Raintree

by Linda Howard

  Hope was normal. If she knew what he was and what he could do, he would never again get close enough to touch her.

  The first crack of lightning split the sky and lit the night. The bolt danced across the black sky, beautiful and bright and powerful, splintering like veins of power. He felt it under his skin, in his blood. The next bolt was closer and more powerful. It was drawn to him, as he was drawn to it. He and the lightning fed one another. He drew the energy closer; he drank it in.

  The next bolt of lightning came to him. It shot through his body, danced in his blood. His eyes rolled up and back, and his feet left the sand so that he floated a few inches off the ground. He never felt more powerful than he did at moments like these, with the night cloaking him, the waves lapping close by, and the lightning running through his blood.

  Gideon didn’t just love the storm, he was the storm. Caught in the lightning show, an integral part of it, he drank in the power and the beauty. He gave back, as well, feeding the storm as it fed him. With the summer solstice coming, he didn’t need the extra jolt of power the storm provided, but he wanted it. Craved it. Standing on the beach alone, fortifying his body with the power he shared with explosive nature, he could not deny who he was.

  Raintree.

  The next thunderbolt hit Gideon directly and blew him back several feet. He felt not as if he had been thrown but as if he were flying. Flying or not, he landed in the sand on his ass, breathless and energized and invigorated. His heartbeat raced; his breath came hard. As the storm moved on, small slivers of lightning remained with Gideon, crackling off his skin in a way that was startlingly obvious in the darkness of night. White and green and blue, the electricity danced across and inside him. He lifted a hand to the night sky and watched the fading sparks his skin generated.

  Normal wasn’t his thing, and it never would be. Best not to waste his time wishing for things that would never happen, impossible things like being inside Hope the next time she lurched and trembled.

  If she scoffed at auras and crystals and lucky tokens, what would she think of him?

  SIX

  Wednesday—8:40 a.m.

  Gideon half expected Hope to be far, far away from her mother’s shop by the time he arrived at The Silver Chalice to pick her up. She’d had time to think about last night. She could be downtown, filing a report against him or requesting a transfer. Maybe she was on her way back to Raleigh, though to be honest, she didn’t look like a runner. Still, it was unlikely that she would continue on as if nothing had happened.

  Again she surprised him. She was waiting out front, outwardly casual, a coffee cup in one hand. As usual, she was dressed conservatively, in a gray pantsuit and white tailored blouse that would look plain on any other woman but looked incredibly hot on Hope Malory. Did she know that those tailored trousers she thought made her look professional only advertised how long and slender her legs were? And with those heels she wore—heels that were probably intended to make her look even taller than she already was—she was a knockout. If she was wearing the charm he’d given her last night, it was well hidden, just as his was.

  “You shouldn’t be standing out in the open,” he said as he reached across and threw open the passenger side door.

  “Good morning to you, too,” Hope said distantly as she took her seat. “What’s the plan?” If she’d had the guts to actually look him in the eye, he wouldn’t have believed she was human.

  “I culled out four homicides, all of them in the Southeast, that share some similarities with the Bishop murder.”

  “All women?”

  He shook his head. “Three women, one man.”

  “Commonality?”

  “Similar weapon and souvenirs taken. Not always fingers and hair, but souvenirs in themselves are unusual enough to make them worth looking at. There were no witnesses, and no evidence to speak of. All the victims were single. Not just unmarried, but unattached romantically and without family living close by. That could be coincidence, but…”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Hope said coolly.

  “Neither do I.”

  He hadn’t seen Sherry Bishop’s ghost since yesterday, which didn’t mean anything. She might show up at any moment to feed him another tidbit of useful—or not so useful—information. Or he might never see her again, in which case he was on his own.

  He glanced at Hope. Not as on his own as he would like to be. Pretty and intriguing and smart as Hope Malory was, he didn’t need or want a partner. Why was she still here? In forty-eight hours he’d tried to antagonize her and then to make her his friend. He’d disabled her car, saved her life and made her come. She should either love him or hate him, and yet here she was, cool as ever.

  What would it take to rattle her?

  “I called a mechanic about your car. He’s going to meet us at the Hilton in ten minutes.”

  “Thanks,” she said coolly.

  “The lab analysis on Sherry Bishop should be in early this afternoon. Most of it, anyway. Once your car is taken care of, I figure we can go to the office and make some phone calls about these other murders while we wait for the report to come in.”

  “Fine with me. If we have the time I’d like a look at the file on Stiles, if you don’t mind. He could be behind yesterday’s shooting, and the blonde the bookstore clerk saw might have nothing to do with the case.”

  “Possible,” Gideon agreed. “If we do have a serial killer on our hands, she hasn’t done this before. She’s never stuck around and targeted the investigators.”

  “Maybe she’s scared because you’re so good.”

  “Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?”

  “Ah, you really are a star detective.”

  So…she wasn’t quite as cool and distant as she pretended to be.

  When they pulled into the Hilton parking lot, the mechanic was already there, waiting. Gideon parked close to Hope’s Toyota and killed the engine. As he started to leave the car, she said softly, “One more thing, Raintree, before the day gets under way. Lay a hand on me again and I’ll shoot you.”

  He hesitated with his hand on the door handle. “You mean you’ll file charges against me, right?”

  She looked him in the eye then, squarely and strongly. Yeah, she was entirely human, not altogether pleased with him, and more than a little rattled.

  “No, I mean I’ll shoot you. I handle my own problems, so if you thought you were going to send me crying to the boss asking for justice and a transfer, you were mistaken.”

  And how.

  “I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t care,” she continued, her voice low but strong. “Well, not much. I am curious, but not nearly curious enough to let this slide. From here on out, keep your hands to yourself if you want to keep them.” She opened the door and stepped out, dismissing him and effectively ending the conversation.

  Damn. Apparently he had himself a new partner.

  Tabby took long strides along the riverfront, anxious and twitchy and unhappy. Sherry Bishop’s funeral wouldn’t be held until Saturday, and even then, it was being held in Indiana. Freakin’ Indiana! What was she supposed to do, travel all that way on the chance that Echo would be there? No, she had to be here on Sunday. Here and finished with her part of the preparations.

  Time to be realistic. Time to look beyond what she wanted and concentrate on what had to be done. It was too late to get Echo first. If the Raintree prophet was going to see that something was about to happen, she’d already seen it. Maybe Echo wasn’t as powerful as advertised.

  Tabby had to focus on what she could do here and now, and dismiss what she couldn’t. Echo was nowhere to be found, at least not at the present time, but Gideon Raintree was right here in Wilmington, so close she could almost taste him.

  Raintree’s neighbors were too close and too nosy. There was always someone on the beach or on a nearby deck. Taking him at home would never work. She needed privacy for what she had planned. Privacy and just a little bit of time. She wouldn�
�t have all the time she wanted, but she definitely planned to have minutes with Raintree instead of seconds. Hours would be better, but she would take what she could get.

  Raintree and his partner had been in the police station most of the day, and she wasn’t stupid enough to try to take them there. Besides, she didn’t want this to be quick. She wanted to be looking into Gideon’s green Raintree eyes when she killed him. She wanted to be close enough to absorb any energy he emitted when he drew his last breath, and she certainly wanted a memento or two.

  Fortunately, she knew exactly how to draw him out of the safety of the police station and well away from home.

  The boardwalk by the river was crowded with tourists and a few locals. She scanned them all, one at a time. Someone here had to be alone. Not just by themselves at the moment, but truly and completely alone. Miserably isolated. Tabby scanned people quickly, dismissing one after another as inadequate for her purposes. And then her gaze fell on the person she’d been searching for.

  Alone, scared, separated from her loved ones. Uncertain, vulnerable, needy. Perfect.

  Tabaet Ansara smiled as she focused on the redhead’s shapely back and wondered if the woman had any inkling that she was about to die.

  Wednesday—3:29 p.m.

  “What do you mean, the computer chip is fried?” Hope all but shouted into the phone. “It’s practically a new car!” Just out of warranty, in fact.

  She listened to the mechanic’s explanation, which was in truth no explanation at all. He didn’t know what had happened. He only knew that a very expensive computer chip had to be replaced. Naturally, he didn’t have the part on hand. It would take a few days to get the new chip in and have it installed.

  She banged the phone down with a vengeance, and Raintree lifted his head slowly to look at her. “Bad news?”

  “I’m without a car for a few days.” She began to leaf through the yellow pages on her desk. “Who would you recommend I call about a rental?”

  “You don’t need a rental car,” Raintree said.

  “I’m not going to let you chauffeur me around town for days,” she argued. And her mother’s mode of transportation was an embarrassment. The car did get good gas mileage, but it was only slightly larger than a cigar box, and had a nasty habit of dying at stop signs and red lights.

  “How are you with a stick?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Standard transmission,” he said, lifting his gaze to her once again. “Can you handle it?”

  “Yes,” she said tersely.

  Raintree had taken her seriously this morning, she supposed, since he hadn’t touched her all day. Not inappropriately, not casually, not at all. That was what she wanted, right? So why was she still so on edge in his presence that she wanted to scream?

  “I’ll loan you my Challenger,” he said. “We’ll run by the house tonight and I’ll get you a set of keys.” When she hesitated, he added, “If Leon was without a car, I’d make the same offer to him.”

  A part of her wanted to refuse, but she didn’t. It would just be for a few days, after all. “Sure. Thanks.”

  Raintree sat well away from his computer, studying the thick file in his hands. They had the initial crime scene report from the Sherry Bishop case, such as it was, and were awaiting the coroner’s report at any moment. Another detective, Charlie Newsom, stuck his head in the office Raintree and Hope shared—at least for the moment. He looked at Hope, openly interested with those sparkling eyes and that killer smile. Charlie was probably one of the nice guys, not a stinker at all. He didn’t put her on edge in the least. “I ran that check on Stiles. He was locked up in the county jail last week for drunk and disorderly.”

  “He bonded out?” Gideon asked.

  Charlie shook his head. “Nope. He’s still there.”

  Which meant he couldn’t possibly have been the one to take a shot at Raintree—or her—yesterday.

  Gideon ran his fingers over the top photo of a woman killed in a rural part of the state four months ago. There were others just like it beneath, some with poor lighting, some from less gruesome angles, but this was the photo that spoke to him.

  Marcia Cordell had very little in common with Sherry Bishop. Marcia had been a thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher in a small county school. At the time of her death she’d been wearing a loose-fitting brown dress that might have been purposely chosen to hide whatever figure she had. She wouldn’t have been caught dead—or alive—with pink hair or a belly button ring. She’d lived not in an apartment but in a small house off a country road, a house she had inherited from her father when he’d passed on five years ago.

  What she and Sherry did have in common was that they were both single. Instead of filling her lonely nights with music and a job at a coffee shop, Marcia Cordell had filled her emptiness with other people’s children, two fat cats, and—judging by the photo on his desk—an impressive collection of snow globes from places she had never been. They’d also both been murdered with a knife that left a similar wound. Sherry had been killed by a slash to her throat, but Marcia had been stabbed half a dozen times before her throat had been cut. The angle and depth of the final wound was the same in both cases, though, and there was destruction at both scenes, as if the murderer had gone into a frenzy once the murders were done.

  And one of Marcia Cordell’s ears had been severed and taken.

  Investigations in understaffed jurisdictions were often shoddy and incomplete, but the sheriff’s office had done a fairly good job with this one. The case file was slim, but the sheriff was still actively pursuing the case and had been very cooperative over the phone. He’d invited Gideon to visit the crime scene, which had been well preserved, as Cordell had no immediate family and had left no provisions for her little house. Not that anyone was likely to want it after what had happened there.

  Was it possible that Marcia Cordell’s ghost was still there in that house, waiting for justice? Possible, but not necessarily likely. Still, this had been a particularly grisly murder, maybe even grisly enough to keep Marcia’s spirit around for a while. If Marcia Cordell knew he was determined to find the woman who’d killed her, would she be able to rest in peace?

  The stack of files on Gideon’s desk was disheartening. If he had the time, he could solve them all. He could find the bad guys, put them away, send the spirits of those who had been murdered to a better place. But dammit, there was so much darkness he couldn’t keep up with it all. One man couldn’t possibly fix the ills of the entire world. It was a world he couldn’t possibly bring a child into. He couldn’t fix it all, not for a child…not for Sherry Bishop and Marcia Cordell.

  “You okay, Raintree?”

  He hadn’t even heard Hope enter the office. “No,” he said. “I’m not okay. I think we have a serial killer.”

  Wednesday—11:17 p.m.

  Gideon hunkered down beside the body that lay atop the cheap carpet in a semirespectable hotel room. The victim’s red hair covered most of her face, but he could see more than enough. Like Sherry Bishop, this woman had been killed with a knife. Unlike Sherry Bishop, this woman’s death had not been quick. The scene looked more like the photos from the Marcia Cordell homicide.

  Lily Clark. According to her driver’s license she was thirty-one years old and had traveled here from a small town in Georgia for a week’s vacation. She’d checked in with a male friend on Saturday, but according to the man at the front desk, that man hadn’t been seen since Sunday afternoon. Clark had been seen in tears more than once since that time. Hope, of course, had immediately pegged the boyfriend as a suspect. Gideon already knew better.

  Two murder victims in three days was unusual for Wilmington. The fact that this one was a tourist was going to cause a ruckus.

  “She said my life wasn’t worth a nickel,” the ghost said softly. “And she was right. I didn’t live the way I should’ve. I existed, scared of something or other more often than not. I never even thought to be afraid of something like this.”


  “She was trying to torment you, Lily,” Gideon said gently. “Don’t let her continue hurting you now. Let everything she said to you go.”

  Lily Clark’s ghost shook her head in denial, unable to let anything go. “No, she was right. She said I was ugly even before she cut my face, and she said that death was best for me because no man would ever be able to love me.” The spirit of the dead woman sat on the side of the bed, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her lower lip quivering. Her form was more substantial than Sherry Bishop’s had ever been. She was likely to stick around for a while. “She was right,” the wraith whispered.

  Hope was interviewing the hotel manager, and uniformed officers were keeping everyone else out. For the moment, at least, Gideon and the ghost were alone. “No, Lily, she wasn’t right. Now, I want you to forget everything she said and concentrate on what you can tell me that will help me find her. Tell me about the woman who did this to you so I can get her off the streets. Tall and blond, you said. What can you tell me about the knife she used?”

  “It was old, I think. The blade was sharp, and the handle was silver. Did you see?” She pointed. “She cut off my little finger!”

  And this time she hadn’t waited until after death.

  “Was there an engraving on the handle?”

  “Yeah,” Clark said, a vague touch of enthusiasm in her voice. “I couldn’t tell what it said, though. It wasn’t English. When she was sitting on my chest and pointing the tip of the knife at my nose, I saw some old squiggly letters.” Her red hair swayed slightly. “They didn’t make any sense.”

  “And you never saw her before today?” Gideon said, repeating something Lily had told him when he’d first arrived on the scene.

  “I was such an idiot,” she wailed. “First I come here with Jerry, only to find out that he’s married, and then I let that awful woman into my hotel room. Of course, I didn’t know she was awful when I asked her in. She seemed so sweet when we met on the riverfront. We ran into each other, literally, and I spilled my lemonade all over her. I thought she’d be mad, but she just laughed. We got to talking. You know how it is. She was having boyfriend troubles, too, and we were going to go out tonight and have a few drinks and…” The ghost went still and looked at Gideon with a puzzled expression on her face. “Wait a minute. Is your name Raintree? Gideon Raintree?”