Page 102 of Paranoid

For now.

Just before he climbed into his truck, he texted Kayleigh: Check out homicide at St. Augustine’s chapel. Could be connected to Sperry murder. Busy now. Will call.

He pocketed his phone and got behind the wheel. Before he switched on the ignition, he turned to look at his daughter, huddled against the passenger door in the dark. God, she looked vulnerable, even though she was trying to hold herself together. “You okay?” he asked.

“No.” She blinked, sniffed, then rolled her eyes. “Are you?”

“No, not so much.”

“I’ll never be okay again,” she whispered and stared out the window.

His heart cracked a little. Never had he wanted her to experience anything so traumatic. Reaching across the cab, he held her as close as her seat belt would allow. “You will be,” he said. “It’ll be different; never the same. But we’ll both be okay.”

She shuddered. “I don’t think so.”

“Give it time,” he suggested and released her. “You’re tougher than you think.”

“If you say so. Come on. Let’s go

. Get this over with.”

He started the engine and the headlights came on automatically, cutting gold swaths into the dark night.

Harper let out a long sigh as he put the car into drive. She whispered just loud enough so that he could hear, “Mom is gonna so freak.”

“She’ll be all right.”

His daughter threw him a disbelieving glare. “Oh, yeah? When was the last time she was ‘all right’?” She made air quotes, then slouched deeper into the seat. “Trust me, Dad, you’ll see. She won’t be anywhere close to all right.”

CHAPTER 23

“Annessa is dead?” Rachel whispered, trying to get her head around what she was being told, here in the middle of her living room, by her ex-husband.

He’d texted, then shown up at the door with Harper in tow, Xander Vale making an appearance a few minutes later, just as she’d woken Dylan per Cade’s demands. With a barking Reno at her side, Rachel had met them at the door, and her daughter had almost fallen into her arms.

At first Rachel had held Harper as if she’d never let go. As the news had sunk in and she’d realized the depth of the trauma Harper was dealing with, Rachel had squeezed her, then finally released her. “Thank God you’re okay,” she’d said as they’d both battled tears and Harper had bravely dashed hers away.

Now Xander, Harper, and Dylan sat on the couch, ashen faced and looking as if they wanted to drop through the floor. Dylan’s hair was mussed, but his eyes were wide as quarters, on alert, despite the fact that he’d been yanked from his bed. Harper wiped away tears, scared as hell and lost in her personal nightmare, while Xander stared at the floor, hands clasped between his knees.

Shocked beyond belief, Rachel tried to control the trembling that rippled through her body as she lowered herself into her favorite chair. She was still struggling to digest the horrific news.

First Violet and now . . . Annessa? Rachel couldn’t believe it. Another classmate. Another young, vibrant woman.

Dead.

Murdered.

And her girl had witnessed the horror, watched a woman die from wounds inflicted by some monster. Rachel was torn between wanting to scream at Harper for being so foolhardy and, relieved that she was safe, holding Harper tight to protect her. Harper looked so young, so innocent . . . so vulnerable. Oh, God.

“Just start at the beginning,” Rachel said once her initial shock lifted and her heart rate returned to nearly normal. She listened as Harper explained how she’d slipped out of the house, met Xander Vale, gone to the apartment owned by Chuck Ryder’s firm, and then heard the moans coming from outside the window. The kids had followed the sounds to St. Augustine’s, where they’d found Annessa barely clinging to life and hanging upside down from the bell tower in the long-closed chapel. Desperately, they had tried to save the near-dead woman, calling 911 as they’d cut her down. But Annessa had died before the paramedics had arrived.

Rachel fought desperately to hold herself together as she struggled to make some sense of the story.

To be calm when she was frightened out of her mind.

What if Xander and Harper had heard those cries for help while the killer was still there? Would they have become his next targets? Would they, too, have ended up swinging from bell tower ropes? Would they have survived? Her throat tightened and she gripped the arms of the chair at the thought of what might have been. Instead of one victim, there could have been more, including Harper.

Her soul turned to ice and she had to battle the panic that threatened when she let her thoughts venture down that dark, crooked path.