Кей Хупер - Whisper of Evil

He hadn't yet put it to the test, choosing his meditation times carefully to make very sure no one would disturb his body in any way. That had limited him severely, and he hadn't been able to visit Nell as often as he'd wanted to.

So he had made every visit count.

It was really late by the time he visited her on Saturday night. Actually, it was Sunday morning, well after midnight. He got to her quickly, as usual, going straight to her bedroom.

She wasn't alone.

They were lying close together, almost tangled together, under the covers but obviously naked, and it caused him the most profound shock to see them that way.

To see her that way.

Ruined.

Ruined just like Hailey.

He wanted to cry, to scream and destroy things in his grief. How could she do this to him? How could she give herself to this… this cowboy with cow shit under his fingernails?

And this was just the beginning, he knew that. There'd be another man and another and another, all of them using her, dumping their seed in her and then moving on to the next broken spirit, the next spoiled angel...

"Nell," he whispered, agonized. "How could you? I didn't want to have to punish you. I never wanted that. Never." He drifted closer, knowing that tears would have been flowing down his face if he'd had his body with him.

"Look what you're making me do..."

It wasn't exactly a nightmare, but Nell didn't like this dream.

She dreamed she was in a very dark place, and someone was whispering to her, telling her to do something. She wanted to move closer to Max, to feel his arms tighten around her even in sleep, holding her safely, but the whisper nagged at her.

And worried her. An instinct deeper than thought told her that Max was in danger, that she had to keep the door between their minds and souls firmly closed and needed to move away from him physically.

She hated that. Hated leaving him. But she had to.

She dreamed that she gently eased away from him and slipped from the bed. There was moonlight now, streaming in the windows, so she could easily see to find her clothes.

The whisper urged her on, and she obeyed it, dressing warmly, finding shoes and a jacket. In utter silence, she got ready to go out, and then left the bedroom.

There were lights on downstairs, which vaguely surprised her. Why hadn't anyone turned them off? Not that it really mattered, but still.

She unlocked the front door and opened it, went outside onto the porch. Keys. She didn't have her car keys. No matter. The voice wanted her to walk. It wasn't very far, through the woods, that's what the whisper said.

Nell dreamed it was a cold night for March, but the moon was almost full, and it was easy for her to see her way. As she walked, the whisper explained carefully where she was to go, made her repeat it, then urged her a final time to hurry.

She walked faster.

Not far, that's what he'd said. Not far at all, and when she got there she'd be happy because an old friend would be waiting for her.

An old friend.

For the first time, her steps faltered. An old friend. But —

Nell.

But she didn't have any old friends in Silence, not really. Did she? She'd run away from them all a long time ago.

Nell, snap out of it.

She was even less happy about the dream now, because her feet were cold and this voice wasn't a soothing whisper, it was sharp and insistent and somehow grated on her nerves.

Nell!

She was about to yell back at the voice to leave her the hell alone when a disconcertingly solid slap literally stopped her in her tracks.

And woke her up.

She stood there, bewildered, finding herself in a moonlit clearing in the woods with no idea how she had gotten there. Her hand lifted to her stinging cheek automatically, and a second shock went through her when she saw who had delivered the slap.

"The traditional remedies," Hailey said rather grimly, "always work best."

"Jesus, did you have to hit me so hard?" Nell demanded, rubbing her still-stinging cheek.

"You're lucky I didn't knock you on your ass. Yelling at you sure as hell wasn't working. Boy, when you're out, you're out ."

"Well, you still didn't have to —" Nell cut herself off and stared at her sister. "What are you doing here? Have you been in Silence the whole time?"

"Just since you got back."

"So — you didn't kill those men?"

"Of course I didn't kill them. Why on earth would I have done that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because they treated you like shit?"

Hailey laughed. "I know it's not everybody's cup of tea, baby sister, but I liked the way they treated me."

"Yuck."

"That's not the best word for it."

"Hailey —"

"Look, we don't have a lot of time for talking here. Come on."

Nell followed as Hailey led the way through the woods, realizing only belatedly that they were continuing to move away from Gallagher land. "Wait a minute, where are we going? For that matter, what the hell am I doing out in the woods in the middle of the night?"

"You don't remember?"

"Well… there was a dream. I thought it was a dream. You mean I walked in my sleep?"

"In a manner of speaking. Think about it. Try to remember the dream."

Nell tried, still automatically following her sister. Her mind was oddly fuzzy, and it felt sort of like pushing her way through a thick fog looking for something. But something in Hailey's voice had been too urgent to ignore, so Nell pushed her way through the fog.

She remembered… being in bed with Max, both of them falling asleep after incredible lovemaking. So much still unsettled between them, yet so much more understood and accepted. She remembered… peaceful sleep that had gradually filled with an uncomfortable, frightening darkness. And then… had there been a whisper?

An oddly familiar whisper, telling her to do something?

Her head throbbed suddenly, and she reached up to rub her temple. "Oh, hell. Not another blackout, not now."

"He doesn't want you to think about him when you're awake. Thinking about him gets you closer to what he doesn't want you to remember."

"He? Who is he?"

Hailey stopped and turned to face her. A shaft of moonlight found its way through the trees and shone on her face, illuminating her wry, mocking smile.

"He's our brother, Nell."

Galen used his pencil flashlight and studied the police file. "This is a hell of a thing to find out at this late stage," he noted grimly.

"Yeah."

"So how'd we find it at all?"

"These murders seemed so obviously confined to Silence, so clearly the product of a local, that we just didn't look outside the parish. But when we connected the first three murders with Hailey, I started to wonder about that. As secretive as she'd been, so careful to keep her sexual relationships quiet locally, there was every chance she'd been involved with at least one man outside Silence. So I checked VICAP for similar crimes in the region. And bingo."

"Four other men murdered in the last five years," Galen said. "All of them left behind family and friends just surprised as hell to find those nice respectable men had at least one nasty secret, usually sexual. Different parishes, so none of the cops put it together they were looking for one killer. Somebody's even serving time for the first murder."

"Yeah. I'm guessing he's innocent."

"Sounds like. Does this help us narrow the field?"

"I think so. I cross-checked the time sheets for every deputy and detective who's been in the sheriff's department at least five years against the approximate time of death for each of these murders. Here in Silence, the killer could well have been on-duty and still carried out a murder, but I figured for those outside the parish he was far more likely to have been off-duty or even on vacation."