Hush by Karen Robards Page A

along behind her. There was nothing there, of course—she checked—but by the time she saw her small white Mazda her pulse was racing and she was breathing way faster than she should have been. A shivery sense of unease kept her glancing over her shoulder even as she unlocked the car. She was starting to mentally chastise herself for being a coward, when it hit her:
    Somebody murdered Jeff .
    Under the circumstances, being scared wasn’t only justified: it was smart.
    That thought did not help her calm down. In fact, it made her go cold all over, despite the oppressive heat.
    Glancing back, Riley could see the lights of the camera crew across from Margaret’s house. Most of the nearby houses had lights on inside them now. What she took from that was, there are people nearby . A scream would bring them running. Not that there was any need to scream: no one had followed her, no one was even close. It was dark, but not so dark she couldn’t see well enough to be sure of that.
    They don’t have any reason to come after you. You never even worked at Cowan Investments .
    Unless they knew she had Jeff’s phone, and wanted it. Or thought Jeff had told her something. Or were killing Cowans for fun or profit. Or—
    Stop it .
    Yanking the door open, Riley got in, slammed it shut, hit the lock-doors button, started the car, and took off way faster than she normally would have done toward her apartment. And tried not to let the impossible-to-shake feeling that she was being watched completely terrify her.

— CHAPTER —
FOUR
    â€œY ou suppose she’s in for the night?” Bax asked as he carefully maneuvered the Acura into a vacant spot on the street outside Riley’s apartment building.
    It was a busy street, full of the kind of tall, boxlike structures that had been built all over Houston in the commercial real estate boom toward the end of the last century. Restaurants and offices and small shops occupied the lower floors of the buildings, and apartments and condos took up the upper floors, so there was plenty of activity, perfect for going unnoticed.
    â€œDon’t know.” Finn’s voice was tight with irritation as he watched her stride across the parking lot and come around the front of her building. Still in her funeral clothes, she looked haunted under the pale glow of the security lights. She was moving fast, and she gave a couple of quick, searching looks around that made him frown. He was confident she hadn’t made them, but something seemed to have spooked her. Even from a distance,he could almost feel the waves of tension she was giving off. “We need to get this damned thing fixed or replaced now .”
    He tapped the blank screen of the mobile receiving unit that was propped on the console between the seats. About the size of a portable GPS, voice and/or motion activated, it was designed to monitor the roving bug that had been turned on in her cell phone. The bug allowed Finn to listen in on her mobile calls, of course, and also to track her anywhere she took her cell phone and listen to any conversation anywhere that cell phone was, even if the phone was powered off. He liked the technology because it was simple to use and it was almost impossible to detect.
    Unfortunately, not long after they had started following her away from her mother-in-law’s house the receiver had stopped picking up her phone’s signal, which had led to a harried chase along the freeway and through the city streets. Finn was now discovering that the bug also wasn’t working to track her present movements, or pick up any sound.
    One possibility was that the receiver was dead.
    The other was that during the course of the drive she’d disabled her phone the same way she’d disabled Jeff’s.
    If that was the case, there could be only one reason: she was afraid of being followed.
    And instead of being interested, he was now officially downright