Paranoid

by Lisa Jackson

  “Why?”

  “Just come, Cade. Are you working today? Can you come now?”

  “On my way.”

  He didn’t like the way she sounded.

  At her house he caught sight of Rachel standing on the porch by the front door, an ugly message painted on the panels behind her.

  “Oh, Jesus.” He parked on the street and jogged up the walkway, aware that the neighbors across the way, an older couple, were in their yard watching the drama unfold. Cade eyed the door and his insides clenched. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see it until the neighbors called. I didn’t notice it when I went for a run this morning, but you know when I leave the house I go in and out through the back door. Anyway, Mrs. Dickerson called to tell me something was up and I came outside and found this.”

  Painted in a crimson shade that made him think of blood, the message was like a shriek in a horror film: KILLER.

  Rachel was ashen faced, but holding it together. “I was going to start painting over it, but I thought I should call someone. . . .”

  “You were right.” He was already whipping out his phone and tamping down his fury. “Vandalism is a crime. Not a prank. But I think someone other than your ex should take the report.” He made the call, and Voss, who was on duty and in the area, promised to be at the house within ten minutes.

  “Officer Voss is on her way,” he told Rachel as he stuffed his phone into his pocket and eyed the vandalized door. “So this happened last night?” he said, pointing at the entrance to the house.

  “I think so.”

  He glanced across the street and saw the Dickersons hadn’t left their stations in their yard. Standing side by side on the other side of a short wrought-iron fence guarding a row of azaleas and rhododendrons, she in a long housecoat, he in a T-shirt and jeans, held up by suspenders, they watched the drama unfold.

  Rachel, obviously aware of the Dickersons, and now a bike rider doing a double-take as he saw the door, touched him on the arm. “Maybe you should come inside.”

  Once they were in the hallway where Reno greeted him and the door with its ugly message pulled firmly shut, he said, “So tell me.”

  “The long and short of it is that I had a bad dream, about Luke.”

  Of course. He didn’t say it.

  “But that’s not the worst of it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Odd things have been happening. I keep hearing things, seeing things, and it’s not just me. Reno does, too,” she said, amping up a bit. “And ... I received a weird text.... I mean, it was as if Luke had sent it. I know that’s impossible—crazy—but . . . here, let me show you.” She patted the back pocket of her jeans and then frowned. “I guess I left it . . .” She walked quickly down the hallway and into the kitchen and he followed. “Here . . .” After retrieving her cell from the counter, she studied the screen, punched out some commands, found what she was looking for, and handed the phone to him.

  “I forgive you,” he read the text aloud, his insides chilling. He glanced up at her. “Who sent it?”

  “Don’t know. I tried to text and call back—no one responded.”

  “Could be a mistake. Sent to the wrong number.” But he didn’t believe it for a second, not with the message—the vile accusation—sprayed across the door.

  “I don’t think so.” She glanced out the window. “I should tell you I saw something last night.”

  “What?” Real? Or imagined?

  The doorbell sounded, and the dog started barking.

  Patricia Voss had arrived.

  Good. He wanted to hear it all, but thought it would be best if someone else heard the story. Someone with a little distance, someone who hadn’t spent nights beside her in bed as Rachel woke with night terrors, someone who hadn’t had to calm their children when their mother was half crazed with fear, someone objective and professional.

  “Reno, hush!” Rachel opened the door, quick introductions were made, and Voss set up a recorder to take Rachel’s statement. They were in the living room, where the clock ticked over the fireplace, nearly buried in the framed pictures of Harper and Dylan crowded upon the mantel. Cade felt an uncomfortable pull remembering when some of the photographs had been taken. Christmas when the kids were just starting elementary school, Harper missing teeth, Dylan sporting a buzz cut that Rachel had hated.

  He stood near the couch where Rachel sat, Voss in a winged-back chair at one end of the coffee table, the dog finding a spot on the corner of the rug.

  “You have any idea who would have done this?” Voss asked, her pen poised to take notes to back up the recording.

  Rachel shook her head. “No. But I think maybe I saw him.”

  “Him. A man?” Voss asked and Cade felt his jaw tense.

  “It was last night, well, around three in the morning.” She explained about having a bad dream, being awakened by the dog’s barking. Downstairs, she’d looked through the windows in the door to see a man and a dog getting into a car at the end of the street.

  “A dog?” Cade repeated, feeling a jolt.

  “Can you describe the man?” Voss asked.

  “No, it was too dark; he looked . . . average, I guess, and he was carrying something. And, like I said, he was walking his dog.”

  “What kind of car?” Cade asked, already guessing.

  “Don’t know. Just what looked like a white, or maybe silver, sedan.”

  He pressed her. “You get the plate number or notice if it was from Oregon?”

  “No.”

  Of course not, but his mind was spinning ahead. “And the dog? What kind was it? What breed?”

  “I couldn’t say. Small or medium sized, I guess, and light colored.”

  “Could it have been a beagle?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “Again, it was dark, but maybe. About that size.”

  “You know anyone named Frank Quinn?” Cade asked.

  “What?” She looked up at him, her lips turned into a frown as she slowly shook her head. “No.”

  “He lives on Toulouse Street,” Cade said.

  “I said I don’t know him. Why?”

  “The other day when I came over?” He explained about the guy looking for his dog, a man who drove a white four-door sedan with Idaho plates, and as he spoke he noticed the panic starting to rise in his ex-wife’s eyes.

  “I have no idea who he is,” she said. “You think he’s the same person?”

  “Maybe.” He kicked himself for not delving deeper into Frank Quinn. “Tell Voss about the text.”

  “What text?” Voss asked.

  “This one.” Rachel found her phone and handed it to Voss.

  “ ‘I forgive you’? From who?”

  “That’s it. I have no idea.” Rachel repeated to Voss what she’d already told Cade, including explaining that she’d tried to contact the caller by phoning and texting back with no response.

  Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she sighed. “It came on the anniversary of my brother’s death. Twenty years ago.”

  “I read about what happened in the paper.” Voss’s eyes narrowed.

  “So you think whoever called you is forgiving you for being involved in his death?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Voss pressed. “Who would need to forgive you? Someone who thought you were guilty, right?”

  Rachel’s face tightened. “I guess.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” Rachel looked away. “I mean, Luke’s dead so it can’t be him.” She didn’t seem convinced.

  “Of course not,” Cade said.

  “I know, but I had this feeling . . . I don’t know. It sounds crazy, but that someone wants me to believe it’s him.”

  “It wasn’t Luke,” he said firmly. She couldn’t go down that impossible track.

  “I know.” Her voice was a little sharp. Defensive.

  Though it had been twenty years, she’d never really gotten over her half brother’s death;
she’d always blamed herself.

  “It’s probably someone who took Luke’s death personally,” Voss thought aloud as she underlined something in her notes. “Someone close to him?”

  Immediately, Cade thought of Lila. Good old Stepmommy. Mother of Luke’s son. But why? Yeah, there had been some tension between Lila and Rachel over the years, family stuff, but nothing that would lead to this. And why now? No.

  “We’ll check with the cell phone company,” Voss was saying. “If it was accidental, which I doubt, or if it was some kind of a sick prank, we’ll figure it out.”

  “But if it’s a burner phone?” Cade wasn’t liking the turn of his thoughts. He wasn’t buying into the “mistake” theory. Especially not with the grotesque message spray-painted on the door. Someone was trying to freak Rachel out, and he thought it might just be Frank Quinn.

  “You know the drill. If it’s a burner we’ll try to track it down from the store where it was purchased. If there’s no record of who bought it, no credit or debit card receipt or check, if the guy used cash, hopefully there will be camera footage of the buyer. And we will double-check all the security cameras in the area that might have images of the man and his dog.”

  “What if it’s a burner app?” Rachel asked. “You can do that, y’know. There are apps that disguise your number, make it impossible to trace.”

  Cade had heard of them. “There has to be some kind of trail, digitally.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I think everything can be encrypted.”

  “I’ll dig deeper on Frank Quinn. Find out if he lives in the neighborhood or owns a Buick with Idaho plates,” Cade said. Again he thought of Violet Sperry, murdered in her own home, and his blood turned cold. Was there a connection?

  Voss said, “Didn’t I see a camera on the porch?”

  “Not working,” Rachel admitted.

  Cade winced inside. He should have dealt with it when he still lived here.

  “It’s old school,” Rachel said, “put in by the people who owned the house before we did over twenty years ago. It wasn’t working, always going off, so I canceled the service and was going to install a new one, connected to an app on my phone.” She smiled weakly. “I just hadn’t gotten around to it.”

  Voss gave a curt nod. “You might want to make that a priority.”

  Amen to that, Cade thought. They went through a few more questions, and the tech came, dusted for prints, and left, with Voss taking off a few minutes later.

  Which left him alone with his ex-wife. In the living room they’d once shared. It felt right but different. Odd. She hadn’t changed the room much other than painting it a lighter color, a neutral gray, rather than the tan it had been. She’d also filled the space where his recliner had sat with a smaller chair.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Do I look okay?”

  “Uh, no. You look like—”

  “Hell. I know. I look like hell.”

  “You don’t—”

  “I do. Crap.” She raked her fingers through her hair and stood. “You know, ever since Luke died, I’ve had these nightmares.”

  “Yeah.” He was nodding, had lived through them.

  “And I’ve always told myself to somehow put it behind me; that what’s done is done, to move on. And I’ve tried. But this . . . Mercy dredging everything up again in the paper, and the reunion meeting with all the people who were there that night, and now . . . this.” She held up her phone, then pointed to her door. “It’s freaky.”

  “You’re right and I don’t like it.”

  “And then there’s Violet.” Shuddering, she sat down again and tucked her feet under her. “Is there any news about what happened to her?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, it’s disturbing. Worse than disturbing.” She was rubbing her arms as if suddenly chilled.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I’m afraid it makes me like a, you know, a crazy, overprotective mother.”

  He slanted a smile and took the chair Voss had vacated so he could look out the window to the Dickersons’ now empty yard. “The kids might agree with that.”

  “Do you think it’s true?” she asked and turned her eyes up to him as Reno stood, stretched, then wandered toward the back of the house.

  “Crazy? No. Overprotective?” He held up his hand, then tilted it. “Sometimes. A little.” But even as he said it, he thought again about Violet Sperry and her bizarre death. There was probably no connection to what was going on here—God, he hoped not—but he didn’t want to just dismiss the thought. “We all need to be careful.” He didn’t want to alarm her, send her over the edge, but he couldn’t pretend that the Sperry murder wasn’t cause for serious concern.

  “The last thing I want to be is overprotective. After growing up with my own parents.” She rolled her eyes. “I swore I’d never be the hovering, nosy parent my mother was, and as for my dad, I saw what being married to a cop was like, how he wasn’t home for a lot of the holidays or major events.”

  He felt his insides turn to stone. How smart had his own choices been, he wondered. “Sometimes history repeats itself. The choices we make.”

  There was a bit of a hesitation before she said, “Then I guess I should make better ones.”

  “Maybe we both should.”

  She stared at him a sec, then changed the subject. “How was your weekend with the kids? We all left on bad terms Friday night. I wasn’t happy with either of them. Dylan because of him ditching class and Harper because of . . . you know. The new boy or man or whatever in her life!”

  “Dylan’s been fine; if it bothers him that he’s in trouble at school, he doesn’t show it and won’t talk about it. Harper says you blew things all out of proportion, that she was just kissing Xander and that she’s . . . Let me get this straight.” He thought for a second. “Oh, I remember. Same old line I said way back when. Harper claimed that she was almost eighteen and when she turned eighteen she could do whatever she wanted.”

  “Like eighteen changes everything. The magic now-I’m-an-adult card.” She smiled. “She’ll find out. But I can’t push back too hard against this boy because it’ll just drive her further into his arms. Ugh.”

  “She wants to go to a concert with him in Portland next weekend. Saturday night.”

  Rachel let out a sigh. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s two hours away, for starters.”

  “She’s gone before.”

  “But we’ve known the kids, the parents.”

  “Lila vouches for him.”

  “Since when do you trust Lila’s judgment?”

  “Okay, point taken. But Harper’s seventeen. She’ll be eighteen in October.”

  “Which she so often reminds us.”

  “Off to college.”

  “Not until next year,” Rachel said, then skewered him with a glare. “You’re promoting this? I can’t believe it.”

  “He might not be so bad. I figure you’ve probably already checked him out online, looked into his social media accounts.”

  She ducked that one. “It’s not about bad or good, Cade, you know that. We’ve been over it before. I just don’t want her to make a mistake she can’t unmake.”

  “Like you.”

  “It was different! I wanted to marry you. I wanted your baby! It just came in the wrong order.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  She folded her arms and stared at him. “I want my daughter to have more options and it’s not like she’s in love with Xander Vale; they’re just in lust. Hot for each other.” She crossed her arms under her breasts in anger, unaware that she was lifting them. “I just hope they think before they act.”

  “Harper’s not an idiot.”

  “Neither was I. Except when it came . . . when it came to you.”

  He let out a derisive laugh. “Me too. You know, she’s texting all the time and when I ask her about it, she’s always texting ‘a friend’ or she’ll c
op to communicating with Lucas, but I’m pretty sure it’s Vale.”

  “When has she ever texted Lucas?”

  “They were pretty tight as kids,” he reminded her. Back in the days when he and Rachel were still married and Lila and Rachel had been close. Since the divorce, things had changed for all of them.

  “And now she’s got a renewed relationship with him.”

  “Looks like.”

  “Because of Xander Vale.”

  “Probably. You remember how it was. When we were in ‘lust’ and hot for each other.”

  She actually blushed. “As I said, ‘options.’ Like college. So she can get a bigger view of the world than just from Edgewater, Oregon. It wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me, okay, I’ll admit it. Having Harper and marrying you, ending up with Dylan. I wouldn’t change a thing. Well, not most things anyway.” She looked away, no doubt thinking about his betrayal. And then, as if the conversation had gotten too deep, she waved in the air as if to dismiss her words. “So, look, don’t worry about the door, okay? I’ll deal with it,” she said with more resolve than he’d seen in her in a long while. “I panicked after Ella called, but I’m okay now.” She glanced at the door. “Nothing a can of spray paint can’t cover up until I can paint the whole thing. I was thinking of changing the color anyway.”

  “And the security alarm?”

  “My . . . our son owes me and he’s got the skills, I think. Maybe even the equipment.”

  He withdrew his keys from his pocket. “Any kind of guard dog?” he asked.

  “Reno?” She let out a humorless laugh, and the dog, hearing his name, wagged his tail, then circumvented the coffee table to stand next to Rachel and place his head on her lap. She scratched him behind the ears. “Not much of one.”

  “Maybe you should upgrade.”

  “Yeah, right.” To the dog she said, “Don’t listen to that. He’s just kidding.”

  His phone buzzed in his pocket and he checked the screen. A text from the precinct. “The job,” he said to her, standing. “The boss wants me in early.”

  “Then you’d better go.”

  “You’ll be okay?”

  “Never better,” she said, though they both knew it was a lie.

  “I can come back, help clean up the door. I’ve painted a few panels in my day.”