A smile crept across Tricia’s lips. Their eyes met, and she leaned in to kiss him.
Squawk! “Dispatch to Six-B.”
“Six-B,” came the reply.
She pulled back, lips pursed. “Russ,” she said, speaking over the dispatcher, “do we have to listen to the scanner all evening?”
“Would you rather watch TV?”
“Not really. I want to sit and converse, although not about Zoë’s death,” she said adamantly. “Can’t we talk about . . . I don’t know . . . current events? Books? Music?”
“You’re so interested in crime, I thought you were entertained by it.”
“I’m interested in crime stories—fiction—not listening to noisy neighbor reports, or—”
“Fourteen Alpha and Six Charlie, respond to a burglary in progress at thirty-six Pine Avenue. Break.”
“Thirty-six Pine Avenue?” Tricia repeated. “But that’s Zoë Carter’s house.” She leaped up from the couch, nearly spilling her wine.
“Fourteen Alpha en route,” came a voice from the scanner, quickly followed by “Six Charlie en route.”
“Are you sure?” Russ asked, not as quick on his feet.
“Yes,” she called behind her, already heading for the front closet and her coat.
“Where are you going?”
“Kimberly’s staying at the house alone. That’s only two blocks away! We might be able to get there quicker than the sheriff’s deputies. Come on!” she yelled and was out the door, running for her car.
Ginny’s prediction of snow had already come true in the few minutes Tricia had been inside Russ’s house. A dusting covered the grass and the windshield of her car.
She’d hopped in, had the engine revving, and the wipers going when Russ finally slammed his front door and jogged to the car. He’d barely closed the passenger door when Tricia jammed her foot on the accelerator and spun the tires.
The car fishtailed on the damp pavement as she rounded the corner.
“Slow down!” Russ implored.
Hands gripping the steering wheel, Tricia paid no attention to her panicked passenger, turned the corner, and took out a piece of the corner lot’s grass.
“I’m going to report you to the sheriff if you don’t slow down,” Russ hollered.
Tricia jammed on the brakes and the car shuddered to a halt at the curb in front of number thirty-six. She yanked open the door and started running toward the house.
“Hey, you! Stop!” Russ yelled, and began running in the opposite direction.
Every light in the house appeared to be switched on, and the front door was ajar. Without a thought—and probably foolishly—Tricia entered. “Kimberly! Kimberly!”
The living room had been ransacked. Pillows and sofa cushions slashed, books dumped on the floor. The shelves on one wall had been cleared of everything breakable. Porcelain figurines and ginger jars lay smashed on the carpeted floor. Tricia cast about, but found no sign of Kimberly.
“Kimberly, where are you?”
She stepped over the detritus and headed down the well-lit hallway. The bedroom door on the left was open. She poked her head inside, saw the bed had been dismantled, the sheets and blankets in a jumble on the floor, the mattress and box springs standing against the far wall—just the metal frame and dust bunnies marked where they had once been. Except for a few clothes on hangers, the closet was empty. Not much else populated the space. Was it because the house was in the process of being sold, or was Zoë as spare with her possessions as she had been with the details of her life?
Tricia moved on. The bedroom on the other side of the hall was in much the same condition. A couple of empty suitcases lay open on the floor, the mattress stood against the wall, the box springs askew, revealing nothing had been stored beneath it. The dresser drawers all hung open, but there was nothing inside them, the contents—socks and underwear—were strewn across the floor.
“Kimberly?” Tricia called again.
Still no answer.
Tricia hurried on. The hallway dead-ended at what looked to be a home office—no doubt Zoë’s inner sanctum—and it, too, had been turned upside down. Copies of the hardcover and paperback editions of the Forever books were scattered across the floor; a lamp lay smashed; pens, pencils, and other office supplies were spread among tapes and broken CDs and DVDs. The screen on a little television in an armoire was shattered. The glass from every picture had been smashed, the pictures themselves punched from the frames. Likewise, holes, three or four inches in diameter—from a sledgehammer?—marred the walls. And an old, battered trunk was upended in the corner, its contents dumped over the floor. It had suffered the same fate as the walls, with holes punched through its thin exterior.
A groan came from what appeared to be a bloody mass of clothes on the floor. “Kimberly!”
Tricia crouched and pulled back what had once been a white sweater. Kimberly’s face was mottled, and her cheek was sunken; her blood-coated teeth hung broken, jagged in her gums. Tricia was glad she and Russ hadn’t gotten as far as eating pizza, because her stomach roiled, but with nothing to bring up, she merely gagged.
Kimberly groaned again, and Tricia forced herself to turn back to the once attractive woman.
“The deputies are on their way,” she managed, her voice catching.
Kimberly’s hand groped for Tricia’s, found it, her fingers slippery with her own blood. “Thone,” she said through swelling lips.
“I don’t understand.”
“Thone,” she tried again, almost frantic.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Kimberly whimpered. “Thone,” she said again.
Thone? “Phone?” Tricia tried.
Kimberly shook her head ever so slightly, a moan escaping.
Thone?
“Stone?” Tricia asked.
Kimberly nodded. For a moment her fingers tightened around Tricia’s, and then went slack.
“Can’t you ever mind your own business?” came a cold, hard voice from the open doorway.
Tricia started; she hadn’t heard anyone approach. She looked up to see a grim-faced Sheriff Wendy Adams looming over her.
Fifteen
Zoë’s tiny kitchen was about the only room in the house that had escaped the madman’s wrath. And surely it had to be a man who’d inflicted all the damage.
Unlike the night of Zoë’s death, when Angelica had thrust a sustaining cup of coffee into Tricia’s hand, now she had only a damp tissue to clutch. She sat at the little Formica table under Sheriff Adams’s unrelenting glare. “Let’s go over it again.”
Tricia sighed. “We heard the call come over the police scanner. We raced right over. Russ went running across the yard and I came into the house.”
The sheriff shook her head in disgust. “A tremendously stupid act,” she said under her breath.
“Russ was chasing whoever ransacked the place and injured Kimberly,” Tricia continued.
“There could’ve been more than one assailant. You didn’t know there wasn’t.”
That was true. Still, their showing up had probably frightened the attacker away.
At least, that was what Tricia chose to believe.
“Get on with it,” the sheriff prompted.
“I hurried through the house and found Kimberly in the office. Bloodied but breathing. Is she still alive?”
“She was when the ambulance pulled out of here.”
Tricia shuddered at the thought of Kimberly’s bashed and bloodied face. “Where’s Russ?” she asked, in an effort to distract herself.
“Talking with one of my deputies.”
“I take it he didn’t catch the robber.”
“No. Too bad he was our high school newspaper editor. He might’ve caught the perp if he’d lettered in track.”
Tricia blinked. Perp? Wendy Adams sounded like a caricature of a TV lawman . . . er, woman.
The sheriff crossed her arms over her ample bosom and leaned against the counter by the sink. “Now what was it Ms. Peters said to you before she lost consciousness?”