She shook her head, one foot still off the curb, braced on the street where she faced the gate. Her eyes slipped toward the crumpled strap of her abandoned laptop bag and the carry-on. No one in this neighborhood would take them. No one would likely even be awake.
She lowered her head for a moment, feeling her lips tingle as memories surfaced, playing across her mind’s eye and bringing with them a thought of John. She’d kissed him back. But did she regret it?
She didn’t know what she thought. John was a man in motion—a form of action in and of himself. And yet was that the life she wanted? Forever? Did she want to live in a way that required the level of danger John seemed to crave?
Did she even want to continue this job forever? Adele sighed. She didn’t like where her mind wandered so late at night.
Regardless, she’d made it too personal. Too personal with John, too personal with her father—not the relationships themselves, but the impact they had on the case. The impact, more importantly, the case had on the relationships. Her mother was dead. Ten years had passed. The killer was out there, likely retreating, hiding in the shadows, disappearing from the radar of any law enforcement agency.
A ghost in the wind.
She’d been left with dust at her fingertips. She couldn’t allow it to remain so personal. It would consume her alive.
With a reluctant, but strengthening nod, Adele focused on the gate once more. Glanced through the cracked window into the study, where light was still shining, and then, when Robert didn’t buzz the gate, she broke into a sprint, taking the three wild strides to cover the distance between the curb and the steel bars.
She flung herself at the gate and in three quick motions, kicked off the stone wall covered in ivy, snared the top of the metal barrier, and pulled herself up and over, vaulting the barricade and landing with a dull thump on the other side, facing Robert’s garden.
Adele brushed the dust off her hands and smiled to herself, moving rapidly toward the front of the mansion. She passed the fallen angel in the mud and paused for a moment, reaching down and plucking up the marble creation, setting it back up as it had been. She frowned at the mud and dirt streaking the sculpted features and, dropping low, she rubbed her sleeve in the grooves of the statue’s face, removing the grime and mud as best she could. Some of it fell away, but mostly it just streaked the statue.
She sighed and shrugged to herself. It was the best she could do; she’d just have to mention it to Robert so he could clean the statue properly.
She moved across the flagstones, through the garden and toward a row of hedges beneath the open window facing the study. She couldn’t spot the fire in the fireplace, but did note the overhead chandelier buzzing with electricity and illuminating the room beyond. Adele frowned, leaning toward the open window.
“Robert!” she called.
No answer.
“Robert!” She raised her voice, now feeling a prickle of fear claw its way up her spine. She checked her phone again. No texts, no calls.
The fear came like a flash flood, bringing with it all manner of horrible imaginings regarding her old mentor and friend. Had his sickness finally overtaken him? What if he was in the bath somewhere, gasping for breath, desperate for help?
Adele cursed and bounded up the steps to the front door. She reached out, slamming a hand against the brass knocker and jamming a finger into the buzzer. The two sounds broke rhythmically in the night. One moment, a faint humming buzz from within, the next a deep, bellowing knock from the door itself.
Again, no response, no answer—the door remained sealed.
“Damn it, Robert!” Adele said, her fear rising in her gut.
For a moment, she considered calling the emergency services. But then inwardly kicked herself. “That’s you, dummy,” she muttered to herself.
She tried the knocker one last time, but when it did nothing, she reached down and pulled on the door handle. Locked.
“Damn it,” she repeated, this time breaking into a jog, taking the stairs two at a time and rapidly approaching the hedge beneath the open window. Robert would understand, certainly. She’d once crept into the house, nearly five years ago, by climbing through a second-story window. He’d understood then—even laughed about it with her—and he’d understand now. Robert always did.
She flung herself over the windowsill, but then went still. One leg dangled inside the room, the other still wedged against the brick wall, pushed against the prickling branches and jutting branches of the bush itself.
“Hello,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the window.
Someone had drawn a heart on the window. Was that lipstick? She leaned in, staring at the small heart, seemingly sketched haphazardly against the glass.
No. Not lipstick.
Her stomach flipped and she went so cold she thought she might fall from her perch. Her eyes fixed unblinking on the small sketch of the red heart in the bottom frame of the open window.
Blood. Someone had drawn a heart in blood.
Her own heart pounded fiercely in her chest, and she lifted her eyes slowly, turning toward the illuminated study.
“Robert…” she murmured, softly, feeling a prickle along her arms and up her spine.
Her eyes fell on the red leather chair furthest from the window. The same chair she normally used when at Robert’s home. She stared at it, blinking.
“Robert,” she murmured, softly…
Her old mentor was sitting in the chair, eyes open, staring up at the ceiling. Adele swallowed. “Robert?” she said a bit more loudly. Slowly, trembling, she brought her second leg through the window, nearly slipping on a pile of toppled books. Greek classics, by the looks of them—Robert’s favorite.
She stared at where her old mentor reclined in the leather chair.
Except it was the wrong chair. He wouldn’t have chosen the one nearest the kitchen. A man of habit, was her old mentor.
She murmured his name again, eyes fixed on his form, stepping forward. No movement. No breath. His chest wasn’t rising or falling. She felt a flicker of sheer horror rising in her. Absolute despair flooded her stomach.
“Ro—Ro—” This time, the word didn’t manage to leave her lips. It died somewhere in her throat as she drew near and went still.
His chair was encircled with a small puddle of water… Well, not small, she realized as she drew within touch. Not a puddle of water either…
More blood, circling Robert’s chair like a crimson halo against the floorboards.
Blood from where?
She reached out with trembling fingers, feeling the horror of the moment slowly wash across her back, tingling along her spine and coming to her scalp in vibrant pulses. She gasped in shattered breaths, her fingers groping the fabric of his bathrobe. “I… I…” she murmured unable to say anything in its fullness.
She slowly opened Robert’s robe and realized now his mouth was twisted, frozen in an agonized scream, his eyes facing up at the ceiling, dead, lifeless.
The flap of his rope opened, falling aside and revealing her old mentor’s bare chest gouged with cuts and laced with swirling patterns of ruined flesh. Adele screamed then, shouting in equal parts shock and blistering agony.
She stumbled back, slipping on her old mentor’s blood and falling on her hands. She scrambled back as if to distance herself from the spectacle alone, but her eyes refused to budge. They remained glued to Robert’s tortured, disfigured form. She spotted one of his hands now, resting on the table next to him. Missing three of its fingers. She spotted where his lips, his cheeks, everything about her old mentor, had been torn about, ripped to shreds, cut and carved in swirling patterns of bloody flesh.