"Ben?"
"We've been through this, Matt. I didn't want to look like a jackass if I dragged you out here and there was nothing to find."
"So you came out on your own. Unarmed. What if the bastard hadn't finished his work, Ben? Jesus, she was hardly cold."
"I wish Ihad found him here. I'm not a twenty-year-old girl."
"And he might have had a gun. Did you think of that? Did you think at all?"
Normally Ben wouldn't have allowed his friend to censure him – loudly – in a fairly public arena, but he knew Matt well enough to recognize that the sheriff was badly shaken.
Before today, the last murder in Salem County had occurred ten years back, when Thomas Byrd had come home early from work to find another man keeping his bed warm. To say nothing of Mrs. Byrd. It had been an entirely understandable crime of passion.
This crime was everything but understandable.
"Matt, can we please get past my reckless actions and move on?"
Mart's mouth tightened, but he nodded.
"Okay. Now, since you were elected by the good citizens of Salem County to catch criminals, and I was elected to prosecute them, I'd say we have work to do."
"Yeah." Matt turned his head to look toward the activity behind the barn and scowled. "And the first thing I want to do is talk to Cassie Neill."
Ben hesitated, then said, "You and your people have to finish up here. Why don't I go get Miss Neill and bring her to the station? I'm very interested in what she has to say."
Matt turned his scowl to his friend. "It isn't your place to investigate crimes, Ben. Your job starts when I catch the bastard."
"My job is made a lot easier if I'm involved early on, and you know it."
"Maybe. And maybe in this case your involvement would be a bad idea. You aren't exactly impartial, are you?"
"What the hell do you mean by that?"
"What I mean is that you obviously have a soft spot for your fragile so-called psychic. I won't let you get in my way, Ben."
It took a moment, but then Ben got it. "Ah, I see. You think Cassie Neill killed Becky Smith."
"And you obviously don't."
"I know she didn't." Ben heard the words come out of his mouth and was more than a little surprised by them.
Matt didn't seem to be. "Uh-huh. And you know that because – "
"I told you. She doesn't have it in her to kill someone. Especially not like that. Come on, Matt. It takes a particular brand of brutality to cut a woman's throat from ear to ear. Don't tell me you saw that in Cassie."
"The first thing you learn as a cop is that the most likely explanation is probably the right one. Cassie Neill did a hell of a good job describing a crime scene. I say it's because she'd seen it."
"I agree. But I don't think she was here."
"The psychic bullshit. Yeah, right."
"Matt, try to keep an open mind." Once more Ben glanced past the sheriff at the uniformed people searching for clues, then added quietly, "You know those hunches I used to get when we were kids?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I've got one now. I've got a hunch that this is just the beginning." He returned his gaze to Matt's face.
"And the psychic bullshit may be the only thing we've got going for us."
The old Melton place consisted of a Victorian-style house and various outbuildings that sat on twenty acres more than ten miles from town. Alexandra Melton had bought the place back in 1976, arriving in Ryan's Bluff from the West Coast with, apparently, plenty of money and nobody but herself to spend it on.
She had been quite a character. Her outfit of choice had been jeans and T-shirts, often paired with unusual hats or flowing silk scarves. Still beautiful right up until her death from pneumonia at sixty-plus the previous year, she had black hair that had been touched by silver only in a narrow streak above her left temple, and her figure had remained striking enough to attract admiring eyes whenever she came into town. Which was rarely. Once a month for supplies, no more often.
The odd thing was that Alex Melton had struck most as a warm and outgoing woman with a brisk, no-nonsense manner and a big heart. Yet she had made it plain from the outset that she did not want or need visitors and that she had no intention of becoming involved in community affairs.
Or affairs of the heart, apparently. Ben had heard the stories. Because she had been so beautiful, more than one man had made an attempt over the years, only to be firmly, if kindly, rebuffed. Word had it that a woman or two had also tried, and received the same decisive refusal.
It apparently wasn't a question of which way Alex Melton swung, but the fact that she didn't swing at all.
Ben thought of all that as his Jeep wound its way up the long dirt drive to the house that now belonged to Alex's niece. She didn't mind the isolation, she'd said. It was peaceful. Or had been.
She'd also said that she had "run" three thousand miles to escape the fate she saw for herself, only to fail.
Ben didn't know if he believed Cassie Neill saw her own fate, but he was certain she was running away from something. And another one of his hunches told him that understanding what that was would be important to him.
He parked the Jeep in the circular drive in front of the house and got out. For a moment he just studied the house, noting that it was being slowly redone on the outside. New shutters^ new paint on the railing of the wraparound porch, and he thought the front door, with its oval leaded glass inset, had also been refinished. The house hadn't been in bad shape before, but the new work definitely improved it.
Ben knocked on the door, and Cassie opened it holding a paintbrush in one hand.
"Hi," he said. "I would say good morning, but it isn't."
"No, it isn't. Come in." She stepped back and opened the door wider.
Just as in his office, she looked at him directly only in flickering glances. But this time, with her hair tied back away from her face and with her dressed in jeans and a close-fitting thermal shirt, he got a much better look at her.
She wasn't just fragile. She was almost ethereal.
"The coffee's hot. Would you like some?" If she was even conscious of his scrutiny, Cassie didn't seem bothered by it.
"Please." He followed her through an open living area with little furniture – where she'd been painting a small table on newspapers spread out in the center of the room – and into the kitchen.
Cassie took a moment to rinse her paintbrush and leave it in the sink, then washed her hands and poured coffee for them both. "Black, right?"
"Right. More ESP?"
"No. Just a guess." She handed him the cup without touching his fingers, then took her own to the scarred old wooden table in the center of the room. "Do you mind if we sit in here? I need to let the paint fumes in the other room dissipate."
"No problem." He joined her, sitting in the chair on the other side of the table. "I always liked this room." It was warm and cheery, sunny with numerous windows and brightly painted in yellow.
"You knew my aunt, then?"
"Slightly. I came out here a few times." He smiled. "I wanted her vote. Besides, she was an interesting lady."
Cassie sipped her coffee, her gaze on the cup. "So I've been told. There's lots of her stuff packed away; sooner or later I'll have to go through it. Looks like she kept a journal, as well as all her correspondence. Maybe I'll finally get to know her myself. I'm not in a hurry about that though. There's so much else to do."
Ben had a hunch that she had put off going through her aunt's things not because of being busy elsewhere but simply because she was not yet ready to open herself up, even to the personality and memories of a dead woman. From what the L.A. detective had told him, Cassie had been worse than walking wounded when she had retreated here nearly six months before. Detective Logan believed she had been about a breath away from a complete physical, emotional, and mental breakdown, the result of living through one nightmare too many.
But Ben accepted her explanation, at least for the moment, and said only, "You're renovating the house?"
"No, just updating a bit." Her glance flickered toward his face, then fell again. "I like working with my hands. Working with wood."
"Touching beautiful things because you can't touch people?"
That brought her gaze to his face, and this time it stayed. There were smudges of exhaustion underneath her pale eyes and he could read nothing in them, yet he still felt the warmth as clearly as though she had reached out and laid her hand upon him. It was an unnerving sensation, yet one he knew he had wanted to feel again.
"That's too simple," she said.
"Is it? You avoid physical contact with people. Or is it just me?"
Cassie shook her head. "It's… uncomfortable for me. I'm a touch telepath. It's very difficult for me to block out someone else's thoughts and emotions when I'm in physical contact with them." Her shoulders lifted and fell.
"So you just avoid touch."
She looked back at her cup. "There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong. In the darkest parts of our minds."
"The parts you can see."
Again she shrugged. "I've seen enough. Too much. I try not to look."
"Except when murderers blast their way in?"
"I tried to shut him out, believe me. I didn't want to know what he was going to do. What he did."
"But if there was even a chance you might stop him – "
"I didn't, did I? Stop him. I went to the sheriff. I went to you. I even opened myself up and crawled into his… darkest places. But it didn't stop him. It never stops them."
"That's not what Detective Logan told me."
Cassie shook her head. "They're caught eventually. Maybe I can help with that, maybe not. But people still die. And there's not a single goddamned thing I can do to change that." Her voice was soft.
"So you ran here, is that it? Here, in this isolated house near a small town where you could hope for peace."
"Don't I have a right to peace? Doesn't everyone?"
"Yes. But, Cassie, you can't ignore what you see any more than I could ignore it if I saw someone stabbed on a street corner. I would have to do what I could to help. So do you."
She drew a breath. "I've spent ten years doing what I could to help. I'm tired. I just want to be left alone,"
"Do you think he'll leave you alone?"
She was silent.
"Cassie?"
"No," she whispered.
Ben wished she would look at him again, but her gaze seemed welded to her coffee cup. "Then help us. Becky Smith was just twenty, Cassie. A college student who loved kids and wanted to be a teacher. She deserved her life. She deserved her chance. Help us catch the bastard who took that away from her."
"You don't know what you're asking."
"I have some idea. I know it'll take a lot out of you. But we need your help. We have to do whatever it takes to get this guy before he gets away. Or before he kills again."
Finally her gaze lifted to meet his, and there was something lurking in the depths of her eyes that made him flinch. Something small and hurting.
"All right," Cassie said quietly. "I'll get my jacket."
"So?" The sheriff wasn't openly hostile, but close. "Let's have it."
They were in Mart's office, seated side by side in the visitors' chairs in front of the old slate-top desk that had been his father's, and the sheriff was already in a nasty mood because his people had found absolutely nothing useful at the crime scene.
And he didn't believe in psychic bullshit, he justdidn't.
"I can't tell you much more than I already have," Cassie said. "The killer is male – "
"How can you be so sure of that?" Ben asked. "You said identity isn't a conscious thing. Is gender?"
"Sometimes. But in this case…" She avoided his gaze, fixing hers on the hands clasped in her lap. "When he was watching her… planning what he would do to her… he was… aware of his erection."
It was the sheriff who reddened slightly and shifted in his chair, but his voice was sharp when he said, "This wasn't a sexual attack."
"They're always sexual attacks."
"This woman was not touched sexually," he insisted. "Preliminary reports say no semen was found anywhere on or near the body. For Christ's sake, she still had her panties on."
"That doesn't matter. He was in a state of sexual excitement when he stalked her, and he achieved release when he killed her."
"My God, you were in his mind during all that?" Ben said, startled.
"Yes. When he first went after her and then again, after he'd tied her up and was… was ready to hurt her. That time I was with him for a few minutes. It didn't take long, and just as he killed her I… managed to breakaway."
Ben wondered what it must be like to observe – maybe even experience intimately – the orgasm of an insane killer, and thought it was undoubtedly one memory Cassie would happily part with. For the first time, he began to truly understand what lay behind her haunted eyes.
Monsters indeed.
The sheriff had something else on his mind. "So he tied her up, did he?"
"Not with ropes," Cassie said. "A belt, I think. For her wrists. He didn't tie her ankles. He – he made her sit with her legs apart."
"Why? "Ben asked.
"It was… part of the pose somehow. Part of what he needed to see. He was taunting her. He kept… he kept putting the knife between her legs and threatening to put it inside her. He wanted her to be afraid. She was. She was terrified."
"You know this because you saw it," Matt said.
"Yes."