Dream Man

by Linda Howard

  She continued watching, and became a little drowsy again. She felt herself begin to give in to the fatigue, effortlessly sliding into a light doze even though she tried to remind herself to stay awake for the rest of the newscast——

  “… NADINE VINICK …”

  Marlie jerked violently as the name blared both inside and outside of her head, her inner awareness amplifying the name just spoken by the television announcer. She struggled to an upright position on the couch, unaware of having slumped over as she dozed. Her heart pounded frantically against her ribs and she heard her own panicked breathing, fast and shallow, as she stared at the screen.

  “The Orlando police aren’t releasing any information about the stabbing murder of Mrs. Vinick, as the slaying is still under investigation.”

  A photo of the victim was flashed on the screen. Nadine Vinick. That was the woman Marlie had seen in the vision. She had never heard the name before, but there was a strong sense of recognition, too strong to ignore. Just hearing the name spoken on television had been like a bullhorn sounding in her head.

  So it was true, it was real. All of it.

  The knowing was back.

  And it would tear her life apart again if she did anything about it.

  On Monday morning Dane stared at the stark photographs of the murder scene, examining each minute detail over and over as he allowed his thoughts free range, hoping that some crucial, previously unnoticed item would slip into focus, something that would give them a direction, any direction. They had nothing to go on, damn it, absolutely nothing. A neighbor across the street had heard a dog bark around eleven, she thought, but it had stopped and she hadn’t thought anything else about it until they had questioned her. Mr. Vinick had definitely been at work; he had been helping another dockman unload a trailer, his time completely accounted for. The medical examiner couldn’t give an exact time of death, because unless there was a witness, such a thing was impossible, and the time frame unfortunately included the half hour before Mr. Vinick had gone to work. Dane still went with his gut feeling: Vinick hadn’t done it. According to his co-workers, Mr. Vinick had been completely normal when he had arrived at work, joking around. It would have taken a real monster, which Mr. Vinick had never given any indication of being, to have butchered his wife, coolly cleaned up and changed clothes, then gone to work as usual without any vestige of nervousness.

  They had no semen, though the medical examiner said that vaginal bruising indicated Mrs. Vinick had been violently penetrated. They had no fibers alien to the house, except for what the Orlando Police Department had brought in themselves. They had no hair samples, pubic or otherwise. They had no fingerprints. And they hadn’t found Nadine Vinick’s fingers.

  “We don’t have shit,” he muttered, tossing the photographs onto his desk.

  Trammell grunted in agreement. They were both tired; they had scarcely stopped in the forty-eight hours since they had first entered the Vinick home. And with every passing hour, the chances of finding Mrs. Vinick’s murderer diminished. Crimes were either solved fast, or they tended not to be solved at all. “Look at the rundown of their garbage.”

  He handed the itemized list over to Dane, who glanced down it. Typical garbage: food waste, empty milk cartons and cereal boxes, an assortment of uninteresting junk mail, plastic shopping bags from a couple of stores, used coffee filters, a pizza box with two remaining slices of pizza, soiled paper towels, an old shopping list, last week’s TV Guide, a couple of scribbled phone numbers, a voided check made out to the telephone company, various empty spray cans, about a week’s worth of newspapers—evidently the Vinicks hadn’t been into recycling. Nothing that was out of place or unusual.

  “What about the phone numbers?” he asked. “I just called both of them.” Trammell leaned back in his chair and propped his Italian-leather-clad feet on the desk. “One is the pizza delivery joint, the other is their cable company.”

  Dane grunted. He leaned back in his chair and propped his own feet on the desk. Dan Post instead of Gucci, and scuffed at that. What the hell. He and Trammell eyed each other across their four feet and two desks. Sometimes they did their best brainwork in this position.

  “Pizza delivery would involve a stranger coming to the house, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance the cable company would send out a repairman.”

  Trammell’s lean, dark face was thoughtful. “Even if a repairman had gone out to the house, it wouldn’t have been at night.”

  “And it would probably be too much to hope that Mrs. Vinick ordered a pizza that late at night, to pig out all by herself. The analysis of her stomach contents …” Dane stretched out his right arm and sifted through the scattered papers on his desk, finally plucking the one he wanted out of the mess. “Here it is. Doc says that she hadn’t eaten anything for at least four or five hours. No pizza. So the pizza in the trash was from earlier, at least lunch. Maybe a day or two.” For all the tantalizing possibilities, in his experience it never had been a pizza deliverer.

  “We can find out from Mr. Vinick exactly when they ordered the pizza.”

  “And the cable company can tell us if they had to send a repairman out to the Vinick’s house.”

  “So we have definitely one, and possibly two, strangers who have been to the house. A pizza delivery boy would have been kept outside, but he could still have seen her. A repairman might actually have been in the house.”

  “Women chat to repairmen,” Dane said, eyes narrowed as he followed the line of reasoning. “Maybe she asked him to please be quiet, since her husband worked third shift and was asleep in the bedroom. The guy says, yeah, he used to work third, too, and it was rough. Where does her husband work? And she tells him, even throws in what time hubby leaves, when he gets home. Why should she worry? After all, would the cable company have hired him if he hadn’t been an upstanding citizen? Women don’t think anything about letting a repairman in and spilling their guts to him while he’s working.”

  “Okay.” Trammell got a pad and propped it on his legs. “One: We check with Mr. Vinick on when the pizza was actually delivered, and maybe a description of the delivery boy.”

  “Delivery person. It could’ve been a girl. So could a cable repairman.”

  “Repairperson,” Trammell corrected. “Possible. If not, then we get a name from the pizza place and go from there. Two: Do the same with the cable company.”

  Dane felt better. At least they were working, had come up with a direction in which to start looking.

  His phone rang. It was the intercom line. He punched the button and lifted the receiver. “Hollister.”

  “Dane,” Lieutenant Bonness said. “You and Trammell come to my office.”

  “On our way.” He hung up the phone. “LT wants to see us.”

  Trammell swung his feet down and stood. “What have you done now?” he complained.

  Dane shrugged. “Nothing that I know of.” He certainly wasn’t the movie image of a rogue cop, but he did have a certain knack of stepping on toes and pissing off people. It happened. He just didn’t have much patience with bullshitters.

  The lieutenant’s office had two big interior windows; they saw the woman with the lieutenant, sitting with her back to the door. “Who is she?” Dane murmured, and Trammell shook his head. Dane rapped once on the glass, and Lieutenant Bonness gestured them inside. “Come on in, and close the door,” he said.

  As soon as they were inside he said, “Marlie Keen, this is Detective Hollister and Detective Trammell. They’re in charge of the Vinick case. Miss Keen has some interesting information.”

  Trammell took a seat on the other side of the lieutenant’s desk, away from Miss Keen. Dane leaned against the wall on her other side, out of her direct line of vision but where he could still see her face. She had barely glanced at either him or Trammell; nor was she looking at the lieutenant. Instead she seemed to be concentrating on the blinds that shaded the outside windows.

  A short silence fell as she seemed to be brac
ing herself. Dane eyed her curiously. She was so tense, he could almost see her muscles tighten. There was something vaguely intriguing about her, something that kept him looking at her. She wasn’t a beauty, though she was even-featured and certainly not hard on the eyes, but she sure didn’t do anything to attract attention. She wore plain black flats, a narrow black denim skirt that came down to midcalf, and a sleeveless white blouse. She had nice, clean-looking dark hair, but it had been pulled back into one of those severe French twists. About thirty years old, he guessed, his policeman’s eye making an automatic assessment. Hard to tell with her sitting down, but probably average height, maybe a little less. A little slimmer than he liked, about a hundred and twenty pounds; he preferred a woman to be soft rather than bony.

  Her hands were tightly clenched in her lap. He found himself watching them: slim, fine-boned hands, free of any jewelry, and a dead giveaway to her tension even if he hadn’t already noticed that her posture was stiff rather than still.

  “I’m psychic,” she said baldly. He barely kept himself from snorting in derision. His eyes met Trammell’s in a lightning-quick glance of shared thought: Another one of the lieutenant’s weird California ideas!

  “Last Friday night I was driving home from a late movie,” she continued in a flat little monotone that didn’t diminish the low, raspy quality of her voice. A smoker’s voice, he thought, except he’d bet the farm that she didn’t smoke. Uptight types like her seldom went in for the easy vices. “It was about eleven-thirty when I left the theater. I had just left the expressway when I began to have a vision of a murder that was taking place. The … visions are overwhelming. I managed to pull off the street.”

  She paused, as if reluctant to continue, and Dane watched her hands twist together until they were bloodless. She took a deep breath.

  “I see it through his eyes,” she said tunelessly. “He climbed in through a window.”

  Dane stiffened, his attention shifting to her face. He didn’t have to look at Trammell to know that his partner’s attention had sharpened, too.

  The recitation continued in a slow, evenly spaced cadence that felt oddly hypnotic. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, as if she were looking inward. “It’s dark in the room. He waits there until she’s alone. He can hear her in the kitchen, talking to her husband. The husband leaves. He waits until the husband’s car has pulled out of the driveway, then he opens the door and starts the stalk. He feels like a hunter after game.

  “But she’s easy prey. She’s in the kitchen, just pouring a cup of coffee. He pulls a knife from the set that’s sitting there, waiting for him. She hears him and turns. She says, ‘Ansel?’but then she sees him and opens her mouth to scream.

  “He’s too close. He’s already on her, his hand over her mouth, the knife at her throat.”

  Marlie Keen stopped talking. Dane kept his concentration on her face. She was pale now, he noticed, colorless except for the full bloom of her lips. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck lifting in response to that eerie present tense she was using when she spoke, as if the murder were happening right now.

  “Go on,” the lieutenant urged.

  It was a moment before she resumed, and her tone was even flatter than before, as if she could thus distance herself from the words. “He makes her take off her nightgown. She’s crying, begging him not to hurt her. He likes that. He wants her to beg him. He wants her to think that she’ll be okay if she just does as he says. It’s more fun that way, when she realizes—”

  She interrupted herself, leaving the sentence unfinished. After another moment she resumed. “He uses a condom. She’s grateful for that. She tells him thank you. He’s easy with her, almost gentle. She starts to relax, even though she’s still crying, because he isn’t hurting her and she thinks he’ll just leave when he’s finished. He knows how the stupid bitches think.

  “When he’s through, he helps her to her feet. He holds her hand. He bends down and kisses her cheek. She just stands there, until she feels the knife. He keeps the first cut shallow, enough to let her know what’s going to happen, so he can see the look in her eyes when she panics, but the cut shouldn’t be so bad that it slows down the chase. There wouldn’t be any fun in that.

  “She panics; she screams and tries to run, and the rage in him is let loose. He’s held it in check all this time, toying with her, enjoying her fear and humiliation, allowing her to hope, but now he can let it out. Now he can do what he came for. This is what he likes best, the complete terror he can see in her eyes, the feeling of invincibility. He can do anything he wants to her. He has total power over her, and he revels in it. He is her god; her life or death is his choice now, his decision. But it’s death, of course, because that’s what he enjoys most.

  “She’s fighting, but the pain and loss of blood have slowed her down. She makes it into the bedroom and falls down. He’s disappointed; he wanted the fight to go on longer. It makes him angry that she’s so weak. He bends over to slice her throat, to finish it, and the bitch turns on him. She’s been faking it. She hits at him. He’d meant to make it quick, but now he’ll show her, she should never have tried to trick him. The rage is like a hot red balloon, swelling up and filling him. He slashes at her over and over, until he’s tired. No, not tired. He’s too powerful to be tired. Bored. It was over too soon; she’s learned her lesson. She hadn’t been as much fun as he’d hoped.”

  Silence fell, After a few seconds, Dane realized that she was finished. She still sat stiffly in the chair, her gaze locked on the window blinds.

  Lieutenant Bonness seemed disappointed by Dane and Trammell’s lack of reaction. “Well?” he demanded impatiently.

  “Well, what?” Dane straightened away from the wall. Rage had slowly built inside him as he had listened to the flat, emotionless recital, but it was a cold, controlled anger. He didn’t know what the bitch’s motive was in coming here, but there was one thing he knew for certain, and he didn’t have to be any sort of mindreader to figure it out: She had been there. Maybe she herself had murdered Mrs. Vinick, maybe not, but she had been in that house when it had happened. At the very least she was an accomplice, and if she thought she could waltz in here with that bullshit story and get a lot of media attention while she jerked them around, she had tangled with the wrong guy.

  “What do you think?” Bonness snapped, irritated that he had to ask.

  Dane shrugged. “A psychic? Get real, LT. That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

  Marlie Keen stirred, slowly unknotting her hands as if the movement were difficult. Just as slowly she turned her head and looked at Dane for the first time. Despite his icy rage, his stomach muscles contracted abruptly in reaction. No wonder Bonness had been taken in! Her eyes were the deep, dark, fathomless blue of the ocean, the kind of eyes a man could look into and forget what he’d been saying. There was something exotic about them, other than the richness of color: a sort of otherworldliness that he couldn’t quite grasp. The expression in them, however, was easy to read, and Dane knew beyond a doubt that he hadn’t exactly overwhelmed her with his charm.

  She stood and faced him, squaring off with him as if they were two adversaries in the old West about to draw down on each other. Her face had gone calm and curiously remote. “I’ve told you what happened,” she said in a clear, deliberate voice. “You can believe it or not; it doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  “It should,” he replied just as deliberately.

  She didn’t ask why, though he paused for her to do just that. Instead her mouth twitched into a tiny, humorless smile. “I realize that I just became your prime suspect,” she murmured. “So why don’t I save your time and mine by telling you that my address is 2411 Hazelwood, and my telephone number is 555-9909.”

  “You know the routine,” he said with sarcastic admiration. “I’m not surprised.” He moved a step closer to her, close enough that she had to look up to maintain eye contact, close enough to intrude into her space and subtly
threaten her. “Or maybe you’re just reading my mind, since you’re psychic.” He put an unflattering emphasis on the last word. “Maybe you can tell me what comes next, unless you need a crystal ball to tell you what I’m thinking.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t take a mind reader, but then you aren’t very original.” She paused, then gave him that little smile again. “I have no intention of leaving town.” She wasn’t backing down, and his stomach muscles knotted again. At first glance she had looked like a drab, a nonentity afraid of making herself more attractive in any way, but the first look into her eyes had forcibly changed that opinion. The woman facing him didn’t lack self-confidence, and she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by him even though he was almost a foot taller. Something else stole into his awareness. Damn, he could smell her, a sweet, soft scent that had nothing to do with perfume and everything to do with female flesh. His involuntary reaction made him even angrier.

  “See that you don’t.” His voice was low and harsh. “Is there anything else you see in your crystal ball, anything you want to tell me?”

  “Of course,” she purred, and the sudden glint in her blue eyes told him that he’d walked right into that one. “Go to hell, Detective.”

  4

  DAMMIT, HOLLISTER!” BONNESS GLARED AT HIM. “DID YOU have to be such an asshole? The woman came in here trying to help, for Chrissake! She told us some amazing stuff—”

  “Amazing, my ass,” Dane interrupted, still aware of the fury boiling up inside, though now at least half of it was directed at himself. “If she didn’t do it herself, then she was there when it was done. She did it, or she’s an accomplice, and she’s daring us to catch her by feeding us this loony psychic story.”

  “She knew details that no one but the killer, or killers, could have known,” Trammell said tersely. “Hell, we’ve all heard the kind of crap those so-called psychics describe in their so-called visions. ’I’m getting an impression of the letter C,’” he mimicked. “’It’s something to do with the letter C. And it’s wet … Yes, yes, I’m definitely getting the impression of wetness. The body is close to water.’”