Кей Хупер - Whisper of Evil

"That door is closed."

"Yeah. You closed it. And all these years, you've refused to open it again, except for those moments when your guard slipped, when you were too tired, or too upset, or sometimes when you were dreaming. Then it opened, just a little. Then I could catch a glimpse of your life, a flash of your feelings."

"I never meant —"

"To shut me out? Or to let me in in the first place?" He paused, but when she didn't answer, he said almost mildly, "Do you have any idea how frustrating it was for me to know that door was there — and not be able to open it myself?"

Nell drew a breath and let it out slowly, not looking away, an expression in her eyes that was both wary and numb, as though she expected a blow of some kind. "Yes. I do know. I'm sorry."

"You could have cut me loose."

She flinched. "I didn't want — I tried. I couldn't."

"And now?"

She wavered visibly, then just as obviously shied away from answering that question. With a glance at her watch, she said, "It's been nearly an hour since Ethan left. I wonder if —"

"Don't change the subject, Nell."

"Look, don't you think another murder takes precedence over —"

"No. I don't. Not this time. Ethan made it clear he wouldn't grant you access to this latest crime scene until his people did their jobs, both to avoid alerting the killer if it is a cop and to keep your undercover status solid as long as possible. So it'll be hours at least before there's anything new for you to consider."

"Even so —"

"Even so, you'd rather talk about anything else. Anything but us."

"There is no us." Nell put her cup on the coffee table and got up, moving to stand before the fireplace. "It's been twelve years, Max. We've both moved on. You said that. You said you got over me."

"And you believed me?" He laughed without amusement as he rose to his feet. "Did you really think there could be anybody else for me? Really believe I'd settle for something… ordinary? Something that could never be half of what we had? Could you? Did you?"

"You know I didn't."

"Just like you know I didn't."

Nell fiddled with a decorative gold box on the mantel, then straightened a black-framed picture of her family that looked to be more than thirty-five years old. "Even so, twelve years is a long time —"

"I know it's a long time. Christ, I know. And I won't say I didn't try to forget you, Nell. Because I did. I didn't want to admit even to myself that no one else could take your place, could mean as much to me as you did. But I finally had to admit it. Because no one could. No one even came close."

"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."