Obsession & Eyewitness: Obsession / Eyewitness

“Sounds like a good idea.” He walked her to the front door, and she gave him a tremulous smile and slipped inside.

He strolled to the end of her walkway and shoved his hands in his pockets as he stared at the spot where Amanda had been killed. He knew that homeless guy wasn’t responsible for the murder. When would the police realize it? When the killer cut down another member of Michelle’s graduating class?

He turned and surveyed Michelle’s tidy beach house through half-closed lids. Michelle was not going to be the next victim. And he’d make damned sure of it.

He had no intention of running away…this time.

Several hours later, Michelle stretched and dropped her red pen on the coffee table where she’d been grading the algebra quizzes. She’d planned on getting them done early, having a light dinner and then turning in, but the hands on her watch were creeping toward midnight.

She hadn’t been able to focus all night. Or rather she hadn’t been able to focus on algebra all night. Her thoughts had drifted down the street toward Colin Roarke. No wonder he’d seemed sad that first night she’d seen him. He’d left his brother behind. Had escaped while his brother faced an uncertain future—maybe death.

She’d wanted to assuage his guilt, but she hadn’t been very successful. It was easy to tell other people to shrug off their guilt. Outsiders had a more logical, more clinical approach to someone else’s situation. After what had happened to Amanda, Michelle found it easy to understand Colin’s feelings.

Would she always feel this way? Would she always wonder if there was something more she could’ve done for Amanda? Maybe she should’ve insisted that Amanda spend the night.

Michelle crossed the room to the window and lifted the side of the curtains. The weather outside mimicked the conditions of last night and she gave an involuntary shiver. The fog had rolled in thick and heavy, blanketing the street in its moist embrace.

Clutching her upper arms, Michelle balanced a shoulder against the wall. She’d already spotted one cop car on a drive-by. She’d be fine. Except now she couldn’t discern a cop car on the street even if it drove by with flashing lights. And the cop couldn’t see her.

Michelle let the curtain fall, tousled her hair and yawned. She stuffed the last of the quizzes into the folder for that class and glanced at her laptop. Should she enter the grades online tonight or wait until tomorrow?

She plopped the folders on top of the closed laptop and spun around. She’d wait until tomorrow when her eyelids didn’t have to be propped open with toothpicks.

She turned off the light in the living room and clicked on the lamp by her bed. She peeled off her clothes, tossed them in the basket in her closet and padded to the attached bathroom in her bra and undies.

Still unable to get Colin off her mind, she brushed her teeth and scrubbed her skin as if that could expunge the image of his face imprinted on her brain. She didn’t need to renew her schoolgirl crush on Colin Roarke. He’d be moving on soon enough.

She wandered back into the bedroom, massaging night cream into her face. She slipped out of her bra and tugged a long T-shirt over her head that had Math Teachers Do It With Pi emblazoned across the front—a silly gift from Amanda. Kicking off her flip-flops, she reached for the lamp.

She froze.

She’d heard a scratching sound on the window like a twig scraping the glass. Only she didn’t have any trees outside her bedroom window.

She held her breath. She squinted at the filmy white curtains. It could just be grains of sand whipped up from the sand dunes.

With her heart pounding, she sidled along the wall toward the window. Crouching down, she inched the curtain to the side. A wave of fear rushed through every cell of her body as she watched a hand scrabble at her window.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MICHELLE SCREAMED AND tumbled to the floor. Her fingers had curled around the curtains, and they ripped as she brought them down with her.

Still clutching a piece of white linen in her fist, she scrambled toward the bedroom door on her hands and knees. She glanced over her shoulder at the gaping rip in the curtains framing a smooth expanse of glass. No face. No hand.

Had she imagined it, that hand clawing at the windowpane?

Someone yelled and pounded on her front door. Michelle let out another yelp. She leaped to her feet and dashed for her cell phone, charging on the kitchen counter.

“Michelle!” Another bang on the door. “Michelle! It’s Colin.”

The phone slipped through her grasp as relief surged through her body. She peeked through the peephole and sagged against the door. With shaky fingers she turned the dead bolt and swung open the door.

Colin charged over the threshold and Michelle didn’t know if he’d swept her into his arms or if she’d fallen there, but here she was tucked against his solid chest.

“I heard you scream, what happened? Are you okay?”

He’d heard her scream from down the block?

She took a ragged breath that scorched her lungs. Maybe her scream had carried all the way to his house. “I—I saw something at the window.”

“What window? Not the front?”

“My bedroom window.”

His arms tightened around her. “A face?”

“A hand.” A tremble rolled through her, and his embrace got tighter.

“You saw a hand at your bedroom window? Trying to open the window? Trying to break it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe pressed against the pane, scratching at the glass.”

He kicked the door shut behind him and advanced into the room with her still clinging to his neck. “Show me.”

She untwined her arms and stepped back. She’d never been the clingy type before, but his strong arms had offered an oasis she couldn’t resist.

Time to buck up and be a math teacher.

She pointed to her abbreviated hallway. “My bedroom’s back here.”

He followed her into the room, and she tugged on the hem of her T-shirt, for the first time realizing she was dressed for bed…or underdressed. Then she remembered the wording on the front of her T-shirt, and she crossed her arms over her chest.

“Whoa! What happened to the curtains?”

“I did that.” She gestured toward the piece of curtain she’d abandoned near the bedroom door. “I had it in my hand when I stumbled backward.”

Colin prowled toward the window and yanked back the bedraggled curtains.

Michelle jumped.

He raised a brow. “Okay, what did you see?”

“I was just about to turn off the lamp on my nightstand, and I heard a scratching sound at the window.”

“Trees or bushes out there?”

“No. Sand dunes.”

“So you went to the window to check it out?”

“Well, I sort of peered out, and that’s when I saw the hand.”

“And the person attached to this hand wasn’t trying to open the window or break it?”

“Not that I could see. It was weird. It was like a disembodied hand. I didn’t see anything else.”

“The guy could’ve been crouched below the window, reaching up.”

Michelle sucked in her lower lip. “Or maybe there was no hand or no body attached to the hand. Maybe I imagined it.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t know. After I screamed and headed for the door, I looked and there was nothing there.”

“He heard you and took off. Believe me, that was some scream.”

“How did you hear me? How did you get here?”

A red flush crept across his face. “I…uh…was outside your house. Your scream carried outside the house, or at least I thought I heard something. And when I looked at your house, I could see the lights still on.”

He’d been outside her house? “Why… What…?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I went out to chuck rocks at the water. Since I hadn’t seen a patrol car since I’d been outside, I decided to cruise past your house myself.”

“I’m glad you did. The hand freaked me out.”

“So now you did see a hand.”

Shaking her head, she shoved her hair behind one ear. “I don’t know, Colin.”

“Do you want to call the police?”

“I was on my way to do just that when you started pounding on my door. Do you think it’s worth it now? If there was someone outside my window, he’s long gone.”

He shrugged. “They can dust for prints.”

Her gaze swept Colin’s reassuringly large frame. He offered the only protection she needed.

“Do you think a murderer is going to leave his fingerprints on windowpanes?”

“Nope, but an even better argument against calling the local police is that I’d like to check the area around your window myself tomorrow morning. And I’d like to do it before some officer of the law tramps around out there.”

“That settles it then. I’d rather have you looking out there than the cops who are already happy with their suspect.”

Colin rubbed the gauzy material of the curtains between his fingers. “You need thicker curtains at your window.”

“There’s nothing on the other side except the dunes, and I have a fence separating my yard from the dunes.”

“Don’t the teenagers still hang out in the sand dunes?”

“Once in a while, but they don’t venture into my yard.”

“Maybe they did tonight.” He drummed his fingers against the window. “Do you have a sheet or something you can hang over this window?”

Michelle gave him a sheet from the linen closet and he draped it over the curtain rod, covering the window and the torn curtains.

“Thanks, Colin. I’m glad you were…taking a walk.”

“Me, too, but I hope that’s not your way of kicking me out of your house.”

“It must be past 1:00 a.m.”

“Must be. But if you think I’m leaving you here alone with disembodied hands at the window and see-through curtains, you’re crazy.”

A warm rush of…something sweet coursed through her veins. “I’m a mathematician. I’m too logical to be crazy.”

“Except maybe crazy about pi.”

She glanced down at her sleep shirt, her cheeks warming. “Oh, this silly thing.”

“I like it.” His blue eyes glowed with an inner fire that singed the ends of her lashes. “I like it a lot.”

She giggled. No, she laughed, because Michelle Girard never giggled. Then she ducked her head in the linen closet again. “I’ll get you a blanket and pillow for the couch. Unless you’d rather have a sleeping bag for the floor.”

“I’d rather— The couch will be fine.”

She held out the blanket and pillow for him, and he took them from her, grazing her arm with his hand. She held herself erect, as an overwhelming desire to throw herself against his chest again surged through her body.

He dumped the blanket onto the couch. “Leave your door open just in case. And if you see or hear anything, don’t hesitate to let loose with one of those screams.”

“Okay, I can do that.” She added a chipper note to her voice to defuse the double entendre. Or was she the only one thinking about a different kind of scream?

Michelle left her door halfway open and crawled into bed, her gaze darting to the makeshift curtain across the window. Had she imagined the hand?

She pulled the pillow to her chest and buried her face into its softness. Whether the hand was real or not, it had brought Colin to her doorstep. And he brought safety and security.

Or maybe he brought more danger than she could handle.

* * *

COLIN WIGGLED HIS toes against the chill seeping into his feet. His nostrils twitched at the smell of rich coffee wafting through the air. Heaven.

He shifted on the uncomfortable couch and peeled open one eye. Michelle buzzed around the kitchen, clinking dishes and dipping in and out of the refrigerator. Pure heaven.

He’d had an uneasy feeling last night ever since he’d left Michelle at her front door after their late lunch. The cops were complacent. That was a bad state of mind—especially for a cop.

He’d noticed the patrol car of one of Coral Cove’s finest cruising down the street once or twice, but Michelle needed more than that. He couldn’t sleep, anyway, and tossing rocks into the inky ocean seemed like a logical alternative. Once outside, his feet beat an automatic path to Michelle’s house.

He’d been on high alert, his ears attuned to the slightest sound. He hadn’t even been sure the noise he’d heard had been a scream or that it had come from Michelle’s house. But it was all the signal he’d needed.

“Did I wake you?”

He blinked and the vision in the kitchen came into focus. “The smell of that coffee woke me up. I know you don’t drink the stuff. You didn’t have to go through any trouble for me.”

“My dad was a coffee drinker, and I still have the coffeemaker—no trouble at all. Besides, it’s the least I can do for a midnight rescue. Black, right?”

She poured a cup of the steaming brew and carried it to him along with a sliced bagel on a plate. She’d already showered and changed from her sexy nightshirt with the sexy slogan into a pair of cargo shorts, a T-shirt and a light sweatshirt to ward off the nip in the morning air.

“Do you want some cream cheese with your bagel?”

“Sure.” He swung his legs over the side of the couch, clutching the blanket in his lap. He’d shed his jeans last night and hadn’t expected breakfast in bed this morning. Not that he minded.

She placed the coffee cup and bagel on the coffee table and retreated to the kitchen for the cream cheese. As she approached him, her gaze dropped to his bare chest. Her cheeks blanched and she averted her eyes.

“Here you go.” She settled the tub of cream cheese with a knife crossed over the top next to the plate.

Before she could draw away, he encircled her wrist with two fingers. “A lovely parting gift from my captors.”

She dropped her lashes. “What’d they do?”

He ran a finger along one of the scars crisscrossing his chest. “You don’t want to know.”

“I’m sorry, even though that’s pretty inadequate.”

“It’s adequate.” He released her and peeled the lid from the cream cheese container. He spread a thick layer on a toasted bagel half. “Are you joining me or did you already eat?”

“I already had something.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Are we going outside when you finish?”

“Yeah. Have you looked out there yet?”

“I looked out the window and didn’t see a thing. Just sand.”

Several minutes later, Colin finished off his bagel and took a last gulp of coffee. While Michelle carried the dishes back to the kitchen, he let the blanket slip to the floor and snagged his jeans from the back of the couch.

She walked back into the room as he was yanking his pants over his thighs. Pink suffused her cheeks, and he couldn’t help grinning as he zipped his fly. Despite the veneer of sophistication she wore, Michelle wasn’t much different from that bashful high school girl with the endless legs and silver in her mouth.

“Are you coming with me?”

“Of course.”

He shrugged into his sweatshirt and shoved his weapon in the pocket. In response to her raised eyebrows, he said, “In case the hand makes an appearance.”

She led him through a side door in the kitchen and he stepped off the concrete porch behind her. The back of her house abutted the sand dunes, just like his. The houses across the street from theirs, like Columbella House, had the ocean tumbling away from their backyards. They just had mountains of sand.

Her backyard was accessible from the front with not even a fence between them. “Anyone off the street can get into your backyard.”

“Yeah, well, I never had to worry about that before.”

They turned the corner of her small beach cottage where two windows faced the sand dunes. She pointed to first one and then the other. “Those are both bedrooms. The first one is mine.”

Colin eyed the bottoms of the windows, which reached about waist-high. Anyone could climb through those windows. Before he clumped through the sand to the window, he asked, “I suppose you wouldn’t notice any footprints out of the ordinary back here, would you?”

Michelle looked down at the bumps and indentations in the sand and shook her head. “You can’t really make out footprints in dry sand, can you?”

“Not really.” He shuffled through the sand and crouched beside her window. “If you saw a disembodied hand, it’s because the hand’s owner was down here. You couldn’t see the rest of his body or his face because he was hiding below the window and reaching up with his hand.”

“Why would he do that if he were trying to break in or even peer through the window like a Peeping Tom?” She hugged herself and hunched her shoulders.

“Maybe he thought he could cut the glass first before reaching in to unlock the slider.”

She shook her head and her light brown hair slipped over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure he wasn’t holding a glass-cutting tool. He was scratching or almost clawing at the window.”

Colin mumbled more to himself than Michelle. “Why would you scratch at a window?”

“Huh?”

He ignored her question and brushed his fingers on the front of his sweatshirt, the muscle in his jaw jumping. He smoothed the tips of his fingers across the glass in a grid pattern—up and down and left to right. Then he moved on to the next quarter of the window. He sucked in a breath.

“What is it?”

Lightly, he traced the pads of his fingers over the rough spot on the windowpane. With his nose almost touching the glass, he scraped at the patch with his fingernail.

He held up his finger, dug the residue from beneath his fingernail with his other nail and rubbed the sticky substance between his thumb and forefinger.

“Colin, what did you find? Looks like a grain of sand to me, which wouldn’t be all that unusual.”

She’d crouched down beside him, and he extended his finger beneath her nose. “It’s adhesive.”

“Adhesive? You mean like tape?”

“Yeah, or more likely one of those two-sided adhesive strips.”

Her eyes widened and he could see flecks of gold in her irises. “What does that mean? I’ve never taped anything to the outside of this window.”

“I didn’t figure you had, which means someone else did.”

“How old is that stuff? It could’ve been my dad.”

He rolled the adhesive between his fingers. “It’s still sticky. Old stuff wouldn’t be sticky anymore, or it would be covered with sand. This isn’t.”

“I don’t get it, Colin.” A note of panic had crept into her voice and he cursed himself for being the one to keep bringing bad news into her life.

“Help me search the ground.” He tapped the window to replace the adhesive and dropped to his hands and knees. Michelle liked to keep active, to be involved.

“Wh-what are we looking for?”

“Anything out of the ordinary. A button. A cigarette butt. A chewing gum wrapper.”

She skimmed her hands across the sand, sifting her fingers through the silvery grains. “A button?”

“A button?” Colin sat back on his heels.

Michelle held out her cupped hand to him. “Not a button like from someone’s shirt, but a black button that looks like it could’ve broken off some machinery or something.”

Colin’s heart jumped in his chest as he held out a surprisingly steady hand to receive Michelle’s discovery.

She turned her hand over, dumping the object into his waiting palm.

He wedged the black disc between two fingers and brought it close to his face. He ran the pad of his finger along the smooth side of the disc, but it wasn’t so smooth.

The same sticky substance he’d collected from the window was present on the disc. He closed his fist around the button and cursed, a black fury beating wings in his chest.

Michelle dug her fingers into the sand. “What is it?”

Colin drew in a steadying breath to keep from smashing his fist into the wall of Michelle’s house.

“It’s a camera.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

PINPRICKS OF SHOCK raced along Michelle’s flesh. And then she laughed. “A camera? That little thing?”

But Colin didn’t get the joke.

He opened his hand and the black device in the middle of his palm stared at her, like an evil eye.

Her smile collapsed. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“It’s a spy camera, but you don’t have to be James Bond to get one. Anyone can order one of these off the internet.”

“And what’s it doing on the ground outside my bedroom window?” She pressed her hand over her heart as if she could rein in its wild gallop.

Colin flipped the button over with his thumbnail. “It’s sticky on this side, just like the adhesive from your windowpane. Someone stuck this—” he held it up “—onto your window.”

Michelle tried to swallow, but her dry throat wouldn’t cooperate. “D-do you think that’s what he was trying to do last night? Place the camera?”

“Place it or retrieve it.”

“Once in place, why would he try to take it back?”

“The chips in these cameras are set to record for only so many hours.” He slipped the camera into the pocket of his sweatshirt. “Once the time is up, you have to retrieve them to download your recording.”

“Recording? Like a video camera?” The hair on the back of her neck stood at attention, and she had to grind her teeth to keep them from chattering.

“Yeah, it’s a video camera, Michelle.” They’d been squatting in the sand, and now Colin rose, hooking his hand beneath her arm.

Her knees quaked and she wedged her shoulder against the stucco wall of her house. Someone had been spying on her. Before she examined the why, she wanted to know the how. The how would make her feel more in control, make her take a detour from the land of feelings to the land of reason…and action.

“How does it work? How can something so small do so much work?”

The harsh lines around Colin’s mouth softened. “It’s those tiny computer chips. The device is remotely controlled. You can hook it up to your computer and download the video. This one looks like it needs a special attachment and maybe some special software.”

“That’s amazing.” And knowledge was power. She pushed off the wall and squared her shoulders.

“I’m sure you’ve heard about cases where these spy cameras were installed in women’s dressing rooms or bathrooms. The women don’t even notice them.”

“Do you know how to download the video?”

“If I had the right stuff on my PC, I could figure it out. But I have a better idea.”

“The police?” The wobblies came back in full force as Michelle thought about the cops on the Coral Cove P.D. watching video of her coming and going from her bedroom to her bathroom.

“Too slow. Too much bureaucracy.” He took her hand and pulled her away from the side of the house. “I have a buddy in the county sheriff’s department. Played football with him in high school. He does this sort of thing all the time.”

“How soon could he find out what’s on that thing?”

“I made him look really good on the football field. If I get the camera to him this morning, he might be able to get us a read by the end of the day.”

Michelle stumbled as she rounded the corner to her front yard and Colin caught her just as he’d done every time since he’d entered her life two days ago.

“Will your friend be able to tell anything about the person who planted the camera?”

“Before I realized what it was, I had my fingers all over the surfaces. Even if the perpetrator had left any prints, which I doubt he did, I pretty much destroyed them. If we can nail down the make and model, we could start tracing that way, but there are a lot of these things around.”

“Do you think it’s him, Colin? Do you think it was the killer who planted the camera and then returned to my house to retrieve it?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but it would be really interesting to find out if Amanda had one of these stuck to her window.”

“We’ll have to find out, won’t we?” She charged up the front steps and held open the door for him.