Whisper of Evil

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"You didn't have to stay," Nell said.

Max debated silently but decided there was no benefit in arguing about it, at least not at the moment. So he ignored the question. "Is your partner taking care of the… remains?"

"More or less. Supervising the removal."

"He can hardly watch you from way out there. Some guardian."

Nell smiled faintly. "He knows you're here." She sipped her coffee, keeping her gaze fixed on the dark fireplace. This living room wasn't her favorite part of the house, particularly since even throwing open the heavy drapes did little to brighten it, but the sofa was comfortable and it was infinitely preferable to resting in bed — which Max would otherwise have insisted on.

"You weren't surprised about this latest murder," he observed.

"No. I was… warned there had probably been an-other one. And for it to be so soon after the last one is a bad sign. A very bad sign. We're running out of time."

From his chair near the fireplace, where he could watch her, Max said, "You can only do what you can do. Nobody expects more of you than that."

"Yeah. I know."

"Headache gone?"

"Well, there's still a faint throb," she admitted. "But it's not nearly so bad as it was. And at least…"

"At least what?"

"At least this one didn't herald a blackout."

Max frowned. "That isn't what you were going to say."

"You read minds now?"

Max leaned forward to set his cup on the coffee table, and said coolly, "Yours sometimes, yeah. But you knew that."

Nell looked at him finally, expressionless.

"You knew it," he said as though she'd argued with him. "Even though you've done everything in your power to shut me out since you came home, you've known all along that you haven't been able to. Not completely."

"That door is closed."

"Yeah. You closed it. And all these years, you've refused to open it again, except for those moments when your guard slipped, when you were too tired, or too upset, or sometimes when you were dreaming. Then it opened, just a little. Then I could catch a glimpse of your life, a flash of your feelings."

"I never meant —"

"To shut me out? Or to let me in in the first place?" He paused, but when she didn't answer, he said almost mildly, "Do you have any idea how frustrating it was for me to know that door was there — and not be able to open it myself?"

Nell drew a breath and let it out slowly, not looking away, an expression in her eyes that was both wary and numb, as though she expected a blow of some kind. "Yes. I do know. I'm sorry."

"You could have cut me loose."

She flinched. "I didn't want — I tried. I couldn't."

"And now?"

She wavered visibly, then just as obviously shied away from answering that question. With a glance at her watch, she said, "It's been nearly an hour since Ethan left. I wonder if —"

"Don't change the subject, Nell."

"Look, don't you think another murder takes precedence over —"

"No. I don't. Not this time. Ethan made it clear he wouldn't grant you access to this latest crime scene until his people did their jobs, both to avoid alerting the killer if it is a cop and to keep your undercover status solid as long as possible. So it'll be hours at least before there's anything new for you to consider."

"Even so —"

"Even so, you'd rather talk about anything else. Anything but us."

"There is no us." Nell put her cup on the coffee table and got up, moving to stand before the fireplace. "It's been twelve years, Max. We've both moved on. You said that. You said you got over me."

"And you believed me?" He laughed without amusement as he rose to his feet. "Did you really think there could be anybody else for me? Really believe I'd settle for something… ordinary? Something that could never be half of what we had? Could you? Did you?"

"You know I didn't."

"Just like you know I didn't."

Nell fiddled with a decorative gold box on the mantel, then straightened a black-framed picture of her family that looked to be more than thirty-five years old. "Even so, twelve years is a long time —"

"I know it's a long time. Christ, I know. And I won't say I didn't try to forget you, Nell. Because I did. I didn't want to admit even to myself that no one else could take your place, could mean as much to me as you did. But I finally had to admit it. Because no one could. No one even came close."

"Maybe you just didn't give it a chance." She stared at the photograph, wishing she could shut out his voice, his insistence. Wishing her head would stop hurting.

"Twelve years of chances. Twelve years of telling myself you weren't coming back. That you hadn't cared enough even to send me a Christmas card somewhere along the way and let me know you gave me a thought now and then. Twelve years of telling myself I was a fool. Then I walk down Main Street last week and there you are."

"I'm sorry." Nell stared at the old photograph, vaguely bothered by something. But her head hurt. It hurt almost as much as it had at the Lynch house.

"Nell, I understand now why you ran away." His voice was closer now, just behind her. "After that vision the night of the prom, you had to be scared to death. Believing your father had murdered your mother, that he would never willingly let any of you go —"

"I tried to tell Hailey," she murmured, blinking because her vision seemed to be blurring. "But she wouldn't believe me. She said he'd never do anything Like that, never hurt us. She was — There was no way I could convince her. We never had gotten along, and by then we were like strangers. So I ran."

"Away from love. When you said that, I thought — But it was his love you ran from, wasn't it? A love so possessive, so jealous, that it killed what it loved rather than allow it freedom."

"I knew he was capable of doing it again. Of killing one of us if we tried to leave. Or killing someone else we — I knew he could do that. And even though she said she didn't believe me, deep down Hailey must have known it too, because she kept all her relationships secret from him. Even the one with Ethan."

"Nell —"

"I guess Glen Sabella was the first one she cared enough about to run away for." Nell reached out to touch the photograph, her puzzlement increasing. "Who is —"

Red-hot pain pierced her skull as though someone had driven a spike into it, and before Nell could even draw breath to cry out, everything went black.

The body of Nate McCurry lay sprawled across his bed, a butcher knife from his own kitchen protruding from his chest. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, but from the tumbled condition of the bed, the fact that he lay atop the covers, and the estimated time of death, it appeared he had at least managed to get out of bed that morning before being killed.

"Nice wake-up call," Ethan muttered.

"Yeah." Justin stood near the sheriff, both of them watching as the two lone forensic specialists the Lacombe Parish sheriff's department could boast did their thing, one photographing the body exhaustively and the other carefully dusting every possible surface in the room for fingerprints.

"Speaking of which, he got a call same as the others?"

Justin nodded. "Last night. According to his caller I.D. it was from one of the pay phones in town."

"But we haven't found evidence of a secret life. So far."

"So far," Justin agreed. "No hidden rooms or compartments, no false floor in any of the closets, no concealed safe. Paperwork here looks normal, just personal bills and records, and if Kelly had found anything unusual at his office, she would have called. From all the evidence we've found so far, he was a perfectly normal insurance salesman — if there is such a thing."

Ethan offered a faint smile at the weak joke, but all he said was, "This time, the killer got very, very close; you can't get much more hands-on than stabbing a man in the chest. Unless he means to strangle his next victim."

"You think there'll be another victim?"

"Don't you?"

With a sigh, Justin said, "We're sure as hell not stopping him, I know that. And for him to kill again so quickly —"

"Is a bad sign. Yeah, I know. Either he's been spooked into moving faster, he's deliberately escalating for some reason we don't yet know, or he's escalating because whatever restraints there might have been once are no longer holding him back. And we have no way of knowing why that is."

Justin eyed the sheriff thoughtfully. "Look, I'm pretty damned sure that George Caldwell didn't have a nasty secret he was trying to hide. I think we all are. Right?"

Ethan nodded. "I think we would have found it by now if it existed."

"Okay. But we're at least sixty percent sure he was killed by the same man."

"The same killer anyway," Ethan muttered.

Justin didn't miss the inference, but said only, "Which has to mean that Caldwell was a threat to the killer or somehow got in the killer's way, made himself a target."

"Odds are."

"Remember I asked you why Caldwell would have been searching through old parish birth records?"

"Yeah. I haven't had a chance to ask you if you found anything."

"Well, I haven't found anything. Or, at least, I haven't found anything that looks like anything. But it's still the only unexplained thing Caldwell was doing in the weeks before his murder. So he must have found something, some kind of information, and either passed it on to the killer in all innocence or accidentally. Information the killer considered a threat."

"And George was killed to shut his mouth."

"Nothing else makes sense, at least not to me."

Ethan brooded for a moment. "But how do we find out whatever it was? You said it was more than forty years of parish birth records, right?"

"Right. Lots of babies born in the last forty years, I can tell you that much. And we don't even know if it's the births or something else. Place of birth, parents' names, stillborn children or kids that died young, witnesses to a birth, the doctors who delivered the babies — God knows what we're looking for. I sure as hell didn't see anything worth killing over."

"You're new to the area," Ethan noted, "so you might not have noticed what someone born and raised here might have seen."

"True enough," Justin said after a slight hesitation, still wary of saying anything about Shelby's involvement.

"Do you have the copies of the records?"

"Locked in the trunk of my car."

"When we get back to the office, bring them to me. If there's something odd there, I'm willing to bet I'd spot it as quick or quicker than anybody else would."

"George Caldwell may have been killed for spotting it," Justin reminded him.

Ethan didn't like to think that one of his deputies or detectives might be a traitor, and he was almost equally unhappy to think that one of them might be an FBI agent operating undercover, but one thing he was sure of was that he couldn't afford to play guessing games or second-guess his own instincts. So he continued to talk to Justin Byers as if the shadow of neither possibility had ever crossed his mind.

"George had trouble keeping his mouth shut," he told Justin. "I don't. Plus, it's entirely possible that he didn't realize what he knew was a threat. I'll definitely know."

"If you find something."

"Yeah. If I find something."

"And if you don't?"

"Then we're no worse off than we are now." Ethan shrugged. "At this point, I'm willing to try most anything."

"Including the paranormal? Like, maybe, talking to an avowed psychic?"

Grim, Ethan said, "Either Steve Critcher is less discreet than I thought, or somebody else saw me talking to Nell Gallagher."

Without answering that directly, Justin merely said, "It's a small town. Hard to do anything without being noticed."

"You mean unless you're keeping a nasty secret?"

Justin smiled wryly. "Yeah, I haven't quite figured that out yet. As for you talking to Nell Gallagher — was she able to tell you anything helpful?"

This time, Ethan did hesitate. "Maybe. I'd rather not say anything until we thoroughly check out Nate McCurry. And I mean thoroughly, Justin. I want to know who he talked to, who his pals were, who he dated in the last ten years, and who cleaned his teeth."

"Matt's out now with a couple of deputies gathering that information. What is it you're hoping they'll find?"

"A secret," Ethan said. "One secret all these men had in common."

"You mean they all had the same secret? Apart from all these nasty little bad habits we've discovered?"

"I think so. All except George, so far. I want to know if Nate did as well."

"It might help if I knew —"

"I know, but I'd rather not… contaminate your judgment when I have nothing solid, no evidence I could take to court, to support this… theory."

"Just information supplied by a psychic?"

With a grimace, Ethan nodded. "Exactly. Which, by the way, you don't seem too bothered by."

"I don't care if we find the answers in tea leaves, as long as we find them," Justin said frankly. "I've seen enough weird things in my life not to discount anything out of hand. Maybe it's possible for some people to see things the rest of us can't. Maybe it's just another rare but natural human ability. Who am I to say it can't be real?"

"Well, I'm not quite so untroubled about the possibility, but I'm also a lot less certain of my certainties than I was yesterday." Ethan sighed. "I guess we'll see. I'm going back to the office. I've got a shitload of reports and calls to handle. Stay here and get this wrapped up, will you? And do what you can to transport the body out of here quietly."

"I'll do my best." Justin watched the sheriff leave, then returned his gaze to the two technicians still working silently. He didn't suspect either of them of being something other than they appeared, but it certainly did no harm to oversee every possible aspect of the investigation just to make damned sure nothing fell through the cracks.

It didn't surprise him that Ethan Cole hadn't wanted to tell everything he knew; Justin hadn't exactly been either completely forthcoming or entirely truthful himself. He wondered if that reticence would come back to haunt both of them, then dismissed the thought.

Nothing he could do about that at the moment.

He was just about to ask the photographer if he was done yet when Brad spoke first.

"Hey, Justin? You guys see this?"

"See what?" Justin joined the photographer beside the bed.

"My zoom lens caught it," Brad explained. "See that little piece of material sticking out past the hem of his shorts?"

Justin bent closer and looked, frowning. "Yeah. So?"

"So I don't think it's part of his shorts. He's wearing regular cotton boxers, and that little bit of material is silk. Colorful silk, as a matter of fact."

"Some kind of lining, maybe?"

"Not unless it's homemade. I use that brand, and they're just cotton. No lining at all."

He'd investigated too many murders to have any squeamishness left, so Justin didn't hesitate to bend even closer and grasp the small bit of material. He pulled gently, carefully, beginning to draw it from inside the dead man's shorts.

"Looks like a scarf," Brad murmured, watching intently as more of the silky blue material became visible. "A lady's scarf. You can see little flowers — hey. What the hell?"

Encountering a sudden resistance, Justin stopped pulling and shifted position so he could gingerly lift the waistband of the shorts far enough to see inside them. "Christ."

"What?"

Justin hesitated, glanced up at Nate McCurry's open, sightless eyes, and murmured, "Sorry to do this to you, buddy, but I have to."

"Have to what?" Brad demanded.

"Help me pull the shorts down. You'll have to get a picture of this."

Brad opened his mouth, then closed it and rather gingerly helped Justin pull the dead man's shorts down around his knees. When the genitals were exposed, the photographer muttered something under his breath, then silently began snapping pictures.

The fingerprint technician, whose name, improbably, was Dolly Sims, came to the foot of the bed, studied the corpse for a moment, then said to Justin, "You guys ever consider you might be after a woman?"

"Not until now," Justin said.

She nodded. "Well, I'd say the odds are pretty good this was done by a woman. Maybe a woman scorned. Or just one who was real pissed off."

"Yeah," Justin murmured, looking down at what had been done to Nate McCurry. "Real pissed off."

The colorful silk scarf had been tied in a jaunty bow around his penis and testicles.

Being out in a rural area had its advantages; Galen had the satisfaction of knowing that the remains he and Nell had that morning uncovered were removed and taken to the FBI lab by a very efficient team who had arrived and departed unnoticed by any of the locals.

At least, he was pretty sure they had.

It wasn't yet dark when Galen settled back into place to watch the Gallagher house. Since Tanner's truck was still parked out front, he knew Nell wasn't alone, but as he studied the house he felt oddly uneasy. Something was different, and he didn't know what it was.

Something he saw?

Something he felt?

When his cell phone rang, he was definitely relieved to see the call came from Nell.

"Tanner giving you a hard time?" he asked in lieu of a hello.

"Not yet," Max Tanner replied imperturbably. "At the moment, Nell is out cold — and I want to talk to you. Face-to-face."

Galen's hesitation was momentary. "Is Nell okay?"

"I don't know."

"How long's she been out?"

"More than an hour."

This time, Galen didn't hesitate. "I'll be right there."

It required no more than two minutes for him to reach the front door, where he found a very grim Max Tanner waiting for him. Galen had been in this situation before, "meeting" for the first time someone he had watched unseen long enough to feel he knew fairly well, but he didn't blame Max for the wariness that was plain to see.

"I'm Galen." He stepped into the house, offering no more than the brief introduction.

"Max." His lips twisted as though Max appreciated the absurdity of introducing himself to this man, but he merely turned and led the way to the living room. "Nell's upstairs, in bed," he added.

"You say she's been out for more than an hour?"

"Yeah. I tried to wake her just before I called you, but couldn't get any kind of response. Pulse and respiration are normal, and her color's good. Better than it was when she collapsed, as a matter of fact."

"Collapsed? It wasn't the usual sort of blackout? There was no warning?"

Facing the other man as they both stood before the cold fireplace, Max said, "No warning at all. We were talking, and she went out literally in the middle of a sentence. I have never seen her go out so fast or hard."

"It's been getting worse," Galen noted slowly. "More blackouts more often. Stronger pain. And I don't think she's been sleeping well at night."

"So I'm right in thinking this isn't normal for her."

Galen looked at him. "We've only worked together a few times, but from what I've been told, no, it isn't normal. Until she returned to Silence, Nell averaged a blackout no more often than every few months. She's been here less than a week, and this makes at least the fourth blackout."

"Is it because she's been using her abilities too often? Pushing herself too hard?"

"I don't know."

"You damned well should know," Max said in a harsh tone just this side of violent. "I know she feels this special unit you all belong to is something that made her life better, but that doesn't give you people the right to push her so goddamned hard — to use her up, burn her out, until she ends up in a coma with her brain fried."

Mildly, Galen said, "In case you hadn't realized it, nobody pushes Nell harder than she pushes herself. And just so you know, it's not really company policy to use tip field agents and then throw them away. Plays hell with the payroll, to say nothing of recruitment."

Max drew a breath and made a visible effort to control his temper and his anxiety. "Maybe not, but even Nell admitted that some psychics risk more than a bullet doing this work. She's obviously one of them."

"True enough. It's also true that we don't know what price Nell might ultimately pay for using her abilities in her work. But she knows the risks. And accepts them."

"Because she's got a fucking death wish."

"Is that what you think?"

Max hesitated, then said, "I think part of her does, yeah. She's convinced she comes from something evil and that her family is cursed. That she's cursed. Doomed to live her life alone in any meaningful sense. Unable to let anybody get close because she's afraid this so-called darkness inside her will hurt whoever she cares about."

Max shook his head. "Coming home just made it worse, since she found the evidence that Adam did kill his wife — and that Hailey was not only involved with sadistic men but might actually be killing them. Some family tree."

Galen debated silently, then said, "Before we came down here, Bishop — you know who Bishop is, right, Chief of the Special Crimes Unit? He told me privately that he was convinced Nell's blackouts were only indirectly caused by her abilities. He believes they have something to do with her past."

"In what way?"

"Well, that's the question. It could be some trauma she's suppressed all these years, some knowledge she hasn't been able to face directly. Probably something that is connected to her abilities, since using them seems quite often to trigger a blackout, though there's no way to be sure until we find out the truth. But the thing is, Bishop said that if he was right about that, and if this investigation somehow made Nell begin to face her past, to examine her roots here, then it would be likely that the blackouts would become more frequent or more severe — as she got closer to whatever it is causing them."

Max was frowning. "Have you reported back about her blackouts coming more often?"

"Yeah. Bishop said to consider whatever she's saying or doing when the blackouts hit. Is there some commonality? A particular place? A certain line of the investigation? Anything to indicate there's something in particular her mind is resisting."

Still frowning, Max said, "I know she blacked out the day she arrived, probably here in the house. She was here today when she blacked out. But she also blacked out at the Patterson house, after one of her visions."

"The first blackout might have been as much stress as anything else," Galen suggested. "Coming home had to be incredibly difficult, especially when she knew one of the things she'd have to do was look for her mother's remains."

"No kidding." Max glanced at his watch. "She's been out an hour and a half now. That's too long."

"We'll give it another half hour. If she's not awake by then and we aren't able to wake her, there is one thing we can try. Another psychic, a telepath, can try to contact her mind directly."

"Would that be you?"

"I'm not a telepath. But we do have another team member here undercover who is." Somewhat dryly, Galen added, "Or you could try. Have you, by the way?"

"I'm not even psychic."

"No, but you're linked to her. Have you tried to use that?"

Max looked both startled and a bit annoyed, and avoided Galen's eyes when he said, "She won't let me in. Won't even let me get close. Sometimes her guard drops and I catch a glimpse, the flicker of a thought, but then — Anyway, how the hell do you know about that?"

"Sorry, but there aren't many secrets among a team of psychics, especially when so many of them are telepaths. Bishop knew she was linked to someone else and had been for quite a while. We guessed it was you."

"Bishop," Max muttered.

Not really surprised by the reaction, Galen said lightly, "I know, he can be a pain in the ass. Very irritating to have to deal with somebody who isn't often wrong. But in case you weren't sure about it, Nell isn't in love with him. He just inspires an incredible brand of loyalty from his agents. I've never seen anything like it, actually. Probably has a lot to do with the fact that he pretty much single-handedly changed their lives."

Max glanced at him, then cleared his throat and changed the subject. "You said we should consider whatever Nell might have been doing or saying when she collapsed, right?"

"It might give us a piece of the puzzle, yeah."

"Okay. Do you happen to know if the earlier blackouts here at the house came with any warning?"

"I'm pretty sure both of them did. I know the second one did, because I talked to her just before, and she warned me one was coming."

"Just the usual blackouts, the sort of thing she's experienced most of her life."

"Right."

"But when she went out at the Patterson house, and again when she went out here today, it was without the kind of warning she was accustomed to. I know she came out of the vision today with a bad headache, but she insisted it wasn't one warning of a blackout. Still, it was bad enough that she was pale and afterward more than once seemed to lose the thread of the conversation." He didn't add that she had also been less guarded, a vulnerability he had taken advantage of by pressing her to talk to him about their relationship. "She seemed… distracted, almost as if she was trying to listen to something."

"What did she see at the Patterson house?"

"A very intense vision in which Hailey, as a young girl, was… involved… with a man who liked to play sadomasochistic games."

Galen nodded. "Today she was with you and the sheriff at the Lynch house. A vision, but no blackout, at least not immediately. All she told me when she filed her so-called report after you guys got back here was that she had a vision apparently unrelated to Lynch's death. A vision that told her Hailey and Sheriff Cole had been involved at one time. She said the vision was odd, that it felt different, but she didn't explain just how."

"The commonality seems to be Hailey," Max said slowly. "Hailey and her relationships."

"You sound doubtful."

"It doesn't feel right somehow. I can barely accept the possibility that Hailey might be hiding somewhere nearby taking out the men who treated her like dirt. But that doesn't explain Nell's blackouts. Both times she went out with little or no warning, the visions she had recently experienced were unusual in some way: the intensity of the vision in the Patterson house, and then — what was odd about this latest vision — seeing Ethan and Hailey in a completely different place."

"So you think it's not so much what she saw as how she saw it that might have triggered the blackouts?"

"All I know is that Nell is experiencing things she never has before. It's not just a case of the blackouts getting more frequent and more intense, it's also that the visions themselves are changing. But even that doesn't make a lot of sense. Sometimes it seems her abilities are getting more and more powerful, and at other times they seem almost weakened… muffled."

"As if there's some outside influence at work?

Someone or something blocking her at least part of the time?"

"Is that possible? I've read a lot about the paranormal, but the research on anything like that is sketchy —"

"The official research, yeah. Luckily, we have our own. And, yes, it is definitely possible for a psychic to be blocked or influenced by another psychic. And we do have reason to believe that this killer, whether it's Hailey or someone else, is a pretty powerful psychic."

Max stared at him for a long moment, then said, "Then maybe that's it. Look, what if we're all — even Nell — looking at this whole thing the wrong way? What if we're only seeing what somebody wants us to see? What if Nell is so certain it's Hailey because that's what the real killer wants her to believe?"

Slowly, Galen said, "The original profile said the killer was likely to be a cop. Mix investigative knowledge and savvy with a psychic's ability to manipulate, and —"

"And you've got a killer leading you around by the nose," Max finished grimly.