Whisper of Evil tbscus-5

by Кей Хупер

  With all of that very much in his thoughts, Tony spoke carefully. "We're spread pretty thin right now, with a half-dozen separate major investigations scattered across the country all going on at once. We have to use all our resources and all our aces. Every team in the field has to have a dominant member, that's your rule. A lead investigator with as much experience as possible who's also the most powerful psychic available."

  Bishop said, "Something else you don't need to remind me of, Tony."

  "All I'm saying is that Miranda being the lead might make all the difference in her case, and you know it. Just like you being the lead here and Quentin being the lead out in California, and Isabel running the show in Boston. Besides, Miranda took care of herself for a good many years before you tracked her down and reappeared in her life."

  "I know that."

  "She's a black belt and a crack shot, besides being able to read at least two-thirds of the people she encounters. All of which gives her quite an edge in the survival department."

  "I know that too."

  "I know you know that. All of that. I also know none of it makes a damned bit of difference at the moment because you've spent way too many sleepless nights alone in bed. It's starting to show, boss."

  "Look who's talking."

  Tony started slightly and felt his face get warm. Damned inconvenient sometimes, he thought, working with a telepath. Especially one as powerful as Bishop. "Never mind me."

  Remorselessly, Bishop said, "Nothing like getting the scare of your life to advance a relationship to the next step."

  "Shit. How long have you known?"

  "About you and Kendra?" Bishop smiled slightly. "Longer than you have, Tony. Long before she was shot."

  Tony considered that, then shook his head. "I knew Quentin was on to us but figured that was mostly because he's usually Kendra's partner in the field. And because he so often knows things he shouldn't, damn his eyes."

  Mildly curious, Bishop said, "Why even bother trying to keep it quiet?"

  "I don't know. Yeah — I do know. You've said yourself there are few secrets in a unit full of psychics; sometimes it's fun to have a secret. Even if you're only fooling yourself that's what it is."

  "I get that where you're concerned. It's just the sort of thing you'd like. But Kendra? She's awfully levelheaded to enjoy a secret romance."

  Tony grinned. "Are you kidding? It's the levelheaded ones that go off the deep end, believe me."

  "I'll take your word for it."

  "Do that. I'm not nearly sure enough of her to risk having everybody openly watching us to see what happens next."

  "Remember who you're talking to. In this unit, we don't have to openly watch to know what's going on."

  "Yeah, but at least that way we won't feel quite so much like bugs under a microscope."

  Deadpan, Bishop said, "So we should be subtle while we gleefully observe?"

  "I'd appreciate it if you would," Tony responded earnestly.

  Bishop lifted a brow at him. "It occurs to me that you're having a shot at that sort of subtlety now. Tony, are you trying to distract me?"

  "I was working on it, yeah."

  "Why?"

  "You know damned well why. The tension in here. That's something you couldn't be subtle about if you tried. And you never try."

  With only a mild attempt to defend himself, Bishop said, "I'm always tense during an investigation."

  "No, that's a different kind of tension."

  "And you'd know."

  "Well, yeah."

  Bishop grimaced slightly. "Okay, okay. I will do my best to stop worrying about things I can't control. In the meantime, would you care to come away from that window and do something useful? Like work?"

  "I thought you'd never ask," Tony responded cheerfully, joining his boss at the conference table. But before he picked up a photograph to study, he added in a musing tone, "Getting back to Silence for just a minute — what do you think about this connection Nell has? Think it'll make things easier for her?"

  "No," Bishop replied soberly. "I think it'll make things harder for her. Much harder."

  Tony sighed. "And there's nothing we can do to help?"

  "Some things have to happen —"

  " — just the way they happen," Tony finished. "Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that. And in some cases, boss, it really sucks."

  "Tell me about it," Bishop said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "I don't know if I'll ever get used to these… episodes of yours," Max said, releasing her shoulders only because she moved away.

  Nell nearly reminded him that he wouldn't have to since she didn't intend to remain in Silence for long, but instead heard herself say, "They're unnerving, 1 know. Especially for someone else. Sorry about that."

  He shook his head. "Never mind. Just explain a few things, will you, please? I'm getting really tired of groping through this fog of confusion." Even though the words were flippant, his tone was anything but. "And before I try to figure out what the hell you mean by saying your father was murdered too, can you start with the basics?"

  "It's getting late," she hedged, wondering if she was only talking about the lateness of the hour on this particular night or something a lot more important. She had a hunch it was the latter, and it bothered her more than she wanted to admit even to herself.

  "I know. But I doubt either one of us is going to be able to sleep anytime soon. I need to understand, Nell. And I think you owe me that much."

  She didn't protest, all too aware that she owed him a lot more than that. What was the going price for leaving a man in limbo? High. Maybe too high to pay. She set her coffee cup on the scarred old butcher-block table in the center of the kitchen and sat down in one of the ladder-back chairs. She waited until he sat down across from her, then spoke slowly. "Explain the visions, you mean?"

  "Can you explain them?"

  Nell shrugged. "I understand them a bit better than I did while I was growing up — even though what I felt instinctively way back then turned out to be pretty accurate."

  "For instance?"

  "What it is I actually tap into during a vision. A sociologist would say I had just experienced what they call an apparitional event. That I had seen — or at least claimed I had seen — the ghost of my father walk through this room. But that's not what I saw."

  "No? What, then?"

  "It was… a memory."

  "Whose memory?"

  She smiled faintly. "In the very broadest sense, it was the memory of the house."

  "Are you saying this house is haunted?"

  "No. I'm saying the house remembers."

  "You said something like that before, years ago," Max noted. "That some places remember. But I don't understand what you mean. How can a house have a memory?"

  "Any object — a house, a place — can have a memory.

  Life has energy, Max. Life is energy. Broken down into their most basic form, emotions and thoughts are energy: electrical impulses produced by the brain."

  "Okay. And so?"

  "And so energy can be absorbed and retained by an object or a place. By walls and a floor, by trees, even by the ground itself. Maybe certain places are more likely than others to retain energy because of factors we don't yet understand, because their physical composition lends itself to storing energy, or there are magnetic fields — or even that the energy itself is particularly powerful at a given moment and we ourselves stamp that into a place with our own strength and intensity.

  "However it happens, some places remember some things. Some emotions. Some events. The energy remains trapped in a place, unseen and unheard until someone with an inborn sensitivity to that particular kind of energy is able to tap into it."

  "Someone like you."

  "Exactly. There's nothing magical about what I do, nothing dark or evil — or inhuman. It's just an ability, as natural to me as your instincts about horses are to you. A perfectly normal talent, if you will, that not everyone has. Maybe
it's genetic, like the color of our eyes or whether we're right- or left-handed; in my family it certainly seems to be, at least partly. On the other hand, there's every possibility that every human being has the capacity for some form of psychic ability, that everyone has an unused area of the brain that could perform seemingly amazing things if we only knew how to… turn it on."

  Nell shook her head and frowned slightly as she looked down at her coffee. "We're pretty sure that some people are born with the potential to develop some kind of psychic ability, that in them the area of the brain controlling that function is at least partly or intermittently active, even if it's entirely on an unconscious level; we call them latents. They usually aren't aware of it, though another psychic often is."

  Max frowned, but all he said was, "But latent abilities do sometimes become active on a conscious level?"

  "They have been known to. As far as we can tell, turning a latent into a conscious, functioning psychic requires some sort of trigger. A physical or emotional trauma, usually. Like a shock to the brain, literally or figuratively. Something happens to them, an accident or an emotional jolt — and they find themselves coping with strange new abilities. Which would explain why people with head injuries or who develop certain kinds of seizures often report psychic experiences afterward."

  "I had no idea," Max said.

  "Not many people do. I didn't, until I joined the unit and began to learn." She shook her head again. "Anyway, in my particular case, my brain is hardwired for a sensitivity to the sort of electrical energy produced by… emotional or psychologically intense events. Those events leave electrical impressions behind, energy that's absorbed by the place where the events occur, and I have the knack of sensing and interpreting that electrical energy."

  Max spoke carefully. "Isn't sensing electrical energy a long way from envisioning an image of a dead man?"

  "Is it? The mind interprets the information it's given and translates that into some form we recognize and understand. What happened in this room had a form, a face, a voice — and all that survived as energy. As a memory. Just the way you recall a memory of your own, I can recall the memory of a place. Sometimes quite vividly, and sometimes only bits and pieces, images, feelings, scattered and unclear."

  "Okay. Assuming I can accept all that, explain to me why that particular scene — your father walking through a kitchen he must have walked through a million times — is what this room retained. Why that? Out of everything that must have happened here in decades, all the emotional scenes and crises so common in every kitchen everywhere, why was that very normal scene important enough to retain?"

  "Because it wasn't normal. What my father was feeling when he walked through this kitchen then was… incredibly intense. He was emotionally devastated."

  Max frowned. "You felt that?"

  "Sensed it — some of it, at least. It was difficult to get a fix on his emotions, simply because he was overwhelmed by them himself. But I know he was distraught, in shock, that he'd just discovered something he could hardly believe was true."

  "Something she should have told him, isn't that what you heard him say?"

  "Yes. Given the calendar I saw, that must have been when he found out whatever it was that made him disinherit Hailey. He died in late May, and he'd changed his will just a few weeks before that, not long after she left."

  Still frowning, Max said, "So why do you believe he was murdered? No one suspected it was anything other than a heart attack."

  "Yes, but there was no one here to suspect, no one to question. All the rest of the family was gone, not on the scene to wonder. He had no close friends. It looked like a heart attack; he was the right age for one and had been warned by his doctor that his habits and temperament put him into the high-risk category. And with no other unexplained deaths before then to put anyone on guard…"

  "I understand why no one here would have suspected a murder, but how can you be so sure he was killed? Did he think he was going to be, fearing for his life in that scene you envisioned?"

  For the first time, realizing, Nell felt a chill. "No, he had no idea," she said slowly. "No fear or worry. His mind was entirely focused on the shock he'd had, but he wasn't in the least afraid or concerned for himself. It was… I must have picked up on something else. Sensed something else."

  "Like maybe the killer?"

  She drew a breath. "Like maybe the killer."

  Nate McCJurry was scared.

  He hadn't been at first. Hell, he'd barely paid attention when Peter Lynch had died, and as for Luke Ferrier, well, Nate had always expected something bad to happen to him.

  But when Randal Patterson's death had exposed his S&M leanings, Nate had started to get nervous. Because he had something in common with Randal. And, he was beginning to think, with the others as well.

  Not that Nate had any big secret, not like those other guys. He hadn't broken the law, and he didn't have any whips or chains in his basement or skeletons in his closet. But sometimes a man had things he wanted to keep to himself; that was perfectly natural. Perfectly normal.

  Unless there was a madman running around punishing men for their sins, that is.

  He was nervous enough to install a security system in his house, paying double to have it done quickly when, the installation guy had told him, the company was backed up on work because so many orders had come in.

  So he wasn't the only nervous man in Silence.

  And at least he could claim it was just good business to protect oneself. After all, he sold insurance. And everybody knew insurance companies were very big on reducing risk.

  That's what Nate was doing, reducing risk.

  But he was still scared.

  It didn't help that he lived alone. Creepy to be alone when you were scared. He kept the television on for background noise, because every rattle of a tree branch or sudden hoot of an owl out there made him jump. But even with the background noise, he found himself going from window to window and door to door, checking the locks. Making sure.

  Watching the night creep slowly along.

  He didn't sleep.

  He had stopped sleeping days ago.

  "Nell, are we talking about the same killer? Are you saying your father was his first victim?"

  She hesitated, then shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. Maybe that was the start of his little execution plan."

  "And he was here in this house."

  Again, she hesitated. "There's no way for me to be sure, Max. But it makes sense. My father was found here in the house, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Nobody suspected the body had been moved."

  "Not that I ever heard. But since it looked like a heart attack, I doubt anyone even considered the idea."

  That was true enough, and Nell nodded.

  Max watched her broodingly. "Even if he was moved, what you picked up was right here, in this room — so the killer was probably here at some point."

  Perfectly aware of what was bothering him about that, Nell tried to avoid discussing it. "It would be nice if I could peek back into that scene and try to get a better fix on the killer, but it doesn't seem to work that way. Or it never has. I never see the same scene twice."

  "Do you ever see a second scene in the same place?"

  "So far, no. It's as if, once I've tapped into the energy of a place, I've drained some of it away, eased the pressure somehow. Like the way you can be shocked by static electricity when you first touch something but not when you touch it a second time."

  "The same thing can shock you a second time if you go away for a while and then touch it again later," Max pointed out. "Once the static has a chance to build back up."

  "Yes, but so far I haven't figured out the time frame, if there is one, for this kind of energy. Maybe I could go back a week or a month or a year later and see something, but I haven't been able to yet. Different places may have different time frames depending on the intensity of the energies absorbed. Or this particular type of energy may diss
ipate completely once someone is able to tap into it. I just don't know."

  "Nobody in this unit of yours has figured it out yet?"

  Nell smiled slightly. "Well, aside from a pretty full load of cases to occupy most of our time, between us we also have a very wide range of paranormal abilities to deal with and try to understand. We're learning, slowly and mostly through bitter experience as we live each day and investigate cases, what our ranges and limits are, but that's an individual thing."

  "And no help from science."

  "No. As far as today's science goes, psychic abilities can't be validated in any acceptable sense. Oh, there are still people scattered around trying to do research, but our feeling is that today's technology and scientific methodology just isn't capable of effectively measuring or analyzing the paranormal. Not yet."

  It was Max's turn to smile, albeit briefly. "That sounds just a bit like the company line."

  "It is, more or less. One of the reasons I wanted to join the SCU was because I thought Bishop and his people had a very reasonable way of looking at the paranormal. They don't discount anything just because science can't explain it yet. And I have never heard any member of the team use the word impossible when referring to any aspect of the paranormal."

  "Sounds like a pretty good way to live."

  A little surprised, Nell said, "Corning from a hard-headed rancher, that's unexpected."

  Max dropped his gaze to his mostly empty coffee cup and said slowly, "Maybe once you're touched by the paranormal, it changes your thinking about a lot of things."

  Nell was very tempted to follow that path and find out where it would lead them but shied away. Not now. Not yet. The slightly sick feeling in the pit of her stomach told her she wasn't yet ready to face the truth of how badly she had messed up Max's life. So she reached for professionalism, for the safety net of why she was supposed to be here. She reminded herself that there was a dangerous killer on the loose. Which was more than enough reason to concentrate on her job and push everything else aside.

  At least for now.

  So all she said was, "One thing it doesn't change, in essence, is how a murder or series of murders is investigated. The next step for me is to try to gain access to the crime scenes. All of them. And I can't do that by openly waving my badge."