on me. I use plastic for almost everything I buy. And I don’t own a lot of jewelry.” Caroline held up her hands. “These pieces are all from family members. Aunts and my mother. My grandmother,” she added, pointing to the gold heart necklace.
Family stuff. Something else he knew little about. “What about any small valuable antique that the intruder could have taken from your house?”
Another head shake. “I run an antiques business and love vintage cars, but I prefer modern decor.” She paused. “Or rather, no decor. I’m not much for fuss or clutter.”
He thought of her virginal white bedroom and glistening black kitchen and agreed. Modern, uncluttered and maybe even a little anal. Everything perfectly aligned and in its place, like the cool crystal.
Everything in place but those cookies.
Store-bought. Not the gourmet kind from some chichi bakery. Normal ones. Egan had a hard time imagining her standing in her kitchen. Surrounded by all that expensive glitter. Wearing silk designer clothes. And eating Oreos.
“Wait. There is something,” she said a moment later. “I have a small clock that was a Christmas gift from my mother. It’s portable and probably worth a lot. It’s on the nightstand, next to the dream journal I’ve been keeping for the psychiatrist.”
Egan didn’t remember seeing a clock or a journal, but then his attention had been on those open French doors, not the nightstand. He grabbed his phone and punched in the number to the SAPD dispatch, who in turn connected him with Detective Mark Willows.
“This is Sgt. Caldwell,” he said when Willows answered.
“Glad you called,” Willows interrupted before Egan could explain. “I just got an update from the CSI guys. They took Ms. Stallings’s lock from her bedroom door so they can test it to see if it was picked. They’ll replace it with a temp so we can secure the house.”
“Thanks. I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”
“Well, we don’t want another break-in. This is just preliminary, but those shoe prints left on her bedroom floor are about a size eleven. Some kind of athletic shoes. So, we’re probably looking for a male.”
Egan made a note to check Kenneth Sutton’s shoe size. “I need you to check on the nightstand in the master bedroom and tell me what’s there,” Egan said to the detective.
“Give me a minute. I’m walking that way.” Egan heard the sound of the man’s movement. And waited. “There’s a phone and a clock,” Willows reported. “The phone is white, and the clock is about the size of baseball. It’s gold, and it’s got pearls and what looks like emeralds all around the dial. Heck, the friggin’ hands look like they’re made of diamonds. Caldwell, this is some clock.”
Yes, and the intruder didn’t take it. “Is there anything else on the nightstand?”
“Just a pen. Common, ordinary variety.”
Oh, man. “There’s no paper or notepad?”
“Nada.”
“Thanks. Make sure CSI checks that nightstand for prints.” Egan hung up, ready to relay that to Caroline, but he could tell from her expression that she already knew.
“My dream journal is missing,” she mumbled.
“Yeah. The expensive clock is still there, though. So, let me guess—everyone at that lunch today heard that you’d been keeping a journal.”
The color crept back into her face, and she looked as if she wanted to curse. She nodded.
Hell.
Egan leaned in and looked straight into her eyes. “Caroline, what exactly did you write in that journal?”
“It’s gibberish,” Caroline concluded as she glanced over the notes that she’d spent most of the previous night and that morning making. Or, rather, the notes that Egan had insisted she make so she could try to re-create her stolen dream journal.
She’d told him the night before that it was futile, that the dreams hadn’t revealed anything important. Caroline still believed that. But Egan had persisted anyway, right before the bomb squad had given her the all-clear to leave his office and go to the house of her best friend, Taylor Landis.
Taylor had welcomed Caroline with open arms. Literally. And her friend had hardly let her out of her sight since. They’d chatted, drunk some wine, and then Taylor had called her security expert to go over to Caroline’s house to change all the locks on the windows and doors and to repair the security system. It wouldn’t give Caroline peace of mind exactly, but it was a start.
“Okay, let me have a look at those notes,” Taylor insisted. She had her long blond hair gathered into a ponytail, she gave it an adjustment and then waggled her fingers. “Maybe they won’t be gibberish to me.”
Caroline handed her the notes and proceeded with her so-called walk-through of her own house. Yet something else Egan had insisted that she do. With an armed security guard shadowing hers and Taylor’s every move, Caroline checked her office to make sure everything was in place.
It was.
A PC, laptop and several thousand dollars worth of computer accessories. All still there.
She checked off another room from her list and went to the guest suite off the main corridor. She’d decorated this one all in blue. Pale, barely there blue, for the most part, with the exception of the glossy navy paint on the floor and a fiery abstract oil painting that hung over the natural white stone mantel. She no longer liked that particular bold shade of blue in the painting because it instantly reminded her of Egan’s eyes.
Caroline made a mental note to replace it.
“You dreamed about clocks chasing you?” Taylor commented, reading from the reconstructed journal.
“Yes.” Caroline frowned. “And don’t you dare say anything about ticking biological clocks. I get enough of that from my parents.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” However, Taylor’s pun indicated she’d thought it. Caroline’s frown deepened at her friend’s grin.
Caroline checked the white marble guest bathroom. Nothing missing there. And she went into a storage room crammed with carefully stacked, unopened cardboard boxes. Things she’d bought to redecorate when she’d moved from her condo to the house five months earlier. The house had been a thirtieth birthday gift from her parents, and even though she had plenty of space—fourteen rooms—Caroline just hadn’t gotten around to making the place hers.
She glanced inside the storage room, saw nothing undisturbed and then headed to the one area that she did indeed want to check out.
Her garage.
With her attention nailed to the notes, Taylor followed her. So did the guard, but he kept some distance from them.
“In the dream you had, a man saved you from the attacking clocks,” Taylor concluded. “Looks like your rescuer was Egan Caldwell.”
Caroline stopped so abruptly that Taylor nearly plowed right into her. “How did you come up with that?”
“Easily. In your notes, you said you were running through the woods with the clocks in pursuit. A man stepped out. He had blond hair, a blue shirt and a silver star embedded in his hand. He shot arrows at the clocks to stop them. Sounds like Egan to me. He has a star badge. He often wears a blue shirt, and he has blondish hair. And if you ask me, those arrows are phallic symbols.”
Stunned, Caroline snatched the notes and read over them again. Oh, God. She was certain she hadn’t dreamed about Egan and his phallic symbol, but if Taylor believed she had, then Egan might