Sense Of Evil

10

CALEB HEARD THE NEWS about a fourth woman’s body being found when he stopped by the coffee shop for a cup to take home. The girl behind the counter-he couldn’t figure out how on earth they could be called “sales associates” when they worked in a coffee shop-was only too happy to fill him in on the latest details while she prepared his latte.

Gory details.

“And you know the worst part?” she demanded as she put a lid on the cup.

“Somebody died?” he suggested.

She blinked, then said anxiously, “Well, yeah, but I heard she’d been dead for months.”

Caleb resisted the impulse to ask what the hell difference that made. Instead, he said, “And the worst part is?”

“She was brunette,” Sally Anne, sales associate for the coffee shop and a brunette herself, whispered.

“Ah.”

“So none of us is safe. He’s not just going after blondes now, he’s-he’s going after the rest of us.”

Caleb paid for his coffee and said with ruthless sympathy, “If I were you, I’d leave town.”

“I might. I just might. Thanks, Mr. Powell. Oh-can I help you, ma’am?”

“One iced mocha latte, please. Medium.”

Caleb turned quickly, surprised to find Hollis there. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She looked tired and also more casual than he’d yet seen her, in jeans and a black T-shirt that demanded to know if the hokey-pokey was really what it was all about.

“You’re not still working?”

“No, we’ve pretty much called it a day.” She shrugged. “Can’t do a lot in the way of investigating the body Sally Anne just told you about until we get forensics and a postmortem.”

Something about her wry tone made him say, “You didn’t expect the news to not get around, did you?”

“No. But this town sets the land speed record for gossip, I’ve realized that much. The unfortunate thing is that it tends to be so damned accurate.”

“I’ll say. I didn’t grow up here, but when I started my practice fifteen years ago, it took less than a week for everyone in town to know that my parents were dead and my younger brother had gotten his girlfriend pregnant and married her literally at the business end of her daddy’s shotgun.” He paused, then added, “I told no one, absolutely no one.”

Hollis smiled slightly and paid Sally Anne for her coffee. “They do seem to find out what they want to know. Which begs the question…”

“How can a killer walk among us, unseen?”

“Oh, not that question. Killers always have walked among us unseen. No, the question I’m asking myself is: how is it possible that a woman’s decomposing body hung inside a derelict gas station less than three blocks from the center of town for months without anybody noticing?”

Sally Anne uttered a choked little sound and rushed toward the back of the shop.

Hollis grimaced. “Well, that was definitely indiscreet. To say the least. I must be more tired than I thought. Or, at any rate, that’ll be my story.”

Caleb shook his head slightly. “Look, I know you’ve had a hell of a day, but can we sit down here and talk for a while? There’s something I want to ask you.”

She nodded and joined him at one of the small tables by the front window.

“Have you eaten?” Caleb asked. “The sandwiches here aren’t bad, or-”

Hollis shook her head, almost flinching. “No. Thank you. I’m reasonably sure the coffee will stay down, but only because I was practically breast-fed the stuff. I’m not planning to eat anything for the foreseeable future.”

It was Caleb’s turn to grimace. “So I take it Sally Anne’s gory details about the body were on the mark?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I’m sorry. That had to be rough.”

“Not destined to be one of my more pleasant memories. But I was warned what to expect when I signed on for this gig.” She sipped her latte, adding, “You wanted to ask me something?”

“Why did you sign on for this gig?”

Surprised, Hollis said, “I… didn’t expect a personal question.”

“I didn’t expect to ask one,” he confessed.

She smiled. “I thought lawyers always rehearsed what they said.”

“Not this one. Or, at least, not this time. If it’s too personal, we can forget I asked. But I’d rather not.”

“Why so curious?”

Even experienced as he was at reading juries, Caleb couldn’t tell if she was stalling or really wanted to know. “That explanation would undoubtedly involve a lot of me backpedaling and trying to justify my curiosity to myself, let alone you, so I’d just as soon skip the attempt. Let’s just say I’m a curious man and leave it at that.”

She gazed at him for a long moment, blue eyes unreadable, then said in a queerly serene voice, “I was assaulted. Beaten, raped, stabbed, left for dead.”

Not what he had expected. “Jesus. Hollis, I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

“Of course not, how could you?”

He literally didn’t know what to say, and for one of the very few times in his life. “That’s… why you became an agent?”

“Well, my old life was pretty much in tatters, so it seemed like a good idea when I was offered a chance at a new one.” Her voice retained that odd tranquillity. “I was able to help-in a small way-stop the man who had attacked me and so many other women. That felt good.”

“Revenge?”

“No. Justice. Going after revenge is like opening a vein in your arm and waiting for somebody else to bleed to death. I didn’t need that. I just needed to… see… him stopped. And I needed a new direction for my life. The Bureau and the Special Crimes Unit provided that.”

Tentatively, because he wasn’t sure how far she would be willing to go in talking about this, he said, “But to devote your life to a career that puts you face-to-face on a regular basis with violence and death-and evil? How healthy can that be, especially after what you’ve gone through?”

“I guess it depends on one’s reasons. I think mine are pretty good, beginning with the major one. Somebody has to fight evil. It might as well be me.”

“Judging by what I’ve seen in my life, it’ll take more than an army to do it. No offense.”

Hollis shook her head. “You don’t fight evil with an army. You fight it with will. Yours. Mine. The will of every human soul who cares about the outcome. I can’t say I thought much about it until what happened to me. But once you’ve seen evil up close, once you’ve had your entire life changed by it, then you see a lot of things more clearly.” Her smile twisted, not without bitterness. “Even with someone else’s eyes.”

He frowned, not getting that last reference. “I can understand feeling like that after what you went through, but to let it change your whole life-”

“After what I went through, it was the only thing I could do with my life. I not only saw some things more clearly, I also saw things differently. Too differently to ever go back to being an artist.”

“Hollis, it’s only natural to see a lot of things differently after such a horribly traumatic experience.”

A little laugh escaped her. “No, Caleb, you don’t understand. “I saw things differently. Literally. Colors aren’t the same now. Textures. Depth perception. I don’t see the world the way I used to, the way you do, because I can’t. The connections between my brain and my sight are… man-made. Or at least man-forged. Not organic. The doctors say my brain may never fully adjust.”

“Adjust to what?”

“To these new eyes I’m wearing. They weren’t the ones I was born with, you see. When the rapist left me for dead, he took a couple of souvenirs. He took my eyes.”

By the time Mallory got back to the station, it was nearly eight and she was tired. Tired as hell, if the truth be known. Also queasy, depressed, and not a little anxious.

“Mallory-”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ginny McBrayer said. “I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

“These days, everything is making me jump.” Mallory sighed. “What is it, Ginny?”

“You asked me to check with the other women in the department and find out if anybody had the sense of being watched lately.”

“Yeah. And have any of them?”

Ginny shrugged. “It’s sort of hard to say. Everybody’s jumpy. Two or three said they’d gotten the feeling of being watched at least a couple of times in the last few weeks, but even they admitted they weren’t sure of anything. Of course, now that I’ve brought up the subject, everybody’s talking about it, the guys too.”

Mallory sat down at her desk and rubbed her eyes wearily. “Well, hell. Dunno if that helps.”

“We’ll all be alert, anyway. Have you talked to the FBI agents about it?”

“Not yet. Need to, though, I suppose.” She sighed. “The dairy farmer’s wife; she turn up yet? And what is her name, anyway? Helton. What Helton?”

“Rose Helton. Not a sign of her. And we still have two other women reported missing in Hastings during the past month, not counting that news reporter who vanished last night. Sharona Jones and Kate Murphy. Plus the dozen or so missing from the general area outside Hastings in the same time period.”

“I know Sharona-she doesn’t fit the profile, she’s black. She’s missing?”

“Well, her boyfriend claims she is. But her dog is also missing, as well as her car and a lot of her clothes, and her mother says she’s always wanted to see the world, so we’re thinking she might have upped and left.”

“If Ray Mercer was my boyfriend, I’d up and leave too.” Mallory sighed again. “Still, we have to make sure, so keep everybody on it. What about Kate Murphy?”

“More troubling, in that she does fit the profile. Late twenties, blond, successful; she owns one of those new little boutiques on Main Street. Was doing pretty well with it too. Didn’t show up for work on Monday, so her assistant manager has been running the shop.”

“We’ve checked out her house or apartment?”

“Uh-huh. No sign she’s been taken-but no sign she left voluntarily either. Her car is in its slot at her condo, and far as we can tell it’s clean. Haven’t found her purse or keys, though. She didn’t-doesn’t-have any pets, and no family in Hastings. We’re trying to track down relatives now.”

“And still no sign of Cheryl Bayne.”

“No. The station in Columbia has sent another reporter, this one male, to cover this new… angle.”

“How caring of them.”

Ginny nodded. “Yeah, even the other reporters are being pretty scathing about that.”

“While doing their own reports.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mallory shook her head in disgust. “Okay. Let me or the chief know if anything changes.”

“Right.”

When she was alone again, Mallory sat for a moment with her elbows on her desk and her hands cupping her face, fingers absently massaging her temples. She should stay, but Rafe had made it plain she was to go home as soon as the body had been taken from that old building and the forensics team finished.

Both of which had been done.

Mallory was tired but also curiously wide awake. She didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to be alone. She wanted something to get the image of that poor woman out of her head.

With only a slight hesitation, she picked up her phone and called Alan’s cell. “Hey, are you home?” she asked without preamble.

“Headed that way. Pulling into the parking lot now, as a matter of fact.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Nothing you could truthfully define as food,” he replied. “There was something a charitable person might have called a sandwich hours ago, but it may have been just a figment of my imagination. Are you offering?”

“I’m offering takeout Chinese. I’ll even pick it up on my way to your place. Deal?”

“Deal. Stop for wine if you feel like that. My place is dry as a bone. Oh-and I have a splitting headache, so if you could pick up some aspirin as well? I don’t think I have any.”

“Okay. See you in a few minutes.” Mallory hung up, telling herself this wasn’t a bad idea at all. So what if she had spent most of the previous night in his bed? It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have to mean anything. Alan could be an amusing and entertaining companion, and he was good in bed.

Very good, in fact. And she couldn’t deceive herself into believing she wasn’t looking forward to a little body-on-body comfort, because she was. Two clean, healthy, sweaty bodies tangled together in the sheets sounded like a dandy way to affirm that both of them were alive.

Alive. Not hanging from a beam like a weeks-old gutted fish. Not lying in a boneless, bloody sprawl in the woods off some highway. Not laced into an impossibly tight leather corset and smothered with a hood while a woman with a whip and chains tortured-

“Christ,” she muttered. “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

It took a few minutes, of course, to do what she had to in order to leave for the night, but she took care of things quickly and bolted before anyone could come up with anything that required her continued presence at the station.

She called and ordered the food on her way to the restaurant, so it’d be ready and waiting for her, and did stop for wine even though she wasn’t usually much of a drinker. She even remembered Alan’s aspirin. Still, it was barely half an hour after she talked to him when Mallory entered his apartment with one bag full of little cardboard cartons and another holding the wine and aspirin.

“You look jumpy as hell,” he commented as soon as she walked through the door.

“It’s a jumpy time.” Mallory knew the way to the kitchen, of course, and lost no time in getting the wine out and hunting through his cupboards for glasses. “Jesus, Alan, not a single wineglass?”

“Housewares aren’t a priority with me. Sue me.”

“My life has come down to drinking wine from jelly glasses. Could this day get any better?”

Alan had swallowed several aspirin dry, then began setting out the cartons on his breakfast bar, where they normally ate. He paused to look at her intently. “I heard. Couldn’t have been much fun, finding that body.”

“No.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.” She poured wine into one of the glasses and immediately took a swallow. “I intend to drink at least half this bottle, part of it while I shower away the assorted smells of today, then choke down some shrimp and vegetables. After that, unless you object, the plan is to adjourn to your bedroom and fuck like bunnies. Possibly all night. Unless you still have your headache, of course. Tell me you won’t.”

“I expect the aspirin to work any minute,” Alan replied. “And that plan suits me just fine.”

The Mexican restaurant wasn’t crowded despite the fact that Saturday night was usually one of the busiest. As the owner had told them mournfully when he escorted them personally to a cozy table back in the corner, people were going out less at night since the murders had started. And after what had been found today, undoubtedly most of his usual patrons were home with their doors locked.

So if Rafe and Isabel didn’t have the restaurant to themselves, they did have their own secluded corner of it. With quiet music playing in the background and an attentive but unobtrusive waiter, they were almost in their own world.

Almost.

“You still believe Jamie didn’t mutilate Jane Doe?” Rafe asked as they were finishing up the main course. They had been talking generally about the murders and the investigation, both with too much experience as cops to allow either the clinical details of brutal death or the bloody images they had seen all too recently to affect their appetites. And both shying away from anything more personal.

“I’m positive. My guess is, he was watching Jamie and saw her put the body into the trunk of Jane Doe’s car. I don’t know if she drove the car to wherever she planned to leave it, or if he did-and when she came back either to the playroom or to the car for some reason and didn’t find the body, that was when she really freaked out. In any case, I think he put the body in that old garage. And amused himself with it.”

“That’s sickening,” Rafe said.

“Definitely. He’s very twisted, our boy.”

“So his reasons for picking Jamie as his first victim in Hastings were probably twisted as well.”

“Well, it may have been about Jamie being a dominatrix rather than a lesbian. Her wielding so much power over other women, power he wanted and didn’t have. Maybe sheer jealousy was the trigger. Or envy. Maybe he couldn’t stand the fact that she could control the women in her life.”

“And he couldn’t control the women in his.”

“Maybe. Or it could have been the fact that her partners came to Jamie, willingly put themselves into her hands, submitted to her. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get that response from women. Ironic, really. He always goes for the smart, successful ones, the ones least likely to allow themselves to be dominated in a relationship, and yet to dominate women is what he desperately wants.”

“So for him it really is the unattainable.”

“Unless his taste in women changes, yeah.” Isabel’s voice was wry. “He’ll never get what he wants-except by killing them. It’s only when they’re dying and then lifeless that he’s the one in control, stronger than them.

“In killing Jamie, he could have achieved a particular sort of satisfaction, because she was a dominatrix. For the first time, he was able to dominate a woman whose specialty was dominating others. Even if he had to kill her to do it.”

“She possessed traits he wants to destroy?”

“That’s usually the case with a sexual sadist.”

“But not this time? Not our guy?”

Isabel frowned. “Targeting the breasts and genitals is a classic sign of a sexual obsession. But this guy, our guy, the sense I get is that he seems to be… punishing them for being women. So maybe he is trying to destroy the feminine traits in his nature. Or maybe he’s furious with them because they’re too female for him, literally too much woman for him to handle.”

“And that isn’t a sexually driven motivation?”

“Not really. More a question of identity. His.”

“This is fascinating,” Rafe said.

Isabel stared at him for a moment, then sat back in her chair with a sigh. “See, this is why my social life sucks. I always end up talking about killers.”

“My fault. I did ask.”

“Yeah, but the subject sprang to mind. Doesn’t say much about my sex appeal.”

Rafe eyed her. “It says we’re in the middle of a murder investigation. And so.”

“That’s a handy excuse. Can’t you tell when a woman is fishing?”

“You’re not serious? Isabel, you have to know you’re gorgeous.”

“My mirror tells me all the pieces fit together nicely, but that doesn’t mean I’m your type. Lots of men prefer petite redheads, or very slender brunettes. Or-women who don’t carry guns and know a dozen different ways to really hurt a guy if he pisses her off.”

He had to laugh. “I admit that last bit is enough to give any man pause, but you don’t see me taking to my heels, do you?”

“No, but since we sort of have to work together-”

“We don’t have to go out to dinner together. Isabel, I’m here because I want to be, period. Just for the record, I don’t prefer petite redheads or slender brunettes. And I never figured you for the insecure type.”

“And here I was thinking I was coming on too strong.”

Their attentive waiter appeared to clear the plates and take their order for coffee and dessert, and Rafe waited until he’d gone again to respond to her somewhat mocking comment.

“So what happened today?”

Isabel blinked. “You know what happened today.”

“What don’t I know? What’s got you so rattled that you’re pushing yourself to… make a different kind of connection with me when you’re not sure it’s what you want?”

“Who says it’s not what I want?”

“I do. Hell, you do. Look at your body language, Isabel. As soon as you decided to end the shop talk and get into more personal territory, you leaned back. Away from me. That’s not as good as a sign, that is a sign. Your words say you’re interested, but your body says stay away.”

“Dammit,” she muttered. “What was that I said earlier about you making a fair profiler? I’m changing my assessment. You’d make a very good one.”

“So I’m on target?”

“Well, let’s just say you’re not far off it. I am just not very good at this sort of thing.”

Rafe had to smile at her disgruntled tone. “You’re a very confident woman, Isabel-almost always. Very sure of yourself. But right now, at this moment, you’re scared. Why?”

She was silent, frowning down at the table.

“Something happened. What was it?”

“Look, this investigation is… different, that’s all. Odd things are happening. My abilities seem to be changing. And I don’t quite know what do to about it.”

“Have you reported this to Bishop?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because… I don’t know why not. Because I want to figure it out for myself.”

“And making a move on me seemed like a good way to do that?”

“Stop rubbing it in.”

“What?”

“My failure.”

Dryly, he said, “Who says you failed? Isabel, I realized I wanted you sometime yesterday. Early yesterday. Or possibly about ten minutes after we met. I also realized it was going to hellishly complicate the entire situation, so I’ve been doing my best not to think about it.”

“Maybe thinking about it would be good,” she said earnestly. “And doing something about it even better.”

“You’re still leaning back in your chair,” he pointed out.

“I can lean forward.” But she didn’t. She frowned again, honestly baffled.

“See?” Rafe said. “Conflicting signals. Even consciously, you’re not sure what you want.”

With a sigh, she said, “Trust me to find myself attracted to the one man who isn’t willing to take what he’s offered, no questions asked. Keep this up, and I’ll have to start believing in leprechauns. And unicorns.”

“Sorry about that. But I’m not a kid, Isabel. I’m a twenty-year veteran of the sexual wars, and I’ve learned a few things along the way. One being if you’re going to get involved with a complicated woman, you’d better damned well know what the complications are. Ahead of time. Before you trip over them.”

“That does sound like bitter experience.”

“It was. Not bitter, really, but I learned a hard lesson. And it’s more or less my own fault. You said the sort of energy that makes you psychic is something you have in common with our killer; well, I have something in common with him too. I like strong women. With strong, I’ve discovered, comes complicated, which can cause problems. Unless I know about the complications going in.”

“Okay. Well, I hear voices. There’s that.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“I need coffee in the morning before I’m human. And cornflakes. I like cornflakes. I take really hot showers, always, so I tend to steam up the room. I hate silence in strange places, so I travel with a sound machine. Ocean waves. I have to have air-conditioning on full blast even in the dead of winter to sleep well. Oh-and I hate moonlight shining in the bedroom.”

“Isabel.”

“Not those sorts of complications, huh?”

“No.”

“Dammit.”

“If I were a profiler,” he said slowly, “making an educated guess, I’d say that your breezy manner and humorous attitude cover up a lot of pain. And I’m not talking about the headaches your voices give you. That evil face you saw-it really did change your life, didn’t it?”

Their waiter placed coffee and dessert on the table and went silently away again, and still Isabel said nothing. She picked up a spoon and poked at her dessert, then put it down again.

“Still not ready to tell me?” He fixed his coffee the way he liked it, his gaze remaining on her face, trying to make his own posture and expression as relaxed and unthreatening as possible.

She sipped her coffee, then grimaced and dumped cream and sugar in before trying a second sip.

“Isabel?”

Abruptly, as if against her will, she said, “It was beautiful.”

“What was?”

“The face evil wore. It was beautiful.”

It was late when Ginny left the police station, much later than usual for her. And after talking to the other women and hearing how jumpy they were, she made a point of walking out to her car in the company of a couple of male officers who were also leaving. Though none of the guys had said anything openly to the female officers, Ginny had noticed that in the last week or so all the women had an escort coming or going.

She doubted any of the women were complaining. She certainly didn’t; anytime she was outside alone, she tended to spend a lot of time looking back over her shoulder and jumping at shadows.

By tacit consent, neither of the men left her until her car was unlocked, the door open, and the interior light showing them all an empty, unthreatening little Honda.

“Lock your doors,” Dean Emery advised.

“You bet. Thanks, guys.” She got in and immediately locked the doors and started the car, absently looking after them until both reached and safely entered their own cars.

Not that the guys had to worry, really.

So far, anyway.

Ginny was hardly a profiler, but she did have a semester of Abnormal Psychology under her belt, and she vividly recalled the section about serial killers, especially since it had given her nightmares for weeks.

Very few serial killers murdered both men and women. There had been killers who targeted both male and female children or young people, but when the targets were adults, they were almost always one sex.

A homosexual serial killer targeted men or young males, and a heterosexual killer targeted women or girls, as a rule. Though some homosexual killers, or men who were insecure sexually and feared they might be homosexual, had been known to target women out of sheer rage. They didn’t want to be whatever they were, and they blamed women for it.

The very rare female serial killers went after men, or apparently had so far-except in the rather frighteningly common cases of women poisoning children or other family members, when they tended not to differentiate between the sexes.

Have some soup, dear. Oh, it tastes funny? That’s just a new spice I’m trying out.

Jesus.

The things people got up to.

Ginny pulled her car out of the lot and headed for home, still pondering, mostly because her mind refused to let go of the subject.

What did he look like? Did she pass him on the street every day? Did she know him? He was strong, very strong; the medical report on Tricia Kane said that he’d driven a large knife into her chest to the hilt.

Ginny shivered.

What kind of rage did it take to do something like that? And how had Tricia aroused it in him? Just by being blond and successful? Just by being female?

Just by being?

When Ginny had colored her bleached hair back to something approximating its natural dark brown a week or so before, not a soul at the station had laughed or even commented, and her friends said it was wise of her. No reason to take stupid chances, after all, not when she was a cop in the thick of things.

Her mother had been visibly relieved.

Her father had said at least it made her look less like a whore.

As she pulled her car into the driveway, Ginny felt all her insides tighten. He was home, and judging by the crooked way his car was parked, he had, as usual on a weekend, spent the afternoon drinking.

Shit.

Still in the car, she removed her holster and locked it securely away in the glove compartment. When she got out, she locked the car up as well.

She never took the gun with her into the house. Never.

It was too tempting.

She went up the steps and used her key to let herself in, silently telling herself for the hundredth time that she had to get her own place, no matter what. And soon.

“Hey, little girl.” His voice was slurred, his mouth wet. “Where you been?”

Her own voice deadened, Ginny replied, “At work, Daddy,” and pushed the door closed behind her.