by Linda Howard
“Which narrows it down to the whole fucking state,” Dane finished. “That wasn’t a psychic vision she described; it was an eyewitness account. The lady was there when it happened, and she just placed herself at the top of my list.”
“She couldn’t have done it,” Bonness protested weakly, his disappointment plain.
“Not alone,” Dane agreed. “She wouldn’t have been strong enough.”
“We definitely should check this lady out,” Trammell said.
The lieutenant sighed. “I know you think it was a goofy idea, but psychics have really helped in some cases I’ve been involved in.”
Dane snorted. “As far as I can tell, a psychic is just a psychotic with a couple of letters missing.”
“All right, all right.” Bonness still looked unhappy, but he flapped his hand at them in dismissal. “See what you can find out about her.”
Trammell was right behind him as they walked back to their desks. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he muttered to Dane’s back.
“Whaddaya mean? You think I should have pretended to believe her?” “No, I mean you had a hard-on the size of a goddamn nightstick, and you were standing so close, you were about to poke her in the belly with it,” Trammell snapped.
Dane turned and glared at his partner, but he couldn’t think of any excuse to give. He didn’t know what had happened, only that from the minute she had turned those dark blue eyes on him, he’d had a boner so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it. He was still twitching. “Hell, I don’t know,” he finally said.
“If you’re that horny, partner, you’d better get the itch scratched before you get around her again. Either the lady’s very familiar with a knife, or she hangs out with someone who is. I wouldn’t want any of my body parts sticking out to draw her attention.”
“Stop worrying about my sex life,” Dane advised grimly. “We need to find out all we can about Marlie Keen.”
It had never made her angry before. Marlie was used to mingled disbelief and derision, but she had always felt an almost desperate need to make people believe, to convince them that she could help, that her claims were true. She felt no such need where Detective Hollister was concerned. She didn’t give a damn what that Neanderthal thought, assuming he was capable of such an advanced mental process.
Maybe it was because she had dreaded going to the police so much, with the full knowledge of how this could disrupt her carefully built life. Maybe it was simply that she had changed. But when he had been so insultingly dismissive, she had felt nothing but anger. She certainly wasn’t about to stay there and plead with him to believe her. She was already late to work, damn it, and though she had called in, she resented it that she had gone to so much trouble for nothing. She had put herself through the ordeal of recounting what she had seen, and that big jerk had called it bullshit!
Her movements were jerky as she negotiated the heavy traffic, and with sheer force of will she made herself calm down before she caused an accident. She had dealt with jerks before, many times. He was nothing new, except for the way he had moved so close to her, trying to intimidate her with his brute size. She had had to steel herself to face him, to allow him that close. He had used his masculinity as a weapon, knowing that any woman would feel threatened by a strange man looming over her like that, especially a man who looked as if he were hewn out of wood and ate nails for breakfast. In any good cop/bad cop routine, his looks would automatically make him the bad cop. No one in his right mind would expect leniency or consideration from that man.
She had almost panicked when he had moved so close. In her mind, she could still feel the heat his body had generated, overpowering the small space that had been between them. Furiously she wondered if he would have done that if she had been a man; her instinct said no. That was a tactic that men used only on women, the threat of touching. Odd that something so simple, so basic, could also be so frightening.
She shuddered. She couldn’t have borne it if he had touched her. She would have bolted like a total coward.
As late as she was, it was difficult to find a parking space at the bank where she worked. She had to circle the lot three times before a departing customer left an open slot that she managed to get to before someone else did. Then she sat in the car for several minutes, taking deep breaths and trying to achieve some sense of calm. She stared at the bank building, finding comfort in its solidity. Her job was such a nice, safe, passionless one, in accounting. She had chosen it deliberately, when she had moved here. Numbers didn’t bombard her with thoughts and feelings, didn’t ask for anything from her. Their qualities never varied; a zero was always a zero. All she had to do was align them into columns, feed them into a computer, keep track of their credits and debits. Numbers were always neat, never messy like human beings were.
And it felt good to support herself, even though she knew she didn’t have to. The small house she had made into a home had been bought outright for her, when she had decided that she wanted to live in Florida, on the opposite end of the country from Washington. Dr. Ewell would have arranged for her to receive a check each month, had she wanted; she hadn’t, preferring to finally stand alone, without all the support systems of the Association. Even now, all she had to do was pick up the telephone and tell Dr. Ewell that she needed help, and it would be provided. Though it hadn’t been his fault, hadn’t been anyone’s fault, Dr. Ewell was still dealing with his guilt over what had happened six years ago.
She sighed. She was paid by the hour; every minute she sat there was being deducted from her paycheck. Resolutely she pushed Detective Hollister out of her mind and got out of the car.
“Hey, doll, found anything interesting yet?” Detective Fredericka Brown, who answered only to “Freddie,” patted Dane on the head as she passed behind his chair. She was a tall, lanky, endearingly plain woman, with a habitually cheerful and amused expression that invited smiles. It was tough for a woman to be a cop in general, and a detective in particular, but Freddie had fit right in. She was blissfully married to a high school football coach, size huge, who looked as if he would tear limb from limb anyone who caused his Freddie the least upset. Freddie tended to treat all of the other detectives as if they were the teenage boys on her husband’s team, with a disconcerting blend of light flirtation and motherliness.
Dane scowled at her. “This should have been your case. We had the weekend off, damn it.”
“Sorry,” she said blithely, giving Trammell a smile of greeting when he looked up from the telephone that had been welded to his ear for most of the morning.
“How’s the tooth?” Dane asked.
“Better. I’m up to my eyeteeth in antibiotics and painkillers, no pun intended. It was an abscess, so now I’m having a root canal.”
“Tough.” The sympathy was sincere.
“I’ll live, but Worley’s doing all the driving while I have to take this stuff.” Worley was her partner. “Anything we can do to help, any leads we can run down? We have our own cases, but from what I’ve heard, the scene Saturday morning was straight out of a horror movie.”
“It wasn’t pretty.” An understatement if he’d ever made one. Freddie patted him again, this time on the shoulder, and went about her business. Dane turned back to his.
Detective work was mostly boring; it involved a lot of talking on the telephone, going through papers, or going out to talk to people race-to-face. Dane had spent the last few hours involved in the first two activities. Usually Trammell handled this part of the job better than he did, being more patient, but this time he had set himself to it with grim determination. What had happened to Nadine Vinick should never happen to anyone, but it really pissed him off that Marlie Keen had all but rubbed his nose in her knowledge of it.
“Got anything yet?” Trammell asked, frustration plain in his voice as he hung up the telephone. “I came up empty on both the pizza delivery and the cable company. The entire street had trouble with the cable, and it was repaired on the line, over a bl
ock away. It wasn’t necessary to enter any residence. And the pizza was delivered by a sixteen-year-old girl. Mr. Vinick is the one who paid her, anyway. Dead end.”
“Nothing here, either,” Dane muttered. “Yet.” Marlie Keen had never been arrested, had never even had a parking ticket, as far as he could find. He didn’t let that discourage him. Maybe “Marlie Keen” was an alias. If so, he’d eventually turn up that information. People could be tracked through Social Security numbers, tax returns, any number of means. He knew where she worked and what kind of car she drove. He’d already sent out various requests, such as for a record of calls she’d made and received; by the time he was finished, he’d even know her bra size.
He bet he could make a damn good guess at that right now: 34C. At first he would have guessed no more than a B cup, but that nunnish white blouse had been deceiving. He had noticed a tantalizing roundness—
Damn it! He had to stop thinking about sex, at least in connection with her. Every time he remembered that eerie, macabre tale she’d spun, he almost choked with rage. Nadine Vinick had endured unutterable hell before she’d died, and Marlie Keen, if that was her real name, was trying to turn it into a sideshow. He wouldn’t be surprised to get a call from the local media, asking if there was any truth to the rumor that the OPD was working with a psychic to find the murderer. If Marlie Keen wanted publicity, for whatever sick reason, her next move would be to notify the media herself.
Her gall still astounded him. He totally discounted that psychic shit; the only way she could have known the things she’d known was to have been there. He didn’t know if the murder had been played out exactly as she’d said, but the pertinent details of it had been dead on the money. The only way she would have had the nerve to bring herself to their attention was if she knew there was no evidence to link her to the crime. The murderer had been excruciatingly careful; forensics hadn’t turned up even the tiniest shred of alien material. Therefore, she had done it for the thrill of thumbing her nose at the police department, flaunting the details before them and knowing they couldn’t pin anything on her.
She hadn’t handled the knife herself; he was fairly certain of that. So the actual murderer was someone she knew, someone she was close to. A brother, maybe, or a boyfriend. Someone close enough to share torture and murder. He thought of her in bed with the bastard who had carved up Mrs. Vinick, and his stomach twisted.
She had made a mistake, taunting him with her knowledge. She was the thread that would lead him to the murderer, and he wouldn’t let go until he reached the end.
He stood up and reached for his jacket. “Let’s go,” he said to Trammell.
“Any place in particular?”
“To talk to Ms. Keen’s neighbors. Find out if she has a boyfriend.”
She didn’t. The neighbors on the left, retirees from Ohio, were certain of that. Bill and Lou, as they introduced themselves, described Marlie as quiet, friendly, and always accommodating about collecting their newspaper and mail whenever they visited their daughter back in Massillon, and feeding their cat. Not many neighbors were so friendly.
“Have you noticed anyone coming or going from the house? Does she have many visitors?”
“Not that I’ve seen, though of course, we don’t just sit and watch Marlie’s house,” Lou said with all the indignant righteousness of someone who did just that. “No, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed any visitors over there. Have you, Bill?”
Bill scratched his jaw. “Don’t think so. She’s just about the perfect neighbor, you know. Always speaks when we see her, don’t have her nose in the air like some. Keeps her yard neat, too.”
Dane frowned as he scribbled in the small notebook that every policeman carried. “Not any visitors?” he stressed. “Ever?”
Lou and Bill looked at each other and shrugged helplessly, shaking their heads.
“No family? Brothers, sisters?” More head shaking.
“Girlfriends?” he growled.
“No,” Lou repeated a bit testily. “No one. She even takes care of the yard work herself, instead of hiring a neighborhood boy. I’ve never seen anyone over there except for the mailman.”
Dead end. He was frankly puzzled by it. He glanced at Trammell and saw the small frown that said his partner was just as buffaloed. Men could be loners, but women seldom were. He tried another tack. “Does she go out much?”
“Not often, no. She sees an occasional movie, I think. I can’t believe she’s in any sort of trouble. Why, when Bill broke his leg two years ago, she’d stay with him whenever I had to go out.” Lou glared at him. Dane noticed that she was saving it all for him, rather than including Trammell in her bad graces.
He flipped his notebook shut. “Thanks for your help.” Some help.
The neighbors on the right had basically the same comments, except the lady of the house had two squalling rug rats hanging on her legs and couldn’t be expected to pay a lot of attention to the comings and goings next door. No, she’d never seen anyone visiting Marlie.
They went back to the car and got in, both sitting in silence and staring at 2411 Hazelwood. It was a neat, solid little bungalow, typical of houses built in the fifties, though it had been spruced up with a cool, sand-colored paint and enlivened with the kind of touches women put on their nests, the trim done in what he thought of as ice cream colors, which only women and gays knew the names for. The front porch was decorated with a couple of ferns and some pinkish flowers, all in pots hanging from hooks. So what had they just found out? That their most likely suspect sounded like some kind of nun?
“That big thud we just heard was us, hitting a blank wall,” Trammell finally said.
Dane scowled, but there was no denying it. He felt frustrated and angry, but underlying it was a certain … relief? Damn, what was wrong with him? He was feeling relieved because a murder case was turning into one big headache, and he couldn’t come up with anything on the best lead they’d had?
“She had to have been there,” he said. “She knew too much.”
Trammell shrugged. “There’s another possibility.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe she’s psychic,” he suggested lightly.
“Give me a break.”
“Then you explain it some other way. I can’t. I’ve been thinking about it, and nothing that we’ve been able to find out about her even hints that she’d be involved in something like this. Weird as it sounds, maybe there’s something to it.”
“Yeah. And maybe aliens are going to land on the White House lawn.”
“Face it, buddy. That neighbor lady is the type who peeps out the window every time a pizza delivery car goes down the street. If Marlie Keen went out, or had anyone over, you can bet it would have been noticed.”
“We still haven’t checked out her friends at work, who she has lunch with.”
“Yeah, well, let me know how it goes. I for one know how to recognize a dead end when I see one.”
5
SHE SAW HIM IMMEDIATELY WHEN SHE LEFT THE BANK. HE WAS alone in his car, just sitting there, watching for her. The late afternoon sunshine glinted off the windshield and prevented her from clearly seeing his face, but she knew it was him. Detective Hollister. Though she could really only discern the width of those heavy shoulders and the shape of his head, some primal sense of self-preservation, an alertness to danger, recognized him.
He didn’t get out of the car, didn’t call to her. Just watched her.
Marlie strode to her car, stonily refusing to react to his presence. When she pulled out of the parking lot, he pulled out right behind her.
He stayed there, tight on her rear bumper, as she threaded her way through the normal afternoon traffic. If he thought he could rattle her with this juvenile game, he was in for a surprise; her nerves had been tested in circumstances far more dire than this, and she had survived.
She had errands to run, things she would have done over the weekend if she hadn’t been overwhelmed by that nightmare vis
ion. She didn’t let his presence stop her; if he wanted to see what she did after work, he was in for a real thrill. She stopped at the cleaners, leaving a few soiled garments, picking up the clean ones. Next stop was the library, where she returned two books. Then she went to the neighborhood grocery store. At every stop, he parked as close to her as possible, twice right beside her, and imperturbably waited until she returned. When she came out of the grocery store, he watched as she wheeled the cart, loaded with four bags, to the back of her car. She put her foot on the cart to keep it from rolling while she unlocked the trunk.
He was out of the car and standing beside her almost before the sound of the car door slamming could alert her. Her head jerked up and he was there, as big and grim as a thunderstorm. His eyes were hidden by a pair of very dark sunglasses. Sunglasses had always made her vaguely uneasy. As before, his physical presence was as forceful as a blow. She had to restrain herself from automatically stepping back. “What do you want?” she asked in a cool, flat voice.
He reached out one big hand and effortlessly lifted a grocery bag from the cart into the trunk. “Just helping you with the groceries.”
“I’ve managed all my life without you, Detective, so I can manage now.”
“It’s no problem.” The smile he gave her was both humorless and mocking. He stowed the remaining three bags in the trunk beside the first one. “Don’t bother saying thank you.”
Marlie shrugged. “Okay.” Turning away, she unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel. The parking space in front of her was empty, meaning she didn’t have to back out; she pulled out through the space in front, leaving him to park the cart or do whatever he wished with it. She wasn’t in the mood to be gracious. She was tired, depressed, and angry. Worse than that, she was frightened. Not of Detective Hollister, as unpleasant as he was. Her fears were much deeper than that.
