LITMIR.BIZ

      Larsen’s nerves were eating her alive.

      She paced Jack’s living room, her sandals clipping over the hardwood floor as she waited for word from the Tony Jingles stakeout. The Orioles game was scheduled to begin in twenty minutes unless they called a rain delay, which was a real possibility given the drizzly skies.

      The woman cop Jack had sent to babysit Larsen walked through the living room on one of her quarter-hourly rounds. The woman, Sergeant O’Malley, wasn’t much in the way of company. Short, stocky and unsmiling, she’d relinquished no more than one-word answers when Larsen tried to engage her in conversation when she’d first arrived. When the cop wasn’t making her rounds, she remained firmly by the kitchen door.

      Outside, two male cops kept an eye on the house. Larsen hadn’t considered the fact that whoever supposedly put the note in Jack’s paper obviously knew where he lived. Of course, that person had been her, though she could never tell him that. So she cooled her heels in a protective custody with no means of escape short of outside intervention.

      It wouldn’t take much to get herself out of here. She was convinced of that. A phone call, maybe two. Heaven knew she’d made enough of them already this morning, apologizing for yesterday and clearing her calendar for the next few days until the police caught the albino and ended this nightmare.

      Why was she hesitating? Maybe because if she left now she’d never know what happened. Larsen stared out the front window at the damp, gray afternoon, the trees in front of the row house wilting with the drizzle.

      And maybe the problem was Jack himself. She needed to get away from him. She knew that. But it didn’t change the fact that she was drawn to him in a way she hadn’t been to a man, to anyone, in longer than she could remember. But staying here was foolish. She was playing with fire.

      With a sigh, she turned from the window as the clock on the chest in the corner chimed two o’clock. The Orioles game was about to begin. Her heart gave a nervous kick. If she was right about the murder happening pregame, it would happen soon.

      Larsen turned on the television and stared as the Orioles mascot ran onto the field exactly as she’d seen him in the premonition. Chills raced over her skin, standing her hair on end. The murder had begun. The memory of that vision, that nightmare, replayed in her head like a horror film—the restaurant, the albino, every patron hypnotized but one. And she’d sent Jack and the D.C. police into the thick of it. With guns.

      A sudden, horrible thought struck her. What if he controlled them, too?

      Oh, God, what have I done?