Conduit (4 page)

“Thanks for reminding me of how helpless I feel against this
guy,” Shawn said.

Lionel ignored him. “Perry’s going to say the same things he
always does. This body isn’t different from the rest, other than the letter
being carved postmortem, which could be worthless to us.”

“Then what kind of help do you want?”

“I want to call in a private on this one, before the feds
take over in nine days.”

“You’re not thinking—”

“Emily’s a good kid.”

“She’s not a cop. I admit, she’s been great on the cases she’s
helped other detectives with, but those have been small time. Theft, missing
persons.” Shawn stopped walking when they reached Lionel’s car. “This is a
serial killer. Do you really want to get her and Cassie involved in this?”

Lionel didn’t want either one of them anywhere near the
investigation, but Emily could assist in a way no other person could. She knew
things that any other person looking at a crime scene couldn’t know. She could pick
up on things by standing in close proximity to someone or something. In all his
years of knowing Emily, he had seen it happen enough to know it was more than
coincidence, yet he couldn’t explain it. While he might not understand it, he
needed to use it as long as Emily wanted to help.

“A fresh pair of eyes couldn’t hurt,” he told Shawn, who
knew nothing of Emily’s extraordinary detective skills. “Emily’s smart, she’s
good at what she does, and I’m calling her.”

“It might be a mistake to get her involved. She’s never
helped out on a case like this.”

“I just want her and Cassie to take a look at the files.
Maybe they’ll see something we haven’t. Besides, Cassie took all those criminology
and behavioral classes. As far as I’m concerned, between those classes and her
time on the force, Cassie’s just as good as the feds and she doesn’t have her
own agenda.”

“You may be right. Cassie would be in homicide working this
case with us if she were still a cop.” Shawn shrugged. “It’s your call, so do
what you need to. The feds will be here soon enough, demoting us to answering
the tip line. We should try everything we can while we still have a case to
work.”

“Let’s get an ID on this one as soon as possible. Maybe he
got sloppy and this girl is connected to another victim or to the killer.”

“Fingerprints, dental impressions, serial numbers off any
implants.” Shawn scribbled in his notepad as he spoke.

“Also check missing person reports on Asian women in their early
twenties,” Lionel added. “He’s never held them for more than 36 hours, so start
with new reports and move up to a week.”

“I’m on it,” Shawn said. He waved goodbye to Lionel and jogged
toward his car.

Lionel looked past Shawn at the Channel 12 news van pulling
up alongside the ditch, followed closely by Channel 10. “Damn,” Lionel
muttered.

He grabbed his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and called
Bill Evans, the head of the crime scene unit collecting evidence. When Bill
answered, Lionel said, “The vultures are swarming. Tell Perry to put a rush on
it. Finish the photos of the victim and get that poor girl out of the open.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket and started toward his
car. Lionel remembered the other call he needed to make and took the phone back
out. Number five was the speed dial for Monroe & Reid Investigators.

As his call rang through, he wasn’t sure what to expect from
Emily, wasn’t even sure he trusted her unusual detective skills, but he didn’t
know what else to do. For weeks, they had watched the killer carve out his
message on victims that he tortured for hours before their bodies relinquished their
hold on life.

At his car, he rested the phone against his shoulder and flipped
open his notepad. He added the last letter to the others he wrote down at five
previous crime scenes. The addition of the last letter completed the message. Lionel
just needed to figure out what it meant.

Hear me.

Nestled in the corner of an L-shaped
strip mall, Ristorante Italiano had not been updated since opening its doors
almost four decades earlier. White paint flaked off two wrought iron benches in
front of the restaurant. The outside walls boasted a fading mural of
vine-covered picket fences, wine bottles, and random bunches of white and red
grapes. According to online reviews, the food quality had also deteriorated
under new management.

In front of a cheap, ceramic planter filled with a dying mix
of flowers, Jillian Waters wrapped her arms around her lunch date’s neck. Several
inches shorter than Jillian, the man raised his head up for a kiss, and she
returned his affection.

Watching their kiss from his vantage point in the parking
lot, David Noakes shook his head in disgust. Her date’s selfish kiss took pleasure
away from her, without offering anything in return. The awkward kiss continued,
and David frowned. The taste of garlic and bumping noses ensured Jillian would not
experience passion in her last kiss before she died.

Passion belonged in every step of life. David took pride in inserting
passion into each moment of his work, and he would make sure Jillian experienced
the ultimate passion before she took her final breath. Though intended for
Emily Monroe, his passion would pass through and consume Jillian until she
embodied it.

Jillian stepped away from her date and walked in the
opposite direction toward her black Eclipse. The smile clinging to her lips
indicated she found the poor kiss satisfactory. David thought it a sad thing
for Jillian to settle for less than perfection in a kiss.

For a moment, he considered Jillian unworthy of his work. It
wasn’t the first time he’d had doubts about her. Over the past several days,
she had exhibited many undesirable traits.

But as soon as he came in contact with Jillian, he recognized
her as a conduit, and a strong one at that. Jillian could channel his abilities
and direct them toward Emily, allowing him to connect with her. Born with the
gift he needed to exploit to reach Emily, he could not deny Jillian the
opportunity to participate in his work because she had bad taste in men.

Jillian stumbled on her high heel. She recovered before
falling to the asphalt, but continued down the row of cars with a slight limp
that pushed the smile away from her mouth and added one to his. Sprained ankles
made the dirty side of his work easier.

Tomorrow morning, while Jillian finished her early shift at
the coffee shop, David would wait in her small apartment for her to come home
for lunch, and then convince her to get in his car. Once restrained in his
basement, Jillian would become number seven, bringing him one step closer to
reaching Emily.

Number seven for Emily, David thought, as Jillian climbed
into her Eclipse. The others before Emily hadn’t been receptive to him. They
denied his presence in their mind, shoved him aside, and gave up the chance to
become one with him. After just a couple tries, he realized that each one
refused to connect with him through the women chosen to die for them.

He had wasted too much time with the others. Even during the
time he spent seducing them through the women he used as conduits to reach them,
he knew someone else waited for him.

After years of searching the country, the moment David saw Emily,
he forgot about all the others. Emily had brushed up against him in line at a
coffee shop and gushed out a polite apology. In that moment, her immense psychic
ability stilled his heart and he knew she would help him fulfill his work and
make him whole.

Yet as difficult as it had been for him to find her, it had
taken an even greater patience to connect with Emily. He had almost stopped trying
after number three, but he pushed himself to continue. Then with number five,
he made the connection, and number six strengthened it.

While successful, the last two connections had an
unexplainable delay. He almost didn’t notice it at first, as he thought both
girls connected with Emily when they screamed her name. It wasn’t until several
hours after he dumped number five’s body that he sensed Emily and her reaction
to the girl’s voice.

To reinforce the connection, he focused his thoughts on
Emily and wrote the words “hear me” over and over, until he covered the fronts
and backs of several sheets of paper. He resorted to writing the words on a
whim, but it worked. With the last girl, number six, he achieved the same
result of reaching Emily, but only when he scribbled the phrase on paper.

Much stronger than the other women, Jillian would close the
time gap and help him forge a bond with Emily. If Jillian failed him, if Emily
didn’t remain receptive to him, he would have to give up on her, too. He didn’t
want to think about it, as it would force him to kill her, like all the others
before her. Jillian wouldn’t fail, though, and soon he would be with Emily,
forever.

The cursor hovered over the print
icon on the monitor and Emily punched the left mouse button. She waited until the
printer started up before closing out of the case file on her computer. She
disliked the hours wasted on necessary paperwork, but Cassie had spent that afternoon
in the field, leaving Emily to catch up on case files.

When Monroe & Reid Investigators opened its doors seven
years earlier, cases were hard to come by, the same as any other new business
struggling for its place in the world. In those days, Emily loved the
opportunity to do paperwork. Cassie’s five years as an officer with the Wichita
Police Department paid off during their early search for clients. Well-liked as
a police officer, Cassie had planned a lifelong career in law enforcement, but
responding to one bad domestic violence call altered her plans. Shot in the
thigh, she suffered through a lengthy recovery and resigned her position.

Due to her outstanding reputation as a police officer,
business trickled in from her contacts on the force. It turned out to be a
great source of referrals, and gave them an occasional case to work. Outside of
Cassie’s contacts, Emily used every marketing trick she could find to bring in
more cases. Between their hard work to drum up business and word-of-mouth, Monroe
& Reid Investigators soon became exactly what they imagined.

With only the two of them on staff, they often turned away clients
and could be choosy about which cases to take. Despite the onslaught of clients,
they long ago decided against adding another investigator to the firm. Though some
of Emily’s investigating skills were learned through trial by fire at the
beginning of their partnership, the rest of her skills were ones that neither
Emily nor Cassie were eager to make known to others. The public revelation of
Emily’s psychic abilities would close the doors of Monroe & Reid
Investigators forever.

They could not hold out much longer without adding new investigators,
with both women working seven days a week. Their increasing workload and desire
to expand made hiring a new employee a necessity, but Emily struggled with how
to hire someone and keep them in the dark about her abilities.

Emily pulled the updated pages from the printer and placed them
into the folder designated for Mrs. Linder. She turned to the file cabinet and placed
the folder in the bottom drawer, where she kept her recently closed files. Emily
turned the key in the file cabinet’s lock, but left it there instead of
removing it. After a moment of hesitation, she unlocked the cabinet again and
pulled out an unlabeled folder from the back of the top drawer.

Seated at her desk, Emily opened the folder and took out the
only two sheets of paper inside. The erratic handwriting from the automatic writing
incidents faced her, both with the same message:
hear me
.

It didn’t take a handwriting analyst to see the writing on
both sheets originated from the same source, and differed from her own tidy penmanship.
The disorganized letters looked like the person writing it had been rushed with
incoherent thoughts crowding them while relaying the message to Emily.

She wondered what she needed to hear. Someone called her
name and someone forced her hand to write these words. Whether both incidents were
caused by the same person remained as much a mystery as the meaning of the
words.

After committing the handwriting to memory, Emily spun her
chair around so she faced the wall behind her, and closed her eyes. With the
words written in the front of her mind, she shut out everything around her. She
opened her mind and pushed out any stray thoughts, just as Aunt Susan had
taught her to do.

Emily trained her mind on the voice that called her and tried
to reconnect to that voice. It was a female; she had no doubts about that. The
voice sounded frantic yet hushed, as if the woman called to her from a
distance.

She reached out further with her mind, searching for a
source for the voice, and found nothing but a recording in her memory. Emily
replayed the voice several times, listening for anything she could use to determine
from where the voice came and to whom it belonged. After a few moments of the
voice running on a loop through her mind, she recognized a quality in the voice.

The woman was terrified.

Emily opened her eyes and rotated her chair back around to
face her desk. She had not heard fear in the woman’s voice before. Now she not
only heard it, but the woman’s fear penetrated Emily’s mind and body, as if she
projected her emotions onto Emily. An invisible demon propelled the woman’s
fear, and Emily wished that demon to remain masked.

Cassie bounced into Emily’s office, and Emily shut the file
folder. She had not told Cassie about the automatic handwriting or voices and
did not want to disturb her with the news of her evolving talents.

“How did it go?” Emily asked.

“Surveillance is surveillance is surveillance.” Cassie sat
down and placed her Canon 70D on Emily’s desk.

Emily smiled. “You got photos.”

“I got photos. Mr. Friedman sure didn’t have much of a
problem with his right arm when he bowled a 254 at Vinnie’s Pies and Pins.”

“A 254?” Emily let out a low whistle. “You must have been
jumping with jealousy. The last time we went bowling, I beat you 96 to 48.”

Cassie glared at her. “And that’s precisely why it was the
last
time we went bowling. That won’t
ever happen again.”

“You seem to have a far better score with these workers’
compensation cases than with bowling. That’s the third one you’ve caught
scamming in the last month. I bet Heartland Insurance is going to throw us a
lot more work.”

“They already have. I called Keith right after I got the
evidence and he is thrilled. He said he wants to talk exclusive contract with
us.”

“Congratulations,” Emily said. “Now we just have to start
working 18 hour shifts, seven days a week to keep up.”

“If we get that contract, we have to hire someone else, or
even two more people,” Cassie said. At Emily’s groan of protest, she added, “They
can work solely on the Heartland Insurance cases and never know a thing about...your
ways.”

“I guess we could manage that,” Emily said. “Besides, I
wouldn’t want to give up any of the cases I like to handle to a newbie. We just
have to keep any new employees away from all of my cases, no matter what.”

“Agreed,” Cassie said. “Speaking of case overload, Beverly
said Uncle Leo called this morning.”

“I saw that, but I hadn’t had a chance to call him back.”

“I just spoke with him and he’s on his way over right now.”

“Did he say why?”

“Just a case he wants us to look at. He didn’t say much else.”

Emily grabbed the folder off her desk, took it back to the
file cabinet, and tucked it away in the back of the top drawer. Locking the
cabinet, she said, “Since I’ve wrapped up the Linder case, I can take on
whatever he brings us. But he’s heading up the task force on the serial killer
case, so I’m not sure what we can help him with.”

“It’s probably a case for another cop,” Cassie said.

“Whatever he has for us, it will be good to see him again.”

“Don’t forget about Shawn,” Cassie said. She raised her
eyebrows and pursed her lips. “His divorce went through last month.”

Emily laughed. “You sure don’t waste much time, do you? I
don’t think Uncle Leo would approve of you hitting on his partner.”

“What does he know? He was lucky enough to find Aunt Barbara
back in the days when finding your soul mate was as easy as finding a pair of
eights in a game of Go Fish.”

“Why are you so focused on Shawn? Don’t you have a date
tonight?”

“Stephen and it’s the fourth date.” Cassie said. She stood
up and pushed the chair back to the desk. “Might as well be getting hitched,
seeing how we made it this far.” Cassie pointed at her. “And since you’re going
to this thing with me tonight, you’ll have the pleasure of meeting my future
husband. If Shawn doesn’t come around first, that is.”

For the third year in a row, Cassie managed to snag an invitation
for Monroe & Reid Investigators to the annual party hosted by Wolk, Trotter
& Wolk, one of the largest defense attorney and family law firms in the country.
Though an honor to receive an invitation, Emily dreaded the affair more than a root
canal without Novocain. Conversation with narcissistic defense attorneys might
result in high profile and top dollar cases, but Emily wished Cassie would
handle the hobnobbing and let her sit in the office handling the case files.

Instead of making up an excuse to get out of the party,
Emily shot her a superficial smile and said, “I can’t wait. I bought a gorgeous
black dress just for the occasion.”

“I’ll be okay if you wear a burlap sack, as long as you don’t
break your arm to get out of the party.”

“You’re giving me a choice between breaking my arm and going
to the party?” Emily lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “How high do you think the
roof of this building is?”

Cassie laughed. “Don’t you dare try to jump off the roof just
to break your arm and get out of going tonight.”

Emily’s phone buzzed and she pressed the speakerphone. “Yes,
Beverly?”

Beverly’s kind voice came through the speakerphone. “Lieutenant
Edwards is here to visit with you and Cassie. Shall I take him to the conference
room?”

“That’s great, Beverly. We’ll meet him in there.” She turned
off the phone and looked at Cassie. “Don’t worry. I’d rather suffer through this
pretentious gathering than land myself in the ER with a broken arm. I’m not
that masochistic.” Emily locked her computer and stood up. “After you,” she said,
gesturing toward the door.

“You want some coffee?” Cassie asked, as they walked toward
the conference room. “I think I might grab a cup before we start.”

“I’m good, thanks.” Emily turned into the conference room,
and Cassie wandered toward the break room.

When Emily entered the conference room, Detective Lieutenant
Lionel Edwards closed his notebook and stood to meet her. A lean, impressive
man at just above six feet tall, Lionel’s strong features disappeared under
animated facial expressions whenever he spoke. Grey brushed his temples above
the earpieces to his reading glasses, but his otherwise young appearance seemed
to defy aging.

Though not her biological uncle, Lionel always treated Emily
like part of the family, and she considered him just that. He smiled, took off
his reading glasses, and held out his arms to embrace her. “Good to see you
again, Emily,” he said, his arms swallowing her petite body.

Emily chuckled and released him. “I just saw you last week
at Aunt Barbara’s birthday dinner.”

“Must be that old age getting to my memory again,” he said. “Of
course it helps that Barbara is four months older than me.”

“She robbed the cradle with you.”

Cassie walked into the conference room with her full coffee
mug. “Uncle Leo!” She set down her mug and hugged him. She looked around the
room and frowned. “Is Shawn joining us today?”

Emily stifled a laugh and sat down at the table.

“He had to give a deposition to the prosecutor for the
Madison murder trial that starts in a few weeks.”

“Such a sad case,” Emily said. “Hopefully that one goes away
for life.”

During a nighttime home invasion, a frantic burglar shot Clive
and Tonya Madison point-blank while they slept. In a room down the hall, their
newborn escaped the killer’s wrath.

“Nah, he deserves the death penalty and he’ll probably get
it,” Cassie said. “Uncle Leo and Shawn built up a pretty solid case. The good
guys win again.”

“I would rather we didn’t have to battle that case,” Lionel said.
“There are times when nobody wins.”

“It sounds like more is weighing on you than the Madison
murders.” Cassie took a sip of her coffee. “Do you care to elaborate?”

“You know me too well,” Lionel said. He reached beside him
and picked up his briefcase. “I have a case that I would like for you to take a
look at.” He pulled an unmarked file out of his briefcase. At least four inches
thick, tape reinforced the torn seam.

Cassie’s eyes widened at the sight of the file. “That’s a
lot of case for us to look at.”

“Unfortunately, this is one of eight folders,” Lionel said. “I
can’t leave you this copy of the file, but you can look at it briefly now, and
if you want to see more you can come down to the station. I figured we’d start
with the most recent and work our way backwards on the timeline.”

“I can come down on Monday morning to the station,” Cassie
said. She paused and held up her hand. “Wait a second. What do you mean by most
recent?”

Emily’s fingertips grazed the edge of the folder, and a
shadow crossed her mind. She pulled her hand back. “This isn’t a missing person
or theft case,” she said.

“I would like you to help out on the serial killer case,”
Lionel said. “We found a new body this morning, so that makes six victims in
ten weeks.”

“Serial killer case?” Cassie asked. “As in the one all over
the news right now? The same case Aunt Barbara complains about because you’re
never home? The case that makes you tell us to be aware of our surroundings?
That
serial killer case?”

Emily would have laughed at Cassie’s diatribe, but the file
still held her mind in its grip. While plain and unthreatening, the flaps of
the manila folder contained something dark.

Though difficult to tear her eyes away from the file, Emily
gathered her resolve and looked at Lionel. The wrinkles on his brow and
displaced corners of his mouth revealed the wear of his job and the toll this
case had taken on him. Extreme emotion, especially distress or pain, gave her
something to latch onto and ignited her abilities. Once she grasped onto a
strong emotion, she sensed and even saw things that gave her weeks of insomnia.