Whisper of Evil

by Kay Hooper

  Nobody.

  “Are you all right?” Max asked.

  “I’m fine. Ethan, I know he was supposed to have died of a heart attack, but I think it’s at least possible that—”

  You’re wrong. You’re wrong about all of it.

  “Nell?”

  She stared at Ethan for a moment, then shook her head. “Sorry. I’m ... sorry. I’m having a little trouble concentrating.”

  “You need to rest,” Max said in a voice that could best be described as determined. “If a blackout is coming—”

  “It isn’t. At least, I don’t think so. I just have a headache, that’s all.” Nell sighed. “But I think I probably do need to rest. Ethan, I can arrange to have the remains taken to the FBI lab for analysis, if that’s okay with you. It’ll be quickest, and quietest, so nobody in town has to know until you’re ready to tell them.”

  Ethan swore under his breath, but said, “If Hailey’s behind this rather than a cop, keeping quiet won’t matter. But just in case your profiler is right, I think it would be best not to have any of my people deal with this.”

  “Then I’ll arrange it.”

  He nodded. “Far as I know, FBI agents seldom work alone. You have a partner here, don’t you?”

  Nell didn’t hesitate. “As you say, we seldom work alone. But sometimes we do have to work very quietly, behind the scenes. Even undercover.”

  “And I’m not supposed to ask, I guess.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.” Nell smiled. “Please don’t think of us as spies, Ethan. We’re doing our jobs, just like you. Trying to do the right thing, just like you. Trying to catch a killer—just like you.”

  “Okay, point taken.” Ethan settled his shoulders with the air of a man accepting, however reluctantly, something he didn’t like but really couldn’t fight. “Do you still want to see George Caldwell’s place today?”

  Nell didn’t wait for Max to object. “Maybe later this afternoon, if I’m up to it.”

  “I still want to hear all this about Adam’s death,” Ethan said. “And sooner rather than later.”

  “I know.”

  “But for now, I need to get back to town, and you apparently need to rest.” Ethan eyed Max. “I gather you’re staying?”

  “You gather correctly.”

  All Nell said was, “We should close the cellar doors just in case some kid wanders past, but there’ll be someone here to collect the remains within an hour. With any luck at all, we should have at least preliminary results by sometime tomorrow.”

  “Fast work,” Ethan grunted. He went over to close the cellar doors, then rejoined the other two, and they walked back through the woods to the Gallagher house. Ethan had dropped his deputy off in town before joining Nell and Max here earlier, so his cruiser was waiting for him.

  “Let me know later if you feel up to seeing the Caldwell apartment,” Ethan told Nell. He added flatly, “And I expect to be kept informed from here on out about the activities and conclusions of the FBI.”

  “You will be.”

  Ethan’s radio muttered quietly but imperatively, and he reached for it to turn up the volume and respond to the summons. They all heard his dispatcher’s urgent announcement.

  “Sheriff, we’ve got another one. Another murder.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  You didn’t have to stay,” Nell said.

  Max debated silently but decided there was no benefit in arguing about it, at least not at the moment. So he ignored the question. “Is your partner taking care of the ... remains?”

  “More or less. Supervising the removal.”

  “He can hardly watch you from way out there. Some guardian.”

  Nell smiled faintly. “He knows you’re here.” She sipped her coffee, keeping her gaze fixed on the dark fireplace. This living room wasn’t her favorite part of the house, particularly since even throwing open the heavy drapes did little to brighten it, but the sofa was comfortable and it was infinitely preferable to resting in bed—which Max would otherwise have insisted on.

  “You weren’t surprised about this latest murder,” he observed.

  “No. I was ... warned there had probably been another one. And for it to be so soon after the last one is a bad sign. A very bad sign. We’re running out of time.”

  From his chair near the fireplace, where he could watch her, Max said, “You can only do what you can do. Nobody expects more of you than that.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Headache gone?”

  “Well, there’s still a faint throb,” she admitted. “But it’s not nearly so bad as it was. And at least...”

  “At least what?”

  “At least this one didn’t herald a blackout.”

  Max frowned. “That isn’t what you were going to say.”

  “You read minds now?”

  Max leaned forward to set his cup on the coffee table, and said coolly, “Yours sometimes, yeah. But you knew that.”

  Nell looked at him finally, expressionless.

  “You knew it,” he said as though she’d argued with him. “Even though you’ve done everything in your power to shut me out since you came home, you’ve known all along that you haven’t been able to. Not completely.”

  “That door is closed.”

  “Yeah. You closed it. And all these years, you’ve refused to open it again, except for those moments when your guard slipped, when you were too tired, or too upset, or sometimes when you were dreaming. Then it opened, just a little. Then I could catch a glimpse of your life, a flash of your feelings.”

  “I never meant—”

  “To shut me out? Or to let me in in the first place?” He paused, but when she didn’t answer, he said almost mildly, “Do you have any idea how frustrating it was for me to know that door was there—and not be able to open it myself?”

  Nell drew a breath and let it out slowly, not looking away, an expression in her eyes that was both wary and numb, as though she expected a blow of some kind. “Yes. I do know. I’m sorry.”

  “You could have cut me loose.”

  She flinched. “I didn’t want—I tried. I couldn’t.”

  “And now?”

  She wavered visibly, then just as obviously shied away from answering that question. With a glance at her watch, she said, “It’s been nearly an hour since Ethan left. I wonder if—”

  “Don’t change the subject, Nell.”

  “Look, don’t you think another murder takes precedence over—”

  “No. I don’t. Not this time. Ethan made it clear he wouldn’t grant you access to this latest crime scene until his people did their jobs, both to avoid alerting the killer if it is a cop and to keep your undercover status solid as long as possible. So it’ll be hours at least before there’s anything new for you to consider.”

  “Even so—”

  “Even so, you’d rather talk about anything else. Anything but us.”

  “There is no us.” Nell put her cup on the coffee table and got up, moving to stand before the fireplace. “It’s been twelve years, Max. We’ve both moved on. You said that. You said you got over me.”

  “And you believed me?” He laughed without amusement as he rose to his feet. “Did you really think there could be anybody else for me? Really believe I’d settle for something ... ordinary? Something that could never be half of what we had? Could you? Did you?”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “Just like you know I didn’t.”

  Nell fiddled with a decorative gold box on the mantel, then straightened a black-framed picture of her family that looked to be more than thirty-five years old. “Even so, twelve years is a long time—”

  “I know it’s a long time. Christ, I know. And I won’t say I didn’t try to forget you, Nell. Because I did. I didn’t want to admit even to myself that no one else could take your place, could mean as much to me as you did. But I finally had to admit it. Because no one could. No one even came close.”

 
“Maybe you just didn’t give it a chance.” She stared at the photograph, wishing she could shut out his voice, his insistence. Wishing her head would stop hurting.

  “Twelve years of chances. Twelve years of telling myself you weren’t coming back. That you hadn’t cared enough even to send me a Christmas card somewhere along the way and let me know you gave me a thought now and then. Twelve years of telling myself I was a fool. Then I walk down Main Street last week and there you are.”

  “I’m sorry.” Nell stared at the old photograph, vaguely bothered by something. But her head hurt. It hurt almost as much as it had at the Lynch house.

  “Nell, I understand now why you ran away.” His voice was closer now, just behind her. “After that vision the night of the prom, you had to be scared to death. Believing your father had murdered your mother, that he would never willingly let any of you go—”

  “I tried to tell Hailey,” she murmured, blinking because her vision seemed to be blurring. “But she wouldn’t believe me. She said he’d never do anything like that, never hurt us. She was—There was no way I could convince her. We never had gotten along, and by then we were like strangers. So I ran.”

  “Away from love. When you said that, I thought— But it was his love you ran from, wasn’t it? A love so possessive, so jealous, that it killed what it loved rather than allow it freedom.”

  “I knew he was capable of doing it again. Of killing one of us if we tried to leave. Or killing someone else we—I knew he could do that. And even though she said she didn’t believe me, deep down Hailey must have known it too, because she kept all her relationships secret from him. Even the one with Ethan.”

  “Nell—”

  “I guess Glen Sabella was the first one she cared enough about to run away for.” Nell reached out to touch the photograph, her puzzlement increasing. “Who is—”

  Red-hot pain pierced her skull as though someone had driven a spike into it, and before Nell could even draw breath to cry out, everything went black.

  The body of Nate McCurry lay sprawled across his bed, a butcher knife from his own kitchen protruding from his chest. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, but from the tumbled condition of the bed, the fact that he lay atop the covers, and the estimated time of death, it appeared he had at least managed to get out of bed that morning before being killed.

  “Nice wake-up call,” Ethan muttered.

  “Yeah.” Justin stood near the sheriff, both of them watching as the two lone forensic specialists the Lacombe Parish sheriff’s department could boast did their thing, one photographing the body exhaustively and the other carefully dusting every possible surface in the room for fingerprints.

  “Speaking of which, he got a call same as the others?”

  Justin nodded. “Last night. According to his caller I.D. it was from one of the pay phones in town.”

  “But we haven’t found evidence of a secret life. So far.”

  “So far,” Justin agreed. “No hidden rooms or compartments, no false floor in any of the closets, no concealed safe. Paperwork here looks normal, just personal bills and records, and if Kelly had found anything unusual at his office, she would have called. From all the evidence we’ve found so far, he was a perfectly normal insurance salesman—if there is such a thing.”

  Ethan offered a faint smile at the weak joke, but all he said was, “This time, the killer got very, very close; you can’t get much more hands-on than stabbing a man in the chest. Unless he means to strangle his next victim.”

  “You think there’ll be another victim?”

  “Don’t you?”

  With a sigh, Justin said, “We’re sure as hell not stopping him, I know that. And for him to kill again so quickly—”

  “Is a bad sign. Yeah, I know. Either he’s been spooked into moving faster, he’s deliberately escalating for some reason we don’t yet know, or he’s escalating because whatever restraints there might have been once are no longer holding him back. And we have no way of knowing why that is.”

  Justin eyed the sheriff thoughtfully. “Look, I’m pretty damned sure that George Caldwell didn’t have a nasty secret he was trying to hide. I think we all are. Right?”

  Ethan nodded. “I think we would have found it by now if it existed.”

  “Okay. But we’re at least sixty percent sure he was killed by the same man.”

  “The same killer anyway,” Ethan muttered.

  Justin didn’t miss the inference, but said only, “Which has to mean that Caldwell was a threat to the killer or somehow got in the killer’s way, made himself a target.”

  “Odds are.”

  “Remember I asked you why Caldwell would have been searching through old parish birth records?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t had a chance to ask you if you found anything.”

  “Well, I haven’t found anything. Or, at least, I haven’t found anything that looks like anything. But it’s still the only unexplained thing Caldwell was doing in the weeks before his murder. So he must have found something, some kind of information, and either passed it on to the killer in all innocence or accidentally. Information the killer considered a threat.”

  “And George was killed to shut his mouth.”

  “Nothing else makes sense, at least not to me.”

  Ethan brooded for a moment. “But how do we find out whatever it was? You said it was more than forty years of parish birth records, right?”

  “Right. Lots of babies born in the last forty years, I can tell you that much. And we don’t even know if it’s the births or something else. Place of birth, parents’ names, stillborn children or kids that died young, witnesses to a birth, the doctors who delivered the babies—God knows what we’re looking for. I sure as hell didn’t see anything worth killing over.”

  “You’re new to the area,” Ethan noted, “so you might not have noticed what someone born and raised here might have seen.”

  “True enough,” Justin said after a slight hesitation, still wary of saying anything about Shelby’s involvement.

  “Do you have the copies of the records?”

  “Locked in the trunk of my car.”

  “When we get back to the office, bring them to me. If there’s something odd there, I’m willing to bet I’d spot it as quick or quicker than anybody else would.”

  “George Caldwell may have been killed for spotting it,” Justin reminded him.

  Ethan didn’t like to think that one of his deputies or detectives might be a traitor, and he was almost equally unhappy to think that one of them might be an FBI agent operating undercover, but one thing he was sure of was that he couldn’t afford to play guessing games or second-guess his own instincts. So he continued to talk to Justin Byers as if the shadow of neither possibility had ever crossed his mind.

  “George had trouble keeping his mouth shut,” he told Justin. “I don’t. Plus, it’s entirely possible that he didn’t realize what he knew was a threat. I’ll definitely know.”

  “If you find something.”

  “Yeah. If I find something.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Then we’re no worse off than we are now.” Ethan shrugged. “At this point, I’m willing to try most anything.”

  “Including the paranormal? Like, maybe, talking to an avowed psychic?”

  Grim, Ethan said, “Either Steve Critcher is less discreet than I thought, or somebody else saw me talking to Nell Gallagher.”

  Without answering that directly, Justin merely said, “It’s a small town. Hard to do anything without being noticed.”

  “You mean unless you’re keeping a nasty secret?”

  Justin smiled wryly. “Yeah, I haven’t quite figured that out yet. As for you talking to Nell Gallagher—was she able to tell you anything helpful?”

  This time, Ethan did hesitate. “Maybe. I’d rather not say anything until we thoroughly check out Nate McCurry. And I mean thoroughly, Justin. I want to know who he talked to, who his pals were, who he dated in the la
st ten years, and who cleaned his teeth.”

  “Matt’s out now with a couple of deputies gathering that information. What is it you’re hoping they’ll find?”

  “A secret,” Ethan said. “One secret all these men had in common.”

  “You mean they all had the same secret? Apart from all these nasty little bad habits we’ve discovered?”

  “I think so. All except George, so far. I want to know if Nate did as well.”

  “It might help if I knew—”

  “I know, but I’d rather not ... contaminate your judgment when I have nothing solid, no evidence I could take to court, to support this ... theory.”

  “Just information supplied by a psychic?”

  With a grimace, Ethan nodded. “Exactly. Which, by the way, you don’t seem too bothered by.”

  “I don’t care if we find the answers in tea leaves, as long as we find them,” Justin said frankly. “I’ve seen enough weird things in my life not to discount anything out of hand. Maybe it’s possible for some people to see things the rest of us can’t. Maybe it’s just another rare but natural human ability. Who am I to say it can’t be real?”

  “Well, I’m not quite so untroubled about the possibility, but I’m also a lot less certain of my certainties than I was yesterday.” Ethan sighed. “I guess we’ll see. I’m going back to the office. I’ve got a shitload of reports and calls to handle. Stay here and get this wrapped up, will you? And do what you can to transport the body out of here quietly.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Justin watched the sheriff leave, then returned his gaze to the two technicians still working silently. He didn’t suspect either of them of being something other than they appeared, but it certainly did no harm to oversee every possible aspect of the investigation just to make damned sure nothing fell through the cracks.

  It didn’t surprise him that Ethan Cole hadn’t wanted to tell everything he knew; Justin hadn’t exactly been either completely forthcoming or entirely truthful himself. He wondered if that reticence would come back to haunt both of them, then dismissed the thought.