Кей Хупер - Out of the Shadows

"She won't wake for hours," he said, keeping his voice low. He eased Bonnie back out into the hall and pulled the door almost closed.

Restless, Bonnie said, "If there's anything I can do to help your parents with the other patients—"

"Dad said they might need us later, but not now. We have some time to ourselves. I think we should talk, don't you?"

Bonnie wanted to deny that, but she was ruefully aware that Seth had been uncommonly patient and he certainly deserved an explanation. Or two. So she followed him to a small waiting room just down the hall. It wasn't what you'd call the ideal place for a serious conversation, since it was decorated in bright primary colors and boasted decals of cartoon characters on the walls — decor geared to the mostly young patients the clinic treated — but there were a couple of comfortable couches, and lamps turned low kept it from feeling too much like Disney on parade.

"Who's Bishop?" Seth asked as soon as they sat down.

It surprised her that it was his first question given everything that had happened that day, but when she thought about the abrupt and strained meeting with Bishop on the steps of the Sheriff's Department her surprise faded somewhat. From the point of view of someone who didn't know the story, it had quite likely been a decidedly enigmatic meeting.

Cautiously, she said, "You know he's an FBI agent."

"Yeah, I know that. But what is he to you and your sister? What happened that isn't his fault? It has something to do with that scar on your arm, doesn't it?"

Bonnie looked down at her right forearm, absently brushing the sleeve of her sweater back to expose the white, raggedly crescent-shaped scar. She was trying to decide how much to say, worried about overwhelming Seth; given how sensitive and empathetic he was, she was inclined to say as little as possible even if it wasn't the whole story.

"Bonnie?"

She chose her words with care. "When I was a little girl, before we came to Gladstone, I lived outside L.A. with our parents and our sister Kara."

"I didn't know you had another sister."

Bonnie nodded jerkily. "I... I did. Randy didn't live with us, she had her own place. She had just finished law school. It was in the spring that year when a man the newspapers called the Rosemont Butcher started killing people. He always chose families, and he got inside their homes so easily it almost seemed like magic. Alarm systems, guard dogs, even armed security guards — nothing could keep the families safe once he'd picked them.

"The police needed help, so they asked the FBI. And that whole summer, agents and cops were trying to figure out how to stop the killer. And he kept on killing."

Seth reached over and took her hand. "What happened?"

"My sister Kara was . . . psychic. And the ability she had was a very unusual one. A dangerous one. Sometimes she had visions, and in those visions she could . . . see through the eyes of someone else. Sometimes she could even make it happen, see through a particular person's eyes by holding something they had touched."

She paused, waiting anxiously for Seth to comment, but he just said, "Go on."

Bonnie drew a deep breath. "Bishop was part of the FBI investigation. He and Randy had met , I don't know how, and had gotten involved that summer. Pretty seriously involved. He found out about what Kara could do, and he thought he could use her abilities to help him catch the Rosemont Butcher."

"Did it work?" Seth asked slowly.

"No. Maybe it would have, but what Bishop didn't know, what nobody knew, was that the killer was psychic too. When Kara tried to see through his eyes, he saw her instead. And he came after our family." She looked down at her arm, at the scar. "I was the only one in the house who survived."

Seth reached for her other hand, his face pale. "Jesus, Bonnie, I'm sorry."

Bonnie hadn't intended to add anything else, but. heard her voice, thin and unsteady. "The worst thing . . . the worst thing was that Kara realized too late that he was in the house. There wasn't time for her to do anything except — except hide me. So she did. And I saw . . . everything he did to her."

"Bonnie ..."

She looked up finally to meet his horrified eyes, and whispered, "She made me promise. When she hid me, she made me promise not to make a sound. No matter what. So I watched him kill her, and I didn't make a sound."

Seth looked at her scar and suddenly realized he was seeing what her own teeth had done to the flesh. In the desperate need to remain silent, she must have bitten down almost to the bone.

"Jesus Christ," Seth said, and pulled her into his arms.

Miranda didn't like storms as a rule. She supposed if she could curl up in front of a roaring fire and sip hot tea while watching snow fall, she'd feel different, but she had never had that luxury. From the time she and Bonnie had first moved to a part of the country that actually had four distinct seasons, she had been more concerned with the inconveniences and possible dangers of bad weather than its beauties.

It wasn't her job to get Gladstone prepared for a storm; there were other authorities to take care of that. But she had to get her people and the Sheriff's Department ready, and that took time. It was after seven-thirty when she went into the conference room to check on any progress in the investigation.

She knew before she opened the door that Bishop wasn't in the room — or in the building, for that matter — but asked as casually as she could when she found only Tony Harte there.

"He's at the hospital with Sharon," Tony replied. "Said he wanted to sit in on the autopsy. Didn't say why. I don't know, maybe he's got a hunch. Or maybe he's just looking for something to spark one."

Miranda sat on the table, unconsciously taking Bishop's accustomed place, as Tony worked on his laptop. "And you're trying to get something from the tire track?"

"Trying being the operative word. The good news is that we got a terrific clear cast of the treads."

"And the bad news?"

"It's one of the best-selling tires in the country. I've got someone back at Quantico trying to narrow down the possibles, but half the dealers aren't on computer yet. It's going to take days just to get a reliable list of retailers within a hundred miles who sold the damn things — never mind finding out from those dealers who their customers were and getting a list of them."

"Did we get anything else from the scene at the mill-house? Anything at all?"

"Not much. The bastard might not have been ready for us to find his victim, but he runs a pretty clean murder. We have the rope around Penman's ankles, which is your basic garden-variety hardware-store rope, and there was nothing fancy about the knot. We have a few — a very few — forensic odds and ends that might eventually help us build a case in court, but nothing helpful at this point. A few carpet fibers that could be from his car or his house; a couple of strands of hair we found caught in the door frame that may or may not match the victim's; a sliver of a footprint — without a distinctive tread." He shrugged. "What we can't interpret here we've sent back to Quantico for analysis. For what it's worth."

Miranda was silent for several minutes, staring at the bulletin board already displaying the grisly crime-scene photographs from that afternoon. "Two things bother me," she said.

"Only two?" Tony's voice was wry.

"Well, two at the moment." She turned back to the agent. "What the hell is he doing with the blood — and what happens if we've really pissed him off by finding Steve Penman before he wanted us to?"

"For the first, I haven't a clue. I'd think the second was potentially more dangerous. Like I said out at the scene, I really don't want to see this guy pissed off."