Glamorous: A Grace Bishop Novel (Grace Bishop Novels)

by Denise Bossarte

  DL looked from Billy to Anthony and then to Grace. “You’re not joking, are you? You can do something that strange?”

  “Yes,” Grace did not hesitate.

  Anthony sighed again. “It is not ‘strange.’” Anthony made air quotes with his fingers. “It is what some people do naturally,” he said, a slight air of superiority tinting his words.

  He glanced over at Grace and amended, “And Grace can, as well.”

  Grace ignored the aside and turned to DL, taking over the conversation. “I have a supernatural ability which allows me to ‘see’ things when I touch objects.”

  “Grace and I both have this ability,” Anthony added.

  Billy looked surprised by Anthony’s statement but then nodded to himself.

  “Do you all have this ability?” DL stared at the three of them, one after the other.

  Anthony smirked but said nothing.

  Billy laughed out loud. “No, Grace and Anthony are the only ones here who can do readings. I’m as normal as you are, in that respect.”

  “Let’s not forget the ghost in the room isn’t one, either.” Danny sounded annoyed.

  “Billy’s aware neither of them know about you. He won’t put you at risk by mentioning it in front of Anthony.” Grace tried to keep Danny focused.

  “Right.” Danny grumbled in response.

  DL set the sweater in his lap, running his hands over it. “You’ll use this sweater to tell us where Sabra is?”

  “Yes. Although what I get isn’t always detailed or specific. Sometimes it’s more general.”

  He turned to Anthony. “If Grace can do the reading, why do we need both of you?”

  Chapter 20

  “I’m here because sometimes different clairvoyants get different things from reading the same object. We do not want to miss out on opportunities to get as much information as possible,” Anthony answered.

  “Besides, I am much more experienced with readings than Grace. I do this type of thing on a weekly basis with a crowd of strangers at the theater. But Grace has only done a few readings, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “Okay, he’s a big ass,” Danny said.

  Grace gritted her teeth, reminding herself that they needed Anthony’s help to do something about DL’s missing kids.

  Before she could respond with something inappropriate, Billy spoke.

  “It sounds like a solid plan for multiple people to do readings tonight.” Billy eyed Grace in a way conveyed he would want a full explanation later of how such an ass came to join their group.

  Grace hadn’t expected Anthony to admit he was clairvoyant, let alone be willing to do a reading tonight. Nicco promised Anthony would help with the case. She supposed this was what he meant—even if it came with having Anthony put her down while doing it.

  Grace held out one hand for the sweater. After a moment’s hesitation, DL gave it to her, still looking a bit skeptical. Grace settled into her chair and spread the sweater out on her lap, smoothing the creases on the front.

  With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and lay both hands on the sweater. She visualized the dark material sliding away from her fingers to her palms and up her arms, leaving her hands in direct contact with the soft fabric.

  Grace felt an overwhelming sense of fear, pain, and despair, and a bone chilling coldness. She had a flash of a concrete floor, pools formed from water dripping off broken pipes in the ceiling. Then a blank nothingness.

  With a sigh, Grace got control of her emotions and opened her eyes, smoothing out more invisible creases in the sweater, and visualized the dark material sliding down her arms, and over her palms and her fingers, closing her off from Sabra’s sweater.

  Leaning forward, DL asked, “What did you see? Where she is?”

  Grace met DL’s eyes. “I got something, but it’s vague.” She shook her head.

  “Anthony, do you want to try?” she asked, offering the sweater to him.

  He gave her a smug smile and took it, holding it in both his hands. It was the first time Grace could watch another clairvoyant do a reading. She couldn’t tell if he was doing anything different than her to interact with the sweater or to engage his ability. He only sat there staring at it without moving.

  “Can you see anything happening? Is he doing something special?” she asked Danny.

  “I can’t see him doing anything like what you do.” Danny squinted in concentration at Anthony. “The only thing I see is his aura growing stronger and brighter, but that’s about it.”

  After a moment of silence, Anthony shook his head and tossed the sweater back to DL. “There is nothing helpful to get from this.”

  “What did you see, then?” DL turned to Grace.

  “The insides of a warehouse—an old unused warehouse. That’s all I could get. I didn’t get a sense of Sabra’s presence.” Grace glanced at Anthony and saw his eyes widen at what she was sharing.

  “I’m sorry, DL. There’s no easy way to tell you this. But I think Sabra’s dead.” She reached out to place one of her hands on top of his, holding the sweater.

  DL grasped the sweater, staring hard at her. “Dead? I can’t believe it! Did you see her dead?”

  “DL,” she said gently. “She’s dead. I would’ve had a sense of her presence and what was going on with her otherwise. All I have is an echo of where she was killed.”

  “Who did it? Who’s the bastard who did this to her?”

  “I have a general picture of him from Beth’s reading,” she said. She noticed DL’s look of surprise but continued. “Enough to recognize him if I saw him again, but together we can figure out more of what’s happening.”

  DL glared at Grace as he grabbed the brown paper bag and shoved the sweater into it.

  “I trusted you, Grace. But you’ve dragged me over here multiple times on the pretense that your friends could help me figure out what’s happening to my girls. Working with a cop at least made sense. But this mumbo jumbo crap with readings and claiming Sabra’s dead? That you saw the killer and have a ‘vague’ awareness of where she was murdered—?”

  “DL—” Grace began as he stood.

  “Thanks for wasting my time,” he said as he headed for the door.

  “You arrogant fool. Who is next?” Anthony said in a loud voice.

  DL stopped with his hand on the doorknob and turned to glare at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Give me the name of the girl you want to be the next victim. Grace says she saw the killer and where the girls are being killed. If you refuse to believe what she saw and walk away tonight, then more girls will die. So which one are you ready to see die, next? Name her.”

  DL’s hand released the doorknob and slowly lowered to his side.

  The room remained in complete silence as he returned to sink back into his seat on the sofa. His fists clenched around the top of the brown bag as he stared at Grace with a pained expression.

  Grace leaned over to place a hand on his arm.

  “I know it is a lot to take in at one time. But even though I gained a supernatural ability after my accident, I’m still the same person I was before. The same person you’ve known for years. I swear on my parents’ graves that I’m not joking around. This is real, and this is what may allow us to solve the case.”

  DL shifted back and forth a few seconds before nodding. He placed the brown bag down on the floor and appeared to gather himself.

  “Okay, Grace. I’ll stay. What do we do with the information you learned?”

  Grace pointed to the map on the table and the markings they added earlier. “Let’s see how we can pull the pieces together. We’ve got five main areas the women and girls are disappearing from. The areas are near Midtown but not equidistant from it. Names and locations and not much else.”

  “We’ve got dates,” DL reminded her.

  “What dates?” Anthony asked. “I thought you only had locations on a map.”

  “We’ve got approximate dates for when the women went missing
or were last seen,” Billy said.

  “Yeah, see where we added them next to each location,” DL added. “But there’s no pattern in the dates or the locations.”

  “No, you are wrong,” Anthony said. “I see something.”

  He leaned closer. “How far apart are the dates?”

  “About a month each, give or take,” Grace said.

  “And each month another person goes missing, correct?” Anthony asked.

  “Yeah, but the kidnapping locations jump around. The women aren’t abducted from the same place multiple months in a row. And the abductions are not in the same place at the same time each year.” Billy’s hand swept to indicate the spots spread across the map.

  “Not quite,” Anthony said. “Read them off in order, by date, one-by-one for me. Leave out the ones that are not part of these five major groupings.” He pointed to the overlapping areas from Billy’s and DL’s groups. “Those are likely not related.”

  As Grace read off the dates from the map, Anthony wrote each of the dates on a fresh sheet of paper. After they were through, he bent his head and began scribbling out to the side of each date.

  “Still not seeing anything but a mess of dates.” Danny seemed unimpressed.

  “Neither do I. But it seems like Anthony is on to something.”

  Anthony finished his scribbling and handed the paper to Grace.

  “Read off the locations in the order of the numbers I wrote beside them,” he said. “I will show you on the map what I believe is the pattern for the attacks.”

  As Grace read through the dates, Anthony pointed to the spots on the map. For the first several items, it didn’t appear to be anything but random motions of his hand. But by the end of the list, Grace thought she understood what he was getting at.

  Grace pulled out a pen. “Anthony, would you mark off what you just showed us? It might help us visualize things better.”

  Anthony raised his eyes to the ceiling for a moment but took the pen. He drew out the symbol on the map with the points of a star hitting each of the five areas of overlapping color. He laid the pen on the table, then stepped back to analyze the results.

  “A star!” Grace said.

  “Not a ‘star’,” Anthony corrected her. “It is a pentagram.”

  DL was on his feet and back at the map.

  “A ‘what’-a-gram?” Billy asked staring at the drawing on the map.

  “A pentagram,” Anthony repeated. “It is a shape that holds special significance for people with supernatural powers.”

  Grace glanced at Anthony. “So you think a Par…someone with supernatural powers is involved in this.”

  Anthony nodded. “I suspected it once I picked out the pattern. The pentagram pattern of attacks is based on the Dreamspell calendar—a modern interpretation of the Mayan calendar by New Age spiritualists and supernaturals. It uses a 260-day sacred calendar rather than a 360-day solar calendar. That is why the pattern made no sense until I converted it and interpreted it.”

  Despite herself, Grace was impressed. She had to admit having Anthony as part of the group was paying off.

  Anthony continued. “It would explain a great deal if someone with supernatural ability was involved. It would be unusual for several disappearances to happen and no one to see or hear anything—girls gone without leaving a trace. It is not something a normal person could do multiple times. Not without leaving any clues.”

  “Anthony’s right,” Billy said. “It’s been driving me crazy, wondering how John Doe is able to get away with this. But someone like you and Grace could, right?”

  “Not a clairvoyant like Grace and me,” Anthony said. “But someone with a different ability, yes. One who can make people forget he and the women were even there.”

  “That’s way cool!” said Danny. “Sick way to use a Paranormal ability, but way cool.”

  Grace’s stomach sank. “There are people with the ability to control minds?”

  “It’s not true mind control,” Anthony said. “They do not have that strong a capability. The ability to convince people to ignore them, not see them, or forget they’ve been there? Yes, they can do that. When it showed up in the past, it was termed a ‘Glamour.’”

  “Who in the city can do this?” Grace asked, annoyed to be learning about it now and not earlier.

  “No one I know of,” Anthony said. “I am only aware it is possible.”

  “It might be someone outside your circle who’s got this ability?” Billy suggested.

  “It is very unlikely, but it might be feasible for someone to come and settle in the city without us finding out about him. With his abilities, he could avoid the other supernaturals and focus on areas vacant of Paranorms for his searches for women.” He motioned to the clusters of color on the map.

  “And there is something else you need to be aware of,” he said. “These types tend to be unstable. They become addicted to their ability to manipulate people and escalate their use of Glamour over time.”

  “Escalate?” Billy looked at Anthony with concern.

  “Yes, they use their abilities more and more frequently and become blatant about their use, even flaunting their powers.”

  “Where does that leave us?” Grace asked. “How do we catch him? Where is he going next?”

  DL tapped the circle with Beth’s name. “This was Beth five nights ago.”

  Anthony followed the lines of the pentagram with his finger to the next point in the pattern. “Here. He will be here, next.”

  “But when?” Grace asked.

  “Every month or so, right?” Billy leaned forward to stare intently at the map. “Starting in about three weeks, we should look for him. It will be a month from the last attack.”

  “I think we can be more accurate,” Anthony said. “Can someone pull up the moon cycles for the last couple of years on the Internet for me? I want to compare those dates to the ones we have for the missing girls.”

  Grace pulled out her phone and searched for the information Anthony needed. She set the phone down in front of him to let him compare the data to what was on the map.

  “Just like I thought, the dates are falling near the full moon. We should focus our efforts around the next full moon at the expected location. We will have a chance of catching up to him before he kidnaps another girl.”

  Chapter 21

  DL felt his sense of helplessness starting to diminish now that they had established the pattern of attacks. He looked around the room at everyone before speaking.

  “So, now we know when and where to expect the Glamour. What’s our plan going to be? I can tell the girls to stay away from this location until we’ve caught him, but how do we plan to catch him?”

  Billy spoke first. “We should bring this to the police and have them set up an official sting. We can use the resources of the police department to catch him, based on the description Grace got from Beth.”

  DL pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “I tried going to the police before, and they did nothing.”

  “But that was before we had the additional information about the prostitutes and the Glamour’s description,” Billy said.

  “But all we have is circumstantial evidence, a description from a girl attacked but not kidnapped, and a New Age theory on how it all connects. No offense, Anthony,” DL said.

  “None taken.” Anthony smiled and waved his hand at him.

  Billy scowled. “I thought you wanted us to help stop this man from attacking more of your girls, DL. That’s the whole point of us getting together tonight.”

  “I do.” DL glared back at Billy. “But trying to convince the police they should be the ones to find this man is a colossal waste of time. We should be out there looking for him ourselves.”

  Before the argument could escalate further, Grace jumped into the conversation.

  “Regardless of whether we could convince the police to take on the case, we shouldn’t involve them.”

  “Since when
have you decided it was a good thing to play vigilante, Grace? Of all people, I expected you would support letting the professionals handle something like this,” Billy said.

  Grace pursed her lips but didn’t respond. DL saw from her tense face that Billy had insulted her by placing Grace into the group of non-professionals despite her standing as a PI.

  “DL and Grace are right, Billy,” Anthony said. “It would be difficult to convince the police to believe our theory without more non-paranormal evidence. More evidence than DL’s notes on the girls and the sketchy arrest records for the prostitutes.”

  “Thank you, Anthony,” Grace said. “My main reason for saying we shouldn’t involve the police is because the Paranorm we want to catch would just glamour officers in the area. The risk is too great to the officers. And having too many people involved also means a higher risk of the Glamour fleeing before we can catch him.”

  Billy sat back in his chair, crossing his arms. His scowl had shifted to a deep frown, but at least he wasn’t arguing with the group.

  “So, Grace, if we aren’t going to involve the police, we’re back to my original question. How are we going to stop this guy from hurting more of my girls?” DL asked.

  “My idea is to stake out the location where we expect the Glamour to be next. We can be on the street where the girls are tricking and keep an eye out for him to show up.”

  “That sounds simple enough.” Billy eased forward in his chair. “But how do you plan to get close enough to him to make sure he doesn’t grab another girl or notice something unusual is going on?”

  “The best option is for me to go undercover as a prostitute.”

  Billy threw up his arms. “That’s ridiculous!”

  Grace’s face went bright red. That made two strikes for Billy this evening if Grace’s expression was anything to go by.

  “No way! I don’t want you making yourself into bait to do this.” DL reached out to place a conciliatory hand on her arm.