Horror enveloped her like a dark cloud. “The perp? The crime lab?” Her stomach turned over again and acrid saliva filled her mouth. She swallowed hard.
“Why is my father’s house a crime scene?” she demanded, her voice hollow to her own ears. “He didn’t do anything here.” She shuddered as the scrapbook’s pages rose before her inner vision and the court bailiff’s bland voice listing the women her father had killed played over in her mind. “Did he?”
He sniffed. “The suspect’s residence has been declared part of the crime scene, as have his vehicles.”
“I see,” she said, feeling numb. “Thank you.”
The policeman gestured toward her car. “Now get on out of here,” he said as he holstered his gun.
She had no choice but to obey him. She walked past him down the sidewalk. As she did, the microphone attached to his shoulder crackled. The only words she could make out were Moser and hospital.
“What?” she exclaimed, turning back toward him. Her heart thudded painfully. Her father? Hospital? Oh, no!
The policeman spoke into his mic. “I’ve got the daughter here. I’ll let her know.”
“Ms. Moser,” he said. “That was the dispatcher. Your father has suffered a heart attack. He’s being taken to St. Tammany Parish Medical Center.”
“Oh, no!” Christy breathed. “Not again!” She started toward her car.
“Ma’am?” the officer called after her. “I can get you there faster in the squad car.”
Christy stopped in her tracks. “Thank you,” she said.
As she got into the police car and the officer cranked it and sped away, blue lights flashing, she prayed, “Please don’t let my father die before I get there. I need to tell him how sorry I am.”
THREE HOURS LATER, after her father had been moved from the emergency room to the cardiac care unit, Christy left the hospital. The nurse in charge had told her that she wouldn’t be able to see him again until morning. She argued that she was a physician and demanded to see the doctor in charge. But when the cardiac specialist found out she was a pediatrician, he’d smiled apologetically and told her the same thing. It was a hospital policy. Intensive-care visiting hours must be observed—by everyone.
So she’d called a taxi to take her back to her dad’s house to pick up her rental car. Then, exhausted, she headed to the Oak Grove Inn, a bed-and-breakfast she’d booked in Chef Voleur, stopping along the way to pick up a bottle of wine.
After her flight the night before, she’d barely had time to unload her bags and fall into bed. Then this morning she’d been up at dawn, unable to sleep with her father’s nine o’clock sentencing hearing looming. Now more than twelve hours later, her dad was in the hospital, and all she wanted to do was go back there and sit with him. But she couldn’t. The last thing the nurse had told her was to rest. “It’s the best thing you can do for your father now. It won’t help him if you’re exhausted.”
Irritatingly, it was the same thing she told worn-out parents of her young patients. It was bitter medicine to swallow, but she knew the nurse was right.
She took a deep breath and squeezed her burning eyes shut. She vowed to take the nurse’s advice.
As she approached the inn, which was on a quiet street in a residential section of Chef Voleur, she thought about the difference between the north shore of the Pontchartrain and Boston. As much as the north shore had grown over the last twenty years, the cities still retained a lot of small-town character.
She pulled into the small parking lot. A loud roar announced a big pickup pulling in beside her. Living in Boston for six years, she’d forgotten how many pickups were on the roads in Louisiana. She couldn’t remember ever seeing one in Boston proper.
She got out, grabbed her purse and the bag holding the wine and headed for her cottage, sending a vague smile toward the darkened windows of the pickup. As she walked past the main house toward the third of four tiny cottages lined up behind it, a motion-sensing light came on. But her cottage was dark. Someone—the maid?—had turned off the light she’d deliberately left on this morning.
Behind her, heavy footsteps crunched on the tiny seashells that were mixed with gravel to form the path to the cottages. The driver of the pickup, probably.
Her big-city instincts kicked in and she clutched her purse tightly against her ribs as she quickly inserted the key into the door and turned it.
The crunching footsteps came closer.
It’s just the person in Cottage Four, she told herself as she opened the door to slip inside.
A crushing blow hit her on the back and sent her sprawling onto the floor.
Chapter Two
When the blow slammed Christy to the floor, the bag containing the bottle of wine flew out of her hands and landed with a thud in front of her.
Still driven by the momentum of the blow and the weight against her, she pitched forward, hands out to break her fall. She hit the hardwood floor hard and felt a distinct, painful snap in her right wrist.
Pain and panic immobilized her for an instant as a heavy body landed on top of her. He straddled her, pinning her down.
Her heart pounded violently and her limbs quivered. The man grabbed a fistful of her hair and slammed her face down onto the hardwood floor. He put his mouth near her ear. She could smell stale cigarettes on his breath.
She tried to suck in enough air to scream, but his weight pressing her chest into the hardwood floor was too heavy. She tried anyway. All that came from her lips was a feeble squeak.
“Shut your mouth,” his gravely voice whispered.
Christy’s hands were pinned underneath her, and her right wrist pulsed with a sickening pain. Using her left hand, she tried to move, to roll, anything to get him off her. Nothing worked and every tiny movement intensified the piercing agony in her broken wrist. It was making her nauseous.
Whatever the man intended to do to her, she couldn’t stop him. He was too strong and she was too weak.
“Please—” she rasped. “What do you want—?”
His hand pushed her cheek harder into the floor. “Go back where you came from,” he growled. “Or you’re as dead as your sister.”
Terror sliced through her like a razor blade. Her sister’s killer. He’d followed her. Just as the thoughts whirled through her brain, he grabbed her hair again and banged her head against the floor—twice. The blows stunned her.
At some point, she was aware that his crushing weight was gone. Dazed, her head spinning and her wrist throbbing, she managed to roll over onto her side.
Where was he? Dear God—she couldn’t see anything in the dark. Was he really gone? Or was he hiding in the shadows, preparing to kill her?
Instinctively she reached for the tiny can of Mace she carried in her pocket, but when she moved her hand, the pain nearly took her breath away.
She rolled onto her back and tried to reach it with her left hand. It was awkward—almost impossible. Tears welled in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. Tears of frustration, of pain, of paralyzing fear.
Finally, she got her fingers on the object in her pocket, but it wasn’t the Mace. It was her smart phone.
Desperately she grabbed it, trying to press the buttons for 911. But her fingers were shaking too badly. The device slipped from her fumbling fingers and clattered across the hardwood floor.
No!
“Help!” she whispered, her lungs deflated by sobbing.