Paranoid

by Lisa Jackson

  “It’s too high,” she said.

  “Nope. Just wait here.”

  “What? No!” She was frantic. For a wild, horrifying second she thought he was leaving her.

  “I’m just going to move my Jeep.”

  “What?”

  He loped to his rig, climbed inside, switched on the ignition, and then reversed to the spot near where Harper was standing. “I’ll climb over first. Then you.”

  Before she could ask any questions, he had made his way onto the hard top of his Jeep and placed his hands on the top of a post, then vaulted to the other side. He landed with a hard thud.

  “Come on,” he called to her in a low voice.

  Great. Harper didn’t like the idea, but wasn’t about to be left, so she did the same, scrambling onto the roof of his Jeep and standing up to peer over the fence. Xander was in the school yard, looking up, arms outstretched. “Come on,” he whispered and motioned quickly with his fingers. “I’ll catch you.”

  This was nuts.

  Crazy.

  But she placed her hands on the post, hesitated an instant, then swung one leg over the top of the fence, straddling it for a second, then finally getting her second leg across. As she let go to drop to the ground, she felt strong hands at her waist, just before her toes touched the uneven ground.

  “See, easy peasy. Come on.” He took one hand and they skirted the quiet school yard, where beneath the gaseous light of the lone security lamp, she spied pieces of broken play equipment, clumps of weeds, and piles of junk scattered between the school, hospital, and church.

  Fear skittered up Harper’s spine.

  This was wrong. So wrong.

  She strained to listen but now heard nothing but an occasional car passing on the street and the soft sough of the wind over the frantic beating of her heart.

  Where?

  Where was the woman?

  Maybe she’d left.

  Perhaps she hadn’t been here in the first place.

  And then she heard it. No words. Just a low moan that seemed to crawl through the night air.

  Xander took her hand and pulled her toward the chapel. He placed a finger to his lips and she moved along beside him, trying desperately to tamp down her fear.

  Creeeak!

  That awful sound again. But there were no big trees, no strong wind.

  Oh. God.

  Fear chasing her, Harper kept up with Xander as he crossed the yard. They should leave. Now. Just call the police and let them take care of whatever they might find. An injured person? Or a crazed lunatic? What?

  The door to the chapel hung open, sagging on one hinge, revealing the stygian darkness inside.

  “I don’t think—” she started to whisper, but Xander gave a quick shake of his head and stepped through the opening.

  Her throat dry, every nerve strung tight, she followed, through a small, rotting vestibule and into a larger space, what had once been a nave, a few pews remaining on either side of the aisle, the altar still intact. Above it all, a huge cross was still suspended. Though not Catholic, Harper sketched a sign of the cross over her chest.

  What would it hurt?

  A rat scurried across the dusty boards of the aisle and Harper let out a sharp scream.

  “Shh!” Xander pulled her farther inside.

  She held fast to his big hand, squinting to see in the dark.

  What if someone else was here? Watching them? Maybe from the tiny choir alcove over the vestibule or . . .

  Creeeak!

  Her stomach dropped.

  This was all wrong. Fear sizzled through her and she was sweating nervously, seeing images in the cracked stained glass windows, imagining killers lurking between the broken pews or behind the altar.

  Xander pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight app.

  Another groan echoed through the vast space and Xander released her hand to sprint forward.

  “No!” she cried after him, thinking that an attacker might be nearby, watching and waiting. With Xander’s phone as a beacon, an attacker could zero in, find them, hurt them. They could be walking into a trap!

  Screw it!

  She whipped out her phone and punched in 911.

  If she got into trouble—and she would—tough!

  “Oh, Jesus!” Xander said as another raspy groan seemed to ooze through the chapel. He took off, running to one side of the altar, through a door that hung awkwardly on only one hinge, his footsteps pounding loudly as if he were climbing stairs.

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” an operator asked.

  “Someone’s hurt. In the church at St. Augustine’s. This . . . this is Harper Ryder and I’m here and someone’s hurt . . . on Hawthorn Street. I don’t know the address, but send someone fast. . . .”

  “Holy shit!” Xander said. “It’s a woman. Oh, God. Lady, I’m here, I’ll help you.”

  Harper was already dialing her father’s cell as she climbed the few steps to the bottom of the bell tower. Then she stopped, her hand on the phone freezing, her eyes bulging.

  From a long rope, a woman was hanging upside down by one leg, her hair sweeping the floor of the tower, her eyes blindfolded as she groaned and spun slowly.

  “For Christ’s sake, Harper, help me!” Xander ordered. “We have to get her down!”

  She dropped the phone.

  CHAPTER 21

  It had been years since Cade had been involved in a stakeout, and here he was at 1:13 in the morning parked a few doors down and on the opposite side of the street from the cottage where Rachel and the kids lived. His old house. He felt a lot more nostalgic about it than he’d ever felt about the massive Victorian where he’d grown up, the home now occupied by his father, Lila, and Lucas.

  “Small town,” he reminded himself and sipped from his cup of rapidly cooling coffee. He’d been here for nearly an hour, and so far he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary. His vigil wasn’t official business, just a man watching his ex-wife’s home because he couldn’t sleep and because of recent events that included a murder along with the vandalism and an anonymous text.

  Being here wasn’t stalking, he told himself. He was just looking out for his kids’ and their mother’s safety.

  The area was quiet, a few street lamps casting pools of light on the roadway, several unoccupied cars parked on either side. He cracked the window and heard the soft hoot of an owl hidden in the thick branches of the fir trees high overhead.

  The cottage, like the other homes along the street, was dark, only the faintest glow emanating from the dining room window along one side. He remembered how she’d always insisted on leaving the light on over the stove in the kitchen. Some things never changed. Some things were always changing.

  Earlier this evening Rachel had called and told him that Dylan had jerry-rigged the old security system and he could see that Rachel had handled the message on the front door, the cruel message covered by a thick coat of paint.

  Still, Cade hadn’t been satisfied that she and the kids were safe. Not with Violet Sperry’s brutal murder unsolved, and the weird text Rachel had received and, of course, the vandalism to her home with the single word: KILLER.

  Was someone just trying to freak her out? Get his or her jollies from terrorizing his ex-wife? A cruel prank that preyed on her fears? That was bad enough and it made his blood boil, but it could be the start of something more dangerous, a warning of more dire, perhaps deadly things to come.

  He snorted.

  He was starting to be as paranoid as she was.

  But, he told himself, his eyes scanning the street, with good cause. He saw a movement in the shrubbery, a dark shadow, and felt himself tense until he realized the motion in the leaves was an oversized racoon. Standing on his back legs, the critter stared straight at Cade’s truck with his masked eyes before waddling away, deeper into the shrubbery guarding the fence line.

  Cade had spent the day trying to track down the elusive Frank Quinn, who didn’t have a driver’s
license or registration for a white Buick, nor did he live on Toulouse Street. Though there were four Frank Quinns in Portland, two on the other side of the mountains, one in Bend, and another living outside of Pendleton, none was the man he’d met on this very street last week. He’d even checked dog registrations in Chinook County—again no Frank Quinn, nor F. Quinn.

  He’d thought the name was an alias and kicked himself for not taking a picture of the guy or asking more questions at the time.

  He saw a light go on upstairs in the office overlooking the front yard. Her silhouette was visible beyond the shade, and for a second he felt like a voyeur, a teenaged boy trying to gain a peek of the girl next door taking a shower. He watched as the light snapped off, replaced by a blue glow—her computer. And he imagined her in an oversized T-shirt, her hair pulled into a messy bun that was falling loose after hours of restless sleep, a yawn parting her lips.

  God, he missed all that.

  He missed her.

  He missed living with the kids—being a part of his family.

  “Get over it.” He’d blown that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  He wondered if she’d gotten another text that had woken her.

  Or had it been another one of her nightmares?

  Or just her ongoing battle with insomnia?

  He’d been such a fool.

  “Too little too late.”

  Staring at the house, watching and waiting, he remembered the good times . . . and the bad. When he’d married Rachel she’d been pregnant and scared, and he hadn’t realized how deeply scarred she was from the tragedy of the night her brother died. Yeah, it all came back to Luke’s death and that stupid, dangerous game the group of kids had been playing.

  She’d always blamed herself.

  Despite the fact that most of the people in that darkened cannery had testified that they didn’t think Rachel could have fired the gun. Violet Osbourne and Annessa Bell had both claimed they weren’t sure that Rachel was the killer.

  He finished the coffee and saw the computer light dim in the house, but the street remained quiet. He thought of how it had all fallen apart. There had been fights, of course, especially about her ever-increasing paranoia. With motherhood came a whole new raft of fears. She’d overprotected the kids, he’d thought, and the kids had rebelled. Rachel probably hadn’t been able to stop herself and the nightmares had increased. She’d been freaked out that something would happen to a member of their family and hated the fact that he was a detective, as her father had been. She blamed her father’s job for his drinking and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. She’d been certain the same fate would befall them, and because of that, her fears of divorce, she’d almost put the wheels into motion.

  Yeah, Ryder, but you were the driver, weren’t you?

  His partner at the Chinook County detective division had moved on and had been replaced by Kayleigh O’Meara and they’d spent many a night on stakeouts like this one, getting closer, enjoying the camaraderie and the hours alone. She’d broken up with a boyfriend—Travis Mcsomething or other—and Cade’s marriage was crumbling. He’d confided more than he should have on those long, dark nights, and he’d recognized that she was starting to fall for him. He should have put the brakes on, headed her off at the pass.

  But he didn’t.

  Once in his old sedan, Kayleigh had been bold enough to kiss him and he hadn’t stopped her. Her warm lips felt like heaven after weeks of being shut out from a wife who was falling apart. One kiss led to another, and soon they were fumbling at each other’s clothes before he came to his senses and stopped the madness. “I can’t,” he said, breathing hard, looking away from her. “And . . . and we need to pay attention here.” They were on a stakeout of a suspected drug dealer, in a sketchy area southeast of Astoria near the bay, a small, one-story house tucked among similar crumbling residences, some abandoned and boarded, trash littering the cracked road. There was a chance that this was a meth lab, a small operation but one that might lead to others, part of a larger system.

  He straightened his clothes, and from the corner of his eye he saw her do the same, her lips pursed, as she swallowed hard. Embarrassed. As he was.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be.” She stared straight ahead through the bug-spattered windshield to the house with a single lamp glowing in a cracked window. “My mistake.”

  “Kayleigh—”

  “Don’t. Just don’t.” Her lips had barely moved, but in the weak streetlight he saw that her eyes were glistening, a tear starting to slide down her cheek.

  “Oh, God, I . . . I don’t know what to say. I’m married.”

  “Are you?” She swung her head around to stare at him. “Really? All you’ve done for the past month or so is talk about how miserable you are, how miserable she is, how you don’t know what to do.”

  He couldn’t deny it. He’d crossed a line. But he wasn’t going to cross another.

  “I thought your marriage was over; Jesus, Ryder, I usually don’t make this kind of mistake!”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Oh, shove it.” She sniffed loudly, but her eyes, almost luminous in the night, glared at him, her pain turning to a palpable fury. “I’m sick of this. Really sick of it. I’ll ask for a new partner in the morning.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Yeah,” she said, cutting him off and pulling her sidearm from its holster. “Yeah, I do.” And with that, she opened the door and slid out of the car. “I’m over this.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Finding out if we’re wasting our time out here.” She closed the door and, in a half crouch, ran toward the house.

  “No. Oh, fuck!” Frantic, he called for backup as he exited the car, closed the door, then took off after her. What the hell was she thinking? Not only might she blow their cover, but she was going to get herself killed in the process! And if these guys were cooking meth . . .

  And they were. He smelled it, that acrid odor filtering through a crack in the windows somewhere. Maybe from the attic where one small dormer peeked from the dilapidated roof, the glass of the window nonexistent.

  Kayleigh had made it to the broken-down fence of the backyard and was slipping past a leaning post when he heard the creak of a door.

  Oh, crap!

  A second later a scrawny man with thin, stringy hair stepped onto the porch to light a cigarette. Beside him, a beast of a dog, gray and bristly, wandered into the yard only to stop suddenly, turn, and bark wildly. A sharp, loud warning.

  No!

  Cigarette dangling from his lips, the man turned, peering in the direction of Kayleigh just as the dog spied Cade. Snarling, it leapt from the porch and the man twitched, his gaze shifting from the fence to the street. He raised his gun.

  “Police!” Cade yelled. “Drop your weapon.”

  “You heard him!” Kayleigh screamed. “Drop it. Now!” She was aiming straight at the back porch. Then, “No! Cade! Watch out—!”

  Blam!

  A gun fired.

  Cade’s body jerked, then spun. He took a wobbling step backward before he stumbled, his pistol clattering to the broken pavement. His knees folded and he felt a sharp, burning sensation on his neck. He’d never seen the man on the porch lift his weapon, but Cade had gone down, the world spinning as more gunshots blasted and somewhere far in the distance the sound of a siren wailed through the night.

  He found out later a second shooter had been in an attic window and had fired at him, while stringy-hair and the dog had backed down. The dude had dropped his weapon and commanded the dog to “stay,” rather than risk shooting an officer. Kayleigh had gotten off several shots, hitting the assailant in the window. Both of the suspects had been arrested, charged, and convicted and were now serving time, their small operation shut down, the link to the larger system never discovered.

  Now Cade stared at Rachel’s house, dark again, Rachel having, he presumed, turned off the comput
er and returned to bed. Not that she would sleep; he knew better. When she had the nightmares she had trouble finding sleep again. He knew. He’d been there. Had held her and whispered that “everything’s all right,” and that she needed to “calm down” as he’d kissed the top of her head and felt her trembling in his arms.

  He checked his watch and found it now after 4 a.m., the neighborhood calm. Not even the raccoon disturbed the stillness. He stretched the muscles in his neck by rotating his head, then settled back against the seat. That stakeout had been the beginning of the end, he thought.

  When he’d opened his eyes, he’d found himself staring up at the can lights in the ceiling of the intensive care unit of the hospital.

  A male nurse was in the room with him. His name tag read Ari Granger, RN. With stern blue eyes, a soul patch, and the brisk demeanor of a bartender, Ari checked Cade’s vital signs. Cade winced.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice gravelly and dry. For a second he wasn’t able to remember anything.

  “EMTs brought you into the ER. Gunshot wound. You’ve been in surgery.” Another grave look.

  Cade tried to shift in the bed and changed his mind when the pain flared through his back.

  “How’s your pain on a scale of one to ten? I can give you something for that,” Ari said.

  “Not . . . not good.” Cade stopped moving to help the agony subside. “My back . . .” The top half of his body felt raw.

  “The bullet lodged close to your spinal cord. Another inch and I don’t think we’d be having this conversation right now. But if you rest and follow the doctor’s orders, in a few days, you’ll walk out of here a whole man. For now, you need rest. Here, let me give you something for that pain,” he said, and added a dosage into Cade’s IV.

  “Point taken. Is my partner okay? Kayleigh O’Meara?” he asked as the memory of the scene at the meth house started to return.

  “She’s out in the waiting room, I think. You thirsty?”

  Cade nodded, increasingly aware of the dryness in his throat and the burning pain spreading through his back, shoulders, and chest.

  The nurse disappeared for a minute or so it seemed, then returned with water in a glass with a bendable straw. “Dr. Kendris will be in sometime this afternoon to discuss your prognosis.”