Page 93 of Paranoid

Her stomach dropped.

This was all wrong. Fear sizzled through her and she was sweating nervously, seeing images in the cracked stained glass windows, imagining killers lurking between the broken pews or behind the altar.

Xander pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight app.

Another groan echoed through the vast space and Xander released her hand to sprint forward.

“No!” she cried after him, thinking that an attacker might be nearby, watching and waiting. With Xander’s phone as a beacon, an attacker could zero in, find them, hurt them. They could be walking into a trap!

Screw it!

She whipped out her phone and punched in 911.

If she got into trouble—and she would—tough!

“Oh, Jesus!” Xander said as another raspy groan seemed to ooze through the chapel. He took off, running to one side of the altar, through a door that hung awkwardly on only one hinge, his footsteps pounding loudly as if he were climbing stairs.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” an operator asked.

“Someone’s hurt. In the church at St. Augustine’s. This . . . this is Harper Ryder and I’m here and someone’s hurt . . . on Hawthorn Street. I don’t know the address, but send someone fast. . . .”

“Holy shit!” Xander said. “It’s a woman. Oh, God. Lady, I’m here, I’ll help you.”

Harper was already dialing her father’s cell as she climbed the few steps to the bottom of the bell tower. Then she stopped, her hand on the phone freezing, her eyes bulging.

From a long rope, a woman was hanging upside down by one leg, her hair sweeping the floor of the tower, her eyes blindfolded as she groaned and spun slowly.

“For Christ’s sake, Harper, help me!” Xander ordered. “We have to get her down!”

She dropped the phone.

CHAPTER 21

It had been years since Cade had been involved in a stakeout, and here he was at 1:13 in the morning parked a few doors down and on the opposite side of the street from the cottage where Rachel and the kids lived. His old house. He felt a lot more nostalgic about it than he’d ever felt about the massive Victorian where he’d grown up, the home now occupied by his father, Lila, and Lucas.

“Small town,” he reminded himself and sipped from his cup of rapidly cooling coffee. He’d been here for nearly an hour, and so far he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary. His vigil wasn’t official business, just a man watching his ex-wife’s home because he couldn’t sleep and because of recent events that included a murder along with the vandalism and an anonymous text.

Being here wasn’t stalking, he told himself. He was just looking out for his kids’ and their mother’s safety.

The area was quiet, a few street lamps casting pools of light on the roadway, several unoccupied cars parked on either side. He cracked the window and heard the soft hoot of an owl hidden in the thick branches of the fir trees high overhead.

The cottage, like the other homes along the street, was dark, only the faintest glow emanating from the dining room window along one side. He remembered how she’d always insisted on leaving the light on over the stove in the kitchen. Some things never changed. Some things were always changing.

Earlier this evening Rachel had called and told him that Dylan had jerry-rigged the old security system and he could see that Rachel had handled the message on the front door, the cruel message covered by a thick coat of paint.

Still, Cade hadn’t been satisfied that she and the kids were safe. Not with Violet Sperry’s brutal murder unsolved, and the weird text Rachel had received and, of course, the vandalism to her home with the single word: KILLER.

Was someone just trying to freak her out? Get his or her jollies from terrorizing his ex-wife? A cruel prank that preyed on her fears? That was bad enough and it made his blood boil, but it could be the start of something more dangerous, a warning of more dire, perhaps deadly things to come.

He snorted.

He was starting to be as paranoid as she was.

But, he told himself, his eyes scanning the street, with good cause. He saw a movement in the shrubbery, a dark shadow, and felt himself tense until he realized the motion in the leaves was an oversized racoon. Standing on his back legs, the critter stared straight at Cade’s truck with his masked eyes before waddling away, deeper into the shrubbery guarding the fence line.

Cade had spent the day trying to track down the elusive Frank Quinn, who didn’t have a driver’s

license or registration for a white Buick, nor did he live on Toulouse Street. Though there were four Frank Quinns in Portland, two on the other side of the mountains, one in Bend, and another living outside of Pendleton, none was the man he’d met on this very street last week. He’d even checked dog registrations in Chinook County—again no Frank Quinn, nor F. Quinn.