And yet she sensed hidden eyes, watching her every move.

“Guilt, for sleeping with Jay,” she told herself, but she yanked the bathroom door closed and locked it.

She turned on the faucet, adjusted the spray, and waited for the water to heat. Stepping into the small glass cubicle, she pushed all thoughts of some unseen voyeur out of her head and took one of the shortest showers of her life.

Aunt Colleen’s house could wait, Jay thought as he drove to the cottage to drop off the building materials he had stored in the back of his truck.

It was threatening rain again, the sky gloomy, the defrost mechanism on his truck struggling with the condensation that had collected overnight. As it was early Sunday morning, traffic was thin, a little heavier by the churches.

As far as Jay was concerned his battling cousins, Janice and Leah, could bloody well cool their jets as well. Oh, they’d probably start pushing him again, especially Leah with Kitt, her do-nothing of a husband. Kitt spent his time getting high and jamming with a garage band and dreaming of becoming a rock star. Kitt saw his dead mother-in-law’s cottage as a gold mine and a way to prolong his status as an out-of-work musician. Jay understood that his cousins needed to sell the place and Jay intended to keep up with the renovations, but right now, he had more important things to consider.

Uppermost on the list?

Kristi Bentz’s safety.

Leah’s damned granite countertops and stainless steel appliances were a far-off second.

As soon as he unloaded the pickup and cleaned up, he intended to return to her apartment and go over it carefully with his evidence collection kit, though what he expected to find eluded him. It had been months since Tara Atwater had lived in the unit, and there was no indication that it had ever been a crime scene. But if a prowler had broken in, there was a chance he’d left a fingerprint or latent shoe print or hair or something…maybe.

Jay didn’t know what to believe. The place had seemed undisturbed.

But the studio apartment had belonged to Tara Atwater and she was definitely missing.

“So we’ll just see what we shall see,” he said to the dog as the clouds grew darker. He stopped for a traffic light and waited for a woman jogger pushing a baby carriage in front of her as she crossed in front of him. When the light changed, he beat out a minivan filled with teenagers. Once ahead of the van, he switched lanes, feeling a sense of urgency he couldn’t quite shake.