Kay Hooper - Stealing Shadows

When the light fell on her, Ben heard his own sharply indrawn breath.

Just as Cassie had described, the victim sat with her back against a tree, facing the barn, easily visible. Her eyes were open, her head tilted a bit to one side and her lips slightly parted as though she had paused in saying something to listen politely to a companion. Her hands lay folded in her lap, palms up. She was fully dressed.

Ben knew her. Becky Smith, a girl barely twenty who worked – had worked – at the drugstore in town while she attended the local community college. She had wanted to be a teacher.

Her throat was cut from ear to ear.

"Goddammit, Ben, you know belter!" The sheriff was furious, and it showed.

"Like you wouldn't have done the exact same thing?" Ben shook his head. "As convincing as she sounded, Matt, I didn't really believe I was going to find anything. So, yes, I walked within twelve feet of the body. I didn't realize it was a crime scene until it was too late. But I didn't touch her or disturb anything."

"Why the hell didn't you call me before coming out here?"

Ben glanced past the sheriff, toward the rear of the barn, where most of the dozen or so deputies Matt had brought were carefully combing the ground. The sun was well up now, and Becky's body had been taken away.

Her body being zipped into the black bag was a sight he would not soon forget.

"Ben?"

"We've been through this, Matt. I didn't want to look like a jackass if I dragged you out here and there was nothing to find."

"So you came out on your own. Unarmed. What if the bastard hadn't finished his work, Ben? Jesus, she was hardly cold."

"I wish I had found him here. I'm not a twenty-year-old girl."

"And he might have had a gun. Did you think of that? Did you think at all?"

Normally Ben wouldn't have allowed his friend to censure him – loudly – in a fairly public arena, but he knew Matt well enough to recognize that the sheriff was badly shaken.

Before today, the last murder in Salem County had occurred ten years back, when Thomas Byrd had come home early from work to find another man keeping his bed warm. To say nothing of Mrs. Byrd. It had been an entirely understandable crime of passion.

This crime was everything but understandable.

"Matt, can we please get past my reckless actions and move on?"

Mart's mouth tightened, but he nodded.

"Okay. Now, since you were elected by the good citizens of Salem County to catch criminals, and I was elected to prosecute them, I'd say we have work to do."

"Yeah." Matt turned his head to look toward the activity behind the barn and scowled. "And the first thing I want to do is talk to Cassie Neill."

Ben hesitated, then said, "You and your people have to finish up here. Why don't I go get Miss Neill and bring her to the station? I'm very interested in what she has to say."

Matt turned his scowl to his friend. "It isn't your place to investigate crimes, Ben. Your job starts when I catch the bastard."

"My job is made a lot easier if I'm involved early on, and you know it."

"Maybe. And maybe in this case your involvement would be a bad idea. You aren't exactly impartial, are you?"

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"What I mean is that you obviously have a soft spot for your fragile so-called psychic. I won't let you get in my way, Ben."

It took a moment, but then Ben got it. "Ah, I see. You think Cassie Neill killed Becky Smith."

"And you obviously don't."

"I know she didn't." Ben heard the words come out of his mouth and was more than a little surprised by them.

Matt didn't seem to be. "Uh-huh. And you know that because – "

"I told you. She doesn't have it in her to kill someone. Especially not like that. Come on, Matt. It takes a particular brand of brutality to cut a woman's throat from ear to ear. Don't tell me you saw that in Cassie."

"The first thing you learn as a cop is that the most likely explanation is probably the right one. Cassie Neill did a hell of a good job describing a crime scene. I say it's because she'd seen it."

"I agree. But I don't think she was here."

"The psychic bullshit. Yeah, right."

"Matt, try to keep an open mind." Once more Ben glanced past the sheriff at the uniformed people searching for clues, then added quietly, "You know those hunches I used to get when we were kids?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I've got one now. I've got a hunch that this is just the beginning." He returned his gaze to Matt's face.

"And the psychic bullshit may be the only thing we've got going for us."

The old Melton place consisted of a Victorian-style house and various outbuildings that sat on twenty acres more than ten miles from town. Alexandra Melton had bought the place back in 1976, arriving in Ryan's Bluff from the West Coast with, apparently, plenty of money and nobody but herself to spend it on.

She had been quite a character. Her outfit of choice had been jeans and T-shirts, often paired with unusual hats or flowing silk scarves. Still beautiful right up until her death from pneumonia at sixty-plus the previous year, she had black hair that had been touched by silver only in a narrow streak above her left temple, and her figure had remained striking enough to attract admiring eyes whenever she came into town. Which was rarely. Once a month for supplies, no more often.

The odd thing was that Alex Melton had struck most as a warm and outgoing woman with a brisk, no-nonsense manner and a big heart. Yet she had made it plain from the outset that she did not want or need visitors and that she had no intention of becoming involved in community affairs.

Or affairs of the heart, apparently. Ben had heard the stories. Because she had been so beautiful, more than one man had made an attempt over the years, only to be firmly, if kindly, rebuffed. Word had it that a woman or two had also tried, and received the same decisive refusal.

It apparently wasn't a question of which way Alex Melton swung, but the fact that she didn't swing at all.

Ben thought of all that as his Jeep wound its way up the long dirt drive to the house that now belonged to Alex's niece. She didn't mind the isolation, she'd said. It was peaceful. Or had been.

She'd also said that she had "run" three thousand miles to escape the fate she saw for herself, only to fail.

Ben didn't know if he believed Cassie Neill saw her own fate, but he was certain she was running away from something. And another one of his hunches told him that understanding what that was would be important to him.

He parked the Jeep in the circular drive in front of the house and got out. For a moment he just studied the house, noting that it was being slowly redone on the outside. New shutters^ new paint on the railing of the wraparound porch, and he thought the front door, with its oval leaded glass inset, had also been refinished. The house hadn't been in bad shape before, but the new work definitely improved it.

Ben knocked on the door, and Cassie opened it holding a paintbrush in one hand.

"Hi," he said. "I would say good morning, but it isn't."

"No, it isn't. Come in." She stepped back and opened the door wider.

Just as in his office, she looked at him directly only in flickering glances. But this time, with her hair tied back away from her face and with her dressed in jeans and a close-fitting thermal shirt, he got a much better look at her.

She wasn't just fragile. She was almost ethereal.

"The coffee's hot. Would you like some?" If she was even conscious of his scrutiny, Cassie didn't seem bothered by it.

"Please." He followed her through an open living area with little furniture – where she'd been painting a small table on newspapers spread out in the center of the room – and into the kitchen.