Whisper of Evil (31 page)

"Maybe you just didn't give it a chance." She stared at the photograph, wishing she could shut out his voice, his insistence. Wishing her head would stop hurting.

"Twelve years of chances. Twelve years of telling myself you weren't coming back. That you hadn't cared enough even to send me a Christmas card somewhere along the way and let me know you gave me a thought now and then. Twelve years of telling myself I was a fool. Then I walk down Main Street last week and there you are."

"I'm sorry." Nell stared at the old photograph, vaguely bothered by something. But her head hurt. It hurt almost as much as it had at the Lynch house.

"Nell, I understand now why you ran away." His voice was closer now, just behind her. "After that vision the night of the prom, you had to be scared to death. Believing your father had murdered your mother, that he would never willingly let any of you go—"

"I tried to tell Hailey," she murmured, blinking because her vision seemed to be blurring. "But she wouldn't believe me. She said he'd never do anything Like that, never hurt us. She was—There was no way I could convince her. We never had gotten along, and by then we were like strangers. So I ran."

"Away from love. When you said that, I thought— But it was his love you ran from, wasn't it? A love so possessive, so jealous, that it killed what it loved rather than allow it freedom."

"I knew he was capable of doing it again. Of killing one of us if we tried to leave. Or killing someone else we—I knew he could do that. And even though she said she didn't believe me, deep down Hailey must have known it too, because she kept all her relationships secret from him. Even the one with Ethan."

"Nell—"

"I guess Glen Sabella was the first one she cared enough about to run away for." Nell reached out to touch the photograph, her puzzlement increasing. "Who is—"

Red-hot pain pierced her skull as though someone had driven a spike into it, and before Nell could even draw breath to cry out, everything went black.

The body of Nate McCurry lay sprawled across his bed, a butcher knife from his own kitchen protruding from his chest. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, but from the tumbled condition of the bed, the fact that he lay atop the covers, and the estimated time of death, it appeared he had at least managed to get out of bed that morning before being killed.

"Nice wake-up call," Ethan muttered.

"Yeah." Justin stood near the sheriff, both of them watching as the two lone forensic specialists the Lacombe Parish sheriff's department could boast did their thing, one photographing the body exhaustively and the other carefully dusting every possible surface in the room for fingerprints.

"Speaking of which, he got a call same as the others?"

Justin nodded. "Last night. According to his caller I.D. it was from one of the pay phones in town."

"But we haven't found evidence of a secret life. So far."

"So far," Justin agreed. "No hidden rooms or compartments, no false floor in any of the closets, no concealed safe. Paperwork here looks normal, just personal bills and records, and if Kelly had found anything unusual at his office, she would have called. From all the evidence we've found so far, he was a perfectly normal insurance salesman—if there is such a thing."

Ethan offered a faint smile at the weak joke, but all he said was, "This time, the killer got very, very close; you can't get much more hands-on than stabbing a man in the chest. Unless he means to strangle his next victim."

"You think there'll be another victim?"

"Don't you?"

With a sigh, Justin said, "We're sure as hell not stopping him, I know that. And for him to kill again so quickly—"

"Is a bad sign. Yeah, I know. Either he's been spooked into moving faster, he's deliberately escalating for some reason we don't yet know, or he's escalating because whatever restraints there might have been once are no longer holding him back. And we have no way of knowing why that is."

Justin eyed the sheriff thoughtfully. "Look, I'm pretty damned sure that George Caldwell didn't have a nasty secret he was trying to hide. I think we all are. Right?"

Ethan nodded. "I think we would have found it by now if it existed."

"Okay. But we're at least sixty percent sure he was killed by the same man."

"The same killer anyway," Ethan muttered.

Justin didn't miss the inference, but said only, "Which has to mean that Caldwell was a threat to the killer or somehow got in the killer's way, made himself a target."

"Odds are."

"Remember I asked you why Caldwell would have been searching through old parish birth records?"

"Yeah. I haven't had a chance to ask you if you found anything."

"Well, I haven't found anything. Or, at least, I haven't found anything that looks like anything. But it's still the only unexplained thing Caldwell was doing in the weeks before his murder. So he must have found something, some kind of information, and either passed it on to the killer in all innocence or accidentally. Information the killer considered a threat."

"And George was killed to shut his mouth."

"Nothing else makes sense, at least not to me."

Ethan brooded for a moment. "But how do we find out whatever it was? You said it was more than forty years of parish birth records, right?"

"Right. Lots of babies born in the last forty years, I can tell you that much. And we don't even know if it's the births or something else. Place of birth, parents' names, stillborn children or kids that died young, witnesses to a birth, the doctors who delivered the babies—God knows what we're looking for. I sure as hell didn't see anything worth killing over."

"You're new to the area," Ethan noted, "so you might not have noticed what someone born and raised here might have seen."

"True enough," Justin said after a slight hesitation, still wary of saying anything about Shelby's involvement.

"Do you have the copies of the records?"

"Locked in the trunk of my car."

"When we get back to the office, bring them to me. If there's something odd there, I'm willing to bet I'd spot it as quick or quicker than anybody else would."

"George Caldwell may have been killed for spotting it," Justin reminded him.

Ethan didn't like to think that one of his deputies or detectives might be a traitor, and he was almost equally unhappy to think that one of them might be an FBI agent operating undercover, but one thing he was sure of was that he couldn't afford to play guessing games or second-guess his own instincts. So he continued to talk to Justin Byers as if the shadow of neither possibility had ever crossed his mind.

"George had trouble keeping his mouth shut," he told Justin. "I don't. Plus, it's entirely possible that he didn't realize what he knew was a threat. I'll definitely know."

"If you find something."

"Yeah. If I find something."

"And if you don't?"

"Then we're no worse off than we are now." Ethan shrugged. "At this point, I'm willing to try most anything."

"Including the paranormal? Like, maybe, talking to an avowed psychic?"

Grim, Ethan said, "Either Steve Critcher is less discreet than I thought, or somebody else saw me talking to Nell Gallagher."

Without answering that directly, Justin merely said, "It's a small town. Hard to do anything without being noticed."

"You mean unless you're keeping a nasty secret?"

Justin smiled wryly. "Yeah, I haven't quite figured that out yet. As for you talking to Nell Gallagher—was she able to tell you anything helpful?"

This time, Ethan did hesitate. "Maybe. I'd rather not say anything until we thoroughly check out Nate McCurry. And I mean thoroughly, Justin. I want to know who he talked to, who his pals were, who he dated in the last ten years, and who cleaned his teeth."

"Matt's out now with a couple of deputies gathering that information. What is it you're hoping they'll find?"

"A secret," Ethan said. "One secret all these men had in common."

"You mean they all had the same secret? Apart from all these nasty little bad habits we've discovered?"

"I think so. All except George, so far. I want to know if Nate did as well."

"It might help if I knew—"

"I know, but I'd rather not… contaminate your judgment when I have nothing solid, no evidence I could take to court, to support this… theory."

"Just information supplied by a psychic?"

With a grimace, Ethan nodded. "Exactly. Which, by the way, you don't seem too bothered by."

"I don't care if we find the answers in tea leaves, as long as we find them," Justin said frankly. "I've seen enough weird things in my life not to discount anything out of hand. Maybe it's possible for some people to see things the rest of us can't. Maybe it's just another rare but natural human ability. Who am I to say it can't be real?"

"Well, I'm not quite so untroubled about the possibility, but I'm also a lot less certain of my certainties than I was yesterday." Ethan sighed. "I guess we'll see. I'm going back to the office. I've got a shitload of reports and calls to handle. Stay here and get this wrapped up, will you? And do what you can to transport the body out of here quietly."

"I'll do my best." Justin watched the sheriff leave, then returned his gaze to the two technicians still working silently. He didn't suspect either of them of being something other than they appeared, but it certainly did no harm to oversee every possible aspect of the investigation just to make damned sure nothing fell through the cracks.

It didn't surprise him that Ethan Cole hadn't wanted to tell everything he knew; Justin hadn't exactly been either completely forthcoming or entirely truthful himself. He wondered if that reticence would come back to haunt both of them, then dismissed the thought.

Nothing he could do about that at the moment.

He was just about to ask the photographer if he was done yet when Brad spoke first.

"Hey, Justin? You guys see this?"

"See what?" Justin joined the photographer beside the bed.

"My zoom lens caught it," Brad explained. "See that little piece of material sticking out past the hem of his shorts?"

Justin bent closer and looked, frowning. "Yeah. So?"

"So I don't think it's part of his shorts. He's wearing regular cotton boxers, and that little bit of material is silk. Colorful silk, as a matter of fact."

"Some kind of lining, maybe?"

"Not unless it's homemade. I use that brand, and they're just cotton. No lining at all."

He'd investigated too many murders to have any squeamishness left, so Justin didn't hesitate to bend even closer and grasp the small bit of material. He pulled gently, carefully, beginning to draw it from inside the dead man's shorts.

"Looks like a scarf," Brad murmured, watching intently as more of the silky blue material became visible. "A lady's scarf. You can see little flowers—hey. What the hell?"

Encountering a sudden resistance, Justin stopped pulling and shifted position so he could gingerly lift the waistband of the shorts far enough to see inside them. "Christ."

"What?"

Justin hesitated, glanced up at Nate McCurry's open, sightless eyes, and murmured, "Sorry to do this to you, buddy, but I have to."

"Have to what?" Brad demanded.

"Help me pull the shorts down. You'll have to get a picture of this."

Brad opened his mouth, then closed it and rather gingerly helped Justin pull the dead man's shorts down around his knees. When the genitals were exposed, the photographer muttered something under his breath, then silently began snapping pictures.

The fingerprint technician, whose name, improbably, was Dolly Sims, came to the foot of the bed, studied the corpse for a moment, then said to Justin, "You guys ever consider you might be after a woman?"

"Not until now," Justin said.

She nodded. "Well, I'd say the odds are pretty good this was done by a woman. Maybe a woman scorned. Or just one who was real pissed off."

"Yeah," Justin murmured, looking down at what had been done to Nate McCurry. "Real pissed off."

The colorful silk scarf had been tied in a jaunty bow around his penis and testicles.

Being out in a rural area had its advantages; Galen had the satisfaction of knowing that the remains he and Nell had that morning uncovered were removed and taken to the FBI lab by a very efficient team who had arrived and departed unnoticed by any of the locals.

At least, he was pretty sure they had.

It wasn't yet dark when Galen settled back into place to watch the Gallagher house. Since Tanner's truck was still parked out front, he knew Nell wasn't alone, but as he studied the house he felt oddly uneasy. Something was different, and he didn't know what it was.

Something he saw?

Something he felt?

When his cell phone rang, he was definitely relieved to see the call came from Nell.

"Tanner giving you a hard time?" he asked in lieu of a hello.

"Not yet," Max Tanner replied imperturbably. "At the moment, Nell is out cold—and I want to talk to you. Face-to-face."

Galen's hesitation was momentary. "Is Nell okay?"

"I don't know."

"How long's she been out?"

"More than an hour."

This time, Galen didn't hesitate. "I'll be right there."

It required no more than two minutes for him to reach the front door, where he found a very grim Max Tanner waiting for him. Galen had been in this situation before, "meeting" for the first time someone he had watched unseen long enough to feel he knew fairly well, but he didn't blame Max for the wariness that was plain to see.

"I'm Galen." He stepped into the house, offering no more than the brief introduction.

"Max." His lips twisted as though Max appreciated the absurdity of introducing himself to this man, but he merely turned and led the way to the living room. "Nell's upstairs, in bed," he added.