by Gayle Wilson
“Because whatever’s going on, I got you into it.”
“So…basically your offer boils down to guilt.”
“It’s a powerful motivator.”
One she knew about. If anything happened to her, Jace would feel just as she did about Andrea.
“I’ll be fine,” she lied.
“I’d like the opportunity to make sure of that.”
By protecting her from the person who had put the snake in her hamper and set the fire tonight. Would that be wrong? Jace was a cop. And, as he’d said, he got her into this.
The problem was that, unlike somebody like Rick Carlisle, who might well have made this same offer, she was attracted to Jace. That alone changed the dynamics of the situation.
“I have no ulterior motive,” Jace added. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
She almost laughed, considering the cause of her hesitation. “Believe me, the thought never crossed my mind.”
“Really? I guess I should ask why not.”
She’d left herself wide open for that one. “Because you don’t strike me as that kind of man.”
“You must not know many men.”
Not like him. Something she’d admitted from the first.
The more she was around him, the more she recognized those differences. And the more she was attracted. A very dangerous attraction for her peace of mind.
“I really need to go inside.”
There was no response. Clearly Jace had said all he intended to. The choice was hers. She could let him take care of her, or she could go into her house and spend another sleepless night wondering what would happen next.
Leaning down, she put her hands on the bottom of the window frame. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to say it. Thank you for what you did tonight. For fighting the fire and for getting me out. Not many people would have—”
“You’re right. I don’t want to hear it. Get in the car, Lindsey. Go cut off your floodlights if you want. Then come back out here and get in the goddamn car.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to.”
“And you always get what you want?”
“Very seldom. But in this case, it’s what you want, too. You don’t want to spend the night here. You’ve tried that, and it didn’t work. You told me so yourself. All I’m asking is that you come home with me and get some sleep. I’ll keep watch. I swear to God nothing else is going to happen to you.”
It was the kind of promise her father had made when she was a child and had had a nightmare. Go back to sleep, Lindsey girl. It’s just a bad dream. If only this were…
She removed her hands from the frame, at the same time straightening away from the car. She looked out over its top, conscious of the row of houses and the neatly mown lawns of her neighbors stretching to the corner.
Hers were the only lights on the street. That didn’t mean that half a dozen people weren’t looking out their windows to watch her say goodnight to whoever had followed her home.
Let them, she thought. And let them think whatever the hell they want to. Without giving herself a chance to change her mind, she walked around the front of Jace’s car.
Before she reached the passenger side door, it opened. She slid into the seat. When she closed the door, the overhead light went out, providing a sheltering darkness.
“Now I know why you were chosen as the gifted coordinator.”
“That isn’t how it works,” she said with a laugh.
“Well, it damn well should be,” Jace said as he turned the key in the ignition.
She woke with a start, jarred out of the dream by its growing horror. Although she was aware enough to know it had been a dream, she was disoriented by the lingering images of the flames. Not real, she assured herself. None of it was real.
Except it had been, she thought, full consciousness returning in a rush. Real fire. Real danger. Real menace.
She took a breath, only now remembering where she was. And that she wasn’t here alone.
There had been none of the awkwardness she’d expected when they’d reach Jace’s apartment, which was in a complex on the edge of the downtown area. He’d shown her the bedroom and its adjoining bath. He’d opened a drawer and pointed out an unopened package of T-shirts. Then he’d left her alone.
She hadn’t expected to sleep, but she had. Almost as soon as she’d closed her eyes. And now…
She turned her head, searching in the darkness for the clock on the bedside table. The digital display read 4:40 a.m.
More hours of uninterrupted sleep than she’d gotten in the last three days combined. And since it was Saturday, all she needed to do was to turn over and go back for five or six more.
She shut her eyes again, conscious of the deep silence that surrounded her. No sounds of traffic. Not at this time of the morning, despite the location. No noise from the occupants of the other apartments. Almost as if she were—
Alone? Her eyes opened. Ears straining, she lay in the darkness, trying to evaluate the quality of the stillness.
Jace was asleep. What he’d said about keeping watch had been metaphorical. He’d assured her that anyone who wanted to get to her would have to go through him, but that didn’t mean he was literally out there watching.
She took a few soothing breaths, trying to return to that blessed state of oblivion from which the dream had pulled her. Instead, the images she’d fought through those sleepless nights at her house began to parade through her head.
Lifting the lid on her clothes hamper. Andrea standing in her doorway, fingers worrying at the cuff of her long-sleeved top. The reddish glow at the bottom of the door to the ticket booth. Jace’s dark eyes looking up at her through the window of his car, the burn on his cheek obvious despite the darkness.
She wasn’t sure why that particular image had been seared into her brain like the rest, but it was. At least it was far more palatable than the others.
She threw the covers off and crawled out of bed. She’d slept in her underwear and one of Jace’s new T-shirts, but she wasn’t going to go traipsing around his apartment looking for him like this. She grabbed her jeans off the chair she’d draped them across last night and slipped them on.
She hesitated when she reached the bedroom door. She had the urge to knock, although she was coming out of a room rather than going into one. Finally, she turned the handle and eased the door open.
There was a dim glow from the next room, the apartment’s second bedroom, which Jace had told her he used as his office. Although the door was open, she was hesitant to walk in.
“Jace?”
“In here.”
Emboldened by his response, she took the few steps that would take her to the doorway. His back to her, Jace was seated at a desk in front of a computer monitor. Apparently he had meant that “keeping watch” literally.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. There’s coffee in the kitchen. I drink mine black, so I’m short on amenities like cream. It’s fresh, though, and I can vouch for its potency.”
“It smells wonderful,” she admitted, thinking caffeine might chase the remaining cobwebs—and the dregs of the nightmare—from her head.
Jace swiveled the chair around so he was facing her. The five o’clock shadow she’d noticed last night was darker, emphasized by the black T-shirt he still wore. If he’d been sitting here all night—
“I’ll get you a cup while you take a look at that.” He jerked his head toward the machine behind him.
“What is it?”
“You tell me,” he said, pushing up out of the chair.
She had never liked guessing games. Her father said that was because she was afraid of being wrong. She’d always thought it had more to do with a fear of the unknown. Right now that’s what the computer screen represented.
Jace walked past her and out of the room. An expanse of maybe twelve feet lay
between her and whatever he had wanted her to see. You tell me.
She crossed her arms over her stomach, fighting a rush of nausea. There had already been enough this week. More than enough. Whatever this was…
Disgusted with her cowardice, she crossed the room until she was close enough to make out the central image on the monitor. She swallowed to control the nausea that climbed into the back of her throat. Then she closed her eyes and breathed deeply a few times to keep it at bay.
Jace wouldn’t have asked her to look at this if it weren’t important. That would take a cruelty he wasn’t capable of.
She opened her eyes, deliberately focusing them on the screen. As she took the final steps to the desk, she reached out with one hand to drag the chair Jace had vacated with her. She sat down in it, steeling herself for the emotional response she knew this site would evoke.
Surrounded by text and smaller pictures, a photograph of Andrea Moore centered the page. An Andrea Lindsey had never seen before. Her hair and makeup looked as if they’d been professionally done. Both the clothes she wore and the pose itself seemed deliberately provocative. Sexual in a way she had never associated with the girl.
Unconsciously, Lindsey shook her head, trying to reconcile the shy student she’d taught with this. Andrea looked as if she were trying to titillate the viewer. Or entice.
The thought was enough to make Lindsey’s eyes go to the text at the bottom of the picture. It seemed innocuous enough. Name, age, the name of the school, favorite activities. Nothing more than the usual yearbook stuff.
Relieved by that normality, she continued to examine the page. On the right was a guest log, each entry accompanied by a photograph or icon or a slogan. Those had obviously been chosen by the individual posters, many of whom had left comments.
The column on the left of the photograph appeared to be a blog, the last entry dated two days ago. Twenty-four hours before Andrea had committed suicide.
Obviously this was what Jace had wanted her to read. Maybe he thought she could explain something Andrea had written. Something about her motives?
Why would you do that, Andrea? Why would you tell the whole world and then come to stand in my door and not tell me?
Somehow, despite the thick carpeting, she was aware Jace had reentered the room. She didn’t turn, unwilling to reveal that she hadn’t read what he’d wanted her to and was this upset.
He set a steaming cup of coffee down on the coaster beside the mouse. She picked it up, using the excuse to regroup. She took a sip, allowing the liquid to soothe her still-raw throat.
Only when she had taken two long swallows did she turn her head and look up at him. “Thanks.”
“So what do you think?” He nodded toward the screen.
“I’m not sure I can do this. The last entry was written the day before she died. It’s too soon.”
“I can’t ask her mother to read it, Lindsey. I don’t know anyone who knew her better than you.”
“That’s just it. That’s what you don’t get. I didn’t know her. Obviously,” she said, remembering Shannon’s comment, “I didn’t know her at all.”
“Better than I did. All I’m asking is you read those pages and tell me what you think. It might be better to start a few days back. And look at the comments from that same timeframe.”
“It seems…I don’t know. An invasion of her privacy.”
“She posted this on the Web. She wanted it read.”
“Before she died. Before she made the decision to take her own life. Now…Now it seems as if we’re ghouls, picking over her corpse.” Exactly what Shannon had said yesterday.
“Picking over the corpse, as you call it, is how cops solve cases. I don’t want to have to do that for another one of your students. I sure as hell don’t want to have to do it for you.”
“Andrea isn’t a case, Jace. She committed suicide. The police aren’t responsible for determining why.”
“We are if her death has a bearing on another, on-going investigation.”
So that, too, was part of the equation. Jace had implied Andrea’s suicide hadn’t been an isolated act. Not a coincidence that just happened to have occurred during the same week someone had attacked Lindsey. Twice.
“You still think all this is connected?”
“All this?”
“Me and the church fires, maybe.” She had already conceded that because Jace was the lead investigator on those, they must have something to do with the attacks on her. “But Andrea? I told you that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe not, but at least read this.” He again indicated the screen with a tilt of his head. “All of it. All the comments. Then tell me it makes no sense.”
Despite her reluctance, she knew that eventually she would have to do what he’d asked. If not tonight, then another night when she couldn’t sleep. Alone. In a house that had become anything but the sanctuary it should be.
“Not with you here.” She didn’t want him looking over her shoulder, examining her every expression, reading into them things that she didn’t want him to see. “Go get some sleep, Jace. I promise I’ll wake you when I’ve read it all.”
Fifteen
The fact that he didn’t hear the bedroom door open indicated the depth of his exhaustion. It wasn’t until Lindsey called his name that he began to climb out of the pit of sleep. By the time she said it again, the events of last night flooded back into his consciousness. Adrenaline roared into his system, bringing him awake and upright at almost the same time.
Lindsey must have been leaning over the bed. When he bolted up, the Glock he’d laid beside the pillow clutched in his right hand, she began backing away, her eyes wide.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
Wordlessly, she shook her head, staring at the weapon.
No threat, he realized belatedly. That wasn’t why she was here. Which meant…“You read it?”
She nodded, her eyes leaving the Glock to dart to his face.
“And?”
He lowered the semiautomatic. His impression had always been that everyone down here was comfortable around guns. Based on Lindsey’s reaction that wasn’t true. Or maybe she just wasn’t accustomed to having them pointed at her.
“She didn’t do it.”
Jace examined the sentence, trying to figure out the context, given that there were a couple of scenarios where the phrase “didn’t do it” might apply.
“Didn’t do what?” he asked carefully.
“That blog. Or any of them. Anything on that page. I’d bet my life that isn’t Andrea’s writing.”
The wording was unfortunate, considering the stakes, but he ignored the unintended irony. “Writing a blog is a very different animal from writing an essay.”
“I know. But there are all kinds of indications of authorship. In any kind of writing. The phrasing. Vocabulary. A lot of other things I probably couldn’t explain to someone who doesn’t read papers for a living. I’ve read Andrea’s work for more than a year. She didn’t write that filth.”
He had set out to show Lindsey the image she had of her student as shy and retiring wasn’t accurate. Now she was telling him that the person portrayed in the online profile he’d found wasn’t just a different side of the girl she’d known. It had actually been created by someone else.
“Are you sure?”
It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. She seemed too sure for him to doubt what she claimed as her area of expertise. He just needed some time to understand the implications.
“She didn’t write it, Jace. I know.”
“And the picture?”
Her eyes changed, losing their surety. “I…don’t know. Photo-shopped maybe? Andrea’s head on some other girl’s body?”
Could it be determined if that had been done from a picture on the Web? He knew there were plenty of people who could tell about an actual photograph, but he didn’t know how difficult that kind of manipulation, if it were well done, would be to spot on a
computer screen.
“I don’t know, but now that you mention it…”
He let the sentence trail as he got out of bed and crossed the room to the hall. When he reached the doorway to the second bedroom, he discovered his computer had gone to sleep while they’d been talking. He walked over and jiggled the mouse, only to find that Lindsey had clicked out of the site he’d left her to read. Her way of dealing with its graphic nature?
He sat down in the desk chair, still warm from contact with her body, and brought it up again. Even after a careful examination of the picture of Andrea, at this resolution he couldn’t tell if it had been manipulated or not.
Whoever had put this up had to have a modicum of technical know-how. Most high-school kids these days had quite a bit, and he would be willing to bet some of Lindsey’s students would qualify as experts. There were always a few who got off on this kind of stuff.
He couldn’t think of anyone he could call on in the sheriff’s department to verify her suspicions about the picture. A few of the deputies fancied themselves computer experts, but he didn’t know if that expertise would spill over into determining if an image had been doctored.
“She wasn’t that kind of person,” Lindsey said from behind him. “Did you read all of that garbage?”
“Enough.”
She moved nearer, so that she was standing in his peripheral vision. He glanced up at her, but her eyes were focused on the screen. She leaned down and toward the monitor, examining the image.
“Could this be a prom picture?” he asked. “Or a shot from a modeling portfolio? She have aspirations in that direction?”
Without straightening, Lindsey turned her head. They were eye-to-eye, their faces in closer proximity than they’d ever been before. The urge to lean forward the few inches that separated them and put his lips against hers was almost undeniable. It seemed he could feel them under his. Soft and warm and open to his kiss.
“I don’t know.” She straightened, breaking the spell. “If she did, she never said anything to me about them.”
“I’ll ask her mother.”