Dream Man

by Linda Howard

  After she had taken care of her most pressing need, she ran a glass of water and gulped greedily, spilling it down her chin in the process. She didn’t care. She couldn’t remember ever being so thirsty before. Or so tired. This was the worst it had ever been, even worse than six years ago when—

  She froze, and her suddenly terrified gaze sought her own reflection in the mirror. The woman who stared back at her had her face, but it wasn’t the soothingly ordinary face she had become accustomed to. It was the face from before, from six years in the past, from a life that she had thought, hoped, was finished forever.

  She was pale, her skin taut with strain. Dark circles lay under her eyes, dulling the blue to a muddy shade. Her dark brown hair, normally so tidy, hung around her face in a mass of tangles. She looked older than her twenty-eight years, her expression that of someone who has seen too much, lived through too much.

  She remembered the stark, bloody vision, the storm of dark, violent emotion that had taken control of her mind, that had left her empty and exhausted, just as the visions always had. She had thought they had ended, but she had been wrong. Dr. Ewell had been wrong. They were back.

  Or she had had a flashback. The possibility was even more frightening, for she never wanted to relive that again. But it suddenly seemed likely, for why else would she have seen that flashing knife blade, dripping scarlet as it slashed and hacked—

  “Stop it,” she said aloud, still staring at herself in the mirror. “Just stop it.” Her mind was still sluggish, still grappling with what had happened, with the aftereffects of the long stupor. Evidently the results of a flashback were the same as if she had had a true vision. If the mind thought it was real, then the stress on the body was just as strong.

  She thought about calling Dr. Ewell, but a gap of six years lay between them and she didn’t want to bridge it. Once she had relied on him for almost everything, and though he had always supported her, protected her, she had become accustomed to taking care of herself. Independence suited her. After the encompassing, almost suffocating care of the first twenty-two years of her life, the solitude and self-reliance of the last six had been especially sweet. She would handle the flashbacks by herself.

  2

  THE DOORBELL RANG. DETECTIVE DANE HOLLISTER OPENED one eye, glanced at the clock, then closed it again with a muttered curse. It was seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, his first weekend off in a month, and some idiot was leaning on his doorbell. Maybe whoever it was would go away.

  The bell rang again, and was followed by two hammering knocks on the door. Muttering again, Dane threw aside the tangled sheet and swung naked out of bed. He grabbed the wrinkled pants he had discarded the night before and jerked them on, zipping but not fastening. Out of habit, a habit so ingrained that he never even thought about it, he picked up his 9mm Beretta from the bedside table. He never answered the door unarmed. For that matter, he didn’t even collect his mail unarmed. His last girlfriend, whose tenure had been brief because she couldn’t handle a cop’s erratic hours, had said caustically that he was the only man she knew who carried a weapon into the bathroom with him.

  She hadn’t had much of a sense of humor, so Dane had refrained from making a smart-ass remark about male weapons. Except for missing the sex, it had been a relief when she had called it quits.

  He lifted one slat of the blinds to peer out, and with another curse he clicked the locks and opened the door. His friend and partner, Alejandro Trammell, stood on the small porch. Trammell lifted elegant black brows as he studied Dane’s wrinkled cotton slacks. “Nice jammies,” Trammell said.

  “Do you know what the hell time it is?” Dane barked. Trammell consulted his wristwatch, a wafer-thin Piaget. “Seven oh two. Why?” He strolled inside. Dane slammed the door with a resounding bang.

  Trammell halted, belatedly asking, “Do you have company?”

  Dane ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his face, hearing the rasp of beard against his callused palm. “No, I’m alone.” He yawned, then surveyed his partner.

  Trammell was perfectly groomed, as usual, but his eyes were dark-circled.

  Dane yawned again. “Is this a very late night, or an early morning?”

  “A little bit of both. It was just a bad night, couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come over for coffee and breakfast.”

  “Generous of you, to share your insomnia with me,” Dane muttered, but he was already on his way to the kitchen. He had his own share of bad nights, so he understood the need for company. Trammell had never turned him away on those occasions. “I’ll put on the coffee, then you’re on your own while I shower and shave.”

  “Forget it,” Trammell said. “I’ll put on the coffee. I want to be able to drink it.” Dane didn’t argue. He could drink his own coffee, but so far no one else could. He didn’t much care for the taste of it himself, but since the caffeine kick was what he was after, the taste was secondary.

  He left Trammell to the coffee and sleepily returned to the bedroom, where he stripped off his pants, leaving them in their original location on the floor. Ten minutes in the shower, leaning with one hand propped on the tile while the water beat down on his head, made waking up seem possible; shaving made it seem desirable, but it took a nick on his jaw to convince him. Muttering again, he dabbed at the blood. He had a theory that any day that started with a shaving nick was shit from start to finish. Unfortunately, on any given day his face was likely to sport a small cut. He didn’t deal well with shaving. Trammell had once lazily advised him to switch to an electric shaver, but he hated the idea of letting a razor get the best of him, so he kept at it, shedding his blood on the altar of stubbornness.

  Dressing, at least, was easy. Dane simply put on whatever came to hand first. Because he sometimes forgot to put on a tie, he always kept one in his car; it might clash with whatever he was wearing, but he figured a tie was a tie, and it was the spirit rather than the style that mattered. The chief wanted detectives to wear ties, so Dane wore a tie. Trammell sometimes looked horrified, but Trammell was a clotheshorse who tended toward Italian silk suits, so Dane didn’t take it to heart.

  If any other cop had dressed the way Trammell did, or drove a car like Trammell’s, Internal Affairs would have been all over him like stink on shit, which was an appropriate way to describe IA. But Trammell was independently wealthy, having inherited a nice little bundle from his Cuban mother as well as several successful concerns from his father, a New England businessman who had fallen in love while on a vacation in Miami and remained in Florida for the rest of his life. Trammell’s house had cost a cool million, easy, and he never made any effort to tone down his way of living. His partner was such an enigmatic son of a bitch that Dane couldn’t decide if Trammell lived as luxuriously as he did simply because he liked the lifestyle and had the means, or if he did it to piss off the bastards in IA. Dane suspected the latter. He approved.

  He and Trammell were opposites in a lot of ways. Trammell was whipcord-lean, and as aloof as a cat. No matter what the circumstances, he always looked elegant and cultured, his clothes hanging perfectly. He liked—actually liked—opera and ballet. Dane was the exact opposite: he could wear the most expensive silk suit made, perfectly tailored to fit his muscled, athletic frame, and he would still look subtly unkempt. He liked sports and country music. If they had been vehicles, Trammell would have been a Jaguar, while Dane would have been a pickup truck. Four-wheel drive.

  On the other hand, Dane thought as he wandered back out to the kitchen, nature had balanced itself out in their faces, in a kind of backwards way. In person, Trammell was smoothly handsome, but in photographs his face took on a sinister cast. Dane figured his own face would frighten children and small animals, assuming there was any difference between the two, but the camera loved him. All those angles, Trammell had explained. Trammell was a camera buff and took a lot of photos; he was never without his camera. Dane, being his partner and constantly in his company, was naturally in a lot of the photos. On
film, the brutal lines of high, prominent cheekbones, the deep-set eyes and cleft chin, all became brooding and intriguing instead of merely brutish. Even the broken nose somehow looked right in a photograph. In person, he looked grim, his face battered, his eyes a cop’s eyes, watchful and too old.

  Dane got himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. Trammell was still cooking, and whatever it was smelled good.

  “What’s for breakfast?” he asked.

  “Whole wheat waffles with fresh strawberries.” Dane snorted. “There’s never been any whole wheat flour in my house.”

  “I know. That’s why I brought it with me.” Healthy stuff. Dane didn’t mind. He could be pretty damn affable when someone else was doing the cooking. When they were working they mostly lived on junk, whatever was fast and easy, so he didn’t mind balancing it with low-fat, nutritious shit whenever they had the time. Hell, he’d even learned to like sprouts. They tasted like green peanuts, fresh out of the ground and not quite developed, with the hulls still soft. He’d eaten a lot of green peanuts when he was a kid, preferring them over the fully formed ones that had to be shelled.

  “So what kept you awake last night?” he asked Trammell. “Anything in particular?”

  “No, just one of those nights when a weird dream starts every time you doze off.”

  It was funny how the dreams came and went. All cops had dreams, but he and Trammell had gone through a rough patch a few years back, just after the shootout; the dreams had come every night for a while. Most cops went through their entire careers without ever firing their weapons on the job, but Dane and Trammell hadn’t been that lucky.

  They had been trying to find a suspect for questioning in a shooting and had been led, by the suspect’s pissed-off girlfriend, right into the middle of a big-time drug operation, operated by none other than the suspect himself. That was usually the way the bad guys went down; they weren’t caught by sharp detective work most of the time, but by someone dropping the dime on them.

  That particular time, instead of bailing out any available window and disappearing down rat holes, the bad guys had come up with lead flying. Dane and Trammell had hit the floor, diving into another room, and for five of the longest minutes in history they had been cornered in that room. By the time backup had arrived, in the form of every cop in the vicinity, uniformed and otherwise, who had heard Dane’s radio call of “officer under fire,” three of the bad guys and the girlfriend were down. The girl and one of the men were dead. A slug had ricocheted, splintered, and part of it had hit Dane in the back, just missing his spine. It had still packed enough punch that it had broken a rib and torn a hole in his right lung. Things had gotten a little fuzzy there, but the one clear memory he had was of Trammell kneeling beside him and cussing a blue streak while he tried to stop the bleeding. Three days in intensive care, fifteen days total in the hospital, nine weeks before he’d been able to return to the job. Yeah, they’d both had a lot of bad dreams for a while after that.

  Just as Trammell served up the waffles, the phone rang. Dane stretched to pick up the receiver, and at the same time Trammell’s beeper went off. “Shit!” they both said, staring at each other.

  “It’s Saturday, damn it!” Dane barked into the receiver. “We’re off today.”

  He listened while he watched Trammell hurriedly gulp a cup of coffee, then sighed. “Yeah, okay. Trammell’s here. We’re on our way.”

  “What canceled our day off?” Trammell wanted to know as they went out the door.

  “Stroud and Keegan are already working another scene. Worley called in sick this morning. Freddie’s in the dentist’s office with an abscessed tooth.” Things happened; no sense getting hot about it. “I’ll drive.”

  “So where are we going?” Dane gave him the address as they got into his car, and Trammell wrote it down. “A man called in and said his wife was hurt. An EMT was dispatched, but a patrol officer got there first. He took one look and canceled the EMT, and called Homicide instead.”

  It took them about ten minutes to reach the address, but there was no mistaking the house. The street was almost blocked with patrol cars, a paramedics van, and various other official-capacity vehicles. Uniformed officers stood around on the small lawn, while neighbors gathered in small bunches, some of the onlookers still in their nightclothes. Dane automatically studied the onlookers, looking for something that didn’t fit, someone who didn’t seem to belong or who was maybe just a little bit too interested. It was amazing how often a murderer would hang around.

  He shrugged into a navy jacket and grabbed the spare tie out of the backseat, loosely knotting it around his neck. Somehow, he noticed, Trammell had managed to impeccably tie his own tie in the car. He looked again. Damn, he didn’t believe it! The dapper bastard had chosen a doublebreasted Italian suit to wear on his day off! He’d simply slipped into the suit jacket as they’d left the house.

  Sometimes he worried about Trammell. They showed their badges to the policeman at the door, and he stood aside to let them enter.

  “Sheeit,” Dane said in an undertone as he got a good look.

  “And all the other bodily excretions,” Trammell replied in the same disbelieving tone.

  Murder scenes were nothing new. After a while, cops reached the point where violent crimes were pretty routine, in their own way. Stabbings and shootings were a dime a dozen. If anyone had asked him half an hour earlier, Dane would have said that he and Trammell had been detectives long enough that, for the most part, they were unshockable.

  But this was different.

  Blood was everywhere. It was splattered on the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. He could see into the kitchen, and the bloody path wound from there through the living room, then into a small hallway and out of sight. He tried to imagine the kind of struggle that would have sprayed blood so extensively.

  Dane turned to the uniformed policeman who was guarding the door. “Have the crime lab guys showed up yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Shit,” he said again. The longer it took the crime lab, or forensics, team to arrive, the more the crime scene would be compromised. Some disturbance was unavoidable, unless the forensics boys were the ones to discover the victim and immediately secured the area. But forensics wasn’t here, and the house was crowded with both uniformed and plainclothes policemen, milling around and inevitably muddying the evidential waters.

  “Don’t let anybody else in except for Ivan’s guys,” he told the officer. Ivan Schaffer was head of the crime lab team. He was going to be really pissed off about this.

  “Lieutenant Bonness is on the way.”

  “You can let him in, too,” Dane replied, his mouth quirking.

  The house was middle-class, nothing out of the ordinary. The living room was furnished with a couch and matching chair, the required coffee table and matching lamp tables of genuine wood veneer, while a big brown recliner had the best spot in front of the television. The recliner was occupied now by a dazed-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, probably the victim’s husband. He was giving monosyllabic answers to the questions put to him by another uniformed officer.

  The victim was in the bedroom. Dane and Trammell forced their way through the crowd and into the small room. The photographer had already arrived and was doing his job, but for once was noticeably lacking in his usual nonchalance.

  The nude woman lay jammed in the cramped space between the bedside table and the wall. She had been stabbed repeatedly—hacked was a better description. She had tried to run, and when she had been cornered in the bedroom she had tried to fight, as evidenced by the deep defensive wounds on her arms. She had been nearly decapitated, her breasts mutilated by the sheer number of wounds, and all of her fingers had been severed. Dane looked around the room, but he didn’t see the missing digits. The bed was still neatly made, though splattered with blood.

  “Has the weapon been found?” Dane asked.

  A patrolman nodded. “It was right beside
the body. A Ginsu knife from the kitchen. She had a whole set. It looks like they really do what the ads say; I think I’ll get my wife some.”

  Another patrolman snorted. “I’d rethink that idea if I was you, Scanlon.”

  Dane ignored the black humor, which all cops used to help them handle the ugliness they saw on a daily basis. “What about her fingers?”

  “Nope. No sign of ’em.”

  Trammell sighed. “I think we’d better go talk to the husband.”

  It was a fact that most homicides, except for the random gang drive-bys, were committed by someone who knew the victim: a friend, a neighbor, co-worker, or relative. When the victim was a woman, the usual list of suspects was narrowed down even more, because the murderer was almost invariably her husband or boyfriend. A lot of times, the murderer was the one who “discovered” the body and reported the crime.

  They went back to the living room, and Dane caught the eye of the officer who was talking to the husband. The officer came over to them.

  “Has he said anything?” Dane asked.

  The officer shook his head. “Most of the time he won’t answer the questions. He did say that his wife’s name is Nadine, and his name is Vinick, Ansel Vinick. They’ve lived here twenty-three years. Beyond that, he ain’t talking.”

  “Is he the one who called it in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. We’ll take it now.”

  He and Trammell went over to Mr. Vinick. Dane sat down on the couch, and Trammell moved the other chair closer before sitting down, effectively sandwiching Mr. Vinick between them.

  “Mr. Vinick, I’m Detective Hollister and this is Detective Trammell. We’d like to talk to you, ask you a few questions.”

  Mr. Vinick was staring at the floor. His big hands hung loosely over the padded arms of the recliner. “Sure,” he said dully.