Dark Obsession Read Free Page A

must have dozed here on the couch for a little while. I thought I was dreaming at first. Then I opened my eyes and realized I was awake and the voices were coming from below. The window was open.”
    She tilted her head toward the French doors that flanked one side of the fireplace. Her black hair, pulled smoothly back and knotted, rippled with iridescence in the light. Her skin was as pale and soft as moonlight, her features delicate, almost fragile.
    But her eyes…her eyes were the contradiction. In their violet blue depths, he glimpsed the soul of a woman who could write novels so terrifying that they sent shivers along
his
spine.
    She might be in shock now, but Slade knew she wouldn’t accept a simple explanation for her sister’s murder and then allow herself to go quietly away.Instinctively he could tell that she would want it all. Every last detail. Her guilt would demand it. He just hoped to God she’d be able to live with the facts when she learned them.
If
she learned them. He would do his damnedest to see that she didn’t. That was his job.
    Abruptly he got up and walked over to the window. He knelt and examined the latch. “Did you leave the door open?”
    “No. It must have been that way when I came in. The latch on that door sometimes sticks. You think it’s fastened, but it’s not. It’s always been that way.”
    Slade glanced up. “You’ve been here before then?”
    Something flickered in her eyes and then disappeared, but Slade thought again of the horrifying stories she so aptly created. “I lived here as a child,” she explained quietly. “My sister and I own this apartment. We grew up here. Megan probably didn’t get the lock fixed because…she wanted to prove she wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.”
    “Lots of things in the dark to be afraid of,” Slade murmured. He stepped out onto the balcony and looked down at the yard. The body had already been placed in a bag, but there were still several people milling around in the yard. One of the officers laughed. The sound carried easily to the balcony. Slade glanced back inside, glad suddenly that he’d persuaded Erin to leave the scene below.
    “So you heard voices,” he said, walking back into the apartment and closing the door to block the sounds from the yard. “Did you recognize them?”
    Erin looked up at him. “I thought I heard Megan’s voice. I thought I heard her…laughing.”
    A chill seeped through Slade’s skin, accompanied by a cold, dark suspicion. “Did you recognize anyone else?”
    Erin shook her head, wrapping his leather coat more tightly around her shoulders. “I think I heard a man’s voice, but I’m not sure. It was more like a…like a whisper, and yet I could hear it all the way up here. When I looked out the window, all I could see were shadows. I called to Megan, and I heard her laugh again. That’s when I went down to the yard to find her.”
    “What did you see when you got there?”
    She gazed at him reproachfully as if to say,
the same thing you saw, Detective.
But he hoped she hadn’t. He hoped to hell she hadn’t seen the same thing he had.
    Her bottom lip trembled with emotion and she bit it. Slade could almost taste the blood on her tongue. He took a few steps toward her. “What did you see, Erin?”
    The sound of her name seemed to startle her. She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. He moved to the couch and sat down beside her again. The warmth of her presence filled the emptiness insidehis soul, and for the first time in eight years, Slade felt a yearning deep inside him. She looked so vulnerable, so…innocent, but he suspected in reality she was neither. And somehow that notion excited him even more.
    Back off, he warned himself. She’s not for you. But at the moment, all he wanted to do was wrap his arms around her slender shoulders, draw her close to him and protect her from the evil that lurked in the darkness.
    The evil that was part of himself.
    Erin’s eyes