by Kay Hooper
“Dan, no!”
Emma saw Navarro move faster than she’d ever seen a man move, reaching the back porch of the cabin, then the door, and kicking it in even as she heard the crash of the front door also giving way beneath someone’s determined foot.
He disappeared through the doorway.
Gunshots, terrifyingly loud.
So many.
Emma didn’t realize she was holding her breath until, in the stark silence, she heard Nellie speak.
“Well, it’s about goddamned time. That son of a bitch was planning to cut my throat and stuff me in his freezer!”
Emma hurried to the rear doorway of the cabin, seeing nothing at first except Navarro, standing just inside, his gun lowered.
Safe.
She took a deep breath, so utterly relieved that it told her everything she needed to know.
“You’re lucky we got here at all,” the brunette “researcher” told Nellie severely. “Next time tell somebody where you’ll be when you decide to go off and look for a killer.”
“Pot, meet kettle,” her partner murmured.
“I did not go off looking for that killer,” she said to him. “I just found him, is all.”
“Uh-huh.”
Nellie frowned at the enigmatic byplay. “I didn’t know he was a killer. Jesus. I just came up here because I was pretty sure it’s one of the last places Jessie was. She’d asked me at the festival if I’d ever been to Victor’s cabin, and I told her it was really Dan’s, something that seemed to shock her. So I came up here to look around. He came in not two minutes later and surprised the hell out of me.” She sat down suddenly on a rustic chair behind her.
She was very pale, Emma realized. Taking several more steps into the cabin, she felt her own face drain of color.
Dan Maitland, a knife in one lifeless hand and his service revolver lying not far from the other, lay only a few feet away from her. He had been shot at least three times in the chest.
The male “paranormal researcher” said to Navarro, “Did you have to kill him?”
“Yes,” Navarro said. “I did.”
The blond man studied Navarro for a moment, then nodded and said calmly, “Good enough for me.”
Officer Neal was also just inside the cabin’s front door, his gun drawn, face ashen. “I saw,” he said hoarsely. “I know…he would have killed Miss Holt. Or one of you. But…I don’t understand.”
“Yeah,” the blond man said, still calm, “the report’s gonna be a bitch. But everybody’ll know the truth in the end.”
Steadily, Nellie said, “Thank you—Hollis, isn’t it? And Reese?”
“Hollis Templeton. He’s Reese DeMarco.”
Navarro said, “And they’re FBI. Special Crimes Unit. Damned Bishop. I specifically asked him if he had agents here.”
“And I’m sure he neatly avoided the question,” Hollis said with sympathetic understanding. “He’s like that, you know. Even with us. Never shows anybody the cards up his sleeve.”
Emma was baffled by that, but all she could think to say was, “I didn’t think you guys had jurisdiction.”
“Hence the undercover jazz,” Hollis told her. “We’re here very, very unofficially. But our list of missing hikers covers people who came here across state lines, so assuming we find the bodies Chief Killer here must have buried somewhere about, I expect Bishop will fix things so it’s all nice and legal.”
“Bishop?” Emma finally thought to ask. Her mind seemed to be working very sluggishly.
“Their boss,” Navarro explained. “Remember, I told you about him. Special Crimes Unit chief. And a man who usually gets what he wants.”
“Oh.” Emma decided to let that sink in.
Nellie said, “Well, whoever you are, thank you.”
“Thank Jessie,” Hollis said. “She led us here.”
Emma was more than a little startled. “You saw her? Is she here? Can you still see her?”
Hollis shook her head. “Afraid not.”
“Then where is—”
“Out here.” Navarro was standing on the small back porch, moving to make room for Emma as she joined him. “They’re all out here.”
She stood beside him for a moment, utterly motionless. And then her hand crept into his, and she leaned into him.
“Oh, my God,” she murmured. “Is every one—?”
“I think so. No…I’m sure. Every one.”
Stretching out before them, covering almost all the clearing between the cabin and the woods, was at least an acre filled with rosebushes of all colors, blooming gloriously.
“His flowers,” Navarro said. Every one a grave.
IT WAS NAVARRO who found the box, searching the small cabin until he found the tiny lightning bolt scratched into the flagstone hearth. He immediately reached up into the chimney and brought out the box filled with trophies.
“What’s the lightning bolt mean?” Nellie asked, almost absently, as she looked at what the box contained.
“Haven,” Navarro said. “A sign we all use.”
“She must have slipped in here again and again to search,” Emma murmured, looking at the box that was filled with driver’s licenses and student ID cards, locks of hair and pieces of jewelry.
So many trophies. So many innocent victims.
She saw the little dream catcher earring and caught her breath, a sudden memory slamming into her. Jessie letting her borrow the earrings because they’d belonged to their mother, one of them torn from her earlobe in the attack and the other lost somewhere…
Low, Navarro asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat. “Just…remembering something. Tell you later.”
He nodded.
Still studying the trophies, Hollis mused, “I wonder if he caught her in here, or went after her somewhere else? This isn’t where he held them; that’s obvious. There has to be another place. But whichever it was, Jessie had time to hide the box. It must have driven him crazy to realize his trophies were missing. And I’ll bet it never occurred to him that she’d hidden them right here in his own cabin.”
Emma drew a breath. “I don’t want to know if he tried to make her tell him. Before he was done with her. Don’t anybody tell me that, okay?”
“No,” Navarro said, reaching for her hand. “Nobody will tell you that. Just remember that, in the end, Jessie stopped him. And she brought us here to find them. All of them.”
“IT WAS A favor,” Victor said, his face still gray with shock, and maybe something else. “Years ago, he asked me if he could put up a cabin out here, just for…fishing. A place he could get away from town, where he could be alone. He said—”
Guessing, Emma said, “He said you owed him. For keeping quiet about what you did to Jessie.”
Navarro looked at her, but kept his mouth shut. They were all three standing off to the side of the cabin, watching the swarm of state police crime scene people and FBI agents and God only knew who else.
Excavating Dan Maitland’s rose garden.
Victor half nodded, but said defensively, “All I did was keep filling her glass. It was wrong as hell, yeah, I admit that, and worse because I did it just for fun, because it amused me to watch her get so drunk she could hardly talk—but I didn’t know what they planned to do later. I never would have been a part of that.”
“But you were a part,” Navarro said. “She was barely seventeen and you got her drunk deliberately. Then you watched them take her upstairs.”
“To sleep it off, I thought. I swear. It wasn’t until a few years later when Peter got drunk one night and started rambling that I realized they had raped a girl upstairs. Him and Kenny and Dan. He kept saying Jessie would never forgive him for it. That you would never forgive him.”
Emma shook her head and spoke steadily. “Peter was one of Jessie’s friends. He never would have…done that on his own.”
“Like dogs in a pack,” Navarro said. “People do things in a group they’d never do alone.�
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Emma wasn’t sure if she was strong enough to admit that it had been her who had been brutalized that night, so she kept up the fiction that it had been her sister, for now, at least. In a way, honoring the burden Jessie had carried for her.
“But you never checked on her that night. Never saw to it that she got home all right. Did you even think about her the rest of the night, Victor, or did you go off with some other girl who was maybe a little bit older and a little less drunk and not your cousin?”
He let out a rough sigh, but didn’t look away from her accusing gaze. “All right, I was eight kinds of a bastard that night, and I should have been looking out for Jessie. And for you—though I at least made sure you weren’t drinking anything but soda. Then, later…I sort of lost track of you. I thought you’d gone home. I told Jessie that, and told her how sorry I was, when she finally confronted me about it.”
“At the festival,” Emma said.
Victor nodded. “I didn’t ask her forgiveness, but I did tell her I was sorry. I told her I believed, for what it was worth, that the men who had hurt her all those years ago had paid in their different ways, for what they’d done. Kenny killed himself just a couple of years afterward, and nobody will ever convince me that wasn’t why. Peter became an alcoholic, and his life pretty much went to shit; his liver’s shot now and it’s only a matter of time. Only Dan…”
“Only Dan Maitland seemed to have put it behind him,” Navarro said.
Victor frowned. “Yes. And no. He didn’t seem to think about it, to let it affect his life, yet there were times, like with the cabin, when he…used it. Not often, maybe half a dozen times in fifteen years. He didn’t say in so many words that I owed him, or that I was just as guilty as he was in what happened to Jessie. But he somehow made me remember, and feel guilty.
“This time, it was something that didn’t matter to me anyway. The land was good for nothing, really; I needed Emma and Jessie’s acreage to add to what I had to make a parcel large enough to maybe appeal to developers. Emma was emphatic in saying no, and I had no reason to suspect, then, that Jessie would ever come back to Baron Hollow. So I told him he could put up a cabin if he wanted.”
Navarro said, “And how long was it before he hinted that you should deed this bit of land over to him?”
“Couple of years.” Victor’s mouth twisted. “I probably would have done it, if Jessie hadn’t come home. But I’d been stalling him, hoping I could convince Emma to sell out. Then Jessie came home, and I figured I had a shot at getting her land.”
Emma stared at him wonderingly. “It never occurred to you that she might be scarred by what happened to…her…fifteen years ago—and blame you for it?”
“Not until we talked at the festival. I didn’t know her memories had been fuzzy, Emma, that she thought that I’d been the one that night to…attack her. Hell, I didn’t know she blamed me for anything other than egging her on to drink too much.”
Emma shook her head, but said, “So you gave permission for Dan to build the cabin, and never bothered to visit it later?”
“No. When the tax appraisal came in higher than I expected, I asked the appraiser, and he said there was a pretty nice little cabin on the land, close to the creek. So, higher value, higher taxes. I wasn’t happy about that, and I told Dan if he was going to use the land, he was damned well going to pay the taxes. I expected him to get pissed about it, actually, but he just wrote me a check, and cheerfully too.”
“He didn’t want you focusing on the land,” Navarro said. “Didn’t want to make trouble, make you curious. As long as he believed he could persuade you to deed it over to him, it was in his best interests not to make waves.”
“Yeah, I realize that. Now. And if I’d had any idea at all what the sick bastard was doing out here, I never would have told him that I expected to be able to persuade Jessie to sell me her land. Or that I already had a developer interested.”
Navarro said, “You threatened his secret. But he still believed he had some power over you—as long as Jessie was out of the way.”
“I thought she’d just leave,” Victor murmured. “Sell the land to me and leave. She never really belonged here. This place, this town, was too small to hold her.”
Emma was silent for a long moment, watching the crime scene technicians work, then brought up a last, baffling point. “Victor, what do you know about that tattoo of Dan’s?”
“The rose tattoo on his forearm? He told me once it was to honor his college girlfriend, but it was a pretty creepy homage—which is more understandable now that I know what he’s been doing all these years.” Victor shook his head. “A rose encased in a cage of thorns. Very distinctive.”
“He didn’t show it off,” she murmured.
“No, he usually wore long sleeves,” Victor agreed. “Even in summer. I never asked him why.”
Emma exchanged looks with Navarro, and she knew he was wondering what she was herself. Because surely, in all the years since, she would have seen Dan Maitland’s bare forearm. Had her mind protected her to the extent that she had been literally blind to it?
“It’s a powerful thing, the human mind,” Navarro said. “It knows how to protect itself.”
“It was that simple,” she murmured.
“It usually is simple, when you get to the truth,” Navarro said. “Jessie went looking for the men she believed had scarred her life, but the skills of a trained investigator sent her off on a different path.”
“And she found a killer,” Hollis said, joining them. “Happens to me all the time.”
JULY 10
“The forensics team will be here for days if not weeks,” Navarro reported. “And it’s only the cops and a dozen private security guards keeping the media at bay. More or less.”
“How’s Emma doing?” Maggie asked.
“She’s…holding it together,” Navarro replied. “With so much hitting her at once, I half expected her to just shut down, but she’s stronger than that. She still isn’t sure about going public, but…horrific as it all is, she wants to remember, and face it all, and then put it behind her.”
“You know I can help,” Maggie said.
“I know. And I’ll tell Emma about that. But my hunch is that she’ll want to go it alone.”
“Not quite alone. You’re staying, aren’t you?”
He answered immediately, calm. “I’ve decided to take some of my leave time. A few weeks, maybe. We’ll see. With Maitland gone, maybe Baron Hollow will turn out to be a nice little town, after all.”
“Okay. Keep in touch.”
“I will. Thanks, Maggie.”
Maggie Garrett hung up the phone.
And smiled.
HAVEN OPERATIVE AND SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT AGENT BIOS
HOLLIS TEMPLETON, FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special agent, profiler-in-training
Adept: Medium. Perhaps because of the extreme trauma of Hollis’s psychic awakening (see Touching Evil), her abilities evolve and change much more rapidly than those of many other agents and operatives. Even as she struggles to cope with her mediumistic abilities, each investigation in which she’s involved seems to bring about another “fun new toy” for the agent.
Appearances: Touching Evil, Sense of Evil, Blood Dreams, Blood Sins, Blood Ties, Haven
JESSIE RAYBURN, HAVEN OPERATIVE
Job: Investigator
Adept: Medium. Also shares an uncertain one-way telepathic link with her sister. Jessie is not especially strong as a medium, and so is unnerved by all the spirits she sees when she returns home in search of answers about her past.
JOHN GARRETT, COFOUNDER OF HAVEN
Job: Oversees the organizational duties of running Haven, and makes certain all equipment, information, and assets are ready when his people require them.
Adept: He is not psychic, but possesses a unique understanding of those who are.
MAGGIE GARRETT, COFOUNDER OF HAVEN
Job: Handles the operatives and invest
igators who work for Haven, overseeing their training and, even more, monitoring their emotional and psychic welfare, both at base and when they’re in the field.
Adept: An exceptionally powerful empath/healer, Maggie has the ability to literally absorb into herself the emotional and even physical pain of other people, in a sense speeding up their healing processes and helping them to cope with extreme trauma. The act of doing so requires that she give of herself, give her own energy and strength to the person she’s helping.
NOAH BISHOP, FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Unit chief, profiler, pilot, sharpshooter, and trained in martial arts
Adept: An exceptionally powerful touch-telepath, he also shares with his wife a strong precognitive ability, the deep emotional link between them making them, together, far exceed the limits of the scale developed by the FBI to measure psychic talents. Also possesses an “ancillary” ability of enhanced senses (hearing, sight, scent), which he has trained other agents to use as well. Whether present in the flesh or not, Bishop always knows what’s going on with his agents in the field. Always.
REESE DEMARCO, FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special agent, pilot, military-trained sniper; has specialized in the past in deep-cover assignments, some long-term
Adept: An “open” telepath, he is able to read a wide range of people. He possesses an apparently unique double shield, which sometimes contains the unusually high amount of sheer energy he produces. He also possesses something Bishop has dubbed a “primal ability”: he always knows when a gun is pointed at or near him, or if other imminent danger threatens.
TONY HARTE, FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special agent, profiler
Adept: Telepath. Not especially strong, but able to pick up vibes from people, particularly emotions.
PSYCHIC TERMS AND ABILITIES
(As Classified/Defined
by Bishop’s Team and by Haven)
Adept: The general term used to label any functional psychic; the specific ability is much more specialized.
