He slapped her on the rump, his hand connecting with her towel. “I hate to say this, but get dressed.” His lips curved into that irreverent smile she’d hated because it was so damned irresistible. “Bo and I are going to check out the grounds, run the perimeter, find out if we see any evidence of an intruder.”

Or a ghost, she thought, for that’s the sensation that had slid through her—that something unworldly had crossed the threshold to her home, intent on doing harm.

She quivered inside again and glanced over at the desk, where her notes were spread and the copies of Cammie’s diary . . . “Oh, no!”

“What?”

But she was already moving to the small nook where her desk was tucked. Across the surface, phone bills, receipts, unopened mail, and reservation slips were stacked in neat piles. The flyer for this weekend’s auction at St. Elsinore’s was still pushed into the pages of the paperback she’d been reading, but that was it.

What was very obviously missing were the copied pages of Cammie’s diary.

The scrawled, lined pages describing Cammie’s most intimate and darkly sexual thoughts were gone. With a sickening thought, she wondered what would happen if someone from the press got Cammie’s notes and printed them in one of the tabloids: CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERED NUN, with Cammie’s photograph, one of her in a dark habit with a solemn, reverent expression.

“Oh Lord.” Her eyes scoured the desk and floor, everywhere nearby, though she’d remembered leaving them on her desk. The spot was empty. “Damn it all to hell,” she muttered under her breath; then Slade walked to the desk, asking questions, and she noticed the small black device tucked into the corner of the bookcase near the desk. In the very spot she placed her coffee cup when she was working. “What in the world?”

“What?” Slade asked.

“I’m not sure.”

Barely visible, the thin electronic device was positioned in front of a picture of Cammie, taken during her senior year of high school.

Valerie felt a chill as cold as a Canadian winter.

Slade was next to her in an instant. “What is it?” he asked, his voice laden with worry as she picked it up. “A cell?”

“Uh-huh. A BlackBerry,” she said, and knowing she shouldn’t, she clicked it on. “I think it might be Camille’s.”

Within seconds, the small screen glowed and a picture appeared.

An image of Cammie in the throes of death.

“Nooooo! Holy Christ!” Valerie let out a disbelieving scream as she recognized the image.

Her blood turned to ice, and she dropped the phone as if she’d been burned. “Oh, God, no,” she squeaked as the phone hit the top of the desk, faceup, and she found herself watching a three- or four-second video of her sister, taken just moments before her death.