by Kay Hooper
“You can be sure I’ll follow up on any lead I get, Mr. DeMarco, no matter where it comes from. As for you two hiking up to where Jane Doe’s body was found, I wouldn’t advise it. You’d be well off the trails, and in this area even experienced hikers familiar with the terrain can get turned around and not know which way is out.”
DeMarco looked at his partner. “If it’s likely she wasn’t killed at that spot, I’m thinking there probably wouldn’t be any residual energy anyway.”
Hollis Templeton, still looking a bit queasy, nodded in clear reluctance. “I guess you’re right. She could have been killed a long way from here. And she might never have even lived in the area.”
“Nobody in Baron Hollow has gone missing,” Maitland assured her. “We have transients like yourselves, visitors passing through, but we keep a fairly close eye on them while they’re here.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t want to lose anyone on my watch.” Even as he said it, Maitland reflected that he had indeed very publicly lost one on his watch, even if she hadn’t turned up on any missing-persons list.
She sighed. “Well, there’s still Rayburn House, especially if Miss Rayburn gives us permission to explore the family rooms. And we have two churches and three other downtown buildings on our list to check out.”
“As long as you have permission or it’s a public building, feel free to explore. With the usual caveats, of course. Be careful, be respectful of the property owners and their property, and if you mean to photograph or video anything or anyone, be very sure you have permission to do so.”
“Got it, Chief.” DeMarco smiled pleasantly and rose to his feet, offering a helping hand to his partner.
For the first time, Maitland wondered if what he saw in her face was queasiness or real illness. There was something more than a little fragile-seeming in the attractive brunette. He found himself getting to his own feet, and saying, “We have several good doctors practicing here in town, Miss Templeton.”
She smiled, if a bit weakly. “Oh, I’m okay. Just jet-lagged is all. But thanks for the concern, Chief.”
He didn’t escort them from his office or the building, but gazed after them with a slight frown, not even sure why he was bothered.
Outside the small but fairly modern police station, the two paused on the walkway for a moment, then turned to head slowly in the direction of a beautiful old church a couple of blocks away.
“Did you get anything?” Hollis asked.
Her partner half shrugged. “Not much useful, I’d say. A few tidbits. You?”
“No, I don’t think I got anything useful. He’s more agitated than he lets on, but finding human remains tends to do that to cops.”
“You shouldn’t have pressed so hard to tune in his aura. I was afraid you’d get a nosebleed.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
She sighed. “I keep telling you, I’m stronger than I look.” But she didn’t object when he firmly took her arm, more supportive than anything else.
“This isn’t about strength,” he said. “I know how strong you are, believe me. I also know how tired you are. You need to get some serious sleep. We both do. We won’t be any good at all if we don’t.”
“I’m not sure we have time to rest.”
“And I’m sure we’d better take time.”
“What I feel about time right now…You don’t have any sense of a ticking clock?”
He shook his head. “Not really the kind of thing I pick up on. The chief isn’t happy to have an unidentified body on his hands, and something else was bugging him, something I couldn’t quite read, but I don’t think he’s overly concerned about anything in particular.”
His partner drew a breath and let it out slowly, leaning just a bit on his supportive arm. “Well, I think he should be concerned. This whole place…it’s off somehow.”
“Maybe you’re just sensing energy left by the storm.”
“I felt it before the storm.” She looked up at him, blue eyes disturbed. “I felt it as soon as we got here. There’s something wrong in Baron Hollow. Something a lot darker than a haunted inn or church. That body…I think she was his first mistake. Or maybe his mistake was Jessie Rayburn. Because without her, we never would have known about the woman in the woods.”
JULY 3
“You’ve done a good job of avoiding me.”
Emma drew a breath and let it out, trying not to make the action obvious, then turned to face Nathan Navarro. “I have my hands full running a business,” she said.
“You weren’t here yesterday afternoon.”
She wasn’t about to be questioned by him, and let him know that by silently lifting her brows and then turning away from him.
“Emma—”
“At least get out of the reception area,” she said over her shoulder, walking into one of the common rooms that a glance had told her was empty of guests. She went to a wingback chair near the fireplace, but instead of sitting, stood behind it, leaning casually to face him with the chair between them.
He eyed the chair, only then seeing that she had yet another barrier between them. A Sheltie, standing beside her mistress. Not growling or barking, merely watching him with an intensity he could feel.
“Yours, I gather,” he said.
Her expression was thoughtful, nothing more. “Herding dogs. They can stare a hole through you. Yes, she’s mine.”
He eyed the dog. “Want to introduce us?”
“It’s okay, Lizzie,” she said, after a moment.
The Sheltie’s plume of a tail waved once, but her Lassie-like face remained alert and watchful.
Navarro took a couple of steps closer and knelt to offer his hand, opened loosely and palm down, and when the dog had sniffed it, he scratched her behind an ear briefly before rising to his feet. “I think she’s reserving judgment,” he offered, still aware of those bright eyes fixed on his face.
“She’s reserved with strangers, period. It’s a characteristic of the breed.”
Small talk. Navarro wondered how long they could keep that up.
“So I guess I call you Nathan now,” she said, her gaze meeting his.
Not long at all.
ELEVEN
“It’s my name,” he responded.
“Uh-huh.”
“My real name—Emma.”
“Well, you know, that’s the thing. I have a town full of people who will tell you I’m Emma Rayburn, people who’ve known me my whole life. I can introduce you to the doctor who delivered me. You’re staying in the family home where I grew up.” She paused. “But you? How do I know Nathan Navarro is really your name when it was something else last summer?”
“I can show you identification,” he said. “But we both know that can be faked. I can give you my word, but only you know if that’s enough.”
“I don’t know that it is.”
It was a not-unexpected response, and Navarro merely nodded. “I get that. But even if I have all the proof I need to convince me your real name is Emma Rayburn, what I don’t have is an explanation of why you were living under an assumed name last summer.”
“That,” Emma said, “is a problem we both have.”
He shifted position, surprised by his inability to hide what he knew was restless anxiety; as Maggie had said, he was normally quite good at masking his feelings. But not with Emma. And it was made even more difficult when he caught a faint whiff of her perfume. Trying not to get sidetracked by the disturbing jumble of images and emotions triggered by the scent of jasmine, he said, “I will if you will.”
“Let’s hear it.” Her tone was noncommittal.
He had already decided what to tell her, at least initially. “I’m a private investigator. I was in St. Louis looking into the disappearance of Vanessa Faber. You remember—she worked for the same company you did. Then.”
“Doesn’t explain why you used an assumed name.”
“Strangers turning up suddenly with no good cover story seldom get their quest
ions answered. It’s a common, useful practice to borrow the identity of a real person with real reasons for being where we—where I—need to be.”
“And you always find such people? With every investigation?”
“So far, whenever that was needed.”
“And the real people whose names you use? I’m assuming they’re compensated?”
“Of course. Zach Allen got an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii. He’d always wanted to go.”
Emma lifted an eyebrow. “What about this time? You claim to be using your real name.”
“It’s a unique situation. I’m borrowing an occupation more than an identity; Colin Sheridan is a pseudonym, and the writer has gone to the extreme of using other fictitious names while traveling in order to protect his real name; he’s a very private guy. So if anyone got too curious and tried to find out if Nathan Navarro was his real name, they’d come up against a wall.”
“They wouldn’t discover that Nathan Navarro is a real person?”
Talk about a loaded question.
He hesitated, then replied, “Unless they were very, very good at researching identity, they’d find just enough to convince them Nathan Navarro is likely a fictional person. If they had access to law enforcement or military data banks, and the right clearance, they could find out easily enough that I am who I say I am, that Nathan Navarro is a real person and he is me.”
“My, my.” Her tone was mild. “It all sounds very cloak-and-daggerish. I mean, being someone whose background requires a special clearance to learn about.”
“I spent ten years in the military, Emma. Naval intelligence. Because of the work I did, the military developed multiple cover identities for me—and pushed my real identity into the background. Deep background.” And he hadn’t explained so much about himself to anyone for a long, long time. “Working now as a private investigator, that’s come in handy more than once.”
“Has it? Do you even know who Nathan Navarro really is?”
“I know. I have to know. To live as someone else for an extended period requires it. Otherwise…you can get lost.”
“And you never have.”
“No.” Not yet, anyway.
Emma nodded slowly. “Okay. The writer is supposed to be here researching for a new book. I talked to him months ago. Did you talk to him months ago?”
“No. But when I needed a cover story, it wasn’t hard to find out who had reservations at Rayburn House.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why wasn’t it hard?”
“It’s a small town, Emma. With a thriving gossip mill. Other people know your business.”
He thought she was going to challenge that, but finally she shrugged and said, “True enough.”
“Your turn,” he said.
She looked at him for a long moment, then said dryly, “Nothing so exciting as investigating what turned out to be a murder. I just like to be somebody else sometimes. Temp summer jobs and different names.”
“Emma, with identity theft being the issue it is, companies are careful these days, very careful. They check things like Social Security numbers. It isn’t an easy thing to fabricate a background that stands up to scrutiny.”
She smiled faintly. “They aren’t so fussy with volunteers and interns. About official paperwork, I mean. I don’t work for the money, but for the experience. In St. Louis, I was officially a student intern, unpaid.”
“They didn’t tell me that.”
“They didn’t need to. I wasn’t even a person of interest in the disappearance of Vanessa Faber. My work never connected in any way with hers; we worked different hours and on different floors.” She shrugged again. “If you hadn’t been a regular at the company coffee shop, like I was, we probably never would have met.”
Navarro had to admit that was probably true.
“What I want to know,” she went on with hardly a pause, “is what you’re doing here. What are you investigating, Nathan?”
He should have been ready for that question from her, but rather to his surprise, he wasn’t.
When in doubt, tell the truth. Or as much of it as you can.
He drew a breath and let it out slowly. “My company has reason to believe more than one young woman has gone missing in this area.”
Her gaze was fixed on his face, and Emma didn’t blink. “You found a body. Remains.”
Navarro nodded. “Yes, and she could be one of the women on my list. But—”
“Your list? How many women are you looking for? Because according to the official records, there are no young women from this area who’ve been reported missing.”
“I didn’t say they were from this area. Just that we have reason to believe they disappeared in this area.”
Emma frowned. “So passing through. Tourists, hikers. You have reason to believe these women on your list came through Baron Hollow at some point.”
He nodded again. “No evidence to convince the police, unfortunately.”
“Except the body you found.”
Navarro said, “Identifying that body, even assuming it can be done, is likely to take weeks or months. In the meantime, my assignment is to keep looking.”
“For other bodies?”
He hesitated, then said, “As unpleasant as it sounds, that’s more or less my specialty.”
“Finding bodies?”
“Yeah. I learned a lot about investigative techniques in the navy, but I find bodies because…Well, call it a knack. An instinct.”
Emma was frowning again. Very slowly, she said, “The company you work for. It isn’t by any chance called Haven, is it?”
Navarro had no idea how much Jessie might have told her sister about Haven, so even though he had carefully avoided any mention of psychic abilities, he’d known she might put the pieces together and come up with the right picture.
She was, after all, highly intelligent. And she knew this small town that was her home; the presence of two investigators, especially when one of them was her sister, was unusual enough that she was bound to look for a connection.
Play it by ear.
That was what Maggie had told him to do if his and Jessie’s investigations intersected, or she—or, by extension, Emma—got suspicious enough to ask questions.
“Jessie told you about Haven?” he asked bluntly.
Emma nodded slowly.
“All about Haven?”
“Psychic investigators,” Emma said.
Which just about summed it up, rather to Navarro’s relief.
“Okay. Yes, I’m Haven. No, Jessie doesn’t know I’m here. There was no official reason for me to be here when she set out. She came here for personal reasons, as you know?”
He made it a question, because he really wasn’t sure how much Jessie had confided in her sister.
“Yes. To…face her past. Close the door, so she could move on.”
“Yes. Nobody expected anything else to come of it. But…in the course of exploring her past, Jessie saw something. A spirit warning her that there’s a killer at work here.”
Emma stared at him for a long moment, then came around the wingback chair and sat down in it. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she muttered.
The chair had an ottoman in front of it, and Navarro sat there, facing her, almost touching. Every sense he possessed told him that his investigation was about to take a turn. He just wasn’t sure in which direction that would prove to be.
“She didn’t tell me,” Emma said, half to herself. “Spirits, yes, all over the house, all over town. Lots of spirits. Even asked me if there had been any recent murders reported. But she never said… Dammit. I never said either.”
“Never said what?”
Emma drew a breath and let it out slowly, obviously steadying herself. “Never said I was dreaming about murders.”
HE’D LEFT HER in the dark for so long that by the time he entered her prison carrying a very, very bright light, she was literally blinded by it. She could hear herself whimpering, pleading fo
r him not to hurt her, promising she wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t tell, wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want her to do.
He turned on other lights, so that she was totally blinded, and even through her pleas she heard strange sounds she couldn’t identify but which terrified her. Metal on metal. Scraping sounds. Wet sounds of something being moved and dropped to the ground.
The head. He’s moved the head.
The fact that he said not a word only fed her terror.
“Please, oh, please, I’ll do whatever you want, I promise. I—”
He slapped her brutally across the mouth.
She still couldn’t see because of the bright light, but now her eyes were watering as well, and sobs clogged her throat so she couldn’t say anything at all.
He handled her with a casual cruelty, unlocking her wrist manacle and dragging her off the cot, across the short span of hard dirt that scraped her knees.
Wait. I’m naked. I’m naked?
The last time her mind had worked sanely, when she had tried to explore her prison, she had been wearing her clothes; she was sure of it. But not now.
Now she was totally naked, and she had no idea how or when he had managed to get her that way.
She instinctively tried to cover herself with her free hand, but he was working too quickly, and the moment of modesty fled when she understood what was happening. He was fastening her onto something that was definitely some kind of small chair, and she realized it must have been where she had managed to touch the unspeakable remains of his last…victim.
Victim?
Never in her life had she been a victim, not Carol Preston. She was strong, athletic. She had a black belt in karate, for God’s sake! Nobody had ever pushed her around.
Ever.
She wanted to fight him, was desperate to at least try, but he never gave her a single opportunity. He was very, very good at controlling her physically, at maneuvering her quickly without allowing her to have even the chance of getting a hand free to scratch and claw, and that told her he had done this before.
She thought of her little gun and the pepper spray, both taken away from her with terrifying ease, and her confident words to the other hikers about being prepared for her hike, and a wave of despair more powerful than anything she had ever felt in her life washed over her.
