Page 74 of Paranoid

“I’ll dig deeper on Frank Quinn. Find out if he lives in the neighborhood or owns a Buick with Idaho plates,” Cade said. Again he thought of Violet Sperry, murdered in her own home, and his blood turned cold. Was there a connection?

Voss said, “Didn’t I see a camera on the porch?”

“Not working,” Rachel admitted.

Cade winced inside. He should have dealt with it when he still lived here.

“It’s old school,” Rachel said, “put in by the people who owned the house before we did over twenty years ago. It wasn’t working, always going off, so I canceled the service and was going to install a new one, connected to an app on my phone.” She smiled weakly. “I just hadn’t gotten around to it.”

Voss gave a curt nod. “You might want to make that a priority.”

Amen to that, Cade thought. They went through a few more questions, and the tech came, dusted for prints, and left, with Voss taking off a few minutes later.

Which left him alone with his ex-wife. In the living room they’d once shared. It felt right but different. Odd. She hadn’t changed the room much other than painting it a lighter color, a neutral gray, rather than the tan it had been. She’d also filled the space where his recliner had sat with a smaller chair.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Do I look okay?”

“Uh, no. You look like—”

“Hell. I know. I look like hell.”

“You don’t—”

“I do. Crap.” She raked her fingers through her hair and stood. “You know, ever since Luke died, I’ve had these nightmares.”

“Yeah.” He was nodding, had lived through them.

“And I’ve always told myself to somehow put it behind me; that what’s done is done, to move on. And I’ve tried. But this . . . Mercy dredging everything up again in the paper, and the reunion meeting with all the people who were there that night, and now . . . this.” She held up her phone, then pointed to her door. “It’s freaky.”

“You’re right and I don’t like it.”

“And then there’s Violet.” Shuddering, she sat down again and tucked her feet under her. “Is there any news about what happened to her?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, it’s disturbing. Worse than disturbing.” She was rubbing her arms as if suddenly chilled.

“I know,” he said.

“I’m afraid it makes me like a, you know, a crazy, overprotective mother.”

He slanted a smile and took the chair Voss had vacated so he could look out the window to the Dickersons’ now empty yard. “The kids might agree with that.”

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked and turned her eyes up to him as Reno stood, stretched, then wandered toward the back of the house.

“Crazy? No. Overprotective?” He held up his hand, then tilted it. “Sometimes. A little.” But even as he said it, he thought again about Violet Sperry and her bizarre death. There was probably no connection to what was going on here—God, he hoped not—but he didn’t want to just dismiss the thought. “We all need to be careful.” He didn’t want to alarm her, send her over the edge, but he couldn’t pretend that the Sperry murder wasn’t cause for serious concern.

“The last thing I want to be is overprotective. After growing up with my own parents.” She rolled her eyes. “I swore I’d never be the hovering, nosy parent my mother was, and as for my dad, I saw what being married to a cop was like, how he wasn’t home for a lot of the holidays or major events.”

He felt his insides turn to stone. How smart had his own choices been, he wondered. “Sometimes history repeats itself. The choices we make.”

There was a bit of a hesitation before she said, “Then I guess I should make better ones.”

“Maybe we both should.”

She stared at him a sec, then changed the subject. “How was your weekend with the kids? We all left on bad terms Friday night. I wasn’t happy with either of them. Dylan because of him ditching class and Harper because of . . . you know. The new boy or man or whatever in her life!”