Searching for Secrets: Author Preferred Edition

Usually the woods near her apartment are friendly. But when Christa Heckertt is stuck in a deserted cellar there, it's anything but. Christa ends up there not long after interrupting an intruder who tried to steal parts from the computers her Iowa City fourth-grade class won in the mayor's competition.

Officer Kirk Reynolds was called from a drug surveillance to investigate the attempted burglary at Buckingham Elementary School. That throws Christa and Kirk together. He wants enough evidence to convict a drug dealer who sells to kids and Christa who wants to keep her students safe and get control of her life again. The thieves who want the newly won computers will stop at nothing. They'll kidnap, run cars off the road, steal, and threaten worse.

Christa and Kirk's attraction to each other is growing, but they are too stubborn to admit it. Will it get in the way as they try to decipher an encoded file and learn what the bad guys want and why it's worth killing to get it? On Halloween eve, Christa is kidnapped by a drug dealer who wants to use her as leverage to get what he wants. Will she escape in time to work with Kirk to keep the dealer from making that delivery and find out who his partners are? Can she and Kirk trust the right people--and each other?