"I know her history," he bit out, obviously irritated. "Why?"

"I don't know. I just thought maybe it was something to recheck."

"What? Why?" he demanded, affronted.

"Due diligence."

"So now you're the doctor?"

She wasn't going there, wasn't going to be drawn into a no-win discussion, and Byron's pager erupted, anyway, and he stormed off. Fortunately, in the direction of Mrs. Shields's room. Good. He could deal with her.

She walked the other direction but felt him glance over his shoulder and give her an assessing look. The way he always did when she became a puzzle, something he couldn't begin to understand. His ex-wife just wasn't a square peg that fit snugly into the square hole he'd wanted to force her into.

Not that it mattered any longer.

Laura pushed aside all thoughts of him and, for now, her unexpected pregnancy. For now, she concentrated on doing her job and keeping Justice, the monster, at bay.

Thankfully, the rest of her shift was uneventful, but as she was driving to her house, her senses were on high alert. She hoped to hell they'd caught Justice already, but she suspected that hope was unlikely. If he were captured, she believed he would blast out a raging message to her, and since that last sibilant ssssisterrrr, he'd been quiet.

The house she and Byron had rented was a two-bedroom with white trim and gray shingles. One bathroom. Built in the fifties, renovated in the seventies, left to disintegrate over time. She and Byron had bought a condo in downtown Portland, and then the housing market had tumbled and they'd sold for a small loss. It had soured Byron on real estate; he hated losing anything. So, they'd chosen this rental for its proximity to the hospital and signed a six-month lease, which had turned into month-to-month as time had marched on. Once Byron had moved out, Laura was grateful for the cheap rent, even if it did come with a leaky bathroom faucet.

Pulling up to the back porch, she cut the engine and climbed from her Subaru. Byron drove a black Porsche, but Laura had preferred her dark green Outback. The Porsche was leased and Byron's affair; Laura owned the Outback in her own name. Another blessing.

Hurrying past the rhododendrons long past blooming, she heard the rumble of the Pacific Ocean and smelled the thick, damp scent of the sea as she walked along the cement walk to her porch. The neighbor's black cat slid under the porch as she climbed the two steps and unlocked the back door.

Once inside the small kitchen, she snapped on the lights, then dropped her purse and coat on the counter. Its chipped Formica had been scrubbed to a shine when Laura moved in, and she'd repainted all the interior cabinets, trim, and walls herself. Tired it might be, but it was bright and white.

And home.

Her sanctuary.

She'd thought that she might feel a bit of nostalgia, a loss, when Byron had moved out, but all she'd really experienced was relief, a quiet peace.

Until today.

When Justice had reached out to her and reminded her that she was different. Growing up at Siren Song had made her so. Now she was vulnerable . . . so very vulnerable. Sighing, she sat down in one of the two cafe chairs surrounding the small glass table, put her elbows against the surface, and buried her face in her hands.

The baby . . . a baby . . .

She should go to the lodge and talk to Aunt Catherine, tell her that Cassandra's prediction had come true. But Justice was out there. Loose. Waiting for someone to make a move. And she, being outside the gates, was the logical choice.

Oh, dear God.

She shuddered. She'd never told Byron about her past. She'd simply said she was estranged from her mother and she'd never known her father. She'd been in her second year of nursing at the hospital where he'd been a resident when they met, and he'd just become a full-fledged osteopath when they'd started dating. She'd been starry-eyed and too eager, and he'd been intrigued by her ability to understand, practically diagnose, underlying problems with his patients that had nothing to do with the broken bones he corrected. He called it her instinct, and they both let it be an understood, and basically untouched, thing between them. Now she knew it was what had set her apart from the other young nurses and medical staff that cast admiring glances in his direction. When he'd casually suggested marriage, she'd jumped at the chance. She'd ignored his selfish traits. She simply hadn't cared. She'd wanted the whole picture: the house with the picket fence, 2.5 children, a dog, and a husband. She'd suspected Byron wasn't as deep as she was. The fact that he hadn't been all that interested in her family had been one clue, but she'd thought it wouldn't matter if she was more in love than he.

On that, she'd been wrong.

So wrong.

He was not only shallow, but he was unfaithful. And uncaring. And unrepentant. He'd wanted her for his wife. He was intrigued with her "instinct," but he wasn't going to be monogamous for anyone. That was simply the way it was. She'd tried to accept the rules but been unable. She'd tried once to make believe they could work their way back together, and that was a complete failure, for which she now was pregnant.

With Byron's child. For so long she'd wanted a baby, hoped for a child, and now . . . oh, God, now she felt a fierce love for this baby but didn't kid herself that raising the child-Byron's child-alone would be easy.

She sat at the table a long time, finally got up and heated water in the microwave and, when the timer dinged, dipped a packet of decaf tea into the steaming cup. As the fragrant tea steeped, she turned on the television and caught breaking news.

Her heart nearly stopped.

The narrow face of Channel Seven's Pauline Kirby, her short, slick dark hair blowing a bit in the evening breeze, was reporting that Justice Turnbull, a known murderer, had escaped from Halo Valley Security Hospital. Two men had been critically injured. One was fighting for his life.

"Oh, dear God." Laura stared at the screen.

"A madman is loose," Pauline was saying, and Laura recognized the redwood and stone facade of the mental hospital in the background, filmed earlier this evening, and shivered to her toes.

Her tea forgotten, she watched the rest of the short report while her heart drummed in her chest and her worst fears were confirmed.

She wished suddenly, mightily, that there was someone out there who could find Justice Turnbull, dig him out from under whatever rock he chose to hide, expose him, and make sure he was locked away so deep that he could never hurt her or the new life growing inside her, a life she was already bonding with.

CHAPTER 3.

It had been a less than interesting day for Harrison Frost, but then they all were since he'd been fired, let go, canned, kicked in the ass, and ordered ten million miles away from the Portland Ledger and his old job. One day he was a respected investigative reporter; the next he was dog meat. All because he'd tweaked a few tails that didn't want to be tweaked. And he would do it again. His brother-in-law's death was a homicide no matter how many people wanted to shriek otherwise, and at some point he was going to prove that fact.

But tonight . . . tonight he was following another story, one with less drama but one that was a fascinating character study nonetheless. He was sitting at an outdoor cafe table, scrunched down in a half-lounging manner by design, staring across Broadway-Seaside, Oregon's main drag-toward a waffle cone stand as this surprisingly soft June day faded into night. His right arm was hanging loose, his fingers touching the fur of his sister's fuzzy mutt, Chico. He'd be lucky if the mean little bastard didn't turn around and bite him. The beast seemed to have an aversion to men of all kinds, but the dog sure as hell liked the girls, and that was exactly the reason Harrison had deigned to take him out. Harrison was on a story that involved teenagers, and he didn't want the young girls to think he was some creepy guy, so he kept Chico around to make him seem more approachable.

Now the dog growled low in its throat, so Harrison carefully removed his hand. No need to risk injury for the sake of his costuming. Chico had snapped at him enough times for him to respect the little bastard's space. Jesus. The only thing good about this assignment was it didn't require much in the way of self-realization and reflection. He could just move forward and forget-or at least put aside-the events that had led him here. It was a job. It didn't require anything from him but to be in the present.

Harrison glanced at his watch. It was 9:00 p.m. The girl Harrison currently had under surveillance was a sixteen-year-old thief with a bad attitude, a habit of chewing gum with her mouth open, and an enormous sense of entitlement. She and her girlfriends and a few guy friends appeared to have banded together and started stealing items from the more affluent families in their neighborhoods or schools. Not that they weren't affluent themselves. It was a lark, an exercise, a way to kill time. They were giddy and drunk with power and their own secrets. They were zigzagging toward something worse: home invasion. It would take only one time for a home owner to catch them in the act and the situation would turn from burglary to something far worse. The Seaside police weren't really aware of the crimes yet, as the victims had been unilaterally silent. Maybe they thought their own kids were involved? Maybe they even were. The bottom line was these kids weren't on anyone's radar but his, and Harrison had stumbled on the story rather than sought it out.

He'd moved from Portland to the coast, following his sister, Kirsten, and her daughter, Delilah, whom everyone called Didi, after Kirsten's husband, Manuel Rojas, was gunned down. Harrison hadn't meant to move with his sister. He'd intended to stay hot on the story and expose Manny's murderers for the brutal killers they were. But that hadn't happened; and when Kirsten, sad and broken, quietly asked if he'd come with her, he'd reluctantly done as she suggested; and now, over a year later, he'd just moved from her little bungalow into his own apartment, which was full of unopened boxes, a blow-up double mattress and sleeping bag, and a couple of camping chairs that could fold up into a sling for easy packing. Each sported a black, plastic cup-holder space in the chair's right arm. He'd set many a beer in that spot and nursed it on the front porch of his sister's place and now on the miniature side deck of his own.

His sister's husband, Manny, had been killed in a senseless shooting rampage when a kid opened fire on a group of people waiting to get into a nightclub before turning the gun on himself. Manny was in that line, trying to stop an argument that had arisen between two men over an anorexically slim blond woman who was smoking a cigarette nearby. Then the kid suddenly pulled out a .38 and sprayed several rounds into a madly fleeing crowd. Manny and one of the men were killed instantly, the other man and a woman and her boyfriend were critically injured and later died in the hospital, and the twenty-year-old shooter, who was underage and had never been allowed into the nightclub, turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. He was later found to be an unemployed high school dropout who was also a pharmacological repository. He was filled with enough meds to knock out an elephant. The anorexic blond woman was unhurt and had simply sauntered off. She was only known to exist because of the security cameras.

It was ruled a terrible tragedy. The blame rested entirely on the extremely high and screwed-up kid, who'd been dabbling in drugs since anyone could remember. But he'd never shown suicidal or murderous tendencies. He'd never shown aggression. When Harrison got a look at the security tape of the shooting, he saw the kid had pulled out the weapon and shot Manny point-blank. Then he seemed to wake up and realize what he'd done, and he just sprayed gunfire from left to right and took out whoever was in his arc of fire before he killed himself.

Manny's partner in the nightspot, Bill Koontz, obtained full ownership of the place, while Kirsten received a small insurance stipend.

Then Harrison got an anonymous tip from a cool female voice that suggested maybe the drugged-up shooter was somehow connected to the business partner.

The blond woman? Maybe. Or maybe someone else. But as soon as Harrison started writing pieces that contained more questions and conjecture about Bill Koontz than cold, hard facts, he was shown the door of the Ledger.

Which was just plain odd. A journalist was supposed to expose the truth, right? Even if it pointed to Koontz?

These thoughts passed across his mind in half an instant. Yeah, maybe he'd screwed up. His sense of impartiality certainly had taken a beating after Manny's death. He'd liked his brother-in-law, a darkly handsome man with flashing white teeth and a deep belly laugh who'd won his sister in less than thirty minutes upon one meeting over shared drinks. He had wanted to find the conspiracy behind Manny's death and had rashly chased imaginary leads and listened to gossip and conjecture and reported it as fact.

He'd really pissed off Koontz, who had friends in high places. For that he wasn't sorry.

And since that time he'd been forced from his job-well, technically he'd quit when they'd given him the "retract-or-you're-fired" speech-he had steered clear of conspiracies, major news stories, and anything that remotely resembled real investigative reporting, until this teenage thievery ring fell into his lap. Was the fact that he was interested in this story progress? Was he ready to give up the bullshit small stories he'd been delivering to the Seaside Breeze and make a run at the big time again? Maybe even try to dig into Manuel Rojas's death a little deeper again? On his own time, of course, and without involving the Breeze or anyone else? He had friends in high and low places himself, regardless of how he'd been treated in Portland. He sensed that if he were to ever step forward into the larger arena, he would be welcomed by some, reviled by others.

But did he really even give a damn? He hadn't for over a year. Yet . . . there was an itch beneath his skin he couldn't completely deny.

He shifted his weight and Chico growled again.

"Oh, shut up," Harrison muttered without heat, an order that Chico utterly ignored, as the growling continued on as if he'd been encouraged.

Night had fallen completely, and the shops along Broadway were decked out in bright white lights, giving it a carnival feel. Harrison glanced to his left, to the overhang of the coffee shop/gelato bar/gift shop, where his "quarry" was leaning forward and conversing rapidly with the girl behind the counter. Without looking, he could describe them both in detail: slim, dark-haired, practically nonexistent hips, expensive jeans or cutoffs for weather like today's, flip-flops, smirky smiles, eyes that exchanged glances with their friends as they made unspoken comments about the rest of the world. The one behind the counter had her hair scraped into a ponytail; the one leaning over the counter was wearing impossibly short cutoffs, so ragged they looked like they might disintegrate. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, and Harrison could see an earring that glimmered as she tossed her head. Diamonds? Fakes? Hers, or something she stole . . .

Harrison had followed the news and been aware of some unconnected robberies, though it was nothing that initially blipped on his radar. But then, one night while he and Chico were on a walk along the beach neither of them wanted to take, he overheard a girl-the one he was surveilling tonight-talking about hitting the Berman mansion with a group of friends. He'd noted the girl and her friends by habit and watched them get to their feet from the stone bench where they'd been sitting and amble toward Seaside's main drag, where bumper cars and stands that sold elephant ears stood cheek by jowl with trendy clothing stores, art galleries, and wine shops. The girl he was watching walked up to the counter of the hip gelato/coffee/gift shop and talked in whispers to a girl behind the counter whose eyes narrowed and mouth tightened into a cold, hard smile of relish.

Two days later the Bermans were robbed, the thieves taking money, jewelry, and expensive handbags.

And Harrison had thought, Huh.

The last couple of days he'd made a point of waiting outside the coffee and gelato store with Chico, passing time, his mind traveling of its own accord to Manny and the reasons behind his death. He'd gotten in trouble for suggesting his brother-in-law's death was more than a random killing, that Koontz, Manuel's business partner, one of those terminally charismatic salesmen who showed you a smile, a handshake, and not much else, was involved in some way. Both Koontz and Manny had known the boy with the gun as someone who'd tried to sneak into their high-end club with its lowbrow name, Boozehound, by showing fake ID more than once.

Something was just off with the whole scenario, but Harrison had been warned off, and so here he was, waiting and watching as life continued on.

And now he was experiencing a low-level excitement because this case intrigued him, the first since his brother-in-law's death. He had considered going to the police but had dismissed it. He hadn't really heard anything of substance and was playing a hunch. He'd been burned badly enough trying to ferret out the truth in Manny's death, hadn't he?

The girl with the glittery earring started to stroll by him.

He yanked on the leash a bit, and Chico, on cue, resisted, pulling away from him just as the girl tried to pass. The leash tangled in her legs and she started to fall.

"Hey!" she cried. "What the fu-?"

Harrison, on his feet in an instant, reached out and caught her arm, keeping her from actually hitting the sidewalk. "Sorry."

"Let go of me!" She managed to unwind the leash from her legs and yanked her arm away from him. "Jesus, can't you control your damned dog!"

"Usually, but he does have a mind of his own."

She rolled her eyes as if she was bored out of her mind with his explanation, then reached down and rubbed her bare leg where the leash had bit into her flesh. A thin red welt was developing.

"You okay?" he asked.

"No!" she said angrily, then straightened to narrow her eyes at him.

"Do you need a doctor?"

"What? No!" Then, some of her anger having dissipated, she added, "I'll live."

"Good." He turned his attention to the dog. "Chico! Here, boy!" Knowing she was still watching him, he picked up the dog and tucked him under his arm. Chico's eyes glittered in pure hatred, as if he realized that he'd been used as a pawn in some subtle game, but he didn't growl or snap.

"Cute dog," she admitted, giving him a long look.

"I guess." He ruffled the fur on the back of Chico's head.

"No, I mean it." She seemed to have lost most of her quick-fire fury. Which was good. This was the first time they'd made actual contact. "His name is Chico?"

"Yeah." Nodding, he said, "To tell you the truth, he doesn't like me much."

"Yeah, why?" she asked. "You beat him?"

"No. Not that he doesn't deserve it. Dogs, these days," he teased. "You feed them, love them, give 'em an education. Buy 'em a car when they turn sixteen, and whad'd'ya get? Grief."

She couldn't stop her sudden smile, even if she thought he was corny. Harrison half smiled back, aware he'd sunk the hook. He knew how to be engaging, although he rarely tried hard at it and basically used the skill only when he was working. The rest of the time he was, by his own admission, a loner. He didn't trust many people. Most, he'd found, lied.

And he couldn't stand liars.

"He's actually my sister's dog," Harrison said as he set Chico on the sidewalk again. "I take him for walks, but he really just tolerates me."

"Can I pet him?"

"Sure. Go ahead. He won't bite you . . . much."

She leaned in closer, hesitated, saw he was teasing, then reached forward. Harrison let Chico, who was busting at his leash and wagging his tail, get his furry head beneath her hand, sniffing and licking and wiggling all over. The little traitor.

At the same time Harrison leaned back in his chair, keeping a large distance between himself and the girl; he didn't want to scare her off. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a black T-shirt with a worn plaid cotton shirt as a kind of jacket, the tails hanging out. His dark hair was longer than usual, brushing his collar, and purposely a bit shaggy. He was clean-shaven, and he'd taken off his sunglasses as the sun started setting. He hoped he was unthreatening. He wanted information.

"I've seen you here," she said. "You don't have a job?"

"I got this dog-walking gig."

"How do you make money?" she asked, ignoring that. Uninvited, she perched on the chair opposite him. Suddenly, it seemed, she was curious. Or just didn't have a place to go.

"I don't make much," he admitted. "How about yourself ? You got a part-time job of some kind? You look like you're in high school."

"How old do you think I am?" She tilted her head and smiled, striking a sexy pose. Almost flirty. Her anger with him long forgotten.

"Eighteen?" He figured she was sixteen, seventeen maybe.

"Fifteen going on thirty," she answered smugly. "Or, so my stepdad says."

There were rules to interrogating teenagers, Harrison had learned. Unspoken rules. Rule #1 was pretend you want to talk only about yourself and watch what happened. "I used to work in Portland for a corporation," he said. "I was a cubicle guy. Go to work at eight. Off at five. Go home, have a drink. Watch the news. Eat dinner. Go to bed."

"God, I'd kill myself," she said.

"Got me a paycheck."

"Sounds mega-boring."

"It was." Okay, he'd never been a cubicle guy. He could lie when he was working, but not when it counted. When it counted, when it involved people he cared about, then the truth was all that mattered. There was no other option.

She tilted her head and looked at him from beneath deeply mascared lashes. "I go to school at West Coast High. You know it?"