Hoping the orders would wait another minute, she booted her computer and quickly logged into the bank’s website, scrolled down to about three weeks, and checked the account history. Sure enough, the entries for tuition payments were there. “Well, they’re right here. Why don’t I give the office a call, and I can send them a copy of the statement.”
Her sister sighed in relief. “I thought it was strange when they told me that. I’m actually standing at the counter right now, why don’t I hand the phone over?”
Olivia spoke with the woman at the registrar’s office and explained that she could immediately fax or scan a copy of the proof that the tuition had been paid.
The woman’s deep foghorn voice filled the line. “I don’t think you understand. Our records indicate that transaction had a stop payment placed on it.”
“What?”
“Yes, ma’am. And, I’m afraid another personal check will not do in this case, since it’s been an issue. We can accept a cashier’s check or money order, but not a personal check.”
She bit her lip, uncomfortable with going out by herself when she knew there was a stalker out there. In fact, she realized he was probably the one behind this whole situation. If he had access to her house, then he surely had access to her files and financials. There was no way she’d be able to head to the bank and then make the drive over to the college today.
She ran her hands through her hair. The lady’s silence on the other end sounded like recrimination. “Unfortunately, I can’t get away from the café right now to head down there. However, my sister really needs to be able to register today. Would you be willing to accept a credit card over the phone right now?”
She could hear the loud sigh as the woman let her know how put out she felt, but then she begrudgingly replied, “I suppose that will do.”
She rolled her eyes, Oh, you “suppose” you’ll be willing to take my money? Reminding herself not to think uncharitable thoughts, she infused her voice with warm cheer. “I appreciate that. Let me just read the numbers for you.”
Ten minutes later, Fiona got back on the phone. “Thank goodness I could get a hold of you.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry for the confusion, but you should be all set now. Do me a favor and get a receipt from her, okay?”
“Will do.”
“I’ve gotta let you go and get back to the kitchen. Tom is out sick and I’m the only one filling the orders.”
“Okay, thanks, Olivia. Talk to you later.”
She wondered what the heck had just happened. She wanted to take a closer look through her bank accounts, but didn’t have the time. Making a mental note to check with the bank later, she hoped to find a more benign explanation for the problem. Maybe there had been a mix-up or human error, somehow. She doubted it, but it felt good to hope it had been something less sinister, even if only for a moment.
Olivia made her way back to the dining room and noticed that everything was still under control. In fact, there hadn’t been any new tables set in the time it took for her to handle the crisis. For once, she was happy that business was slow.
Impulsively deciding to take a moment, she grabbed the coffee pot and made her way around the breakfast counter. Too often lately, she’d felt the need to hide back in the kitchen, not knowing who or where her terrorizer could be. She was sick and tired of acting like a victim and being cowed. This was her place, dammit. If she couldn’t feel safe here, surrounded by friends, then where else could she go?
Girded by her thoughts and resolve, she straightened her shoulders and stubbornly pasted a smile on her face.
“Hello, how is everything going over here?” She warmly greeted one of her regulars, leaning over to refill a mug.
“Olivia. Everything is great, as usual! You ready for the holidays, yet?”
She grimaced. “Ugh, not even. I haven’t started any of my shopping.”
The young woman smiled. “I know, me neither. We’d better get on it, though.”
Olivia nodded. “You’re absolutely right. Well, enjoy your meal. Thanks for coming in.”
Slowly, she made her way around the tables, taking a moment with each party to see how they were doing and touch base with her clientele.
Many of the patrons were familiar to her, but there were a few here and there that she didn’t recognize. Although, with friends and family coming into town for Thanksgiving, she supposed that was to be expected.
Gradually, she began to feel more secure again. This wasn’t just her place, this was her town. She’d grown up with these people; she knew them, knew their stories. No stalker was going to be able to take that sense of belonging away from her unless she let him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Robert watched as Olivia stopped at the table next to him and took a moment to speak to the patrons there. His pulse began to beat an unsteady staccato. He couldn’t believe his good luck!
She rarely came out of the kitchen and here she was, so close. He probably could have leaned over and touched her. Maybe she had seen him sitting here in the dining room and fabricated some excuse for coming out to see him discreetly.
He scanned the café to see if Mason was anywhere nearby. All morning, he’d been keeping an eye out for the annoying detective, but hadn’t seen him. It had been a pleasure being able to watch her without him interfering. Perhaps today would finally be the day he could make his move.
Suddenly, she turned towards his table. Frantically, he swallowed the bite he was chewing, coughing and sputtering as he swallowed it down the wrong pipe.
“Hi, are you okay?” The look of concern on her face had him turning red with embarrassment. He pounded his chest a few times, willing himself to stop hacking.
“Yeah, sorry. Food went down the wrong way.”
“Don’t you hate it when that happens?” Olivia smiled. “Need a refill on your coffee?”
He just sat, stunned. She smiled at him. At him!
He fought to remember what her question had been. “What? Coffee? Oh, yes please.”
She leaned over the table in order to fill his mug. Subtly, he shifted so he could lean forward and inhaled deeply, memorizing the scent of her. He could just make out the curve of her tits. His fingers ached to reach out and test their softness.
Oblivious, she straightened. “How’s your breakfast? Would you like anything else?” It was easily apparent to him she was looking for any reason to stay with him a little longer. He gave her a long, considering look. “I think you know what I’d like….”
He saw something flash in her eyes before she stepped back from the table and gave a hesitant half-laugh. He knew it. She could feel the connection between them. The little minx had just been playing coy. She probably couldn’t even help herself, being a weak-willed female.
A sick thrill coursed through him at the way her nervousness filled the air between them. It was so obvious she was responding to him. He watched silently as she glanced towards the next table. Her skittishness made him feel powerful.
She quickly licked her lips and seemed to compose herself. Images of those lips wrapping themselves around his sensitive flesh as he filled her mouth flashed in his mind. “Well, if there’s nothing else, I’ll have Jackie come by with your check.”
Such a little tease. He gave her a smug, knowing look and nodded. Was it his imagination, or did her hips sway a little more as she moved on to the next table? She wanted him.
Finally! He had the sign he’d been waiting for.
Today would be the day.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The orange line of the speedometer crept past eighty. Mason gripped the steering wheel and reluctantly lifted his foot off the pedal. Slightly.
He couldn’t complain. Overall, he’d made remarkably good time, despite the fact that he’d hit morning rush hour traffic. Still, the sooner he could be back in Maine, the better he’d feel. Leaving Olivia by herself was making him jittery.
As he passed the ha
lf mile sign to his exit, he let out a sigh of relief. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the parking garage about a block away from the police station.
The station’s lobby wasn’t very large, and was the standard issue, dingy, institutional beige that seemed to be found in every police station – small town or big city notwithstanding. After greeting the officer manning the front desk, he was buzzed through the security doors.
A wall of sound rose up and buffeted around him. It was the usual din of drunks yelling, victims weeping, and criminals threatening. There was the squall of perpetual phones ringing, the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum, conversations among peers, the occasional crash from someone giving the cops a hard time, and underneath it all was the barely perceptible clickety-clack of the keyboards as diligent cops and detectives hunched over their terminals and hacked out their reports. It sounded like a madhouse.
Mainly because it was one.
He took a deep breath, the corners of his lips involuntarily curling for just a moment as the constant cacophony assailed him. Home…
There was a glass-enclosed office at the back—the Captain’s—and another room along the side for conferences or interviews. The aroma of stale, burnt coffee lingered in the air from the break room, through one of the doors on the back wall.
“Mason!” A beefy man, a little over six-foot tall, his muscular body just turning soft, came walking up and gave him a hearty slap on the back. “Good to see you, Detective. When you gonna get off your duff and stop milking the state for disability?”
He smiled. “Aww, come on, Smithy. We both know me being away is the only way you’ve gotten any attention around here. Are you really so quick to relinquish top spot?”
Detective Smithy grinned and gave his shoulder a warm squeeze. Mason was quietly relieved he was standing by the side of his good arm.
Smithy stopped and took a good look at him then dropped the smile. Mason keenly felt the other man’s assessment as his astute detective’s eyes quickly delved past the outer layers of his presence.
Uncomfortably, he shifted his stance, feeling slightly dissected but not wanting to break the other man’s gaze. Smithy had been a veteran when he and Ryan had first become detectives and had taken them both under his wing, acting as a mentor to them. He owed a lot to the man standing before him.
With a sigh, Smithy let his arm drop to his side and gave him a wink. “Looks like you’re really coming along. Glad to see you’re up and about again. How’s the chest?”
He shrugged. “Tight, achy in this damn cold…but getting better.”
Smithy pinned him with a look. “You’ve got a couple of ten-pound bags under your eyes, man. You sleeping okay?”
“Mason. You gonna stand there and jaw all day, or are we gonna do this?” The captain’s voice bellowed out of the office and above the bedlam. Instantly, the room hushed and heads swiveled to peer at the two men standing in the aisle before noise rushed in to fill the void once again.
With relief, he gave Smithy an apologetic look. “That’s my cue. Hey, man, nice to see you.”
“You, too. Take care of yourself, lad.”
Mason strode across the room towards the man impatiently standing in the doorway and noticed the Captain looked a bit more haggard than usual. His badly wrinkled shirt appeared to have been slept in, and there was what looked like a mustard stain gracing his left cuff.
“Late night?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Captain Paul Fields just gave him a long look and sighed. “Aren’t they all?” Mason nodded in commiseration. The older man had earned his respect a long time ago. He was a no-nonsense, extremely tough man, with exacting standards. Someone who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and worked just as hard as any of the guys on the force. Mason knew he’d lost his wife to breast cancer a number of years back, which may account for his willingness to pull an all-nighter in the office just as often as anybody else.
He took a seat in the beat-up, slightly stained chair squatting across the desk from where Captain Fields’ much more comfortable chair sat. However, instead of moving towards his own seat, his superior leaned a hip on the desk. “So, tell me what’s going on with you up there. I know we’ve gone over a few things already, but why don’t you start from the beginning and refresh my memory.”
With a deep breath, he began categorizing the recent events leading up to his visit, ending with the most recent flowers on Olivia’s step and the pile of cigarette butts left in the street outside her door.
“I assume you brought a few with you for evidence?”
He pulled the plastic baggie of butts from his jacket pocket. “Yes sir.”
Captain Fields nodded and opened the door, “Hey, you. Officer Reynolds!”
The eager, fresh-faced officer hurried to the door. “Sir?”
“Take these down to forensics, would ya?” He glanced back at Mason before instructing the officer, “Tell them to make it priority.”
The officer took the baggie and rushed off to do the Captain’s bidding. After watching him weave through the bullpen for a moment, the captain closed his door again. This time, he moved around the desk and sat down. The chair groaned and squeaked before finally giving up and accepting the familiar load. He leaned back in his chair, looking at Mason over his steepled fingers.
Mason caught himself bouncing his leg and had to consciously force himself to stop. Telling the sequence of events in their entirety had left him feeling antsy and filled with nervous energy. He didn’t like being down here while knowing Olivia was up there with a madman in town.
The captain’s voice redirected his thoughts to the business at hand. “Well, I guess that would help explain why you look like shit. I thought the whole point of you being up there was to get some much needed R&R and recover.” He sighed heavily. “I take it you’re seeing this woman.”
It wasn’t a question so much as a statement. Mason winced before schooling his features back into a relatively impassive expression. “Not that it’s your business, but yes. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with her.”
Captain Fields leaned forward in his chair. “Well, hell, that complicates things, doesn’t it? No need to get defensive; I just like to know the lay of the land a bit before I go jumping headfirst into a situation.”
Mason blew out a breath and ran his hands through his hair. “Look, I know I’m not back on active duty yet, sir, but I need to know if you guys have made any progress on this. Have there been any other breakthroughs, any ideas about where Mendez may have holed up? The guy couldn’t have just dropped off the face of the earth.”
The older man pulled a manila folder out of his top drawer and slid it across the desk. “As a matter of fact, we have. I don’t think you’re going to like any of the information we’ve discovered, though.”
Mason pried the metal tongues apart and opened the flap. There were a number of reports along with a stack of crime scene photos. He looked up, surprised. “What’s this? They’ve already found another one of his victim’s?”
An odd mixture of relief and alarm balled up in his stomach. Maybe his instincts really were off. However, if that meant Olivia’s stalker wasn’t Mendez, then that was a good thing. For once, he’d be happy knowing he had been wrong.
“Well…not exactly.”
“What do you mean not exactly?” Mason looked a little closer at the report in his hands.
“This was taken a little over a year ago…an unsolved case of a murdered woman in South Boston. She’d been bound, sexually assaulted, and brutally stabbed to death.”
“Jesus,” Mason flipped the top page up to read the second page. “They thought the fiancée did it?”
“Yeah, at first…but then they started doing the interviews with her family members and it didn’t quite fit. They mentioned she’d begun to feel like someone was watching her. Had even made a few comments to them about flowers and notes being left for her – secret admirer shit. Only it persisted. Eventually, it st
arted to affect her mood and actions. Friends said she stopped wanting to go out as often, had started declining invites to dinner, that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, standard stalking stuff…sounds like a red flag.”
Fields nodded. “Right. But then the family started talking about odd incidents happening to them up to the time of the woman’s abduction. It was only much later, after it was too late, that they began to put together all the pieces and realize it must have been his way to separate and isolate the woman. She’d started to become estranged from her family, stopped returning their phone calls; you get the idea. Surprisingly, despite it all, the woman’s boyfriend stuck around, and had recently proposed to her when she disappeared.”
“No kidding.”
“Yup. Unfortunately for the happy couple, the investigators suspect that was the catalyst. The detectives thought at the time—and I’m inclined to agree with them—that whoever was stalking her became enraged when he realized she’d gotten engaged.” He gestured at the stack of gruesome pictures in Mason’s hand. “Well, you can see where it led him.”
Mason’s lips twisted in a moue of distaste. He peered into the envelope and discovered a final piece of paper. It appeared to be a more recent printout. As he read it, he could feel his Captain’s eyes watching him, assessing. After taking a moment to scan it, his eyes widened in shock.
“Are you shitting me?”
“And that’s the link I wanted to tell you about today. I assure you, I am not ‘shitting you.’”
“But this says the DNA at the scene of Robert Mendez’ house—the scene of my shooting and Ryan’s death—is a match for DNA at this woman’s murder. How can this…? How did you even make this match?”
“We wouldn’t have, to be honest. This case would have just sat in the unsolved murders cabinet and collected dust but for the fact that the head guy down in forensics just happened to have had a personality conflict with one of the guys working down there, and put in a transfer to move to Downtown. I honestly don’t know how he paired the two together…but it’s a match.”
Secret Hunger (The Harper Sisters) Page 20