Out of the Shadows tbscus-3

by Кей Хупер

  From the doorway, Miranda said quietly, "Sometimes you're just too goddammit smart for your own good, Bishop."

  He and Tony looked at her, alerted by something in her voice. Strain showed in her grim eyes and in the straight, hard line of her mouth.

  "We have another missing teenager," she said.

  By nine o'clock that night, they were reasonably sure that eighteen-year-old Steve Penman was not going to return from some unannounced trip or errand wondering innocently what all the fuss was about. He had last been seen shortly before four o'clock, when he had dropped off his sixteen-year-old girlfriend at her home. He'd made sure to get her home before curfew, Amy Fowler numbly told the sheriff and FBI agents, so she'd be safe. Then, not restricted by the curfew himself, he had headed back toward town to pick up something at the drugstore before he reported to work at the paper mill for the six o'clock mini-shift.

  When he hadn't reported to work, his supervisor, as requested by the Sheriff's Department, had immediately notified his parents. They had called the sheriff.

  His car was found parked near the front of the drugstore, but no one inside remembered seeing him come in. Deputies were questioning other merchants, and the sheriff had gone on the radio to request calls from anyone who had been downtown between four and six and might have seen anything unusual.

  The phones were ringing off the hook, but the calls were only from concerned citizens saying they had seen nothing.

  "How could he just vanish like that?" Miranda was absently rubbing her temples. "How could he have been taken against his will without a sound or any kind of commotion, without even being noticed? The kid's six feet tall, and he was wearing his bright blue football jacket. Not what you'd call invisible. If he got to town just after four, it wasn't even dark yet."

  Alex looked at the legal pad before him on the conference table. "At last count, between four and six o'clock there were a dozen senior boys in town wearing those jackets. They were planning to throw some kind of party for their coach sometime this week, apparently postponed from the end of the season because he was in Nashville having bypass surgery. So several of them were in town getting supplies." He paused. "None of the boys saw Steve Penman or anything they believed to be even remotely suspicious."

  Miranda felt Bishop's eyes on her, realized what she was doing, and stopped rubbing her temples. With a certain amount of detachment, she wondered if it was possible for a head to split wide open. "No trail for the dogs to follow. No leads. No witnesses. No clues."

  "And we don't have much time," Tony contributed soberly. "If Bishop is right, this boy may be kept alive for a while — but I'm guessing it won't be for long."

  Miranda leaned back in her chair, trying to appear at least somewhat relaxed, and looked across the table at Bishop. "Does this abduction alter your profile?"

  He shook his head. "We're looking for a white male, thirty to forty-five, in good physical shape. He's probably single, or has a place other than his home where he's assured of privacy and has the means to confine his victims. He's highly intelligent, meticulous and controlled, definitely organized. He either has a business of his own or else works in some administrative or managerial capacity, a position of authority. He understands enough about police procedure to avoid leaving any forensic evidence we can use, but whether that's professional knowledge or just a hobby is impossible to guess."

  "Professional knowledge? Are you saying he could be a cop?" Alex asked.

  "It's possible."

  "But is it likely?" Miranda watched him closely. "What's your hunch?"

  "My hunch is he's not. I think it's a hobby of sorts, that he's educated himself in police techniques. He may even have a conduit into this department, a friend or relative who could be, in all innocence, passing on information to him."

  "Great," Miranda said.

  Bishop shook his head. "It isn't likely to be restricted information. But if it was, I doubt he'd be stupid enough to let us know he has it by altering his M.O. He's smart enough to know how to leave a body so that nothing can be traced back to him, and cool enough to take his time and make sure it's done right. He's not given to panic or carelessness."

  "An expert killer," Alex said.

  Musing aloud, Tony said, "I'm wondering what the trigger was. What set him off so suddenly. Most killers of this sort start comparatively young, showing signs of homicidal tendencies all the way back to childhood.

  Not many reach their thirties or forties with their crimes still completely undiscovered."

  "Unless they're very, very lucky," Bishop said slowly. He asked Miranda, "Before the new highway opened, this town was on one of the main routes to Nashville, wasn't it?"

  She nodded, a frown drawing her brows together.

  "According to your records, there are no unsolved disappearances of locals, but what about transients? Teenagers, either runaways or kids passing through the area. Say . . . within fifty miles of Gladstone. There would have been bulletins of some kind among regional law enforcement agencies, general alerts."

  "None since I took office," Miranda said. "Before | that, I wouldn't know. Investigating disappearances wasn't one of my duties as a deputy."

  "We need to know how many unsolved cases we're really dealing with here," Bishop told her. "I'm hoping like hell we don't find any more missing teenagers, but if we do, every other case gives us one more opportunity to see if this bastard made a mistake we can use to throw a net over him."

  Miranda looked at Alex and nodded.

  Alex got up. "I'll have Sandy and Greg start checking files. We only have the recent stuff on computers; anything going back further than five years or so will be in storage boxes in the basement. How far back do you want to look?"

  "Ten to fifteen years," Bishop replied.

  Alex sighed. "It'll take days, probably longer. The last few administrations weren't exactly known for their record-keeping expertise."

  "Call in anyone you need to help," Miranda said. "We're all on overtime anyway." After the deputy left, she said to Bishop, "Ten to fifteen years?"

  "If the killer is at the high end of that age estimate, he could have been at this fifteen years or longer."

  "Christ. And nobody noticed?"

  "Maybe because he was hunting somewhere else. Or maybe just because his victims fell through the cracks and were never really missed."

  Miranda drew a breath and let it out slowly. "And it seemed like such a nice, safe little town."

  "You know there's no such thing."

  She was silent.

  "There's no such thing," he repeated.

  "Yes. I know."

  Into the silence, Tony murmured something about helping Alex and slipped from the room.

  Before Miranda could follow him, Bishop said, "You have another headache, don't you?"

  Lightly, she said, "My entire life is a headache at the moment."

  He ignored that. "Miranda, do you understand the danger of what you're doing?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're working so hard at keeping me out—"

  "Don't flatter yourself," she snapped.

  Bishop counted silently to ten. "All right. You're working so hard at keeping us out, channeling all your psychic energy into blocking us, that your body is beginning to rebel. Headaches, sensitivity to light and sound, nausea."

  "You're imagining things, Bishop."

  "It can damage you beyond repair, Miranda, do you understand that? We've learned a lot more about psychic ability in the last few years, and the current understanding is that the electrical impulses that trigger telepathy and precognition can also damage the brain — especially if they aren't allowed to dissipate naturally."

  "If you'll forgive a lousy pun," she said, "I'll keep that in mind."

  He stared at her for a long moment, then said deliberately, "I suppose you've considered what would happen to Bonnie without you to watch over her."

  M
iranda wondered why she wasn't getting up and walking out of the room. "Bonnie is not your concern."

  He hesitated. "She would be, you know. Not because I owe you, but because I owe her."

  She was surprised and tried not to let it show. "It's not a debt you can pay, Bishop."

  "I know."

  Miranda felt the sudden need to go away somewhere by herself and reinforce her shields. She put her hands on the table as she got to her feet, hoping grimly that the action looked more casual than the necessary support it was.

  Abruptly, Bishop reached across the table and grasped her wrist.

  For a frozen instant, Miranda stared into those pale, compelling eyes of his with a sense of blind panic. Then she jerked away from him and stepped back.

  Bishop remained where he was, his arm stretched out, the long fingers slowly closing into a fist. "You won't let me in."

  Miranda uttered a shaken laugh. "And you have the nerve to be surprised by that?"

  His scar stood out so starkly that it appeared newly made, raw. "What are you afraid of, Miranda?" he demanded roughly. "What is it you don't want me to see, don't want me to know?"

  "Like I said before, don't flatter yourself."

  "Miranda—"

  She hadn't intended to say anything else. She should have simply turned around and walked out of the room. But the panic drove her to distract, deflect. "I let you in once, Bishop. Into my life. Into my mind. Into my bed. Even, God help me, into my heart. And that mistake cost me so much I'm not likely to ever repeat it."

  He leaned back and spoke with great deliberation. "I'm the one who made the mistake. I was stupid and arrogant, and so obsessed with catching a killer I couldn't see beyond that goal. And I'm sorry. Not a day passes that I don't regret what happened eight years ago. But it's done, Miranda. I can't go back and change anything, as much as I'd like to. I have to live with what I did, what I caused to happen. But..."

  She didn't move, didn't prompt him or do anything except wait.

  "But if anything happened now to you or Bonnie because of me, I couldn't live with that. I'm not asking for your forgiveness. I'm just asking you not to hurt yourself trying to keep me out. I'll stay out. I swear to you, I will."

  Miranda would have liked to say something cool or mocking, but she didn't trust herself to say a word. Instead, she just turned and walked out, leaving him there.

  And wondered how long she could keep the truth from him.

  EIGHT

  Wednesday, January 12

  Liz Hallowell had learned at her grandmother's knee how to read faces. The color and shape of eyes, the angle of jaw and arch of brow, the curve of the mouth. They were all signposts, her gran had said, the outer directions to the soul.

  So when she stepped outside her store in the early afternoon for a quick break and one of the rare cigarettes she allowed herself, and saw standing on the sidewalk only a few yards away the FBI agent with the marked face, she studied him intently. They hadn't yet been introduced; the other two agents had been in her coffee shop, but not this one.

  He was talking to Peter Green, who owned the old-fashioned barbershop behind them, and Liz didn't have to read the tea leaves to know what they were discussing. Half of Randy's deputies and two of the three federal agents had been moving methodically through town all day, talking to everyone who might have seen something yesterday when the Penman boy had vanished. Nobody had talked to Liz yet.

  Taking advantage of the time granted to her, she smoked and watched the agent, not especially worried if he noticed her stare. Most of the people on the streets were staring at him anyway, so why should she be different?

  It was an interesting face. Fascinating, even. Her gran would have loved it. It was both unquestionably hard and unquestionably handsome, and the scar marking his left cheek didn't detract a bit from either quality. It was a face that kept the secrets of the man who wore it, yet to Liz it also revealed much of his character.

  Even at a distance, the intensity of his pale gray eyes was almost hypnotic, the outward sign of deep and powerful emotions, and laugh lines at the corners suggested he was at least capable of laughing at himself. His mouth was sensitive and mobile, yet held firm with absolute mastery. His sharp jaw was strong, determined, his forehead high and exotically framed by the perfect widow's peak of gleaming black hair. The flying arch of his eyebrows hinted at quick wit, and the faint kink in the bridge of his aristocratic nose pointed to equally quick fists.

  It was, Liz decided, the face of a brilliant, proud, highly perceptive man of considerable courage and acute compassion. It was also the face of a man who could be caustic, arrogant, impatient, and apt to act ruthlessly if he honestly believed the occasion called for it — and the results were important enough to him.

  His friends, Liz thought, would never question his absolute loyalty or his willingness to do anything within his power to help in times of trouble. And his enemies would never doubt that once on their trail he simply would not give up.

  Liz shivered without really being aware of it and drew her jacket more closely around her. But when the agent left Peter and approached her, she was able to sound perfectly calm. "My turn now?"

  His sentry eyes studied her with interest. "You're Liz Hallowell?"

  "That's me."

  In a virtually automatic gesture, he showed her his I.D. "Noah Bishop."

  Liz felt her eyebrows climbing. "Now, that's unexpected."

  "What is?"

  "Your name. Not the Bishop part, that's definitely you, but the Noah part. Noah was a caretaker, someone who offered comfort. Is that you?"

  He smiled faintly. "I'm just a cop, Miss Hallowell." He paused and then, almost as if he couldn't help himself, added, "Why is the Bishop part definitely me?"

  "Bishop means overseer." She barely hesitated. "I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about Steve Penman disappearing yesterday. I mean, I know that he did, but I didn't see anything. Not surprising, since the drugstore is at the other end of town."

  "Do you know him?"

  "Sure, as well as I knew any of the teenagers. To speak to. I didn't like him much."

  "Why not?"

  "The way he treated his girlfriends," she answered promptly.

  "How does he treat them? Is he abusive?"

  Liz took a long draw on her cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly before she spoke. "Depends on your definition of abusive, I guess. I never heard he hit any of them, or was physically rough in any other way. But he was a good-looking, charming kid who knew it and took advantage of it to get what he wanted. I don't think many girls said no to him, even though he had a track record of getting bored and moving on fairly quickly. What I didn't like was the way he seemed to view the girls as just something useful he carried along with him — like his backpack."

  Bishop nodded and then, softly, said, "You keep using the past tense, Miss Hallowell. Do you know something I don't know?"

  "I know he's lost. But you know that too."

  "I know he's missing."

  She shook her head. "You know more than that, Agent Bishop."

  "Do I?"

  "Sure. It's your job to know more, isn't it? They call what you do profiling, I hear. Which basically means you try to climb inside the head of the monster, figure out who he is and what he's going to do next. Isn't that right?"

  "More or less."

  "I wouldn't call that a pleasant job."

  "That part of it isn't."

  "But you're good at it, aren't you? You understand how the monsters think."

  He shrugged. "There's a kind of logic even in insanity. It looks like a jigsaw puzzle, but all the pieces are there and usually fit together. It isn't that difficult to do once you know how."

  Liz drew on her cigarette and blew out the smoke in a quick burst. "Maybe, but I'd say it was dangerous. If you go too deep into that insane logic, you might never get out."

  Bishop smiled suddenly. "Who's interviewing whom, Miss Hallowell?"

  Liz had t
o laugh. "Sorry. I'm incurably nosy, but I don't mean any harm. What was it you wanted to know? Why I believe Steve Penman won't be coming back? Well, I don't know monsters as well as you do, but one thing I do know about them is that they seldom leave their . . . prey . . . unharmed. Right?"

  "Right."

  "And this monster didn't leave behind any puzzle pieces for you guys to put together, did he?"

  "Not many."

  "Then Steve's lost, isn't he?"

  Bishop looked at her for a long, steady moment, then smiled again. "I hear you read tea leaves, Miss Hallowell. Have you seen anything in the bottom of a cup lately that could help us?"

  Liz listened for scorn or disbelief in his voice, and heard nothing except mild interest. It encouraged her to say, "I don't know how helpful it'll be, but he's trying to distract you — not you personally, I mean the investigation — by taking Steve Penman. There's something about one of the others he doesn't want you to look at closely. I don't know what it is, maybe a mistake he made or just something you have the ability to see more clearly than he bargained for, but it's there. And he's afraid you'll find it."

  "So he took Steve Penman?"

  Liz hesitated. "That's partly it. He had other reasons for picking Steve. I don't think he liked him." Unconsciously, she cocked her head, trying to hear what her gypsy blood was trying to tell her. "He was a little afraid of Steve — no, he was afraid of something Steve knew."

  "What was that?"

  She groped mentally, but the elusive knowledge was gone. "I don't know." Surprised at herself, she shook her head. "That was weird. I usually don't get much of anything without tea leaves or cards in front of me." She was just about to add that his spiritual energy must be especially strong to spark hers like that, when she saw him glance past her. Without turning her head or even thinking about it, she knew he had spotted Miranda Knight — and in a sudden flash understood much that had been murky to her before.