Unknown Enemy (Love Inspired Suspense)

by Michelle Karl

  She pulled her hand away and glanced back at the policemen who now guarded the scene. “What happened?”

  “I made an error in judgment. I thought we could get one step ahead. I should never have let you make the drop yourself.” He’d thought they could just walk away and wait for someone to retrieve it, then catch the culprit red-handed. But a homemade firebomb? They’d been made. Their opponent must have noticed what they were doing and taken matters into his or her own hands. And they might have succeeded, because he needed to get Ginny away from here and get her checked over, and most of the police were already scouring the campus for the bomber. That meant this trash can, with the dropped materials inside, would be left unattended and the envelope easily retrieved. Even if the contents inside were fake, the letter writer didn’t know that and had tried to turn the situation in his or her favor.

  Whoever they were dealing with was smart, able to adjust plans and think on the fly. Probably the benefit of having lackeys at one’s disposal, which made it even more difficult for Colin to anticipate what would happen next. After a move like this, the likelihood of being able to protect the woman beside him from another attack dropped drastically. “Let’s get you out of here.” He pointed at the remaining two officers who stood at the edge of the quad. One was on the radio calling for backup. “Don’t let this trash bin out of your sight, but stay vigilant. Someone anticipated we’d be here and they’re trying to draw us away.”

  He led Ginny back to the Daviau Center, growing more concerned by the minute as she remained silent. He hadn’t seen her head hit the ground, but it might be worthwhile for her to get checked out regardless. Two major falls in two days could do plenty of cumulative damage. “I’m going to call the campus nurse down to check you over once we get to your office, since that’s closer than trying to get all the way to the med center. Can you make it to your office?”

  “I’m fine,” she mumbled. He had a hard time believing that.

  In the department’s main office, Sam still filled in at the front desk. The student stood in surprise as they entered, but Colin shot him a look that suggested he hold any questions for the time being. They headed toward Ginny’s little office and she dug out her key ring, flipping through a slew of keys in many different shapes and sizes. “Do you even know what half of those open?”

  “I used to.” Ginny placed the correct key in the lock. “It’s more about possibility than the known. I like old mysteries.”

  Her voice had grown stronger since leaving the quad. Good. Colin was just as concerned about these events taking a mental toll as he was about the physical. Before he could stop himself, his eyes were tugged to look at the ruined side of her face that remained covered by a veil of blond hair. Speaking of old mysteries...

  He saw a slight frown on Ginny’s lips. She’d seen him looking and it bothered her. It wouldn’t do to have this tension between them—he needed to have her full trust and confidence if he was going to protect her from additional harm.

  “Sorry, Ginny, I—”

  “Save it.” She swung her office door open and stepped backward with a cry of surprise.

  The office had become a disaster zone.

  Books and papers were strewn around the small office, her chair overturned and her desk drawers open with their contents spread across the floor. Tigris’s bowl lay empty in the middle of the room.

  Someone had trashed her office—and that someone had a key.

  SIX

  Colin didn’t waste a second. He raced back to Sam at the front desk. The student had giant, noise-cancelling headphones covering his ears, and his nose was buried in a textbook as he tapped out the rhythm of a song with the end of a bright yellow highlighter. Colin reached over the desk and yanked the headphones off. Sam looked up with a shout of alarm.

  “Did anyone come through here this afternoon?” Sam’s stunned face caused Colin’s already mounting frustration to rise further. “Anyone? I’m waiting.”

  “Sure,” Sam sputtered. “Tons of people. Students coming to pick up assignments, and there are offices of a bunch of teachers here. I mean, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Who came through here who would have a key to Professor Anderson’s office?”

  The student’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Professor Anderson’s office? She has the key. The custodial staff has a master key, but the only other key is right here.” He tapped on a desk drawer beside him. “I have them while I’m covering for Mrs. McCall. Why?”

  “My office has been broken into, Sam.” Ginny joined Colin at the desk, weariness etched across her face. Her shoulder sagged from the weight of the tablet satchel. If only she’d let him help her carry it—but no, that wasn’t her call to make.

  Sam’s eyes widened, his mouth opening and closing like Ginny’s poor little betta fish. “But that’s impossible. I didn’t see anyone, and I’m the only other person here.”

  “Open the drawer, Sam.” Colin tried to keep the growl out of his voice, but the kid’s hesitance told him that perhaps Sam wasn’t the best fill-in for the regular receptionist after all. “Ginny, you’re exhausted. Go sit down.”

  Sam shook his head. “I’m telling you, I’ve been here the whole time and the keys are right—” He pulled open the drawer, reached inside, and pulled out...nothing. Surprise and panic rippled across the student’s features as he scraped around inside the drawer. Still finding nothing, he repeated the process with the rest of the desk drawers, coming up empty-handed. “I don’t understand.”

  Next to Colin, Ginny sighed. It didn’t look as if she planned to relax anytime soon. “Sam? You’re sure you were here the whole time?”

  Sam’s expression turned sheepish. “Yes?”

  “Try again,” Colin said, not bothering to hide the growl this time. “The truth.”

  Sam moaned and thumped his head onto the desk. “My girlfriend came in like, ten minutes ago. She needed help getting a bag of chips unstuck from the vending machine. I was only gone for like, two minutes, I promise.”

  “And that was enough time for the keys to get stolen, a professor’s office to get broken into and the place trashed. Now someone out there has the keys to this entire department and probably the building. Am I right?”

  Sam’s upper body remained prone against the desk.

  “Finish out the day, Sam,” Ginny said, her voice tense. “I’ll be letting the department head know about this. Also, I’m sorry, but I’ll be having Clarisse fill in as TA for your tutorial session.”

  “No!” Sam bolted upright. “I need this job, Professor Anderson. Please. I made a mistake, it won’t happen again. I’ll call a locksmith and stay here all night if I have to, I’ll have them replace everything and I’ll pay for it.”

  “You have the money for that, son?” Colin couldn’t help but feel a little pity for the kid. Hearing Ginny’s readiness to kick Colin off the job sparked a memory of Colin’s own distraction-caused mistake with the Service. The difference was that his mistake had cost someone their life. Sam’s mistake hadn’t done damage of nearly that caliber, so far as they knew, but he recognized the desperation in the young man’s voice.

  He’d heard it from himself the day he’d been called into the deputy director’s office and dismissed from the job that had meant everything to him.

  Sam sputtered something about student loans and working extra hours and teaching assistant duties to cover the expense, but Colin held up his hand to still the flood. “Professor Anderson and I will speak to the dean about this. Finish up your shift here for now and we’ll talk more later.”

  Colin took Ginny’s upper arm and led her away from the desk, back to her tiny office. He winced internally at the disbelief on her face and the redness around her eyes.

  “Think you may have overstepped your bounds a little bit on that one, Mr. Tappin
g?”

  Colin sighed. “The kid made a mistake. No need to fire him completely. Put him on probation for a while or take away one of his tutorial classes or something, but don’t punish him for trying to help someone.”

  “His girlfriend?”

  “You’re telling me you never leave your office to get a cup of coffee? What if the keys had disappeared while he’d gone to the washroom or been holding the door open for a delivery? Circumstances make his actions look grimmer and more severe than they are. It was a dumb move for him to not keep the keys with him, but he had no reason to suspect they’d go missing. Besides, what would someone want with access to your department if they already believed you’d hand over your research documents?”

  Ginny pursed her lips and looked around her trashed office. “Our computers are all pretty old, thanks to constant budget cuts. There’s not much in the way of artifacts or ancient stuff in here. Not anything of value at all. The archaeology professor down the hall has a separate lab that’s accessed with the master key, but she has most everything locked up in there in private cabinets. Plus, it’s all pottery fragments and figurine pieces anyway, nothing valuable on the black market.”

  Colin crossed the room and surveyed the damage. “Can you tell if they took anything?”

  Several beats of silence passed as Ginny gazed at the mess of papers and books strewn about her office. In the far corner, a potted plant had been overturned, its roots now exposed to the air and its leaves crumpled under the weight of its formerly life-giving soil. “Nothing jumps out at me. I’d like to think this is unrelated to what happened outside, but I suppose that’s ridiculous to even consider.”

  “Agreed. Unless you know of a jealous colleague who’s prone to breaking and entering?”

  “Jealous colleague?” Ginny’s voice grew quiet. “There’s one other professor here who may also be eligible for the tenure-track position, but I haven’t even met the woman. I can’t see her considering me a rival without having ever said hello.”

  That’s what Colin was afraid of. Ginny seemed like the kind of person who saw the best in others, even when they gave her a reason not to. “I think we’ll want to make meeting her a priority.”

  “The computer!” Ginny knelt and crawled under her desk, leaving Colin to decipher the non sequitur. She dragged the computer tower out from where it lay on its side under the desk, a wince of pain on her face.

  Colin joined her on the floor and gently nudged her hands aside. “You just got knocked to the ground by a homemade bomb. Take it easy.” Their eyes locked and she gave a slight gasp before standing. Colin swallowed down the sudden surprise of how cold her fingers were. And the electric spark that seemed to alight upon contact.

  That wouldn’t do. Would not do at all.

  He trained his focus on the computer tower, flipping it around to look inside the back. “Looks like your hunch was right. The hard drive is gone.” He risked a glance at her, but she’d bent over to retrieve something on the floor.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter?” He stood, noticing she’d cupped her palms together. “What about your research?”

  Her voice dropped volume further, hitching on the words. “I only use cloud storage these days...more secure...”

  Colin’s heart constricted at her tone. He automatically reached out to offer a light touch of comfort to her wrist, but she pulled away and opened her palms. Her little fish lay cupped in her palms, lying still. “Oh, Ginny, you should have said something.”

  She shook her head and swallowed hard, blinking back tears. “Figuring out who did this is more important. I only hope... I hope Tigris didn’t suffer when whoever did this threw his bowl on the floor...”

  The impulse to do something, anything, to stop her sadness spurred a memory buried deep in his childhood psyche. “Wait here. Don’t move.”

  Colin grabbed the fishbowl from the floor and scooped up some of the stones and aquarium plants, then ran a few steps down the hall to the staff room. He opened cupboards at random until he found what he was looking for—room-temperature bottled water. He dumped three bottles of water into the fishbowl and sped back to a bewildered Ginny. “Put him in here.”

  “But he’s stiff. He’s been out of water too long.”

  “Trust me. Put him in the water.”

  She frowned, but gently lowered the little fish into the bowl. Several tense moments passed as they both watched the bowl in silence, Colin praying that his childhood memories of his parents’ fish tanks hadn’t betrayed him.

  Tigris wiggled, his little gills moving slowly as his natural breathing returned. Colin released the breath he’d been holding and looked up to see Ginny staring at her fish in disbelief.

  “How is that possible? I thought fish couldn’t survive out of water for more than a few minutes.”

  Colin set the bowl down on her desk where she could keep a close eye on it as she cleaned the place up. “Betta fish have something called a labyrinth organ that allows them to breathe air for a short period of time, even up to several hours. I suspect he wasn’t out of water for anywhere near that length of time, so I imagine he’ll be fine. You’ll want to change the water in his bowl and treat it as usual as soon as possible, but he’s going to be okay.”

  “That’s amazing. When I saw his bowl on the floor, I thought the worst. Thank you.” Without warning, she reached out and hugged him, but immediately pulled back and stared at the floor as though embarrassed by this sudden display of emotion. Standing this close, he could see a hint of the redness on her hidden cheek through the loose strands of shiny blond hair that attempted to cover it up. His curiosity nearly got the better of him, but he shoved aside the question. There were far more important issues to focus on, and Ginny needed to get checked over by a nurse. Plus, he’d promised to take the original letter and envelope down to the police station.

  They needed to figure out what was really going on and do it fast, because one thing had become abundantly clear this afternoon—whoever wanted Ginny’s research was getting desperate.

  * * *

  Ginny checked her rearview mirror as she pulled into her apartment building’s parking garage, seeing Colin’s car on the street a few lengths behind hers. Nurse, police, hospital visit to Donna. All with Colin in tow, the man constantly checking corners and exits and all the while insisting Ginny remain within arm’s length. He’d then insisted on accompanying her home and checking the apartment over for security flaws. She had faith that the police would figure it out and connect the dots between the attacks and demands on her research—and she appreciated Colin’s dedication to her safety—but this was a bit much, wasn’t it?

  He parked in one of the few visitors’ spots outside the garage and then joined her in taking the stairs up to the eighth floor.

  “Remind me again why we can’t take the elevator?” Ginny huffed, feeling a twinge in her knees from the impact of hitting the ground earlier. Colin took the stairs ahead of her, making it look easy. The man was in peak physical condition, which she kept trying not to notice. He didn’t make that easy at all.

  “There’s little security in taking an elevator from the ground floor. Too easy for an ambush. If you’re hurting, though, I’d feel safe taking it up the final few floors. Everything seems clear so far.”

  She appreciated his concern and almost agreed, but the sudden thought of the elevator doors yawning open reminded her of the open van doors earlier that morning. Had it really happened less than twelve hours ago? This day seemed never ending. Ginny gritted her teeth and pushed through the pain. “I can make it.”

  When they reached her apartment, Colin motioned for her to hand him the keys. “Here’s how we do this. There’s no sign of forced entry, but I’m not willing to make assumptions. I enter and begin a sweep, you come inside behind me and stand to the
left of the doorway. You’ll be out of sight from anyone in the hallway and allow for a fast exit if there’s trouble. Make sense?”

  Ginny nodded and leaned against the wall to ease the pressure in her aching legs. One small mercy was that she hadn’t had to endure that climb while also trying to lug the bag of heavy tablets. As per the agreement with the Ashmore Museum and the Kingdom of Amar, they were locked tight inside a heavy-duty cabinet in the school’s archaeology lab.

  With her assent, Colin drew his gun, unlocked the door and swung it open. Ginny followed close behind as he entered, stepping aside as instructed once past the doorway. She leaned against the wall. Could Colin hear her heart pounding in her chest? She wanted to believe Colin was overreacting by searching her apartment, but his intensity had rubbed off and now she couldn’t shake the fear.

  Might it have something to do with almost getting abducted and blown up? She suddenly felt very, very tired, as if her energy had been siphoned away and left her dry. She blinked away the descending fog of sleepiness as Colin returned to the common room.

  “No one here, nothing looks amiss,” he said. He tucked his gun back into the waistband of his pants, then brushed aside a set of curtains at a nearby window. “Unless you see anything I didn’t. You know the contents of your place better than anyone.”

  “Lord willing, this can be a safe haven for me tonight.”

  “I’m sure God has better things to do than patrol your apartment.”

  She heard the hurt in his voice. “You’d be surprised.” As much as she’d like to ask him more questions about that reaction, she wasn’t sure she could stay upright even one moment longer. She needed a cup of tea and chance to put her feet up. No more running around for a little while. “Thanks for looking around. I’ll do a quick walk-through, but I don’t see anything immediately concerning. Does that mean you get to go home tonight?”