Julia stared at the blank screen of her laptop, but the words refused to come. She’d been trying to finish this same scene for going on two hours, to no avail. She wanted to think it was the turmoil in her life keeping her muse at bay. The stalker. Closing the shop. Temporarily moving in with her father. But she knew the reason for her writer’s block had nothing to do with any of those things—and everything to do with a troubled ex-cop from Chicago.
Every time the phone rang her heart pounded. Even though she desperately wanted to talk to him, she never answered. But John hadn’t called.
She missed him with a desperation she’d never before experienced. She longed to hear his voice. See his smile. She wanted to raise her hand and touch his cheek. For the first time in her life she understood what it was like to have an addiction. A compulsion. In the last few days John Merrick had become both.
Sighing, she looked down at the blinking cursor on her screen. She tried to concentrate, tried to put herself in the scene. But her muse refused to cooperate.
“Damn. Damn. Damn.”
Closing her laptop lid, she rose and left her bedroom for the kitchen downstairs. She wanted to talk to Claudia, but her sister was out with Rory. It would have been nice to pass the time with her father, but he and Parker Bradley were in Baton Rouge at an overnight meeting. As a last resort, she decided to make coffee and take a tall mug to the private detective parked outside the house. She’d only met Ellis twice. He was an ex-cop from Houston. Nice enough, but his personality was about as engaging as a head cold.
“Tonight you’re going to have to do,” she muttered as she entered the kitchen and flipped on the light.
A glass of wine would have been nice. Her father didn’t condone the use of alcohol, but he tolerated it. If she wasn’t mistaken, one of his non-church friends had given him a case of Portuguese wine for Christmas last year. If she was lucky, he’d forgotten about it and it was still in the garage gathering dust.
She ground beans and started a pot of coffee. While the coffeemaker hissed and bumped, she went to the garage and flipped on the lights. Her father’s Lincoln was gone. Her Volkswagen looked small and lonely sitting in the big garage all by itself.
“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” she said as she crossed to the shelving unit on the far wall. Spotting the case of wine on the top shelf, she looked around for something to stand on. The stepladder was nowhere in sight, so she opted for the wooden crate next to the garbage can. Removing the balled-up newspaper inside, she was about to turn it upside down when she noticed the mask.
Her blood froze in her veins when she realized it was a Mardi Gras mask similar to the one the stalker had worn. She told herself it couldn’t possibly be the same mask. But her heart quickened as she reached for it. Then she spotted the purple feathers at the crown and her heart began to pound. It wasn’t merely similar to the mask her stalker had used, it was the very same mask. But how in the name of God had it ended up here?
“I knew you’d figure it out sooner or later.”
Julia yelped as she spun. The mask fell to the floor when she saw Parker Bradley standing in the doorway that led back into the kitchen. A sense of impending danger overwhelmed her when she spotted the nasty-looking pistol in his hand.
“Parker.”
“I see you found the mask.” He shook his head. “Silly of me to leave it where you could so easily discover it, but your father almost caught me with it when I was about to dispose of it.”
Her entire body began to quake as the situation crystallized. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He raised the pistol, pointed it at her chest. A chilling smile curved his mouth. “I see it in your eyes. You’re frightened of me, aren’t you?”
The roar of blood in her ears was so loud she could barely hear him. A terrible realization had taken root. Icy fear spread through her body.
“Why?” was all she could manage.
“I thought that would be obvious.”
“It’s not.”
“I love you, Julia. I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you almost three years ago. Do you remember that night?”
She didn’t. Thin and ordinary, Parker was not the kind of man a woman remembered. He’d been her father’s executive assistant for three years.
“Parker, you don’t even know me. You can’t possibly love me.”
“I know all I need to know.” Gooseflesh prickled her arms as his gaze swept slowly down her body. “Your religious convictions are strong, like mine. Your beliefs parallel mine. You’re kind and beautiful. The kind of beauty that elicits lust in a man, you know?” The smile turned self-deprecating. “Even a wimpy guy like me.”
“You’re not—”
He cut her off. “But we all know beauty is only skin deep. I fell in love with you the instant I met you. I knew that one day we would be married. That we would have children. All this time I’ve been saving myself for you.”
Julia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Never in a million years would she have suspected Parker Bradley of being her stalker.
The kind of beauty that elicits lust in a man . . .
The words made her shiver. She glanced around the garage, seeking an escape route. There was one window on the north side of the garage, but there was no way she could open it and get through before he reached her. He was standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen and the button for the garage door opener. There was no escape.
“I’m thirty-two-years old and I’ve never had intercourse with a woman.” He looked intense and embarrassed at once. “But I’m only a man. A sinner. I’ve lusted. After you mostly.”
“Parker, don’t do this.”
“God knows I tried to fight it,” he said. “I tried to exorcise these feelings from my psyche. From my body. Then you came to me in a dream and I saw you for what you really are. It was a message from God, Julia. A message telling me it was my responsibility to save you from yourself.”
Julia could hear herself breathing hard. Her heart hammered like a freight train in her chest. She measured the distance between her and the door. The nearest phone was in the kitchen, on the wall next to the bar. Her cell phone was charging in her bedroom. There was no way she could reach either . . .
“You were so innocent. Virginal. So . . . perfect.” His lips peeled back, revealing small, straight teeth. “Then I found out about the book and everything changed.”
“Parker, how did you know?”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, it’s just that—”
He cut her off. “I heard you and Claudia! At the shop. Whispering about the book. You were laughing. I didn’t understand at first. I didn’t want to believe you could write filth. To prove myself correct, I went to the post office where Elisabeth de Haviland’s address is listed in the bio of her book. And I waited.” His voice cracked. “My heart broke when I saw you. When you used your key and opened the box for your dirty fan mail.” Fervor of the righteous gleamed in his eyes. “Immoral filth. Writing of fornication and lewd acts between unmarried men and women. Masturbation. Oral sex. Anal sex.” A dark red blush colored his cheeks. “You glorified it.” He wiped his mouth as if the words had dirtied his lips. “My God, how could you do that to your father? How could you do that to God? To me?”
“It’s just . . . a novel, Parker. A fantasy—”
“A fantasy that is perpetuating the downfall of a society.”
“No—”
“I saw you with Merrick!” he shouted abruptly. “You let him put his hands on you. You took him into your bed. Into your body. It is his seed inside you, not mine!”
A profound sense of violation shook her. Julia stared at him, her only thought that he had somehow seen them together. That he was insane and there would be no reasoning with him. At least not in rational terms. “Parker, it isn’t too late to stop this. Let’s go outside and get Ellis and we’ll
talk about it.”
“Don’t talk to me as if I’m crazy,” he said calmly. “I’m not insane. Far from it, Julia. God has bestowed upon me the responsibility of saving you from your own immorality, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
She thought about getting into the Volkswagen and locking the doors. But then what? The keys were in her purse inside. He would probably just break a window. Then she remembered her father had given her a garage door opener. She’d clipped it to her visor. If she could get into the car and hit the button she could run out the door and find Ellis.
“Parker, let’s go inside and talk about this.” Reaching out as if to take his hand, she stepped closer to him, closer to the driver’s side door. “Please.”
He looked confused for a moment and lowered the gun. “You’re not going to talk me out of what I have to—”
Julia dashed to the Volkswagen and yanked the door open. Bending, she slammed her fist against the garage door opener clipped to the visor. Behind her she heard Parker’s shoes against the concrete floor. The garage door groaned and began to rise. One foot. Two feet. Not taking time to look back, she threw herself at the small gap between the garage door and the floor and rolled.
“Stop!”
She didn’t stop. In the driveway, she lurched to her feet and looked around wildly. Ellis’s Ford was parked in the circular driveway twenty yards away. “Help me!” she screamed and sprinted toward the car.
She could hear Parker behind her, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t slow down. She reached the car seconds later, darted around the hood, slapped both hands against the driver’s side window. “Help me!”
When the door didn’t open, she reached for the handle, yanked the door open. “Ellis!”
The private detective lay against the seat back, his face slack. The blood on his jacket looked black in the dim light from the street lamp. Horror and disbelief slammed into her like a giant fist. Julia tried to scream, but no sound came.
She sensed Parker behind her. She was about to turn and run when pain exploded at the back of her head. Black and white lights flashed before her eyes. She managed to grab the side-view mirror before her knees buckled. The world dipped and spun as she tried to crawl away.
“Help me!” she cried.
The second blow sent her into total darkness.
TWENTY-EIGHT
John had never been good at letting things go. It was his scourge and, some would say, his saving grace. After Parker left, he threw the copies of the threatening letters in the trash. He poured half a glass of gin and carried it to the living room, where he turned on the television and stared blindly at the screen.
Old man Wainwright should have given him the opportunity to brief his replacement. It was PD protocol when a detective handed a case to another. Was the private detective capable of keeping Julia safe? Was he taking the assignment seriously? If no one would listen to John, perhaps he could ask Mitch to give the private detective a call and fill him in. Or at least get of sense of whether or not the man was competent.
But John knew that while all of those things were valid concerns, what he really wanted to know was how Julia was faring through all this. Picking up his cell phone, he scrolled through the numbers until he found Julia’s. He didn’t hit Send, but he was thinking about it. He could feel the desperation tugging at him. He hadn’t eaten dinner and the alcohol was going straight to his head. Not a good thing considering he was an inch away from making a call he had no business making. He was probably going to say things he had no business saying.
“What the hell,” he muttered.
Taking another long drink, he hit Send and waited. Her voice mail answered on the third ring. His chest actually went tight at the sound of her voice. He left a message asking her to call him and hung up.
For a crazy instant he considered driving by the Wainwright estate, just to make sure she was all right. But on some level he knew it would only tempt him to do more. Like walk up to the house and knock on the door. The Wain-wrights had made their position on his being there perfectly clear.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue to work the case. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do these days. Setting down the glass, he went to the kitchen, dug the letters out of the trash and spread them on the table.
Her tainted pen spills sin onto the page like the fevered blood from a sickle slash. Soon thine blood will be hers and vengeance will be mine.—Author unknown
Death is here and death is there, Death is busy everywhere, All around, within, beneath, Above is death—and we are death.—Shelley, “Death” [1820]
The wages of sin is death.—The New Testament
Yet each man kills the thing he loves.—Oscar Wilde, “Ballad of Reading Gaol”
The sins ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one.
—Rudyard Kipling, “Tomlinson”
He stared hard at the characters, thinking about the writer, trying to get inside his head. A tiny blotch of toner on each paper revealed that the letters had been printed from the same printer. It was barely larger than a comma and appeared at regularly spaced intervals on each paper. He stared at the blotch. Something pinged in his brain. Suddenly he was pretty sure he’d seen the blotch before. But where?
He slid the check Parker had given him from the envelope and laid it beside the letters. His heart began to pound, the way it did back when he’d been a cop and knew he was about to break a major case. The same blotch appeared on the check Wainwright had sent to him as final payment.
Disbelief and a cold new fear coursed through him. John stood abruptly, nearly knocking his chair over. He couldn’t take his eyes off the check. Was Benjamin Wainwright the stalker? Parker Bradley? John hadn’t eliminated them from his list of suspects. But neither were strong contenders.
John’s heart went into overdrive when he realized Julia was in imminent and grave danger. She was staying at the Wainwright estate, a place John had always believed safe.
“Shit,” he hissed as he sprinted to the living room and snatched up his cell. He hit Julia’s number as he grabbed his keys off the counter. Three rings and her voice mail answered. “Julia, this is John. You’re in danger. Lock your bedroom door and don’t let anyone in. Not your father. Especially not Parker Bradley. I’m on my way.”
Cursing, he hit the End button and quickly called Mitch. His brother answered on the first ring.
“I think Parker Bradley is the stalker,” John said without preamble.
“Bradley? How do you know?”
Quickly, John explained about the blotch of toner. “I’m on my way over to the estate now.”
“Stay put, John. I’ll handle it.”
“Not going to happen.”
“They don’t want you there. Damn it, you’re not a cop anymore.”
But John was already out the door and sprinting to his car. “She’s there alone, Mitch. There’s no way I can sit this one out.”
“Goddamn it, John, let me handle this. If Bradley is the stalker, that means he’s now a strong suspect in the murder case. I can be there in ten minutes with a couple of patrol cars and a warrant.”
“I can be there in two,” John said and disconnected.
John hauled the Mustang into Wainwright’s driveway, skidded to a halt in front of a massive ornate steel security gate and hit the intercom button with his fist.
“This is John Merrick,” he said. “Open the gate.”
A minute ticked by, but it felt like an eternity. He glanced through the massive gate. The mansion was large and surrounded by stately live oaks. There was no sign of Julia’s Volkswagen. A Ford sedan was parked in the circular driveway. It was too dark for John to see if there was anyone inside. In the back of his mind he wondered if the car belonged to the private dick. If it did, where the hell was he?
He hit the intercom again. “This is Merrick. Open the goddamn gate or I’m coming through it.”
He laid on the horn and watched for lights, b
ut nothing happened. Getting out of the Mustang, he strode to the gate and tested it with a vigorous shake. But the mechanism held strong and secure.
Not letting himself consider the consequences of what he was about to do, John climbed back into the Mustang, secured his safety belt and put the car into reverse. Halfway down the driveway, he slammed it into drive and floored the gas. The big V-8 roared. The car shot forward. Zero to thirty in three seconds flat. The bumper hit the gate. Steel screamed against steel. The impact jolted him, but he didn’t let off the gas. The gates exploded open. The one to his left was ripped from its hinge and clattered to the cobblestone. The one on the right slammed against the fence hard enough to bend steel.
John brought the Mustang to a screeching halt outside the three-car garage. He was out of the car and running for the front door when headlights played over the stucco exterior. A glance over his shoulder told him Mitch had arrived. “Shit,” he muttered, not sure if that was good or bad. The only thing he knew for certain was that his cop’s instincts were telling him something was terribly wrong. He wasn’t going to let police protocol keep him from finding out what.
He tried the front door, but found it locked. Cupping his hands, he looked through the beveled glass sidelight, but the interior was as dark as a cave.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
John turned to see Mitch jogging up the sidewalk, his face incredulous and angry.
“She’s in trouble.”
“How do you know?” Mitch looked around.
“I can’t get her on the phone.”
“Maybe she’s not taking your calls. For God’s sake, John, can you blame her?”
“The bedroom light is on, but she’s not answering the intercom.”
“So you obliterated their security gate?” Mitch gestured angrily toward the gate. “How are you going to explain that to the old man?”
John started toward the garage, but Mitch stepped in front of him, blocking his way. “Not so fast, hotshot.”