Whisper of Evil

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

"Jesus, did you have to hit me so hard?" Nell demanded, rubbing her still-stinging cheek.

"You're lucky I didn't knock you on your ass. Yelling at you sure as hell wasn't working. Boy, when you're out, you're out."

"Well, you still didn't have to —" Nell cut herself off and stared at her sister. "What are you doing here? Have you been in Silence the whole time?"

"Just since you got back."

"So — you didn't kill those men?"

"Of course I didn't kill them. Why on earth would I have done that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because they treated you like shit?"

Hailey laughed. "I know it's not everybody's cup of tea, baby sister, but I liked the way they treated me."

"Yuck."

"That's not the best word for it."

"Hailey —"

"Look, we don't have a lot of time for talking here. Come on."

Nell followed as Hailey led the way through the woods, realizing only belatedly that they were continuing to move away from Gallagher land. "Wait a minute, where are we going? For that matter, what the hell am I doing out in the woods in the middle of the night?"

"You don't remember?"

"Well… there was a dream. I thought it was a dream. You mean I walked in my sleep?"

"In a manner of speaking. Think about it. Try to remember the dream."

Nell tried, still automatically following her sister. Her mind was oddly fuzzy, and it felt sort of like pushing her way through a thick fog looking for something. But something in Hailey's voice had been too urgent to ignore, so Nell pushed her way through the fog.

She remembered… being in bed with Max, both of them falling asleep after incredible lovemaking. So much still unsettled between them, yet so much more understood and accepted. She remembered… peaceful sleep that had gradually filled with an uncomfortable, frightening darkness. And then… had there been a whisper?

An oddly familiar whisper, telling her to do something?

Her head throbbed suddenly, and she reached up to rub her temple. "Oh, hell. Not another blackout, not now."

"He doesn't want you to think about him when you're awake. Thinking about him gets you closer to what he doesn't want you to remember."

"He? Who is he?"

Hailey stopped and turned to face her. A shaft of moonlight found its way through the trees and shone on her face, illuminating her wry, mocking smile.

"He's our brother, Nell."

Galen used his pencil flashlight and studied the police file. "This is a hell of a thing to find out at this late stage," he noted grimly.

"Yeah."

"So how'd we find it at all?"

"These murders seemed so obviously confined to Silence, so clearly the product of a local, that we just didn't look outside the parish. But when we connected the first three murders with Hailey, I started to wonder about that. As secretive as she'd been, so careful to keep her sexual relationships quiet locally, there was every chance she'd been involved with at least one man outside Silence. So I checked VICAP for similar crimes in the region. And bingo."

"Four other men murdered in the last five years," Galen said. "All of them left behind family and friends just surprised as hell to find those nice respectable men had at least one nasty secret, usually sexual. Different parishes, so none of the cops put it together they were looking for one killer. Somebody's even serving time for the first murder."

"Yeah. I'm guessing he's innocent."

"Sounds like. Does this help us narrow the field?"

"I think so. I cross-checked the time sheets for every deputy and detective who's been in the sheriff's department at least five years against the approximate time of death for each of these murders. Here in Silence, the killer could well have been on-duty and still carried out a murder, but I figured for those outside the parish he was far more likely to have been off-duty or even on vacation."

"And?"

"And I came up with only two names of men who were either off-duty or otherwise unaccounted for during every one of these murders. One is Sheriff Cole."

"Who we are reasonably sure is in the clear. And the other?"

"Kyle Venable."

"Jesus," Galen said.

"Yeah. How about that."

"You're not serious," Nell said, lifting her other hand so she could rub both temples. The fog was even thicker now, and that plus the throbbing pain made it even more difficult for her to concentrate.

"Oh, yes, I am. Kyle Venable is our brother. Half-brother, anyway. Our father's son by another woman." Hailey turned and continued walking.

Nell followed, tried to think, to understand. "What woman? And when did this happen?"

"You make it sound like a car crash."

"Hailey, I don't —" She felt dizzy, sick.

"Listen to me," Hailey snapped, her voice intense. "Listen to my voice, Nell. Concentrate on that."

"My head —"

"I know. But you have to push through the pain, stay in control. You can't let him block you this time."

"Block me?"

"He's been in your head for years."

Nell stopped, her stomach heaving so strongly that she nearly threw up. "What?"

"You shared something, Nell. Something besides our father's blood. The Gallagher curse. Come on, keep walking. We don't have much time."

Nell obeyed almost blindly. "But what — how —"

"It happened, baby sister, before either one of us was born. As you may or may not remember, our parents had a few… difficulties in sharing the same bed. Apparently, those difficulties went all the way back to the start of their relationship. So dear old Dad had himself a nice piece on the side. Several, in fact, in those early years. Household help, usually."

"Oh, Christ," Nell murmured.

"Yeah, disgusting, isn't it? For what it's worth, 1 think most of them were willing. Seduced probably, but not coerced. He could be very charming when he wanted something, and he wanted sex often. He usually picked older women, widows or divorcees. You know — the type who were likely to enjoy sex but didn't have a regular man in their beds. And he liked variety, which is why our cooks and housekeepers never seemed to last very long."

"Are you saying he slept with other women under his own roof?"

"At least a few times he did," Hailey responded coolly. "I saw him. Don't slow down now, we have to hurry."

Nell followed, so numb she wasn't sure if she could feel anything at all now, except the pounding in her head. "And when he got her pregnant? Kyle Venable's mother? What then?"

"Well, to do him justice, he didn't know he had. See, she was different from the others. Never married and sexually inexperienced. Younger, prettier. Looked a bit like Mom, as a matter of fact. He got sort of obsessed with her, started trying to control her the way he tried to control us. She got spooked and quit, left the parish."

"Pregnant."

"Yep. I guess she was too scared of him to ask him for any help, or maybe just too scared, period. Being pregnant without a husband was still a scandal in those days, at least in most places. She was Catholic, formerly a good girl, so abortion wouldn't have been possible even if she'd known how to find a doctor willing to do it."

Nell was still fighting to think clearly, and there were so many questions in her mind she couldn't even choose one, so she just listened.

"Her sister, who was a young widow, lived near New Orleans. That's where she went. Told her sister the story but made her promise that if anything happened, the sister wouldn't try to contact Adam Gallagher in any way or ever let him know there was a child. When it was time, and as the sisters had agreed, she checked herself into the hospital using the sister's married name. Maybe she had a touch of the sight herself, because she died in childbirth.

"So the sister, who'd been left fairly well off when her husband died, found herself with a child to raise. I don't know why she brought Kyle back here to live. Maybe she thought he needed to be near his father. Maybe she was just curious. Or maybe she thought she might need to contact him someday. But she didn't."

"A son," Nell murmured.

"A firstborn son; he was born a month before I was."

"Without the Gallagher name."

"But with the Gallagher curse. He knew he was different from the time he was just a kid. Started having experiences he couldn't really explain. Scared the hell out of his mother, and she finally told him who his father was. Big mistake, and in so many ways."

"What happened?"

"He was a voyeur as a kid. Liked to watch people without them knowing. He started watching Dad. Peeking in the windows, hiding behind trees. He saw him controlling us like we were puppets or dolls. Saw him always hovering around Mom, touching her, stroking her in that way he did, as if she were a favorite pet. He saw him screwing the help like some medieval lord of the manor, treating women other than us as if they were no more than a handy handkerchief to jack off in."

"How do you know —"

"And then Kyle saw something else." Hailey stopped and turned to stare at her sister. "He saw Dad kill Mom."

Nell was dimly aware that they had reached the edge of the woods and that across a cultivated field was a house with several lighted windows, but she didn't take her eyes off her sister. "I tried to tell you."

"I know. I even believed you, I think. I just couldn't admit it. But it did happen. And there was a witness."

"He was watching?"

"Yeah. Peering in the window. He heard them argue, heard Mom saying she was leaving — and taking us with her. Dad accused her of having a lover, said she'd ruined herself, that she'd let another man spoil her. He started beating her."

With brutal suddenness, Nell saw a flashing image of a fair woman cowering, crying, a big dark man swinging big fists. She could hear a harsh voice yelling the same word over and over. Whore. Whore. Whore. Heard the blows, dull and wet, pounding like her head was pounding, splitting flesh, breaking bone, hurting her.

Killing her.

Grief washed over her, and the pain was so intense her knees nearly buckled.

"Nell."

She opened eyes she hadn't realized she had closed and stared into her sister's curiously impassive face. "I… I saw. I saw him kill her."

"Tell me something," Galen requested dryly. "Tell me what good psychic ability does an investigator when it so seldom even picks up on what's right under your nose?"

"He has shields. Not unusual, especially in a small town. There was nothing to indicate his shields were in any way different from anyone else's in Silence."

"You sound defensive."

"Well, I'm no more happy I missed it than you are."

'"I thought psychics were supposed to recognize each other."

"Not always. That would make it too easy, wouldn't it? The universe would be giving us a gift. It doesn't do that, as a rule."

"Uh-huh. And is that little shortcoming included in the Special Crimes Unit literature? Because I don't remember reading it when I signed on."

"We try to keep it quiet. It tends to unsettle the new recruits."

"I guess it would. Look, do you think we should — Hey. What is it? Did you see something?"

"No. I didn't see anything. Get back to Nell's."

"What are you going to do?"

"Call out the troops."

"I saw him kill her," Nell repeated.

Hailey nodded. "Kyle found you later, when he went back to… nose around the crime scene. You were hiding in a closet, where you'd been playing with a litter of kittens before the violence started. You were pretty much in shock. Maybe he felt sorry for you. Or maybe our father's views had already begun to twist his thinking and he didn't want your pure little mind corrupted by watching your mother being punished for whoring around."

"He touched me," Nell remembered. "Put his hands on either side of my head. Told me it would be all right. That I'd… never have bad dreams."

"To his credit, he did try to make sure of that. But he was only thirteen himself, and his abilities weren't entirely under his control. He didn't really have the skill to do what he tried to do. He couldn't take the memory away from you, but he did manage to hide it from you, lock it in the smallest, darkest corner of your mind. Without even knowing what he was doing, he placed a block there as well, so that anytime you got close to remembering, you'd black out."

"It wasn't the visions?"

Hailey shook her head. "The only reason you so often blacked out after having a vision is that the visions use a part of your mind close to the block. Or maybe it's the same kind of electrical energy, since both the visions and the block come from the Gallagher curse. From our family, our blood."

Nell was silent for a moment, trying to take that in. "Hailey, how do you know all this?"

"Does that matter?"

"I think it does."

Hailey turned her head and gazed off across the field at the lighted house, then looked back at Nell and said, "There's no time. Listen to me, Nell. That darkness you've been afraid of all these years? It isn't you. It was never you. It's Kyle. When he touched your mind, Kyle messed up, he left something of himself there by mistake, some of his energy, I guess, his essence. You were both so young, neither of you able to protect yourselves from that kind of energy, and he went so deep… It's how he was able to make contact again when you came home."

"He's… connected to me? Linked to my mind?"

"Not the way Max is. He can't read your thoughts, never knows what you're thinking or feeling — and if you'll think about it, you'll realize you've never had a sense of him. As another mind, I mean, another person. But he has been able to influence you, even control you, when you were sleeping or unconscious. That was the whisper you heard sometimes. The whisper you've been hearing in your dreams ever since you came back to Silence."

Nell drew a breath and let it out slowly. The fog in her mind seemed to be clearing, but it was still difficult for her to absorb all this. "He's the killer. Kyle is the killer. And he killed all those men… because of you."

With a grimace, Hailey said, "Like father, like son, I guess. Only two kinds of women in the world, according to them. And I turned out to be the wrong kind. He couldn't stand it that someone of his blood had been… tarnished. Spoiled. But for the longest time, he couldn't bring himself to blame me. It was them. Those men. They had corrupted me, and they had to pay for what they'd done to me. So he made sure they did."

"We can stop him, Hailey. We can put him in a cage where he'll never hurt anybody else again."

"Yeah, that'll be great. But we have to catch him first. And I'd rather we did that before he kills Ethan."

Nell was conscious of a chill. "What?"

"That house across the field is Ethan's. Kyle has him inside, and he's planning to kill him. He's just waiting for you."

"Me? That's why he called me out here? To see him kill Ethan?"

"You'll have to ask him why, but I know he's waiting for you. And if you don't reach the house in the next couple of minutes, he'll know something is wrong, and he'll try to get inside your head again. We can't let him do that."

"He will not get inside my head again," Nell said fiercely.

Hailey smiled. "No, he won't. Remembering what he didn't want you to destroyed the block, Nell. And his way in. But if he realizes that before we're ready, we'll lose the element of surprise. That's what they call it, isn't it, in all the detective books? The element of surprise?"

"This isn't a book, dammit."

"Yes, I know. The guns are real." Hailey reached inside her jacket and produced a pistol, holding it rather gingerly as she handed it to Nell. "He didn't let you bring yours, so here. I think the FBI agent should always get the gun, don't you?"

"The FBI — How did you know about that?"

"Never mind now. The point is that you have to get your ass in there, and armed is probably better than not."

Nell automatically checked to make sure the gun was loaded and the safety on, then said, "Why the hell didn't you tell me all the important stuff sooner, so I could call out the troops? I'm at least two miles away from a phone I could use, from any backup. Kyle has a marksman's medal — I remember that from the background check — so even if he does believe I'm under his control, it won't give me much of an edge."

"Just stall him, keep him from killing Ethan. I'm going after that partner of yours."

"Galen is —"

"Not him. The other one."

Nell blinked. "I still want Galen. He's a pit bull when he's pissed. Or even when he isn't."

"I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, you might try calling Max."

"Calling —"

"Oh, hell, you could always call him, even before you two carved your initials in that tree. Call him. You might be surprised how he can help you now that Kyle can't get in."

Nell would have said something to that, but Hailey gave her a somewhat mocking salute and hurried off through the woods back the way they'd come, leaving Nell to mutter to herself.

Hailey had always been able to do this, dammit. Answer only the questions she chose to, manipulate people into doing what she wanted without bothering to explain herself. So damned typical.

Even with the tensions and strains between them, she'd had the knack of carrying Nell along in a rush, overwhelming any objections or protests, do this, do that, hurry now — and Nell always found herself in trouble at the end of it.

There was entirely too much about the situation Nell found bewildering, but as she hurried cautiously across the cultivated field toward the lighted house, the last of the fog cleared from her mind and both her training and instincts finally kicked in.

The situation was definitely not a good one. She was one agent alone, and even if she was well trained and experienced, it would require more than surprise for her to get the upper hand against a psychotic killer who just happened to be not only a cop but also a half-brother.

And psychic.

She needed help.

Maybe Hailey could get the cavalry here quickly enough and maybe not. Nell had to assume the latter and make her plans accordingly, that's what her training and experience told her. She was alone, and —

Was she alone? She thought about that as she crept closer to one of the lighted windows and very cautiously peered through the narrow opening of the curtains and into the house.

The first window showed her nothing but an empty room, what looked like a den. But the second, the living room, was definitely occupied. Ethan was sitting in a dining room chair, his hands cuffed behind him. His head lolled, and Nell could see blood on the side of his face, though from her angle she couldn't tell how bad his injuries were.

Kyle Venable was also in the room. He was at the doorway of the room, leaning against the door frame. There was a length of rope in his hands. He was knotting a noose.

Was that what he intended for Ethan, suicide? If he set it up right, it could certainly make sense. The FBI could provide their profile indicating the killer was a cop, and there was, after all, no solid evidence clearing Ethan. Just Nell's certainty, and if Kyle had brought her here to witness this death, it was unlikely he meant to allow her to live long enough to testify on Ethan's behalf.

A body found with a note, the motives for murder and suicide painfully apparent, and who would question? The sheriff, last of Hailey's lovers still in Silence, killing himself after murdering all the men who had corrupted his love.

Nell saw Kyle look at his watch and frown, and she immediately drew back from the window and began making her way around the house to the front door. She checked the gun again, then stuck it down inside the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, hidden under the tail of her jacket.

She knew she could get her hands on it fast, but would it be fast enough?

Useless to pretend she wasn't terrified, both because she was about to face a killer and because it was at least possible Hailey had been right, that Kyle had lurked in her mind all these years like a cancerous growth, stealing her very consciousness, twisting her own self-image. Nell hadn't had time enough to take in all Hailey had told her, all she had realized for herself, but that was clear, that possibility. It was terrifying, that something alien could have been with her all this time.

But it also offered a hope Nell clung to.

That the only evil in her had been him.

She had to know. She had to.

Nell stepped up to the front door and put her hand on the knob, then closed her eyes briefly.

Max. I need you.

She opened the door and went into the house, looking around with a frown, blinking in the light of the foyer, trying to give the appearance of someone waking up out of a deep sleep.

"Hey, Nell. Come on in."

Galen didn't bother to reclaim his watching post in the woods, because as soon as he neared the house he could see the front door standing open. His gut twisted, and he was drawing his gun before his foot hit the first step.

"She's gone." Max met him just inside the door, dressed but obviously in haste and pulling on his jacket even as he spoke. "Ethan's place."

Galen didn't ask any questions until they were in Max's truck barreling down the driveway, and then all he said was, "Is she telling you anything now?"

"A little, but I'm not getting everything. Bits and pieces. Something about Hailey being here, about Venable holding Ethan and getting ready to kill him. And about Venable being her brother. Christ, how did he get her out of the house past both of us?"

"I haven't been outside for the last hour," Galen said. "We didn't think he'd move again so soon, and we knew you were in the house with her."

Max didn't waste time with condemnation of either his own obliviousness to the danger Nell had been in or Galen's absence. He just gripped the steering wheel harder and floored the accelerator as soon as the truck reached the highway.

"A brother?" Galen said, getting out his phone and beginning to punch in a number.

"Yeah."

"We've got to get some new psychics. The ones we have keep missing some pretty important stuff."

"I would have preferred to wait a bit longer before punishing Ethan," Kyle said, gesturing with his gun to indicate Nell take a seat on the couch at right angles to Ethan's chair and his own position near the doorway. "Let all my fellow cops stumble around in the dark a while longer searching for Nate McCurry's secret sins while Ethan looked like an ass. But what the hell. Might as well finish it."

Nell sat down but on the outer half of the cushion, making sure she could get to her gun. If she got the chance. "I don't understand any of this." It wasn't difficult to sound bewildered about it.

"Don't you?"

"No." She sneaked a glance at Ethan. His head still lolled forward and his eyes were closed, but she had a hunch he was at least half conscious. "I really don't."

"Oh, it's quite simple, Nell. I had to take care of you and Hailey. I had to protect you. That's what big brothers do."

"We don't have a brother," she said, not so much stalling for time as following her instincts.

"I know we were never properly introduced, which is a shame." He was smiling, relaxed. "We grew up in different homes and with different mothers, after all. But Adam Gallagher was my father too. He didn't know about me, you see. He didn't know until I told him. Last May."

"May? You mean — just before he died?"

"Well, that wasn't the plan. I knew he was upset, losing both his girls. You'd been gone for years, then Hailey. I thought he needed to know about me, that it would make him happy. I even offered to change my name, to make sure the Gallagher name would go on."

"And the Gallagher curse?" Nell asked.

Kyle's smile widened, but his eyes were curiously flat. "I thought that would please him most of all."

"It didn't, did it?"

"No. It didn't. He threw me out of the house, can you believe that? Actually knocked me down the steps."

Intently focused on Kyle's face, Nell was surprised when she got a strong flash, a harsh voice yelling. "He called you a liar. He… called your mother a whore."

"He never should have done that," Kyle said reasonably but with an edge to his voice. "I had to punish him for that. Because my mother wasn't a whore."

"Was that when you killed him?"

"I had to. You see that, don't you, Nell? That I had to kill him?"