She takes my face between her hands and makes me look into her eyes.
“The fact that that man is a sick bastard is not your fault. He’s a monster, and he took a great deal of pleasure taunting all of you. I don’t have to be psychic to know that. And you don’t have to be a shrink to know that I’m right.”
“Carlson died because I didn’t do my job well or fast enough.”
“No, he died because a person who swore to protect and serve turned out to be a psychopath, Cash. You know that as well as I do. You can’t beat yourself up for that anymore, or it’ll eat you up inside. Trust me on this.”
“I don’t want you to blame yourself for those girls’ deaths, Bri.”
“Any more than I want you to blame yourself for your friend’s death. Sometimes, monsters walk among us, and there’s just nothing we can do about that.”
I kiss her hand and pull her to her feet.
“Let’s go catch this particular monster, shall we?”
“Absolutely.”
We walk into the building and go through the process of checking in at the reception desk. When we reach Asher’s office, he jumps out of his chair and slides his phone into his pocket.
“You’re just in time,” he says. “We have another body.”
We rush to the morgue in the basement of the building. Brielle’s body tightens. I’m sure there are many spirits down here, ready to taunt the hell out of her.
“Are you okay?”
She nods stiffly. “I’m all right.”
Asher opens the door to a cold room lined with freezers that hold bodies on rolling trays.
In the center of the room is a table holding a body with a sheet covering it.
“Pulled her from the swamp this morning,” the medical examiner says. “Another swamp tour.”
“He’s getting sloppy,” Asher says.
“Impatient,” I reply. “He’s working faster now. He’s starting to make mistakes.”
The ME glances at Brielle and then back to Asher. “She might not want to see this.”
“I’m fine,” Brielle says again.
“It’s not pretty,” he says as he grips the sheet and peels it down the corpse’s torso.
“Oh,” Brielle whispers, leaning over the body. “She wasn’t tortured.”
“Strangled,” the ME confirms, pointing to the ligature marks around her neck. “She was definitely dead when she hit the water, though. No fluid in her lungs.”
“That’s unusual.” Asher turns to me. “It doesn’t follow the killer’s MO.”
“You’re right.” I narrow my eyes. “She does have dark hair, and it looks like she’s about the right height.”
“Sixty-seven inches,” the ME says. We all look at him. “Five foot seven,” he clarifies.
“But there are no other marks on her,” Asher says. “Our guy is way angrier than this.”
“Agreed.” I glance down at Brielle. “Do you recognize her?”
“She’s not one of the girls who’s been following me,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t think I’ve seen her before.”
“I’m not ready to rule this as a homicide,” Asher says. “She might have killed herself.”
“If she hung herself, how did she end up in the swamp?” I ask and notice Brielle pull her phone out of her purse. “What are you doing?”
“I want Daphne to touch her.”
All of us turn to her in surprise.
“Who the hell is Daphne?” Asher asks.
“My sister,” she responds. “She’s psychic and psychometric, meaning she knows and sees things by touching objects. It works with people, too.” Her attention turns to the phone call. “Hey, Daph? Can you come to the police station? It isn’t going to be a fun visit. I need you to touch a dead body. I know. Are you sure? Okay, see you soon.”
“I’m not sure I want a civilian touching my vic,” Asher says.
“If she’s not a victim, Daphne will know. And if she is, Daphne might be able to see the killer.”
“I’ll call up and tell them to escort her right down,” Asher says immediately, making us both smile.
“Oh. While we wait, I should let you both know that I’m going back to work,” Brielle says as casually as if she’s talking about going to the grocery store.
“Negative, ghost rider.” I shake my head emphatically. “Now that we know you’re his target, you are absolutely not going to work.”
“Cash, I need to try and lure him out. If he’s really after me, if I’m his sick end game, I need to be somewhere that he can easily take me.”
“No way.”
“Actually, she’s not wrong,” Asher says. “And she won’t be alone. We can have undercover officers on her tour. Hell, you can be on her tour. I’ll go one night and take my wife and kids. We’ll rotate. There will be eyes on her at all times.”
“And eyes on everyone around me,” she says. “If he’s lurking nearby, there’s a better chance that someone will notice him. I mean, he must be watching me, right?”
“What if this all blows up on us?” I ask desperately. “What if we do everything right, and he still manages to take you? I will not lose you to this sick asshole, Brielle. I’ll protect you, no matter what it takes.”
“I’m not Carlson,” she says softly. “This is not the same thing. There are cameras in our town.”
“Trust me, we’ve tried using them to find him,” Asher says in disgust. “He must know where they are and has figured out how to evade them.”
“He’s smart,” Brielle says. “But you said yourself, he’s getting impatient. We need to end this. And doing that might just mean me putting myself out there as bait.”
“This is a bad idea,” I whisper. “And there will be rules. Strict rules, Brielle, I mean it.”
“I won’t do anything stupid,” she says immediately. “Trust me, I don’t want to get caught. But I do want to catch him.”
Asher’s phone rings. “Excellent. Bring her down.”
“Is Daphne here?” Brielle asks.
“She’s here.”
Chapter Seventeen
Brielle
“I can honestly say that no one’s ever invited me to touch a dead body before,” Daphne says when she walks through the door. She hugs me tightly before being introduced to Asher and then turns to the covered form on the table. “Let’s get this over with.”
“I want to reiterate what Brielle said,” Cash says. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Are you kidding? I might see this bastard. Of course, I have to do this.”
“Do you need her to be uncovered?” Asher asks.
“Yes, please.” Daph takes a long, deep breath. She links her fingers with mine, and we silently recite our protection spell, the one we’ve used since we were small girls. When we open our eyes, the body is uncovered. “She wasn’t tortured.”
The surprise in Daphne’s voice mirrors my own from earlier.
“That’s why you’re here,” I say softly. “We need to know for sure if she was his victim.”
“Lucky me,” she whispers and licks her lips. She reaches out, her palm hovering over the girl’s arm. As she touches her, skin to skin, she inhales sharply. “Oh, she was absolutely his.”
“What do you see?” Cash asks.
“A lot, actually. Let me make some sense of it.” She frowns, taking it all in. It’s always been fascinating to watch Daphne see. Her eyes cloud over, her pupils dilate. “Okay, she was there a couple of days. She watched what he was doing to the others. She listened to them cry out, beg, sob. She didn’t react much. And she knew that she wasn’t going to let him do what he did to the others to her. So, when she was able to get her hands free of the ropes, she looped them over the bedpost and hung herself.”
“Christ,” Asher mutters, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “Can you see him?”
Daphne scowls. “Yes. I can see him. His back is to me, and he’s sawing up a victim on his workbench.�
�
“Has he turned around?” Cash asks.
“Not yet.” Daphne pauses, and her breath hitches. “He’s going to turn around. There he is. But…”
“But what?”
“I can’t see his face. He’s wearing a mask and something over his hair. Goggles.”
“A disguise?” Asher asks.
“No, it’s a surgical outfit,” Daphne says. “Like he’s protecting a patient from his germs. It’s so fucking creepy.”
“Can you look for a different time?” I ask her. “Maybe when he took her?”
She shakes her head mournfully. “She’s not showing me. She keeps showing me how she fell into the water. He dragged her by her arm. It dislocated her shoulder, and then he threw her over a railing into the water below.”
“So he lives over water?” Asher says. “This is new information.”
“I don’t know if he lives there,” Daphne replies. “But he’s definitely holding the girls there. Because he just dragged her from the bed, outside, and hitched her over the rail, like I said. She’s fading now.”
“Fading?” Asher asks.
“Her spirit is weakening. She’s leaving,” Daphne says. “Everything loses its intensity over time, especially people, although I’ve never touched a corpse before. I usually get my information from things. Tables, chairs, a letter, a child’s ball. I’ve never done this before. It feels like the end of a song when it fades away to nothing.”
“So interesting,” I whisper. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she says as she backs away from the body and accepts a towel from the ME. “But I do know her name. Kathy Sikes. She was a mother. On vacation with a girlfriend just before her thirtieth birthday. She lived in Chicago.”
“I’ll find a way to reach her family,” Asher says quietly. “We may have a missing person report on her.”
“You did a lot,” I inform my sister. “You just helped Kathy rest peacefully. That will mean a lot to her and her family.”
“I want to find this bastard,” Daphne says, her voice strong with conviction. “I’m sick to death of his bullshit. Of him killing all these women. And why? Because they look like you? It’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not,” I agree and wrap my arm around her shoulders. “I wish I knew who the fuck this guy is, so we could find him and stop him.”
We walk out of the morgue and take the elevator up to the first floor before stopping at the exit.
“I’m going with Daphne,” I inform Cash and lean in to kiss his cheek. “We’ll go find Millie. Daphne’s shields are down now, and we need to get them restored, and I’m going to read through Grandma’s book again. There has to be something in there that can help us stop this.”
“I’ll let you know when I’m done here,” Cash says. “And, Brielle, don’t you dare go back to work until I’m with you.”
“I promise, I won’t.”
Daphne and I leave the police station and turn toward Witches Brew.
“You’re going back to work?” she asks casually.
“I have to. I have to lure this fucker out.”
“That’s probably dangerous.”
We walk a full city block in silence before she speaks again.
“He doesn’t hate you,” she says, surprising me.
“Who?”
“The killer. He’s not doing this because he hates you.”
I stop on the sidewalk and turn to her. “How do you know that?”
“Because he touched her and I could feel that. He doesn’t think he’s acting out of anger. In fact, he loves you. Or at least he believes he does.”
“That’s beyond fucked-up, even for a serial killer.”
“Hey, I’m no profiler, and it was a super brief impression, but when he took her, when he touched her, he felt happiness. Affection.”
“I don’t have many men in my life.” The frustration hangs heavily in my voice. “I have Cash. That’s pretty much it. On a regular basis, anyway.”
“Well, he knows you. And, no, I don’t know how or why. If I did, I would have said so back there. It’s so damn frustrating.”
We walk into Witches Brew and stop short.
“You’re kidding,” Daphne says as a smile spreads over her face.
“A little help?” Millie asks, trying to control a coffee machine that seems to be going crazy, all by itself.
“What in the world?”
We hurry behind the counter and start flipping knobs and switches, but it doesn’t help. Finally, I crawl under the bar and unplug the machine entirely, and everything goes quiet.
“Thank you,” Millie says. She’s wiping her brow when I shimmy out and sit on my ass, right there in a puddle.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“It was just a little spell I’ve been working on,” she says with a shrug. “I thought it would be nice if the machine worked a little faster, but I must have said something wrong because—”
“Because it went crazy like something out of Beauty and the Beast?” Daphne asks, her hands on her hips.
“Well, yeah.” Millie sighs. “Sorry, guys. I’ll clean this up.”
“We’ll help.” I stand, and the three of us mop up the milk and water as Daphne and I fill our sister in on the happenings of the past hour.
“You’ve been busy,” Millie says softly. “I’m sorry, Daph.”
“It could be worse,” Daphne says. “I could have dead people following me around the city.”
Both of them turn to me. “How many now?” Millie asks.
“Six.” I sigh and glance out the window to the sidewalk. “He killed someone last night. They just follow me. Sometimes, their mouths move like they’re speaking, but I can’t hear them. It’s frustrating as hell.”
“The answer is in the dream-walking,” Millie says.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Because you never dream-walked before this. It’s new. And because no one is going to find him without you seeing where he is or who he is. It’s up to you, and I hate that for you, but I also kind of think it makes you a serious badass.”
“I mean, I am a badass,” I agree with a grin. “And I hate that it’s up to me because I feel like I’m failing.”
“I don’t even want to suggest this,” Daphne says, “but I think you need to fully surrender yourself to it. Let your shields down completely when you go to sleep.”
“No,” Millie says, horrified.
“It’s the best way,” I agree, thinking it over. “If I keep protecting myself, it’s less likely that I’ll see everything I need to. I’m missing things. Daphne’s right.”
“We’ll be with you, as always,” Daphne reassures us.
“Right now.” I stand and reach for my bag. “I want to do it right now.”
“You’re just going to force yourself to go to sleep?” Millie asks.
“You can give me something to make me sleep.”
“It makes you so damn groggy, we’ll be lucky if you wake up by Thursday.”
“It’s only Monday,” Daphne says in surprise.
“Exactly,” Millie agrees.
“So, give me a smaller dose.” I shrug. “But whip it up fast because we’re heading back to my apartment.”
“You’d better give Cash a heads-up,” Daphne warns. “I don’t want to be on his shit list.”
“Are you afraid of Cash?” I ask, surprised.
“No, but he’s going to be around for a long time, and I want him to like me.” She smiles smugly.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, please,” Millie says as she measures something with a special spoon. “We don’t have to be psychic to see that the man is completely in love with you.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it? We were thrown together because of a serial killer, and we’re falling in love.”
“There are weirder ways to fall in love,” Daphne points out. “It could be in prison or something.”
“You’re no
t helping.”
“You’re back.”
Sarah’s sitting on her little bed.
“You’re still here.”
“Damn right, I am.” She smiles thinly but it doesn’t reach her tired eyes. “It’s happening faster now, though. So many girls…gone.”
“Why hasn’t he hurt you?” I wonder aloud.
“Because I fight back, and I think that scares him. Or excites him.” She hitches a shoulder. “And I’m gonna keep fighting back.”
“Do you still have the knife?”
“Yep. He was mad when he couldn’t find it. Sick fuck.”
I nod and glance around. At least one more girl I don’t recognize. Maybe two.
“He’s taking so many now.”
“And killing them faster,” she agrees.
“I’m going to try to go out there now. I have to see him. I have to figure out where we are so I can bring the police here. We’re working really hard, Sarah. I promise.”
She only nods as I walk to the door and try the knob.
This time, to my utter surprise, it gives.
I can walk out the door!
It opens to a hallway, with the smell of pine hanging in the air. As if someone came through with a cheap can of aerosol air-freshener and doused everything with it.
He must be covering the smell from the room.
I gingerly walk down the hallway. Nobody should be able to hear or see me, but Sarah can, so I’m not taking any chances.
I can hear music playing. Soft strains that sound like something from the ’40s. Big band-style, but slow. It’s the only nice thing I’ve seen or heard in this place.
The floor creaks under my foot, and I stop, waiting to see if anyone comes running around the corner.
No one does.
I pass one open doorway and glance inside, then have to fight off the urge to throw up.
It’s a shrine. A fucking shrine with candles and flowers and incense burning.
And a picture of ME in the middle.
He’s made a shrine to me.
Who the hell is this sick bastard?
I back away and keep going down the hall. On the left is another open door with another shrine.
But it’s not my photo in the center.
It’s Millie.
The air whooshes out of me as I back away and come to another room, this time with a shrine built around a photo of Daphne.
Shadows: A Bayou Magic Novel Page 13