, for his brother.
Niall drove up right beside Duncan’s SUV. He took the time to turn off lights and siren before crossing the short distance to her front door almost as precipitously.
“You’re armed?” he asked Duncan. “Have you gone through the house?”
They did it together, after gently placing Jane with her back to a wall right inside the front door, which Niall locked. They covered each other, one at a time, and silently and smoothly cleared the house, room by room, whether Jane had already done it or not. Somebody could have been upstairs, waiting for a chance to slip out as she succumbed to hysteria. Maybe he had only wanted to see her terror.
Duncan didn’t let himself be sickened by the sight of Jane’s bedroom until he was sure the nutcase who’d gone berserk in here was gone. Then he let his gun hand sag to his side and looked.
The words on the wall, Duncan thought, weren’t the worst of it, even though the sharp, metallic tang in his nostrils told him that the dripping red was blood.
Niall, grimly silent until now, said, “Somebody hates her big-time.”
Her clothes had been torn from closet and dresser and slashed like the bedding. For some reason Duncan’s gaze fixated on a dainty blue satin bra with both cups hacked in a telling display of frenzy. A few perfume bottles and the like on the dresser were smashed. So were the mirror above the dresser and the oval, freestanding, floor-length one. Jagged shards clung to the oak frame.
Almost nothing in the room was undamaged, except the windows and blinds.
He was sane enough to know he didn’t want to risk being seen by a neighbor.
“Glass breaking would have made some noise.”
Niall grunted. “We might get lucky.” He tilted his head. “The troops are here.”
After a last look at the devastation, Duncan followed his brother downstairs, where Jane was letting two uniformed officers inside.
Niall dispatched them immediately to knock on neighbors’ doors. Duncan had gone straight to Jane, who stared up at him with eyes near black with shock, and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her to his side.
“You’re coming home with me,” he said gruffly.
She didn’t argue, only gave a little shiver and said, “I suppose I should pack some things.”
Duncan’s eyes met his brother’s over her head. After a moment, he asked, “How far did you go into the room?”
“I didn’t go in at all. I saw enough…” She broke off. Her fingers clenched Duncan’s shirt under his jacket. “There’s more.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so.” When he hesitated, she tipped her head to stare at him.
“What?”
“You’re going to need a new wardrobe.”
She stared. Swallowed. “Paint? Or…?”
“He cut your clothes up. I doubt he had time to get everything, but… He did a lot of damage. Smashed mirrors and the bottles on your dresser, too.” He paused. “You can sleep in one of my T-shirts.”
Her self-possession remained formidable although he could feel the quivers running through her body. She gave a stilted nod. “Maybe I could…get some things out of the bathroom?”
Duncan raised his eyebrows at Niall, who nodded. “Sure,” he said easily. “You got a bag you can use, so you don’t have to go in the bedroom?”
“Oh. Yes. I keep my suitcases in a hall closet.”
He accompanied her while she retrieved an overnight-size bag from the closet and packed a few things in the bathroom. He noticed she was careful not to so much as glance toward her bedroom as they came and went.
“Do you need us?” Duncan asked Niall, who shook his head.
“Jane,” Niall said gently, “I think you’d better plan to stay with Duncan for at least a couple of days. I’m going to treat your bedroom like a full-blown crime scene, plus we’ll need to figure out the entry point and hope for fingerprints. I don’t suppose you accidentally left the front door unlocked?”
Her scathing look brought a fleeting grin to his face. “Didn’t think so.”
She left her keys for Niall, and then Duncan hustled her out the door and bundled her into his SUV, not letting her do more than exchange a couple of words with the next-door neighbors standing in a fearful cluster out on their lawn, staring.
“You doing okay?” Duncan asked her a couple of times during the ten-minute drive, and she nodded or mumbled assent.
They were almost to his house when she said, “It wasn’t paint, was it?”
He didn’t want to lie to her, ever. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Where would you get so much…?”
“Kill something.” He glanced sidelong at her. “An animal.” They weren’t dealing with a serial killer here, he reassured himself. The blood had to be from an animal, although something bigger than a rabbit, he thought. At least raccoon-size, given the volume of blood used.
She hunched farther in on herself, for which he couldn’t blame her. When he parked in his own garage, she sat like someone in a waking sleep, waiting until he came around and opened her door. As he herded her into the house, she seemed more docile than grateful to be here.
“You had dinner,” he remembered, awkwardly.
Jane swallowed, as if she’d rather not have thought about food. “Yes. Thank you.”
“I think a hot shower or bath would be good for you. You’ve got to be suffering from some shock.”
“That…would be good.”
He delivered her and her overnight bag to the guest bathroom, checked to be sure there were towels and shampoo and anything else she’d want, then went to get something for her to wear. He didn’t have anything like a robe. Sweatpants, maybe? Flannel pajama bottoms? He had a couple of pairs he rarely wore. Eventually he offered a pair of each along with a T-shirt and some warm socks, all of which she accepted without comment. Then he went to the kitchen to heat water for tea or coffee and waited.
She was so long he went down the hall, but he heard water running in the bathtub so he didn’t knock to say, You okay? Of course she wasn’t. He wasn’t okay. Duncan had seen a lot of ugly things in his career in law enforcement, but this one had been a strike against Jane, and that made it different. This was probably like a doctor whose wife had been diagnosed with some insidious disease. Cancer. That doctor wouldn’t be cool and thoughtful. He’d feel like any other scared husband.
She’s not your wife.
No. But right now, she might as well be, for the impact her shock and fear were having on him.
The sound of the bathroom door opening brought his head around. Jane appeared hesitantly in the kitchen
, her cheeks flushed pink from the bath and her hair hanging loose and damp. She’d decided on the green plaid pajama bottoms, which didn’t fit her too badly, what he could see of them. She was long-legged enough, they didn’t even bag at the ankles. His T-shirt hung to nearly midthigh on her, though.
Giving an uncertain smile, Jane said, “I don’t suppose you have a ponytail holder? I didn’t think to grab anything.”
“Uh…” He touched his own head, his hair tousled but short. “No. Would a rubber band do?”
“They break your hair. I’ll leave it loose.”
“Tea?” he offered. “English Breakfast or herbal.”
Between Love and Duty Page 19
