by Kay Hooper
“On that chair behind you. And you’re lucky I stopped them from cutting them off you. Mal should have taken everything by rights, since there were no witnesses to what happened, but he accepted my word you’d had no choice. He’s very confused too. Relieved, but confused.”
“Well, let’s go unconfuse everybody.” She got her clothes and placed the folded garments on the bed.
“I don’t think that’s a word.”
Somewhat impatiently, she made a gesture with one finger indicating he should turn around.
“Seriously?” he demanded.
“Well, for now.”
Grumbling under his breath, Reese sat up and swung his legs over the side, with his back to her, though he remained on the bed. “I could tell you I was in the same room when they stripped you for the examination,” he said.
“You could. Were you?”
“No, I was in the next cubicle, explaining why there was no reason for me to take off my pants.”
For some reason, Hollis found that amusing. “Bet it disappointed the nurses,” she said as she got into her own jeans.
“I didn’t notice,” he retorted. “Listen, do you know who the real monster is?”
“I do now.”
“How?”
Hollis didn’t even have to consider. “Well, I sort of knew before. Not who, but how. Today I found out who. Because his trick failed when I had to reach out with every sense I had and at least one or two I didn’t know I had. It was . . . really, it was like punching through cardboard. Damned trick never would have worked if he hadn’t used my own weakness against me. Once I knew there was nothing wrong with me, with my eyes, it was only a matter of time before I could see him even better than he saw me.”
Reese didn’t comment on the fact that what she had described was more like clairvoyance or even telepathy than any ability Hollis had possessed before this case. Though he wondered, for the first time, if Hollis would end up with every psychic ability they knew about and a few she’d create out of thin air for herself, continuing to rewrite the psychic rule book—if there was such a thing. But all he said was, “Does the monster know?”
With some satisfaction, Hollis said, “I’m blocking him now.”
“You’re not broadcasting,” Reese said. “But your shield—”
“I know,” Hollis said, coming around the bed still adjusting the V-neck T-shirt she’d been wearing underneath the light jacket and Windbreaker. She held the Windbreaker in her free hand, absently shaking it slightly because the last time she remembered touching it, she’d balled it up and put it on the ground underneath her partner’s head. “Where’s my gun?”
“Mal took yours and mine back to the sheriff’s department. I think the docs and nurses here were uneasy about unconscious and nearly unconscious patients having lethal weapons.”
“That’s understandable.” She shrugged into her jacket. “We’ll need our guns. And there’s a stop I want to make before we get there. I want to meet Sean Brenner.”
“And who is Sean Brenner?”
“Sean is an eight-year-old boy. I could feel him once the block stopped working on me. Because he played a part in all this, was connected to all this. He was used as a tool just like Joe was. Not to kill, but to help cause a death. I need to make sure the kid’s all right, and protected from our monster.”
“And you can do that?” Reese asked mildly.
“I can try. And he might know something he doesn’t know he knows, which could be important.”
“To us? To the case I thought was over?”
“Important things are important things,” she told him seriously. “More puzzle pieces. I don’t know where they’ll fit. Or even if they’ll fit. People, places, events. Things I see, but things I feel as well.”
“You appear to know more about the puzzle than I do,” he told her wryly.
“Weird how we pick up knowledge, isn’t it?” She looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure I’ve ever picked up stuff like this before. It’s more than emotions now.”
“Yeah, I know. What I don’t know is why.”
She smiled at him. “We need to go. Right now.”
Reese got off the bed and found his shoes, but said as he put them on, “Are you not answering me on purpose?”
“Not answering you about what?”
“Innocent is not your best face.”
She waited, brows raised.
“You’re going to be an extremely stubborn life partner, aren’t you?”
Hollis smiled faintly but reacted as matter-of-factly as he had reacted to her—finally—declaration of love. “Well, you can’t say you haven’t been warned.”
SEVENTEEN
“That is true.” He took her hand as they left the quiet room and went out into the equally quiet hallway.
“Are we checking ourselves out?” she asked.
“We were never really checked in. At least, nobody asked a zillion questions or presented a zillion forms for us to fill out, so I’m thinking we’re off the books.”
A few nurses and people in white coats looked at them as they passed, but nobody objected or even questioned. In fact, most of them very studiously went back to whatever they’d been doing.
Hollis was silent and thoughtful until they were heading out through the emergency-room lobby, then said, “Bishop?”
“Probably. You know how he hates to leave records or a paper trail for the media or any other interested parties to follow. I can’t decide if he’s secretive or just stealthy.”
“Both. Where’s the— Oh, there.” They were approaching what looked like their black SUV, parked off to the side barely out of the way of emergency vehicles. “Do you have the keys?”
Reese produced them. “I think I’ll drive.”
“You got shot today. Twice.”
“Yeah, and you nearly died from the wounds.” He lifted her hand to his lips briefly, then opened the passenger door for her, more or less helped her in, then closed the door and went around to slide behind the wheel.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever done that,” she said, interested.
“Not the first time I’ve wanted to,” he confessed, starting up the vehicle and beginning to find his way out of the typically congested parking area around the small hospital. “My mama raised me to be a gentleman.”
Hollis blinked. “Did I just hear a Southern drawl?”
“Possibly.”
“How far Southern?”
“Just outside New Orleans.”
Now that surprised her. “Wow. You have never said anything that sounded like it came from just outside New Orleans.”
“I mostly lost the accent in the military,” he explained. “I was in for eight years. Thought about making a career of it, but . . .”
“Bishop came calling?”
“How did you ever guess.”
Hollis sighed. “You know, it’s kind of spooky when you think about it. I mean, how Bishop just turns up at the right moment, and how he knows things he really shouldn’t know, and—” She stopped herself, adding, “Spooky. And if you tell him I said that, I’ll deny it. My relationship with Bishop is based entirely on my patent disbelief of his omniscience.”
Reese chewed on that for a mile or two in silence, then said thoughtfully, “Not many of us question him, as a rule. So it’s probably good that you do.”
“Well, somebody has to. Because nobody’s always right, even Bishop. We don’t need a unit chief with a God complex.”
“True enough.” Reese glanced over to see that she was drumming her fingers against her knees. “Hollis?”
“Hmm?”
“Is the monster still hibernating?”
Staring straight ahead, she frowned slightly. “I’m not exactly sure. I think the thing with Joe, sending him after us, was planned
before today. Maybe like a . . . posthypnotic suggestion or something. And I don’t know if he had to be out of hibernation to trigger that. Maybe something we did triggered it.”
Before Reese could comment, she suddenly sat up straighter. “Damn. Remember where Joe was sitting in the Webbs’ den? He was sitting on the end of the sectional that didn’t face the TV. It faced that big window.”
“Which,” Reese remembered, “looked out the front of the house, which is at the end of a cul-de-sac, facing the main road through town. He could have seen us drive by before we pulled into the lookout.”
“Bet he did.”
“He had to move fast, if so. To get to the house, on foot, in time for that ambush.”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t really Joe, it was the monster controlling him. And we already know he can move fast.”
Thinking of the late Reverend Pilate, his butchered body still dripping blood, Reese said, “Yeah, he’s proved that.”
“We’ll have to figure out which murders he actually committed himself, instead of using tools. Obviously Reverend Pilate was one he did himself. Maybe he actually killed Perla, even though Joe helped set it up. Maybe the monster likes getting his hands bloody.”
“Tools?”
“Hey, Joe was practically under house arrest, right? Keith Webb seemed like a more than capable guard.”
Reese didn’t repeat the question. “So he was. Until Joe apparently got up to use the bathroom, and then somehow managed to sneak up behind Webb and hit him over the head with a golf trophy.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’ll live. But he was pissed enough, according to Mal, not to look too terribly sad about Joe’s death.”
“I can see how he wouldn’t be. He plays golf?” The question was almost absentminded, and she was frowning again and staring straight through the windshield.
“No. His wife, Carla, does.”
Hollis’s frown deepened. “So you found out all this stuff while I was out and you weren’t?”
“Well, I only got shot. You nearly got dead. You had to heal me and then yourself. To say it used up a lot of your energy would be an understatement.” He reached over and took one of her hands, his fingers twining with hers. “I was awake when EMS arrived. And Mal, and Cullen, and Kirby. And about half a dozen deputies. And the fire department. Just in case, apparently.”
All looking at her unconscious self.
Hollis sighed.
“The deputies were impressed,” Reese offered. “Not only did you shoot a bad guy who had shot—at—us, but you hit him with a head shot, and did it with my gun.”
“At. He shot at us. That was your story?”
“Well, for everybody outside the team. Mal’s probably still got deputies out at the Cross house looking for those bullets that missed us.”
“That’s mean.”
“You want to tell him the truth?”
“Not really.”
“Well, then.”
A sound that wasn’t quite a laugh but definitely held amusement escaped Hollis. “So . . . in this fairy tale, how did I end up shooting the bad guy with your gun and how did I end up unconscious?”
“Do we need to talk about this now?”
“One of us does.”
It was Reese’s turn to sigh. “I made myself look like a klutz,” he offered. “Said I tripped over one of the roots of that damned tree and went down. I was dazed. You were bending over me when you saw Joe coming toward us with his rifle, saw him cock it, aim it—and your hand was practically on my gun anyway, so that’s what you used. But the recoil knocked you back against the tree, you hit your head, and went out.”
Since she actually had hit the ground with considerable force after firing his powerful gun, Hollis couldn’t really argue with that point. Still . . .
“Who uses somebody else’s gun when they’re accustomed to drawing their own?”
“Listen, best I could do spur of the moment.”
“And they bought it.”
“Obviously there are some lingering questions. Like how Joe managed to kill Reverend Pilate when he had a cast-iron alibi—because nobody wants to think there are two killers. I didn’t have an answer for that, so I didn’t offer one.”
“One killer,” Hollis said. “Several tools.”
“Several?”
“What are the other lingering questions?”
Allowing his own lingering question to stand, Reese said, “Like the holes in my jacket and shirt. Like how long you were out after a bump on the head. That, by the way, was what had all the medical people so concerned. Because you were out, all told, more than an hour.”
Hollis nodded slowly. “Since my head doesn’t hurt, I’m assuming I healed that along with the rest?”
“There were a number of confused medical personnel,” Reese admitted.
“We’ll be lucky to get out of town without Mal arresting us.”
“Not if we can capture and cage or kill the real monster in Clarity. And can back it up with proof of his guilt. Can we do that, by the way?”
Hollis was silent for a moment, and her face was grave when she looked at her partner. “The phrase ‘by the numbers.’ That’s military, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Originally from the American Revolution, actually. Battle plans. Positions of weapons, soldiers, timing. Why?”
“Well, if I’m right, we need to move very carefully tonight. We have to have a plan, and it has to be by the numbers. We have to get it right. No room for error.”
“Or?”
“Or somebody besides the monster dies.”
—
“WOW.” CULLEN RUBBED his temples unconsciously, his gaze roving between Hollis and DeMarco. “He is . . . not the first person I would have thought of. Or even the hundredth.”
Kirby just looked stunned.
“Do admit it’s been an excellent cover,” Hollis said. “We called Bishop from the car, and he had the analysts at Quantico do a quick check. They hadn’t gotten to his name yet, but when they did, everything fit. He grew up in Clarity, went away for schooling and his first couple of jobs, returning here about five years ago. Right around the time those candlesticks were stolen.”
Kirby blinked. “He needed them?”
“He believed he did. He’d been collecting antiquities of that sort most of his life. It amused him to have them out in the open, where only another Satanist might recognize them.”
“Okay, but . . . but . . .”
“He likes to travel and everyone knows it. He’s been picking up . . . trinkets . . . like those candlesticks all over the world.”
“I’m surprised he’d give them up,” Cullen said slowly.
“He didn’t give them up.”
“But the expert guy, he finished for the day. When we got back here after tearing out to the Cross house to help you guys, Mal said the candlesticks were locked away in his safe.”
“Did he?” Hollis asked quietly. “Did you hear him say that, Cullen?”
“I . . . Somebody said it. I thought it was Mal.”
Hollis smiled slightly, her eyes locked with his. Without following that subject, she said instead, “It was an odd time frame, we thought. It seemed strange that the fake accidents only started last month. But he needed time to plan, and not only is he meticulous, but he had a fairly demanding job and other obligations. And he wasn’t in a hurry.”
Cullen murmured, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
“Yes. It is. To the very, very dangerous and very, very patient, that’s exactly what it is. Delayed gratification.”
Kirby said, “I don’t— What set him off? I mean, isn’t there always a trigger for serial killers?”
“Yeah,” DeMarco said. “His was a simple, senseless accident that caused the death of someone he loved.”
“Not exactly,” Hollis said. “He just needed some people to die. First in seeming accidents, and then in obvious murders. Until a pattern began to emerge. Until outsiders needed to be called in to investigate.”
“How did he pick the victims?” Cullen asked.
“We think we know,” Hollis said. “There’s bound to be evidence we can use against him, if we dig deeply enough. But . . . what we really need is a confession. That—or catching him on the verge of committing another murder.”
Cullen rose to his feet slowly. “Wait a minute. You said tonight. So he already has a victim under his control?”
Hollis nodded.
“And we aren’t going to break some land-speed record to get there in time to save them?”
“We’ll save her,” Hollis said. “We’ll save her, and we’ll cage or destroy the monster.”
“But—”
Frowning, seemingly deep in thought, Hollis walked around the table toward him. Cullen had a sudden odd sense he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but when he opened his mouth to say something, his eyes met DeMarco’s, and the other man shook his head very slightly.
Cullen looked back at Hollis just as she walked behind his partner’s chair, turned abruptly, and placed her hands on either side of her head, just above her ears.
“Kirby,” Hollis said softly.
—
“FIVE TO NINE,” Reese said softly. “The others should be in position.”
“They’d better be,” Hollis said, equally quiet. “He’s vicious and single-minded. We have to throw him off his game, and fast. We won’t get a better chance.”
“Almost time.”
She glanced at the unaccustomed watch on her left wrist and muttered, “Damn, I hope this thing keeps working. Just long enough, that’s all I ask.”
“It will. Besides, you’re with me.”
The plan had been more than a little difficult because there were only two entrances to the room, not counting three small windows, very high up, windows that would hardly allow the passage of a determined child. But they had planned carefully, and everyone, please God, understood exactly what to do, and they functioned perfectly as a team. Perfectly executing their plan.
