“Even if they saw Mrs. Cross murdered?”
“Even if. Though I’m not entirely convinced they always see what’s going on outside their own realm, especially those who died a long time ago. I think they see most living people the way most living people see them—the flicker of a shadow caught out of the corner of their eye.”
“They never help point the way to our killers, do they?” Cullen mused.
“No, not in my experience. I have encountered a few helpful spirits over the years, but in other ways, leading me to a clue or some other information I needed.” She glanced back over her shoulder as the sounds from outside the window intensified, then added, “Let’s go through the house and see if we pick up anything. Cullen, you and Kirby take the second floor. Stay together. Reese and I will take the main floor. We’ll meet back up in the foyer.”
“Copy that.”
As the other team made their way down the stairs, Hollis stopped at the top, near the single red high-heeled shoe, and stared down at it with a little frown.
But DeMarco didn’t believe it was the shoe that held her so motionless. He waited a moment, then said neutrally, “We’re assuming the attic was thoroughly searched. Big place. You want to start up here?”
“We wouldn’t find anything.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “The whole floor’s been mopped; I can still smell it. Probably one reason why both big windows are open, and have been for hours. To help disperse the smell. He used bleach.”
DeMarco was only a little surprised he hadn’t smelled anything until she spoke. He could smell it now, very, very faintly.
“He spent a lot of time here,” Hollis said. “A lot of time. And not just tonight, killing her.”
“Is that what’s bugging you?”
“I suppose.” Her frown deepened, and without looking at him she said steadily, “Something else, though. I just got this funny, flashing image of a goblin or gargoyle crouching on the roof. Just a flash. It’s gone now, and I can’t seem to bring it back.”
“This roof?”
“I don’t know. It flashed by too quickly for me to tell. Just a . . . creature in the dark, on a roof, crouched and waiting.”
“It is a horrific crime scene,” he said after a moment.
“We’ve seen worse.”
“True. You think what you saw was real?”
“How could it be real?”
Dryly, he said, “We’ve both seen stranger things that were real.”
She looked at him, finally, her smile twisting. “True enough. I don’t know if it was real. If it was real, I don’t know if it was something in the past, something right now, or something to come—except I’m not a seer. Not supposed to be clairvoyant. As a matter of fact, I’m not supposed to be anything that would show me the image of a goblin or gargoyle. I don’t know if it was symbolic. In fact, I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about that. Or about any of this.”
“We just got here,” he said.
“Yeah.” Hollis stepped around the red shoe and started down the stairs, her gaze no longer meeting his. “We just got here.”
Frowning a little himself, DeMarco followed her.
SIX
They made their way to the main floor, and it wasn’t until they reached the bottom of the stairs across from the front door that DeMarco said, “Your shield’s holding up pretty well. You saw the spirits in the house anyway?”
Since her shield was relatively recent and had, like so many of her abilities, developed in a single instant when she’d badly needed it, and because she’d spent most of her time at Quantico since that case, they hadn’t yet really field-tested her new shield.
That had been one of the reasons for her restless need to get back out into the field. Because she needed to learn all she could about this new ability, how strong it was—or how weak.
Whether she could trust it to protect her.
“I’m not broadcasting?” she countered, pausing briefly to look up at him.
“Not so much. Though I admit I haven’t been trying to read anybody; the sheriff has absolutely no shield, so I could hardly help picking up a lot of what he was thinking.”
“I doubt he’d be comfortable with that, assuming we decide to confide in him.” She had taken exam gloves from the pocket of her jacket and was pulling them on.
Taking note of that, DeMarco said, “The sheriff and his deputies missed some evidence?”
“Probably not, but he said himself they were just doing a general search of the house until they found the victim. I doubt they did much searching after that. We don’t know if the killer was lying in wait for Mrs. Cross or just walked in while she was up in the attic, but he definitely spent some time here, outside and inside.” She frowned.
“What?” her partner asked.
“I just don’t understand the escalation. Until this murder, every death could have been an accident. I gather the harvester was least likely to be, since there were safeguards to protect the farmer, but still a possible accident. Even a likely one. How do you go from seeming accidents to a . . . brutally clear murder? More importantly, why do you? If it is attention he’s after, you could argue that the first two accidents gave him what he wanted. Not just the accidents themselves, the violence, but the horrified onlookers. He could easily have been among them, getting his jollies. The car crash happened downtown, and the grill explosion was during a neighborhood barbecue. Plenty of horrified witnesses to both. The elevator too, it seems.”
“But the farm accident and this scene had no civilian witnesses,” DeMarco agreed. “Both were farther out from town in fairly isolated locations, and few other than law enforcement and the ME saw the aftermath. Nobody really witnessed what happened the way they did at the other accident sites, at least not here. And the sheriff said the farmer’s wife didn’t see what happened to her husband, thankfully.”
“So what changed?” Hollis mused. “Did he plan the escalation for some reason we don’t yet know, deliberately? Did he . . . throw the farmer into his harvester because he couldn’t make the killing work any other way, and got a taste for hands-on?”
“Some killers do develop that way, more or less.”
“Yeah, but on the jet we theorized he might be a symphorophiliac, getting off on the horror of staged accidents or disasters, and that almost always includes extra jollies from watching the aftermath, the reactions of onlookers, and you have to be fairly close for that. These last two deaths were pretty damned private. Granted, there isn’t a lot of research on symphorophilia because it’s so rare—for which I’m thankful—but it’s a very specific condition. A very narrowly focused need. If that were driving him, the first three deaths fit, but these last two don’t. And that means the profile is wrong.”
“It was only a preliminary working profile,” DeMarco reminded her. “Based on what we had, it made sense.”
Hollis sighed. “But now we start over.”
“We haven’t checked into our hotel or unpacked,” he said, stating the reminder dryly. “To say it’s early days would be an understatement.”
“I know. But if he even had a cooling-off period, that’s over. He’s moving awfully fast. The farmer was killed sometime during the night Wednesday; Mrs. Cross was killed sometime today, Friday, presumably after dark. I don’t know about you, but I’m expecting a not-very-peaceful weekend.”
“Good point.”
“So let’s go through this house and then regroup, see if there’s anything helpful here. If not, we go back to town, toss our bags into our hotel rooms, and then get set up in whatever space the sheriff has found for us. I don’t think settling in and catching our breath is much of an option, much less a good night’s sleep.”
“You’re probably right.”
Hollis nodded. “There are no obvious signs of a struggle down here, but if this is where they spent most of their ti
me, we need to check out every room. And Cullen needs to, since he’s the clairvoyant. He may pick up something both of us would miss.”
DeMarco nodded and followed her toward a hallway that, in a logically laid-out house, would have led to bedrooms; in this house, there was really no guessing what they might find.
But that wasn’t what was occupying Reese DeMarco’s mind. He had seen his partner, he believed, in just about every imaginable situation and quite a few no one sane could have predicted. He had seen her amused, mocking, exhausted, gleeful, angry, humorous, sarcastic, briskly professional, vulnerable, guarded, shocked, angry, and almost unspeakably hurt. He had seen her face evil without flinching, and he had seen her channel the darkest of energies using her own body and soul, transforming them from negative to positive without allowing them to harm her.
He had not seen this Hollis Templeton.
She wasn’t so much guarded as she was . . . distant. Not in the personal sense he’d felt these last months, although he was still very conscious of that distance between them. No, this was . . . something else. She was cool, methodical, professional, matter-of-fact, watchful and supportive of the newer agents. Seeing everything and asking all the right questions. In fact, she was displaying every necessary trait for an outstanding SCU team leader.
And that was fine. That was, in fact, very good.
Except that DeMarco had the uneasy feeling that Hollis was hiding something, especially from him, and he had no idea what that could be.
All he knew was that his instincts were screaming a warning that whatever it was, it was bad. Very bad.
—
SHERIFF GORDON HAD provided the agents a surprisingly comfortable space, what was clearly a little-used conference room just beyond the station’s bullpen and across from his own office. There was an oval table with eight chairs, a conference-type landline telephone in the center of the table with clear speaker capability plus a built-in power strip for any other devices being used, a computer station with very new equipment set up on neat desks facing each other on either side of the door, and two clear evidence boards set along the wall that separated this room from the bullpen.
That wall held windows looking out on the bullpen, currently hidden by discreet blinds, and a couple of exterior windows actually offered daylight and, according to the sheriff, a nice view of part of the valley and mountains looming not too distantly.
And between the two big windows, a large flat-screen could serve as both a TV and, if needed, a monitor.
There was even a compact kitchenette tucked into a little alcove off to one side—and the coffeemaker was already bubbling.
“Well, I’ve certainly worked in worse places,” Hollis said, clearly pleased as she looked around.
“I’ve lived in worse places,” Cullen said dryly. “Smaller, too.”
“I can’t take the credit,” Mal told the agents. “The sheriff before me held the job for more than fifteen years, and this building was pretty much rebuilt on his watch. Both he and the town council saw the future as being prosperous and the population of Clarity growing, and designed accordingly. I have half a dozen offices we don’t use, and a garage downstairs that’s more than sufficient for our vehicle maintenance sharing the space with eight holding cells and three interview rooms.” He paused, adding dryly, “The town drunk has his own cell and leaves his pillow here on the cot.”
Hollis looked at him, brows rising in faint amusement. “Just like Mayberry.”
“Yeah, it pretty much was, before all this began happening.” He looked tired, which wasn’t really surprising.
Hollis hadn’t had much of a chance to study him until now, but she liked what she saw. He was about forty, she guessed, his thick hair once black but now peppered with gray which, along with his rugged features, gave him a distinguished air and one of authority. He had level gray eyes and a deep, calm voice, and she thought he was likely a popular sheriff, good at his job.
She also thought the job had cost him at least one marriage and pretty recently, since there was still a very faint pale line on his left hand where a wedding ring would be worn. He didn’t strike her as the type to discard his ring if he’d been widowed, but divorces could be mean. Or just . . . weary.
“I don’t know if you all plan to settle in here tonight or wait until tomorrow,” he was saying, apparently oblivious to her focused attention, “but I’d advise you go ahead and check into Solomon House and get a decent meal tonight either way. Their room service is breakfast to midnight, and from the restaurant next door to the hotel, which is actually pretty good.”
He looked at his watch and frowned. “Damn, it seems later than ten. Anyway, the restaurant serves up till midnight, and after that if you want food your choices are limited to convenience-store snacks or fast-food burgers and tacos.”
“At least we have options.” Hollis looked at the stack of files Kirby had just placed on the conference table to join two other tall stacks already waiting for them, plus the laptop case and tablets Cullen had brought in from their SUV. She was debating silently, torn between the common sense that told her they should rest when they could and the growing uneasiness she hadn’t been able to shake since they had first arrived in Clarity.
“I vote for food, and sooner rather than later,” Kirby said, following that by saying a bit wryly, “I’m betting the doc will have crime scene photos and even an autopsy report by sometime in the morning, and I don’t think I’ll have much of an appetite after that.” She had very definitely not looked at the body of the latest murder victim, preferring to put off that horror as long as she could.
The sheriff nodded. “Yeah, what information we have now is probably all we’ll have until morning. Whatever’s in Jill’s reports on the first four crime scenes, which even she admits don’t tell us much more than we already knew from the little left behind. And we have those cell phone records I requested.”
Hollis gestured slightly toward the two tall stacks of files on the table. “Your reports?”
“Yeah. The original reports you’ve already seen, plus witness statements, whatever background info I could reasonably get from the friends and family of the victims, and the in-person interviews we conducted after each of the deaths. I’m hoping something in all that will help you at least figure out what it is we have here.”
He paused, then added, “I’m no profiler, but any cop would know that these last two deaths being so close together is not a good thing.”
“No,” Hollis said. “Not good at all.”
—
“THERE WAS NOTHING else you could have said,” Miranda Bishop reminded her husband and partner quietly. “No real way to warn them when we don’t even have a vision to point us in the right direction.” She was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman with raven-black hair she tended to wear casually pulled back and electric blue eyes, and her habitual loose sweater and jeans did little to conceal a centerfold figure that turned heads wherever she went.
It was also extremely informal wear for Quantico, but nobody ever gave her grief about it.
Bishop shook his head slightly, though not in disagreement. “We have five teams out on cases, every one of which appears, at least on the surface, to be far more dangerous than the killer in Clarity. So why do I feel such a sense of dread about that case, that investigation?”
Matter-of-fact, Miranda replied, “Maybe because Hollis is there. The investigations she’s involved in virtually always turn out to be more deadly than we expected. It’s her first time back in the field since the case in Georgia. And . . . even a cat with nine lives eventually runs out of them.”
“Maybe.” But he was still wearing a rare frown.
“And maybe because of what happened to Dante,” Miranda added quietly. “You can’t keep blaming yourself for that.”
“Why not? Robbie still blames me.” One of their newer agents, Robbi
e Hodge had been born a psychic, so her control over her telepathy and the strength of her shield were two very important attributes that made her an excellent SCU agent. And neither of those precluded her very human ability to make her feelings plain to anyone who cared to look.
“Dante was her partner,” Miranda said. “Robbie cares about people in general; her loyalty to a partner is bound to be strong. It’s only been a few weeks, and the first time she’s ever had to kill. Or help kill. She needs more time, that’s all. As much to accept the power of her own abilities as to forgive us.”
“She acted in self-defense. What was my excuse?”
“A monster,” Miranda answered simply. “You hunt monsters. We hunt monsters. Evil thrives when good people do nothing to stop it. So we do our best to stop it. And all too often our teams pay a price for that. We pay a price for that.”
He turned his back, finally, on the window that offered only darkness as its view and looked at his wife. “I don’t often doubt what we do,” he said.
“I know.”
“So why do I feel this way about the situation in Clarity? Why do I want to recall them all here to Quantico, ASAP?” His wife was, quite literally, the only person he could or would talk to like this, exposing the cracks in what most everyone else in the SCU saw, by necessity, as the bedrock certainty at the core of their unit chief.
Miranda, sitting on his desk as she often did, said slowly, “I’m still betting it’s Hollis. We all know you have more of a connection with some members of the team than with others. Hollis is one of those. She’s also one of the very first of our agents who joined the FBI and SCU after being herself a victim of a killer we were hunting.”
“Are you sensing anything?” he asked her.
“No, not really. A general sense of unease, but that’s from you. And not that uncommon with teams out. Especially this many teams. But . . . more restless than usual.”
The two of them shared an exceptionally deep connection that was intimately emotional and psychic, and they quite often did, in a very real sense, share feelings. But they had also learned to allow the connection to exist without necessarily reaching out to each other, and even to sometimes close the “doors” at either end of that connection. It was a necessity when they were separated and working different cases, as they often were, because their unique bond was an equally unique vulnerability and could be used against them.