by Kay Hooper
He wasn’t going to hurt her and then just let her go.
She was going to die here.
And nobody would even think to begin looking for her for another week or more. Looking far north of Baron Hollow.
“Please…” she whispered.
From behind the bright lights, his voice finally came, pleasant and almost cheerful. “There are stages to this, you know. Keeping you in the dark was one. People are always afraid of the dark, whether they want to admit it or not. Letting you realize, in your own time, that you can’t escape—that’s a stage. Now comes the stage where I give you some idea of what’s really going to happen to you.”
She started when a gloved hand seemed to come from nowhere, holding something so that she could see it.
A huge, wicked hunting knife, with a serrated blade.
Covered with blood.
Carol Preston began to scream.
EMMA ONLY JUST stopped herself from leaning closer as she looked over Navarro’s shoulder at the screen of his tablet. They were in his suite because that was where the tablet had been, though Emma couldn’t help a fleeting hope that Penny hadn’t seen them head in this direction.
Penny could be the soul of discretion. When she wanted to be.
“Your police chief was right,” Navarro said. “Nobody fitting the description of the woman you saw in your dream has been reported missing from the area. From the entire Southeast, as a matter of fact. And there’s nothing on the name Carol Preston.”
“How could there be nothing?”
“I mean nothing on any of the official missing-persons databases. I’ll send a request back to Haven, and they’ll do an identity search, find out who Carol Preston is, where she’s from. And probably where she buys her groceries and gets her teeth cleaned.” His fingers were already moving rapidly over the screen keys, sending the request to Haven.
“You can’t do that here?”
“I’m not a hacker,” he said frankly. “Haven has a lot of clout and even more money because it’s mostly funded by a multibillionaire with a lot of very powerful friends and allies, but there are privacy laws, and contrary to what you may have seen on TV, it isn’t all that easy to actually get access to official records concerning private citizens. I mean, she probably has a Facebook page, maybe even a blog, but aside from those providing precious little useful info, there are also likely to be a whole lot of Carol Prestons somewhere on the Internet. It’s not a particularly uncommon name.”
Emma moved slowly away and sat down in a reading chair near the little desk in his suite. Her dog moved immediately to sit by her feet, and Emma leaned forward a bit to scratch behind one of those alert little ears. “Facebook might give us a photo,” she offered.
Navarro glanced at her, then did a bit more rapid work on the tablet. When he was done, he frowned at the screen and then turned it so she could see. “The only human faces representing Carol Prestons are considerably older than the woman you saw. The rest—and as you can see, there are many—are using avatars or silhouettes to represent themselves. Not a bad idea, actually. Too many people don’t realize how vulnerable they can be when they use the Internet. When they put too much of themselves out there. And out there forever.”
“Note to self,” Emma murmured.
Navarro turned in his chair and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and linking his hands loosely. “So you’ve been dreaming of women being tortured and killed.”
She nodded. “Not often. Every few months, usually. And just since the accident.”
“Which was a head injury.”
He wasn’t really asking her questions, and yet Emma heard herself replying anyway. “Yeah, a little over two years ago. Knocked me out, cost me a few stitches and a few days in the hospital.” She still felt extremely wary of him, and wanted badly to talk to Jessie about him. But Jessie’s cell phone was going straight to voice mail, and Emma didn’t really expect her sister to return until close to nightfall. If then.
“Why a few days in the hospital for what you’re describing as a minor head injury?”
“I have a cautious doctor.” She shrugged. “I was out for longer than he liked.”
“How long?”
“An hour, give or take.”
His brows rose. “Yeah, that would give a doctor pause. He probably scared you silly with all the possible effects of an injury to the brain that would keep you out that long.”
“Bad dreams seemed one of the more benign of the possibilities,” she confessed. “Until I started remembering more and more details. Very violent, very scary details.”
“And it felt real to you?”
“Very real.”
“Not so much a typical nightmare.”
“Not so much.”
Navarro shook his head slightly. “But you aren’t psychic.”
“No, that’s Jessie’s deal. You know Jessie?”
“Actually, we’ve never met.”
Emma glanced at him, brows raised. “How big is this outfit you both work for?”
“It’s not so much the size as it is the scope. Many of us are based in different areas and rarely if ever visit base. I live in Chicago.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
“I wasn’t born or raised there.”
Emma sighed. “Well, this is all very stiff and unnatural, isn’t it? Talking about anything personal, I mean. In talking about murders and possible murder victims, we’re fine.”
He ignored the last part of that. “To be expected, I guess, under the circumstances. Last summer was…I did leave abruptly.”
“But then, you never promised to stay, did you?”
“Emma—”
“Why don’t we get back to talking about possible killers.”
“We will. But I want you to know first that I did go back to St. Louis as soon as I could, and I did look for you. Obviously, I didn’t find you. The alias you’d been using made that all but impossible.”
Emma wasn’t quite sure what to do with that. Or with her surprise. “Oh. Okay.” She frowned. “I’m probably going to hate myself for asking this, but just what did you have in mind?”
“I was going to come clean, tell you who I really was and what I do for a living. After that, the ball would sort of be in your court.” He paused, adding, “Which is where it is now.”
“Oh, don’t you dare,” she told him. “There are a million things going on right now, many of them apparently very bad things, and what I don’t want on my mind is any thought of restarting a relationship with a man I barely know. Less than barely.”
He almost smiled, but murmured, “Got it. Bad timing.”
“To say the least.” She made a determined effort and pushed all that out of her mind. “I need to talk to Jessie. You need to talk to Jessie. If she saw a spirit that warned her about a killer, and I’m having dreams about a killer, bad enough. Then you come to town and right off the bat find a body? A body that matches up in some very unpleasant way with a recent dream of mine? It all has to be connected.”
“In which case, you’re right. We need to talk to Jessie.”
“And I have no idea where she is,” Emma said. “Except that she’s out there looking for something, for a secret that might very well be what the killer most needs to protect.”
TWELVE
Victor Rayburn was parked outside the newspaper office, waiting for Nellie to come out and join him, when he saw Emma, with her dog and a tall stranger, emerge from the inn and begin to walk slowly toward the downtown area. They were a couple of blocks from his position and on the other side of Main Street, but he could see them clearly enough.
The man might be a stranger to him, he decided, but not to Emma. She looked fairly inscrutable, and that meant she was on guard if not actually on the defensive.
He’d seen the look more than once over the years. A very private person, their Emma.
The stranger also wore an unreadable expression, but something about the way h
e moved told Victor he was more than a little tense. Accustomed to weighing up people, he saw a big man who was physically powerful and comfortable in his skin, with a straight posture that was possibly ex-military—
When that thought surfaced, Victor remembered that Dan Maitland had mentioned that the hiker who’d found what was left of a woman’s body on Tuesday was ex-military. A very experienced hiker, way more prepared than most who chose to explore the wilderness around Baron Hollow. But Dan had been most surprised, Victor knew, by the fact that the hiker was the writer staying at Rayburn House.
Dan had supposed out loud that writers surely came in all shapes and sizes, but this one still surprised him.
Surprised Victor too. If, that was, it was the writer he was looking at now.
Frowning, he tapped long fingers against the steering wheel and watched the couple until they passed him and continued on their way down Main Street.
Something to worry about? He wasn’t sure. Wouldn’t be sure until he found out just who the stranger was.
He hated complications.
ANOTHER TYPICAL SUMMER storm had broken not long after Emma and Navarro had returned from lunch—that being an excuse both had grasped to get out of the inn and do something until Jessie showed up.
“We could go looking for her. I could,” Navarro suggested.
Bluntly, Emma replied, “Does your ability help you find the living as well as the dead?”
“No.”
“Then looking for her is a waste of time. She took her backpack when she headed out, as usual, and all I can tell you is that nobody seems to see her in town, or up on the trails. I’ve asked.”
“And you still refuse to tell me what, specifically, she’s looking for?”
She watched him reach up to rub one temple slightly and decided he wasn’t even aware of the action. Clearly, though, storms bothered him. “It isn’t my story to tell.”
“Emma—”
“It’s her story to tell, if and when she wants to tell it. I promised to keep her confidence, and I take my promises seriously.”
“Note to self,” he murmured, then said, “If she’s investigating anything that could threaten the murderer, then she’s in deadly danger, Emma.”
“Don’t you think I know that? But I won’t break a promise. Because if you’re wrong—and you have no proof you aren’t—then breaking that promise could destroy what little trust exists between my sister and me.”
Navarro didn’t remind her again what that promise could cost; in his experience, family meant complications and illogical decisions based on emotion, and he knew better than to waste his time trying to untangle that.
“Headache?”
He looked at Emma, frowned, then realized what he was doing and stopped rubbing his throbbing head. Since they were alone in this small sitting room, he said, “Psychics are often sensitive to storms. All that electrical energy in the air. It affects us in different ways, but almost always dulls our abilities—and, in my case, also gives me a pounding headache. On the level of a migraine.”
“Lying in a dark room might help,” she offered.
He wondered if it was concern for him or just her desire to be rid of him that sparked the suggestion, and was afraid he knew the answer.
“It doesn’t,” he said briefly.
“Meds?”
“No. This sort of headache doesn’t respond to anything except the end of the storm.” Thunder boomed, and he winced.
Wondering if a distraction might help his headache—and her worries about her sister—Emma said, “You said something about not having your psychic abilities all that long. Not born with them?”
“No.”
“Neither was Jessie, I think. At least, she never showed any signs until our mother died.”
“Was she close to your mother?”
Emma thought about it, and nodded. “Yeah, she was. Neither of us was close to our father, and I was…a solitary child happiest on my own. I guess Jessie was closer to Mom. And she was two years older than me, so Mom’s death probably hit her harder.” Emma felt a pang when she said that, realizing that she should have known, not merely guessed, how her sister had felt over the loss of her mother.
They had never talked about it.
Navarro nodded. “That trauma is probably what turned her from a latent to an active psychic.”
“A latent?”
He gave up the pretense and rubbed both temples, but answered her because talking at least didn’t make the headache worse. Much. “Some people believe and some of the science we have strongly suggests we’re all born with latent psychic abilities; it’s just that we never need them or nothing ever happens to…turn them on.”
“And trauma does that?”
“Often. Physical, emotional, or psychological trauma. The death of someone close is a common traumatic trigger. Losing her mother may have been Jessie’s.”
“What was yours?” she asked, unable to fight the curiosity.
“I got shot,” he replied matter-of-factly. “In the head.”
“WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” Sam Conway, owner and editor of Baron Hollow’s one newspaper, The Daily Ledger, stood in the doorway of Nellie Holt’s small office, frowning at her. “I know you come and go pretty much as you please, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here on a Friday afternoon.”
Nellie waited out a deep, rolling rumble of thunder, then said, “Well, look out there; it’s pouring. Vic had business after we had lunch earlier; then the storm came. I was bored at home and decided I might as well come back in and work.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “I wasn’t aware you had a story going.”
“Nothing as defined as a story,” she told him wryly. “Just a few questions and an itch on the back of my neck.”
Conway’s expression turned wary. “The last time you had an itch, I nearly got sued.”
“Is it my fault a certain town commissioner had a conflict of interest and didn’t recuse himself from an important vote?”
“No, but it’s your fault he got caught.”
Nellie smiled. “Yes. It was.”
Conway sighed. “So what is it this time? The itch?”
“Jessie Rayburn.”
“What about her?”
Nellie gestured toward her computer. “I’ve been looking into the last fifteen years of Jessie’s life, after she left Baron Hollow.”
Conway leaned against the doorjamb and folded his arms, deciding not to ask why. Nellie had an itch; that would have been reason enough for her. “And?”
“And she did a damned thorough job of disappearing for most of that time. Far as I can determine, she didn’t have a job, a bank account, a home or apartment, or pay taxes for at least ten of those years. She was either totally off the grid or using another name.”
“How did you—”
“Don’t ask.”
He decided not to. What he didn’t know he could deny later, and with a clear conscience too. “Okay. And then?”
“Then, a few years ago, she signed on with an outfit called Haven.”
“Never heard of it.”
“No, neither had I. Not really a company, more like an organization. They aren’t secretive, exactly, but they are…discreet. They’ve done a good job of keeping their activities out of the news. But there’s been some buzz within law enforcement, and I have a few contacts. What I found out is that Haven is a civilian organization that more or less mirrors a very specific unit within the FBI.”
He blinked. “FBI? Jesus, Nellie—”
“Oh, don’t worry. They’ve teamed up on a few investigations when big task forces were involved, but it looks to me like Haven operates completely independently of the FBI. Sometimes they work for fees, but the whole outfit is bankrolled by a very wealthy businessman named John Garrett. He’s kept a low profile, especially for a guy who’s worth a few billion dollars.”
Conway could feel himself begin to sweat. A nice little newspaper in a nice litt
le town—that was all he’d ever wanted. A newspaper with pleasant articles about nice people doing nice things in that nice little town.
Had that really been too much to ask?
Nellie laughed. “You’re regretting offering me this job, aren’t you?”
“It crossed my mind. More than once.” He sighed. “So Jessie works for this Haven outfit. So? What is it they do?”
Very deliberately, Nellie said, “Well, mostly they investigate crimes. Violent crimes. Like murder.”
After counting to ten silently, Conway said, “Last I heard, we had cops to do that sort of thing. And other law enforcement agencies. Like the FBI.”
“Apparently, we’ve got Haven too. Or can have them, if a case fits within their areas of expertise. I’m not clear on all the details, not yet, but it looks like each of their…I don’t know, agents, detectives, operatives, whatever, is a licensed private investigator, with at least some law enforcement training.”
“You’re still talking about Jessie?”
Nellie ignored that. “They’re based somewhere near Santa Fe, but with John Garrett’s resources, that doesn’t mean a thing in terms of how widely their reach extends. They’ve got about three jets at their disposal, and I’ve found evidence of their involvement in police or FBI investigations in at least six states. And that’s just what I’ve been able to find today. Since lunch.”
“Stop bragging; I know you’re fast.”
“Just reminding you. I could use a raise.”
“Jessie’s a private detective?” Conway couldn’t get past that. “Jessie?”
“Wild, huh?”
“I’ll say. She was a couple of years behind me in school, but even so, I knew she had a…reputation.”
Interested, Nellie said, “I heard the same thing, but never could trace it back to anything specific. Do you know?”
“No. Just heard she was…up for anything.”
Nellie made a rude sound. “Well, if that’s all it was, I’m betting some guy she turned down before he could get to second base lied through his teeth that he made a conquest. That’s how most wild teenage girls get that reputation.”
