by Kay Hooper
“Are you so sure it’s wild?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ben—”
“Look, I was doubtful too. But did you bother to check her out? Because I did.”
“And?”
“And the LAPD detective I talked to says there are half a dozen multiple killers behind bars today because of Cassie Neill. And that’s just in his jurisdiction.”
Matt narrowed his eyes. “Then how come I never heard of her?”
Ben shook his head. “There’s been very little press, and nothing national. The way she wanted it, apparently—which I count as a point in her favor. The cop told me his superiors were delighted that she insisted the department take the credit and keep her out of it. Naturally they weren’t too eager to admit that they’d used the human version of a crystal ball to track down bad guys.”
Matt grunted, and gazed absently at the peaceful scene of downtown Ryan’s Bluff on a mild Tuesday afternoon. “I just don’t buy that psychic bullshit, Ben. Last time I checked, neither did you.”
“I’m still not sure. But I think we’d better pay attention to what the lady says.”
“Just in case?”
“Just in case.”
After a moment Matt shrugged. “Okay. You tell me what I’m supposed to do about the lady’s so-called warning. She says somebody’s going to die. That somebody is a woman—only she doesn’t know who. All she knows is that the woman is possibly dark-haired, possibly between twenty and thirty-five, medium height and build—possibly. Which narrows down the possible victim to, oh, a quarter of the area’s female population, give or take a few hundred. And our helpful psychic knows even less about the aspiring murderer. Don’t even have a possible on him except that he’s male. Eliminating you and me, and every man over sixty just on logical grounds, that leaves me with—what?—a few hundred conceivable suspects inside the town limits? What the hell do I do with that, Ben?”
“I don’t know. But there must be something we can do.”
“What? Panic a town by announcing one of our ladies is being stalked and doesn’t know it?”
“No, of course not.”
Matt sighed. “My gut says to have somebody watch Cassie Neill, and watch her close. Maybe there’s a good reason she’s so sure there’s going to be a murder.”
Ben stared at him in disbelief. “You can’t be serious. If she weighs a hundred pounds, I’d be surprised.”
“What, killers have to have muscles? You know better, Ben.”
“I just meant she’s too… fragile to have that in her.”
The sheriff cocked an eyebrow. “Fragile?”
“Don’t even start with me.” Ben could feel heat rise in his face, as aware of his uncharacteristic credulity as his friend was but unwilling to examine it at the moment.
Matt hid a grin. “Okay, okay. It’s just I’ve never heard you use that word before.”
“Never mind my words. What are we going to do about this, Matt?”
“Wait. Nothing else we can do. If your fragile psychic comes up with something useful, great. If not—I guess we twiddle our thumbs and wait for a body to turn up.”
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 better!” 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 Sale
m 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?”
Matt’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 c
learly 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.”