Stealing Shadows

TEN

"All I know is what the sheriff and Judge Ryan said in the paper," Hannah Payne told her boyfriend worriedly as they sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and finishing the last of the muffins she'd fixed earlier. Joe was about to leave for his third-shift job at the plant, and she was up because he was about to leave her alone in the house they shared.

"Baby, he just wants to scare you girls into being careful, that's all," Joe said patiently. "And he's right. But s'long as you are careful and don't go anyplace by yourself, you'll be fine. I checked all the doors and windows, locked everything up tight. You've got a dependable car, a cell phone, a pistol in the nightstand drawer, and Season."

Half asleep under the kitchen table, the big mongrel thumped his tail against the floor in a brief response.

"I know, but – "

"Take him with you when you leave the house, and be sure you drive with all the doors locked. Don't open the doors here to anyone but me or your sister. Let the machine screen all the calls, and don't pick up if you don't know who it is." He smiled at her. "Just be careful, Hannah. If you're really scared, I'll take you and Beason over to your sister's every night when I leave for work, and you can stay with them till morning."

"No, I don't want to do that. You know we always end up in a fuss over something stupid if we spend too much time together. I'll be okay here with Beason."

"You sure?" He watched her intently. "I don't know if I can, but if you want I'll try to get some time off maybe next week. We could drive up into the mountains. Unless they catch this bastard before then."

"Well, let's wait and see."

"I need to go ahead and put in for the time."

Hannah considered, then nodded. "I think I'd like to get out of town for a while. Even if they do catch him."

"Okay, I'll see if personnel can schedule me off for a few days. Just stop worrying, baby, okay?"

"I'll try. But I need to get groceries tomorrow morning," she said.

"I'll be home by eight-thirty. I'll take you."

"You need to sleep."

"I can sleep later. Now, come on – and lock the door behind me."

Hannah went with him to the front door of their small house and kissed him good-bye, perhaps clinging a bit more than was her habit. "Drive carefully. It's still snowing."

"I will, don't worry." Joe patted her on the bottom and whispered a lewd suggestion in her ear, which made her smile and remind him they didn't have time and he was going to be late for work. He grinned and winked at her.

And then he was gone.

Hannah locked the door behind him and checked the locks twice. She took Beason with her when she finally went to bed, even though he was supposed to stay in his bed in the living room.

She turned on the TV and watched a very old movie just so she wouldn't have to listen to the thick silence of the snowy night.

" Gary," Abby said.

He kept his gaze on the dog and didn't venture to cross the threshold. "Where the hell did you get that?" he demanded.

Abby was about to answer him, when it occurred to her that she didn't have to. " Gary, what are you doing here? It's nearly midnight." She made no attempt to quiet the tense, growling dog at her side.

Gary tore his gaze from the dog and smiled at her. It was the charming smile she had fallen for as an eighteen-year-old girl too young and inexperienced to worry about his brooding silences and bursts of jealous rage. He had been a strikingly handsome man then; at forty, he was thickening – around the middle and in his features. Too many years of indulging his temper and his appetites had left their mark.

"I just came to see you, Abby. What's wrong with that?"

She had been terrified, and fought not to let him see her overwhelming relief. He didn't know about Matt, at least not yet. If he had, he wouldn't have been able to keep quiet about it; in Gary, jealousy was immediate and unmistakable.

Abby drew a breath and kept her voice even and without emotion. " Gary, it's late, the weather's lousy, and I'm tired. And if that isn't enough, you must remember what Judge Ryan told you. You don't live here anymore, and if you keep showing up here unannounced, I'll get a restraining order. You don't want me to do that, do you? Talk about our business in court for everybody to know?"

It was the only real leverage she had against him, and she used it cautiously so as not to use it up. Gary was a vice president at one of the local businesses, a real estate development company that was highly respected and very prominent in town, and his reputation meant a great deal to him. A divorce was one thing; a divorce from a wife claiming physical and emotional abuse during a thirteen-year marriage was something else entirely.

She had gone to Ben Ryan the day after she'd ordered Gary – at the point of his own gun – to leave. He had listened to her story, the whole sad and messy story Matt still didn't know, and had given her both genuine compassion and excellent legal advice. Even more, he had paid Gary a discreet visit and had made it very plain to her husband that he could either quietly agree to an uncontested divorce, or find himself charged with assault and battery and divorced on the grounds of extreme cruelty.

In the months since then, Gary had been relatively cooperative, though at first prone to show up at the house from time to time. When she had gotten involved with Matt only a few months after her separation, Abby had grown fearful that her volatile husband would appear at just the wrong moment; combine Gary 's violent jealousy with Matt's fierce protectiveness and the meeting could only end in tragedy.

Once again she had gone to Ben, though this time withholding the relevant fact of her involvement with another man. And once again he had visited Gary, this time to explain that unsolicited visits would not be tolerated.

Gary had been very quiet since then.

Too quiet.

Now he scowled at her. "I suppose you'll go running to Ryan again, just because I wanted to see you. It's a sad thing when a man can't talk to his own wife, Abby."

Bryce's growls grew louder as he either sensed her growing tension or heard the menace in Gary 's voice.

Abby allowed the dog's growls to fill the silence for a moment, then said, " Gary, our divorce will be final in just about three weeks. I am not your wife, not anymore. There's nothing you have to say to me that I'm the least bit interested in hearing. Except good-bye. Please close the gate as you leave."

His scowl intensified, but his voice was low, almost gentle. "You really shouldn't talk to me like that, Abby. Until those final papers are signed, you're still my wife. And a wife should never say such things to her husband. Not if she knows what's good for her."

Abby felt an all-too-familiar chill of fear and fought to keep him from seeing how easily he could still manipulate her emotions. "In thirty seconds I'm going to let go of this dog. From the sound of him, I don't think he'll need any encouragement at all to take a few pieces out of you. And while he's doing it, I'll be calling the sheriff."

Maybe he remembered that shotgun she had pointed at him on his last night in this house, or maybe Gary simply recognized that Abby was not going to back down this time. In any case, he was the one who retreated, slowly, down the steps.

"And Gary?"

He looked at her, silent, face hard.

"Just so you know – if anything happens to this dog, like poison, for instance, or a stray shot from some anonymous hunter's gun, or even a car that doesn't stop, I'm going to give your name to the sheriff."

His expression darkened just a bit, proving to Abby that she did indeed know her husband. Then he swore beneath his breath and stalked away. She heard the gate open, and then close with a loud click.

Abby stood stiffly, listening until she heard a car start up nearby, then the crunch of tires on the snowy street and the engine fading into the distance.

Then she slumped against the doorjamb.

She really needed to get a padlock for the gate, a strong one. And the security company had recommended shrubbery lights and a post lamp at the front walkway, so that no one could approach the house at night unseen. Burglars, they'd said, tended to avoid houses with good perimeter lighting.

She wondered if violent ex-husbands would.

Bryce was whimpering softly, obviously disturbed. Abby managed to get hold of herself enough to take him out onto the porch. But the dog refused to move more than a few feet away from her, lifting his leg against the nearest bush and returning quickly to her. Maybe it was the cold or the snow still drifting lazily downward that made him disinclined to linger. Or maybe he simply knew that he needed to remain close.

Abby brought him back inside and locked the door, then reset the security system.

"Tomorrow," she told the dog as she dried his feet and brushed a bit of snow from his glossy red coat, "we're calling the security company and getting those lights put in. And we'll get a padlock for the back gate."

Her voice was calm, but her heart still thudded, and that horrible cold knot of anxiety that Gary always created lay huge and heavy in the pit of her stomach.

She was afraid. She hated to be afraid.

"I don't want to scare you, Abby. But you have to be careful. I saw a possible future for you, and it isn't good.

There's a chance… I saw him kill you, Abby. I couldn't see his face, and I don't know who he is, but he was enraged, cursing, and his hands were on your throat."

"What? What are you saying?"

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. You have to be careful. He's a madman, sick in his mind, and he'll kill you unless – "

"Unless?"

"The future is not static, Abby. Even prophecies are not always what the seer interprets them to be."

That had been Alexandra Melton's warning, and all she would say. Since Abby had only a few days earlier thrown her abusive husband out of the house, she had been half convinced it had been her own fear and anxiety the older woman sensed, that the "prophecy" had arisen from that.

Still, she had continued to be wary, to take care. Given Gary 's propensity toward violence, it had been obvious to her that if Alexandra had indeed seen a future event, the madman in her vision would certainly be him.

Until, as Matt had baldly stated, a killer had begun butchering women. Now she had to be wary, not only of her ex-husband, but of virtually every other man as well.

They were certainly not reassuring thoughts that followed Abby to bed that night. And when Bryce looked at her with pleading eyes, she allowed the big dog to stretch out happily beside her.

She kept her hand on him all night.

FEBRUARY 25, 1999

Cassie woke in the morning with a sense of expectancy. She lay in bed for some minutes, thinking, aware from the brightness of the room that it had snowed considerably more during the night, but in no hurry to get up and look. Her sleep had been unusually restful, dreamless as far as she remembered, and she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

The evening with Ben had been surprising. As he had noted, she was able to relax her guard in his company, yet even as her "extra" senses lay peacefully dormant, the other five had awakened with a vengeance. She had been hyper-aware of him, of his voice, his movements and gestures, his smiles.

Especially his smiles.

And oddly aware of his awareness. She found that strange because it was something completely new for her. Always before, either she could read a man – such as the sheriff – or she could not. If she could not, it meant he was a closed book to her, revealing nothing of himself that was not visible.

Perhaps because of the violent male minds she had routinely dipped into her entire adult life, Cassie had seldom felt more than a fleeting interest in any man personally. And even when the natural urges and drives of a healthy young female body had presented themselves, she'd had little difficulty in pushing them from her consciousness.

When one's only experience of sex lay in horrible mental images of unspeakable violence and death accompanied by terror and agony, it was virtually reflexive to completely avoid even the possibility of becoming involved with any man.

So Cassie knew herself to be dangerously isolated and inexperienced when it came to saner human emotions, and ridiculously ignorant about the physical side of a normal male-female relationship.

Ben was attracted to her, she was sure of it. She knew she was attracted to him. Instincts she hardly understood told her that the attraction was strong and intensifying, and that it was only a matter of time before…

Before what? Before they ended up in bed together? Before they fell in love? Before he swept her off her feet and into some absurd emotional fairy tale she hadn't believed in since she was eight and possibly not even then?

Cassie threw back the covers as she sat up, her earlier sense of happy expectancy deflated. She was, she told herself, being an absolute idiot. For the first time in her adult life, she had been thrown into the company of a handsome, sexy man whose mind was closed to her and who had shown her what was undoubtedly only ordinarily polite attention, and her imagination was running away with her.

Ben needed her to help catch a madman threatening his town, and that was the only reason he needed her. His devotion to this town and its people was strong, his abhorrence of insane killers even stronger, and in her abilities lay possible tools for him to use to protect the former and destroy the latter.

That was all.

Having reached that conclusion, Cassie tried to stop thinking about it. About him. She got up and dressed, then put the coffee on, got her boots from the laundry room, and took Max out for his morning run.

It had snowed about four inches, not so much that it made walking difficult but just enough to cover the winter-flattened grass of the fields with a blanket of pristine white. The bare limbs of the hardwood trees were frosted with a thin layer, while the pines so common in the state bore the weight of snow on drooping boughs that appeared to slump in weariness.

Cassie watched Max dash around happily, then lifted her gaze to the mountains. Ryan's Bluff was nestled in a valley high up against a shoulder of the Appalachians; normally the view of the mountains was pleasant and often a bit hazy, but today the dull green and brown was dusted with snow and the cold, clear air made the hulking shapes seem to loom nearer than they actually were.

As she stared up at them, Cassie's smile of pleasure faded. For the first time, they felt threatening, brooding down on the valley and the town with an almost malevolent stare.

Watching her.

Just as she had in Ivy Jameson's kitchen, she felt a pressure in or on her chest, at first barely noticeable but intensifying slowly. The chill of the ground seemed to sweep upward from her boots in a wave that left behind it cold flesh and quivering muscles.

The crisp white landscape surrounding her took on a dingy gray hue, as though a fog had moved in, and a dull, roaring sound grew louder in her ears. She had the sense of something beating up against her like fluttering wings, trying to get in, and the touch of it was as icy as the grave.

The sensations were so unsettling and unfamiliar that Cassie didn't know what to do. She was afraid to lower her guard, to open herself up and let whatever it was touch her mind. But as wary and fearful as she was, experience had taught her that struggling against any attempt to contact her would only prolong the situation – and possibly make it impossible for her to control what happened.

If she could control it.

Cassie drew a breath and let it out slowly, watching it turn to mist before her face. Then she closed her eyes and opened herself to whatever it was that demanded her attention.

Ben tossed the plastic evidence bag onto Sheriff Dunbar's desk and said, "Cassie may not mind, but I really don't appreciate your sense of humor, Matt."

"Excuse me?" Matt was wonderfully polite.

"Don't play innocent, it's not your best face. That scrap of cloth is from your old Boy Scout uniform."

"So she got that, huh?" Matt said as Ben sat down in his visitor's chair.

"She got it. Said the cloth was only evidence of your sense of humor – which she had doubted until then."

Matt smiled, but then quickly frowned.

"She said it wouldn't convince you." Ben was watching him. "But that it might at least give you pause. For Christ's sake, Matt, what's it going to take?"

Matt ignored the question. "Following up on the coins hasn't given us squat. For one thing, all the collectors we've talked to so far have been middle-aged or older. All apparently happily married with kids. And not so much as a traffic ticket among them."

"And so nowhere near the profile."

"If I accept the profile, yes."

"Do you? And will you finally admit we have a serial killer?"

Matt hesitated. "I may be stubborn, but I'm no fool, Ben. The only real connection between the three victims is their sex and race – and the fact that we can't find, in any of their pasts, an enemy angry enough or with any other kind of motive to kill any of them. Which means it's looking more and more likely all three were killed by a stranger, or at least by someone they hardly knew."

"Which points to a serial killer."

"I don't see any other option, goddammit." Matt sighed explosively. "They used to call them stranger killings, did you know that? Before somebody coined the term 'serial killer.' The most difficult kind of murder to solve because the killer has no tangible connection with his victim."

Ben nodded. "I've been doing some reading on the subject, especially since Ivy and Jill were killed. Sounds like you have as well."

"For all the good it's done me. All I end up with is that pathetically thin profile your damned psychic offered after Becky was killed. White male between twenty-four and thirty-two, probably single and unlikely to be involved with a woman, probably from an abusive background with at least one domineering parent, probably with sexual problems. Hell, I probably speak to the guy when I pass him on the streets!"

Ben could understand the sheriff's frustration, because he shared it.

"Worst of all," Matt said gloomily, "yesterday I heard at least three people mention the phrase 'serial killer,' and once that spreads, things are going to get crazy around here very fast. Say we've got a murderer running around and people get upset. Say it's a serial killer and they go nuts. It's like yelling Shark! at the beach."

"Most of the women seem to be taking care, at least we've got that," Ben offered. "I don't think I've seen one walking alone all week."

Matt grunted. "It's not much to brag about, Ben. The bald truth is that we're no closer to finding this guy than we were last week when Becky was killed. And you know as well as I do that the longer we go on without a break in the case, the less likely it is that we'll ever get this bastard. We catch killers because they leave evidence we can interpret or they do something stupid. This one has done neither. Maybe he'll kill again and get cocky enough to leave us some helpful evidence. Or maybe three was his limit and now he's just sitting back, watching us stumble around in the dark."

"Cassie thinks he isn't finished yet."

"Oh, shit." The sheriff didn't sound so much disgusted as despairing.

Keeping his tone as neutral as possible, Ben said, "If we're going to take advantage of her abilities, we'd better do it soon. The longer this goes on, the more likely it is that this bastard could catch Cassie in his mind and recognize her as a threat."

Matt stared at him. "You've been reading up on psychics as well as serial killers, haven't you?"

Ben didn't deny it. "The consensus seems to be that some people are abnormally sensitive to the electromagnetic energies of the brain. Through one conduit or another they're able to tap into the energies of other people's minds and read them, interpret them as thoughts and images, and even emotions."

"What do you mean by 'conduit'?" This sounded more like science and a lot less like magic, so Matt was at least inclined to listen.

"What Cassie called 'connections.' Physical touch, either of a person or some object he or she has touched, is most common. It's rare for a psychic to be able to tap into another mind without being in some kind of contact. But for a very few psychics – and I think Cassie's among them – once that contact has occurred and lasted long enough, it seems to leave a sort of map or trail behind, like a faint stream of energy connecting the two minds. After that, it's possible for the psychic to follow the trail virtually at will."

Ben paused. "Unfortunately it's also possible for the target mind to identify that connection – maybe even follow it back to the psychic."

"Even if he isn't psychic?" Matt asked intently.

"There's some speculation that the mind of a serial killer is so abnormal that their thoughts literally 'misfire' so that the electromagnetic energy spills into the brain and causes changes at the molecular level. Just the way a head injury can trigger latent psychic abilities by jolting the brain, so can these misfires. Over a period of time the serial killer can actually become psychic. If that's so, and if this killer is as young as Cassie believes, it may be only a matter of time before he can follow the trail back to her."

"Assuming he doesn't read her name in the paper first," Matt commented dryly.

"That's the other risk, and probably a more likely one. Sooner or later word will get around that Cassie is psychic and that we've been talking to her."

"Won't that look just dandy at the next election."

"If we put this killer behind bars," Ben reminded him, "I doubt very much the voters will care how we did it."

"Maybe. But in the meantime, we'll take a lot of flak. And your psychic will take center stage."

"Stop calling her my psychic. You know her name."

Matt eyed him. "Touchy, aren't you?"

"This is not about me. Are you going to ask Cassie for help or aren't you?"

Rather mildly Matt said, "Yes, I am."

Ben blinked. "And just when did you make up your mind about that?"

Matt fingered the evidence bag still lying on the blotter in front of him. "When you told me she knew this came from my old Boy Scout uniform. Like you said – like she said – I'm not convinced. But I can't think of a single trick or deception to explain how she could identify this correctly. Except that she knew. Taken with the rest, it's enough to make me want to find out what else she knows."

"It's about time."

"Well, don't just sit there staring at me. Call her."

At first Cassie was aware of nothing except the cold. Far beyond the chill of snow and wind, this cold was absolute. It felt, she imagined, the way the biting touch of deep space would feel against cringing human flesh. She had the hazy idea that even the blood in her veins was slowing, turning to slush as the cold reached it.

The fluttering sensation returned, intensified for a moment, then faded, and she felt something else.

Someone else.

Cassie opened her eyes slowly. Around her the air remained gray and foggy. She was distantly aware of the dog barking frantically but didn't see him. She turned her head slowly, toward the woods, where more pines than hardwood trees made the area dark and gloomy with the canopy of their heavy branches.

The people were standing just inside the woods.

There must have been a dozen of them, mostly women but a few men as well, and at least one young boy. They watched her with eyes as profoundly reproachful as those Ivy Jameson had aimed across her kitchen at Cassie days before.

When they started moving slowly toward her, Cassie saw the wounds. One woman's throat gaped open. Another's head was misshapen, a horrible depression of the skull crying mutely of a heavy object and terrible force. One man carried his own bloody arm, while another held his hands protectively over the inches-wide gash that opened him from chest to crotch.

They walked toward her steadily, emerging from the shadows of the woods and into the field with its gray snow and foggy air, and that appalling coldness came off them in waves that were almost visible.

They left no footprints in the snow.

Cassie heard a faint whimpering sound and realized it was coming from her own throat. It was a pathetic substitute for the scream crawling around deeper inside her. She was frozen, immobile. She couldn't run away or back away or even throw up an arm to try to protect herself.

All she could do was stand there and wait for them to reach her.

To touch her.