Page 71 of Paranoid

“Hi. This is Rachel, right? Rachel Ryder?” a woman asked, then didn’t wait for an answer. “I thought I should call you.”

“Sorry, who is this?”

“Oh. My. It’s Ella Dickerson. From across the street. Jim’s wife.”

Rachel’s heart sank as she pictured her neighbor, a white-haired woman pushing eighty who was always working in her yard and complaining about one thing or another. There was her arthritis, her children, or her husband, whose latest offense, or at least the most recent one Rachel had heard about, was purchasing a seventy-two-inch flat-screen, “to watch more sports, if you can imagine. I swear they’re on twenty-four/seven!” Ella was the neighborhood busybody who knew everything about everybody on the street.

“Your front door,” Ella was explaining. “I mean, have you seen it? Oh, dear. You’d best take a look. I assume it was vandalized and I thought you should know if you hadn’t seen it, but if you have, then—”

“What are you talking about?” Rachel asked, already walking through the house.

“I was afraid you hadn’t seen it. I said so to Jim. I saw it when I went to pick up the paper this morning. I told Jim that you couldn’t possibly know—”

“I don’t get what you mean.” Rachel unbolted the door and flung it open to find out what the nosy neighbor was talking about.

She took one step onto the porch, then stopped, her heart plummeting as she saw the single word, scrawled in red paint on her black door:

KILLER

CHAPTER 17

Cade pushed the speed limit on his way to Rachel’s house. When she’d called he’d immediately heard the strain in her voice, the edge to it. “I think you’d better come over here.” She’d sounded wound tight.

“Why?”

“Just come, Cade. Are you working today? Can you come now?”

“On my way.”

He didn’t like the way she sounded.

At her house he caught sight of Rachel standing on the porch by the front door, an ugly message painted on the panels behind her.

“Oh, Jesus.” He parked on the street and jogged up the walkway, aware that the neighbors across the way, an older couple, were in their yard watching the drama unfold. Cade eyed the door and his insides clenched. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it until the neighbors called. I didn’t notice it when I went for a run this morning, but you know when I leave the house I go in and out through the back door. Anyway, Mrs. Dickerson called to tell me something was up and I came outside and found this.”

Painted in a crimson shade that made him think of blood, the message was like a shriek in a horror film: KILLER.

Rachel was ashen faced, but holding it together. “I was going to start painting over it, but I thought I should call someone. . . .”

“You were right.” He was already whipping out his phone and tamping down his fury. “Vandalism is a crime. Not a prank. But I think someone other than your ex should take the report.” He made the call, and Voss, who was on duty and in the area, promised to be at the house within ten minutes.

“Officer Voss is on her way,” he told Rachel as he stuffed his phone into his pocket and eyed the vandalized door. “So this happened last night?” he said, pointing at the entrance to the house.

“I think so.”

He glanced across the street and saw the Dickersons hadn’t left their stations in their yard. Standing side by side on the other side of a short wrought-iron fence guarding a row of azaleas and rhododendrons, she in a long housecoat, he in a T-shirt and jeans, held up by suspenders, they watched the drama unfold.

Rachel, obviously aware of the Dickersons, and now a bike rider doing a double-take as he saw the door, touched him on the arm. “Maybe you should come inside.”

Once they were in the hallway where Reno greeted him and the door with its ugly message pulled firmly shut, he said, “So tell me.”

“The long and short of it is that I had a bad dream, about Luke.”

Of course. He didn’t say it.

“But that’s not the worst of it.”