Secret Obsession (Carder Texas Connections #6)
Robin Perini
Chapter One
The sting of frozen rain pricked Lyssa Cafferty’s cheeks, another attack she couldn’t prevent. She hurried from the L station toward her small Chicago apartment. If only she could pull her hood over her head, duck down and avoid the piercing needles of ice on her face, but then she’d lose her peripheral vision.
She couldn’t afford to allow comfort to trump safety.
Not now. Not ever.
Instead, she tugged her thrift-store winter coat tighter around her body, the jacket too big but at least warm. She peered over one shoulder then the other, seeing only commuters huddled against the winter wind and racing down Roger’s Park streets. No one familiar.
She picked up her pace and pressed on through the blustery weather. Of course, she wouldn’t recognize the man out to kill her until she was already dead.
Two years. Two long, horrible years since the night she’d lost Jack, since she’d lost her love, her life and everything that had made the world wonderful.
She couldn’t have imagined things would get worse after Jack’s murder.
They had.
A brilliant, uncatchable psycho had made it his business to find her.
Archimedes.
Just his name made her heart stutter...with fear and fury. He’d stolen her life.
She paused two blocks from her apartment and, ignoring the cold, stilled. On high alert, her entire body tensed. She struggled to calm the rapid beat of her heart.
Some days she just prayed he’d find her and get it over with. Those were the days when the constant state of fear wore down her soul.
Most days, though, she longed to look him in the eye and kill him for what he’d done to Jack, and to her. For the precious moments she’d lost with the one thing she loved more than herself. The one secret she’d die to protect.
She refused to even let her mind go there. She couldn’t contemplate what might have been. Or what could be. Until Archimedes was brought to justice, this was her life. She had to focus on staying alive. At least for one more day.
Lyssa shifted, keeping her movements subtle, scanning each person, each darkened corner, searching for anything out of place, anyone following her. Her gaze flickered back and forth, furtive and cautious. He could be anyone, anywhere.
With each new stretch of building and street, her chest tightened in dreaded anticipation. She hurried past a couple of boarded-up storefronts and still, he wasn’t there.
For three hundred and fifty-three days he hadn’t been there.
One more day and he hadn’t found her.
She tugged her hood lower and raced through the main entrance to her building. She trudged up the stairs, acutely aware of each squeak. A baby cried in apartment 219. At the sound, Lyssa paused, her hand instinctively reaching for the brass doorknob. A wave of despair nearly propelled her to her knees. A shush and a coo, and the baby quieted.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the burning wells in the corners. She couldn’t think about the past, or her loss. She had to stay focused.
With careful placement of each step, she padded across the floor, knowing the location of each creak, a skill she worked to perfect every single day. She needed to move silently, invisibly.
Finally, she stopped in front of the small apartment the Justice Department had arranged for her. So-called Witness Security. She wasn’t the best witness. She’d only heard the whispers of a madman, but had never seen him. And she certainly wasn’t secure.
She was simply the sole survivor of a man who’d killed dozens.
The walnut door to her temporary home appeared exactly as she’d left it, down to the small slip of paper she’d wedged near the hinge. A trick she’d learned. Few would notice it, and as long as the paper didn’t move, Lyssa could be confident no one had opened the door.
Safe at last.
She slipped the key into the dead bolt. As she tried to turn it, the key resisted in the lock ever so slightly. At the slight deviation from normal, she hesitated, her instincts firing.
The cold. It could be the cold. The temperature had plummeted twenty degrees today.
It probably was the cold.
One hand slipped into her pocket to the phone she carried with her. She hesitated. She couldn’t call Gil again. She’d contacted her WitSec handler three times this month already. All false alarms.
The last time, after he’d rushed over to her place, she’d witnessed irritation in his eyes, though he’d tried to hide his reaction. He couldn’t understand. She’d been in Chicago almost a year. Too long. She knew in her gut time was running out.
She flipped open her bag with her free hand and gripped the butt of the black-market .45 in her purse. Gil may have read the file, but he didn’t comprehend the minute-by-minute fear that stalked her. Archimedes wasn’t a typical serial killer. He was smart. He was thorough, and for some reason he had Lyssa in his sights.
Hand tight on the weapon, trigger finger ready, she shoved open the door and stepped across the threshold of a place she could never call home.
The coppery scent of blood strangled her belly.
Gil Masters lay on the ground, dead, in a pool of blood.
Archimedes had found her.
She forced herself to look at Gil’s face. Someone had gouged out his eyes. Empty sockets stared unseeing at her, accusing. She didn’t want to look lower, but she had to. His shirt had been ripped open, a frame for Archimedes’s handiwork.