Sense of Evil (22 page)

“Deceiving everyone.”

She nodded slowly, her gaze fixed on the table now, eyes distant. “The weird thing is, after taking all the time and trouble to deceive everybody around him for such a long, long time, when it came right down to it, it didn’t take much at all to start revealing the beast inside.”

Rafe was very much afraid he knew where this was going, and it required an effort to hold his voice steady when he asked, “What did it take?”

“
No.
Just that. Just one little word.” She looked up, focused on him. “That was the beginning. He asked me to a school dance, and I said no.”

“What did he do, Isabel?”

“Nothing then. I told him I didn’t feel like that about him, that he was more of a brother to me. He said it was a shame, but he understood. A few days later, I saw him in the bushes outside my house. Outside my bedroom. Watching me.”

“You didn’t call the cops,” Rafe guessed.

“I was seventeen. I trusted him. I thought he was just . . . taking the rejection badly. Maybe I was even a little bit flattered on some level of myself, that it mattered so much to him. So I just closed the curtains. And kept them closed. But then he started . . . turning up wherever I was. Always at a distance. Always watching me. That was when I started to be . . . just a little bit afraid.”

“But you still didn’t report it.”

“No. Everybody loved him, and I think I was half afraid nobody would believe me. I confided in my best friend. She was envious. Said he had a crush on me, and I should be flattered.” She laughed, again without humor. “She was seventeen too. What do you know, at seventeen?

“I tried to feel flattered, but it was getting more and more difficult to feel anything but scared. I could take care of myself, I knew self-defense, but . . . there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before. Something angry. And hungry. And I didn’t understand why, but it terrified me.”

Rafe waited, unable to ask another question. He wished they were somewhere more private yet had a strong hunch that, if they had been, Isabel wouldn’t have been willing—or able—to confide in him about this. He thought she needed the insulation of a semipublic place for this. There were people here, even if not close by. Food and music and an occasional quiet laugh from another part of the room.

Normality here.

He thought Isabel was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold it together enough to talk about this if they were alone. Either that or she had chosen, quite deliberately, to tell him this without even a shadow of intimacy. With a table between them in a public place, where the ugliness could be softened or blurred or even discarded at the end with a game shrug and a bland
But it happened years ago, of course.

Depending on his reaction to what she was telling him.

Depending on how well
he
held it together.

“Of course, it wasn’t talked about so much in those days, stalking.” Her voice was steady, controlled. “I mean, that was something that happened to celebrities, not ordinary people. Not seventeen-year-old girls. And certainly not involving boys they’d known their whole lives. So when I finally did tell my father, he did the logical thing in his mind. He didn’t call the police—he confronted the boy. Very reasonably, no yelling, no threats. Just a friendly warning that I wasn’t interested and he should, really, stay away.”

“His trigger,” Rafe muttered.

“As it turned out, yes. My father couldn’t have known. Nobody could have known. He’d hidden his true face all too well. If my father had gone to the police and everyone had taken the threat seriously, maybe the ending would have been different. But after it was all over, they told me . . . it probably wouldn’t have. Delayed things, maybe, but he hadn’t actually done anything, and he was such a
good
boy, so they couldn’t have held him for long. So it probably wouldn’t have changed anything if I had acted differently, if my father had. Probably.”

“Isabel—”

“It was a Wednesday. I came home from school, just like always. Rode with a friend, because my father didn’t believe I was old enough to have a car yet. She let me out, and then she headed home while I went into the house. As soon as I closed the front door behind me, I knew something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Maybe I smelled the blood.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rafe said softly.

“I went into the living room and . . . they were there. My parents. Sitting on the couch, side by side. They were holding hands. We found out later from the note he’d left that he had forced them in there at gunpoint. Sat them down. And then he shot them. Both of them. They hadn’t even had time to get really scared; they just looked . . . surprised.”

“Isabel, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She blinked, and for just an instant her mouth seemed to quiver. Then it steadied, and she said calmly, “The story could have ended there. If it had, maybe I wouldn’t have come out of it psychic. I don’t know. Nobody knows.

“But that was really just the beginning. I turned—to run or call the police, I don’t know. And he was there. He said he’d been waiting for me. He had the gun, a silenced automatic; that’s why the neighbors hadn’t heard. I was too scared to scream at first, too shocked, but then he told me he’d kill me if I made a sound. So I didn’t. All during those hours, all night long, I never made a sound.”

Rafe wished he could drink. He wished he could stop her from finishing the story. But he couldn’t do either.

“Looking back, knowing what I know now, I think if I had made a sound he might not have gotten so crazy. I think that’s what maddened him, that no matter what he did to me, he couldn’t get me to scream. Or even to cry. Without even understanding how or what it would mean, I was taking away his power.

“He—right there on the living-room rug, in front of my dead parents, he tore my clothes off, and he raped me, holding the gun jammed against my neck. He kept saying I was his, I belonged to him, and he’d make me admit it.

“He did things to me I didn’t even know were possible. I was just seventeen. Just a kid, really. I was a virgin. I’d never had a boyfriend serious enough to—to do more than kiss. I wasn’t ignorant about sex, but . . . I couldn’t understand why I didn’t die, why what he was doing didn’t kill me. But it didn’t. I bled. And I hurt. And as the hours passed, the beautiful face he’d worn for so long got uglier and uglier. He started cursing me. Hitting me. He took the gun and—hurt me with that too.”

She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Cracked ribs, a fractured jaw and wrist, a dislocated shoulder. Too many bruises to count. Raw inside. At the end, he was sitting astride me, both hands holding my head as he slammed it against the floor, over and over again. Screaming that I was his and he’d make me admit it.”

Isabel didn’t shed a tear, but her eyes were very bright, and her voice was very soft when she finished. “And his touch burned. He had red eyes, and horns, and scaly flesh, and his breath smelled of brimstone.”

Travis was more pleased than he wanted to admit—or show her—when he found Ally waiting for him outside the police station after work. Waiting on the hood of his car, actually, and wearing a very short skirt.

“You shouldn’t be out alone this time of night,” he told her, trying not to stare at long legs that looked great even under garish outside lights.

She lifted an eyebrow at him, amused. “I’m in a brightly lit parking lot. At the police station. Other than being inside the building, I doubt there’s a safer place right now.”

“Maybe not. Some of our female officers think they’ve been watched, maybe even followed.”

“Really?” She slid off the car’s hood and shrugged. “Well, I’m not a blonde. And I can take care of myself.”

“It might not be just blondes, you know. Or didn’t you hear about the body we found today?”

“I heard. Also heard she’d been dead a couple months or thereabouts. So maybe it was a different killer.”

Travis didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t so close to the inner circles of the investigation that he was up on the latest theories, so he merely shrugged and said, “Still, we’ve got other women missing in the area, and not all of them are blondes. You really should be careful, Ally.”

“It’s so sweet that you’re worried about me.”

He grimaced. “Don’t make it sound like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re amused. I’m not some toy you’re playing with, Ally. Or, if I am—”

“If you are, what?” She stepped closer and slipped her arms up around his neck.

“If I am . . . then tell me before I make a goddamned fool of myself,” he said, and kissed her.

She laughed. “Believe me, sweetie, you are not a toy. I like my men with plenty of muscle and minds of their own. You fit that bill, right?”

“I’d better.”

“Great. And now that we both understand that—how about a drink or two to unwind after a tough day?”

He groaned. “I’ve gotta be up at the crack of dawn. Why don’t we just pick up a pizza on the way to my place?”

“Or we could do that,” Ally agreed. She smiled at him and kept smiling as he put her into the passenger seat of his flashy sports car and went around to the driver’s side.

She wondered how soon she could find a few minutes alone to call in and report what Travis knew.

Before he figured out what she was up to.

Without a word, Rafe placed his hand on the table between them, palm up.

For the longest time, Isabel didn’t move. Then, finally, at last, she leaned forward and put her hand in his. The shock this time was almost a crackle, as if it should have been white-hot and burned them. But it didn’t. It just felt warm, Isabel thought.

He said, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you survived that. And then to survive, sanity intact—only to find yourself hearing voices. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “The worst of it, at first, was that I was in the hospital with my jaw wired shut.” A shaky little laugh escaped her. “Left-handed, and it was the left wrist that was fractured. So I couldn’t even write to the doctors and tell them what I was hearing. I just had to lie there and listen.”

“A combination of the head injury and the other shocks and trauma. That woke up your latent abilities.”

“With a vengeance. At first, I just thought I was going nuts. That he had damaged my mind even worse than he had my body. But slowly, while I healed physically, I began to realize that the voices were telling me things. Things I shouldn’t have been able to know. A nurse would come in to check on me or whatever, and I’d know she was having trouble in her marriage. Then later, I’d hear her out in the hallway talking to another nurse—about having trouble in her marriage. Things like that. Sometimes voices, as though another person were saying something to me conversationally, sometimes . . . I’d just know.”

“And when you could finally speak again? You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“Not even the trauma expert—shrink—I saw for nearly a year afterward. I went to live with an aunt while I finished high school. Another school, needless to say. In another neighborhood.”

“Where no one knew.”

Isabel sighed. “Where no one knew. My aunt was very kind, and I loved her, but I never told her about the voices. At first because I was afraid they’d lock me up. Then, later, when I began reading up on what little information I could find on psychic abilities, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”

“Until you met Bishop.”

“Until I met Bishop. By then, the only thing I was sure of was that there had to be a reason I could do what I did, a reason why I heard the voices. A reason why that evil hadn’t been able to destroy me, hard as it tried.”

“A reason you had survived.”

“Yeah. Because there had to be a reason. They call it survivor’s guilt. You have to get through that, find some purpose in your life. Figure out how you lived when those around you died. And why. I didn’t know those answers.

“I drifted through college until my friend was killed. Julie. She died horribly, suddenly. There one day, gone the next. Before I could even begin to grieve for her, more women were dead and their killer had vanished.”

“The second traumatic event in your life,” Rafe said. “And the second time you encountered evil.”

Isabel nodded. “I hadn’t seen it coming then either, that was what hit me hardest. These voices that told me things never told me I was going to lose my best friend. That was when I decided to become a cop. I still didn’t know how to channel or use the voices—or how to keep myself from being locked away in a padded cell somewhere if I did. But I knew I had to try. I knew I had to look for that evil face. And destroy it when I found it.”

Dana had finally grown tired of Joey’s whining and sent him back to Columbia—but she had also ordered him to make the drive back to Hastings on Sunday morning. And when he whined about
that,
she reminded him that news was a twenty-four-seven business and if he didn’t like it he could go use his supposed camera skills elsewhere.

As for Dana herself, she had elected to keep her room at the inn. There were several women staying there, including the federal agents, and it felt safer there.

If anywhere could feel safe in Hastings.

Dana didn’t apologize even to herself for being so jumpy, especially since Cheryl Bayne had disappeared. If this maniac was killing anybody who got in his way, anybody who offered a threat to him . . . then Dana now had two strikes against her. She was blond and she was media.

It was enough to make any woman jumpy, and never mind the additional worry of too many guys prowling around town with guns stuck in their belts, also jumpy as hell—

“Hi.”

Dana nearly came out of her skin. “Christ, don’t do that!”

“Sorry.” Paige Gilbert shrugged apologetically. “Like you, I just came out for ice.” She was holding an ice bucket in one hand.

Dana looked at her own bucket and sighed, continuing around the corner of the hallway to the alcove where the ice machine lived on this floor of the inn. “Why’re you staying here?” she asked the other woman. “You live in Hastings, don’t you?”