“Yeah,” he answered after scouring the article again. “It burned down three years ago. The arsonist was never caught. The owners had an apartment right above the store. It was destroyed also. Three bodies were found when the fire was investigated. The owners and their son had apparently all perished in their sleep.”
She slumped. The flowers she’d received had been after the florist shop was long gone. She’d never checked. Another thought struck. “What does it mean that there were flowers from that place at Brett’s funeral?”
“It means you might have a stalker. It also means that your stalker may have been the same person who burned down the building. At the very least, we know he had access to the building.”
Setting the bottled water on the table, she covered her face with her hands. Suddenly, she was so tired. Lethargy seeped into her skin and worked its way down her body. A shiver caught her by surprise. It was difficult to tell if she was shivering because it was cold or if it was a delayed reaction to the horrific events of the past few hours.
“Hey, Alexa.” Gavin’s voice brought her back to the present. “We will find whoever this nutcase is. You know that, right? We will do everything we can to protect you.”
She nodded, more to make him feel better than because she believed him. After all, how would they find someone if they had no idea who the person could be? Or why the person was fixated on her.
Sergeant Parker closed his laptop. “Do you have any thoughts about who could be stalking you?”
She racked her brain to come up with possible suspects, but no one came to mind. “No, sorry. I can’t think of anyone. I want to go home.”
All she wanted to do was to go home, lock the doors and the windows, and snuggle with her cat on the couch. Maybe she’d even call her brother, Allen. Although he’d no doubt ask her what was bothering her, as she never called him when something wasn’t wrong. Her brother loved her, but he was so much older than her and lived so far away that he didn’t give her too much thought. She received a Christmas card every year from his wife and a phone call on her birthday. He’d never even seen her apartment. No. She’d be better off dealing with this alone.
“Soon,” Gavin promised. “Let’s finish here, then I’ll let you go.”
She nodded. If it would help catch whoever hurt Noah, she’d do whatever the police said.
Gavin hesitated. “Alexa, we need to know what happened to Brett. How did your fiancé die?”
She’d known it was coming. And she’d thought she was prepared for the question. But the way the question came at her, forcing her to put the two situations together, chilled her blood. Were they connected?
The sudden conviction that they were connected caused her to blurt out, “I think he was murdered.”
Gavin and Parker exchanged a glance. “You think he was murdered?” Gavin asked.
A grimace twisted her face. Then it smoothed into resignation. “I do now. At the time it never occurred to me. It wasn’t something we were looking at. And, honestly, it just never would have occurred to me.”
“Okay, Alexa. Why not start back at the beginning? What happened with your fiancé?”
Her head dropped for a moment. He could almost see her trying to collect her thoughts and gather her courage. Admiration flickered briefly before he squashed it. Leaning forward, he waited.
“Brett Stevens and I had been dating for six months.” His heart wrenched at the sorrow on her face, in her voice. “We had gone to high school together, but never really knew each other. There were over five hundred students in our graduating class. We met up again at a five-year get-together and just clicked. We dated for six months before we got engaged. I know that doesn’t seem like a long time, but we’d been talking marriage since the second month. We’d gotten engaged just five days before he died. I was over the moon.”
She swallowed. He knew that she was struggling, but to her credit, she kept going. “I went to a conference, and when I came home, he was in the hospital. An overdose. No one even knew we were engaged. Brett wanted to wait to announce it.”
The heartache in her eyes was painful to even watch. But he made himself. Maybe if he could get some answers for her, she’d have some peace.
“So he was in the hospital...” he said when the silence grew too long.
She ran a hand through her shoulder-length blond hair. “Yeah. He was actually supposed to be one of my patients. Isn’t that ironic?” She huffed a bitter laugh. “When I told the head nurse who he was, she put another nurse in charge of his case. During the night shift, he was somehow given the wrong IV. He went into cardiac arrest. They were unable to revive him.”
She stood, began to pace. “I was investigated because I was on duty that night. All the night staff were, but the police looked especially hard at me because of our relationship. Something about the significant other often being the culprit. To make matters worse, I had gone in to visit him during my break.” Alexa shook her head. “It was like being on one of those TV crime shows.”
No doubt. “I’m guessing that you were cleared of any wrongdoing.” It wasn’t really a question. If she hadn’t been, she would never have been hired as a nurse practitioner again.
“Yes. By the police. But the other nurses at the hospital were noticeably colder to me. I could tell that they weren’t convinced. Someone started the rumor that I had driven him to attempt to kill himself and then had finished the job. It was horrible. I knew that wasn’t the case, but still, I did wonder if it was my fault. If I had failed him. The guilt nearly destroyed me. Which is why I handed in my notice and sought out a new home in a quiet town where nothing exciting ever happened.”
“Why do you think you failed him?”
The glance she flung in his direction clearly said she thought he was being thick. “Seriously? I’m a nurse. I came back from a medical conference to find the man I planned to marry had been admitted into the hospital after supposedly trying to kill himself.”
“Surely, though, you knew you weren’t at fault when he died at the hospital.”
Alexa shrugged. “I wasn’t the nurse taking care of him, so obviously I knew that I hadn’t made the mistake with the IV. However, I thought that if I had realized he’d been depressed and gotten him help, he wouldn’t have been in the hospital to begin with.”
“Alexa, I will look into his death and the situation at the hospital. I will say this—I find it too much of a coincidence that both your fiancé and a man under your care at a medical facility have been hurt, or worse. Add to the mix the flowers that you got from a flower shop destroyed by arson.” He tightened his lips. He knew in his gut that Brett had been murdered. Without absolute proof, though, he was reluctant to voice the thought. Even though he was sure both Parker and Alexa were thinking the same thing.
“Alexa? Are you all right? Maybe you should sit down.” Parker’s concerned voice broke into his thoughts.
Looking up at the woman standing on the other side of the table, he understood why. If he thought her face was white before, it was completely colorless now. For a second, he feared she’d faint. He stood and moved to her side. Gently he urged her back to her seat. When she sat, he pulled out the chair beside her and sank into it.
“Alexa?” He touched her shoulder.
Finally, she turned her head, slowly, like it took great effort. “He followed me, didn’t he? The man stalking me followed me from Chicago. I hadn’t realized that someone was watching me there, too.”
That startled him. “Too? Alexa, has someone been watching you?”
The urgency of his voice seemed to jerk her out of her of the dark place she’d gone in her mind.
“I don’t know. I