Sense of Evil

by Kay Hooper

  “And now that I do know, O wise one?”

  Hollis smiled faintly at what was only a token stab at mockery. “Now you know he matches you. He has as much strength of will as you, possibly as much psychic ability as you, and is certainly as stubborn as you.”

  “So?”

  “So stop fighting him. You haven't said, but I'm willing to bet Paige told you that the two of you would have to work together to control his shield.”

  “Rookies,” Isabel muttered.

  “I'm right.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I'd say there's one last little bit of control you'll have to give up. You'll have to stop trying to control the relationship. To guide, or aim, or shape it—whatever it is you've been trying to do since the moment you met Rafe. If you'll forgive the cliché, we don't master love, it masters us. The more you struggle against it, the tighter those hobbles are going to be.”

  “This should not be about my relationship with him,” Isabel said in a last-ditch effort. “Four women are dead in Hastings, five if you count Hope Tessneer, and more are missing. It can't all hinge on my love life, it just can't.”

  “Human relationships are at the heart of everything, you know that. You said yourself they were at the heart of this case. It's about relationships, you said.”

  “Maybe I didn't know what I was talking about.”

  “You knew. You know. Relationships matter, Isabel. History's been changed by them, armies toppled, societies rebuilt.”

  Isabel was silent, frowning toward the bloody ground.

  “They have power. Human relationships have power. Family. Friends. Lovers. The closer and more intimate the relationship, the more power it can and does generate. Use that energy. And use it wisely.”

  “To break through Rafe's shield?”

  “No. To make it your own.”

  “Got it?” Rafe asked, meeting up with Mallory in the bullpen at the station.

  “Yeah, not that it's helpful. The call Emily received was from a pay phone in town. One of the few remaining pay phones in use.”

  “Doesn't miss a trick, our guy.”

  “No. I've got T.J. checking out the phone, but I'm betting she'll either find a million prints or none at all.”

  “I'll cover that bet. Come on, let's get back out to the scene.”

  “Isabel and Hollis still out there?”

  He nodded, leading the way from the station. “Pablo and Bobby are keeping an eye on them.”

  “I'll bet Isabel loves that.”

  “Frankly, I don't give a shit how she feels about it at this point. She's a target, and I have a strong hunch she's next on his hit list.”

  Mallory looked at him curiously as they got into his Jeep. “Why?”

  “Word's getting out. I've had at least two calls from media and one from the town council today asking if it's true we've got a psychic investigator working the case.”

  “Lovely.”

  “And the reporter who replaced Cheryl Bayne was one of those calls; he's looking to make a reputation for himself, and it's obvious. His predecessor missing and a psychic working the case? Sounds like a dandy story to him.”

  “He's going to broadcast that?”

  “On today's six o'clock news, he says.”

  “Shit.”

  Rafe shrugged. “At this point, I don't think he'll report anything the killer doesn't already know. That's what worries me. If I were him, the killer, I'd go after Isabel, and I wouldn't wait a week to do it. I'm assuming he's thinking the same way.”

  Mallory sighed and said, “Safe assumption, probably. Plus, if Isabel's right and he really did kill Emily because she knew something rather than because she was one of his blondes, then he could have been—for want of a better word—unsatisfied by the murder.”

  Rafe muttered a curse under his breath and increased the Jeep's speed. He didn't say anything else until they reached the informal rest area and pulled off the highway. Ignoring the questions called out to him by several members of the media still braving the hot day hoping for a photo or a news bite, he headed toward the clearing, relaxing visibly when he saw Isabel and Hollis.

  “The phone call?” Isabel asked as the two cops reached the agents.

  “No joy,” Mallory reported. “Pay phone.”

  “And there won't be prints,” Isabel said with a sigh. “He's using gloves. Not latex, I think, which is odd.”

  “What do you mean?” Rafe asked.

  “Well, latex gloves leave you with a much more tactile sense of what you're touching, you know that. And since they're form-fitting, they don't get in the way.”

  “No, I mean how do you know he isn't using latex gloves? We haven't found a sign either way at any of the crime scenes.”

  “I touched them,” Isabel said slowly, surprised that she only now remembered that.

  “Excuse me?” Mallory's voice was very polite.

  Isabel realized she was being stared at, and shook her head. “Sorry. I forgot none of you had seen it here. Or even knew, I guess. I wonder why I forgot that part?”

  “What part?” Rafe asked with visible patience.

  “I told you that sometimes, rarely, my abilities manifest themselves physically in a vision. During one of those, I am the victim. I feel what he or she feels, and I usually come out of it covered in blood. Blood that fades away completely after a few minutes.”

  “I'd call that creepy,” Mallory said.

  “Yeah, it's not much fun.” Isabel shrugged. “Anyway, what really brought me to Hastings is that I had a vision while Tricia Kane was being killed. I felt what she felt. And when he drove that knife into her chest for the last time before she died, her hands reached up to touch the knife—and touched his hands. He was wearing gloves. Not latex gloves, but thick leather gloves, like working gloves. His hands were big, or at least that was the sense I got.”

  “And you're just now telling us this?”

  “I'm just now remembering.” Isabel frowned. “I guess the voices crowded it out. Maybe that's one in the plus column for your shield.”

  Thunder rumbled just then, and they all glanced upward at the threatening sky.

  Half under her breath, Hollis muttered, “Oh, God, I hate storms.”

  “We're about to have our crime scene washed away,” Rafe noted. “Weather's calling for heavy rain today and tonight, with and without thunderstorms.”

  Isabel hesitated, looking at him. “I've tried,” she said. “I've tried all morning to pick up something, and I can't. I can't break through the shield.”

  “Stop trying to break through it.” He held out a hand to her. “Work with me, not against me.”

  “Rafe—”

  “We don't have the luxury of time, not that we ever did. We can't afford to wait any longer. Like it or not, this is it.”

  “Should we leave?” Hollis asked, indicating herself and Mallory.

  “No,” Isabel said, then hesitated, recalling what had happened with Paige, and added, “But you might want to step back a little bit.”

  Both women did, watching the other two warily.

  Slowly, Isabel reached out her own hand and felt the spark, felt his fingers closing around hers.

  “I wish we had more time,” Rafe told her. “I wish we had the luxury of dinners and movies, and hours of talking to each other about what matters to us. But the truth is, we don't have that time. We need every possible tool we can get our hands on—or our minds wrapped around—and we need it now.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “You're next on his list. You know that too.”

  Isabel hesitated again, then nodded.

  “Paige said we'd have to work together. That it would take both of us to figure out how to use this shield.”

  “Yes.” Isabel looked at their hands for a moment, suddenly realizing something. “You're right-handed; I'm left-handed.” Those were the hands clasping.

  “Like closing a circuit,” Rafe said slowly. “Or maybe . . . openin
g one. All this started when I held your wrists. Both of them.”

  “Alan, why on earth would I trust you?” Dana Earley demanded.

  “Because you want a good story, you want to find out what happened to Cheryl Bayne, and you don't want to be the next blonde on the menu.” He paused. “Probably in that order.”

  Dana didn't bother to be indignant. “So you found out that I have police sources in Alabama you want me to tap, and in exchange you'll share information you got from your own sources in Florida.”

  “Yes. Look, you're TV and I'm newspaper; if we work this right we can both be heroes.”

  “Or one of us could be dead. Like me. Alan, if Cheryl is dead it has to be because she got too close. I'm not so sure I want to get too close to this guy, story or no story.”

  “Which,” Alan said, “is why we have to move fast.”

  “Jesus. I know I'm going to regret this.”

  Isabel turned slightly so that they were facing each other, glanced down at the bloody ground where the horribly mutilated body of a young woman she had both liked and felt sorry for had so recently lain, and her mouth firmed. “We should be somewhere else,” she said.

  “No.”

  She looked at Rafe.

  “We should be here. We need to be here, Isabel.”

  “Why?”

  “Because two women died here. Because evil did what it wanted to do, needed to do, here.”

  The sound of thunder grew louder, more ominous.

  “It's disrespectful. Let the rain wash away her blood.”

  “That isn't the investigator talking,” he said.

  Isabel smiled wryly. “No. It isn't. I liked her, you know. She felt isolated and misunderstood—and I could relate. I'm sorry she's dead.”

  “I know. So am I. But the only thing we can do for her now is stop her killer before he does that to someone else.”

  Before he does it to you.

  Isabel could almost hear his words in her head. Or maybe she did hear them. Whichever it was, she knew he was right. “Yes,” she said.

  “The universe put us here. And it put us here, and now, for a reason. Remember what you told me? We leave footprints when we pass. Skin cells, stray hairs. And energy. He left his energy here, and recently. He left his hate, and his anger, and the stamp of his evil.”

  There was a flash in the distance, and Isabel said, almost to herself and with a touch of fear in her voice, “I can smell it. But it's lightning, not brimstone.”

  His fingers tightened around hers. “Is it? You said you had to face it this time. Confront it this time. That ugly face evil always hides behind something else. You have to face it. But, Isabel, you won't do it alone. Not this time. Not ever again.”

  She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I didn't expect that. I'm not quite sure how to deal with that.”

  “The same way you deal with everything else,” he said, smiling faintly. “Head-on.”

  “Before the storm gets here.”

  He nodded. “Before the storm. Before the rain washes away the blood, and the lightning changes the energy here. The energy in this place—his and ours, even anything left of hers—is what we need to help us take the next step. There's nothing disrespectful about that. It's doing our job. It's fighting evil the only way we can.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I've been paying attention.”

  Isabel hesitated only another instant, then held out her right hand. “Okay. Let's see where the next step takes us.”

  He put his left hand into her right one.

  Hollis said, at the time and long afterward, that there should have been something, some outward sign, to indicate what turned out to be a most astonishing event. But, outwardly at least, there was nothing. Just two people facing each other, holding hands, their faces calm but eyes curiously intent.

  Mallory took a step closer to Hollis, murmuring, “I get the feeling I've missed something important.”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Hollis told her. “I mean, I know it has to do with this shield of Rafe's, but I have no idea what they're trying to do about it.”

  “Get rid of it, maybe?”

  “No, from what Isabel told me, that would probably not be such a good idea.”

  “Why not? I mean, if it's blocking her voices?”

  “I don't know. She said something about their combined energy being too strong, especially now when it's new and not under their control. That bad things could happen if they just . . . let go of it.”

  Mallory sighed. “I long for the days when all we had to deal with was trace evidence, footprints, the occasional half-blind or very stoned eyewitness . . .”

  “Yeah, I imagine that was easier. Or simpler, at least.”

  “I'll say.”

  After several minutes of silence except for the growing intensity of the thunder rumbling overhead, Hollis ventured a step closer to Isabel and Rafe. “Well?”

  “Well, what?” Isabel asked in perfect calm without turning her head.

  “What's happening?”

  “Good question.”

  Hollis looked at Mallory, then back at the other two. “Guys, come on. People are beginning to stare. Pablo and Bobby look real nervous. Or real embarrassed, I'm not sure which. What's happening?”

  After a moment, Isabel turned her head to look at Hollis. “I don't want to sound like a country song, but I can feel his heart beating.”

  “I know she didn't eat breakfast,” Rafe said, also looking at Hollis.

  “And he's uneasy because—” Isabel turned her head abruptly to stare at Rafe. “Jesus, why didn't you tell me?”

  “You know damned well why I didn't tell you,” he replied, meeting her gaze.

  “It was your abilities manifesting themselves physically. Which, remember, is a rare thing but not unheard of. In your case, probably caused by guilt because you believed you should have stopped him after the first murder. The blood of the innocent, literally on your hands.”

  “I realize that. Now. Before we talked yesterday, the possibilities were a lot more creepy.”

  “So that's why you were blocking me. That was the part of you I couldn't get at?”

  “I'm guessing yes. Isabel, I was waking up with blood on my hands every morning and had no idea where it had come from. Women were dead. Other women were missing. You were offering me theories of a serial killer who could be walking around most of the time not knowing he was a murderer. So I was afraid I was blacking out.”

  “And killing blondes? I could have told you there wasn't a chance in hell of you doing that.”

  “Well, I was . . . afraid to ask.”

  “Guys,” Hollis's voice was just this side of strident.

  Isabel looked at her partner, frowned slightly, and then let go of Rafe's hands. “Oh. Sorry. We were . . . somewhere else.”

  “I noticed. Where were you?”

  “In a galaxy far, far away,” Rafe murmured.

  “You really are beginning to talk like me,” Isabel told him.

  “I know. Spooky, isn't it?” He took her arm and guided her toward the yellow crime-scene tape on the highway side of the clearing. “I say we head back to the station before the heavens open up.”

  Hollis and Mallory went with them, wearing almost identical expressions of baffled interest.

  “Blood on your hands?” Mallory said to Rafe. “You were waking up with blood on your hands?”

  “Yeah, for the past few weeks.”

  Hollis muttered, “Man, have you got a great poker face.” And waited until they were outside the crime scene to add, “If somebody doesn't tell me, right now, what's going on—”

  “I'm not so sure I can.” Isabel shook her head. “All I really know is that everything's different.”

  “Different how?”

  “The voices are back. But . . . very, very quiet. Distant.”

  “What about Rafe's shield?”

  “It's still there. Here. I think we punched
a couple of holes in it, though. I told you I wasn't sure I could explain.”

  “And I should have listened,” Hollis said.

  Addressing his patrolmen, Rafe said, “You two can take your lunch break and then head back to the station; unless you hear otherwise, follow your assignments on the board for the rest of the day.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No watchdogs?” Isabel asked.

  “I'm your watchdog,” he replied. “Mallory, if you'll ride back with Hollis?”

  “Sure.”

  By the time they reached the parked vehicles, they saw that the media had vanished, along with any curious passersby.

  Isabel said, “Did the weather happen to mention that the storms today and tonight could be mean ones? The sort to keep golfers off courses and reporters with electronic equipment indoors?”

  Rafe nodded. “We're not in the Southeast's tornado alley, but close enough.”

  Isabel didn't say anything else until they were in the Jeep heading back to town, and then her voice was tentative. “Back there at the scene when we . . . did whatever it is we did, I got a flash of something. That box. The box of photographs. We have to find it. The answer is in there, I know it.”

  “If it's in a bank under an assumed name—”

  “I don't think it is. I think we've missed something.”

  Rafe frowned as thunder boomed again. “We've checked all the properties she owned.”

  “Have we?” Isabel turned in her seat to look at him. “Jamie had a secret life. A secret self. And she hid her secrets very, very well. What if, once Hope Tessneer died, Jamie decided to bury all the secrets for good?”

  “We found her playhouse,” Rafe reminded her.

  “Yeah, but Jamie didn't count on dying herself. I think if she'd been granted just a little more time, we wouldn't have found anything but an empty storage building there. And nothing at all of her secret life.”

  “Wouldn't she just have burned everything? I mean, if she had wanted to destroy the evidence of that other life.”

  “She didn't want to destroy it. Destroy the strongest part of herself? No way. It would have been like cutting off her arm, or worse. She wanted to bury it. To put it where nobody but she would ever find it. Look, when Hope's body turned up missing—and I'm still convinced the killer took it from wherever Jamie had put it—she had to know someone else knew about the death. She had to be afraid that at best the body would turn up and it would be traced back to her, or—possibly worse from her point of view—that someone could be planning blackmail.”