Page 142 of Secrets Beneath the Waves

Dante wandered around, checking the windows—both locked—the dresser, the floor. Nothing appeared amiss to him. The most likely scenario was that their perp had used her phone again to freak Jules out. He stopped next to her. “Nothing that I can see.”

Jules drew in a deep breath. “That’s good. He must have sent that message himself to make me think he was here. I’ll close my email account as soon as I get home, and that should be the end of it.”

Dante suspected they were far from the end of it, although he wasn’t about to say so. Hopefully if she did close her email account the chilling messages would end, anyway. “Good plan.”

Her features softened as she grasped the top of the blanket and tugged it higher, to her mother’s chin. Dante took a step toward the door. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to the nurses, see if they had seen anyone. Maybe get a warrant to review the video from the cameras they must have mounted around the place. And he’d walk around the?—

Jules drew in a sharp breath, and Dante whirled around. “Jules?”

Her cheeks had gone even paler than her mother’s.

He closed the space between them. “What is it?”

With a trembling finger, she pointed to the silver necklace around her mother’s neck. “That’s my locket. The last time I wore it was the night we met at the pub. As soon as I got home, I took it off and set it in a china dish on my dresser. I haven’t touched it since.”

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

After speakingto the nursing staff and, once again, calling in the crime scene team, Dante drove Jules home. The nurses had seen nothing. As far as they knew, no one had come or gone from her mother’s room since they had helped her to bed the night before. How did the guy do it—come and go while leaving as little trace of his presence as he had left an imprint on her mind?

Jules stared out the side window—at the streaks of pink and gray lining the horizon to the east, at people jogging or biking or walking their dogs in the early morning coolness. Ordinary people living their ordinary lives with no dark shadows rising all around them the way the killer’s shadow had loomed before Jules in the alley. Would she ever be able to return to a life like that?

The ramifications of her mother wearing the locket Jules had left on the dresser in her bedroom were too horrific to contemplate. It meant thathehad been there, in her mother’s room. If he himself had put Jules’ locket around her mother’s neck, his hands—hands that had wrapped around another woman’s neck only days before—had touched her skin. Shudders rippled through her. And he’d been in Jules’ room. When? Thenight she had seen his face in the window? Had he entered the house before that? Crept into her room and watched her as she slept? Touched her too?

Her stomach roiled, and she pulled her feet up onto the seat and wrapped her arms around her knees, drawing in one deep breath after another to keep the nausea at bay.

Dante touched the side of her leg with the back of his hand. “Are you all right?”

Jules propped her elbows on her knees and lowered her forehead to her palms. “No. Not even close.”

He gave her a minute before lightly tucking a strand of hair behind one ear, his fingers brushing across her skin. “It’s going to be okay, Jules.”

Ignoring the hot tingles of, well,electricitydancing across her flesh, she lifted her head. “Is it?”

He sighed. “I have to believe that, yes. He took too many chances this time. Something has to turn up at the hospital that will help us nail him. Video footage, maybe.”

“Meaning that we would then have the image of his face I should have been able to provide you with days ago.”

Dante took his eyes from the road to look at her. “Jules. Would you blame a deaf person for not being able to hear a noise or a blind person for not seeing something?”

She studied her clasped hands as she mumbled, “I guess not.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. You not being able to call that guy’s face to your mind is the same thing.”

When she didn’t answer, he reached over and squeezed her forearm. “We’re going to get him. I won’t give up until we do.”

The adamance in his voice helped. Jules sloughed off the self-pity and the numbness as she lowered her feet to the floor. “Neither will I.”

“Good.” Dante returned his hand to the wheel. “Have you given any more thought to where you will stay until then?”

Clever man. He hadn’t asked her if she was willing to move out, only where she would go when she did. No way she was letting him get away with that. “IfI move out, I’ll likely go to a hotel. Obviously, I can’t go near anyone I care about.” She checked her watch. “For now, all I have time to do is pack a bag and head to work. I’ll figure out the rest later.”

Dante steered the car up her driveway and shifted into park. “You know if you spend the night at your house again, I’ll find out from your neighbor.”

His lips twitched, and a little more of the darkness swirling around her lifted. “I’ve spent years cultivating their loyalty. They won’t turn on me now.”

“We’ll see.” He grinned at her. “I do owe you a coffee, though, since I never got the chance to make it for you this morning.”