Кей Хупер - Whisper of Evil

Casey said, "As I understand it, profiling is mostly educated and intuitive guesswork. More of an art than a science. Bound to be some vagueness there."

Nell was still frowning. "Bishop isn't normally vague, believe me. And his profiles tend to be bull's-eyes more often than not. But something about this killer is bothering him, and I don't think even he knows why. If he hadn't been hip-deep in another tricky case himself, he'd be down here trying to solve the puzzle firsthand. As it is, I have a direct line to him and I'm under orders to keep him advised."

"But you aren't here alone," Max repeated.

"No."

"How effective can an agent be when he or she is pretending to be something else?"

"We all function quite well that way, actually. My unit is… peculiarly suited to undercover operations."

"Why?" Max demanded.

"Well, among other things, let's just say we're all accustomed to keeping secrets."

He frowned at her. "I thought most feds were."

"You've been watching too much television."

Casey laughed and said, "You've told him this much, Nell, might as well tell him the rest."

Nell shrugged. "It's not something the Bureau publicizes, but the Special Crimes Unit is made up mostly of agents who each have one or more… unorthodox investigative abilities."

"Meaning?"

"Psychic abilities, Max. I finally found something useful to do with the Gallagher curse."

Shelby Theriot had grown up in Silence, just as her parents had done. And unlike some of her friends, she hadn't even gone away to college; there was a small community college in the parish, and it had provided all the additional education Shelby could bear after finishing high school.

In high school, she had been voted Most Likely to Grace the Cover of a Magazine, which only proved that kids in high school were rotten judges of character.

Shelby didn't give a damn what she looked like, and had in fact rejected several offers that would have put her feet on the path to possible fame and fortune as a model. But she very much liked being on the other end of a camera, and over the years her pictures had begun appearing in various magazines.

It was still more of a hobby than a career, mostly because Shelby didn't really need a career, and also because she wasn't in the least ambitious. She didn't need a career because her parents had left her both a nice house and stock in a number of flourishing businesses. She wasn't ambitious because it simply wasn't in her nature to be. She took pictures because she enjoyed it and needed neither money nor approval to validate doing something that was fun and satisfying in and of itself.

All of which explained why Shelby had spent the day just wandering around with her camera, snapping pictures here and there of whatever scenery or person caught her fancy. The townspeople were too accustomed to this to protest; Shelby had formed the habit of giving away prints to her subjects, cheerfully handing over negatives as well if asked for them, and since she never used a picture without permission, no one minded even the sometimes unflattering shots she occasionally got while catching her subjects unawares.

Since the light was particularly good on this Thursday, Shelby spent virtually the entire day outside, quitting only when darkness forced her to. She stopped by the cafe for supper because she didn't feel like fixing anything for herself, flirted with Vinny for a few minutes afterward, and then went home.

Her small house, on the outskirts of town, was the picture-postcard image of a white cottage, complete with a white picket fence. She loved flowers but boasted a brown thumb, so she paid a gardener to keep the front and back yards looking pretty year-round; the rest of home maintenance she took care of herself, perfectly capable of wielding both a paintbrush and a hammer with equal skill.

She drove a small, neat Honda and lived with a cat named Charlie, currently the only male fixture in her life. Despite the well-meaning attempts of friends to fix her up, Shelby had yet to meet any man who even mildly tempted her to give up her independence — or the freedom to work in her darkroom until dawn or eat cold pizza in bed while watching her favorite horror movies at midnight.

On this particular night, after a day spent happily with her camera, she intended to shut herself up in her darkroom and develop her film. She was looking forward to hours of work and was curious to see what she had captured, since there were almost always surprises.

This time, there was definitely a surprise.

"What the hell…" she muttered to herself, holding up the last shot of a roll she had taken around mid-afternoon.

It had amused her to notice that Max Tanner seemed to be following Nell Gallagher around town today, and at least twice Shelby had captured the image of him lurking, very intent on Nell and apparently unconscious of the fact that he wasn't exactly being subtle about it. Shelby felt she knew Max well enough to be pretty certain he hadn't been stalking with any kind of deadly intent, and that certainty had freed her to speculate as to his motives.

Had to be those abandonment issues, she'd decided. Or was it merely rejection of a particularly nasty sort when one referred to a prom date gone humiliatingly awry?

In any case, she had snapped a shot of Max skulking near one corner of the courthouse while Nell, apparently oblivious to his presence, walked down the steps toward her Jeep. That much was ordinary enough, even if interesting.

What wasn't ordinary was the odd, hazy shape just a couple of feet behind Nell.

Like any good photographer, Shelby knew a lot about shadow and light. She also had a solid familiarity with the tricks a camera could produce, some of them odd or eerie. She knew about occlusions of the lens, about double exposures, about reflections, about corrupted film.

"This is definitely weird," she muttered to herself, after silently running through possibilities and discarding them one by one. The camera was fine, the film, the paper. When she checked the negative carefully, it, too, bore the odd, shadowy shape that seemed to float behind Nell. So something had definitely been there, at least for the camera to see. But not the naked eye, because Shelby had seen nothing unusual when she had framed the shot.

She turned on the white lights and stood back to stare at the eight-by-ten hanging over the trays.

Every detail of the shot was clear. The building, Max, Nell. Everything just as it should be, with the light falling just so and shadows where they should have been.

But behind Nell, beginning several inches above the steps and stretching upward maybe six feet, was a shadow that had no right to be there. It was vaguely man-shaped and, though it appeared more dense than smoke, was certainly not solid.

"What the hell is that?" Shelby wondered aloud. No matter how carefully she studied the shot, she could find absolutely nothing solid to account for the shadow.

But that shadow was definitely there. Even more, with hardly any imagination at all it could be argued that the shadow loomed over Nell, even seemed to reach out for her.

Grasping. Threatening.

It was some time before Shelby realized that she was absently rubbing the nape of her neck because of an odd, tingly sensation, and it took a minute or so more for her to recognize what was happening.

The hair on the back of her neck was standing up.

Maybe it was nothing. Probably it was nothing. But Shelby had always listened to her instincts, and they were whispering an urgent warning now.

"Jeez." Shelby glanced at her watch, then made up her mind and left the darkroom. Too late for a visit, maybe, but not too late for a phone call.