Stalker in the Shadows (Love Inspired Suspense)

by Camy Tang

  “I still don’t have a boyfriend. Your guess is as good as mine.” Monica didn’t look at Shaun, but could sense him glancing at her at Lorianne’s words. Really, what business was it of his? She wished she weren’t so close to their table.

  “Ooh, a secret admirer,” Lorianne said. “Well, as owner of this fine establishment, I am entitled to view any and all flowers delivered.” She winked at Monica.

  A part of her was flattered by the gift. Who wouldn’t be? But another part of her was wary. Who gave flowers to a woman through a delivery and not personally? Then it occurred to her that maybe Phillip had them delivered in advance of their meeting. He had seemed a bit friendly last week at the Zoe banquet, but she’d been careful not to encourage anything more than a business relationship. She hoped he didn’t misinterpret her body language.

  Well, she knew who it wasn’t from. She tried to angle her body away from Shaun as she lifted the lid. An odd cigarette smell made her eyes burn, and she blinked away sudden tears.

  In the box, nestled among white tissue paper, lay a huge dead snake.

  Monica gasped and dropped the box onto the table, making the silverware rattle.

  “Oh, my gosh.” Lorianne’s eyes were huge.

  The ugliness of the gift seemed to stifle her, and Monica fought to breathe. Who would send her something so hateful, so horrible?

  “I’m so sorry,” Lorianne said. “If I’d known…”

  “Monica, are you all right?”

  Shaun’s voice cut through the shocked fog of her brain, and she managed to swallow, her eyes still riveted to the hideous carcass. Then she felt his fingers grasp her chin and turn her head away from the sight into his concerned face. The blue of his eyes calmed her a little.

  His finger caressed her cheek. “Breathe. Are you all right?”

  She swallowed again. “I’m fine.” Her voice came out shaky.

  “Who is this from?” Mr. O’Neill’s outraged voice filtered through her consciousness.

  She steeled herself, then pulled away from Shaun’s hand and looked back at the box. A white envelope peeked out from behind a jagged fang in the open mouth. Shaun reached forward, but she moved faster to take it, not touching the snake. Her fingers trembled as she opened it and pulled out a thick, plain white notecard.

  Monica,

  Consider this a warning. Cease your efforts on your persistent plans. Your free children’s clinic will never see the light of day. I will kill you if I must. My course is set, my determination sure. If you do not abandon your clinic, my vengeance upon you will be “As the snake late coil’d, who pours his length, And hurls at once his venom and his strength."

  It was unsigned.

  The menace and yet the poetry of the words frightened her. She began to shiver violently.

  Who would do this? Why would anyone want to stop her free children’s clinic?

  “‘The snake late coil’d.’” Shaun’s voice was hushed and yet harsh at the same time as he read the note over her shoulder.

  At the quote, his father jerked in surprise, his brow furrowed.

  Monica’s fear chilled as she took in Shaun’s burning eyes and pale face. “What is it?”

  “Could I see it, please?”

  Monica handed the notecard to him.

  He studied it with a frown, which deepened as he read.

  “Shaun?” Mr. O’Neill asked. There was an urgent gravity and also a slight quaver to his voice.

  Monica could see the note in Shaun’s hands tremble slightly, and she realized his hands were shaking.

  He glanced at his father, and some unspoken message passed between them. Mr. O’Neill turned whiter than the notepaper and swayed.

  “Mr. O’Neill!” Lorianne rushed toward him and helped him to sit down in a chair.

  “I’m fine.” He waved her away, but his hand gripped the table edge tightly.

  Monica turned to Shaun. “What’s going on?”

  His entire body had become taut like a bowstring. His eyes darted to hers, feral, fierce. Then he blinked, and a steely determination replaced the fleeting wildness.

  “The man who wrote this letter killed my sister.”

  He shouldn’t have said it in front of everyone that way, but the shock had ripped through him like a California breaker wave.

  “Right this way…” The hostess’s voice died away as she approached the back of the restaurant with two lunch customers and saw them all around Monica’s table.

  Lorianne immediately moved to block their view and spoke to her hostess in a low voice. The woman smiled at the couple and said, “If you’ll follow me, we’ll find you a different table.”

  They walked away, but Shaun could see that the restaurant was filling up with people coming in to eat lunch. He reached over Monica’s shoulder and covered the box with the lid to hide the snake from view—hers as well as any of Lorianne’s customers.

  “You have to call the police,” Mr. O’Neill told her.

  Lorianne looked a little strained at the suggestion, but she nodded to Monica. “I remember what the delivery guy looked like—short, really thin, big nose. Brown hair. I’ll talk to the hostess to see if she remembers, too.” She moved away to intercept the woman as she was returning to the front desk after seating the couple at a different table by the window.

  Shaun sat at a seat at the table while Monica pulled out her cell phone, but she dialed a different number than 9-1-1. He was about to ask who she was calling when she said, “Aunt Becca, I’m at Lorianne’s Café. I need you to call Detective Carter and have him meet me here.”

  “Monica, what happened?” Shaun could hear her aunt’s voice through the cell phone, sharp with concern.

  “I got a threatening note.” She opened her mouth as if she’d say more, but then rushed on without mentioning the snake. “He doesn’t need to bring an officer with him. I don’t want to make a fuss and chase away Lorianne’s customers.”

  Her aunt said something briefly and then Monica hung up.

  “So Becca’s still dating Detective Carter?” Shaun’s father said, trying to adopt a normal tone of voice, but Shaun could hear the reedy thread of stress behind his words.

  Monica nodded. “She has his direct number so he’ll be here sooner than if I’d called 9-1-1.”

  Her clear amber eyes found Shaun’s, and he could read the question in them about what he’d said about his sister. “I’ll tell you about it when the detective gets here,” he promised.

  She also called Phillip and canceled the lunch appointment. Shaun’s jaw tightened as he faintly heard Bromley’s voice. Something about an overturned truck. He was probably lying.

  Detective Carter must have been nearby because he arrived at the restaurant within minutes. He pulled off his sunglasses as he entered the dining room, and his gray eyes were filled with concern as he saw Monica. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice kind.

  “I’m fine. You know Patrick and Shaun O’Neill, right?” She gestured to Shaun and his father, who were sitting at the table. Detective Carter seated himself in the remaining chair. Then she pushed the box toward him and handed him the notecard.

  The detective’s expression grew hard as he read the note, but it grew fierce when he lifted the lid and saw the snake. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  Monica recited how someone had delivered the gift to the restaurant and Lorianne had carried it to her. “I’ll talk to her later,” he said. “You don’t know who sent this?”

  She shook her head, but her eyes darted to Shaun. “But Shaun mentioned something about his sister,” she told the detective.

  Shaun looked to his dad, whose lined face seemed to have aged a decade. “Tell them,” Patrick said, his voice weak.

  Shaun paused, staring at that hated notecard, gathering his thoughts. Finally he said, “Five years ago, my younger sister, Clare, moved from Sonoma to Los Angeles to work at one of Dad’s hotels and to be closer to her boyfriend, Johnny. She had gotten her MBA the year befor
e, and she was consulting for a free family planning clinic where Johnny was director, which was also down in L.A. But a couple months after moving, she was found dead in her apartment by her roommate.”

  He had to pause, to let the ache in the base of his throat ease so that he could continue. “It looked like suicide—drug overdose. But I knew my sister. She didn’t use drugs. Her roommate said the same thing, and they hung out together a lot. Also, I had spoken to her on the phone the day before. We talked every week. She wasn’t depressed, and she wouldn’t have taken her life.”

  His father nodded slowly. “I spoke to her once or twice a week, too.”

  “When I was going through her things, I found postcards and letters that had been mailed to Clare during the two months before she moved to L.A. and also a few mailed to her L.A. apartment. They threatened her life if she didn’t stop consulting for the family planning clinic.”

  He realized his hand had clenched into a fist, and he willed his fingers to relax. Breathe. You’re just telling the story. Except it hadn’t been just a story to him. It had been a surprising and hurtful discovery to make after burying his only sister. Clare had been the jewel of the family, especially after Mom had died. Losing his sister had shattered them all.

  “Did she file incident reports?” Detective Carter asked.

  “I don’t know if she did for the notes she received in Sonoma,” Shaun said. “I did find a report number in her notebook, but for an incident report she had filed in L.A.”

  The detective scribbled in his notebook. “I’ll look into it.”

  “I confronted her roommate, Angela, about the notes,” Shaun said. “Clare had confided in her about it all. Angela said that Clare had kept this secret from Dad and me and my brothers because we were all too protective of her and we wouldn’t have let her move to L.A. if we’d known.” Shaun fought back the wave of guilt. He had known how desperately Clare wanted to leave Sonoma, which at its heart was a small town despite the heavy tourist traffic. But Clare had been the only girl among four brothers, and their mom had died years ago, so they were naturally a bit overprotective of her. But maybe if they hadn’t been, she might have felt she could confide in her family and Shaun could have protected her.

  “Did the L.A. police look into her death?” Detective Carter asked. “They should have, if she filed an incident report for the notes.”

  “They couldn’t conclusively prove it wasn’t suicide,” Shaun said. “Her boyfriend and roommate had alibis. Also, Angela told me that Johnny had been receiving threatening notes and other death threats for over a year from anti-abortion activists who opposed the family planning clinic, so when Clare first got the notes in Sonoma, she thought they were along the same lines. She also thought the notes would stop once she moved, but the stalker found her in L.A. and kept sending her letters and gifts.”

  At the word gifts, Monica shivered and her eyes slid to the white box resting in front of Detective Carter. Shaun wanted to comfort and protect her as he hadn’t been able to do for his sister.

  As he hadn’t been able to do for any of the women in his life.

  “Couldn’t the L.A. police find anything?” Monica asked him.

  “They focused on the anti-abortion activists angle, but I thought that the notes Johnny got were different from hers. His were violent death threats, but one of her notes quoted from Don Juan by Lord Byron—the same quote as that.” He pointed to Monica’s note.

  Her eyes became wide and dark in her pale face. “So that’s why it caught your attention.”

  When he’d read it, he’d felt a burning in his chest like red hot barbecue briquettes. “I recognized the quote because I had looked it up when I saw it in Clare’s note. It was the only time he ever quoted from a poem. The LAPD even searched the database for any quote from Byron’s poetry being used in any other stalker or murder cases, but they never found anything that tied to Clare’s stalker.” Until now.

  Shaun shouldn’t have let Clare go to L.A. He should have argued more with her. He should have been there for her rather than down south on the border patrol. She might have confided in him. He might have been able to do something about the stalker.

  He happened to look up and he saw Monica’s eyes on him. She seemed to see through the expression on his face, past the words he said to the words he didn’t say, reading his thoughts. Her eyes and her face were filled with compassion, reaching out to him. It was as if she were trying to tell him that it hadn’t been his fault.

  Except she was wrong. It had been his fault. He was supposed to have protected Clare.

  “How did the stalker know she was consulting for the family planning clinic?” Detective Carter asked.

  Shaun shrugged. “Everyone knew. She didn’t keep it a secret.”

  “But how would the stalker have known if she was still consulting for them or if she had stopped?” Monica asked.

  He hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know,” Shaun said. The notes had become more and more threatening, but he hadn’t considered how the stalker knew she hadn’t stopped working on the clinic.

  Detective Carter made notes in his notebook. “I’ll look into that.”

  “What happened to the family planning clinic?”

  “It never opened, but not because of the death threats or Clare’s death. Funding eventually fell through.”

  “And I’m working on funding for my free children’s clinic right now,” Monica said. “What does this guy have against free clinics?”

  “Maybe that’s the connection,” Shaun said. Clare’s stalking had seemed so random, but maybe they’d found a clue that would lead them to the stalker. “We need to check all the other stalking cases involving women working for free clinics.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Detective Carter promised. He then turned to Monica. “Stalkers are rarely rational, and they can also be unpredictable. Be careful. Keep an eye out for suspicious cars, try to make sure you’re not followed when you go home from work. Call me at the first sign of anything unusual.”

  Monica nodded, but they were interrupted by a bustling at the front of the restaurant as her aunt, Becca Itoh, hurried into the dining room. Several of the other customers looked up at the disturbance she created in her panic, but Detective Carter rose to his feet and gave Becca a hard, meaningful look and a subtle gesture with his hand. Becca’s gaze flitted around the dining room, then she walked calmly to join them at their table.

  “Are you all right?” She gave Monica a hug.

  Monica’s hand grasping her aunt’s shoulder clenched once, then relaxed. “I’m fine.”

  While Monica explained what had happened, it gave Shaun an opportunity to study her. She tucked her long, wavy hair behind her ear when she concentrated on something, and her clear eyes seemed to glitter like golden gemstones, framed by her dark lashes.

  When their gazes had met earlier, his attraction for her had hit him like a train wreck. It was still the same today as it was when they’d first met years ago. Then, there had been an ardent fire in her eyes, which she hid behind a cool demeanor. Holding him at arm’s length, like he had Ebola or something.

  Today, she’d again tried to be cool when he first came up to her, but for a moment during their brief conversation, before he’d angered her, he’d seen a flash of warmth in her amber eyes, a softening of her mouth. It somehow soothed him in a deep place inside.

  He had been confused, so of course he ruined everything by getting into an argument with her about Phillip Bromley.

  It was for the best. He would be stupid to get involved with a woman like Monica Grant. Any woman, actually. All the women in his life ended up dead.

  He hadn’t taken care of Clare well enough. He hadn’t been able to save those illegal immigrants who had been killed at the border by the “coyote,” a smuggler those people had hired to help them cross into the U.S.

  He felt like he’d failed all the people in his life he was supposed to protect, and he wasn’t about to let another
one in.

  She might end up dead, too.

  But sitting here, looking at her, it was hard for him to remind himself that she was better off without him. As he studied the curves of her face, the color of her lips, he had to admit that she was even more magnetic than when he’d last seen her.

  “Clare never found out who the stalker was?” Becca asked Shaun, drawing his attention from the glossy dark waves of Monica’s hair.

  “He never met her face-to-face. She kept trying to find out who he was so she could issue a restraining order against him. She tried backtracking the packages he sent her, but couldn’t come up with any proof of who it was.”

  He glanced at Monica and resolved to speak privately to the detective about his suspicions. No need to alarm her, but he had to give the police everything he knew so this madman wouldn’t slip away between their fingers. That frustration nagged and ate at him like an ulcer.

  Although Clare was already gone, he had been driven to find her killer. If this were the same man, here was a chance for Shaun to catch him.

  He hadn’t yet turned in his application for the Sonoma Police Department. He hadn’t quite understood why he’d been dragging his heels, but now he was glad because it gave him time to investigate Monica’s letter-writer—assuming the stalker followed the same pattern as he did before.

  The man had already taken his sister’s life, and maybe others in the years since her death. He had to stop him from terrorizing any more young women.

  He would find out who the man was. And this time, he wouldn’t let him get away with harming Monica.

  TWO

  “We’re not done with this conversation,” Monica’s dad said. “I think you should just lay aside the plans for this clinic for now.”