The Killing Edge by Heather Graham Page B

was just the sunset.
    He turned on his flashlight and his eyes went immediately to the west wall.
    People might have cleaned the house. They might have scrubbed the wall. But he was startled to see that the bloodstains had never been fully erased. The remnants were faint, but the words were still legible.
    Death to defilers!
    And then an image that vaguely resembled a hand.
    He closed his eyes. He could almost see the words as they had once been.
    Red.
    Bloodred.

FIVE

    M onday seemed awfully long.
    Chloe was accustomed to changing gears, as Victoria called it. She loved it when she was brought in to sketch for witnesses to or victims of a crime, because as much as it hurt to see someone in pain because of what they’d been through, she got a real sense of satisfaction from helping to see justice done. Art had been her first love, especially drawing. Finding the character in a face, the emotion in a captured movement. Stuckey had brought her in to help the police on a case she had no connection to about a year after the massacre. A witness had seen a suspect running down the street after a stabbing over a purse in downtown Miami. Listening to a description, closing her eyes, trying to make the face real in her mind, had been fascinating. She’d been called in several timesafter that when the police needed extra help, and she’d done such a good job that she’d even been asked to join the force. But she’d still been in college then, and in college, perhaps because of what had happened to her, she had fallen in love with psychology. Art therapy as an actual vocation had seemed the perfect fit, so she’d turned down the offer.
    But today had been long, filled with patients whose troubles really got to her. Mindy Sutton was trying to maintain a normal life with a decent husband and a darling two-year-old, but she had been abused by her stepfather from the age of six until she was sixteen. He had gone to jail, but her mother had never forgiven her, convinced that she had made it all up or, worse, seduced her stepfather. After Mindy, she had worked with her youngest patient of the day, fifteen-year-old Isabel Jacobi, who had been stabbed by a fellow student in the restroom at school. Farley Astin was a gentle thirty-year-old who had been freed a year ago after serving seven years in prison for a rape he hadn’t committed.
    The day had gone on in that vein, draining her.
    She left for home late, thanking Jim Evans, her assistant-slash-secretary-slash-sometimes-very-best-friend, for all he did to keep her patients happy and her schedule in such good shape, and wasn’t surprised to see that her uncle had beaten her home.
    She was just about to open the door to the carriage house when Leo stepped through the French doors from the main house to the pool area. “Chloe,” he called, and his tone was serious.
    She groaned inwardly. “Hey, Uncle Leo.”
    “I hear you’ve been doing some prowling around,” he said. “Want to join me for a minute?”
    “Of course,” she said, forcing herself to sound cheerful, then walked across the pool area and gave him a hug.
    “That’s not going to cut it,” he told her gruffly.
    She rolled her eyes. “Stuckey has been talking to you, I take it?”
    “He has.”
    “Leo,” she said firmly, following him into the family room at the rear of the house, “I don’t know what he’s worried about. I’m telling you the truth. The agency is legitimate, and I haven’t seen or heard anything to imply that someone working there is a maniac. And you did tell me to keep my eyes and ears open because of Colleen. So what’s the big deal now?”
    “I was a fool to suggest that you try to listen for information. I should have known that you’d go a step further and get involved yourself. I know you. And I should have realized you would run into danger if you thought it would help someone, because I remember how you looked that day when you saw Colleen Rodriguez’s parents at the