Tuesday, July 27. 12:57 p.m. Seatoun, Wellington, New Zealand.

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Ana had a wicked case of the heebie-jeebies.

Aside from the obvious element of being in someone’s house without permission, a combination of things disturbed her.

“I doubt he brings friends here to entertain,” she said, walking through the kitchen archway into the living room with the solo La-Z-Boy. “Does he consider this place home or just a place to stay?”

Daniel followed her into the hallway and waited silently as she looked in the bathroom and the room with gym equipment.

“He’s fastidiously clean for a man, that’s for sure,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “There’s nothing personal anywhere. No photos, books, or usual guy clutter.”

“Guy clutter? Hey, guys don’t have clutter.”

“Stuff, junk—whatever,” she argued. “Think about your home. I bet you’ve got family photos or art on your walls?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Junk mail on the counter? Sports gear, dirty washing, electronic gadgets, toolboxes, and half-finished projects left lying around?”

“Also yeah. I get it.”

“Wouldn’t a drama teacher have books on Shakespeare, heaps of theater posters and, I don’t know, at least this year’s school production of Les Misérables?”

She wasn’t an expert on bachelors in their twenties by any means, but the ones she did know—her neighbors Jimmy and Adam were a case in point—exhibited aspects of their personality by the way they chose to decorate their homes.

The owner of this home had all the personality of a beige wall.

His bedroom revealed little more. A black comforter covered the bed, flanked by matching black nightstands and a solitary reading lamp. One chest of drawers sat in the corner, and a sliding mirrored door, half open, revealed closet space with a row of neatly pressed white shirts, black dress pants, and only a few more casual-looking items.

“I bet you five bucks he irons his jeans, too,” she said wrinkling her nose at the stale, rank smell in the room.

Ana headed toward a corner desk while Daniel slid open a nightstand drawer. God knew the thought of what the man kept beside his bed was enough to turn her stomach.

The top of the desk was clear apart from a closed laptop. She pried the lid open, tapped the on button, and the computer whirred to life.

“It’s probably password protected,” Daniel said behind her.

“Probably.” While the laptop was booting up she flicked through the papers in an in-tray. Electric bill, cell phone account bill, council rates, a printed sheet of recycling pickup days, a paper flyer advertising a local teenager who’d mow lawns. Ordinary, everyday stuff. Somehow the simple task of running a household, the normality of it, gave her another dose of the heebie-jeebies.

She glanced up at the laptop screen, the curser flicking, waiting for a password. Worth a crack. Grimacing, she slid open the desk’s top drawer. A bank-logoed checkbook sat on top of a hard-covered ledger. She shifted the checkbook aside and picked up the ledger, running her thumb over the leather cover. Expensive.

She flipped it open to a random page in the middle. Cramped but painfully neat handwriting filled the page. There were no gaps or paragraph breaks, just an avalanche of words dumped line by line until there wasn’t any space left on the page. She narrowed her gaze and shifted the book closer then farther away from her face since she didn’t have her reading glasses with her. The tiny script blurred, and with a frustrated huff and a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure Daniel wasn’t watching her Mr. Magoo impression, she held the journal aloft and brought it in close until the letters clarified into words. Rage-filled words.

Violent words.

Words carved so harshly on the paper that many times the author’s pen had stabbed ink-bloody holes in the page.

Ana’s gaze zeroed in on her father’s name and the journal fell from her fingers, landing facedown on the desk.

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They were together today. Sitting in his pretty garden, the bitch lawyer sipping a glass of wine. He paid for her to go to law school so she could defend perverts like himself. Men who rape innocents and then pay a bitch lawyer like her to get them off. Fucking spoiled bitch.

Ana’s throat locked down and Daniel squeezed her shoulder. She skimmed down the page, her name snagging her attention.

My happy place, my utopia is to make that toxic old bastard suffer. Tie him up, force him to watch while I make Ana squeal and scream and weep. Then I’d strip her and fuck her without mercy like he did to my mother. Make him beg for her pathetic life then slice away every precious part of her and shove it down his lying throat. Payback.

She slapped the book shut.

Her eyes felt as if they were bulging out of her skull as blood pumped hotly behind her wide-open lids. This faceless man, this total stranger hated her and her father with a sick passion. Cold tendrils of nausea squirmed through her belly.

“It’s him,” she whispered. “Oh God.”

This time the book slipped from her numb fingers to the floor. Its pages splayed open and a solitary sheet of yellowed paper fluttered out. Robotically she bent down and picked up the book and the sheet of paper. The signature at the bottom caught her attention. She skimmed the page, bile rising in her throat as she read the scrawled writing.

“What is it?”

She couldn’t answer and instead allowed Daniel to take the page out of her hands. He read, his expression shifting from concern to cold fury as he, too, read the words.

“Even in her suicide note Patricia Burbank was filling her son’s head with hatred toward us.” Ana couldn’t suppress a shudder as she looked up into Daniel’s eyes. “He blames my dad for everything.” Bitterness crept into her voice. “That woman’s put a target on my family again, this time aiming her son at us, rather than the law.”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

Her heart lurched at the tenderness in his voice. “It’s not me I’m worried about. I think he’s taken advantage of this earthquake to go after Dad. And since he conveniently teaches at the same goddamned school as my son, I think Theo’s in his crosshairs, too.”

“We’ll take this journal back to the sergeant. He’ll—”

“He’ll what?” she interrupted. “Assemble a task force in the midst of a national disaster on the basis that this man has written some insanely nasty stuff on paper?” She gentled her voice. “The legalities of how I even obtained Harrison’s journal aside, the red tape involved before anyone gets the ball rolling isn’t going to help Theo and Dad.”

His gaze speared her to the spot with intensity. “I can go to his house, see if they’re there. If that son of a bitch has them, I’ll deal with it. With him.”

“You can’t go after them alone. It’s my son we’re talking about.” Her voice cracked like cheap porcelain. “Harrison fantasizes about killing me in front of my father, so there’s hope that if he’s got Theo and Dad, they’re still okay. He’s waiting for me to arrive at Dad’s but if he sees you creeping around, he could kill them both.”

Daniel paced, anger crackling off him like static electricity. He whipped around eyes glittering like frosted sapphires. “So what, you plan to hand yourself over to him tied up in a big red bow?”

“No.” In frustration, she strode over to him and grabbed his forearm. Iron would have felt warmer and more pliable. “You said yourself we don’t know what we’re up against yet. If Harrison is holed up at Dad’s house then the only advantage we have is that there’s two of us and one of him—and he doesn’t know about you.”

“I won’t lose you, Ana. I, ah…damn.” His jaw bunched and he raked his hair off his forehead, sending her a look that was part frustration and part something more. Something suspiciously like love.

Don’t say it, she thought, pressing her fingertips to his lips. Don’t say it out loud and make it real, make me have to deal with it and say it, too.

On tiptoe, she wrapped a hand around his neck and pulled his head down to her level, touching her lips to his.

“You’re trying to distract me again.” His voice was husky as he cupped her chin in one hand and kept her from pulling away. “I’ll allow it for now, as the things we need to say to each other shouldn’t be said in this house.”

That she agreed on. “We’ll go to Dad’s together, then?” she asked.

“On the condition that you don’t go inside.”

She yanked away from him. “What?”

“You’re the bait, not the prize. If he wants you, he’ll be watching. So you approach the front of your dad’s house slowly, make it look like you’re injured, while I enter the house from the back and take him down. You don’t get within hands’ reach of him.”

“But—”

“No buts. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal I’m prepared to make.”

She huffed and fumed, trying to think of a reply that wouldn’t sound like a kid pitching a hissy fit.

“Please don’t kid yourself thinking you can do this alone. Let me do this,” he said gruffly. “Ana, let me help you.”

“I thought you didn’t want another damsel in distress in your life.”

“I want you in my life, Ana Grace.” He swept a soft kiss across her lips. “And, honey? You ain’t no damsel.”

She muttered an un-damsel-like suggestion, picked up the journal, and stalked from the room.