by Kay Hooper
“Who says it's not what I want?”
“I do. Hell, you do. Look at your body language, Isabel. As soon as you decided to end the shop talk and get into more personal territory, you leaned back. Away from me. That's not as good as a sign, that is a sign. Your words say you're interested, but your body says stay away.”
“Dammit,” she muttered. “What was that I said earlier about you making a fair profiler? I'm changing my assessment. You'd make a very good one.”
“So I'm on target?”
“Well, let's just say you're not far off it. I am just not very good at this sort of thing.”
Rafe had to smile at her disgruntled tone. “You're a very confident woman, Isabel—almost always. Very sure of yourself. But right now, at this moment, you're scared. Why?”
She was silent, frowning down at the table.
“Something happened. What was it?”
“Look, this investigation is . . . different, that's all. Odd things are happening. My abilities seem to be changing. And I don't quite know what do to about it.”
“Have you reported this to Bishop?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . I don't know why not. Because I want to figure it out for myself.”
“And making a move on me seemed like a good way to do that?”
“Stop rubbing it in.”
“What?”
“My failure.”
Dryly, he said, “Who says you failed? Isabel, I realized I wanted you sometime yesterday. Early yesterday. Or possibly about ten minutes after we met. I also realized it was going to hellishly complicate the entire situation, so I've been doing my best not to think about it.”
“Maybe thinking about it would be good,” she said earnestly. “And doing something about it even better.”
“You're still leaning back in your chair,” he pointed out.
“I can lean forward.” But she didn't. She frowned again, honestly baffled.
“See?” Rafe said. “Conflicting signals. Even consciously, you're not sure what you want.”
With a sigh, she said, “Trust me to find myself attracted to the one man who isn't willing to take what he's offered, no questions asked. Keep this up, and I'll have to start believing in leprechauns. And unicorns.”
“Sorry about that. But I'm not a kid, Isabel. I'm a twenty-year veteran of the sexual wars, and I've learned a few things along the way. One being if you're going to get involved with a complicated woman, you'd better damned well know what the complications are. Ahead of time. Before you trip over them.”
“That does sound like bitter experience.”
“It was. Not bitter, really, but I learned a hard lesson. And it's more or less my own fault. You said the sort of energy that makes you psychic is something you have in common with our killer; well, I have something in common with him too. I like strong women. With strong, I've discovered, comes complicated, which can cause problems. Unless I know about the complications going in.”
“Okay. Well, I hear voices. There's that.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“I need coffee in the morning before I'm human. And cornflakes. I like cornflakes. I take really hot showers, always, so I tend to steam up the room. I hate silence in strange places, so I travel with a sound machine. Ocean waves. I have to have air-conditioning on full blast even in the dead of winter to sleep well. Oh—and I hate moonlight shining in the bedroom.”
“Isabel.”
“Not those sorts of complications, huh?”
“No.”
“Dammit.”
“If I were a profiler,” he said slowly, “making an educated guess, I'd say that your breezy manner and humorous attitude cover up a lot of pain. And I'm not talking about the headaches your voices give you. That evil face you saw—it really did change your life, didn't it?”
Their waiter placed coffee and dessert on the table and went silently away again, and still Isabel said nothing. She picked up a spoon and poked at her dessert, then put it down again.
“Still not ready to tell me?” He fixed his coffee the way he liked it, his gaze remaining on her face, trying to make his own posture and expression as relaxed and unthreatening as possible.
She sipped her coffee, then grimaced and dumped cream and sugar in before trying a second sip.
“Isabel?”
Abruptly, as if against her will, she said, “It was beautiful.”
“What was?”
“The face evil wore. It was beautiful.”
It was late when Ginny left the police station, much later than usual for her. And after talking to the other women and hearing how jumpy they were, she made a point of walking out to her car in the company of a couple of male officers who were also leaving. Though none of the guys had said anything openly to the female officers, Ginny had noticed that in the last week or so all the women had an escort coming or going.
She doubted any of the women were complaining. She certainly didn't; anytime she was outside alone, she tended to spend a lot of time looking back over her shoulder and jumping at shadows.
By tacit consent, neither of the men left her until her car was unlocked, the door open, and the interior light showing them all an empty, unthreatening little Honda.
“Lock your doors,” Dean Emery advised.
“You bet. Thanks, guys.” She got in and immediately locked the doors and started the car, absently looking after them until both reached and safely entered their own cars.
Not that the guys had to worry, really.
So far, anyway.
Ginny was hardly a profiler, but she did have a semester of Abnormal Psychology under her belt, and she vividly recalled the section about serial killers, especially since it had given her nightmares for weeks.
Very few serial killers murdered both men and women. There had been killers who targeted both male and female children or young people, but when the targets were adults, they were almost always one sex.
A homosexual serial killer targeted men or young males, and a heterosexual killer targeted women or girls, as a rule. Though some homosexual killers, or men who were insecure sexually and feared they might be homosexual, had been known to target women out of sheer rage. They didn't want to be whatever they were, and they blamed women for it.
The very rare female serial killers went after men, or apparently had so far—except in the rather frighteningly common cases of women poisoning children or other family members, when they tended not to differentiate between the sexes.
Have some soup, dear. Oh, it tastes funny? That's just a new spice I'm trying out.
Jesus.
The things people got up to.
Ginny pulled her car out of the lot and headed for home, still pondering, mostly because her mind refused to let go of the subject.
What did he look like? Did she pass him on the street every day? Did she know him? He was strong, very strong; the medical report on Tricia Kane said that he'd driven a large knife into her chest to the hilt.
Ginny shivered.
What kind of rage did it take to do something like that? And how had Tricia aroused it in him? Just by being blond and successful? Just by being female?
Just by being?
When Ginny had colored her bleached hair back to something approximating its natural dark brown a week or so before, not a soul at the station had laughed or even commented, and her friends said it was wise of her. No reason to take stupid chances, after all, not when she was a cop in the thick of things.
Her mother had been visibly relieved.
Her father had said at least it made her look less like a whore.
As she pulled her car into the driveway, Ginny felt all her insides tighten. He was home, and judging by the crooked way his car was parked, he had, as usual on a weekend, spent the afternoon drinking.
Shit.
Still in the car, she removed her holster and locked it securely away in the glove compartment. When she
got out, she locked the car up as well.
She never took the gun with her into the house. Never.
It was too tempting.
She went up the steps and used her key to let herself in, silently telling herself for the hundredth time that she had to get her own place, no matter what. And soon.
“Hey, little girl.” His voice was slurred, his mouth wet. “Where you been?”
Her own voice deadened, Ginny replied, “At work, Daddy,” and pushed the door closed behind her.
11
ISABEL LOOKED AT RAFE with a faint smile. “You didn't expect that, did you? That evil could be beautiful.” She wondered if he understood. If he could even begin to understand.
“No.”
“Of course not. It should be ugly, that's what everyone expects. Red eyes, scaly flesh, horns and fangs. It should look like it was born in hell. At least that. At least. It should breathe fire and brimstone. It should burn to the touch.”
“But it doesn't.”
“No. Evil always wears a deceptive face. It won't be ugly, at least not until it really shows itself. It won't look like something bad. That would be too easy to recognize. Too easy for us to see. Because the important thing, the thing evil does best, is deceive.”
“And it deceived you.”
She laughed, the low sound holding no amusement. “It wore a handsome face, when it first showed itself to me. A charming smile. It had a persuasive voice, and it knew all the right words to say. And the touch of it was kind and gentle. At least in the beginning.”
“A man. Someone you cared about.”
Isabel crossed her arms beneath her breasts, unconsciously adding yet another barrier between them, but she continued speaking in a toneless voice.
“I was seventeen. He was a little older, but I'd known him all my life. He was the boy in the neighborhood everybody depended on. If an elderly widow needed her yard mowed, he'd do it—and refuse payment. If anybody needed furniture moved, he'd offer to help. Stuck for a baby-sitter? He was there, always reliable and responsible, and all the kids—all the kids—adored him. The parents trusted him. Their sons considered him a buddy. And their daughters thought he walked on water.”
“Deceiving everyone.”
She nodded slowly, her gaze fixed on the table now, eyes distant. “The weird thing is, after taking all the time and trouble to deceive everybody around him for such a long, long time, when it came right down to it, it didn't take much at all to start revealing the beast inside.”
Rafe was very much afraid he knew where this was going, and it required an effort to hold his voice steady when he asked, “What did it take?”
“No. Just that. Just one little word.” She looked up, focused on him. “That was the beginning. He asked me to a school dance, and I said no.”
“What did he do, Isabel?”
“Nothing then. I told him I didn't feel like that about him, that he was more of a brother to me. He said it was a shame, but he understood. A few days later, I saw him in the bushes outside my house. Outside my bedroom. Watching me.”
“You didn't call the cops,” Rafe guessed.
“I was seventeen. I trusted him. I thought he was just . . . taking the rejection badly. Maybe I was even a little bit flattered on some level of myself, that it mattered so much to him. So I just closed the curtains. And kept them closed. But then he started . . . turning up wherever I was. Always at a distance. Always watching me. That was when I started to be . . . just a little bit afraid.”
“But you still didn't report it.”
“No. Everybody loved him, and I think I was half afraid nobody would believe me. I confided in my best friend. She was envious. Said he had a crush on me, and I should be flattered.” She laughed, again without humor. “She was seventeen too. What do you know, at seventeen?
“I tried to feel flattered, but it was getting more and more difficult to feel anything but scared. I could take care of myself, I knew self-defense, but . . . there was something in his eyes I'd never seen before. Something angry. And hungry. And I didn't understand why, but it terrified me.”
Rafe waited, unable to ask another question. He wished they were somewhere more private yet had a strong hunch that, if they had been, Isabel wouldn't have been willing—or able—to confide in him about this. He thought she needed the insulation of a semipublic place for this. There were people here, even if not close by. Food and music and an occasional quiet laugh from another part of the room.
Normality here.
He thought Isabel was afraid she wouldn't be able to hold it together enough to talk about this if they were alone. Either that or she had chosen, quite deliberately, to tell him this without even a shadow of intimacy. With a table between them in a public place, where the ugliness could be softened or blurred or even discarded at the end with a game shrug and a bland But it happened years ago, of course.
Depending on his reaction to what she was telling him.
Depending on how well he held it together.
“Of course, it wasn't talked about so much in those days, stalking.” Her voice was steady, controlled. “I mean, that was something that happened to celebrities, not ordinary people. Not seventeen-year-old girls. And certainly not involving boys they'd known their whole lives. So when I finally did tell my father, he did the logical thing in his mind. He didn't call the police—he confronted the boy. Very reasonably, no yelling, no threats. Just a friendly warning that I wasn't interested and he should, really, stay away.”
“His trigger,” Rafe muttered.
“As it turned out, yes. My father couldn't have known. Nobody could have known. He'd hidden his true face all too well. If my father had gone to the police and everyone had taken the threat seriously, maybe the ending would have been different. But after it was all over, they told me . . . it probably wouldn't have. Delayed things, maybe, but he hadn't actually done anything, and he was such a good boy, so they couldn't have held him for long. So it probably wouldn't have changed anything if I had acted differently, if my father had. Probably.”
“Isabel—”
“It was a Wednesday. I came home from school, just like always. Rode with a friend, because my father didn't believe I was old enough to have a car yet. She let me out, and then she headed home while I went into the house. As soon as I closed the front door behind me, I knew something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Maybe I smelled the blood.”
“Oh, Christ,” Rafe said softly.
“I went into the living room and . . . they were there. My parents. Sitting on the couch, side by side. They were holding hands. We found out later from the note he'd left that he had forced them in there at gunpoint. Sat them down. And then he shot them. Both of them. They hadn't even had time to get really scared; they just looked . . . surprised.”
“Isabel, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
She blinked, and for just an instant her mouth seemed to quiver. Then it steadied, and she said calmly, “The story could have ended there. If it had, maybe I wouldn't have come out of it psychic. I don't know. Nobody knows.
“But that was really just the beginning. I turned—to run or call the police, I don't know. And he was there. He said he'd been waiting for me. He had the gun, a silenced automatic; that's why the neighbors hadn't heard. I was too scared to scream at first, too shocked, but then he told me he'd kill me if I made a sound. So I didn't. All during those hours, all night long, I never made a sound.”
Rafe wished he could drink. He wished he could stop her from finishing the story. But he couldn't do either.
“Looking back, knowing what I know now, I think if I had made a sound he might not have gotten so crazy. I think that's what maddened him, that no matter what he did to me, he couldn't get me to scream. Or even to cry. Without even understanding how or what it would mean, I was taking away his power.
“He—right there on the living-room rug, in front of my dead parents, he tore my clothes off, and he raped me, holding the gun jammed against
my neck. He kept saying I was his, I belonged to him, and he'd make me admit it.
“He did things to me I didn't even know were possible. I was just seventeen. Just a kid, really. I was a virgin. I'd never had a boyfriend serious enough to—to do more than kiss. I wasn't ignorant about sex, but . . . I couldn't understand why I didn't die, why what he was doing didn't kill me. But it didn't. I bled. And I hurt. And as the hours passed, the beautiful face he'd worn for so long got uglier and uglier. He started cursing me. Hitting me. He took the gun and—hurt me with that too.”
She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Cracked ribs, a fractured jaw and wrist, a dislocated shoulder. Too many bruises to count. Raw inside. At the end, he was sitting astride me, both hands holding my head as he slammed it against the floor, over and over again. Screaming that I was his and he'd make me admit it.”
Isabel didn't shed a tear, but her eyes were very bright, and her voice was very soft when she finished. “And his touch burned. He had red eyes, and horns, and scaly flesh, and his breath smelled of brimstone.”
Travis was more pleased than he wanted to admit—or show her—when he found Ally waiting for him outside the police station after work. Waiting on the hood of his car, actually, and wearing a very short skirt.
“You shouldn't be out alone this time of night,” he told her, trying not to stare at long legs that looked great even under garish outside lights.
She lifted an eyebrow at him, amused. “I'm in a brightly lit parking lot. At the police station. Other than being inside the building, I doubt there's a safer place right now.”
“Maybe not. Some of our female officers think they've been watched, maybe even followed.”
“Really?” She slid off the car's hood and shrugged. “Well, I'm not a blonde. And I can take care of myself.”
“It might not be just blondes, you know. Or didn't you hear about the body we found today?”
“I heard. Also heard she'd been dead a couple months or thereabouts. So maybe it was a different killer.”
Travis didn't want to admit that he wasn't so close to the inner circles of the investigation that he was up on the latest theories, so he merely shrugged and said, “Still, we've got other women missing in the area, and not all of them are blondes. You really should be careful, Ally.”
