After a pause where he seemed to be thinking, he scowled.
“I don’t know, doc.” His voice twisted into a harder sarcasm. “Why don’t you call him and ask? Maybe you could tell him about Dougal yourself, while you’re at it, so he has time to think about not wringing my neck for not mentioning it the last three times he’s called?”
I looked up, surprised. When I realized he was serious, I felt my jaw harden.
“The phone goes both ways, Nick.”
“Yeah, I know that.” Nick gave me a harder look. “But I’m not dumb, Miri. And I might not know him very well, but I know you. He’s not blowing you off, is he? If he is, he’s doing a really good impression of the guy who feels like he’s getting the brush-off.”
I stared at him, unable to keep the incredulousness out of my voice. “Are you kidding me right now? What is this, guy code crap?”
“Maybe,” Nick growled. “Or maybe I just don’t like lying to someone who seems to be being straight with me. Someone I’ve hired to help me solve a case... who I’m withholding information from solely because you’ve got some kind of personal issue you’ve put me in the middle of. Or are you delusional enough to think he’s not going to find out, Miri? And that he’s not going to blame me for not telling him when he asked how the case was going the last three times we talked?”
Pressing my lips together, I didn’t answer.
I think I was too blown away to answer him, honestly.
Even so, as I sat there, watching Nick eat, I couldn’t help thinking I liked it better when he and Black weren’t getting along.
THE NEXT FEW days went by painfully slowly. There were no more deaths, but I had the strangest feeling of eyes on me anyway. That feeling got worse the longer Black was gone and the worse that pain thing got from me missing him... or from being disconnected from him... or whatever it was that caused that horrible feeling from not having him around.
Angel told me a few times I looked pale. She also grumped at me about Black, and that I should call Black and that both of us were acting like idiots.
I could barely hear her though. Those eyes and Black himself seemed to be the only two things my mind had room for. That and working on the case.
Whatever and whoever those eyes were, it felt like they were waiting.
I felt like I was waiting too.
For a lot of things.
I woke up every morning expecting to hear about another death.
When it didn’t happen, I went to my office and did research on alchemical symbols, and on personality types who typically went into mercenary work of various kinds, whether for organized crime or the government or private security, like Archangel and Black.
I went through the forensics info Nick and Glen fed me as well, comparing what I found and what I felt with the full profiling work-up of the Templar I got from Mozar the same day they found Dougal’s body. The FBI guy who did it was good. I didn’t really find any issues with it, but I still felt like we were missing something, or that some of the assumptions there didn’t hold true for this guy for some reason.
I never heard from Black.
I wasn’t sure if he’d called Nick again, either. After our conversation at the sushi restaurant, Nick seemed to have decided I was being the asshole in the me and Black scenario, which should have been funny but somehow wasn’t. And yeah, I’d thought about calling Black myself, a lot of times, but each time I picked up the phone to do it, I remembered he’d asked me for space so I’d put the phone down again.
For the same reason, I hadn’t tried to reach him with my mind, either. I figured, given our last conversation at the police station, I should let him approach me.
When I finally told Angel that, she frowned a little, but nodded.
I honestly couldn’t tell if she agreed with my reasoning or not, but I supposed it didn’t matter. After all, Angel wasn’t the one dating Black. I was.
So really, I was on my own.
I did reconsider calling Uncle Charles. That whole Archangel, puppet-masters-ruling-the-world thing kind of turned me off that idea too, though, I admit.
Angel brought me in to talk more about my past after they finished running down everything they could on Dougal and Norberg in terms of the physical crime scenes. No fingerprints had been found, apart from those belonging to a prostitute Dougal hired a few days earlier and Dougal’s own prints and those of a business associate of his, who had an ironclad alibi. I knew they would still be going over physical evidence in the lab, as well as the symbols they’d found on both victims, but they were focusing more on the victim side of things again, like Nick said they would. Like Nick also predicted, no witnesses came forward in the Dougal case, either.
Nick had me watch most of the interviews of Dougal’s neighbors and business associates from the observation booth so I could read the people he and Glen questioned. He didn’t only want me looking among them for the killer––he wanted me to make sure they hadn’t seen or heard something they didn’t want to mention for some unrelated reason, or something they didn’t think was important enough to mention or otherwise didn’t realize the significance of.
I didn’t find anything useful on any of them though.
On day two, Angel and I again sat in a coffee shop on Hyde Street, drinking coffee while she interviewed me for yet more names and dates from my own life, going back through my memories year by year as methodically as we could.
Nick also wanted to know if there was any chance I’d run into this guy before, that he might know me from the military or maybe even in connection to Black. We’d already covered most of my high school years and the time I was in the military before Angel circled back to grill me specifically about Dougal and everything I could remember around my sister’s death and the subsequent investigation.
Zoe’s murder was before Nick and Angel’s time, obviously, even though both of them were about ten years older than me. Around then, Nick was already stationed in the Middle East and Angel was a beat cop in Hunter’s Point. I’d been a teenager, not far off from enlisting myself, which I’d done less than a year after Zoe’s death.
Since I’d confessed to Angel and Nick that I’d tried to find Zoe’s killer on my own for awhile, using my psychic ability, Angel wanted to know if I’d had any other suspects besides Dougal. I hadn’t. Honestly, I’d been too young to really have a clue how to go about investigating a murder. Most of what I’d known, I’d learned from television shows and mystery novels. I’d checked out Dougal and another guy Zoe dated because I’d read somewhere that most murders were done by someone the victim knew.
When I couldn’t get a solid hit on either of them, I was at a dead end.
I couldn’t help thinking how differently I would approach Zoe’s murder now, and how differently things might have gone if I’d done a real investigation while the trail wasn’t eleven years cold. Not like the detectives assigned to the case originally were bad––they weren’t––but they couldn’t read the minds of the suspects they brought in.
Some of those people were dead now. I’d gone back to look at the case files after Nick first hired me as a profiler, and some of the persons of interest listed in Zoe’s case were people I’d never heard of, and had no idea the police were investigating.
It hadn’t occurred to me to revisit Zoe’s death until Angel asked me to dig back into that whole mess and remember it all again. Now the thing with Dougal had me thinking about finding Zoe’s real murderer again. Uncle Charles had been adamant he had nothing to do it. He’d also said a few things that indicated Zoe’s murder might have something to do with me and Zoe not being fully human. But I couldn’t really interpret my uncle’s cryptic remarks, truthfully.
I wondered if maybe Black could.
I wondered if maybe I could hire Black to find Zoe’s killer for me.
I wondered if he would do that, if I asked him.
I also wondered if I could afford him, even if he agreed.
Now that Angel kne
w I could read minds, she also wanted to know what I’d picked up about Dougal. Obviously, none of what I told her and Nick in that area would make it into official reports, but I knew they would use any of that information if they could.
Angel asked me, point-blank, if Dougal killed my sister.
When I explained that I didn’t know for sure, she stared at me.
“How could you not know?” she said finally.
I’d been learning, ever since I’d told Nick and Angel about my ability to read minds, how difficult it was to explain to non-psychics how people’s minds actually worked. Not how they thought they worked, but how they actually did work.
Sighing, I told her, “People fantasize constantly, Angel. Constantly. I know he got off on the idea of her death, and the idea of her being murdered... but if he’s the one who actually did it, he never thought about it concretely enough around me. He never felt any remorse. He never worried about being caught... those are things that might have actually convinced me he’d done something to her. I felt him fantasizing about it a few times...” I shuddered a little. “...But honestly? It felt more like it got him thinking it was possible. Like if whoever killed Zoe got away with it, maybe he could get away with it, too.”
“You think he might have killed other women?” Angel said. “Later? After Zoe?”
Again, I shrugged, frustrated by my own inability to give her a concrete answer.
“I have no idea,” I said. “And after months of following him around and trying to decide if he’d done anything and not being able to make up my mind for sure... I had to let it go, Ang. I had to. When I got back from the military I went back and read him once or twice, but I was really afraid I’d kill him if I found something that time. So I made myself let it go then, too. I was going through PTSD more severely then, so I wasn’t stable enough to handle it.”
“Would Black have known?” Angel said, frowning slightly. “If he’d been the one reading Dougal, I mean.”
I sighed, putting down my sandwich. “Probably. He’s actually been trained to use this stuff, Angel. I haven’t. He can probably weed out the b.s. easier.”
She lifted an eyebrow at me. “Is Black going to train you?”
I shrugged, like I didn’t know, but Black and I had talked about it. He’d mentioned training me pretty much the first day we met. I guessed he’d more or less even started out on that pier, showing me how to feel for imprints. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to Angel about that though––or even about what he’d taught me to look for with the Templar killer.
Not until I felt a lot more confident about what I was doing in that area, anyway.
That being said, I’d tried something similar at Dougal’s house, asking Nick to let me in after everyone else had finished up and the place was empty. I didn’t exactly explain my reasons why, but I told him that I might be able to feel more about what happened, if I could look around without witnesses. I reminded him it was a little hard for me to be inconspicuous when people could see me staring off into space like a lunatic.
He’d gotten me in there without Mozar or Hawking or even Glen being present, which I’d also wanted. The only other person on the property besides Nick had been that cop with the buzz cut, and he didn’t come upstairs with us. He’d been stationed outside to keep an eye on the place until the geek squad was finished with all their forensic work.
I hadn’t found much.
Imprints of Dougal, of course, some of which made me sick––even apart from the ones where I’d felt him begging for his life.
I felt the killer, but I still couldn’t get any information about him.
I knew him only because I’d felt him before––it was that same silent presence I’d felt on the pier. I didn’t recognize him from anywhere else.
Using his faint vibration, I did my best to map roughly where he’d stood when he cut off Dougal’s head. Nick told me my estimate matched what the forensics techs told him. I also found whispers of that presence by the covered hot tub where he’d left Dougal’s severed head, and on the lawn where he’d staked out his scalp using regular carpentry nails.
Based on my research of the Bible verses, I’d told Nick I thought the scalping was supposed to signify Dougal as an animal, like the removal of a pelt. I speculated that the excised heart likely supported that theory, since removing the heart was a symbolic ritual of the hunt across many different cultures, as well.
After I’d gone out on the deck and looked around, I also felt a whisper of that Templar vibration in a thick-branched ficus tree that stood on the slope just outside Dougal’s long bay windows.
When I told Nick about that last hit, he’d stared at the tree in bewilderment.
“You think he was in the tree?” Nick said. “To case the place?”
I shrugged. But yeah, I guess I did think he’d been in the tree. I couldn’t really explain why else I would have felt him there.
I knew in some sense Nick was waiting, too.
He was waiting for the next murder.
A lot of police work ended up being waiting, at least when the evidence was thin, like it was with this guy. I knew Mozar had his people in L.A. running things down too. Mozar. Black. Glen. Nick. Angel. Me. We all were waiting, and more or less running down details in the hopes of getting a hit as we did.
Mozar sat in on most of the witness interrogations with Nick and Glen, but I didn’t see Hawking in many of them. When I asked where he was a few times, I was told he was “running down leads,” but I never got specifics on that, either.
Nick and Glen also had people on a few names from my past.
One was another rich ex-client who’d filed complaints about me after I refused to date him. One was an ex-boyfriend from college who’d threatened me a few times after I broke up with him, who trashed my apartment while I wasn’t there and who had an arrest for domestic violence from another woman he’d lived with for a few years. A third was recently released from a criminal psych ward, where he’d resided for about eight years after I testified against him in open court.
Somehow I doubted having a few guys tailing them in an unmarked police car would help much, if the Templar killer really wanted one of them dead.
I didn’t say that though, not aloud.
In all that time, in all my thinking and talking and trying to help Angel, Nick and Glen on the case, I don’t think it really occurred to me what I was waiting for.
Not until it came.
Before then, I might have said I was waiting for another murder to happen, like the cops.
But I wasn’t.
I’D GONE TO Chinatown to meet Lacey, an old friend of mine from college.
It was the first time I’d seen her since Ian tried to kill me.
Kind of a strange way to demarcate time, but so much changed for me around then, I couldn’t help thinking of my life before that as a separate chapter.
I’d barely seen anyone from that older life, meaning pre-Black and pre-The Wedding Killer and pre-finding out I wasn’t fully human––not since all of that first went down. Ian told me he’d slept with most of my female friends while we’d been together, so that might have been part of it. He’d told me that while he had his hands around my throat in my apartment, trying to kill me, so the association there wasn’t a good one.
Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, seeing or talking to any of them after that, even though I knew Ian had been a seer and a psychopath and had more than likely used his psychic abilities to coerce them into sex in the first place.
I knew part of it was the long silence––and the inevitable questions and explanations. I didn’t really want to explain to any of them what happened between me and Ian, and the last time I’d talked to most of them, Ian and I were still engaged.
I bit the bullet with Lacey finally because she was one of my oldest friends.
Even so, I practically had to make myself do it. I could tell from the guilty flush of her cheeks when I told her that Ian and I
“broke up” that she’d been one of the people Ian had talked into his bed. I wasn’t mad at her for it. Truthfully, I had to bite my lip to keep from telling her that it wasn’t her fault, that he’d essentially raped her.
I distracted both of us by telling her I was seeing someone else now.
I also told her a little bit about Black, although I hit up against the limits of what I could say about him, too, and surprisingly fast. I did tell her I worked for him as a case profiler, and that he owned a security firm downtown.
It was strange to be reminded of how different Black sounded on paper than how I experienced him in reality. Of course, that very fact made talking about him easier than I would have thought in some ways. It also made that whole conversation with Lacey a better distraction for both of us. I don’t think I could have handled a real conversation about Black at that point either, but I did admit to her that we appeared to be serious.
Lacey had been thrilled––probably because of the Ian thing, in part.
Of course, I neglected to tell her that Black had killed Ian with his own hands, and pretty much right in front of me––using a knife he’d gotten out of my boot while we were talking to terrorists inside the Louvre in the middle of the night.
It made me tired, really, when it hit me how much of my life I would never be able to share with people who had once been important to me.
Still, I was glad I bit the bullet finally and called her. She’d been so relieved to hear from me and so grateful I called, I ended up feeling like a real shit for waiting so long.
I was standing on the curb on Grant Street not far from Clay, when I felt it.
That presence whispered by me.
More of an absence than a presence. I felt it like a silence that passed through my skin, blanking my mind. It was so soft it’s amazing I felt it at all, but my reaction was immediate, and pure instinct in its intensity.
Black Is Back (Quentin Black Mystery #4) Page 16