by Lois Duncan
“I worked last week on two crimes—one was four years old, and one was five years old—with good results,” Noreen said. “I don’t know how it works, so don’t ask me to explain it. Just send me the things from her body. It works best if they’re metal.”
“I’ve been wearing the watch myself.”
“Then I’ll pick up on you as well as your daughter. You said there were earrings?”
“They weren’t metal.”
“Plastic? I don’t do well with plastic.”
“They were seashells, but they have gold rims.”
“Send me the seashells and the watch—send me as much stuff as you have, and I’ll just keep touching everything and see what I get. Please, don’t include information about the murder. I don’t want to be told about the girl or about the case. When I’m done, I’ll send you the tape and the artist’s composite.”
“The tape?”
“I’ll audiotape everything. I work with an assistant who asks me questions when I’m in a trance, and you’ll hear those as well as my answers. Actually, if you want, we can do a phone hookup; you can be right there on the line at the time it’s done. I don’t usually do it that way with the victim’s family, but you seem levelheaded enough to be able to handle it.”
As soon as I was off the phone, I packed Kait’s purse, wallet, earrings, lipstick, and sunglasses in a mailer to send to Noreen. It was frustrating that so few of those objects were metal. Then I remembered the cross Kait had been wearing. I knew that it had been meaningful to her because it had been her grandfather’s, so I’d given it to her favorite cousin, Heidi.
Heidi was away at college, and I didn’t know how to reach her, but I called my brother and asked him to get in touch with her and to ask her to mail the necklace directly to Noreen.
I felt sure that if Kait’s energy remained anywhere, it would be in the cross.
21
HALLOWEEN HAD ALWAYS BEEN one of Kait’s favorite holidays, because she loved to dress up, and long after she was too old for the practice herself, she had taken the neighborhood children trick-or-treating. This year I took a jack-o’-lantern to the cemetery and felt she was pleased with it. Other graves sported mundane bouquets of autumn flowers, but only Kait had a pumpkin.
I stayed for a little while, enjoying the warmth of the Indian summer sunshine as it slipped between the branches of the trees to make patterns of light and shadow on the grass. Then I went back to the town house to spend the rest of the day in the makeshift darkroom Don had set up for me in the laundry room. The renewal of my friendship with Marcello had brought back memories of his father juggling balls and plates while my father took pictures of the performance, and I’d queried my publishers about the possibility of doing a children’s book about Ringling Brothers Circus. They had greeted the idea with enthusiasm, and now I was making proofs of my father’s fifty-year-old black-and-white negatives of dancing elephants, grimacing gorillas, and such legendary personalities as “The Great Karl Wallenda” teaching his five-year-old daughter to walk a backyard high wire.
Proofing up hundreds of negatives was a lengthy procedure. I was still at it five days later and was in the process of printing a picture of the tramp clown, Emmett Kelly, taking a bubble bath, when the phone rang. Dropping the print into the fixer bath, I hurried to answer it.
The call was from Gwen Spoon, Noreen Renier’s assistant.
“Noreen’s ready to roll,” she said. “The police artist is on his way over to her place, and they’re going to do a composite sketch of your daughter’s killer. If you want to sit in, you can put through a conference call and get on the line with us.”
“You’re not there with her?” I asked in surprise.
“No, I’m calling from work. I’ll be using my lunch hour to do this. Do you want to listen in?”
“I certainly do!”
“Then, set up the call, and when we’re all on the line, Noreen will see if she can home in on Kait’s personality. She’ll be asking you for feedback to see if she’s on the right wavelength.”
I dialed the long-distance operator and set up the conference call. A few minutes later the three of us were on the line together.
“Did my niece send you Kait’s cross?” I asked Noreen.
“Yes, and she enclosed a letter saying she hasn’t worn it yet,” Noreen said. “That’s good, because it means your daughter’s energy hasn’t been defused by her cousin’s. I’m going to see if I can describe her emotionally and mentally. Gwen, will you say her name, please?”
“Her name is Kait.”
“I want to be Kait,” Noreen said. “Kait—I want to be Kait. … Was Kait just in the process of a move or planning to move, or had she just moved recently? I see a move around her at about the time this happened.”
“That’s correct,” I said. “She’d just recently gotten her own apartment.”
“Kait … I want to be Kait. I feel a little school around me. Not a lot, just a little. I don’t know if she didn’t go that much or what, but it’s just a little school.”
“She was taking two summer-school classes at the university.”
“I want to be Kait. … I want to be Kait. I want to go into her emotionally. I want to go into her mentally. I want to be Kait. … Everything looked good to Kait. Everything sounded good. She wanted to try everything a couple of times. She was interested in many, many areas, and she had a low threshold of boredom. Kait, let me just see you. … She wasn’t always thoughtful. She might be late for an appointment, because she had so many things going, but people liked her—her peers liked her—she was popular—she liked people. She was the type of person with her vitality that she liked a lot of people—she might have changed men in her life—maybe there was someone on the fringes, a past relationship or someone who maybe never really entered into her life.
“Kait—I want to go into your body. … I feel like she’s always had bad cramping. I feel stomach problems—a stomachache with her. I am Kait, and my stomach seems to hurt me a great deal. Lois, will you verify?”
“Her intestines were damaged by celiac disease when she was a baby,” I said. “She suffered a lot of abdominal pain all her life.”
“What night was she killed?”
“It was Sunday night, July 16, 1989.”
“July 16, 1989. I see myself in a car—I feel I am driving, so it must be my car. I want to see what happens to me that night. … There were people around me. I wasn’t alone before this happened. … I feel there was a knife. I was threatened by a knife.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said, startled.
“Then it’s not right. That’s okay, it’s not always right, I sometimes get sidetracked. Still, I feel a knife so strongly. Why do I feel a knife?”
“She wasn’t killed with a knife,” I said. “She was shot.”
“Still, I just see a knife! I keep seeing a knife! I am scared of the knife!”
“Maybe that was another occasion we’re not familiar with,” Gwen suggested.
“I wasn’t shot,” Noreen said. “I don’t think I was shot—”
“She was shot in the head while she was driving,” I said.
“Oh, then she was driving? Good! I felt so sure of that. But the gun just isn’t that clear to me. I don’t think she got a good look at it. What we ought to have is the bullet or the projectile. Then I could pick up who put the bullet in the gun. Would the police release that to you?”
“No way,” I said.
“Too bad. It would help so much. Kait … what were you doing? I want to be Kait—before I’m killed—I want to be alive. … Kait—go to that night. …
“I feel like there are hills, strong inclines around me. I see city lights, but I don’t feel I’m exactly in the city at this time as I’m driving. I feel that I’m entering into it—is that accurate, Lois?”
“Albuquerque’s surrounded by mountains, but she wasn’t on a hill when she was shot. She was driving through a downtown area.”
“You mean I can send you visions out of my mind?”
“You can do that very easily, and I seem to be bracing against it. I don’t want to see what you see or what you want me to see; I have to make sure it’s really what I see on my own. So let’s cut off this call, and I’ll work with the artist and see if we can get a face. Then I’ll call you back and fill you in on what’s happened.”
For the next two hours I sat in a chair by the telephone, trying to communicate with Kait.
Take advantage of this opportunity to get a message through to us, I told her silently. Send us more than a picture of Miguel Garcia. We’ll probably never have a chance to do this again, so, if you possibly can, try to tell us why you were killed.
Finally, Noreen called back.
“We’re finished,” she said. “The artist just left, and we’ve got two pictures. One is the man I feel did the actual shooting, and the other is the person who is responsible for the murder.”
“What race are they?”
“Well, we’ve got them both looking sort of white, but I’m not certain about their nationalities. There may be some Mexican or Italian or other stuff in there.”
“Could the man responsible for her murder be Oriental?”
“I can’t really say, because that picture’s not as detailed as the other one. He has a square face and very straight, dark hair with highlights in it. The pictures aren’t going to be one-hundred-percent accurate, because this artist tends to get people looking too pretty, but they’re close to who I saw in my mind.
“I’ll send you the sketches and an audiotape of what you missed. Look over the pictures and listen to the tape. Then you can see if there are other questions you want answered, and we’ll set up a second session to fill in the gaps.”
Three days later I received the sketches of Kait’s killers.
The first was of a face that looked vaguely familiar, as if I’d seen a photograph of it in the newspaper, but it was the second picture that caused my knees to buckle.
The triggerman was “Mike Vamp.”
The hitman in Don’t Look Behind You appeared in the police artist’s sketch exactly as he was portrayed on the jacket of the British edition of that book. That picture wasn’t on the cover of the American edition, so people in the United States hadn’t seen it, but the British edition showed my heroine talking on the telephone while the face of the hitman peered in through a window behind her.
Somehow I managed to drive myself home from the post office and maneuver the house key into the door lock. Then I headed straight for the bookcase that held the foreign editions of my novels. When I held the sketch next to the jacket of Don’t Look Behind You, the resemblance was even more startling than I’d thought. Every detail of Mike Vamp’s face appeared in the sketch—the hollows in the cheeks; the deep-set black eyes; the bulbous nose; the large, pointed ears; and even a scar that ran horizontally between the eyebrows. It was as if Noreen’s artist had copied the book jacket.
Noreen had sent the audiocassette with the pictures, and I inserted it in our tape player and sat huddled on the sofa, shivering as if I were freezing, as I listened to the continuation of the phone conversation.
Gwen Spoon’s side of the dialogue had not been recorded, but from Noreen’s responses I could follow the line of questioning.
“It wasn’t working with the mother on the line,” Noreen said. “She was too emotional. Now, let me see if I can get back into Kait.
“What can I get about the killer? Why did he murder the girl? What was the motive? … Oh, my God, it was a setup! … He killed her because she knew too much. … I think she accidentally knew too much. She got involved in something way over her head before she knew she was over her head. I think they overestimated what she knew. She was someplace when something happened and saw too much and saw too many people.
“There were several people involved in this thing she found out about. One was a man who owned stuff. I don’t know if he’s one of the men in the sketches or not, but he was around there. Did he work at or was he maybe part owner of a club? Maybe some sort of disco or nightclub? That’s very strong around me, a nightclub or disco. … Did Kait work for him in some way or work at the place in some way? I feel work—that she worked for him in some way—how she worked for him I don’t know at this time.
“Now, let me see if I can figure where all this took place. There’s this man who’s thinking—‘Because I’m just here to set up this organization, I don’t necessarily have to buy a home, I can rent.’ I almost want to call it sort of a villa, because it has stucco in it, a low roof, a Spanish- or Mexican-style roof. There’s a strong backdrop of a mountain right behind it.
“I think Kait was leaving this place, going back into town. I don’t know if she was followed by them or not, but when I first tuned into her, the city was in front of me and I was coming down the mountain into a valley where I saw the lights of the town. This man lived on the outskirts of town, and definitely east, maybe a bit northeast. If we were put where Kait was found and we drew a clock around her, I would put his villa maybe at two or two-thirty. It was maybe twelve miles or a little over twelve miles away. There’s a twelve involved in it. And I see a five. That has something to do with a time frame. I don’t know how long ago the girl was killed, but I see a five. I don’t know what it means, but I see a five.”
The tape ran out, and I went to the phone and dialed Noreen.
“Something crazy happened with one of the pictures,” I told her. “Your artist drew a character from one of my books.”
“Which picture?”
“The one with the tight curly hair. The triggerman.”
“He came out of a book?”
“I wrote a book called Don’t Look Behind You and modeled my heroine on Kait. In that story my heroine was chased by a hitman in a Camaro. The book came out in June 1989. In July 1989 Kait was chased down and shot to death by a hitman in a Camaro. Your artist drew my hitman.”
“That’s impossible!” Noreen said. “I told the artist what to draw.”
“But the face you described was of a fictitious character! This isn’t the person who shot Kait, it’s a person I invented!”
“I couldn’t have pulled him out of your mind,” Noreen said. “You weren’t on the line at the time. We’d severed connections.”
“But it’s him!” I insisted. “It’s Mike Vamp! You got the picture somehow! In my book Mike Vamp was a hitman hired by interstate drug dealers.”
“Did Kait ever see a picture of this character?” Noreen asked me.
“She’s one of only a few people in this country who has. The proof for the artwork arrived a few days before her death, and I asked her opinion about how it compared with the American jacket. She said she thought it was much scarier.”
“That’s the answer, then,” Noreen said. “The picture is symbolic. The message Kait was trying to send us is that a hitman was hired to kill her because she was going to expose illegal activities.”
“You said she saw something that night that led to her death,” I said. “There wasn’t any time for that. She went straight from our house to her girlfriend’s house that evening and was shot right after she left there.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s not what I got,” Noreen said. “I got she went somewhere that night and was threatened with a knife.”
“Can you go back into a trance and dig deeper into this?”
“Yes, but I’ve got a heavy schedule this week. I’ll try to get it done within the next ten days or so. Then we’ll give all the stuff to the police and let them run with it.”
“They will when they look at my credentials,” Noreen said confidently.
“They won’t look at your credentials. The police here won’t look at anything. They’re so furious with us right now, they won’t even talk to us.”
“So, go federal,” Noreen said. “What about the FBI? If this is interstate trafficking, you ought to be able to get the feds involved.”
The composite sketch of the triggerman drawn by police artist Mike Deal, working from the description given by psychic Noreen Renier
Drug runner hitman “Mike Vamp” peers through the window on the jacket of the British edition of Don’t Look Behind You
“We’ve tried,” I said. “The FBI won’t answer our letters.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, where do we go from here?” Noreen was clearly irritated. “All this work isn’t going to be worth a hill of beans if nobody will follow up on it.”
“Please, let’s keep trying to put the pieces together,” I said. “If we get it worked out so everything fits and makes sense, then maybe we can force APD to investigate it.”
“If what you’re after are concrete facts, you won’t get them from me,” Noreen said. “That’s not how this works. If I could come up with names and addresses, hell, I’d be charging millions and living in style. Psychic detective work is based on impressions. The case is a jigsaw puzzle—you get a lot of pieces and you know they’ll make a picture—but putting it all together is a job for the police.”
22
WHEN WE MOVED TO the town house, we had asked for an unlisted phone number. The telephone company got careless, however, and in November, when the new phone directories came out, our new number appeared in it.
At once we began to receive more calls from tipsters. Most were obvious weirdos, but one knocked the breath out of me.
“The night your daughter got killed, she went snooping and saw some big shot buy coke,” he said.