Kay Hooper - Stealing Shadows

Cassie took a moment to rinse her paintbrush and leave it in the sink, then washed her hands and poured coffee for them both. "Black, right?"

"Right. More ESP?"

"No. Just a guess." She handed him the cup without touching his fingers, then took her own to the scarred old wooden table in the center of the room. "Do you mind if we sit in here? I need to let the paint fumes in the other room dissipate."

"No problem." He joined her, sitting in the chair on the other side of the table. "I always liked this room." It was warm and cheery, sunny with numerous windows and brightly painted in yellow.

"You knew my aunt, then?"

"Slightly. I came out here a few times." He smiled. "I wanted her vote. Besides, she was an interesting lady."

Cassie sipped her coffee, her gaze on the cup. "So I've been told. There's lots of her stuff packed away; sooner or later I'll have to go through it. Looks like she kept a journal, as well as all her correspondence. Maybe I'll finally get to know her myself. I'm not in a hurry about that though. There's so much else to do."

Ben had a hunch that she had put off going through her aunt's things not because of being busy elsewhere but simply because she was not yet ready to open herself up, even to the personality and memories of a dead woman. From what the L.A. detective had told him, Cassie had been worse than walking wounded when she had retreated here nearly six months before. Detective Logan believed she had been about a breath away from a complete physical, emotional, and mental breakdown, the result of living through one nightmare too many.

But Ben accepted her explanation, at least for the moment, and said only, "You're renovating the house?"

"No, just updating a bit." Her glance flickered toward his face, then fell again. "I like working with my hands. Working with wood."

"Touching beautiful things because you can't touch people?"

That brought her gaze to his face, and this time it stayed. There were smudges of exhaustion underneath her pale eyes and he could read nothing in them, yet he still felt the warmth as clearly as though she had reached out and laid her hand upon him. It was an unnerving sensation, yet one he knew he had wanted to feel again.

"That's too simple," she said.

"Is it? You avoid physical contact with people. Or is it just me?"

Cassie shook her head. "It's… uncomfortable for me. I'm a touch telepath. It's very difficult for me to block out someone else's thoughts and emotions when I'm in physical contact with them." Her shoulders lifted and fell.

"So you just avoid touch."

She looked back at her cup. "There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong. In the darkest parts of our minds."

"The parts you can see."

Again she shrugged. "I've seen enough. Too much. I try not to look."

"Except when murderers blast their way in?"

"I tried to shut him out, believe me. I didn't want to know what he was going to do. What he did."

"But if there was even a chance you might stop him – "

"I didn't, did I? Stop him. I went to the sheriff. I went to you. I even opened myself up and crawled into his… darkest places. But it didn't stop him. It never stops them."

"That's not what Detective Logan told me."

Cassie shook her head. "They're caught eventually. Maybe I can help with that, maybe not. But people still die. And there's not a single goddamned thing I can do to change that." Her voice was soft.

"So you ran here, is that it? Here, in this isolated house near a small town where you could hope for peace."

"Don't I have a right to peace? Doesn't everyone?"

"Yes. But, Cassie, you can't ignore what you see any more than I could ignore it if I saw someone stabbed on a street corner. I would have to do what I could to help. So do you."

She drew a breath. "I've spent ten years doing what I could to help. I'm tired. I just want to be left alone,"

"Do you think he'll leave you alone?"

She was silent.

"Cassie?"

"No," she whispered.

Ben wished she would look at him again, but her gaze seemed welded to her coffee cup. "Then help us. Becky Smith was just twenty, Cassie. A college student who loved kids and wanted to be a teacher. She deserved her life. She deserved her chance. Help us catch the bastard who took that away from her."

"You don't know what you're asking."

"I have some idea. I know it'll take a lot out of you. But we need your help. We have to do whatever it takes to get this guy before he gets away. Or before he kills again."

Finally her gaze lifted to meet his, and there was something lurking in the depths of her eyes that made him flinch. Something small and hurting.

"All right," Cassie said quietly. "I'll get my jacket."

"So?" The sheriff wasn't openly hostile, but close. "Let's have it."

They were in Mart's office, seated side by side in the visitors' chairs in front of the old slate-top desk that had been his father's, and the sheriff was already in a nasty mood because his people had found absolutely nothing useful at the crime scene.

And he didn't believe in psychic bullshit, he just didn't.

"I can't tell you much more than I already have," Cassie said. "The killer is male – "

"How can you be so sure of that?" Ben asked. "You said identity isn't a conscious thing. Is gender?"

"Sometimes. But in this case…" She avoided his gaze, fixing hers on the hands clasped in her lap. "When he was watching her… planning what he would do to her… he was… aware of his erection."

It was the sheriff who reddened slightly and shifted in his chair, but his voice was sharp when he said, "This wasn't a sexual attack."

"They're always sexual attacks."

"This woman was not touched sexually," he insisted. "Preliminary reports say no semen was found anywhere on or near the body. For Christ's sake, she still had her panties on."

"That doesn't matter. He was in a state of sexual excitement when he stalked her, and he achieved release when he killed her."

"My God, you were in his mind during all that?" Ben said, startled.

"Yes. When he first went after her and then again, after he'd tied her up and was… was ready to hurt her. That time I was with him for a few minutes. It didn't take long, and just as he killed her I… managed to breakaway."

Ben wondered what it must be like to observe – maybe even experience intimately – the orgasm of an insane killer, and thought it was undoubtedly one memory Cassie would happily part with. For the first time, he began to truly understand what lay behind her haunted eyes.

Monsters indeed.

The sheriff had something else on his mind. "So he tied her up, did he?"

"Not with ropes," Cassie said. "A belt, I think. For her wrists. He didn't tie her ankles. He – he made her sit with her legs apart."

"Why? "Ben asked.

"It was… part of the pose somehow. Part of what he needed to see. He was taunting her. He kept… he kept putting the knife between her legs and threatening to put it inside her. He wanted her to be afraid. She was. She was terrified."

"You know this because you saw it," Matt said.

"Yes."

"Through his eyes."

"Yes, Sheriff."

The sheriff was looking at her squarely, his gaze narrowed in suspicion. "I'm having a hard time understanding this, Miss Neill. You claim not to know the murderer. So how is it you're able to see what he does? Know what he was feeling? Do you always pick up the thoughts and plans of strangers? Like a bad filling picks up stray radio signals?"

She shook her head and explained what she had explained many times before. "Maybe I touched something he touched. That's most likely."