Superstition

by Karen Robards

  If she wouldn’t be careful on her own behalf, then he would be careful for her.

  “Were you out there giving a fucking interview?” Vince roared at him as Joe stepped through the door. “We want to keep this quiet, not turn it into a media circus.”

  It was too hot inside the house now from the crowding together of too many bodies, too bright from all the lights that had been set up to facilitate the search for even the most minute bits of evidence, and claustrophobic as hell. Now that he knew what it was, even the tiny hint of the death smell that hung in the air was nauseainducing. As soon as the screen door swung shut behind him, he was conscious of wanting to be back out in the fresh air again. Not that turning tail was an option, but still.

  “We’re going to have to deal with the media,” Joe said in an even tone as he headed toward Vince. Still clad in the khaki slacks and forest-green jacket he’d been wearing earlier but minus the tie, Vince was standing over behind the couch, watching as Milton, under the supervision of a guy from the Georgetown County PD’s CSI department, which Joe had insisted be called to the scene, painstakingly used an X-Acto knife to cut through a square of carpet in the corner of the living room that might or might not have a couple drops of the victim’s blood on it. Bright flashes of light from the bathroom told Joe that pictures were still being taken of the death scene. The body was gone, but the pattern of blood spatter and smears could tell them a great deal about the attack, Joe knew. A blue glow from the bedroom told him that they were using luminol to search for more blood in there. “They’re not going to go away, and we can’t make them. What we’re going to have to do is cooperate with them to a degree, feed them select bits of information while keeping what we want to keep quiet out of the loop, and try to manage the story as best we can that way.”

  “To hell with that.” Vince was practically foaming at the mouth. He glared at Joe. “What, don’t you have the balls to tell your girlfriend to take a hike? Oh, yeah, don’t think I didn’t hear about you two being all loveydovey over dinner, for chrissake. I own that damned hotel, you know. A place like this, word gets back.”

  Joe felt his stomach tighten.

  “Vince,” he said. “Let me give you some advice: Keep your nose the hell out of my personal life.”

  Their eyes met and held.

  “I got no interest in your personal life,” Vince said in a milder tone after a moment in which the issue hung in the balance. “But we got to contain this. It’s going to ruin us if we don’t. You think the guy what did this is the same guy what did the girl at the Old Taylor Place last Sunday?”

  Joe shrugged. “Hard to be one hundred percent certain at this point, but I’d say so.”

  “Same guy who killed that fucking ghost girl fifteen years ago?”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “You don’t think so,” Vince translated. “Why not?”

  “A lot of things,” Joe said. “Number one, where’s he been for fifteen years? Number two, he’s cutting off the hair, but he’s not mutilating the faces. Tara Mitchell’s face was cut to ribbons. Karen Wise, this woman tonight—they were butchered, but their faces weren’t touched. Number three, we got no record that the perp fifteen years ago ever contacted anyone. This guy called Nicky Sullivan from the victim’s phone after both murders, sort of like he wanted her to know that he was out there. I’m putting protection on her, by the way. I think it’s justified at this point.”

  Vince looked aghast. “Do you have any idea what that’s going to cost?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I do. A shitload. And I don’t care. You can fire me if you want, but as long as I’m Chief of Police, she’s getting protection.”

  A deep red stain started to creep over Vince’s cheeks. It meant he wasn’t happy, and Joe knew that. He also knew that he wasn’t backing down. Since coming to Pawleys Island, he’d pretty much said “How high?” every time Vince said “Jump.” But that had been because he hadn’t cared. About anything.

  Now he did.

  “Shit,” Vince said. “You want her to have protection? Fine. Give her protection. But we got to get this thing resolved. We can’t have all this shit happening. Not now. Not anytime, but especially not now.”

  “What’s so special about now, for Chrissake?”

  Vince’s eyes collided with his. “Tourist season is coming up.”

  BY THE TIME Nicky walked into the kitchen of Twybee Cottage, she was so exhausted that she felt practically boneless. The parade that had followed her home followed her inside, with the exception of Gordon, who’d taken off for his hotel room. Even Dave came in. The lights were on, the fan was turning overhead, and the scent of coffee hung in the air. Harry was standing at the counter, pouring himself a cup. He turned at their entry, surveying the seven of them—Nicky, Livvy, Leonora, Uncle Ham, Uncle John, Marisa, and Dave—with a frown.

  “So, where’d all of you go haring off to? I was getting worried. I thought maybe Olivia—but I see she’s still in one piece.”

  “You mean you haven’t heard . . . ?” Leonora began, and then they all chimed in, filling Harry in on the details of Marsha Browning’s murder. Nicky, meanwhile, left them to it and went upstairs to her bedroom, lugging her suitcase and laptop case, which she had retrieved from the trunk of her car, and turning on lights as she went. Her bedroom was one of four on the second floor, and it hadn’t changed by so much as a shift in position of the framed picture of herself in her high-school graduation gown that still sat on the corner of her dresser from when she had left for college eleven years before. It was a large room, approximately fourteen by eighteen feet, with the same tall ceiling—nine feet upstairs, ten feet down—as the rest of the house. The walls were a deep, soft moss green, the curtains and trim were white, and the furniture was old—not quite old enough to qualify as antique, but old. The bed, a double four-poster nestled between the pair of tall windows; dresser; and desk were cherry. The rectangular mirror over the dresser was framed in shells, which Nicky had attached herself with a hot-glue gun in her young teenage artsy-craftsy phase, and, in the same corner it had always occupied, the armchair where she’d once spent hours reading was covered in a green-and-white fern-frond print that matched the bedspread. There were two doors, one that led out into the hall and one that led into the bathroom that she shared with Livvy, whose identical room (except for the deep rose color scheme and white painted furniture) opened off the bathroom on the other side.

  Nicky dropped the suitcase by the desk and unzipped her laptop from its case. Her pulse was already beginning to race as she set it up on the desk. Establishing Internet contact took a moment—Twybee Cottage’s roof was metal, which interfered with everything from TV reception to telephone calls—but she eventually got through. It took no time at all to scroll through her e-mail.

  Her heart lurched when she saw it: a message from Lazarus514. May 14. Yesterday—the date of Marsha Browning’s murder.

  She’d been expecting it, fearing it, but still. . . . The cold reality of it made her stomach twist.

  Drawing in a shuddering breath, she clicked on the message:

  Dogs howling in the dark of night

  Howl for death before daylight.

  Cross my heart and hope to die

  Cut my throat if I tell a lie.

  She was still staring at it when, from the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a man’s tall shadow behind her.

  16

  NICKY WHIRLED WITH a squeak. It would have been a full-blown scream, but even before the sound came out of her throat, she realized who was in her bedroom with her.

  “Joe.” It was a sigh of relief. She might be mad at him, but she wasn’t afraid of him. Leaning against the desk for support, she pressed a hand to her heart, which was still pounding double time. “What are you doing here?”

  “I knocked on the door; your mother told me to come in and said you were upstairs. Then she said if I wanted to talk to you, I should go on up. So here
I am. For one thing, I need a list of everyone who had access to your new phone number.” His eyes were on her laptop by that time. “Anything?”

  Reminded of her original fright, Nicky sucked in air. “Yes. Look.”

  Turning, she pointed at the screen. Joe moved, and she could feel him close behind her. Fear trumped anger, she was discovering, and the dread that had filled her upon finding that message was enough to wipe the slate clean between Joe and herself. Well, almost clean. The urge to lean back against his solid strength was almost overwhelming, but she resisted. She and Joe—not a good idea, she told herself firmly. There was definitely something between them—all right, maybe even something above and beyond simple chemistry—but they were on opposite sides of the fence. She was a reporter, he was a cop, and pursuing a personal relationship while they were both working the same investigation was a bad idea. It was, in fact, a conflict of interest waiting to happen, and she, now that she was out of the moonlight and off the beach, was enough of a professional to realize it. So there.

  “I knew it,” he said. She didn’t have to glance around to know that he was reading the message that still showed on the screen.

  “I told you I heard a dog howling.” Her voice was uneven. “At the Old Taylor Place, not long after I saw Tara Mitchell in the window. And before, on the night Karen was killed.”

  Joe didn’t say anything for a moment. Unable to stand the silence, Nicky turned to look at him. They were just inches apart, so close that she had to tilt her head back to see his face. His focus was still on the computer screen. He was frowning, and he looked even more tired than she felt. His eyes were bloodshot and surrounded by a web of tiny, fine lines, his mouth was hard and set, and his jaw was dark with five o’clock stubble.

  He looked irritable and sleep-deprived, and even in that less-than-optimum state, he still managed to make her heart go pitter-pat.

  Their eyes met.

  “If you heard a dog howling earlier, then he probably did, too, or he wouldn’t have sent this particular message. Which means he was probably lurking around the Old Taylor Place when you were there.” His jaw hardened. “What time did you hear the dog howling?”

  Nicky told him.

  “We’ve got to assume that he saw you at the Old Taylor Place, too, then. We know he saw you later on the beach. Which makes it likely that he’s actively following you. Jesus Christ, that’s three times now you could have been killed. That we know about.”

  “Gordon was with me the whole time at the Old Taylor Place,” Nicky said, striving for calm, although this new possibility made her stomach knot. “And by the time the dog started howling, I was in the back of a police car with two cops to protect me. And then, on the beach, there was you.”

  She couldn’t help it. Her voice went soft on the last three words.

  “Being way too careless.” Joe’s voice was anything but soft. Like his face, it was positively grim. His lips thinned, and he cupped her face and looked down into her eyes. His hands were big and strong and warm—quintessentially masculine hands. It would have been a seriously loverlike gesture—if he hadn’t been scowling at her. “I need you to consider that vacation. You’re scaring the life out of me here.”

  “Joe.” Keeping the fact that they were on opposite sides of the fence firmly fixed in her mind wasn’t going to be all that easy, Nicky discovered. What she really wanted to do at that moment was wrap her arms around his neck and press her mouth to his and have him kiss her until the fear that was slowly turning her blood to ice water was forgotten in an explosion of steam. But she still had some self-control left, and so she didn’t. Instead, she grasped his forearms—they were hard with muscle and roughened by fine, black hair—and looked steadily up at him. “Don’t you see? I’m your link with him. He’s communicating with me. You can use that.”

  “I don’t want to use that. I want you off somewhere, sipping margaritas on a beach about a thousand miles from here.”

  “I have to come back sometime. I have to come back here sometime. It’s home.” Nicky tried for a smile that she suspected fell sadly short. “The only way I’m going to be safe is if we work together to catch this guy.”

  “Work together?”

  “Yeah, as in, you and me. A team.”

  “Not happening.”

  Her eyes narrowed at him. “Fine. You investigate, and I’ll investigate, and we’ll just end up duplicating each other’s efforts and wasting a lot of time.”

  His hands dropped away from her face. “I’ve got a better idea. I investigate and you stay the hell out of the way.”

  “It looks to me like you can use all the help you can get.”

  “Not from you.”

  Nicky bristled. “What do you mean, not from me? For your information, I’m a damned good reporter. In fact, I’m willing to bet I can investigate you into the ground. I know how to find sources, and I know how to get information out of them. I know where—”

  The corners of his mouth quirked up in the merest hint of a smile. “Wait. Whoa. There you go again, getting all huffy over nothing. I’m not questioning that you’re good at what you do. I’m just telling you I don’t want your help. And the reason I don’t want your help is because I don’t want you putting yourself in any more danger than you’re in already. My worst nightmare is to get a call about a third victim and find out it’s you.”

  There was a lot to object to in that speech, and Nicky caught every hackle-raising nuance as it was uttered. But what she also caught was the darkening of his eyes and the hard strength of his hands as they gripped either side of her waist. Her pulse speeded up.

  “Oh,” she said, because she was suddenly too busy sliding her hands up over his chest to think of anything better.

  “What I’m trying to say here is that I like you better alive than dead.”

  “That’s romantic,” Nicky decided.

  “Isn’t it?”

  His head lowered, and Nicky felt her breath catch in response. He was going to kiss her. . . . She wanted him to kiss her.

  She could almost feel the steam.

  “Nick,” Livvy said from the general direction of the hall.

  Joe’s head lifted, his hands dropped, and he looked past Nicky toward the doorway.

  Ever impatient, Nicky was stopped in the very act of going up on tiptoe to hurry the kiss along, all her carefully reasoned-out caution having been blown to smithereens by the flash of real tenderness for her that she was almost sure she had just seen in Joe’s eyes. Thwarted, she glanced around at her sister with a “get lost or die” frown.

  “Sorry.” Livvy folded her arms on top of her swollen belly and made an apologetic little face at her. The thing was, though, that she showed no signs of leaving. “Marisa wants to head home, and Mama thought Joe might want to listen to the tape before she goes.”

  Joe’s face suggested that he felt a distinct lack of interest in the tape right at that moment. In consequence, the look Nicky gave him was severe.

  “Livvy! Nicky! Are you all coming down?” Uncle Ham yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “Bring Joe.”

  “We’re coming,” Livvy yelled back, and gave Nicky a pointed look.

  “My mother can help you solve this thing if you let her,” Nicky said to Joe, accepting the fact that there was even less privacy to be had in her childhood home than on the beach, and abandoning all thought of persuading Livvy to leave so that she and Joe could take up where they had left off. Instead, she gave him a little shove toward the door. “Go on, go downstairs. So you don’t believe in ghosts. Fine. You don’t have to. But the least you can do is listen to the tape with an open mind.”

  “You’re lucky,” Livvy said wistfully as Nicky walked past her. Joe was a few paces away, near the top of the stairs by this time, which placed him just out of earshot. “He’s hot.” Then her mouth twisted. “How did this happen? I was always the one who got the hunky guys, not you. And now look at me. And look at you.”

  “You’re just go
ing through a bad patch,” Nicky said. “It will pass.”

  Livvy rolled her eyes. “You sound just like Mama. Come on, let’s go down.”

  “HE’S BACK. He’s back. It’s him. He’s here.”

  Once he knew what he was listening for, Joe could hear the voices distinctly. They were soft, feminine exclamations that popped up at various intervals throughout the audiotape, whispering over the primary action, repeating the same two-word phrases over and over. Unfortunately, that didn’t necessarily make what he was hearing germane to the investigation: As far as he could tell, he could be listening to just about any whispering female on the planet. How this group could tell that the voices belonged to a ghost at all, much less the ghosts of the three girls in question, was beyond him, but he kept that thought to himself. He listened politely, doing his best to keep an open mind—which was vital, because Nicky kept glancing at him—while battling the bone-deep weariness that made concentrating on anything at all, much less ghost voices on tape, an effort. As the tape neared the end, his efforts were rewarded in a way he would never have foreseen, which, in his opinion, went a long way toward proving the old adage that being lucky was better than being good—sometimes much better.

  Forget ghost voices. What he heard, distinct from all the hullabaloo that was the program itself, was a phone call being answered by a real, live human being.

  The phone must have been on vibrate, because he didn’t hear a ring, just a tiny click and then. . . .

  “Hello?” a woman murmured.

  A beat passed.

  She said something that was unintelligible.

  Another beat.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said, a little louder. “You’ll have to speak up.”