Sense of Evil (26 page)

Standing still, Isabel silently drew her weapon and held it in a practiced, two-handed grip, thumbing off the safety.

Then she looked toward Rafe and Hollis, brows lifting in a silent question.

“Tim, we haven’t heard from Rose,” Rafe was saying, still calm. He kept his gaze fixed on Helton, though he could see Isabel from the corner of his eye. “That’s why we’re here, to look for her.”

“Liar. I heard them talking out here a while ago—they’re feds. Both of ’em. You bring feds out here and think I don’t know why? What am I, stupid? Where’s the other one? You tell her to come out, Sullivan, and I mean quick. You know I ain’t afraid to use this gun.”

“Tim, listen,” Rafe said.
“Aspice super caput suum.”

Helton blinked in confusion. “Huh? What’d you—”

The crack of Isabel’s pistol was loud, but before Helton could do more than twitch in surprise, the hay bale that had been hanging several feet above his head crashed down, knocking him to the ground—and out cold.

Rafe immediately moved forward to get the unconscious man’s pistol, calling out, “Got him, Isabel. Nice shot.”

She came around the barn door even as he finished speaking, crunching through the hay, pistol lowered but ready, and said, “Dead-eye Jane, that’s me.”

Hollis was staring up at the loft door and the winch designed to lift heavy bales of hay inside the building. “I’ll be damned. With the barn painted that wheat color, I didn’t even notice that up there.”

“Neither did I,” Isabel said. “Good thing Rafe did. I gather all this was about moonshine, of all the ridiculous things?”

Rafe nodded. “He’s got a still in there. You can smell the stuff. Or, at least, Hollis could. I didn’t notice when we got here, unfortunately.”

“Easy to smell now. On him. He reeks.”

“Yeah, he’s drunk. Probably since he noticed his wife was missing, and possibly what drove her to leave him. I don’t know how long he’s been selling bootleg whiskey, but it’s obvious he’s been drinking and otherwise using it for years.”

“Mallory’s tractor story,” Isabel said, realizing. “He blew up his own tractor using moonshine instead of fuel.”

“Right. I really should have remembered that before bringing two
feds
out here. With that level of paranoia and the amount of raw alcohol in him, he could have shot all three of us and not felt a twinge of regret about it until he sobered up.”

“I’m confused,” Hollis said. “What did you say to him?”

“Not to him. I told Isabel to look above his head. I knew the only clear shot she had was the winch or rope.”

“Nice you trusted me to hit either one,” Isabel said, then frowned at him. “But how in hell did you know I’d understand classical Latin? I didn’t tell you that.”

“No, Hollis did, sort of in passing. I remembered because it so happens that I took it in college as well.” He sent a sidelong glance at Hollis. “A fairly nerdy thing to do, I admit, but it has been useful here and there.”

“Especially here,” Isabel said. “Another few seconds, and this lunatic would have shot one of you. Probably killed you.”

Hollis uttered a shaken laugh and, when the other two looked at her inquiringly, said, “Okay, now I’m a believer.”

It was nearly five that afternoon when Rafe came into the conference room and found Isabel, for the first time that day, alone. He closed the door behind him.

Sitting on the table studying autopsy photos of the woman found hanging in the old gas station, she said, “Please tell me we finally have an I.D. on her.”

“Word just came in from Quantico. They think her name is Hope Tessneer. Age thirty-five, divorced, no children. The dental records are a close, but not exact, match. The record we gave them for comparison is at least ten years old.”

“So there’s a good chance it’s her.”

“A very good chance. Mallory’s talking to the sheriff’s department in Pearson now. That’s another small town about thirty miles from here. We’ll know more when they give us all the information they have, and when they talk to her family and friends. We do know that Hope Tessneer worked as a real-estate agent.”

Isabel looked at him, frowning. “A possible connection with Jamie. How they met, maybe.”

“Could be. She’s been missing almost exactly eight weeks, according to her boss. He wasn’t all that worried, because she had taken off without warning or explanation at least twice in recent years. Said she wouldn’t have come home to a job either time except that she was the best sales associate he had.”

“Then she knew how to please people, how to give them what they wanted. That fits.”

“For a submissive, you mean.”

“Yeah. And a good fit for Jamie. Somebody like that might have been a longtime partner. Someone who wasn’t just submissive but really trusted Jamie. It could help explain the lack of defensive wounds.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Still frowning, Isabel said, “I wish we could find that damned box of photos.”

“We can’t even check for more safe-deposit boxes in the other banks in the area until tomorrow morning.”

“I know, I know. I just think it’s important. We need to see what’s in that box.”

“Agreed.” Very deliberately, Rafe took a chair on the side of the table where she was sitting. “On another subject . . .”

Her frown vanished, and she smiled. “Where the hell am I, and how do I get to Detroit?”

He smiled slightly in response. “Are you a Richard Pryor fan, or do you just know that I am?”

“Both.”

“Any more one-liners you want to throw at me?”

“No. I’ll be good.”

“Just tell me what’s going on, Isabel.”

She closed the autopsy file and set it aside, then drew a breath and let it out slowly. “The short, perfectly truthful version is, I don’t know what’s going on.”

“And the long version?”

“I’m not picking up anything from anyone. I don’t hear any voices. All my extra senses closed up shop last night, and I think it has something to do with you. And I don’t know what the
hell
is going on.”

5:10 PM

Mallory hung up the phone and rubbed the back of her neck as she looked at Hollis, who was perched on the corner of her desk. “They’ll get back to us once they’ve interviewed Hope Tessneer’s family and friends. But just from the information they already had on her bank accounts, it looks like she’d been paying for
something
about twice a month for the last year or so. Checks made out to cash, and cashed by her.”

“For how much?”

“Always the same amount. Fifteen hundred.”

Hollis raised her eyebrows. “I guess Jamie’s services didn’t come cheap.”

“I guess not. If we’re right about all this, that’s an extra three grand in undeclared cash Jamie was pulling in per month—and from just one client. Who knows how many regulars she had?”

“Where the hell did she hide all that money?”

“There has to be another bank. No unexplained deposits show up in any of the accounts she kept at two banks here in Hastings. Her salary, declared income from real estate and other investments—all documented, everything on the up-and-up. The public part of her life was squeaky clean.”

“And the secret part was buried deep.”

“I’ll say. Buried deep and probably under an alias, at least financially; it’s obvious she’s been hiding at least some of her financial dealings for a long time, maybe years. Hell, her other bank or banks could be out of state. Or out of the country.”

“If so, we may never find them. We’ve got people set to start checking out all the other area banks tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah. With pictures of Jamie and the information that she could have been disguised and using an alias.”

“And it seemed like such a nice little town,” Hollis said.

Mallory leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “I always thought so.”

“You grew up here, I think you said.”

“Yeah. Well, from the time I was about thirteen. Both my parents and a brother still live in the area. I thought about leaving when I was in college, but . . . I like it here. Or did. Never knew how many people kept nasty secrets until I became a cop.”

“It’s been an eye-opener for me too,” Hollis confessed. “Still, this sort of thing has got to be unusual for small towns. I mean, a dominatrix practicing her . . . art . . . for paying clients, while also working as a top real-estate agent?”

“If it’s not unusual, I’m moving.”

“I don’t blame you a bit for that.”

“You know, she picked a good public job to hide a private second one,” Mallory mused. “Real-estate agents often keep erratic hours, so nobody would question if she wasn’t in the office at any given time. She could probably meet clients day or night, accommodate their schedules easily.”

“And since she was the dominant,” Hollis said, “she could probably take on as many clients as her energy allowed. No need to take a day or week off now and again to allow those ugly bruises and burns to heal. Or whatever else there might be. She’d be the one dealing out the punishment. Jesus.”

Hearing the distaste in the other woman’s voice, Mallory grimaced in agreement. “A very twisted way to find pleasure, if you ask me.”

Ginny joined them in time to get the gist of the conversation, saying, “The things people get up to behind closed doors. We’ve found Rose Helton.”

“Alive and well, I gather?” Mallory said.

“Definitely alive. I’d say pissed rather than well. When I told her that her husband was sleeping it off in a cell after having waved his gun around at the chief and two federal agents, she said she hoped the judge would throw away the key.”

“Where is she?” Hollis asked.

“In Charleston, with a college friend.”

“She went to college?” Mallory asked in surprise. “And still married Tim Helton?”

Pronouncing the words carefully, Ginny said, “She said it had been a cosmic karmic mistake. And that she’d already filed for divorce and wasn’t coming back here. And, oh, by the way, in case we hadn’t found it, there was also a still in an old shed in the back pasture.”

“We found it,” Hollis murmured.

“Everybody said they were so happy.” Mallory shook her head. “Christ, you really don’t know about people.”

Hollis said, “Well, anyway, we can cross her off the missing list.”

“One less to worry about,” Ginny agreed.

“How’s the rest of the list coming?” Mallory asked her.

“No change. No sign of Cheryl Bayne. Plus, we still have several women missing in the general area, and nothing new on Kate Murphy.” Ginny sighed, clearly weary. “It’s like she disappeared into thin air. She fits right in with the other victims too.”

“But not Cheryl Bayne.”

Hollis said, “I think Isabel’s probably right about Cheryl. If the killer got her, it wasn’t specifically because she was—is—a reporter, but because she somehow got too close. Or he was afraid she had. And if so, it’s only going to get more difficult to even try to predict what he might do next.”

“Except kill,” Mallory offered wryly.

It was Hollis’s turn to rub the back of her neck. “And there’s something else. Isabel’s the profiler, but I’ve got to say, if Kate Murphy is a victim, why haven’t we found her? So far, the rule’s been that if he kills them, he does it quick and leaves them out in the open where they’re easily found. Assuming he has killed again, or that he has Kate Murphy, why would he change his M.O. now?”

“Our patrols are checking out every highway rest stop,” Ginny said. “Most of them two or three times a day.”

“Maybe we’ve spooked him,” Mallory suggested. “He could be killing and leaving the bodies in places we aren’t keeping under observation.”

Hollis glanced toward the closed door of the conference room. “Maybe it’s time we discussed that possibility.”

Mallory didn’t move. “Rafe had a sort of determined look on his face when he closed the door. I’m not so sure I want to be the one to disturb them.”

Hollis continued to look at the door intently, focusing, tentatively trying out the spider sense. After a long moment, she said, “Um . . . let’s give them a few more minutes.”

“You’re serious?” Rafe leaned forward and touched her hand, not even reacting now to the spark.

Isabel looked down at their hands for a moment, then back at his face. “Entirely serious. For the first time in more than fourteen years, there’s silence in my head.”

“That’s what’s been wrong all day.”

“That’s it,” she said, unsurprised that he had noticed. “The question is: why?”

They both looked down at their touching hands, and Rafe said, “Frontier territory, huh?”

“Yeah. Scary, isn’t it?”

“Today, looking at the wrong end of a gun being waved around by a paranoid drunk, was scary. This? This is just a very interesting turn my life has taken.”

“You’re a very unusual man,” she said.

“Which is probably a good thing,” he said, “considering that you’re a very unusual woman.”

There was a part of Isabel that wanted to shy away, to pretend he hadn’t said that or that she hadn’t understood what he meant. But Isabel didn’t let herself shy away, or draw away, or back away. Whatever this was, it was something she had to deal with.

“Rafe, do you realize what this could mean?”

“Static electricity is more important than I thought it was?”

“Electromagnetic energy. And, no, not that.”

“Then I don’t have a clue what this could mean. Or even what this is.”

“Hollis and I have a theory.”

“Which is?”

“The theory is, my abilities are still with me, it’s just that now there’s something standing between me and the great wide world out there.”

“You’re not saying—”

“We think it might be you.”

“You are saying.” He frowned at her. “Isabel, how could it be me? I’m not psychic. I wouldn’t even know how to
be
psychic.”

“We think that might be the problem.”

Rafe waited, brows raised.

“When a latent first becomes a functional psychic, there’s an adjustment period. The psychic isn’t in control of his or her abilities from the get-go. I mean—look at Hollis. She’s been a medium for months and still can’t open and close that door at will. It takes concentration, and focus, and practice. A lot of practice.”