by Linda Howard
“Are you the one who found your wife?”
He didn’t answer, just continued to stare at the floor.
Trammell stepped in. “Mr. Vinick, I know it’s tough, but we need your cooperation. Are you the person who called the police?”
Slowly he shook his head. “I didn’t call no police. I called 911.”
“What time did you call?” Dane asked. The time would be on record, but liars often tripped themselves up on the simplest details. Right now, Vinick was a suspect by virtue of being married to the victim.
“Dunno,” Vinick muttered. He took a deep breath and seemed to make an effort to concentrate. “Seven-thirty or thereabouts, I guess.” He rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “I got off work at seven. It takes about twenty, twentyfive minutes to drive home.”
Dane caught Trammell’s glance. They had seen enough death to know that Mrs. Vinick had been dead for several hours, not half an hour or so. The medical examiner would establish the time of death, and if Mr. Vinick had been at work during that time, if witnesses could reliably state that he hadn’t left, then they’d have to start looking at other possibilities. Maybe she’d had a boyfriend; maybe someone had been keeping Mr. Vinick’s bed warm for him while he worked third shift.
“Where do you work?”
There was no answer. Dane tried again. “Mr. Vinick, where do you work?”
Vinick stirred and named a local trucking company.
“Do you normally work third shift?”
“Yeah. I work on the dock, loading and unloading trailers. Most freight comes in at night, see, for delivery during the day.”
“What time did you leave to go to work last night?”
“Usual time. Around ten.”
They were on a roll, finally getting some answers. “Do you punch a time card?” Trammell asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you punch in as soon as you get there, or wait until time for your shift to start?”
“As soon as I get there. The shift starts at ten-thirty. We have half an hour to eat, and get off at seven.”
“Do you have to clock in and out for lunch?”
“Yeah.”
It looked like Mr. Vinick’s night would be pretty much accounted for. They would check out everything he’d told them, of course, but that wouldn’t be any problem.
“Did you notice anything unusual this morning?” Dane asked. “Before you came in the house, I mean.”
“No. Well, the door was locked. Nadine usually gets up and unlocks it for me, then starts cooking breakfast.”
“Do you usually come in the front door or the back door?”
“Back.”
“What did you see when you opened the door?”
Mr. Vinick’s chin trembled. “Nothing, at first. The shades were pulled and the lights weren’t on. It was dark. I figured Nadine had overslept.”
“What did you do?” “Turned on the light in the kitchen.”
“What did you see then?”
Mr. Vinick swallowed. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He put his hand to his eyes. “B-Blood,” he managed. “All—all over the place. Except—it looked like ketchup, at first. I thought she’d dropped a bottle of ketchup and broken it, the way it was splattered. Then—then I knew what it was. It scared me. I thought she must have cut herself, real bad. I yelled her name and ran to the bedroom, looking for her.” He stopped, unable to carry the tale any further. He began to shake, and didn’t notice when Dane and Trammell got up and stepped away, leaving him alone with his grief and horror.
Ivan Schaffer and an assistant arrived with their bags and disappeared into the bedroom to gather what evidence they could salvage from the carnage. Lieutenant Gordon Bonness arrived practically on their heels. He skidded to a stop just inside the door, his expression one of shock. “Holy shit,” he muttered.
“That seems to be the concensus,” Trammell said in an aside to Dane as they joined the lieutenant.
Bonness wasn’t a bad sort, even if he was from California and could come up with some pretty weird ideas on things. He was as fair as possible in the way he ran the unit, which Dane considered a pretty good recommendation, and he was tolerant of the different quirks and work habits of the detectives under him.
“What have you got so far?” Bonness asked.
“We have a lady who was hacked to pieces, and a husband who was at work. We’ll check out his alibi, but my gut says he’s in the clear,” Dane answered.
Bonness sighed. “Maybe a boyfriend?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“Okay. Let’s move fast on this one. Jesus, look at these walls.”
They went into the bedroom, and the lieutenant blanched. “Holy shit,” he said again. “This is sick!”
Dane gave him a thoughtful look, and his stomach tightened. A feeling of dread went up his spine. Sick. Yeah, this was sick. And he was suddenly a lot more worried than he had been before.
He squatted beside Ivan as the tall, lanky man painstakingly searched for fibers, hair, anything that could be analyzed into giving up its secrets. “Found anything?”
“Won’t know until I get it to the lab.” Ivan looked around. “It would help if we could find her fingers. Maybe there’d be some skin under the nails. I’ve got people going through the trash in the neighborhood. No garbage disposal here, so that’s out.”
“Was she raped?”
“Don’t know. There’s no obvious semen.”
Dane’s feeling of dread was growing stronger. What had seemed like a fairly simple, if gruesome, murder was getting complicated. His gut feeling was seldom wrong, and he had alarm signals going off like an entire brass section.
He followed the gory trail back to its beginning, in the kitchen. Trammell came with him, and they both stood in the small, homey room, looking around. Nadine Vinick had evidently liked to cook; the kitchen was more modern than the rest of the house, with gleaming appliances, a small cooking island, and a variety of shiny but well-used pots and pans hanging over the island. A butcher’s block stood at one end of the counter, and a set of Ginsu knives, with one knife missing, was arranged in a rack on top of the butcher’s block.
“How did the son of a bitch get in?” Dane muttered. “Has anyone even looked for signs of forced entry, or did they just play the odds that the husband was the one who did her?”
Trammell had worked with him long enough to read him. “You getting a feeling about this?” “Yeah. A bad one.”
“You don’t think maybe she had a boyfriend?”
Dane shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It was just something the lieutenant said, about this being sick. It is. And that makes me real uneasy. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out how he got in.”
It didn’t take long. There was a small cut at the bottom of the screen on the window in the spare bedroom. The screen was in place but unfastened, and the latch on the window was open, not that it would have kept out even a determined ten-year-old. “I’ll get Ivan,” Trammell said. “Maybe he can lift a print, or find a couple of stray threads.”
Dane’s gut feeling was getting worse. A forced entry put a different slant on the situation, indicating a stranger. This didn’t feel like a burglary that had escalated into violence when the intruder had been suddenly confronted by Mrs. Vinick. The ordinary burglar would have been more likely to run, and even if he had attacked, it would have been quick. The attack on Mrs. Vinick had been both vicious and prolonged. Sick.
He walked back into the kitchen. Had the first confrontation taken place here, or had Mrs. Vinick seen the intruder and tried to run out the back door, getting as far as the kitchen before he caught her? Dane stared at the appliances as if they could tell tales. A small frown knit his brows and he went over to the automatic coffee maker, the kind that was installed under the upper cabinets so it didn’t take up counter space. The carafe held about five cups of coffee. Using the backs of his fingers, he touched the glass. It was cold. The coffee ma
ker was the kind with the automatic switch that turned off the warming plate after two hours. A coffee mug, filled almost to the rim with coffee, sat on the counter. It didn’t look as if it had been touched since the coffee had been poured into it. He stuck his finger into the dark liquid. Cold.
He pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of his pocket and put them on. Carefully touching only the wooden rim of the cabinet doors rather than the metal handles, he began opening them. The second door revealed a canister of decaffeinated coffee. Mrs. Vinick could drink it late at night without worrying about her sleep being disturbed.
She had made a pot of coffee and she had been in here, in the kitchen. She had just poured the first cup and replaced the carafe on the warming plate. The door from the living room was behind her and to the right. Dane went through the motions as if he had just poured the coffee himself, standing where she would have stood. According to the placement of the cup on the counter, she would have been standing slightly to the left of the coffee maker. That was when she had seen the intruder, just as she had set the carafe in place. The coffee maker had a dark, shiny surface, almost mirrorlike, behind the hands of the built-in clock. Dane bent his knees, trying to lower himself to Mrs. Vinick’s general height. The open doorway was reflected in the surface of the coffee maker.
She had never even picked up her cup of fresh coffee. She had seen the intruder’s reflection and turned, perhaps thinking, in that first moment, that her husband had forgotten something and returned home to get it. By the time she had realized her mistake, he had been on her.
She probably hadn’t been standing naked in her kitchen, though Dane had been a cop long enough to know that anything was possible. It was just another gut feeling. But she had been naked when the killer had finished with her, and probably naked when he had started.
The odds were that she had been raped at knife point, right here in the kitchen. The lack of obvious semen didn’t mean anything; after so many hours, and with the struggle that had gone on, it would take a medical examiner to make a judgment. And a lot of times, rapists didn’t climax anyway. Orgasm wasn’t the point of rape.
After the rape, he had started work with the knife. Until then, she had been terrified but hoping, probably, that when he was finished he would just go away. When he started cutting her, she had known that he intended to kill her and she had started fighting for her life. She had escaped from him, or maybe he had let her escape, like a cat toying with a mouse, letting her think she had gotten away before easily catching her again. How many times had he played his sick little game before finally cornering her in the bedroom?
What had she been wearing? Had the killer taken her clothing with him as a souvenir or trophy?
“What?” Trammell asked quietly from the doorway, his dark eyes intent as he watched his partner.
Dane looked up. “Where are her clothes?” he asked. “What was she wearing?”
“Maybe Mr. Vinick knows.” Trammell disappeared, and returned in less than a minute. “She had already changed into her nightgown when he left for work. He said it was white, with little blue things on it.”
They began looking for the missing garment. It was startlingly easy to find. Trammell opened the folding doors that hid the washer and dryer, and there it was, neatly placed on top of the pile of clothing in the laundry basket that sat on top of the dryer. The garment was splattered with blood, but certainly not soaked. No, she hadn’t been wearing it when the knife attack had begun. Probably it had been lying on the floor, thrown aside, and the blood had splattered on it later.
Dane stared at it. “After raping and killing her, the son of a bitch put her nightgown in the laundry?”
“Rape?” Trammell queried.
“Bet on it.”
“I didn’t touch the handle. Maybe Ivan can get a print; he came up empty in the second bedroom.”
Dane had another gut feeling, one he liked even less than the others. “I’m afraid we’re going to come up empty all the way around,” he said bleakly.
3
IT HADN’T BEEN A FLASHBACK.
She knew because she had been having real flashbacks all day, frightening resurgent memories that swept over her, overwhelmed her, and left her limp and exhausted when her own reality returned.
Marlie knew the details of her own particular nightmare, was as familiar with them as she was with her face; the details that had been flashing in her brain all day were new, different. When she had awoken from her stupor the afternoon before, she had been able to remember little more than the image of the slashing knife, and she had still been so tired that she had barely been able to function. She had gone to bed early and slept deeply, dreamlessly, until almost dawn when the details began to surface.
The bouts of memory had happened all day long; she would barely recover from one when another, vivid and horrible, would surge into her consciousness. It had never happened this way before; the visions had always been overwhelming and exhausting, yes, but she had always been able to immediately recall them. These ongoing attacks left her bewildered, and helpless from fatigue. Several times she had been tempted to call Dr. Ewell and tell him about this frightening new development, but something in her had held back.
A woman had been murdered. It had been real. God help her, the knowing had returned, but it was different, and she didn’t know what to do. The vision had been strong, stronger than any she’d ever had before, but she didn’t know who the victim was and couldn’t tell where it had happened. Always before she had had at least an inkling, had grasped some clues to identity and location, but not this time. She felt disoriented, her mind reaching out but unable to find the signal, like a compass needle spinning in search of a magnetic pole that wasn’t there.
She had seen the murder happen over and over in her mind, and each time more details had surfaced, as if a wind were blowing away layers of fog. And each time she roused from a replay of the vision, more exhausted than before, she had been more horrified.
She was seeing it through his eyes.
It had been his mind that had caught hers, the mental force of his rage that had blasted through six years of blank, blessed nothingness and jolted her, once again, into extrasensory awareness. Not that he had targeted her; he hadn’t. The enormous surge of mental energy had been aimless, without design; he hadn’t known what he was doing. Normal people never imagined that there were people like her out there, people with minds so sensitive that they could pick up the electrical signals of thought, read the lingering energy patterns of long-ago events, even divine the forming patterns of things that hadn’t yet happened. Not that this man was normal in any sense other than his lack of extrasensorial sensitivity, but Marlie had long ago made the distinction to herself: Normal people were those who didn’t know. She had the knowing, and it had forever set her apart, until six years ago when she had been caught in a nightmare that still haunted her. Traumatized, that part of her brain had shut down. For six years she had lived as a normal person, and she had enjoyed it. She wanted that life to continue. She had slowly, over the years, let herself come to believe that the knowing would never return. She had been wrong. Perhaps it had taken this long for her mind to heal, but the visions were back, stronger and more exhausting than ever before.
And seen through the eyes of a murderer.
Part of her still hoped … what? That it hadn’t been real, after all? That she was losing her mind? Would she really rather be delusional than accept that the visions had returned, that her safe, normal life had come to an end?
She had looked through the Sunday paper but hadn’t been able to concentrate; the memory flashes had been too frequent, too strong. She hadn’t found any mention of a murder that had triggered a response. Maybe it had been there and she had simply overlooked it; she didn’t know. Maybe it hadn’t happened anywhere nearby, but by some freak chance she had happened to catch the killer’s mental signals. If the woman had lived in some other town, say in Tampa or Daytona, Orlando’s paper
s wouldn’t carry it. Marlie would never know the woman’s identity or location.
Part of her was a coward. She didn’t want to know, didn’t want to become part of that life again. She had built something safe and solid here in Orlando, something that would be destroyed if she became involved again. She knew exactly what would happen: the disbelief, followed by derision. Then, when people were forced to accept the truth, they would become suspicious and afraid. They would be willing to use her talent, but they wouldn’t want to be friends. People would avoid her; little kids would daringly peek in her windows and run, screaming, if she looked back. The older kids would call her “the witch.” Inevitably some religious fanatic would start muttering about “the work of the devil,” and sporadic picket lines would spring up in front of her house. No, she would have to be a fool to get involved in that again.
But she couldn’t stop wondering about the woman. There was an aching need to at least know her name. When someone died, at least her name should be known, a tiny link with immortality that said: This person was here. This person existed. Without a name, there was only a blank.
So now, still shaking with fatigue, she turned on the television and waited, in a daze, for the local news to come on. She almost dozed several times, but shook herself awake.
“It’s probably nothing,” she mumbled aloud. “You’re just losing it, that’s all.” Strange comfort, but there it was. Everyone’s private fears were different, and she would rather be crazy than right.
The television screen flickered as the talking heads segued into another story, this time devoting an entire minute to an in-depth look at the effect of crack and gangs on inner-city neighborhoods. Marlie blinked, suddenly terrified that the visual images would overwhelm her with mental ones, as had happened in the past when she had picked up on the emotions of the people she had watched. Nothing happened. Her mind remained blank. After a minute she relaxed, sighing with relief. Nothing was there, no bleak feelings of despair and hopelessness. She began to feel a little more cheerful; if she couldn’t receive those images and emotions the way she had in the past, maybe she was just going a little crazy.