Page 128 of Secrets Beneath the Waves

“I’ll come with you.” Jules followed him to the exit, tugged on a pair of white sneakers, and grabbed the jacket hanging on a hook in the entryway. She trailed after him as he wandered along the front of the house, looking for footprints or any other sign of human life. Nothing that he could detect. When he reached the corner, he rounded it and continued along the side of the house. The first window he passed would be the living room and the second was the small one above the kitchen sink.

As far as he could tell, no one had walked along here in the last twenty-four hours. If Jules seriously thought the guy had shown up here, he would have called in the CSI team, butsince she didn’t, what he was observing appeared to corroborate her thesis that she had only been hovering between asleep and awake when she saw the face.

At the back corner, Dante turned again. Two big windows faced the backyard. Two bedrooms, maybe? Or a bedroom and bathroom? He stopped and glanced over his shoulder at Jules. “Which window is your bedroom?”

“The far one. The first one is the bathroom.”

He nodded and started walking again, his gaze sweeping the grass, the foot or so of dirt along the wall, the bush—its leaves turning a flaming red in the frosty, early-autumn nights. Again, no sign of human activity.

Once past the bush, he approached the second window. And stopped abruptly.

In the dirt directly beneath the glass, he could clearly make out two large shoe prints, toes touching the base of the wall.

Looked like he’d be calling in the crime scene investigators after all.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Dante stoppedin front of her, so abruptly Jules almost crashed into him. Had he seen something? “What is it?” She came up to stand next to him as he pointed to a spot beneath her window.

Jules glanced down. Shoe prints. She’d been wrong, then. The face she had seen in her window wasn’t a nightmare. At least, it was, but the living kind, not the hallucinating kind. “He was here.”

Although she’d barely whispered the words, Dante nodded. “Looks like it.” He tugged a phone from his uniform pocket. “I’m calling in the team.”

Numbness started in Jules’ extremities and spread throughout her body. Her home, her private life, her escape from the hard things she saw at work, had been violated in the most egregious way. Dante wandered a few feet from her as he spoke to someone on the phone. Gradually, the numbness in Jules’ body eased, driven out by a fire as scorching as any she had battled on the job. If this guy wanted to shut her up, why hadn’t he tried to break in last night? Was he toying with her? If so, what might he try next?

Dante shoved the phone into his pocket and returned to her. “You doing okay?”

Once again, Jules was caught off guard by how nice he was being.He’s still on the job, doing and saying what he’s been trained to. Don’t get sucked in.“Not really. I’m frustrated. Confused. Mad.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Have you ever had this happen before?”

Dante tilted his head from side to side. “I mean, criminals do go after witnesses sometimes, but almost never at this stage or when they’re perfect strangers. That’s typically more domestic violence situations or when gangs or the mafia are involved.” He paused, running the toe of his running shoe through the grass before adding, “This kind of creeping around without actually trying to get to the witness? That’s new. For me, anyway.”

“You think he’s playing games with me.”

His dark-brown eyes locked with hers. “I’m concerned that he is. The fact that he walked straight toward you in the alley without worrying about you seeing him already had me on edge. That’s a sociopathic level of boldness. Now this? Showing you his face and then disappearing? That definitely sounds like he is playing some kind of long game with you, which is unusual.”

“Lucky me,” Jules murmured, staring at the footprints. They were big, confirming her initialnotethat the murderer was a tall man.

Dante touched her arm with the back of his hand before pulling away. “Do you have someone you can stay with? Family, maybe?”

She frowned. “No. My dad’s gone, my mom is in a home, and I’m not putting my friends in danger. Besides, I refuse to let this guy drive me out of my own place.”

“It’s just for a few days. Until we can track him down.”

“What if you don’t? What if it takes weeks or months? What if you never find him? I will not put my life on hold for this. I didn’t do anything wrong, so why should I be the one who’s punished?”

“In a just and fair world, you wouldn’t be. But it’s not a just and fair world. Bad things happen. All we can do is take steps to keep ourselves as safe as possible. And you staying here by yourself is not safe.”

She crossed her arms but didn’t answer, only met his gaze steadily.

After a moment, Dante blew out a breath. “Fine. Then let me stay here with you. I’ll sleep on the couch. I’ll even make coffee in the morning. Or I’ll be gone before you get up. Or I’ll make the coffee and still be gone before you get up.”

Jules uncrossed her arms. “Absolutely not.”