Deep Within The Shadows (The Superstition Series Book 1) (14 page)

“Thank you, Vivian.”

Juliet waited for her to be out of earshot “She seems to know her stuff.”

“She’s very good. But she’s one of those people who infringes on your personal space without realizing it.”

Juliet had dealt with more than a few like that, but they were usually drunk.

Miranda dragged her thoughts back by saying, “Caleb’s going to pick me up in about an hour, and we’re going to search the house to make sure no one’s planted any more of those spell papers. Call when you want to be picked up.”

Juliet shot a thumb up. “Will do.”

Juliet paused inside the library foyer. Leaving the hospital safely this morning had eased her anxiety somewhat, but as she pushed through the double doors, her heart raced and her breath clogged her throat.

Detective Robinson stood at the bottom of the concrete stairs. He took off his sunglasses and his strange blue gaze pinning her like a butterfly to a board. “I need to talk to you, Ms. Templeton.”

C
hase took a
seat in one of the hard backed wooden chairs in Miranda Templeton’s office. He looked from one woman to the other. Had they not received different injuries, he’d have had a difficult time telling them apart. They were both beautiful, with warm, chestnut-streaked brown hair and high cheekbones. Since he’d done some research on them, he wondered at the different turns their lives had taken.

He broke the news quickly. “Gerald Abbott is dead.”

The relief he’d expected to see in Juliet Templeton’s face never appeared. But she was surprised.

She’d shut down before, when he mentioned her presence during Tanner’s death and Samuel’s attack. He’d seen similar responses in two different categories of the people he’d dealt with. Those who’d been abused, and the hardened criminals who’d gone through the system so many times they were neither intimidated by what lay ahead nor hopeful they were going to avoid punishment.

The more he looked into Juliet’s background and past behaviors, the more he believed she was an abuse survivor.

“What happened?” Miranda asked.

“He was found dead in his cell this morning. We’re investigating, and the coroner, Dr. Brewster, has performed an autopsy. We didn’t want to wait for the state guys to do one.”

The sisters exchanged glances.

“The reason I’m here, Ms. Templeton,” he aimed his look at Juliet, “is because, according to what Gerald Abbott told me, he and Porter were paid to kill you. Tanner Newton was killed by accident.”

Juliet flinched and pressed her fingers against her lips, the shock he’d expected to read earlier obvious.

Her throat worked as she swallowed. “Who hired them?”

“Abbott didn’t know. He’d received payment through a go-between. That man too is dead.”

“This is crazy!” Miranda exclaimed, her voice sharp with anxiety.

Chase scooted forward in the chair. “They were both drug addicts. Addicts will do anything for their next fix. Someone paid them to go after you. The person who hired them is still out there. I’d be remiss if I didn’t caution you to be careful and stay alert.”

Though Juliet’s face remained composed, her hands clenched until the knuckles turned white. “We are.” She ran her fingers through her hair, shoving it back.

Chase’s attention snagged on the graceful line of her cheek and jaw. He tried to ignore the tug of attraction. She was a witness, a victim. He couldn’t get involved with her. And with her history, it would be a bad idea anyway.

She bit her lip. “It seems that whoever is after me can’t tell my sister and me apart.”

He leaned forward in his seat. “Are you sure you don’t know anyone who has reason, real or not, to want to harm you?”

“I’ve never dealt drugs, unless you count the drinks I serve at Steampunk Alley. I haven’t taken drugs since I was eighteen, though some of your patrol officers continued to pull me over on a regular basis until I sold my car. I don’t gamble, so I don’t owe anyone money. And I haven’t poached anyone’s boyfriend. So no, there’s no reason for anyone to come after me.”

“When did you sell your car?” he asked. He’d put feelers out to some of the patrol officers and see what they said about her.

“In May.”

“Have you noticed anyone hanging around at the club?”

“We have regulars who come in all the time.”

“Anyone who’s shown too much interest or gotten too aggressive?”

“Samuel Newton, but I think you can mark him off the list.” She remained silent for a moment. “Justin Chalmers, one of the other bartenders, has been trying to get me to go out with him. He’s been very persistent.”

“Anyone else who’s made you feel uncomfortable?”

“No one outside the occasional drunk customer who gets too mouthy when I cut them off. And those are too many to count.”

Her job sounded a lot like his. He’d go by the bar and get a list of employees from the owner and talk to her coworkers.

Chase turned his attention to Miranda. “How many employees are there at the library, Ms. Templeton?”

“About twenty-five, counting the custodians who clean on the weekend and the two security guards. Plus we have five students on a student work program who come in during the week.”

“Can you get me a list of employees?”

“Certainly.”

“Anyone here who seems out of place?”

“We service the college and the town, Detective. No one’s out of place when they come to the library.”

“Anyone hanging around you or staying close to your work station when they shouldn’t be?”

Miranda shook her head. “I don’t hang out in my office very much. I’m in charge of scheduling and making sure all the other sections of the library are running smoothly. We have classes and community meetings coming in and out daily to use our conference rooms and AV equipment. Interlibrary loan materials to distribute, books to catalogue into the system, and a hundred other things to deal with.”

“Anyone overeager to help?” he asked.

She was silent a moment. “We’re here to be helpful. No one works here whom the college hasn’t vetted. They’ve all been fingerprinted and a background check run.” Her gaze shifted to Juliet. “We have to tell him.”

Chase straightened in his chair. “Tell me what?”

Juliet shot Miranda a frown of displeasure. Her movements impatient, she dug in her bag and removed a plastic bag. When she rose he automatically got to his feet as well. She offered him the bag. “I found a small slip of paper hidden in a tampon in my purse. The paper had been rolled up in the applicator and put back into the manufacturer’s wrappings. Miranda got one, too.”

Impatience tightened the muscles at the back of his neck. “Why didn’t you tell me right away?” Standing close to her for the first time, his gaze skimmed over the smoothness of her skin and the shell pink fullness of her lips.

Her eyes, a toffee brown, glittered with resentment. “We just found them this morning, Detective.”

“We saved the tampons and wrappers,” Miranda said, pulling out a bag from her desk.

“The notes are written in Latin, and I translated them, but you might want to get an expert to check it. I was on my way to the Catholic church to have the priest there look it over when you showed up.”

Miranda added, “Caleb suggested it might be a woman. He didn’t think a man would chose a feminine hygiene product to hide it in.” She offered two bags to him. “He found one in the trunk of my car, too.”

So Faulkner had been with them when they found them. He perused the slips of paper through the plastic. The words had been printed by hand in calligraphy. A reddish cast hung along the edge of each word, like the ink had bled.

He pulled the translation Juliet had done out of the bag and read it.

He thought he’d seen everything. He’d dealt with drug addicts, drunks, prostitutes, pimps, peeping toms, perverts and murderers. He’d arrested them all.

The translation of the words sent an uneasy chill up the back of his neck.

Miranda and Juliet waited for his reaction.

“It’s a threat wrapped up in a voodoo spell.”

“Not voodoo,” Juliet corrected him. “It’s written according to Wiccan custom. Wicca demands you harm none. And one more thing I believe this is something more. I believe the ink may be blood.”

C
aleb tightened the
screws on the new doorknob he’d installed on Miranda’s front door. Once he did the deadbolt, the house would be more secure. Since he already had her car keys with her house keys on it, he’d gone ahead and installed the locks both front and back.

Would she be pleased with this, or upset he’d taken the initiative without asking? He never knew these days. She swung between pushing him away and looking at him as though she wanted… How was he to know what women’s looks meant? He couldn’t seem to stop loving her, and hoping she’d finally let him in…

He jerked out the rag he’d stuffed in his back pocket and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. The breeze was like a hot breath, and clung, sticky with humidity. The hypersensitive feeling of being watched slithered down the back of his neck for the third time in the last few minutes. The hair rose on his forearms. His heart rate skyrocketed.

He picked up the drill to use as a weapon and braced for an attack. How much good would the drill be against a supernatural shadow creature?

After a moment’s pause, when nothing moved, he set the bit to cut away the dead bolt and leaned into the job. He had to believe whoever had planted those fucking slips of paper on Miranda and Juliet hadn’t had access to the house; otherwise everything he was doing wouldn’t provide a damn bit of protection.

Ten minutes later he finished changing out the lock and bent to gather his tools.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and swung to meet it. In the shaded eave of the porch, a darker shape scurried along the vinyl siding to the ceiling. Was it only the light reflected from the windshield of a passing car or something more?

The longer he looked at the shape straight on, the more it seemed to fade. He looked just to the right of it, and it came into stark relief. It looked like a huge spider, suspended close to the door, ready to drop on the unwary.

It had been observing him for some time. He’d felt it. Was it there to watch, or would it attack him? He moved forward with the drill, and it scrambled along the ceiling to the edge of the eaves. Caleb lunged again, and it slipped around the back side of the gutter.

Come on, fucker!

Why wouldn’t it take him on?

Because it hadn’t come for him.

Shit. Locks or no locks, Miranda and Juliet couldn’t come back here.

They were in deeper trouble now. The thing’s legs crept around the edge of the eave and came back into view, its shape coming in and out of focus.

Something major had changed. This one could appear in daylight.

*     *     *

Miranda stepped around
Vivian to reach her desk. The woman had no sense of personal space. She often stood too close when they spoke. “I’ve decided to leave a little early, Vivian.”

“You probably shouldn’t have come in at all today, Ms. Templeton. That bruise on your arm looks wicked painful.”

Miranda settled into her desk chair and suppressed the need to rub her arm. It ached from the top of her shoulder to her elbow, like someone had drilled right through the bone. At the hospital she’d been surprised to find it wasn’t broken.

She’d studied the bruise in the bathroom mirror this morning and gotten nauseous just looking at it. Something evil had stabbed her. And she had no idea what it was or where it had come from. Since Abbott and Porter had probably died of a similar attack, she’d been lucky. The shield she threw up had deflected the blow just enough to keep it from going through her body.

“It has started to ache a little more since this morning. I’ve made up a schedule for the rest of the day, and I was hoping you could pass it on to Ms. Carlyle when she comes in. I’ve already called security, and they’ll be here to search the upstairs restrooms for stragglers in my absence. I’ve decided that from now on they need to be the ones to do that instead of one of us, for safety’s sake.”