Sense Of Evil

11

ISABEL LOOKED AT RAFE with a faint smile. “You didn’t expect that, did you? That evil could be beautiful.” She wondered if he understood. If he could even begin to understand.

“No.”

“Of course not. It should be ugly, that’s what everyone expects. Red eyes, scaly flesh, horns and fangs. It should look like it was born in hell. At least that. At least. It should breathe fire and brimstone. It should burn to the touch.”

“But it doesn’t.”

“No. Evil always wears a deceptive face. It won’t be ugly, at least not until it really shows itself. It won’t look like something bad. That would be too easy to recognize. Too easy for us to see. Because the important thing, the thing evil does best, is deceive.”

“And it deceived you.”

She laughed, the low sound holding no amusement. “It wore a handsome face, when it first showed itself to me. A charming smile. It had a persuasive voice, and it knew all the right words to say. And the touch of it was kind and gentle. At least in the beginning.”

“A man. Someone you cared about.”

Isabel crossed her arms beneath her breasts, unconsciously adding yet another barrier between them, but she continued speaking in a toneless voice.

“I was seventeen. He was a little older, but I’d known him all my life. He was the boy in the neighborhood everybody depended on. If an elderly widow needed her yard mowed, he’d do it-and refuse payment. If anybody needed furniture moved, he’d offer to help. Stuck for a baby-sitter? He was there, always reliable and responsible, and all the kids-all the kids-adored him. The parents trusted him. Their sons considered him a buddy. And their daughters thought he walked on water.”

“Deceiving everyone.”

She nodded slowly, her gaze fixed on the table now, eyes distant. “The weird thing is, after taking all the time and trouble to deceive everybody around him for such a long, long time, when it came right down to it, it didn’t take much at all to start revealing the beast inside.”

Rafe was very much afraid he knew where this was going, and it required an effort to hold his voice steady when he asked, “What did it take?”

“No. Just that. Just one little word.” She looked up, focused on him. “That was the beginning. He asked me to a school dance, and I said no.”

“What did he do, Isabel?”

“Nothing then. I told him I didn’t feel like that about him, that he was more of a brother to me. He said it was a shame, but he understood. A few days later, I saw him in the bushes outside my house. Outside my bedroom. Watching me.”

“You didn’t call the cops,” Rafe guessed.

“I was seventeen. I trusted him. I thought he was just… taking the rejection badly. Maybe I was even a little bit flattered on some level of myself, that it mattered so much to him. So I just closed the curtains. And kept them closed. But then he started… turning up wherever I was. Always at a distance. Always watching me. That was when I started to be… just a little bit afraid.”

“But you still didn’t report it.”

“No. Everybody loved him, and I think I was half afraid nobody would believe me. I confided in my best friend. She was envious. Said he had a crush on me, and I should be flattered.” She laughed, again without humor. “She was seventeen too. What do you know, at seventeen?

“I tried to feel flattered, but it was getting more and more difficult to feel anything but scared. I could take care of myself, I knew self-defense, but… there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before. Something angry. And hungry. And I didn’t understand why, but it terrified me.”

Rafe waited, unable to ask another question. He wished they were somewhere more private yet had a strong hunch that, if they had been, Isabel wouldn’t have been willing-or able-to confide in him about this. He thought she needed the insulation of a semipublic place for this. There were people here, even if not close by. Food and music and an occasional quiet laugh from another part of the room.

Normality here.

He thought Isabel was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold it together enough to talk about this if they were alone. Either that or she had chosen, quite deliberately, to tell him this without even a shadow of intimacy. With a table between them in a public place, where the ugliness could be softened or blurred or even discarded at the end with a game shrug and a bland But it happened years ago, of course.

Depending on his reaction to what she was telling him.

Depending on how well he held it together.

“Of course, it wasn’t talked about so much in those days, stalking.” Her voice was steady, controlled. “I mean, that was something that happened to celebrities, not ordinary people. Not seventeen-year-old girls. And certainly not involving boys they’d known their whole lives. So when I finally did tell my father, he did the logical thing in his mind. He didn’t call the police-he confronted the boy. Very reasonably, no yelling, no threats. Just a friendly warning that I wasn’t interested and he should, really, stay away.”

“His trigger,” Rafe muttered.

“As it turned out, yes. My father couldn’t have known. Nobody could have known. He’d hidden his true face all too well. If my father had gone to the police and everyone had taken the threat seriously, maybe the ending would have been different. But after it was all over, they told me… it probably wouldn’t have. Delayed things, maybe, but he hadn’t actually done anything, and he was such a good boy, so they couldn’t have held him for long. So it probably wouldn’t have changed anything if I had acted differently, if my father had. Probably.”

“Isabel-”

“It was a Wednesday. I came home from school, just like always. Rode with a friend, because my father didn’t believe I was old enough to have a car yet. She let me out, and then she headed home while I went into the house. As soon as I closed the front door behind me, I knew something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Maybe I smelled the blood.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rafe said softly.

“I went into the living room and… they were there. My parents. Sitting on the couch, side by side. They were holding hands. We found out later from the note he’d left that he had forced them in there at gunpoint. Sat them down. And then he shot them. Both of them. They hadn’t even had time to get really scared; they just looked… surprised.”

“Isabel, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She blinked, and for just an instant her mouth seemed to quiver. Then it steadied, and she said calmly, “The story could have ended there. If it had, maybe I wouldn’t have come out of it psychic. I don’t know. Nobody knows.

“But that was really just the beginning. I turned-to run or call the police, I don’t know. And he was there. He said he’d been waiting for me. He had the gun, a silenced automatic; that’s why the neighbors hadn’t heard. I was too scared to scream at first, too shocked, but then he told me he’d kill me if I made a sound. So I didn’t. All during those hours, all night long, I never made a sound.”

Rafe wished he could drink. He wished he could stop her from finishing the story. But he couldn’t do either.

“Looking back, knowing what I know now, I think if I had made a sound he might not have gotten so crazy. I think that’s what maddened him, that no matter what he did to me, he couldn’t get me to scream. Or even to cry. Without even understanding how or what it would mean, I was taking away his power.

“He-right there on the living-room rug, in front of my dead parents, he tore my clothes off, and he raped me, holding the gun jammed against my neck. He kept saying I was his, I belonged to him, and he’d make me admit it.

“He did things to me I didn’t even know were possible. I was just seventeen. Just a kid, really. I was a virgin. I’d never had a boyfriend serious enough to-to do more than kiss. I wasn’t ignorant about sex, but… I couldn’t understand why I didn’t die, why what he was doing didn’t kill me. But it didn’t. I bled. And I hurt. And as the hours passed, the beautiful face he’d worn for so long got uglier and uglier. He started cursing me. Hitting me. He took the gun and-hurt me with that too.”

She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Cracked ribs, a fractured jaw and wrist, a dislocated shoulder. Too many bruises to count. Raw inside. At the end, he was sitting astride me, both hands holding my head as he slammed it against the floor, over and over again. Screaming that I was his and he’d make me admit it.”

Isabel didn’t shed a tear, but her eyes were very bright, and her voice was very soft when she finished. “And his touch burned. He had red eyes, and horns, and scaly flesh, and his breath smelled of brimstone.”

Travis was more pleased than he wanted to admit-or show her-when he found Ally waiting for him outside the police station after work. Waiting on the hood of his car, actually, and wearing a very short skirt.

“You shouldn’t be out alone this time of night,” he told her, trying not to stare at long legs that looked great even under garish outside lights.

She lifted an eyebrow at him, amused. “I’m in a brightly lit parking lot. At the police station. Other than being inside the building, I doubt there’s a safer place right now.”

“Maybe not. Some of our female officers think they’ve been watched, maybe even followed.”

“Really?” She slid off the car’s hood and shrugged. “Well, I’m not a blonde. And I can take care of myself.”

“It might not be just blondes, you know. Or didn’t you hear about the body we found today?”

“I heard. Also heard she’d been dead a couple months or thereabouts. So maybe it was a different killer.”

Travis didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t so close to the inner circles of the investigation that he was up on the latest theories, so he merely shrugged and said, “Still, we’ve got other women missing in the area, and not all of them are blondes. You really should be careful, Ally.”

“It’s so sweet that you’re worried about me.”

He grimaced. “Don’t make it sound like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re amused. I’m not some toy you’re playing with, Ally. Or, if I am-”

“If you are, what?” She stepped closer and slipped her arms up around his neck.

“If I am… then tell me before I make a goddamned fool of myself,” he said, and kissed her.

She laughed. “Believe me, sweetie, you are not a toy. I like my men with plenty of muscle and minds of their own. You fit that bill, right?”

“I’d better.”

“Great. And now that we both understand that-how about a drink or two to unwind after a tough day?”

He groaned. “I’ve gotta be up at the crack of dawn. Why don’t we just pick up a pizza on the way to my place?”

“Or we could do that,” Ally agreed. She smiled at him and kept smiling as he put her into the passenger seat of his flashy sports car and went around to the driver’s side.

She wondered how soon she could find a few minutes alone to call in and report what Travis knew.

Before he figured out what she was up to.

Without a word, Rafe placed his hand on the table between them, palm up.

For the longest time, Isabel didn’t move. Then, finally, at last, she leaned forward and put her hand in his. The shock this time was almost a crackle, as if it should have been white-hot and burned them. But it didn’t. It just felt warm, Isabel thought.

He said, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you survived that. And then to survive, sanity intact-only to find yourself hearing voices. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “The worst of it, at first, was that I was in the hospital with my jaw wired shut.” A shaky little laugh escaped her. “Left-handed, and it was the left wrist that was fractured. So I couldn’t even write to the doctors and tell them what I was hearing. I just had to lie there and listen.”

“A combination of the head injury and the other shocks and trauma. That woke up your latent abilities.”

“With a vengeance. At first, I just thought I was going nuts. That he had damaged my mind even worse than he had my body. But slowly, while I healed physically, I began to realize that the voices were telling me things. Things I shouldn’t have been able to know. A nurse would come in to check on me or whatever, and I’d know she was having trouble in her marriage. Then later, I’d hear her out in the hallway talking to another nurse-about having trouble in her marriage. Things like that. Sometimes voices, as though another person were saying something to me conversationally, sometimes… I’d just know.”

“And when you could finally speak again? You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“Not even the trauma expert-shrink-I saw for nearly a year afterward. I went to live with an aunt while I finished high school. Another school, needless to say. In another neighborhood.”

“Where no one knew.”

Isabel sighed. “Where no one knew. My aunt was very kind, and I loved her, but I never told her about the voices. At first because I was afraid they’d lock me up. Then, later, when I began reading up on what little information I could find on psychic abilities, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”

“Until you met Bishop.”

“Until I met Bishop. By then, the only thing I was sure of was that there had to be a reason I could do what I did, a reason why I heard the voices. A reason why that evil hadn’t been able to destroy me, hard as it tried.”

“A reason you had survived.”

“Yeah. Because there had to be a reason. They call it survivor’s guilt. You have to get through that, find some purpose in your life. Figure out how you lived when those around you died. And why. I didn’t know those answers.

“I drifted through college until my friend was killed. Julie. She died horribly, suddenly. There one day, gone the next. Before I could even begin to grieve for her, more women were dead and their killer had vanished.”

“The second traumatic event in your life,” Rafe said. “And the second time you encountered evil.”

Isabel nodded. “I hadn’t seen it coming then either, that was what hit me hardest. These voices that told me things never told me I was going to lose my best friend. That was when I decided to become a cop. I still didn’t know how to channel or use the voices-or how to keep myself from being locked away in a padded cell somewhere if I did. But I knew I had to try. I knew I had to look for that evil face. And destroy it when I found it.”

Dana had finally grown tired of Joey’s whining and sent him back to Columbia -but she had also ordered him to make the drive back to Hastings on Sunday morning. And when he whined about that, she reminded him that news was a twenty-four-seven business and if he didn’t like it he could go use his supposed camera skills elsewhere.

As for Dana herself, she had elected to keep her room at the inn. There were several women staying there, including the federal agents, and it felt safer there.

If anywhere could feel safe in Hastings.

Dana didn’t apologize even to herself for being so jumpy, especially since Cheryl Bayne had disappeared. If this maniac was killing anybody who got in his way, anybody who offered a threat to him… then Dana now had two strikes against her. She was blond and she was media.

It was enough to make any woman jumpy, and never mind the additional worry of too many guys prowling around town with guns stuck in their belts, also jumpy as hell-

“Hi.”

Dana nearly came out of her skin. “Christ, don’t do that!”

“Sorry.” Paige Gilbert shrugged apologetically. “Like you, I just came out for ice.” She was holding an ice bucket in one hand.

Dana looked at her own bucket and sighed, continuing around the corner of the hallway to the alcove where the ice machine lived on this floor of the inn. “Why’re you staying here?” she asked the other woman. “You live in Hastings, don’t you?”

“I live alone. So I thought I’d stay here at the inn for the duration.”

Dana scooped ice, then eyed Paige. “But you aren’t a blonde.”

“Neither was-is-Cheryl Bayne. And then there’s the body they found today.”

Wary, Dana said, “I know they found one. Been dead a while, I heard.”

“Yeah.” Paige scooped ice into her bucket and straightened, adding, “My sources claim she was brunette.”

“Brunette.”

“Yeah.”

“Did your source also say she was… tortured?”

“Mangled.”

“The difference being?”

Paige hesitated, then said, “Tortured means she was alive when it happened. Mangled means she was dead.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I’ve got a bottle of scotch in my room. Want some?”

Dana didn’t hesitate. “Bet your ass I do.”

Rafe didn’t push his luck by asking too many questions. He knew Isabel had been exhausted even before the evening began, and by the time she’d confided the unspeakable tragedies in her life, it was obvious what she needed more than anything was sleep and plenty of it.

So he took her back to the inn, some instinct urging him to maintain the physical contact between them as much as possible. He was still holding her hand when they walked up the steps to the wide, old-fashioned porch.

Absently, she said, “This place couldn’t decide what it wanted to be when it grew up-a bed and breakfast or a hotel. I’ve never seen a hybrid quite like it.”

“Rocking chairs on the front porch, but no central dining room,” he agreed. “Strange. But nobody has to share a bathroom, and there’s cable.”

Isabel smiled faintly, looking at him in the yellow glow of the front porch lights. “I think Hollis and I, and a few of the news- people, are the only guests.”

“ Hastings was never a favored tourist destination, just a little town on the way to Columbia. Nothing much to see. But if we manage to stop this guy here, before he slips away again, I have a feeling it’ll put us on the map. For all the wrong reasons, unfortunately.” His fingers tightened around hers. “Isabel… that first evil face you saw. He killed himself, didn’t he? After he thought he’d killed you.”

She nodded. “Left that note I mentioned earlier, explaining what he’d done and why. Then blew his brains out. They found his body draped across my bed. How did you know?”

“Because you never went after him. Once you healed and before your friend was killed, if he hadn’t already been dead, you would have gone looking for him.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it. You would have.”

Her smile went a little crooked. “You’re probably right. And I probably would have gotten myself killed doing it. Anger and vengeance as motives never offer a happy ending. So it’s all for the best that he did the job for me, that evil is as self-destructive as it is destructive. Tips the scale a bit toward the good guys on those rare occasions when evil consumes itself with little or no help from us.”

“That balance thing.”

“Yeah. That balance thing.” She looked down at their clasped hands. “Rafe… what happened to me is something I recovered from, eventually. Physically, even psychologically. I’ve had a few relationships in recent years. Not very successful ones, but that’s probably due as much to my dedication to my job as to any lingering… emotional scars. Or maybe it’s the voices that men along the way haven’t been able to deal with. I do come with lots of baggage.”

“You don’t want me to be afraid to touch you.”

“Stop being so perceptive. It’s unnerving.”

Rafe smiled. “The only thing I’m afraid of, Isabel, is that you still don’t know what it is you want. From me. For yourself. And until you do, taking the wrong step could be the worst possible choice. For the record, I don’t think either of us is the type to consider a quick roll in the hay as a great way to de-stress.”

“No.”

“And neither one of us is a kid. At our age, we should know what we want-or, at least, know what we’re risking by getting involved with each other.”

Isabel eyed him, not without a certain humor. “I’ve always been impulsive as hell. Jump, then look for a place to land. Obviously, you look before you jump.”

“They do say opposites attract.”

“They certainly do.” She sighed. “You’re right, I don’t know what I want. And I have been feeling rattled all day because of the changes in my abilities. Not the best time to make this sort of decision, I guess.”

“No. But for what it’s worth…” He leaned over and kissed her, his free hand lifting to the side of her neck, his thumb stroking her cheek. There was nothing especially gentle in the action, nothing in the least tentative; he wanted her, and left her in no doubt of that fact.

When she could, Isabel said, “Okay, that wasn’t fair.”

Rafe grinned at her and stepped back, finally releasing her hand. “See you tomorrow at the office, Isabel.”

“Bastard.”

“Night-night. Sleep tight.”

“If you say don’t let the bedbugs bite, I’ll shoot you.”

Rafe chuckled and turned away.

She stood there on the porch and gazed after him until he returned to his Jeep, then shook her head and went into the inn’s lobby, still smiling.

“Good evening, Agent Adams,” the desk clerk said cheerily.

Isabel glanced back over her shoulder at the mostly glass front door and very well-lighted front porch, then at the clerk’s face. She looked like the soul of discretion.

Which undoubtedly meant she was already making a mental list of people to call with the latest tidbit of gossip.

Sighing, Isabel said, “Good evening, Patty.”

“We provide a continental breakfast on Sunday morning, Agent Adams. From eight to eleven. In case you and your partner didn’t know that.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her. Have a nice night, Patty.”

“You, too, Agent Adams.” She sounded consoling, sympathetic, obviously since Isabel was going to bed alone.

Isabel escaped up the stairs, hoping that glass front door was, at the very least, soundproofed. She stopped by Hollis’s room and knocked softly, reasonably sure her partner was still up but not sure she wanted company.

But Hollis opened the door immediately, saying, “I actually ordered a pizza a couple of hours ago. And ate some of it. Does that mean I’m taking a step closer to becoming accustomed to dead bodies?”

“It means your own body is healthy and needs sustenance, mostly,” Isabel replied, stepping into the room. “But, yeah, it’s a good sign you can handle the more gross aspects of the job. I’d put it in the plus column.”

“Good. I need more checks in the plus column. I was beginning to feel horribly inadequate.” Hollis invited her in with a gesture, adding, “I have an extra Pepsi here. Or did you get enough caffeine with dinner?”

“Enough. Plus, I really need a good night’s sleep.” Isabel frowned slightly, but said, “The plan is to meet up at the station by nine-thirty. Patty, downstairs, says the inn offers a continental breakfast on Sunday morning. We can go down between eight and eight-thirty, if that’s okay with you.”

“Sure.” Hollis studied her thoughtfully as she went to sit on her bed beside a closed pizza box. “You look sort of… disconcerted. Rafe?”

“He’s a little more complicated than I bargained for,” Isabel admitted, wandering around the small bedroom somewhat restlessly. “Even the clairvoyant stuff I picked up didn’t warn me about that. Dammit.”

“You told him?”

“My horror story? Yeah.”

“And?”

“He… handled it really well. Didn’t freak out, didn’t act like I was suddenly a leper. Compassionate and understanding and very discerning.” She frowned again and added in a dissatisfied tone, “Also a cautious man.”

Hollis grinned. “Wasn’t ready to just jump into bed, huh?”

“Now, what makes you think-”

“Oh, come on, Isabel. As soon as we talked earlier, I could see the wheels turning. You saw a potential emotional complication looming and, characteristically, your response was to charge toward it head-on. If he was going to be a problem in any way whatsoever, you intended to deal with it now. Whether he was ready or not.”

“Why is everybody else suddenly so perceptive as to my motives?” Isabel demanded. “I’m supposed to be the clairvoyant one. Look, I wasn’t after a one-night stand. Necessarily. It’s just… things are simpler when the physical stuff is out of the way, that’s all.”

Shaking her head, Hollis said, “Well, now I can understand why your past relationships weren’t entirely successful, if that’s your attitude about sex. Just something to get over and done with?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did. You’re a lot of things, Isabel, but subtle isn’t one of them. You probably as good as told the man you wanted to sleep with him so you wouldn’t be distracted having to think about it anymore.”

“I was not that blunt.”

“Maybe not, but I’m sure he got the gist of it.”

Isabel sat down in the chair in the corner of the bedroom and scowled at Hollis. “The SCU therapist says I have a few emotional issues about giving up control.”

“No, really?”

“It’s not a big thing. I just… prefer to make the first move whenever possible.”

“Because the last guy you allowed to make the first move turned out to be a twisted, evil bastard. Yeah, I get that. I imagine Rafe gets it as well.”

“I don’t like having transparent motives,” Isabel announced. “It makes me feel naked.”

Hollis smiled. “Don’t snap at the messenger. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

Isabel sighed. “It’s about control. I know it’s about control. Even after all these years, I can’t help feeling… wary. Not of men in general, just of men who might-possibly-mean something to me. Especially if they’re obviously very strong men. Don’t you? We both went through similar experiences, after all, and yours was just a few months ago.”

“I had Maggie Barnes,” Hollis reminded her. “That empathy thing of hers did a dandy job of taking away a lot of the pain and healing the trauma. Even though what happened to me was just months ago, it feels more like years. Decades. Distant, unimportant, almost as if it happened to someone else. Almost. Do I know if I can feel a normal, healthy desire for a man? No idea. Not yet anyway. Haven’t met a man I felt that sort of interest in so far.”

Isabel lifted an eyebrow. “You seemed a bit drawn to Caleb Powell, I thought.”

“A bit,” Hollis admitted with a shrug. “But… a big-city-caliber attorney lives and works in a small town for a reason. He wants a simple life. Had one, too, until a lethal killer began stalking his nice little town, and his employee and friend was horribly murdered. Now, like it or not, I’m part of that gruesome series of events that’s turning his simple, peaceful existence upside down.”

“You’re one of the good guys.”

“Yeah, points in the positive column for that. But not enough to balance it, I’m afraid. Especially since I have my own horror story.”

“Did you…”

“Tell him? Yeah. I met him in the coffee shop earlier, by chance, and we talked for a while. He asked questions, so I answered them. He didn’t take it all that well. Sort of freaked, actually. In a very quiet, controlled, lawyerish kind of way. But I saw his face. And he certainly didn’t offer to drive me home.” Her smile was wry. “It was the eye thing that finally got to him. Up until then, he was more or less okay, but that was a bit too much to take.”

“Hollis, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Some things aren’t meant to be, you know? I mean, if he couldn’t accept a little thing like an eye transplant, then it’s a cinch he’d never be comfortable with me talking to dead people.”

“No, probably not.”

“Some people just… can’t think outside the box. You’re lucky Rafe can.”

Isabel was frowning again. Her head tilted a bit, the frown deepening. Absently, she said, “Yes. Yes, I guess I am. The psychic stuff doesn’t throw him at all, and he was more than okay with the rest.”

“So if you can just deal with these control issues of yours, and always assuming we get this killer before he decides to add you to his blonde collection, maybe the universe really is offering you something special. A man who knows what you’ve been through, what you are, and doesn’t mind all the baggage you have to drag around with you.”

“Maybe.”

“At least accept the possibility, Isabel.”

Isabel blinked at her. “Sure. Yes. I can always accept possibilities.”

It was Hollis’s turn to frown. “Are you thinking about the long-term complications of him being settled here and you at Quantico?”

“No. I haven’t gotten that far. I mean, I haven’t really looked past now.”

Hollis studied her. “So what’s bothering you?”

“It’s just… I’m tired. Really tired.”

“I’m not surprised. You need a good night’s sleep.”

Still frowning, Isabel said, “I know I do. I can’t remember ever being this tired. So that’s probably why, right?”

“Why what?”

Softly, Isabel said, “Why I don’t hear the voices. At all.”