Whisper of Evil

by Kay Hooper

  “Answer the first question, Nell. You’re not saying that Hailey killed any of them herself, are you?”

  Nell dropped her gaze to her coffee cup once again and frowned. “No, I’m not saying that. Not that. But I do believe she would be capable of killing—even four men—if she had a good enough reason.”

  “And your father? Could she have killed him—with a good enough reason?”

  She watched her fingers tighten around the cup and tried consciously to relax them.

  The truth.

  “Nell?”

  Trying to sound matter-of-fact as though it were nothing important, she said, “Yes. With a good enough reason, Hailey could have killed him too.”

  “Did she have it? Did she have a good enough reason?”

  The truth.

  “Yes,” Nell replied finally. “She had a good enough reason.”

  “I’ve already searched this place twice myself,” Justin said as he and Shelby went into George Caldwell’s apartment. It was a fairly typical second-floor apartment, conventionally and professionally decorated, the only anomaly being a conspicuously missing armchair and rug across from the television in the living room.

  It was something Shelby noticed. “Is that where ... ?”

  “We have the chair and rug in the evidence room. They were both—well, they were evidence.”

  Shelby grimaced. “Oh.”

  “You did want to do this,” he reminded her.

  “I know, I know. Look, didn’t you say you concentrated mostly on some secret hiding place? Because of the blackmail thing?”

  “It seemed most likely.”

  “And didn’t find anything. So let’s suppose there is no secret hiding place because there aren’t any secrets. Given that, there has to be something here—probably in plain sight—to prove George wasn’t a blackmailer.”

  “You seem very sure of that.”

  “I am. George was not a blackmailer.”

  Justin was still astonished at himself that he had confided in Shelby about the little black notebook, but since her reaction had been instant and definite it had at least served to underline his own increasing doubts. Still, he said, “We have the copies of birth records from the courthouse to go through; maybe they’ll tell us something.”

  “I imagine they will,” Shelby said absently as she stood gazing around the apartment with a frown. “There are some people who thought George was just nosy, but he was not a man to waste his time. If he was looking through those records with the intensity Ne— I believe I saw, then it was because he was after something definite.”

  Justin’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn’t comment on what had sounded like a near slip of the tongue. Instead, he said, “You can take it from me there’s nothing even remotely helpful in the bedroom. Unless you find old issues of Playboy suspicious.”

  “How about in here? What’s in the desk?” Not a large desk, it was the sort of piece some people used in the more public areas of their homes to contain the seemingly endless paperwork necessary in maintaining a household.

  “Mostly private financial information. Checkbook, bank statements, that sort of thing. The serious records he kept at the bank, but there’s an investment ledger in the name of his ten-year-old son—Caldwell was building up a college fund, according to his widow— and paperwork concerning a few other personal financial deals. Nothing jumped out.”

  “Maybe it’ll jump out at me,” Shelby said, sitting down at the desk and opening a drawer.

  Justin watched her for a moment. “This is just an excuse to snoop, right?”

  She smiled without looking at him. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a little box of receipts and stuff here; did you go through it?”

  “I think Matt Thorton went through that one.” He recalled Kelly’s warning and felt suddenly uneasy. “But that was early on, so I probably should go through it now just to make sure there’s nothing helpful in it.”

  Shelby handed over the small cardboard box, and Justin carried it to the couch and sat down. What he found when he opened it was, as she had noted, mostly odds and ends. There were several movie and raffle ticket stubs, a few coupons for free car washes and lunch specials, and numerous receipts for the current year that he might have been considering as possible tax deductions.

  There was also one small piece of paper obviously torn from a pocket notebook. A handwritten I.O.U. for a hundred dollars—signed by Luke Ferrier.

  Had Matt Thorton missed it by accident? Missed the significance of it?

  “Shelby?”

  “Yeah?” She was frowning down at the ledger open before her on the desk.

  “Did Caldwell play poker?”

  “Dunno. I’m sure I could find out. Why?”

  “If he did, would he have played with Luke Ferrier?”

  She looked at him, still frowning. “Well, remember that none of us knew Ferrier had a gambling problem. So I wouldn’t be surprised. I doubt George would have made a habit of playing, though; he wasn’t much into risking his money.”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “And if Ferrier had owed him a hundred bucks from some kind of gambling debt?”

  Shelby lifted an eyebrow. “You mean would George have tried to get his money back if Ferrier welshed? No, probably not. A hundred bucks wouldn’t have meant much to George. But it would have convinced him not to take any more of Ferrier’s markers, or probably just not play with him again. He was a fool-me-twice-shame-on-me kind of guy.”

  It made sense to Justin. He stared at the little piece of paper in his hand, brooding.

  So Caldwell had, in all probability, played poker or otherwise gambled with Luke Ferrier at least once; both Peter Lynch and Randal Patterson had been clients at his bank. It wasn’t enough of a connection between the four men, Justin thought, to explain the three earlier murders—but what if it explained, at least in part, George Caldwell’s murder?

  What if the man everyone called too inquisitive for his own good had gotten curious about the three murders, and through his own associations with the dead men either knew or suspected something else that had connected them? And what if his search for the information or verification of his suspicions was what had really gotten him killed?

  Lots of what-ifs. And no way for Justin to know if he was even on the right track, dammit.

  “Hey,” Shelby said.

  “What?”

  “That unexplained income of George’s. What were the dates of the deposits?”

  Justin got out the little black notebook he’d been carrying with him and read off the dates of the supposed blackmail payoffs listed there.

  “Matches,” Shelby said. “Every one of them.”

  “In the ledger? So how’re they recorded?”

  “Wait a minute, he’s got some kind of private code here....” Shelby frowned and rechecked several pages, then nodded. “Oh, I see. It looks like he had transferred some rental property into his son’s name about three years ago, and ever since then he was depositing the income into that account as part of the college fund he was putting together.”

  “Perfectly innocent,” Justin said.

  “Told you. George was no blackmailer.”

  Quietly, Justin said, “So why did he have to die?”

  Shelby leaned back in the desk chair and looked at him steadily. “If he wasn’t a blackmailer, if he didn’t have some other deep, dark secret—then he must have been a threat to the murderer. Knew something, maybe. So he had to die. That’s the only possibility that makes sense.”

  “And the murderer would then have been left with a killing he badly needed to connect to the others so we wouldn’t start looking for a motive specific to that crime.”

  Her voice as steady as her eyes, Shelby said, “By fabricating so-called evidence of blackmail. Which is a good argument for a cop being involved. It would have been fairly easy for a cop with at least some access to Caldwell’s bank accounts to
spot the regular deposits and put together that notebook to make Caldwell’s murder fit the pattern.”

  “Easy enough,” Justin agreed.

  “And if you couldn’t find information on others he might have blackmailed, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. Most of the other cops probably wouldn’t even have looked very hard to find evidence that George really was a blackmailer. I mean, after all, we’re beginning to expect dark secrets to surface after one of these murders. That made it easier for the murderer.”

  “Which brings us back to the big question,” Justin said. “Why did George Caldwell have to die?”

  Nate McCurry felt increasingly uneasy as the day wore on, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. He had the nagging idea that at some point during the long day he had seen or heard something he hadn’t paid enough attention to at the time, something important.

  By the time darkness fell, he was literally pacing the floor, checking the security system on his doors and windows repeatedly, and wishing he didn’t live alone. And when the phone rang, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

  He looked at the instrument for a moment as though it were a viper ready to strike him, then laughed shakily and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “You’ll pay.”

  It was a low voice, a whisper really, without identifying characteristics; there was even no sense that told him if he was speaking to a man or a woman.

  Nate felt a chill track up his spine with icy claws. “What? Who the hell is this?” he demanded, his voice so shaky it practically wobbled.

  “You’ll pay.”

  He drew a breath and tried not to sound terrified out of his mind. “Look, whoever you are—I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t hurt anyone. I swear.”

  There was an odd, choked laugh, still without identity or gender but with something in it strangely both incredulous and horrified, and then the whisper again. “You’ll pay.”

  The connection was broken with a soft click, and the dial tone buzzed in Nate’s ears.

  He hung up the receiver slowly and stared at it without seeing or feeling anything but his terror.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he murmured.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  What reason did she have, Nell?” Max asked steadily. “Why would Hailey have wanted to kill your father?”

  “Because she loved him.”

  Max frowned. “You’re going to have to explain that to me.”

  She knew that, but she had to do it in her own way. “You asked me what happened the night of the prom. One thing that happened was that Hailey told our father I was planning to go with you. A friend of hers worked in the boutique in town where I’d bought my dress. So she knew, had known for days, that I was going. She’d seen you and me out riding one day, so she put two and two together. And, being Hailey, was saving the knowledge to use when it suited her purpose. She’d told me she knew about it a couple of days before the prom, mostly to watch me worry, I think. So that’s why I was upset that last day or two, because I knew she’d tell him and ruin everything.”

  Slowly, Max said, “I knew you two weren’t close, but I didn’t know there was so much tension between you.”

  Matter-of-fact, Nell said, “She could never forgive me for being our father’s favorite.”

  “You hated him. Even then, you hated him.”

  “Yes. I hated him as much as Hailey loved him. Or maybe I loved him as much as she hated him.” She shook her head a little. “There are some questions not even ... time and distance can answer.”

  Max hesitated, then went on as if forcing himself to say things he’d kept locked inside for a long time. “You never would talk about it, but sometimes I got the feeling you were scared. Scared of him.”

  “I was.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “Not physically. And he never molested us, if that’s what you’ve been thinking.” Watching Max steadily, she saw by the flicker in his dark eyes that he had at least suspected her father might have been sick in that way. She shook her head. “No, he never laid a hand on either of us, Hailey and me. We were never even spanked as children. But we were ... his. Not just his children, his daughters, but his possessions. Like his land and his house and his car—like everything else that belonged to him.”

  “Nell—”

  “No one would ever love us more than he did. That’s what he told us, every night of our lives, before we went to sleep. He’d sit on the edge of our beds and tell us. No one would ever love us more. No one would ever take care of us the way he did, protect us, watch over us. He was going to be the only man in our lives. The only man who mattered to us. He’d make sure of that. He would do ... whatever he had to do to make sure of it. Because we were his. Forever.”

  “That’s sick,” Max said at last.

  “Of course it’s sick. Even more, it’s evil. There’s been a thread of evil running through my family for a long time, as much a part of us as the Gallagher curse.”

  “You aren’t evil.”

  Deliberately, she said, “There’s a dark place inside me, Max, and you know it as well as I do.”

  “Maybe what you see as darkness others would see as strength.”

  “Maybe. But others don’t see everything, do they?”

  He was silent.

  Nell returned to the subject of her father. “A psychologist would probably say my father’s ... needs ... came from the earliest rejections in his own life. From all accounts, his father actively disliked him, made no secret of it, and had the misfortune to break his neck on the stairs when his son was only a toddler, so that rejection was complete. My grandmother you know about, but what you don’t know is that she was afraid of her son.”

  “Why?”

  “She never would tell me. Never told anyone, as far as I know. But I think it was something she saw in one of her visions, a glimpse into the future that terrified her. Whatever it was, it caused her to reject him very early on.”

  “Is that why you were afraid of him? Because she was?”

  Nell hesitated, then shrugged a bit jerkily. “Growing up, I had my own ... visions. There were scenes I tapped into a few times, things that had happened in the past. I saw the darkness in him, saw how twisted his need for love was, how ... all-consuming. I knew it was unnatural. Even before I was old enough to understand why, I understood that much.”

  “You were never close to him?”

  “I wish I could say yes, but...” She shook her head. “By the time my mother came along in his life, he was determined he wouldn’t lose anyone else he loved. So he held on to her as hard as he could. Held on to all of us. My earliest memories are of him ... watching me. Hovering always nearby. My earliest nightmares were of being trapped, or being lost and knowing there was ... something ... stalking me.”

  “Christ.”

  Nell blinked, recalled from those cold memories, and summoned a faint smile. “Not especially pleasant to grow up that way. And confusing for a child. Because he never hit me, never threatened, never did anything to me a loving father shouldn’t do. Except love me so much I couldn’t breathe.”

  Justin lifted Charlie off his lap and with a final pat set the cat gently on the floor. “You realize, of course, that going through all these parish birth records is going to take us all night,” he said.

  “That’s why I made coffee,” Shelby said as she set the tray on the coffee table and joined Justin on the couch. “Plenty of caffeine and snacks to see us through.”

  Justin had certainly spent worse nights than sitting on a comfortable couch beside a gorgeous redhead, so he wasn’t about to complain. But his innate professionalism demanded he make one last protest. “I’m still not entirely convinced that you should be helping me do this.”

  “Because it isn’t my job?”

  “Because it’s my job. Because you’re a civilian and shouldn’t be involved in police matters. Because this is a murder investigation and I’ve got no business putting you in danger.”

  “
I’m not in danger. I’m with you.”

  “Shelby, odds are we won’t be able to stop this guy anytime soon. I mean, unless we find something incredibly revealing in these old records, we are no closer to figuring out who he is. Which means he could kill again. And if he did kill George Caldwell because the man knew something, then anybody involved in this investigation could certainly be at risk for that reason alone.”

  Still cheerful, she said, “In other words, by sticking my nose in I’m in danger of getting it lopped off.”

  “At the very least.”

  “I’m willing to risk that.”

  He stared at her. “I know you are. What I can’t figure out is why.”

  “Didn’t buy my fierce devotion to this town, huh?”

  Justin blinked. “No. Sorry, but no.”

  “Or my rabid hatred of murder?”

  “Dammit, I just know there’s another reason.”

  Shelby grinned. “There is. Just like there’s a reason aside from your job that has you putting in amazingly long hours trying to figure this thing out.”

  “I’m a cop,” he murmured after a startled moment.

  “Yeah, that’ll be it,” she said dryly.

  “Shelby—”

  “Look, Justin, we both want to find the truth. Isn’t that all that matters?” She leaned forward to open the file folder on the coffee table. “Together we can work our way through these copies of birth records in half the time it’d take you to do it alone. I’m perfectly safe here with you. And if anybody does wonder why your car is parked in front of my house all night, well, we’re both consenting adults, so whose business is it but ours?”

  “In this town? Everybody’s business.”

  Shelby grinned again. “True, but my point is that the killer, if he even notices, will just think you spent the night for carnal purposes. Right?”

  “Yeah, probably.” Justin only just stopped himself from saying the idea had crossed his own mind more than once in the past few hours.