Someone Is Watching Read Free Page B

complexes with spectacular views of both city and ocean. The floor-to-ceiling windows in my livingroom look out at the beautiful Miami River, while identical windows in my bedroom overlook the backs of other glass high-rises. Unfortunately, many of the apartments sit empty, Florida real estate having been hit especially hard in the recent economic downturn. Despite this, another tall building is going up just across the street. Cranes are everywhere. The new national bird, I can hear my mother laugh. Surely we have enough tall glass buildings, I think. Still, who am I to protest? People in glass houses, after all.…
    I moved in last year. My father bought the apartment for me, even as he insisted he would be happy if I lived at home forever. But he agreed that it was probably time for me to be on my own. It had been two years since my mother’s death. I was working. I had a boyfriend. I had my whole life ahead of me.
    Of course, that was then.
    This is now.
    Now I have nothing. My job is on hold; my boyfriend is gone; my father died of a sudden heart attack four months ago, leaving me an orphan. At least I think it’s been four months since my father died. Like I said, I’ve lost track of time. That can happen when you stay in your apartment all day, when you jump every time the phone rings and leave your bed only to shower and go to the toilet, when your sole visitors are the police and the one sibling who isn’t suing you over your father’s estate.
    Thank goodness for my brother, Heath, even if he’s not a whole lot of help. He collapsed at the hospital when he first saw me after the attack, actually fainting dead away and almost hitting his head on the side of the gurney. It was almost funny. The doctors and nurses rushed to his side, and I was temporarily forgotten. “He’s so handsome,” I heard one of the nurses whisper. I can’t blame her for being temporarily distracted by Heath’s good looks. My brother, older than me by a scant eleven months, is by far the most beautiful of my father’s children, his dark hair always falling into eyes that are an unnaturally deep shade of green, the eyelashes that frame them obscenely long and girlish. Women are always falling in love with Heath. Men, too. And Heath has always had difficulty saying no. To anyone. To anything.
    At the hospital, they examined me thoroughly, then pronounced me lucky. An odd choice of words, and probably my face registered this, because they quickly qualified: By “lucky,” they meant my attacker had used a condom, so he left no semen inside me. As a result, I didn’t have to go on any of those awful anti-AIDS drugs or take the morning-after pill to prevent unwanted pregnancy. He spared me that. Such a considerate rapist. The downside is that he left not a hint of himself behind. There is no DNA to run through sophisticated CSI computers. Unless I can give the police something more to go on, unless I can remember something,
anything
 …
    “Think,” I recall the uniformed police officer gently prompting the night of my attack. “Can you remember anything about the man, anything at all?”
    I shook my head, felt my brain rattle. It hurt, but trying to talk hurt even more.
    “Can we go over everything just one more time, Miss Carpenter?” another voice asked, this one female. “Sometimes the more we go over something, the more we’re able to remember. Something we don’t even realize might be significant.…”
    Sure, I remember thinking. Significant. Whatever.
    “Your name is Bailey Carpenter, and you live at 1228 Northeast First Avenue. Is that correct?”
    “Yes, that’s right.”
    “That’s downtown. You were found in North Miami.”
    “Yes. As I told you, I was staking out an apartment there. I’m an investigator with Holden, Cunningham, and Kravitz.”
    “That’s a law firm?”
    “Yes. I was looking for a man named Roland Peterson who skipped town about a year ago. We represent his ex-wife, and we’d gotten wind