Whisper of Evil

by Kay Hooper

  Nell was still frowning. “Bishop isn’t normally vague, believe me. And his profiles tend to be bull’s eyes more often than not. But something about this killer is bothering him, and I don’t think even he knows why. If he hadn’t been hip-deep in another tricky case himself, he’d be down here trying to solve the puzzle firsthand. As it is, I have a direct line to him and I’m under orders to keep him advised.”

  “But you aren’t here alone,” Max repeated.

  “No.”

  “How effective can an agent be when he or she is pretending to be something else?”

  “We all function quite well that way, actually. My unit is . . . peculiarly suited to undercover operations.”

  “Why?” Max demanded.

  “Well, among other things, let’s just say we’re all accustomed to keeping secrets.”

  He frowned at her. “I thought most feds were.”

  “You’ve been watching too much television.”

  Casey laughed and said, “You’ve told him this much, Nell, might as well tell him the rest.”

  Nell shrugged. “It’s not something the Bureau publicizes, but the Special Crimes Unit is made up mostly of agents who each have one or more . . . unorthodox investigative abilities.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Psychic abilities, Max. I finally found something useful to do with the Gallagher curse.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Shelby Theriot had grown up in Silence, just as her parents had done. And unlike some of her friends, she hadn’t even gone away to college; there was a small community college in the parish, and it had provided all the additional education Shelby could bear after finishing high school.

  In high school, she had been voted Most Likely to Grace the Cover of a Magazine, which only proved that kids in high school were rotten judges of character.

  Shelby didn’t give a damn what she looked like, and had in fact rejected several offers that would have put her feet on the path to possible fame and fortune as a model. But she very much liked being on the other end of a camera, and over the years her pictures had begun appearing in various magazines.

  It was still more of a hobby than a career, mostly because Shelby didn’t really need a career, and also because she wasn’t in the least ambitious. She didn’t need a career because her parents had left her both a nice house and stock in a number of flourishing businesses. She wasn’t ambitious because it simply wasn’t in her nature to be. She took pictures because she enjoyed it and needed neither money nor approval to validate doing something that was fun and satisfying in and of itself.

  All of which explained why Shelby had spent the day just wandering around with her camera, snapping pictures here and there of whatever scenery or person caught her fancy. The townspeople were too accustomed to this to protest; Shelby had formed the habit of giving away prints to her subjects, cheerfully handing over negatives as well if asked for them, and since she never used a picture without permission, no one minded even the sometimes unflattering shots she occasionally got while catching her subjects unawares.

  Since the light was particularly good on this Thursday, Shelby spent virtually the entire day outside, quitting only when darkness forced her to. She stopped by the café for supper because she didn’t feel like fixing anything for herself, flirted with Vinny for a few minutes afterward, and then went home.

  Her small house, on the outskirts of town, was the picture-postcard image of a white cottage, complete with a white picket fence. She loved flowers but boasted a brown thumb, so she paid a gardener to keep the front and back yards looking pretty year-round; the rest of home maintenance she took care of herself, perfectly capable of wielding both a paintbrush and a hammer with equal skill.

  She drove a small, neat Honda and lived with a cat named Charlie, currently the only male fixture in her life. Despite the well-meaning attempts of friends to fix her up, Shelby had yet to meet any man who even mildly tempted her to give up her independence—or the freedom to work in her darkroom until dawn or eat cold pizza in bed while watching her favorite horror movies at midnight.

  On this particular night, after a day spent happily with her camera, she intended to shut herself up in her darkroom and develop her film. She was looking forward to hours of work and was curious to see what she had captured, since there were almost always surprises.

  This time, there was definitely a surprise.

  “What the hell ...” she muttered to herself, holding up the last shot of a roll she had taken around mid-afternoon.

  It had amused her to notice that Max Tanner seemed to be following Nell Gallagher around town today, and at least twice Shelby had captured the image of him lurking, very intent on Nell and apparently unconscious of the fact that he wasn’t exactly being subtle about it. Shelby felt she knew Max well enough to be pretty certain he hadn’t been stalking with any kind of deadly intent, and that certainty had freed her to speculate as to his motives.

  Had to be those abandonment issues, she’d decided. Or was it merely rejection of a particularly nasty sort when one referred to a prom date gone humiliatingly awry?

  In any case, she had snapped a shot of Max skulking near one corner of the courthouse while Nell, apparently oblivious to his presence, walked down the steps toward her Jeep. That much was ordinary enough, even if interesting.

  What wasn’t ordinary was the odd, hazy shape just a couple of feet behind Nell.

  Like any good photographer, Shelby knew a lot about shadow and light. She also had a solid familiarity with the tricks a camera could produce, some of them odd or eerie. She knew about occlusions of the lens, about double exposures, about reflections, about corrupted film.

  “This is definitely weird,” she muttered to herself, after silently running through possibilities and discarding them one by one. The camera was fine, the film, the paper. When she checked the negative carefully, it, too, bore the odd, shadowy shape that seemed to float behind Nell. So something had definitely been there, at least for the camera to see. But not the naked eye, because Shelby had seen nothing unusual when she had framed the shot.

  She turned on the white lights and stood back to stare at the eight-by-ten hanging over the trays.

  Every detail of the shot was clear. The building, Max, Nell. Everything just as it should be, with the light falling just so and shadows where they should have been.

  But behind Nell, beginning several inches above the steps and stretching upward maybe six feet, was a shadow that had no right to be there. It was vaguely man-shaped and, though it appeared more dense than smoke, was certainly not solid.

  “What the hell is that?” Shelby wondered aloud. No matter how carefully she studied the shot, she could find absolutely nothing solid to account for the shadow.

  But that shadow was definitely there. Even more, with hardly any imagination at all it could be argued that the shadow loomed over Nell, even seemed to reach out for her.

  Grasping. Threatening.

  It was some time before Shelby realized that she was absently rubbing the nape of her neck because of an odd, tingly sensation, and it took a minute or so more for her to recognize what was happening.

  The hair on the back of her neck was standing up. Maybe it was nothing. Probably it was nothing. But Shelby had always listened to her instincts, and they were whispering an urgent warning now.

  “Jeez.” Shelby glanced at her watch, then made up her mind and left the darkroom. Too late for a visit, maybe, but not too late for a phone call.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Nell said as Max followed her into the foyer of the Gallagher house.

  “Humor me,” he requested.

  Nell looked at him a moment, then shrugged. “Suit yourself. But maybe I’d better remind you that I’m the one with the gun.”

  “I’m not likely to forget that.” But he didn’t bother to argue when he knew only too well he wasn’t being particularly logical about this. He just went through the downstairs, turning on lights and checking w
indows and doors. When he was satisfied the first floor was clear, he went upstairs and checked every room up there as well.

  When he came back downstairs, he found Nell in the kitchen waiting for coffee to brew.

  “Happy now?” she asked dryly.

  Instead of answering, Max asked a sharp question of his own. “Will you at least admit that your presence here could be a threat to this killer?”

  She leaned back against the counter and gazed at him steadily for a moment, then sighed. “If he knows about the Gallagher curse, if he believes in psychic ability, and if he knows any specifics about my ability— maybe.”

  “Jesus, you’re stubborn.”

  “I’m a cop, Max, remember? Risk comes with the territory.”

  “Not undue risk.”

  “In this situation, how do you define undue? I can take care of myself, you know. I’m armed. I’m trained in self-defense. And I’m here to look for a killer. It’s my job.”

  “Is that all it is? Your job?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “You also came home to settle your father’s estate.”

  Nell turned away to get out cups and silverware. “Do you take milk or sugar? I don’t think I ever knew that.”

  “Both.” He watched as she put what was needed on the counter near the coffeemaker. “Are you going to answer my question?”

  “Yes, I also came home to settle my father’s estate.”

  “Would you have come home if it hadn’t also been your job?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “You hated him, didn’t you?”

  Nell poured the coffee and pushed his cup across the counter to him so he could fix it the way he liked. Matter-of-factly, she said, “Yes, I hated him. And I think it’s a cosmic joke that I ended up with all his property.”

  There were plenty of questions Max wanted to ask, but he was conscious of feeling an overwhelming caution. He was walking an emotional minefield with Nell, with a single unwary step promising destruction, and every instinct warned him not to push too hard. Not now. Not yet.

  So all he said was, “Did he know you’d joined the FBI?”

  “No. I didn’t write to him either.”

  Max didn’t rise to the bait. “What about Hailey? She talked as if she knew where you were, what you were doing.”

  “She didn’t. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Hailey since I left Silence.”

  He frowned. “Then she made that stuff up?”

  Nell sipped her coffee, then smiled. “She always made stuff up, Max. Didn’t you know?”

  “You’re saying she was a liar?”

  “Sweet, friendly Hailey. So charming, so good-tempered. And she had a way about her, didn’t she? A way of ... getting people behind her. A way of making people believe her. Not exactly my strong suit, huh?”

  “Nell—”

  Abruptly, she said, “I wonder what she did to so alienate our father that he disinherited her. Do you know?”

  “Supposedly . . . she ran off with Glen Sabella. He was a mechanic, and he was married. Gossip had it that your father was furious, especially since—”

  “Since both his wife and his other daughter had also run off without a word.”

  “That was the general consensus, yes. I don’t think anybody ever had the nerve to ask Adam directly, but it was common knowledge he changed his will just a couple of weeks after she left.”

  “Wade Keever does like to talk,” Nell murmured.

  “He isn’t the most discreet lawyer in town. But the general feeling was also that Adam didn’t give a damn who knew.”

  “No, he usually didn’t.”

  “He could be mysterious about some things. The Gallagher curse, for instance.”

  Nell gazed at him a moment, then said, “He was mysterious about it because he didn’t understand it. Any more than the rest of us did. Worse for him, though. He didn’t have it.”

  “What? I just assumed—”

  “Yeah, everybody did. Because it was the Gallagher curse, everybody figured we all had it. And he didn’t do anything to discourage people from thinking that. His mother had it, and his daughter—and I think his father had it as well. Maybe he felt left out.”

  “Daughter. Just you? Not Hailey?”

  “Not Hailey.”

  “She used to joke about it. Even manned the fortuneteller’s tent at the school carnivals. From what I heard, she was pretty good at it.”

  “That sort of thing isn’t hard, given a fair amount of knowledge about your neighbors and a certain . . . theatrical flair. Hailey always had both.”

  “But no genuine ability?”

  “Not psychic ability, no.”

  Max thought about that for a moment. “But your psychic ability is genuine. And it’s what got you into the FBI?”

  “It’s what got me into the Special Crimes Unit. I had to pass all the usual tests to get into the FBI.”

  “Wait a minute—you didn’t graduate from high school.”

  “Yes, I did. Just not here. Went to college, too.”

  “On your own?”

  Nell shrugged. “It took me five years instead of four, since I was working my way through, but I made it. I majored in computer science. Minored in psychology.”

  Max had spent so much time these last hours readjusting what had clearly been his faulty mental image of Nell that he was beginning to feel a little dizzy. “And then you joined the FBI?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “No, then I tried to help a friend whose little sister had been abducted. There was an open-minded cop who listened to me, and they found the little girl before she could be killed.”

  “You’d had a vision?”

  “Yes. I was living in a small town on the West Coast. The cop began coming to me from time to time with some of his more puzzling cases. Sometimes I was able to help. He’s the one who introduced me to an FBI agent who was part of a new unit being put together. The Special Crimes Unit. They thought I’d fit into that unit nicely. As it turns out, I did.”

  “Something useful to do with the Gallagher curse?”

  “Exactly. They don’t treat me like a freak. They don’t whisper about me or look at me nervously. They don’t even think I’m the slightest bit odd. Because I’m not. I’m just one of them, another investigator with a unique tool or two to help me do my job.”

  “Hunting down killers?”

  “Killers. Rapists. Kidnappers. Pedophiles. We usually get the real animals, because they’re usually harder to catch.”

  After a moment, he said, “It sounds like difficult work. Emotionally difficult, I mean.”

  “Bishop says finding genuine psychics is never the problem. Finding genuine psychics who can handle the work consistently is. I can handle it.”

  “So far, you mean.”

  “Yeah. So far.”

  “So ... you use your visions as tools? Use them to try and solve crimes?”

  “To answer questions. To give me pieces of the puzzle. That’s all, usually. Just a little extra help for the more conventional investigative methods.”

  “What about your blackouts?”

  “What about them?”

  “You know what I’m asking you, Nell. How do you cope with them? Prepare for them? What happens if you black out during an investigation?”

  “I try to find something soft to fall on.”

  He set his cup down on the counter with a rather emphatic sound. “Very funny.”

  She was smiling faintly, but her green eyes were watchful. “It’s the truth. The blackouts never come without warning. When my head starts to hurt that way, I make sure I can be alone somewhere I won’t be disturbed. If I’m working with a partner, I make sure he or she is notified that I’ll be ... incapacitated for an hour or so. It’s all I can do.”

  “And your fellow agents understand that?”

  “My fellow agents tend to have baggage of their own. Our sort of abilities often come with . . . si
de effects. Sometimes difficult ones. We’ve all learned to adapt, to work within our limitations.” Nell kept her voice even, casual.

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.” The word was barely out of her mouth when the scene around her changed with stunning abruptness. It was still the kitchen, still night, but Max was no longer standing there looking at her with brooding dark eyes.

  Instead, she saw her father stride in through the back door, his dark hair damp, his face like a thunder-cloud. She wanted to draw back, to run.

  To escape.

  But she could only stand there and watch numbly, listen when a dead man muttered something under his breath as he stalked through the kitchen.

  “She should have told me. Goddammit, she should have told me....”

  He vanished through the doorway leading to the rest of the house, and Nell stared after him. As always, she was completely aware of having a vision, conscious of that peculiar time-out-of-sync sensation that always accompanied them.

  What she saw always meant something, always. What did this mean?

  She turned her head to look toward the wall across from the back door, where a calendar had always hung. It was there, showing her a date of May, the previous year.

  The month Adam Gallagher had died.

  “Nell!”

  With a start, she was back in the here and now, the dizzying out-of-sync sensation gone as abruptly as a soap bubble popping. She looked up at Max. She was only vaguely aware of his hands gripping her shoulders, but something in his face made her voice her thoughts aloud.

  “He was killed too. My father was murdered.”

  It was raining in Chicago.

  Special Agent Tony Harte stood at the window gazing out at the dreary night, sipping his coffee. He hated rainy nights as a rule. And most especially in the middle of a difficult case with nothing going right. And he wasn’t the only one. The tension in the room behind him was just about thick enough to cut with a knife.

  A real knife, not a metaphorical one.

  On top of everything else, Bishop was always restless and uneasy whenever Miranda was out in the field without him. There was probably nobody in the world who respected Miranda’s strengths and abilities more than Bishop did, but that didn’t stop him from worrying about her.