Stealing Shadows

TWO

FEBRUARY 18, 1999

"He's done it."

Ben pushed himself up onto an elbow and turned on the lamp beside his bed. The clock told him it was five-thirty. In the morning.

Christ, it was still dark.

He wedged the phone between ear and shoulder. "Who's done what? And do you know what time it is?"

"He's killed her," Cassie Neill said softly. Starkly.

Ben woke up.

He shoved the covers aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." She drew a breath. "It happened hours ago. There was nothing anyone could do, so – so I waited to call you. As long as I could."

Ben wondered what it was like to be awake and alone through the long, dark hours of the night – and aware of horrors. The professional part of him pushed that aside to say, "You should have called me right away. Evidence – "

"Won't be changed by the passing of a few hours. Not what little he left behind." Cassie sounded impossibly weary. "But you're right, I should have called immediately. I'm sorry."

Ben drew a breath. "Do you know where?"

"Yes, I think so. There's an old abandoned barn on the north end of town, about five miles out."

"I know it. Used to be a stockyard there."

"She's… he left her in the woods behind that barn. He didn't kill her there, but it's where he left her. I think… I think she'll be easy to find. He didn't bury the body or try to hide it in any way. In fact… he posed her somehow."

"Posed her?"

"Sat her up with her back against a tree. He was very careful to get the look just right. It must mean something." Cassie's voice faded on the last words, and she sighed. "I don't know what. I'm sorry. I'm tired."

Ben hesitated, then said, "I'll go take a look."

"Before you call the sheriff?" There was wry understanding in her tone.

Ben was unwilling to admit that he didn't want to look like an even more gullible fool if this turned out to be a false alarm. So he merely said, "I'll probably want to talk to you later."

"I'll be here." Cassie hung up quietly.

Dawn was just lightening the sky when Ben parked his Jeep at the old Pittman stockyard. He turned on the flashlight he'd brought along in order to pick his way around the barn and through a ragged gap in what was left of the fence to the woods in back of the place.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

He didn't go very far into the woods before halting and directing the flashlight in a slow arc ahead. These were hardwood trees, bare of leaves in February, the undergrowth scant, so he could see quite well.

He hadn't really believed she would be there.

When the light fell on her, Ben heard his own sharply indrawn breath.

Just as Cassie had described, the victim sat with her back against a tree, facing the barn, easily visible. Her eyes were open, her head tilted a bit to one side and her lips slightly parted as though she had paused in saying something to listen politely to a companion. Her hands lay folded in her lap, palms up. She was fully dressed.

Ben knew her. Becky Smith, a girl barely twenty who worked – had worked – at the drugstore in town while she attended the local community college. She had wanted to be a teacher.

Her throat was cut from ear to ear.

"Goddammit, Ben, you know belter!" The sheriff was furious, and it showed.

"Like you wouldn't have done the exact same thing?" Ben shook his head. "As convincing as she sounded, Matt, I didn't really believe I was going to find anything. So, yes, I walked within twelve feet of the body. I didn't realize it was a crime scene until it was too late. But I didn't touch her or disturb anything."

"Why the hell didn't you call me before coming out here?"

Ben glanced past the sheriff, toward the rear of the barn, where most of the dozen or so deputies Matt had brought were carefully combing the ground. The sun was well up now, and Becky's body had been taken away.

Her body being zipped into the black bag was a sight he would not soon forget.

"Ben?"

"We've been through this, Matt. I didn't want to look like a jackass if I dragged you out here and there was nothing to find."

"So you came out on your own. Unarmed. What if the bastard hadn't finished his work, Ben? Jesus, she was hardly cold."

"I wish I had found him here. I'm not a twenty-year-old girl."

"And he might have had a gun. Did you think of that? Did you think at all?"

Normally Ben wouldn't have allowed his friend to censure him – loudly – in a fairly public arena, but he knew Matt well enough to recognize that the sheriff was badly shaken.

Before today, the last murder in Salem County had occurred ten years back, when Thomas Byrd had come home early from work to find another man keeping his bed warm. To say nothing of Mrs. Byrd. It had been an entirely understandable crime of passion.

This crime was everything but understandable.

"Matt, can we please get past my reckless actions and move on?"

Mart's mouth tightened, but he nodded.

"Okay. Now, since you were elected by the good citizens of Salem County to catch criminals, and I was elected to prosecute them, I'd say we have work to do."

"Yeah." Matt turned his head to look toward the activity behind the barn and scowled. "And the first thing I want to do is talk to Cassie Neill."

Ben hesitated, then said, "You and your people have to finish up here. Why don't I go get Miss Neill and bring her to the station? I'm very interested in what she has to say."

Matt turned his scowl to his friend. "It isn't your place to investigate crimes, Ben. Your job starts when I catch the bastard."

"My job is made a lot easier if I'm involved early on, and you know it."

"Maybe. And maybe in this case your involvement would be a bad idea. You aren't exactly impartial, are you?"

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"What I mean is that you obviously have a soft spot for your fragile so-called psychic. I won't let you get in my way, Ben."

It took a moment, but then Ben got it. "Ah, I see. You think Cassie Neill killed Becky Smith."

"And you obviously don't."

"I know she didn't." Ben heard the words come out of his mouth and was more than a little surprised by them.

Matt didn't seem to be. "Uh-huh. And you know that because – "

"I told you. She doesn't have it in her to kill someone. Especially not like that. Come on, Matt. It takes a particular brand of brutality to cut a woman's throat from ear to ear. Don't tell me you saw that in Cassie."

"The first thing you learn as a cop is that the most likely explanation is probably the right one. Cassie Neill did a hell of a good job describing a crime scene. I say it's because she'd seen it."

"I agree. But I don't think she was here."

"The psychic bullshit. Yeah, right."

"Matt, try to keep an open mind." Once more Ben glanced past the sheriff at the uniformed people searching for clues, then added quietly, "You know those hunches I used to get when we were kids?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I've got one now. I've got a hunch that this is just the beginning." He returned his gaze to Matt's face.

"And the psychic bullshit may be the only thing we've got going for us."

The old Melton place consisted of a Victorian-style house and various outbuildings that sat on twenty acres more than ten miles from town. Alexandra Melton had bought the place back in 1976, arriving in Ryan's Bluff from the West Coast with, apparently, plenty of money and nobody but herself to spend it on.

She had been quite a character. Her outfit of choice had been jeans and T-shirts, often paired with unusual hats or flowing silk scarves. Still beautiful right up until her death from pneumonia at sixty-plus the previous year, she had black hair that had been touched by silver only in a narrow streak above her left temple, and her figure had remained striking enough to attract admiring eyes whenever she came into town. Which was rarely. Once a month for supplies, no more often.

The odd thing was that Alex Melton had struck most as a warm and outgoing woman with a brisk, no-nonsense manner and a big heart. Yet she had made it plain from the outset that she did not want or need visitors and that she had no intention of becoming involved in community affairs.

Or affairs of the heart, apparently. Ben had heard the stories. Because she had been so beautiful, more than one man had made an attempt over the years, only to be firmly, if kindly, rebuffed. Word had it that a woman or two had also tried, and received the same decisive refusal.

It apparently wasn't a question of which way Alex Melton swung, but the fact that she didn't swing at all.

Ben thought of all that as his Jeep wound its way up the long dirt drive to the house that now belonged to Alex's niece. She didn't mind the isolation, she'd said. It was peaceful. Or had been.

She'd also said that she had "run" three thousand miles to escape the fate she saw for herself, only to fail.

Ben didn't know if he believed Cassie Neill saw her own fate, but he was certain she was running away from something. And another one of his hunches told him that understanding what that was would be important to him.

He parked the Jeep in the circular drive in front of the house and got out. For a moment he just studied the house, noting that it was being slowly redone on the outside. New shutters^ new paint on the railing of the wraparound porch, and he thought the front door, with its oval leaded glass inset, had also been refinished. The house hadn't been in bad shape before, but the new work definitely improved it.

Ben knocked on the door, and Cassie opened it holding a paintbrush in one hand.

"Hi," he said. "I would say good morning, but it isn't."

"No, it isn't. Come in." She stepped back and opened the door wider.

Just as in his office, she looked at him directly only in flickering glances. But this time, with her hair tied back away from her face and with her dressed in jeans and a close-fitting thermal shirt, he got a much better look at her.

She wasn't just fragile. She was almost ethereal.

"The coffee's hot. Would you like some?" If she was even conscious of his scrutiny, Cassie didn't seem bothered by it.

"Please." He followed her through an open living area with little furniture – where she'd been painting a small table on newspapers spread out in the center of the room – and into the kitchen.

Cassie took a moment to rinse her paintbrush and leave it in the sink, then washed her hands and poured coffee for them both. "Black, right?"

"Right. More ESP?"

"No. Just a guess." She handed him the cup without touching his fingers, then took her own to the scarred old wooden table in the center of the room. "Do you mind if we sit in here? I need to let the paint fumes in the other room dissipate."

"No problem." He joined her, sitting in the chair on the other side of the table. "I always liked this room." It was warm and cheery, sunny with numerous windows and brightly painted in yellow.

"You knew my aunt, then?"

"Slightly. I came out here a few times." He smiled. "I wanted her vote. Besides, she was an interesting lady."

Cassie sipped her coffee, her gaze on the cup. "So I've been told. There's lots of her stuff packed away; sooner or later I'll have to go through it. Looks like she kept a journal, as well as all her correspondence. Maybe I'll finally get to know her myself. I'm not in a hurry about that though. There's so much else to do."

Ben had a hunch that she had put off going through her aunt's things not because of being busy elsewhere but simply because she was not yet ready to open herself up, even to the personality and memories of a dead woman. From what the L.A. detective had told him, Cassie had been worse than walking wounded when she had retreated here nearly six months before. Detective Logan believed she had been about a breath away from a complete physical, emotional, and mental breakdown, the result of living through one nightmare too many.

But Ben accepted her explanation, at least for the moment, and said only, "You're renovating the house?"

"No, just updating a bit." Her glance flickered toward his face, then fell again. "I like working with my hands. Working with wood."

"Touching beautiful things because you can't touch people?"

That brought her gaze to his face, and this time it stayed. There were smudges of exhaustion underneath her pale eyes and he could read nothing in them, yet he still felt the warmth as clearly as though she had reached out and laid her hand upon him. It was an unnerving sensation, yet one he knew he had wanted to feel again.

"That's too simple," she said.

"Is it? You avoid physical contact with people. Or is it just me?"

Cassie shook her head. "It's… uncomfortable for me. I'm a touch telepath. It's very difficult for me to block out someone else's thoughts and emotions when I'm in physical contact with them." Her shoulders lifted and fell.

"So you just avoid touch."

She looked back at her cup. "There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong. In the darkest parts of our minds."

"The parts you can see."

Again she shrugged. "I've seen enough. Too much. I try not to look."

"Except when murderers blast their way in?"

"I tried to shut him out, believe me. I didn't want to know what he was going to do. What he did."

"But if there was even a chance you might stop him – "

"I didn't, did I? Stop him. I went to the sheriff. I went to you. I even opened myself up and crawled into his… darkest places. But it didn't stop him. It never stops them."

"That's not what Detective Logan told me."

Cassie shook her head. "They're caught eventually. Maybe I can help with that, maybe not. But people still die. And there's not a single goddamned thing I can do to change that." Her voice was soft.

"So you ran here, is that it? Here, in this isolated house near a small town where you could hope for peace."

"Don't I have a right to peace? Doesn't everyone?"

"Yes. But, Cassie, you can't ignore what you see any more than I could ignore it if I saw someone stabbed on a street corner. I would have to do what I could to help. So do you."

She drew a breath. "I've spent ten years doing what I could to help. I'm tired. I just want to be left alone,"

"Do you think he'll leave you alone?"

She was silent.

"Cassie?"

"No," she whispered.

Ben wished she would look at him again, but her gaze seemed welded to her coffee cup. "Then help us. Becky Smith was just twenty, Cassie. A college student who loved kids and wanted to be a teacher. She deserved her life. She deserved her chance. Help us catch the bastard who took that away from her."

"You don't know what you're asking."

"I have some idea. I know it'll take a lot out of you. But we need your help. We have to do whatever it takes to get this guy before he gets away. Or before he kills again."

Finally her gaze lifted to meet his, and there was something lurking in the depths of her eyes that made him flinch. Something small and hurting.

"All right," Cassie said quietly. "I'll get my jacket."

"So?" The sheriff wasn't openly hostile, but close. "Let's have it."

They were in Mart's office, seated side by side in the visitors' chairs in front of the old slate-top desk that had been his father's, and the sheriff was already in a nasty mood because his people had found absolutely nothing useful at the crime scene.

And he didn't believe in psychic bullshit, he just didn't.

"I can't tell you much more than I already have," Cassie said. "The killer is male – "

"How can you be so sure of that?" Ben asked. "You said identity isn't a conscious thing. Is gender?"

"Sometimes. But in this case…" She avoided his gaze, fixing hers on the hands clasped in her lap. "When he was watching her… planning what he would do to her… he was… aware of his erection."

It was the sheriff who reddened slightly and shifted in his chair, but his voice was sharp when he said, "This wasn't a sexual attack."

"They're always sexual attacks."

"This woman was not touched sexually," he insisted. "Preliminary reports say no semen was found anywhere on or near the body. For Christ's sake, she still had her panties on."

"That doesn't matter. He was in a state of sexual excitement when he stalked her, and he achieved release when he killed her."

"My God, you were in his mind during all that?" Ben said, startled.

"Yes. When he first went after her and then again, after he'd tied her up and was… was ready to hurt her. That time I was with him for a few minutes. It didn't take long, and just as he killed her I… managed to breakaway."

Ben wondered what it must be like to observe – maybe even experience intimately – the orgasm of an insane killer, and thought it was undoubtedly one memory Cassie would happily part with. For the first time, he began to truly understand what lay behind her haunted eyes.

Monsters indeed.

The sheriff had something else on his mind. "So he tied her up, did he?"

"Not with ropes," Cassie said. "A belt, I think. For her wrists. He didn't tie her ankles. He – he made her sit with her legs apart."

"Why? "Ben asked.

"It was… part of the pose somehow. Part of what he needed to see. He was taunting her. He kept… he kept putting the knife between her legs and threatening to put it inside her. He wanted her to be afraid. She was. She was terrified."

"You know this because you saw it," Matt said.

"Yes."

"Through his eyes."

"Yes, Sheriff."

The sheriff was looking at her squarely, his gaze narrowed in suspicion. "I'm having a hard time understanding this, Miss Neill. You claim not to know the murderer. So how is it you're able to see what he does? Know what he was feeling? Do you always pick up the thoughts and plans of strangers? Like a bad filling picks up stray radio signals?"

She shook her head and explained what she had explained many times before. "Maybe I touched something he touched. That's most likely."

"Touched something like what?"

"Like… a door he'd just passed through. Something on the shelf of a store. A theater seat he'd been in the night before. Or I might have bumped against him in the grocery store. Our eyes might have met for a moment on the streets. But – "

Ben interrupted. "Eyes meeting? Something so… impersonal?"

Cassie's head turned slightly toward him, but her gaze remained on her hands. "It's… a question of connecting. I've never been able to – to read anyone without some kind of connection. It's almost always a physical touch, either of the person or something the person came into contact with recently. An object. A bit of clothing."

"But eyes meeting?" Ben repeated. "Two strangers on opposite street corners – it could be as brief and simple as that?"

"Ben, do you mind?" the sheriff said.

"It's an important point, Matt. If all she needed to make this connection was a glance – "

Sourly, the sheriff said, "I know goddamned well what it means, Ben. A town full of suspects. Assuming, of course, that I believe any of this bullshit. So far I haven't heard a good reason to."

"Cassie knew someone would be murdered," Ben said. "She told both of us a couple of days ago. She called me this morning to tell me it had happened – and where."

"Yeah, and you know what I think about that. Maybe she was able to do that because she'd been there. Maybe she knew the details because she killed Becky Smith."

Cassie lifted her gaze for the first time. "No. I didn't kill her. I didn't even know her." Then a frown flitted across her brow. "But neither did he, really."

Ben leaned forward. "What? He didn't know her?"

Cassie turned her head and looked at him. "No. He'd been watching her. He knew who she was. He thought he knew… what she was."

"What do you mean – what she was?"

"Somehow… she wasn't what he thought. He was disappointed in her. Maybe because of something she'd said or done. He was angry at her. Enraged. Yet… I didn't get a sense of intimate knowledge. And I don't believe she had known him in any real sense before he grabbed her."

"She didn't know who he was?"

Cassie shook her head. "I can't be sure, but I don't think so. She might have recognized him as someone she'd seen around town, maybe even on a regular basis, but I didn't get the sense that she really knew him. He: might have done something to disguise himself, of course, though that doesn't seem likely if he knew he was going to kill her. As for what she saw, she was pleading with him not to hurt her, but she never said his name. If she'd known his name, if she'd recognized him, she probably would have."

"You get sound too?" the sheriff said.

Ben swore impatiently, but Cassie's gaze returned to him and a faint smile without real amusement curved her mouth. "Sometimes it's just like turning on a television set."

"Turn it on now," he invited. "Let's see what the bastard's doing at the moment."

"I wish it were that easy."

His chair creaked angrily as he leaned back. "Yeah, I thought so. Not quite like turning on a TV, I guess."

It was obviously an attitude Cassie had encountered before. "I'm sorry, Sheriff. I wish I could just flip a switch or say a magic word and climb inside this monster's head to get the answers you need." She drew a breath. "If he kills again, I'll probably connect again. Murderers like this one tend to get progressively more wound up and excited when the lust to kill starts building in them. Those powerful emotions broadcast strongly. Now… now he's probably in a cooling-down period. Very calm, maybe tired. His mind is quiet, contained. It isn't reaching out. And without a physical connection, I can't reach out to him."

Ben glanced at Matt but said nothing.

There was a moment of silence, and then the sheriff said grimly, " 'Cooling-off period' is the phrase those behavioral sciences boys at Quantico use. Miss Neill, are you trying to tell us we've got a serial killer here? On the basis of one murder?"

Cassie hesitated visibly. "I can't say for sure. I only know there's… something abnormal about him. About the way his mind works. And she was a stranger to him, or as good as. People who kill are almost always driven – by rage, hate, jealousy, greed, even fear. People who kill the way he did, using a knife, getting the blood on him… that can only be done in an extreme emotional state. It's hard to feel so strongly toward a virtual stranger, for someone whose life never touched yours in any meaningful sense. But serial killers… they have their own mad reasons to kill. And they almost always kill strangers."

"You seem to know a lot about the subject," the sheriff said.

"I've spent a lot of time around some very good cops. I learned as much as I needed to in order to try to help them. Enough so that it's been a long time since I had a good night's sleep." Her voice was matter-of-fact and without self-pity.

"Monsters," Ben murmured.

She glanced at him. "When I was a child, my mother told me that if I turned on a light, I'd see there was no monster hiding in the closet or under my bed. She was always right about that. Then. I'm all grown-up now. And the monsters in my life aren't under my bed. They're inside my own mind, where I can't shine a light on them."

The sheriff was unaffected by her words. "Ever talk to a shrink, Miss Neill?"

"Lots of them." Her voice was as dry and unemotional as his had been. "Sheriff, I can give you plenty of references. Testimonials from lots of cops on the "West Coast, all of them as hardheaded and rational as you are. They'll tell you that they were doubtful too, in the beginning. That they also suggested I talk to someone about these… voices and images in my head. And they'll tell you that time and experience convinced them that sometimes – not always, but sometimes – I could help them catch killers."

She drew a breath, her pale eyes fixed on his. "No matter what you believe or don't believe about what I can do, Sheriff Dunbar, there's one thing you can be very, very sure of. I hate this. I didn't ask for this, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It is not a pleasant thing to be jolted awake in the middle of the night with the screams of a dying woman ringing in your ears and the smell of her blood so real, you expect to find yourself covered in it.

"It is not a pleasant thing to sit across a desk from hard and suspicious men like you and talk calmly about vicious crimes and monsters who can't be banished by the light of day or sanity. And it is more traumatic and debilitating than you will ever know for me to force myself to drop all the guards I've spent a lifetime building and climb inside the mind of something that is not human.

"So give me a break, Sheriff. I did not kill that poor woman, and since I did not, you will never find a shred of evidence against me. Now, I will give you the references I spoke of, and you can check them out or not. Believe them or not. If you want my help, I will do everything I can to help you. If not, I'll go back to my peaceful house and my peaceful life. And the next time I'm awakened by the screams of a dying murder victim, I'll pull my pillow over my ears and try my damnedest to ignore them."

Ben looked at Matt but said nothing. Cassie was obviously her own best champion, at least where her psychic ability was concerned, and if there was ever going to be any kind of understanding between her and the skeptical sheriff, it would have to be reached by the two of them.

It would not be easy.

"I don't believe in psychics, Miss Neill," Matt said. "And I don't trust you."

"That is your prerogative, Sheriff." She matched him stare for stare, and her voice was cool, her steel core suddenly evident. "Judge Ryan asked me to help, and I said I would. But I am not going to jump through hoops for you, especially when my help is not wanted. If you think I'm a killer, lock me up. When the next body turns up, I'll have a cast-iron alibi. Unless you do believe it's possible to walk through walls and bars."

He ignored that. "I don't suppose you have an alibi for last night?"

"The same one you have. I was home in bed. Of course, I was alone."

Matt stiffened. "Meaning?"

"Meaning you weren't."

Ben was surprised but kept his mouth shut.

"Nice guess, Miss Neill," Matt said.

"It wasn't a guess. I don't even have to try very hard to read you, Sheriff. You're an open book. The lady has red hair. I believe her name is… Abby. Abby Montgomery."

Ben said, "For God's sake, Matt – if Gary finds out, he'll come after you with a gun. She's still his wife."

"They're separated," Matt snapped.

"Not in his mind."

Matt stared at Cassie. "You probably saw us together."

"You've been very circumspect, both of you," she said. "Nothing in public. As Judge Ryan said, her husband hasn't accepted the separation. He has a bad temper. It's why their marriage broke up." She frowned suddenly. "Be careful, Sheriff. Be very careful."

"Or?"

"Or you'll never be able to take her to Paris next summer the way you want to."