by Julie Miller
He took a step closer, putting him almost nose to nose with the pimp. “Did you see Delilah that last night before Christmas?”
Zero’s arms flinched around the two women. From the corner of his eye, Merle saw them drop their gazes to the sidewalk. They wanted to be somewhere else but were too afraid to leave. Merle shut down his compassion. He never blinked. He wanted an answer.
“She was goin’ to visit her boy,” Zero insisted.
“Try again.”
The two men dueled it out visually.
“Is this off the record?” Zero finally asked.
“No.”
A long moment passed before Zero dismissed the girls, then stepped over to a relatively secluded spot near the mission’s front door. The tough guy was still there in the talk, but not in the eyes. “Mr. H. came to pick up Delilah Christmas Eve, just like he did every other Friday night. In a limo. Treated her like a goddess. Made her forget who she was. Who she belonged to.”
“She wanted to leave you?”
“I got no problem with my girls movin’ on, as long as they pay what they owe me first.” No doubt it was some exorbitant fee. “Mr. H. had that kind of money. She was gonna ask him for it.”
“Did she get it?”
“Yeah.” Zero glanced around as if he expected somebody else to be listening in. “She came home with the cash and paid me. But she was all busted up, just like the girls said. And she was on the bus. Usually, Mr. H. drives her home. The last time I saw her, she was on her way to the doc’s.”
“Did Mr. H. have contact with any of the other victims over the years?”
“Maybe.”
“Zero.”
Eventually, the pimp nodded. “He’s a regular customer. Has been for a lot of years. But I don’t keep records. So I couldn’t say for sure he knew all of ’em.”
“You have a name for this Mr. H.?”
“I can do better than that.” He pointed a gold-clad finger at the mission door. “He’s in there right now, talking to Reverend Wingate about donatin’ money to the mission.”
Chapter Six
Patrick Halliwell was not your garden-variety john. The widowed, seventy-year-old, self-made millionaire had a full head of bright white hair, deeply tanned skin, a Southern gentleman’s accent—and a solid alibi for Susan Cooper’s murder.
Of course. Why should anything about this case be easy? Merle thought. But out loud he remained civil.
“Thanks,” he told the airline rep who’d given him the information. “If I need anything else I’ll call.”
Merle disconnected the phone, hooked it back on his belt and turned his attention back to the evening’s rush-hour traffic. He exhaled an impatient sigh, feeling the same congestion inside his head.
This morning, he’d had next to nothing to go on to solve the murders. By four-thirty, he had suspects with the opportunity to do the crimes, others with the means to kill. He could even rationalize a few motives. But nobody matched up on all three counts to warrant any kind of arrest. Preliminary reports from CSI indicated no usable fingerprints or foreign DNA on the body. Nothing added up.
Patrick Halliwell had been in Tampa visiting his daughter and grandchildren over the Christmas holiday. The airline had the records to prove he’d left KCI at 10:37 p.m. on December 24—hours before Delilah had come home on the bus with cuts and a sprained wrist. He’d returned on the twenty-eighth.
With his lawyer present to oversee a hundred-thousand-dollar donation to the mission, Halliwell had sat in Ulysses Wingate’s office and claimed Delilah was his mistress, whom he showered with gifts and money—not payment for services rendered. He’d never laid a hand on her, he claimed. Except in love. He’d given Merle his alibi, showed him his unblemished knuckles, wished him luck and left. His attorney had lingered back just long enough to inform Merle that he’d need to go through him if he came up with any more questions for Mr. Halliwell.
But the man hadn’t cried, hadn’t hollered, hadn’t seemed upset beyond a generic “That’s too bad,” when he was informed of his so-called mistress’s death.
Ulysses Wingate was another story.
The jovial minister heard the news and collapsed into the chair behind his desk. Bemoaning the loss of “another child to the violence,” he’d put his hands together and prayed. His eyes were rimmed with unshed tears by the time he had finished and offered to see to Delilah’s service and burial. Merle had promised to put him in touch with the right people for his generous offer, and obliquely wondered why Patrick Halliwell, who claimed to have a more personal relationship with the deceased, hadn’t offered the same.
“No sense at all.” Merle’s voice echoed inside the Jeep. He needed something about all this to make sense. And soon.
Ten murders in the mission district in eleven years.
With a morbid laugh, Merle wondered why the killer had skipped the year after Jezebel’s death. The murderer hadn’t been willing or able to kill again for two years—then he’d turned the crime into an annual holiday tradition.
Why? Where was the motive? What was the connection?
He didn’t know which lead to follow. He didn’t know which way to turn.
So, of course, he was driving out Volker Boulevard to the University of Missouri of Kansas City to visit the psychology department.
Where Kelsey Ryan worked.
“Hey, Merle.” Dr. Rachel Livesay-Taylor, professor of psychology and Josh Taylor’s wife, greeted Merle with a serene smile. Resting one hand on her pregnant belly, she rose to meet him in the suite of offices outside the psych lab. “Good to see you again. Did you have a good Christmas?”
Sure. Before he’d become so entrenched in cold-case files and murder investigations. “Mom and I had a nice, quiet day together.” Probably nothing like the loving free-for-all of getting the entire Taylor family in one place for the holidays. “And you?”
“It was the biggest family get-together that I have ever been to. I loved it, even though I had to skip out early to catch a nap.” He listened politely for a couple of minutes while she recounted the antics and excitement of her one-year-old daughter, and the matching antics and excitement of her eternally young husband, Josh. But Rachel was smart enough to know that he hadn’t stopped by just to chat about the mutual friends they shared in the Taylor clan. “What can I help you with?”
“I’m here to see Kelsey Ryan. She said she worked late in the lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
Rachel nodded. “She’s here. Is she expecting you?”
“I doubt it.” He wasn’t quite sure he could explain what had drawn him here at the end of his shift. Talk about things not making sense. “It’s police business.”
“Oh.” With a detective for a husband, she understood the gravity of that statement and quickly pointed down a hallway lined with individual meeting rooms. “She’s in the back running an experiment. I’ll take you to her.”
Merle shrugged off an uncomfortable tingle of familiarity as he followed Rachel down the hallway. The rooms he passed reminded him more of the precinct offices rather than the halls of higher learning. The individual offices were small, like an interrogation room, and every other one had a one-way mirror like the look-at room where witnesses were brought in to look at lineups of suspects.
Rachel put up her hand to stop him and quietly whispered. “We’d better wait here a few minutes until she’s done so we don’t interrupt.”
That unsettling discomfort returned when he looked into the last room on the right. Something deep inside Merle’s gut burned. Kelsey wasn’t conducting an experiment.
She was the guinea pig that the young man in a lab coat was experimenting on.
“Looks like she’s taking a lie detector test.” He kept his voice as low as Rachel’s.
Kelsey sat on one side of a long table, with wires and eletrodes hooked up to her temples and wrists, to her nape under the fringe of red hair and running inside her bright gold sweater, presumably to monitor her heart. The wi
res ran across the table and disappeared behind a screen that blocked her view of the man sitting at the table across from her. A computer sat to one side and a large printer whirred away, logging something on graph paper with a bouncing needle.
“It’s a similar concept,” Rachel explained. “Checking physical reactions to mental stimuli. Our grad student is testing brain waves and other body functions as Kelsey runs through various cerebral exercises. The goal is to find out if psychics use more of their brains than the rest of us, or if those intuitive powers are just the mind working in a different way.”
“Do you believe she has psychic abilities?”
Rachel smiled, taking a graceful out to the question. “It’s not my experiment.”
Merle stepped closer to the glass, wishing it would bring him closer to understanding Kelsey’s claims and whether she really did possess some kind of gift he could trust.
Right now she just looked on guard, he thought, reading the stiff set of her shoulders. Like yesterday in the precinct office, she was hyperaware of her surroundings. Her eyes darted to every piece of equipment and back to the blocking screen. She knew more about what was going on than that kid running the equipment did.
The beginnings of a smile tipped the corners of his mouth. That kid was in trouble if he thought he was going to trip up Kelsey Ryan.
“Here.” Rachel pushed a button on the wall beside him, activating an intercom system. “We can listen in.”
“Try it now,” the grad student ordered.
Kelsey’s posture shook with a minute tremor as she tried to control her reaction. Temper? Fatigue? “I’m not telepathic, Randy. For the last time, I can’t tell you what you’re thinking.”
“Can you tell me what’s on the cards I’ve chosen?” Was the kid trying to get her riled up?
“No. I can only read the imprint of what’s on the cards themselves.” Merle splayed his fingers against the wall and dug in the tips, as if he could reach through the wood and plaster to get to her and…and what? Pat her on the back and say relax? Offer his arms as some kind of safe zone to snuggle up against, like the way she had last night at the mission when she freaked out over that damn scarf? “And I have to touch them to do that.”
“All right, then.” Randy stood and dealt six cards, facedown, on the table in front of her. He sat back down and pushed a button. “One more round. Hold up each card and tell me what you see.”
Was that what happened to her? Pick up a doll, see a murder? Pick up a scarf and see the murder weapon? Illogical. Impossible.
Right?
She picked up the first card and held it so that Randy alone could see the picture. Kelsey had blunt-tipped, sinewy, piano-player fingers. Graceful and adept. Merle realized he hadn’t really noticed her hands before because she always wore gloves or kept them wrapped around a mug or glass. But she had beautiful hands.
“House,” she stated, handing the card to Randy.
He nodded and revealed her guess was correct. He marked something on the printout. “Go on.”
Kelsey picked up the remaining cards in rapid succession and handed them to Randy. “Rainbow. Cat. Car. Feather.” She picked up the last one and gasped.
“Kels…?” Merle almost cried out.
Her cheeks blanched, then fired with bright pink spots of color. She flicked the card over the divider and slumped back in her chair. “Very funny. What are you, in junior high?”
What? What had he done to her?
Randy grinned in smug triumph. “For the recording, you have to tell me what it is you see.”
“A lewd picture of a naked man. I hardly think you can include that in your thesis.”
“Can he do that?” Merle snapped the question.
“I wanted to throw in a picture of something you hadn’t seen before,” Randy explained. “So I could rule out the predictability of any pattern in your readings.”
Rachel had stiffened beside him, not liking what she saw, either. “I see his reasoning, but his choice wasn’t terribly ethical. You talk to Kelsey. I’ll take care of him.”
Rachel pushed the second intercom button. “Randy. It’s Dr. Livesay.” The instant Randy’s attention shifted to the window, Kelsey started ripping the plastic electrodes from her skin and tossing them on the table. “Get your things. I want to see you in my office. Now. Kelsey, you have a visitor.”
“Me?”
Her face flushed with surprise, and she stopped with one hand cupping the side of her breast and the other stuck inside her sweater, fishing for that last electrode. Though the sweater was a bulky knit, adorned with sequins, she’d pulled it taut in such a way that there was no mistaking the proud abundance of that breast.
Something hot and instinctive pooled behind the zipper of his slacks.
What was he, in junior high?
Hell. Randy had noticed it, too.
With a rush of something embarrassingly territorial and completely inappropriate for a woman who was supposed to be a co-worker, Merle opened the door and invited himself in. “It’s me, Kels.”
“T.” She froze.
Randy looked more surprised than Kelsey. Merle narrowed his gaze and encouraged the grad student to move a little faster. Yeah, T’s here, buddy. Quit gawkin’ and go away.
Kelsey quickly dropped her hands and let the sweater bag down over her figure. She clutched the center of her sweater, holding tight to something in the layers underneath. Randy gathered his stuff, slid Merle an apologetic look and disappeared out the door.
“Does he always—?”
“What are you doing—?”
They chimed in together and fell silent at the same time.
Kelsey buried her hands in the pockets of her jeans, giving Merle the perverse desire to want to see them again. She took a deep breath and he found himself watching with greedy curiosity instead of thinking of what he needed to say.
She came to her senses first. “What are you doing here?”
Okay, this would be tricky. “I’ve, um, been doing some research on psychics and how they work.” He didn’t give her time to get defensive. “I thought it might be best to get firsthand knowledge from an expert.”
“You don’t believe in me.” Her eyes were wide, hurt. But she advanced as if getting angry gave her strength. “You just want to catch me in some lie.”
“I need to ask questions. That’s what I do. That’s what I need…to do.” He threw out his hands, not sure if he was surrendering or beseeching her. He couldn’t control his emotions; his hormones had taken on a life of their own, and the damn case kept getting more complicated instead of clearer. “Meet me halfway here. I’d like to find some concrete answers to something today.”
She tilted her head back and frowned. “T, what happened?”
Maybe she was a little telepathic, or maybe he looked as whipped as he felt. He pulled back his coat and jacket and braced his hands at his waist, near his gun and badge, reminding her he was a cop…reminding himself he was here on business. And not very pleasant business at that.
“Another dead body was found this morning in the mission’s trash. A prostitute. Strangled. Probably killed Christmas Day. Our serial murder case has been upgraded to an active homicide.”
He watched the emotions play across her face. Shock. Grief. Anger. Futility. Sadness. She crossed the room until she stood right in front of him. Her lush mouth parted on a sympathetic breath. “I’m so sorry.”
She reached out to touch him and…
She stopped.
Her outstretched hands froze between them, mere inches from his own. He didn’t move his hands from his belt. He couldn’t make the choice for her. But, damn it all, he wanted her to touch him.
He’d never had anybody reach in far enough to ease the raw emotions he buried beneath all his practicality and logic.
“Why can’t you touch me?” Pointing it out made her withdraw completely. She curled her fingers into her palms, then tucked both hands safely out of reach beneath her
arms. No way. If he was going to open up his mind to the possibilities, then she was going to help him understand. “Does it hurt? Do experiments like he was conducting hurt you?” She glanced up at that one. “These are things I need to know.”
“I’ve had people make fun of me and doubt me before.” She squirmed in her boots and dropped her gaze to the middle of his chest. “That hurts.”
He hadn’t considered the emotional impact of being ridiculed. But he understood it. In spades. That inexplicable tension that had been building inside him throughout the day eased a bit by her just opening up a little and sharing that.
“I need your help, Kelsey. I’ve got too many suspects and not enough clues. But I need to know how this works. I need to know how you work.” He dipped his head to make contact with those soft brown eyes and urge her to read the sincerity he hadn’t felt before. “I need to know how to work with you.”
Her eyes locked on to his, humbling him with their shaky trust.
“You may not like what I can do.” She pulled out her hands and wiggled her fingers in an elegant warm-up of some kind. She tried to smile. “Other men have run for the hills and laughed in my face and called me every freaky name in the book.”
“I’m not other men.”
His quiet statement hung like a vow in the air between them, and it seemed to give her the confidence she needed.
She bravely moved closer and started fiddling with his tie. Then his jacket and coat. Her graceful, balletic fingers smoothed the silk and wool, gathered it together, bundled him up with tender care.
He wanted to take hold of her hands now, press them flat against his chest, explore their contours the way she was exploring him. But he hesitated. He didn’t want to do anything to stop the lesson or make her doubt his professional curiosity—and a need that was far more personal than it should have been.
“Your mother gave you this coat. The two of you are incredibly close.” He bit down on the urge to demand how she knew that, but then he realized she was trying to explain. “She picked it out and wrapped it with loving hands. There are other images I get from the coat, but fainter. Maybe something from the people who made it. Or the salesclerk.”