Кей Хупер - Whisper of Evil

She couldn't do that, could she?

Could she?

No. She had to deal with this, no matter what it cost her. It was impossible to move forward until she stopped looking back, she knew that only too well. And she needed to move forward. For Max's sake as well as her own.

She fixed her gaze on the uncommunicative expanse of his leather jacket and stifled a sigh that only the pinto's turned-back ear could have caught.

Why did everything have to be so goddamned hard?

Max stopped at a fork in the trail they were following and turned in the saddle to look back at her and say briefly, "I guess they told you about your grandmother's house?"

"Yeah, they told me." Nell stopped her own horse, gazing along the south trail that all during her childhood had led her to an old house at the edge of a plowed field where her grandmother had chosen to live alone. "It burned down."

"It had been standing empty since she died," Max reported. "I rode out this way pretty regularly and never saw anybody around or any sign of vandalism. Far as I could tell, your father and Hailey never went there once they'd cleared the place out, and nobody from town would have — except maybe some kid on a dare."

Well aware that her grandmother's house had long been considered by the local children to be a spooky, haunted place to be approached only when proving one's bravery, Nell merely nodded in understanding.

"It must have been a couple of years later that it caught fire and burned to the ground before anybody could get to it. The fire chief figured it was a lightning strike."

Dryly, Nell said, "And nobody was much surprised, right? That God finally struck down the wicked?"

He grimaced. "I did hear one or two people calling it a judgment. She went out of her way to make people afraid of her, Nell, you know that."

"She was an eccentric old woman who kept to herself because the visions she lived with terrified her." Surprised at her own ferocity, Nell made an effort to hold her voice even. "Some people never adjust. She didn't. She saw tragedies she couldn't change and tried to hide from them. It's not her fault that other people didn't understand."

After a long moment, Max said, "You're right. I'm sorry. Look, this path is the shortest way to the bayou, but if you'd rather ride out past your grandmother's place first —"

"No, thanks. I'd just as soon go directly to the bayou."

"Okay. This way, then."

Nell followed him as he took the alternate trail, sparing the other one only a brief glance. Sooner or later, she'd have to go there, of course, force herself to stand and look at that burned-out shell of a place. And remember. But she preferred to do that alone.

She had to do it alone.

"Did he have what?" Sue Caldwell stared at Justin with bewildered eyes. "A secret place?"

"Well, did he have a place he liked to keep just to… store things he didn't want to show other people, let's say." Justin made his voice even, soothing.

Her pale face flushing suddenly, Sue said, "If you mean did he have some horrible little hiding place like Peter Lynch had, the answer is no . My husband did not have any dirty secrets, Detective Byers."

Highly conscious of the little black notebook he was still carrying around with him, Justin nevertheless quickly assured her that he'd intended to imply no such thing. "But even the best of men have things they don't want to be… public knowledge. A stash of old magazines, maybe — something like that."

Stiffly now, Sue said, "I wouldn't know about that, Detective. He certainly never had that sort of thing when he lived here with me."

Since he knew they stood a snowball's chance of getting a warrant to search the house George Caldwell had moved out of nearly three years before his death, Justin hadn't even bothered to ask. Plus, he figured any man with a secret blackmail game going would have made damned sure he had his evidence close by — not hidden away in a house with his estranged wife.

And after having spent more than half an hour talking to her, Justin was also convinced that Sue Caldwell hadn't known her husband at all. She struck him as one of those unimaginative people who took everything at face value, a discarded wife still honestly bewildered as to why her husband would have left her and virtually certain he would have come home eventually.

Blunt now, Justin said, "Forgive me, but is it true that your marriage broke up over another woman?"

"No, it is not," she said flatly, eyes bright with indignation. "George was having a midlife crisis, that's all. He bought that little red car, started taking trips all over the place and wearing flashy clothes, just the sort of thing you'd expect. He was about to turn forty and he couldn't stand the thought of losing his youth. But there was no other woman. I would have known if there had been."

Justin wondered, but didn't challenge her assertion. "I see. And you can't think of any enemies he might have made either during your marriage or after he moved out?"

"Certainly not. George was a fine man, everyone said so." She sniffed suddenly. "A fine man. It had to be that maniac everybody's talking about, the one who killed those other men. Because there was no reason, just no reason, to kill George."

Justin knew denial when he heard it; no way was Sue Caldwell willing or even able to believe her husband might have had a nasty little secret that could have gotten him killed. She could lump his death in with those of the other men only because some "maniac" was doing the killing, murdering without rhyme or reason, and the fact that the other victims had led secret lives did not, of course, mean that George had as well.

Figuring he wasn't going to get anything else from the widow Caldwell, Justin made soothing noises once again and began to take his leave.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled his car into the parking lot of the apartment building where Caldwell had lived, and sat there for a few moments, brooding. They had searched the apartment. Questioned the neighbors. Gone over his little red sports car with a fine-tooth comb. Searched his office at the bank, the lockbox he'd kept there.

Nothing.

But if George Caldwell had been a blackmailer, then somewhere there had to be the evidence of it. He had to have kept some kind of proof against his victims, whatever it was he had held over their heads to induce them to pay him.

Justin was still uncertain as to whether he believed the killer himself had sent the notebook to him. It seemed most likely. Which would logically mean, he thought, that the killer was not among the blackmail victims; why provide the police with evidence that would furnish a motive for murder?

Then again, it might be a dandy little diversion. With several blackmail victims to choose from, the killer might have decided he'd be lost in the crowd and draw no more attention from the police than any of the others. A hide-in-plain-sight choice. That made a certain amount of sense.

Of course, it could also be true that exposing Caldwell's sins might have been more important to him than protecting his own ass, and sending the notebook to one of the cops was the only way he could accomplish that. Which certainly argued an obsession amounting to mania,

Justin pulled the little black notebook from an inner pocket and thumbed through it slowly. There had been, of course, no fingerprints whatsoever. He'd used his own latent kit to dust every goddamned page, without getting so much as a smudge. Which certainly screamed "planted evidence." Or else a man who was very, very careful.

He wasn't absolutely positive the handwriting was George Caldwell's, so that was still a question mark. And since he had to consider the whole blackmail scheme a possibility rather than a probability, the only way he could justify continuing to explore the theory was by telling himself that knowing why George Caldwell died would tell him more than the death of any of the other victims had.