Night Hunter (62 page)

Regina shook her head. “None. Especially since Sonya didn’t make the last cut. They were a team, like Donna and me.”

They ate in silence for several minutes.

“
How’s the new book coming,” she asked.

“
Two chapters this week. I think I’ve finally broken through the writer’s block. The galleys for
False Lead
came today. I’m going to be pretty busy for a while.”

Regina looked into his eyes, then quickly looked away. She nodded, sipped her wine.

After dinner they returned to room 142, the same room they had shared before. The fire blazed and the love songs were soft, nostalgic. The champagne John had ordered sat chilling in a bucket on the table.

Regina stared solemnly into the orange-white flames. John came up behind her and handed her a glass of champagne. Deja vu. She smiled, took it.

He lowered himself into the wingback chair and gently pulled her down into his lap.

“
This is nice,” John said, his voice husky. “Did I mention that I love you?”

She swallowed, slowly shaking her head.

“
I love you,” he said softly.

Her eyes misted with tears, happy tears. Until he actually said them, she didn’t realize how much she had wanted to hear those words.

“
I’ve wanted to say that for ... well —damnit, I was afraid to say it,” he went on. “I thought if I said it out loud, you’d be taken from me.”

“
I’m tougher than you think.”

“
Too tough to love an amateur detective?”

“
I owe that amateur detective my life. I love amateur detectives, I love authors, and I love part-time bartenders who wear leather bomber jackets and are hooked on pistachio nuts—the red dye ...” she kissed his stained fingers, then his
lips, “...
turns me on.”

“
What are you trying to say?” he coaxed.

“
That ...
I love you, John.”

He tightened his hold on her. She snuggled deeper into his arms, sighing.

“
Everything in this room is exactly the same except for the rose petals.”

“
I suppose they’re reserved for the bridal treatment,” she said.

“
Umm,” he kissed her ear lobe. “I miss the rose petals.”

“
I miss them too.”

The conversation was left unfinished, but the notion, like the heavy fragrance of the absent rose petals, filled the room.

About the Author
NightWriter--
Dark and deadly nights
. . .

Carol lives with her husband Bob and their psycho cat in Sparks, Nevada. She is the author of six suspense novels: NIGHT STALKER, NIGHT PREY, NIGHT PASSAGE, NIGHT GAME, NIGHT WIDOW and NIGHT HUNTER (formerly titled, Skin Deep).

Carol enjoys hearing from readers—visit her at:

website
http://imagerystudios.com/carol

Blogsite:
http://caroldavisluce.com/

Tweeter:
http://twitter.com/#!/CarolDavisLuce

Buy her books at:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

BONUS

SHORT STORY

SHATTERED CRYSTAL

A gunshot shattered the quiet. The report made me flinch despite the fact I'm a cop accustomed to such sounds and that I knew what was coming. I glanced at the clock on the stove. Eighteen after. Sitting at my kitchen table cluttered with breakfast remnants of cereal, Pop tarts, spilled milk and the uneaten crusts of warmed-over pizza, I closed my eyes again and listened to the ensuing silence, absently crushing cornflakes beneath my fingertips. A second gunshot exploded. I looked at the clock. Six minutes had passed. Exactly two and one half minutes later the cassette clicked off. An image of Trudy Moore flickered across my mind. Trudy in the beginning and Trudy near the end.

Over the years in my police work I had tried hard to stay uninvolved personally, but sometimes it just couldn't be helped. This case had been one of those fraught with disappointment and frustration, impeded by the very system meant to remedy it.

It began for me on a blustery day in November in the cramped detective division of the Spring Valley Police Department where I serve as the department's first and only female detective.

"Detective Winick?"

I looked up from the bottom drawer of my desk where I had just stashed an assortment of commandeered Halloween candy that my seven-year-old nephew, Billy, had collected trick-or-treating the night before. I recognized the woman standing at my desk. It wasn't the first time she'd been in this department. In fact, I'd seen her at least three times in the past, working with two other detectives; first with Sal, then Chester, but that had been months ago.

The change in the woman was shocking. I recalled a rather plain, but robust-looking young woman with a straight, confident posture wearing a tidy waitress uniform. She didn't look so robust now. With dark smudges under her eyes, lipstick chewed away from dry lips and the shine gone from hair that was limp and beginning to show gray, she slouched with what I could only describe as obvious despair. Her uniform had lost it starch and fit a little looser. There was no doubt about it; this woman's appearance had gradually gone downhill with each visit to the station.

That sent red lights flashing in my head. "Have a seat, Mrs. Moore." I let go of the candy and reluctantly closed the drawer. She sank into a chair. Behind her at the double glass doors I saw Sal and Chester approaching, laughing and talking, about to enter when Chester glanced our way then pulled on Sal's arm. Sal looked, his smile instantly changing to a grimace as they both executed a quick about-face and retreated. So that was it. Mrs. Moore was a pass along. First Sal, then Chester, and now me. She was no doubt the station kook. What was it? Voices in her head? Little people on her heels? The neighbor's barking dog?

With head bowed, fingers picking at something that looked like spaghetti sauce on her uniform, she said, "He's beginning to really scare me."

"Why don't you tell me about it. First," I said, readying my note pad, "give me a little background on you, if you will."

She nodded again, swallowed, and began. She was thirty-one, divorced three years and had a daughter, five. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in the mall, but she was going to quit because of him. Before the waitress job she was a teller at a bank, a ticket seller at the Cinema 8, and a clerk at the Stop n' Go, all jobs she'd had to quit because of this weirdo.

"Pestering you, huh?"

"Without let up. Since April Fool's Day."

"Go on." "I get a new job and he finds out where and suddenly there he is, hanging around and grinning that creepy grin."

"He an old boyfriend of yours?"

"Absolutely not!"

She told me that this man turned up one day at the convenience store where she worked, the one under the overpass, and pretty soon he was there every day, hanging around, drinking coffee and watching.

Intimidated by this, Trudy quit and went to work for the movie theater. She felt a measure of safety inside the ticket booth, but when he started showing up there she left and went on to the bank. At least they had a security guard. But after only two weeks she was fired because she made too many mistakes, so unnerved by his vigil on the bus bench across the street--the bus would come and go and still he sat there staring at her through the tinted glass of the bank's drive-up window. Her latest job at the cafe had brought him inside again. He'd come full circle. He was back to sipping coffee and watching her, except now he was calling her at home on her unlisted number.

"What's he say?"

"Nothing." She twisted her fingers. "If he don't quit calling and saying nothing I'm gonna go crazy."

I took a report like my two colleagues before me and suggested she get a new unlisted phone number. Other than that, I said, our hands were tied. She worked in a public place. It was a free country and the man had a right to a cup of coffee if he'd paid for it. Where he looked was his own business as long as he wasn't peeping in her window and as long as he kept his hands to himself. All things she'd heard before and didn't want to hear again. I knew what she was going through. My sister had gone through the same crap. The calls, the letters, the looming shadow. But instead of a stranger stalking Lilly, it had been her ex-husband. Lilly had gone through all the right channels. The police, the courts. Nothing helped. Least of all the restraining order that failed to keep her ex from ambushing her one night after work and shooting her five times in the head before putting the gun to his own head. Lilly's two boys, Billy and Chuck, now live with me.

Two weeks later Trudy sank down into the chair by my desk and said, "He knows where I live."

"Whatshisname? The watcher?" I asked, though not the least bit surprised. He probably knew exactly when she ate, slept, even when she took her daily vitamins.

"He's hanging around our house. I got a little girl, she's just a baby, five. Detective Winick, you've got to do something. Arrest him."

"Has he done anything illegal?"

"I'm not sure. Like what?"

"Like prowling around your house. Going through your mail. Vandalizing personal property. Laying hands on you...laying hands on your little girl." She visibly blanched at the latter.

"He's harassing me. He calls or shows up all hours of the day and night. Isn't there some law that says people got a right to peace and quiet, privacy, and the pursuit of happiness?"

"He has the same rights, Mrs. Moore. And unless he's actually doing something that's against the law, you know as well as I do that I can't do a darn thing."

"What's gotta happen before you can step in, huh? He gonna have to break into our house and hurt me, hurt my little girl? Kill us?" I repressed a shudder. Bile rose to my throat as I remembered looking upon Lilly's nearly unrecognizable face at the morgue when asked to identify her body.

"He threaten to do those things?"

"What he does is calls and tells me he loves me, can't live without me and hopes to spend eternity with me. What's that sound like to you?"

It sounded like he wasn't going to give up, but I didn't say as much to her. I knew that even in states where anti-stalker laws existed, little could be done to stop these guys. Behavior such as theirs was not normal and they went to great lengths and risks to pursue their victim. Before I could answer, she stood, dug into the wide pocket of her uniform, brought out a dozen photographs and tossed them onto my desk. I fanned them out.

Though the background view was different in each one, the man was the same. A scrawny little guy with greasy dark hair and tiny eyes like blackened steelies, dressed in army fatigues. He stared directly into the camera, grinning, obviously aware he was being photographed. "Nam vet?" I inquired.

"I didn't ask. But when I turn up missing or dead one day, you'll know what my killer looks like." She pivoted sharply and marched off. That night I drove to the quiet neighborhood where Trudy Moore lived. Her house, a little bungalow of Spanish design, surrounded by a jungle of shrubs and trees, was a prowler's paradise. The weather was mild and balmy, yet all around the small bungalow the doors and mini-blinds were shut tight. No toys in the yard, no sign of a child anywhere. And then I saw why. Parked at the curb was a beat-up Jeep Wrangler. A man in camouflage fatigues sat slumped behind the wheel with black steelie eyes fixed on the house.

I parked behind him, got out of my car, adjusted the harness holster of my colt 45 beneath my blazer and moved toward the driver's door, taking out my shield as I approached. I had to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention, so engrossed was he in his vigil. Flashing my shield, I said, "What do you think you're doing?"