The sun was rising over the ocean now, and that was a truly beautiful sight. What made it even better was that it was there to be savored every single day, no matter how dark and disturbing the night before had been. When he had first arrived on the island, Joe had been unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time. In consequence, he had spent many a dawn nursing a cup of coffee on the small deck behind his house, letting the glorious pinks and purples and oranges that heralded the coming of a new day do what they could to soothe his troubled soul. Now, as he drove over the narrow stretch of highway that connected the island to the mainland, he glanced automatically at the heavens. The Technicolor pinwheels swirling across the deep lavender sky spread their mirror image across the midnight blue of the slice of ocean he could see off to both sides and the black waters of the creek beneath the causeway. The creek was up, as it rose some ten feet or so every night when the tide came in, and the surface of it was dotted with a flock of Canada geese that were late flying north for the summer. Gulls and herons and egrets wheeled among the gray stretches of cloud left over from the previous night’s downpour, then swooped down low under the bridge, fishing for their breakfast in the relative stillness of the creek. As he had slowly and painfully learned to do over the last few months, Joe took what comfort he could in the sheer splendor of the newborn morning, then spared a brief thought for the irony of it all. That a world of such immense physical beauty could harbor the kind of evil it did was one of the great mysteries of the universe. Sometime, when enough years had passed so that he had attained some perspective, he was going to try to fathom the whys and wherefores of it all.
But not now, he told himself as he pulled into the IHOP parking lot. Now he was going to lock the horrors of the night away in that special place in his mind that he had learned to reserve for such things, and concentrate on doing the job he was being paid to do.
“Think we’re going to be able to solve this?” Dave asked uneasily after they had placed their orders. They were seated in a booth in front of the window, nursing steaming cups of coffee. Joe was looking out through the glass, watching an eighteen-wheeler maneuver carefully into a parking place. The pavement was still wet from the earlier rain; oil mixed with the puddles to form shimmering rainbows on the macadam. There were four other patrons in the restaurant, all men, all, from the look of them, either truckers or fishermen. At just after six a.m. on a Monday morning in May, half a dozen customers was probably about as good as it got for this particular IHOP. Pawleys Island, like the entire oceanside area of the Strand in which it was located, wouldn’t start to get really busy until the tourists started pouring in by the carload right around the first of June.
After the May sweeps were over. Joe had been about as vaguely familiar as the average TV viewer with the concept that in certain designated months, television stations rolled out their best programming in hopes of attracting a large number of viewers, which would then enable them to hike the rates that they charged advertisers. But he had heard—with great interest—about the May sweeps again last night when he had talked to the Twenty-four Hours Investigates people at the crime scene before heading over to interview Nicky at her mother’s house. From what he’d understood from his discussion with them, TV people lived and died (maybe literally in this case?) by the ratings that their programs generated during the sweeps. As a motive for murder, juicing TV ratings wasn’t the best one he’d ever heard, but then again, it wasn’t the worst, either.
“We’re going to do our best,” Joe said, turning over various possibilities in his mind. The truck’s lights went off, and the driver emerged, tromping through rainbows as he headed toward the entrance. Dave made a sound that was sort of like an under-the-breath snort, and Joe pulled his gaze away from the view outside the window to look at him. His second-in-command was pale and tired-looking, with bags under his eyes and smudges and smears of Joe-didn’t-want-to-think-about-what on his once-white shirt.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve never been involved in a murder investigation before. I don’t think any of the guys have.” Dave said it low-voiced, as if he were imparting a slightly shameful secret.
“I’m aware.” It wasn’t exactly Joe’s area of expertise, either, although early in his career, he’d spent six months on the homicide squad before moving on to vice. On the other hand, vice encompassed a lot of territory. He’d seen his share—more than his share—of killings, and had gotten involved in their investigations as necessary. He knew the basics, the rudimentary procedures to be followed, and he had a veteran cop’s keen nose for things that didn’t smell quite right. Since the island had had only one confirmed murder—Tara Mitchell’s—in the last several decades, experience in conducting homicide investigations had not been a very high priority when the town council had hired its new police chief.
They might very well be rethinking that about now. As the saying went, though, hindsight was always twenty-twenty.
“Have you—?” Dave began, only to be interrupted as the waitress arrived with their meals, slapping plates of bacon and eggs and toast—Joe’s—and pancakes and sausage and biscuits with a little bowl of white gravy—Dave’s—down on the table in front of them. Joe was secretly glad for the interruption. The question he assumed Dave had been in the process of asking him—something along the lines of “Have you ever conducted a homicide investigation?”—was better off being left unanswered if possible, Joe judged. He was still the outsider, the new guy in town, the stranger in a place where most people had known each other all their lives. The job was his to do, and it would be easier all around if he had the confidence of his department—to say nothing of the community—while he did it.
“Can I get you boys anything else?” the waitress asked. She was an older woman, late fifties maybe, a little on the stocky side, with short, dark-brown hair and tired eyes. Her uniform was limp and tired-looking, too, as if it had been washed way too many times.
“No, ma’am,” Dave said, already tucking into his food with relish.
Joe shook his head and picked up his fork, digging into his eggs. The smell of breakfast made him think of the kitchen at Twybee Cottage, and for a moment, the image of Nicky Sullivan appeared in his mind’s eye. In a few hours, she’d be on her way to the airport, and that, all things considered, was probably a good thing. With her gone back to where she’d come from, he wouldn’t have to deal with the strong attraction she engendered in him; and, more important, unless the perp was a jet-setter, it would keep her safely out of harm’s way while he tried to figure out who had killed her friend and attacked her.
The driver of the eighteen-wheeler walked past and slid into a nearby booth just then, and the waitress moved away to offer him coffee.
“So what do we do now?” Dave asked after a few minutes, during which he’d managed to make most of the food on his plate disappear.
His Number Two was looking at him with utter confidence, and Joe tried not to grimace. Better get used to it, he told himself. He was now the quarterback, as it were; it was his team, and the plays were his to call. Wishing that, at a minimum, he was hitting on all cylinders mentally was an exercise in futility.
Taking a swallow of the truly awful coffee gave him a moment to think.
“Go over the crime scene with a fine-tooth comb to make sure we didn’t miss anything.” He was ticking off the necessary steps to be taken in his mind as he spoke. “Go over the evidence we’ve already collected, and send off anything that needs to go to the FBI crime lab. Verify witness statements.” Dave was looking eager but slightly bewildered, so Joe clarified. “Make sure everybody was where they said they were last night. If we find inconsistencies, we’ll know where to start looking for our perp.”
“More coffee?”
The waitress was back. Joe shook his head—the stuff was bitter as gall—and Dave declined, too. Joe was just about to ask for the check when the waitress frowned at him.
“Say, aren’t you that new police chief from over at the
island?” Eyes brightening, she was openly looking him over now.
“Yeah,” Joe replied, cherishing a faint hope that she might offer him a freebie meal. His salary wasn’t all that big, and in his view, every dollar he didn’t have to spend today was one more that he had to spend tomorrow.
“Honey, you’re on TV,” she told him. He must have looked surprised, because she stepped back and pointed to a small television set mounted on the wall behind the counter. He hadn’t noticed it before, probably because the volume was turned down so low that he couldn’t hear it even now, when he was looking right at it. But he didn’t have any trouble seeing it, and what he saw appalled him.
There he was, standing in the dark driveway of the Old Taylor Place, talking to Vince while, behind him, Karen Wise’s sheet-wrapped body was being loaded into an ambulance that waited on the driveway, its orange lights flashing. Her body hadn’t been taken away from the crime scene until nearly one-thirty a.m., so he knew approximately what time the piece had been filmed. The pine trees to his left and the big house behind him told him that the camera crew had been located down near the street. There had been a lot of chaos at the time, a lot of comings and goings. He hadn’t even been aware that a local news crew was on the premises.
But there, in front of him, was the unmistakable evidence that indeed it had been.
“Hey, we made the morning news,” Dave said with evident pleasure. Joe didn’t even bother telling him that making the news was not necessarily a good thing, especially under the circumstances. Instead, he stood up and headed for the counter. He was vaguely aware of Dave and the waitress following.
“Mind turning that up?” he asked the fat guy behind the counter. The guy wiped his hands on the apron he was wearing and complied.
All of a sudden, the pretty blonde who’d been moving her lips soundlessly on the screen was given a voice.
“. . . ghost story come to life,” she said. “In an eerie coincidence, a member of the Twenty-four Hours Investigates team down here in Pawleys Island to take a psychic look into the fifteen-year-old murder of a local teenager and the related disappearance of two of the girl’s friends was herself murdered last night. The butchered body of Karen Marie Wise was found minutes after the conclusion of a broadcast involving a séance that purported to make contact with the spirit of previous murder victim Tara Mitchell. What makes this tragedy so bone-chilling is that the murder of Ms. Wise appears to be nearly identical to the long-unsolved murder of Ms. Mitchell, which begs the question: What’s going on here? We’ll be talking to the local police later today in an effort to get the answer for our viewers. In the meantime . . .”
“Crap,” Dave said in an appalled tone as it seemed to finally occur to him that their untested, untried, inexperienced-in-anything-much-besides-DUI-and-disorderly-conduct-arrests police force was now smack-dab on the hot seat.
Joe would have expressed his dismay a little more strongly. He’d already been braced to see the story written up in all the local morning papers; the reporter who had appeared at the door of Twybee Cottage last night had been from the Savannah Morning News. Good news might travel fast, but bad news traveled faster.
“So we got ourselves a woman-killer around here now?” the fat guy asked, looking at Joe and shaking his head. “A hell of a thing for business.”
The dull ache that the bad coffee had almost gotten rid of was back, pounding behind Joe’s temples.
“Frank, you watch my tables for a minute,” the waitress said. “I gotta go call Pammy—that’s my daughter”—that was an aside to Joe—“and tell her to be sure and lock her doors. Her idiot of a husband always leaves them unlocked when he heads off to work.” She started for the back, then paused to lay a hand on Joe’s arm. “Honey, you catch him quick now, you hear?”
“I hear,” Joe said, hoping he sounded less sour than he felt. Then, with Dave on his heels, he slapped some money down on the counter and beat a hasty retreat, thinking, So much for a peaceful life.
9
THE NEXT FEW DAYS were some of the most difficult of Nicky’s life. She flew back to Chicago on Monday. On Tuesday, she went in to work, where the atmosphere was a weird dichotomy of the somber—because of Karen’s death—and the jubilant—because of the buzz the show had generated. On Wednesday, she flew to Kansas City, which was Karen’s hometown. On Thursday morning, she, along with a whole contingent from Twenty-four Hours Investigates, attended Karen’s funeral. By Thursday night, she was alone again, back in her apartment in Chicago.
There, at ten minutes before eleven, exhausted and wrung out with emotion, she was wearing a pair of ratty old sweatpants, a baggy T-shirt, and thick, gray sweatsocks—her favorite sleeping gear—with her hair twisted into a haphazard knot on the top of her head and her face shiny with the intensive-moisturizing pack that she sometimes used to fight the skin-damaging effects of too much air travel. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her queen-sized bed with her laptop balanced on her knees, checking what was almost a week’s worth of e-mail.
With every light in the place blazing. Since Sunday night, she hadn’t been able to stand being alone in the dark. When she wasn’t getting creeped out about a monster who wanted to kill her lurking in the shadows, she was hearing the whispers of a chorus of faceless ghosts.
She was safe in her apartment, she knew. The door was double-locked and chained, the security system was on, and the house of horrors, as she had come to think of it, was roughly a thousand miles away.
None of it could touch her here. And even her memories could be held at bay—as long as she kept the lights on.
She had received hundreds of e-mails, most of them from fans of Twenty-four Hours Investigates who had gotten her e-mail address from the show’s website. Nicky scrolled down through them with one eye on the screen and one eye on the TV, on which one of the many incarnations of Fear Factor was playing. She wasn’t really paying attention to it; she didn’t even particularly like the show. She just had the TV on because, for one of the few times in her life, she needed its noise, along with the illusion it provided that she wasn’t alone.
Her apartment was a cozy—okay, make that tiny—one bedroom on the twelfth floor of a way-too-expensive high-rise that almost had a view of Lake Michigan. Sometimes on a clear day, if she rode up to the exercise club on the top floor and used a little imagination, she thought she could see the flinty blue waters of the lake. Other times, she wasn’t so sure. At any rate, she’d sublet the place, furnished, for the allowed minimum of one year, because TV was an iffy business and by the time August rolled around again, she might well be out of a job, or working on a TV show that was based somewhere other than Chicago.
At any rate, the apartment had all the essentials: a comfortable bed in a bland, white-walled bedroom that was just about big enough to hold it; a white-tiled bathroom; a galley-sized kitchen; and a white-carpeted, white-walled, white-draped combination living-dining area sized so that parties of maybe a dozen or less could crowd into it if they stood really, really close together. Not that she ever had parties. Unless she was attending a work-related function—and she went to a fair number of those—she was strictly a late-to-bed, early-to-rise working girl.
For the first time, Nicky wondered if maybe she was missing something. In Chicago, she had neighbors with whom she exchanged good mornings or good evenings, depending on the time of day when they ran into each other in the halls or elevators, and the occasional piece of misdirected mail; work friends; dozens of acquaintances; and a couple guys she’d gone out with once or twice before deciding that the relationships weren’t going anywhere and were, in fact, more trouble than they were worth. She had lots of friends scattered about the country from other places she had lived, other places she had worked; a fair number of ex-boyfriends, some of whom she actually still spoke to; and more family than any one human being could reasonably be expected to cope with for any extended period of time.
That was her life. That was how she liked it.
Neat, uncomplicated, focused on work and getting ahead. Money put away for a rainy day. A substantial enough income—at least as long as Twenty-four Hours Investigates stayed on the air—so that she could actually live on it and have money left over.
In other words, it was the exact opposite of the chaos in which she had grown up. Her father had died when she was seven years old. From that time on, the household had been as volatile as Leonora herself. “The gift,” as they all called Leonora’s psychic ability, was a capricious master. It tended to manifest itself without warning, and when she felt it speaking to her, Leonora was liable to forget mundane things, like daughters who needed to be picked up from school or dinner cooking on the stove. Strangers were constantly coming to the house for readings, or, nearly as often, Leonora was being called away to assist with this or that investigation. As young girls, Nicky and Livvy had never known, from one day to the next, if they were going to be spending the night at home with their mother or at Marisa’s house across the island, or at Uncle Ham’s in Charleston. Boyfriends and husbands had moved in and out of Leonora’s life on what was practically a revolving-door basis; Nicky and Livvy had learned not to get too attached to them, because one morning the girls would wake up and the latest man in their mother’s life would be gone.
Money had been a constant problem as well. The other thing that no one seemed to quite get about being a psychic was that it didn’t come with a regular pay-check. Sometimes, as when Leonora had her TV show, money had been plentiful. Other times, it had been a struggle just to keep the utilities on. If it hadn’t been for Twybee Cottage, which Leonora and Ham had inherited from their parents and which, through all the turbulent years, had served as Leonora’s base, many times they might not even have had a home. Leonora had never been less than a loving mother, and Nicky was devoted to her. But wherever Leonora was, turbulence reigned, and Nicky had discovered years ago that turbulence was just not her thing.
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