The Girl Next Door

He leapt to his feet.

“Mr. Lockwood?” A feminine voice called out. “Mr. Lockwood...i-is everything all right?”

No, things were far from all right. The broken door should have been a dead giveaway on that point.

“It’s Gabrielle Harper!” The voice called out. “We were supposed to meet...”

His back teeth clenched. Talk about extremely bad timing. He knew Gabrielle Harper, and the trouble that the woman was about to bring his way was just going to make the situation even more of a tangled mess.

Cooper holstered his weapon. He had to get out of that apartment. Before Gabrielle saw him and asked questions that he couldn’t answer for her.

He rose and stalked toward the bedroom window. His footsteps were silent. After all of his training, they should have been.

Gabrielle’s steps—and her high heels—tapped across the hardwood floor as she came inside the apartment.

Of course, Gabrielle wasn’t just going to wait outside. She was a reporter, no doubt on the scent of a story.

And she must have scented the blood.

She was following that scent, and if he didn’t move, fast, she’d follow it straight to him.

Cooper opened the window then glanced down below. Three floors up. But there were bricks on the side of the building, with crevices in between them. If he held on just right, he could spider-crawl his way down.

The floor in the hallway creaked as Gabrielle paused.

She should have called for help by now. At the first sign of that smashed door, Gabrielle should have dialed 911. But, with Gabrielle what she should do and what she actually did—well, those could be very different things.

If she wasn’t careful, the woman was going to walk into real trouble one day—the kind that she wouldn’t be able to walk away from.

He slid through the window. Since it was after midnight, Cooper knew he’d virtually disappear into the darkness when he climbed down the back side of the building.

He’d make it out of there, undetected, provided he didn’t fall and break his neck.

He eased to the side, his feet resting against the window’s narrow ledge. He pulled the window back down and took a deep breath.

“Mr. Lockwood!” Gabrielle’s horror-filled scream broke loud and clear through the night.

She’d found the body.

Jaw locking, Cooper made his way down that building.

Gabrielle had just stumbled into an extremely dangerous situation. Now he’d have to do some serious recon in order to keep her out of the cross fire.

* * *

IT WASN’T HER first dead body.

Gabrielle Harper stood behind the patrol car, her gaze on the apartment building. The cops had rolled in quickly after her call then they’d pushed her out.

They hadn’t needed to push her so far. She knew better than to contaminate the scene. They didn’t have to worry about her destroying evidence.

Not my first dead body. But the sight of Lockwood’s slit throat had still made nausea rise within her.

“Tell me again,” Detective Lane Carmichael said as he leaned back against the patrol car and studied her with an assessing gaze, “just why you were at Keith Lockwood’s house in the middle of the night?”

A crowd had already gathered.

Her gaze slid away from Lane’s and toward the apartment’s entrance. The body was being wheeled out through the double doors. Lockwood had been zipped up in a black bag. Bagged, tagged and taken away.

She swallowed.

“Gabrielle.”

The snap of her name jerked her attention back to Lane. His suit was wrinkled, his dark hair was tousled and his face was set in grim, I’m-sure-not-pleased-with-you lines.

That was typically the way Lane looked at her. Even when they’d been dating—briefly—he’d often given her that same look.

She worked the crime beat in Washington, D.C., covering stories for the Inquisitor—both the paper and its online subscriber base. Since Lane was a homicide detective, their paths crossed plenty.

That crossing had been good when they were dating.

Now that they weren’t—not so good.

“Lockwood called me,” she began.

“Dead men don’t make phone calls.” His arms were crossed over his chest—his interrogation stance. “The ME estimates that he’s been dead for over seven hours. Try again.”

Seven hours. She filed that helpful detail away for later. “He called me around eight a.m. The guy left a voice message for me, saying he had some info to share about a story I’d covered.”

Lane’s head tilted. “Just what story would that be?”

Gabrielle pushed back her hair. It was summer in D.C., and she was sweating. “The unsolved murder of Kylie Archer.” A woman whose body had been discovered in her apartment months ago. Kylie’s throat had been slit.

Just like Lockwood’s.

Even in the summer heat goose bumps rose on her arms.

“I need everything you’ve got on Lockwood, Gabby,” Lane told her, his voice grim. “Everything.”

But she could only shake her head. The body had been loaded into the coroner’s van. Uniforms began to walk back into the apartment building. “I don’t have anything to give you. He called me. Left a message for me to meet him at this address after midnight. He mentioned Kylie’s name and said he had more information for me.” She was trying to cooperate, didn’t Lane get that? “I’d just run a piece on the web, highlighting Kylie’s unsolved murder, so I figured that Lockwood had seen it and he had a lead to share with me.”

Once a month, she featured an unsolved crime in her column. Thanks to those features, she’d helped close three cold cases.

Lane should thank her for that help.

His glare said he wouldn’t be thanking her anytime soon.

“What if the killer had still been inside that apartment?” he demanded. “What if he’d come at you with that knife?”