"Hoffman-HauntedHumans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

Before she could get started on another topic, D.J. said, "I've got to get
inside and make dinner. I'm tired."

"'Course you are, not enough fresh air, too much television, and improper
nutrition." Afra waved her hand in a shooing motion. D.J. escaped. She checked
her mailbox, afraid. She'd signed up here as D.J. Hand, and had paid to keep her
number unlisted. But if Chase could track her to her job, he could track her to
her home.

The only thing in her mailbox was the fall catalog for Community Education. She
carried it upstairs to her second floor apartment, feeling relieved when she had
fastened the chain from the inside.

Then she turned around to face her studio apartment and saw the writing on the
wall. Red spraypaint, right across her Van Gogh and Rembrandt art prints. "Only
you can purify me. Only through your blood will I be saved.

She would never forget his handwriting.

She had seen it in the love notes he'd left with flowers when he had courted
her, four years ago. Later, she had seen his handwriting on the anonymous notes
that the police found next to the corpses. She had seen it in the letters Chase
wrote her from Death Row.

Those letters had finally driven her to give up a paralegal position with a
future in it at one of the big law firms in San Francisco and move north, to
Spores Ferry, Oregon, a town of a hundred thousand, as small a place as she
could live in and not go crazy, she figured. Gary Campbell, the first detective
who had seriously listened to her when she mentioned her suspicions about her
boyfriend to the task force, the one she had kept in contact with after the
sentencing hearing, had told her she didn't even have to open the letters. Chase
couldn't get her, he said. But she opened the letters. She had to. Finally she
had run anyway. She hadn't left any forwarding address anywhere, not even with
her mother.

And maybe she had been right, and Gary had been wrong. Maybe Chase had been
playing with her, through the trial, the sentencing hearing, even his going to
jail for three years, just so he could come back and find her now, hidden as she
was, ferreting out her job and her apartment and everything she had to cling to
in her new existence.

A knock sounded on her door. She jerked and gasped, dropping her mail and her
purse. Her heart speeded. She looked around for anything she could use as a
weapon, grabbed an antique umbrella she had picked up at a yard sale, and went
to the door.

Through the peep she saw Morgan's gaunt young face, his wispy black mustache. He
had done something to his hair; instead of hanging lank and half over his face,
it had height to it. Mousse? Gel? Morgan with fashion sense? A frightening