Dream Man (4 page)

She had made a pot of coffee and she had been in here, in the kitchen. She had just poured the first cup and replaced the carafe on the warming plate. The door from the living room was behind her and to the right. Dane went through the motions as if he had just poured the coffee himself, standing where she would have stood. According to the placement of the cup on the counter, she would have been standing slightly to the left of the coffee maker. That was when she had seen the intruder, just as she had set the carafe in place. The coffee maker had a dark, shiny surface, almost mirror like, behind the hands of the built-in clock. Dane bent his knees, trying to lower himself to Mrs. Vinick’s general height. The open doorway was reflected in the surface of the coffee maker.

She had never even picked up her cup of fresh coffee. She had seen the intruder’s reflection and turned, perhaps thinking, in that first moment, that her husband had forgot-ten something and returned home to get it. By the time she had realized her mistake, he had been on her. She probably hadn’t been standing naked in her kitchen, though Dane had been a cop long enough to know that anything was possible. It was just another gut feeling. But she had been naked when the killer had finished with her, and probably naked when he had started.

The odds were that she had been raped at knife point, right here in the kitchen. The lack of obvious semen didn’t mean anything; after so many hours, and with the struggle that had gone on, it would take a medical examiner to make a judgment. And a lot of times, rapists didn’t climax anyway. Orgasm wasn’t the point of rape.

After the rape, he had started work with the knife. Until then, she had been terrified but hoping, probably, that when he was finished he would just go away. When he started cutting her, she had known that he intended to kill her and she had started fighting for her life. She had escaped from him, or maybe he had let her escape, like a cat toying with a mouse, letting her think she had gotten away before easily catching her again. How many times had he played his sick little game before finally cornering her in the bedroom?

What had she been wearing? Had the killer taken her clothing with him as a souvenir or trophy?

“What?” Trammell asked quietly from the doorway, his dark eyes intent as he watched his partner. Dane looked up. “Where are her clothes?” he asked. “What was she wearing?”

“Maybe Mr. Vinick knows.” Trammell disappeared, and returned in less than a minute. “She had already changed into her nightgown when he left for work. He said it was white, with little blue things on it.”

They began looking for the missing garment. It was startlingly easy to find. Trammell opened the folding doors that hid the washer and dryer, and there it was, neatly placed on top of the pile of clothing in the laundry basket that sat on top of the dryer. The garment was splattered with blood, but certainly not soaked. No, she hadn’t been wear-ing it when the knife attack had begun. Probably it had been lying on the floor, thrown aside, and the blood had splat-tered on it later.

Dane stared at it. “After raping and killing her, the son of a bitch put her nightgown in the laundry?”

“Rape?” Trammell queried.

“Bet on it.”

“I didn’t touch the handle. Maybe Ivan can get a print; he came up empty in the second bedroom.”

Dane had another gut feeling, one he liked even less than the others. “I’m afraid we’re going to come up empty all the way around,” he said bleakly.

It hadn’t been a flashback.

She knew because she had been having real flashbacks all day, frightening resurgent memories that swept over her, overwhelmed her, and left her limp and exhausted when her own reality returned. Marlie knew the details of her own particular nightmare, was as familiar with them as she was with her face; the details that had been flashing in her brain all day were new, different. When she had awoken from her stupor the after-noon before, she had been able to remember little more than the image of the slashing knife, and she had still been so tired that she had barely been able to function. She had gone to bed early and slept deeply, dreamlessly, until almost dawn when the details began to surface. The bouts of memory had happened all day long; she would barely recover from one when another, vivid and horrible, would surge into her consciousness. It had never happened this way before; the visions had always been overwhelming and exhausting, yes, but she had always been able to immediately recall them. These ongoing
attacks
left her bewildered, and helpless from fatigue. Several times she had been tempted to call Dr. Ewell and tell him about this frightening new development, but something in her had held back.

A woman had been murdered. It had been real. God help her, the knowing had returned, but it was different, and she didn’t know what to do. The vision had been strong, stronger than any she’d ever had before, but she didn’t know who the victim was and couldn’t tell where it had happened. Always before she had had at least an inkling, had grasped some clues to identity and location, but not this time. She felt disoriented, her mind reaching out but unable to find the signal, like a compass needle spinning in search of a magnetic pole that wasn’t there.

She had seen the murder happen over and over in her mind, and each time more details had surfaced, as if a wind were blowing away layers of fog. And each time she roused from a replay of the vision, more exhausted than before, she had been more horrified.

She was seeing it through
his
eyes.

It had been
his
mind that had caught hers, the mental force of
his
rage that had blasted through six years of blank, blessed nothingness and jolted her, once again, into extra-sensory awareness. Not that he had targeted her; he hadn’t. The enormous surge of mental energy had been aimless, without design; he hadn’t known what he was doing. Normal people never imagined that there were people like her out there, people with minds so sensitive that they could pick up the electrical signals of thought, read the lingering energy patterns of long-ago events, even divine the forming patterns of things that hadn’t yet happened. Not that this man was normal in any sense other than his lack of extra sensorial sensitivity, but Marlie had long ago made the distinction to herself: Normal people were those who didn’t know. She had the knowing, and it had forever set her apart, until six years ago when she had been caught in a nightmare that still haunted her. Traumatized, that part of her brain had shut down. For six years she had lived as a normal person, and she had enjoyed it. She wanted that life to continue. She had slowly, over the years, let herself come to believe that the knowing would never return. She had been wrong. Perhaps it had taken this long for her mind to heal, but the visions were back, stronger and more exhausting than ever before.

And seen through the eyes of a murderer.

Part of her still hoped… what? That it hadn’t been real, after all? That she was losing her mind? Would she really rather be delusional than accept that the visions had re-turned, that her safe, normal life had come to an end?

She had looked through the Sunday paper but hadn’t been able to concentrate; the memory flashes had been too frequent, too strong. She hadn’t found any mention of a murder that had triggered a response. Maybe it had been there and she had simply overlooked it; she didn’t know. Maybe it hadn’t happened anywhere nearby, but by some freak chance she had happened to catch the killer’s mental signals. If the woman had lived in some other town, say in Tampa or Daytona, Orlando’s papers wouldn’t carry it. Marlie would never know the woman’s identity or location.

Part of her was a coward. She didn’t
want
to know, didn’t want to become part of that life again. She had built something safe and solid here in Orlando, something that would be destroyed if she became involved again. She knew exactly what would happen: the disbelief, followed by derision. Then, when people were forced to accept the truth, they would become suspicious and afraid. They would be willing to use her talent, but they wouldn’t want to be friends. People would avoid her; little kids would daringly peek in her windows and run, screaming, if she looked back. The older kids would call her “the witch.”

Inevitably some religious fanatic would start muttering about “the work of the devil,” and sporadic picket lines would spring up in front of her house. No, she would have to be a fool to get involved in that again. But she couldn’t stop wondering about the woman. There was an aching need to at least know her name. When someone died, at least her name should be known, a tiny link with immortality that said: This person was here. This person existed. Without a name, there was only a blank. So now, still shaking with fatigue, she turned on the television and waited, in a daze, for the local news to come on. She almost dozed several times, but shook herself awake.

“It’s probably nothing,” she mumbled aloud. “You’re just losing it, that’s all.” Strange comfort, but there it was. Everyone’s private fears were different, and she would rather be crazy than right. The television screen flickered as the talking heads segued into another story, this time devoting an entire minute to an in-depth look at the effect of crack and gangs on inner-city neighborhoods. Marlie blinked, suddenly terrified that the visual images would overwhelm her with mental ones, as had happened in the past when she had picked up on the emotions of the people she had watched. Nothing hap-pened. Her mind remained blank. After a minute she relaxed, sighing with relief. Nothing was there, no bleak feelings of despair and hopelessness. She began to feel a little more cheerful; if she couldn’t receive those images and emotions the way she had in the past, maybe she
was
just going a little crazy. She continued watching, and became a little drowsy again. She felt herself begin to give in to the fatigue, effortlessly sliding into a light doze even though she tried to remind herself to stay awake for the rest of the newscast—

—“… NADINE VINICK…”

Marlie jerked violently as the name blared both inside and outside of her head, her inner awareness amplifying the name just spoken by the television announcer. She struggled to an upright position on the couch, unaware of having slumped over as she dozed. Her heart pounded frantically against her ribs and she heard her own panicked breathing, fast and shallow, as she stared at the screen.

“The Orlando police aren’t releasing any information about the stabbing murder of Mrs. Vinick, as the slaying is still under investigation.”

A photo of the victim was flashed on the screen. Nadine Vinick. That was the woman Marlie had seen in the vision. She had never heard the name before, but there was a strong sense of recognition, too strong to ignore. Just hearing the name spoken on television had been like a bullhorn sound-ing in her head. So it was true, it was real. All of it.

The knowing was back.

And it would tear her life apart again if she did anything about it. On Monday morning Dane stared at the stark photo-graphs of the murder scene, examining each minute detail over and over as he allowed his thoughts free range, hoping that some crucial, previously unnoticed item would slip into focus, something that would give them a direction, any direction. They had nothing to go on, damn it, absolutely nothing. A neighbor across the street had heard a dog bark around eleven, she thought, but it had stopped and she hadn’t thought anything else about it until they had ques-tioned her. Mr. Vinick had definitely been at work; he had been helping another dock man unload a trailer, his time completely accounted for. The medical examiner couldn’t give an exact time of death, because unless there was a witness, such a thing was impossible, and the time frame unfortunately included the half hour before Mr. Vinick had gone to work. Dane still went with his gut feeling: Vinick hadn’t done it. According to his co-workers, Mr. Vinick had been completely normal when he had arrived at work, joking around. It would have taken a real monster, which Mr. Vinick had never given any indication of being, to have butchered his wife, coolly cleaned up and changed clothes, then gone to work as usual without any vestige of nervous-ness.

They had no semen, though the medical examiner said that vaginal bruising indicated Mrs. Vinick had been vio-lently penetrated. They had no fibers alien to the house, except for what the Orlando Police Department had brought in themselves. They had no hair samples, pubic or otherwise. They had no fingerprints. And they hadn’t found Nadine Vinick’s fingers.

“We don’t have shit,” he muttered, tossing the photo-graphs onto his desk. Trammell grunted in agreement. They were both tired; they had scarcely stopped in the forty-eight hours since they had first entered the Vinick home. And with every passing hour, the chances of finding Mrs. Vinick’s murderer dimin-ished. Crimes were either solved fast, or they tended not to be solved at all.

“Look at the rundown of their garbage.”

He handed the itemized list over to Dane, who glanced down it. Typical garbage: food waste, empty milk cartons and cereal boxes, an assortment of uninteresting junk mail, plastic shopping bags from a couple of stores, used coffee filters, a pizza box with two remaining slices of pizza, soiled paper towels, an old shopping list, last week’s
TV Guide,
a couple of scribbled phone numbers, a voided check made out to the telephone company, various empty spray cans, about a week’s worth of newspapers—evidently the Vinicks hadn’t been into recycling. Nothing that was out of place or unusual.

“What about the phone numbers?” he asked.

“I just called both of them.” Trammell leaned back in his chair and propped his Italian-leather-clad feet on the desk. “One is the pizza delivery joint, the other is their cable company.”

Dane grunted. He leaned back in his chair and propped his own feet on the desk. Dan Post instead of Gucci, and scuffed at that. What the hell. He and Trammell eyed each other across their four feet and two desks. Sometimes they did their best brainwork in this position.

“Pizza delivery would involve a stranger coming to the house, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance the cable company would send out a repairman.”