“Should I be worried about something else?”
“Yes, I think you should be.”
A silent message passed between them, and Cass figured it was done on a wavelength that only über-macho men and dogs could hear. “Can we please get back on topic? You know…the part about somebody wanting to kill me and cut out my tongue?”
They instantly broke off their staring contest and refocused on Cass.
“It sort of makes sense,” Dougie finally said. “Think about it. There are people who have heard about you. The guy at the coffeehouse heard about you and knew where you worked. Hell, he said he got your name from the postman, who had gotten your name from someone else. Let’s say this person wants to make contact with whoever this monster is that died. Maybe he wants a final chance to say ‘Fuck you’-who knows. Anyway, he hears about you. He gets your name. Tracks down where you live. Only, you moved a couple of months ago, so he’s got the wrong address. He shows up at your apartment, but you’re not you. He goes into a rage and kills Carol. Maybe she tells him that she knows you moved only a couple of blocks away. Or maybe he’s just got it in his head that you should be on Addison. So he starts to target likely candidates that might be you. A witch, a psychic. When they can’t help him, he offs them, too.”
Malcolm flinched at Dougie’s plain speech but said nothing.
“He’s got to be twisted. Whoever the monster is…was…was connected to him in life. That’s how it works. Right?” Dougie asked.
Cass nodded. The monster was different than any spirit she’d ever encountered. That was true. The contact was stronger than any she had felt before. So strong she couldn’t block it out. In the past, she’d always noted that the stronger the connection in life, the stronger the connection in death. If that theory held in this case, then yes, whoever the person in the hooded sweatshirt was, he or she had been intimately connected to the monster in her head. If the beast had been as evil in life as he was in death then that could make for one very twisted and angry person.
“That’s how it works.”
“Then what do we do to find him or her?” Malcolm wanted to know.
Dougie shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “We don’t do anything. Me and my partner will do the things detectives do. We follow the evidence. We found DNA evidence at all three crime sites. I have no doubt that they’ll match. Unfortunately, unless this person’s been arrested before, that won’t help us determine who it is. And those traces take a while. We did have the computer spit out murders where the removal of a tongue had been involved. Aside from our vics, there were three other hits in a five-hundred-mile radius.”
“Good Lord,” Cass exclaimed. “You’re saying that the same person…”
“No,” Dougie stopped her. “One was a gang-related thing. One was a domestic dispute. A wife whacked her husband then cut out his tongue, and the other is an unsolved out of New York. We’re checking with detectives who worked it to see if we can find any links.”
“The wife who killed her husband. What happened to her?” Malcolm asked.
Cass looked at Malcolm and knew he was considering the feminine features he thought he spotted under the hood.
Dougie shook his head. “She did herself in a couple of months later. Couldn’t handle the guilt, I guess. Our best shot is the lead in New York.”
“But what about the train ticket?” Cass reminded him. “It was from Baltimore.”
“Yeah, I thought of that. I don’t have any answers yet. Maybe the person had to get out of New York in a hurry. I’ll know more as soon as we talk to the detective on the case.”
“I was raised in Baltimore. It’s been years since I’ve been there. I can’t imagine anyone would go looking for me there but…”
“I’ll add it to the list. In the meantime, watch your back.”
Watch her back. That seemed like the understatement of the year.
Dougie stood up. “I’ve got to go. I want to check in at headquarters and see if I can’t put a rush on the DNA matching.”
“I’ll drive you,” Malcolm offered.
“Uh. Yeah. Thanks.”
Cass stood as well. “Let me just get my clothes from upstairs, and you can drop me off, too.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Malcolm reached out and caught her arm before she could leave the room. “You’re staying here until this person is caught.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Cass,” Dougie interjected with somewhat of a pained expression on his face. “He’s right. You can’t stay in your apartment, not by yourself. You either stay with me, stay with him, let one of us stay with you, or if there’s someone else…”
“There’s no one else,” she snapped. No girlfriend or family or anybody she could call in the middle of the night and ask if she could crash for a while. But she didn’t like any of her other options, either.
“It’s settled,” Malcolm concluded. “Your place is too small and as I told you before, I’m not sleeping on that futon. I have plenty of room.”
“I can’t leave my cats for another day.”
“We’ll get them and we’ll bring them here. Cats love space.”
Cass looked to Dougie for help, but he was watching Malcolm with a stony yet resigned look. Part of her was tempted to tell Malcolm that she’d prefer staying with Dougie, but in the end she wasn’t ready to deal with Dougie on a personal level yet. Maybe she could forgive what he’d done, but she couldn’t forget it. Not right away. And besides, staying with him would mean regular contact from Claire. The energy it would take to keep her out would be draining. That wasn’t the case with Lauren.
“I guess I don’t have much of a choice,” she relinquished.
“In this, no,” Malcolm said. “I think more than enough women have lost their lives and their tongues to this murderer. Let’s go.”
They dropped Dougie off first and then headed to Cass’s place. When she unlocked the door, she did so with a smidgen of trepidation. But she concluded that if the killer was inside, waiting for her, she would have felt the monster by now. No tingles this time. No charged air.
“Let me.” Malcolm pushed in front of her and switched on the lights. The place was exactly as she had left it. No disturbances. No intruders. Just Spook and Nosey sitting together on the futon, keeping each other company no doubt until their mom came home.
They pushed themselves up and trotted over to greet her and get patted. First from her, then they wandered over to Malcolm. Obligingly, he bent down and stroked them in long, fluid movements.
Strong hands, Cass noted. Strong, but with the ability to show gentleness. Her pets lapped that gentleness up.
“Do you have a carrier for them?”
“I’ll get it.”
“Tell me where it is. I’ll corral them while you pack.”
Packing implied a significant amount of time. And he said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to pack up and move in with him when she’d only known him for days. This morning they had stood across from each other and she’d said horrible things to him and here he was still petting her cats, who were purring so loudly, she thought they might shake apart.
“Why are you doing this? You don’t even know me.”
“Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that I don’t think that’s true.” He stood up and loomed over her. “I think we’re a lot alike, you and me, and if we had met under other circumstances…”
A harsh laugh escaped her throat. “You mean if you had just wandered into the coffeehouse someday. You in your thousand-dollar suit and ten-thousand-dollar watch. You would have taken one look at me behind the counter in my green apron and what? Fallen madly in love? Get real.”
“I would have noticed your eyes. Bright green and exotic the way they tilt up ever so slightly at the end. And your nose. I would have noticed how delicate and fine it is. How delicate your whole face seems to be. I might have ordered my coffee to stay rather than to go. I might have ordered
a second cup.”
Her soft gasp was barely audible and she hoped he hadn’t heard it, but there was a look of satisfaction in his eyes that told her she hadn’t gotten that lucky.
“The point is we’ll never know. Instead we met at a police station with me at my worst. I wanted to throttle you, I was so angry. The next morning I came close to actually doing it. There really aren’t a whole lot of reasons for you to trust me. My one advantage is that currently you trust the detective less. I’m not going to let you stay here because I’m not going to risk your dying. That is the simple answer. Why I can’t risk it…that gets a little more complicated.”
That bothered her. “I think you believe if you save me it will erase the guilt of not saving your sister.” That was reasonable. That made sense. Nothing else.
“That is definitely a factor. And doesn’t that make it easy for you? Help exonerate me, Cassandra, and go pack.”
“Only two people I know call me Cassandra.”
“A shame. It’s really rather lovely.”
Cass didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know how to respond to any of it. He was making her nervous and making her think and she wanted to push him out the door and lock it behind him.
She didn’t scare easily. In fact, death wasn’t really something that frightened her at all. She knew too much about the peace and serenity that was to be found afterward. However, she also wasn’t stupid. There was a killer on the loose and it was hunting her. With a knife and a monster. Even if she found a way to avoid having her tongue cut out, she was pretty sure she couldn’t beat the monster.
“Their case is in the closet next to the bathroom. And their food. And you’ll need their litter. They’re not outside cats. Do you have some kind of box?”
Satisfied he was going to get his way, Malcolm was clearly willing to be accommodating. “I’m sure I have something that will work. If not, I’ll build them a box.”
He seemed so serious, she smiled. “Cardboard and a plastic bag as a liner will work just fine.”
Just then the phone rang and Malcolm seemed as startled by the intrusion as she was. Cass considered letting the machine pick up, but since she had only one regular caller these days, she figured she might as well talk to him.
“Hello?”
“Cassandra,” came the voice from the other end. One of the two other people to use her full name.
“Hi, Dr. Farver.”
“I just wanted to make sure you made it home all right. I was worried about you. You seemed upset, and I don’t think I did much to help.”
“I made it home fine. Don’t worry.”
“Okay. Well, it was good to see you. Mad said so, too.”
“It was good to see you and Mad.”
“Last chance to maybe come down and meet my student…”
Cass smiled into the phone at his near pleading request and this time she felt none of the guilt. “I can’t be swayed. But I will check in soon. I promise.”
And she meant it. Just because she wasn’t part of the institute anymore didn’t mean she had to leave behind the people she cared about. Malcolm leaned against the refrigerator in a negligent pose and watched her as she hung up the phone.
“Are you ill?”
Her brow furrowed when she realized she’d addressed Dr. Farver by name. “No, he’s not a medical doctor. He’s a psychologist who specializes in parapsychology. He founded and runs the Institute of Psychical Studies in Washington, D.C. That’s where I was coming from when I saw you at the train station.”
“Is he serious? I mean his work…”
“It’s legitimate. Funded by a lot of people who are less into science and more into the ‘unknown,’ but he takes his work and his research very seriously. I owe him a lot. He basically saved me. After my grandfather dumped me in the asylum, Dr. Farver found me and realized that I wasn’t crazy.”
“A believer.”
“Not really,” she mused. “He thinks I’m a telepath.”
“A tele-what?”
“Telepathic,” she repeated, using the more common term. “He thinks I can read minds. He doesn’t believe in an afterlife so it stands to reason he doesn’t believe that people from there would contact me. Instead, he thinks I can read people’s minds, access their memories. When a person dies, the living usually think about them more intensely, about their past together. That’s what he thinks I can do.”
“But you can’t.”
“Nope. Don’t have a clue what you’re thinking right now.”
“Good,” he stated somewhat enigmatically. “Let’s go.”
It took longer to corral the animals-they associated the carrier with the vet-than it did for Cass to pack. In the end she pleaded with them to be good girls and finally they allowed themselves to be lifted and placed together inside.
When they got back to the house, Malcolm found a crate that worked well with a plastic kitchen bag for a liner, and the cats seemed to acclimate to the new surroundings almost immediately.
“They’ll get lost,” Cass worried as she watched them search out each new smell and new crevice in the spacious home. “They like to sleep with me. What if they can’t find me?”
“They’ll find you. Cats are very resilient creatures.”
“You had one?” Cass asked, noting his comfort with them.
“Lauren did. It liked me and I didn’t mind it.”
“Spoken like a true man.”
His lips twitched. “Like I said, pink and cats-two things men never admit to liking.” He walked over to the fridge and opened it. He pulled out the casserole dish and got a bowl from a cabinet. “You didn’t eat earlier, but I saw you eyeing it up. Come on, admit it-you want some of my casserole.”
She did. “Fine, I’ll eat it, but my point still stands.”
Malcolm heated some up for her and then decided he could have another round. He put two bowls of the heated macaroni and cheese in front of them, along with two glasses of ice-cold milk. They ate at the table and the strange hominess of the act wasn’t lost on Cass. It had been so long since she had sat and eaten at a kitchen table that it actually unnerved her. She fiddled with her fork, pushed the food around and squirmed in her chair.
Malcolm raised an eyebrow in question.
“I usually eat in front of the TV on a mat,” she explained.
“I usually eat in the other room,” Malcolm said. He put down his fork. “You know, you were right about the casseroles. About me, I suppose. I don’t make friends very easily.”
“Why not? I mean, for me it’s a no-brainer. I’m weird. I hear dead people,” she whispered dramatically. “I couldn’t cope as a teen, and school was filled with people who had lost grandmothers and grandfathers and such. Then after the asylum I didn’t want to trust anyone ever again. I got along with the people at the institute. At the time I would have called them my friends. But it was so easy to walk away and not look back. Too easy. I’m trying to fix that now.”
“That’s why you went to see the doctor.”
Cass shook her head. “I was hoping he might help. Part of dealing with this gift is having control over it. Knowing every nuance of it. The channeling is new to me, relatively new, and I wanted a way to categorize it. Dr. Farver was methodical in his testing. I went looking for some ideas, but because he doesn’t believe, he couldn’t really help me. Anyway, that’s my story. Now yours.”
“Well, I don’t hear dead people. I wasn’t committed to an asylum. I’m not considered to be a freak by anyone-that I know of-merely reserved. I was raised by a loving father and an absent mother until I was eleven. Then my dad met Lauren’s mom and we became a family. We were happy.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“I don’t know that there is one. Yes, I lost my father and it crushed me. Soon after that, Lauren and I lost Becca. She had also been crushed by my father’s sudden death. Neither of those things had been easy. When Dad died, I took over the business and discovered it wasn’t
in great shape.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No. He wouldn’t have said. He had too much pride for that. It had been hard enough for him to marry a woman he knew had more money than he did, but to tell her that he had turned around and lost it…Anyway, when I saw the condition things were in, I knew where the stress in his life had come from.”
“I’m sorry.”
Malcolm’s mouth turned up. “No point in apologizing for something you can’t fix. I should have known he was in over his head. Dad was an ironworker but wanted to build a construction company. He had all the people skills he needed. People loved him. I’ll never understand why my mother didn’t. But he didn’t have much business sense. It was his dream that McDonough Contractors would some day be ‘and Son,’ but he wanted me to be a college-educated man first. He died right after I graduated. When I saw that the money was gone, I put everything I had into saving the company. I didn’t want Becca or Lauren to know. I became consumed with hiding the fact that we were all broke. I’d been broke before but they hadn’t. I couldn’t let them down, for their sake or my father’s.”
“All the things I said about you and your money. I thought it all had come so easily.” Cass didn’t have to say any more to know he understood that she was sorry for that, too.
“Not so easily. It took sacrifice. I didn’t take time out for drinks with the boys or poker on Fridays or parties on Saturdays. I had a fiancée when I started. We’d met in college, but she quickly realized that my first priority was the company, and she couldn’t accept that so she left me. She got most of my remaining friends in the split.”
“Ouch.”
Malcolm shrugged. “I’ve got to tell you, though, I wasn’t the chattiest or most popular little boy on the block, either.”
Cass smiled at the image of a very serious boy who had been his little sister’s hero. “Me, neither,” she admitted. “I loved books. Getting lost in them.”
“I loved sports. Watching them, playing them. Getting lost in them, too. I took them very seriously.”
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