Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (53 page)

“She’s fighting, but the pain and loss of blood have slowed her down. She makes it into the bedroom and falls down. He’s disappointed; he wanted the fight to go on longer. It makes him angry that she’s so weak. He bends over to slice her throat, to finish it, and the bitch turns on him. She’s been faking it. She hits at him. He’d meant to make it quick, but now he’ll show her, she should never have tried to trick him. The rage is like a hot red balloon, swelling up and filling him. He slashes at her over and over, until he’s tired. No, not tired. He’s too powerful to be tired. Bored. It was over too soon; she’s learned her lesson. She hadn’t been as much fun as he’d hoped.”

Silence fell. After a few seconds, Dane realized that she
was finished. She still sat stiffly in the chair, her gaze locked on the window blinds.

Lieutenant Bonness seemed disappointed by Dane and Trammell’s lack of reaction. “Well?” he demanded impatiently.

“Well, what?” Dane straightened away from the wall. Rage had slowly built inside him as he had listened to the flat, emotionless recital, but it was a cold, controlled anger. He didn’t know what the bitch’s motive was in coming here, but there was one thing he knew for certain, and he didn’t have to be any sort of mindreader to figure it out: She had been there. Maybe she herself had murdered Mrs. Vinick, maybe not, but she had been in that house when it had happened. At the very least she was an accomplice, and if she thought she could waltz in here with that bullshit story and get a lot of media attention while she jerked them around, she had tangled with the wrong guy.

“What do you think?” Bonness snapped, irritated that he had to ask.

Dane shrugged. “A psychic? Get real, LT. That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

Marlie Keen stirred, slowly unknotting her hands as if the movement were difficult. Just as slowly she turned her head and looked at Dane for the first time. Despite his icy rage, his stomach muscles contracted abruptly in reaction.
No wonder Bonness had been taken in!
Her eyes were the deep, dark, fathomless blue of the ocean, the kind of eyes a man could look into and forget what he’d been saying. There was something exotic about them, other than the richness of color: a sort of otherworldliness that he couldn’t quite grasp. The expression in them, however, was easy to read, and Dane knew beyond a doubt that he hadn’t exactly overwhelmed her with his charm.

She stood and faced him, squaring off with him as if they were two adversaries in the old West about to draw down on each other. Her face had gone calm and curiously remote. “I’ve told you what happened,” she said in a clear, deliberate
voice. “You can believe it or not; it doesn’t make any difference to me.”

“It should,” he replied just as deliberately.

She didn’t ask why, though he paused for her to do just that. Instead her mouth twitched into a tiny, humorless smile. “I realize that I just became your prime suspect,” she murmured. “So why don’t I save your time and mine by telling you that my address is 2411 Hazelwood, and my telephone number is 555-9909.”

“You know the routine,” he said with sarcastic admiration. “I’m not surprised.” He moved a step closer to her, close enough that she had to look up to maintain eye contact, close enough to intrude into her space and subtly threaten her. “Or maybe you’re just reading my mind, since you’re psychic.” He put an unflattering emphasis on the last word. “Maybe you can tell me what comes next, unless you need a crystal ball to tell you what I’m thinking.”

“Oh, that doesn’t take a mind reader, but then you aren’t very original.” She paused, then gave him that little smile again. “I have no intention of leaving town.” She wasn’t backing down, and his stomach muscles knotted again. At first glance she had looked like a drab, a nonentity afraid of making herself more attractive in any way, but the first look into her eyes had forcibly changed that opinion. The woman facing him didn’t lack self-confidence, and she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by him even though he was almost a foot taller. Something else stole into his awareness. Damn, he could smell her, a sweet, soft scent that had nothing to do with perfume and everything to do with female flesh. His involuntary reaction made him even angrier.

“See that you don’t.” His voice was low and harsh. “Is there anything else you see in your crystal ball, anything you want to tell me?”

“Of course,” she purred, and the sudden glint in her blue eyes told him that he’d walked right into that one. “Go to hell, Detective.”

D
AMMIT,
H
OLLISTER
!” B
ONNESS GLARED AT
him. “Did you have to be such an asshole? The woman came in here trying to help, for Chrissake! She told us some amazing stuff—”

“Amazing, my ass,” Dane interrupted, still aware of the fury boiling up inside, though now at least half of it was directed at himself. “If she didn’t do it herself, then she was there when it was done. She did it, or she’s an accomplice, and she’s daring us to catch her by feeding us this loony psychic story.”

“She knew details that no one but the killer, or killers, could have known,” Trammell said tersely. “Hell, we’ve all heard the kind of crap those so-called psychics describe in their so-called visions. ‘I’m getting an impression of the letter
C,’ ”
he mimicked. “ ‘It’s something to do with the letter
C.
And it’s wet . . . Yes, yes, I’m definitely getting the impression of wetness. The body is close to water.’ ”

“Which narrows it down to the whole fucking state,” Dane finished. “That wasn’t a psychic vision she described;
it was an eyewitness account. The lady was there when it happened, and she just placed herself at the top of my list.”

“She couldn’t have done it,” Bonness protested weakly, his disappointment plain.

“Not alone,” Dane agreed. “She wouldn’t have been strong enough.”

“We definitely should check this lady out,” Trammell said.

The lieutenant sighed. “I know you think it was a goofy idea, but psychics have really helped in some cases I’ve been involved in.”

Dane snorted. “As far as I can tell, a psychic is just a psychotic with a couple of letters missing.”

“All right, all right.” Bonness still looked unhappy, but he flapped his hand at them in dismissal. “See what you can find out about her.”

Trammell was right behind him as they walked back to their desks. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he muttered to Dane’s back.

“Whaddaya mean? You think I should have pretended to believe her?”

“No, I mean you had a hard-on the size of a goddamn nightstick, and you were standing so close, you were about to poke her in the belly with it,” Trammell snapped.

Dane turned and glared at his partner, but he couldn’t think of any excuse to give. He didn’t know what had happened, only that from the minute she had turned those dark blue eyes on him, he’d had a boner so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it. He was still twitching. “Hell, I don’t know,” he finally said.

“If you’re that horny, partner, you’d better get the itch scratched before you get around her again. Either the lady’s very familiar with a knife, or she hangs out with someone who is. I wouldn’t want any of
my
body parts sticking out to draw her attention.”

“Stop worrying about my sex life,” Dane advised grimly. “We need to find out all we can about Marlie Keen.”

•  •  •

It had never made her angry before. Marlie was used to mingled disbelief and derision, but she had always felt an almost desperate need to
make
people believe, to convince them that she could help, that her claims were true. She felt no such need where Detective Hollister was concerned. She didn’t give a damn what that Neanderthal thought, assuming he was capable of such an advanced mental process.

Maybe it was because she had dreaded going to the police so much, with the full knowledge of how this could disrupt her carefully built life. Maybe it was simply that
she
had changed. But when he had been so insultingly dismissive, she had felt nothing but anger. She certainly wasn’t about to stay there and plead with him to believe her. She was already late to work, damn it, and though she had called in, she resented it that she had gone to so much trouble for nothing. She had put herself through the ordeal of recounting what she had seen, and that big jerk had called it bullshit!

Her movements were jerky as she negotiated the heavy traffic, and with sheer force of will she made herself calm down before she caused an accident. She had dealt with jerks before, many times. He was nothing new, except for the way he had moved so close to her, trying to intimidate her with his brute size. She had had to steel herself to face him, to allow him that close. He had used his masculinity as a weapon, knowing that any woman would feel threatened by a strange man looming over her like that, especially a man who looked as if he were hewn out of wood and ate nails for breakfast. In any good cop/bad cop routine, his looks would automatically make him the bad cop. No one in his right mind would expect leniency or consideration from that man.

She had almost panicked when he had moved so close. In her mind, she could still feel the heat his body had generated, overpowering the small space that had been between
them. Furiously she wondered if he would have done that if she had been a man; her instinct said no. That was a tactic that men used only on women, the threat of touching. Odd that something so simple, so basic, could also be so frightening.

She shuddered. She couldn’t have borne it if he
had
touched her. She would have bolted like a total coward.

As late as she was, it was difficult to find a parking space at the bank where she worked. She had to circle the lot three times before a departing customer left an open slot that she managed to get to before someone else did. Then she sat in the car for several minutes, taking deep breaths and trying to achieve some sense of calm. She stared at the bank building, finding comfort in its solidity. Her job was such a nice, safe, passionless one, in accounting. She had chosen it deliberately, when she had moved here. Numbers didn’t bombard her with thoughts and feelings, didn’t ask for anything from her. Their qualities never varied; a zero was always a zero. All she had to do was align them into columns, feed them into a computer, keep track of their credits and debits. Numbers were always neat, never messy like human beings were.

And it felt good to support herself, even though she knew she didn’t have to. The small house she had made into a home had been bought outright for her, when she had decided that she wanted to live in Florida, on the opposite end of the country from Washington. Dr. Ewell would have arranged for her to receive a check each month, had she wanted; she hadn’t, preferring to finally stand alone, without all the support systems of the Association. Even now, all she had to do was pick up the telephone and tell Dr. Ewell that she needed help, and it would be provided. Though it hadn’t been his fault, hadn’t been anyone’s fault, Dr. Ewell was still dealing with his guilt over what had happened six years ago.

She sighed. She was paid by the hour; every minute she sat there was being deducted from her paycheck. Resolutely she
pushed Detective Hollister out of her mind and got out of the car.

•  •  •

“Hey, doll, found anything interesting yet?” Detective Fredericka Brown, who answered only to “Freddie,” patted Dane on the head as she passed behind his chair. She was a tall, lanky, endearingly plain woman, with a habitually cheerful and amused expression that invited smiles. It was tough for a woman to be a cop in general, and a detective in particular, but Freddie had fit right in. She was blissfully married to a high school football coach, size huge, who looked as if he would tear limb from limb anyone who caused his Freddie the least upset. Freddie tended to treat all of the other detectives as if they were the teenage boys on her husband’s team, with a disconcerting blend of light flirtation and motherliness.

Dane scowled at her. “This should have been your case. We had the weekend off, damn it.”

“Sorry,” she said blithely, giving Trammell a smile of greeting when he looked up from the telephone that had been welded to his ear for most of the morning.

“How’s the tooth?” Dane asked.

“Better. I’m up to my eyeteeth in antibiotics and painkillers, no pun intended. It was an abscess, so now I’m having a root canal.”

“Tough.” The sympathy was sincere.

“I’ll live, but Worley’s doing all the driving while I have to take this stuff.” Worley was her partner. “Anything we can do to help, any leads we can run down? We have our own cases, but from what I’ve heard, the scene Saturday morning was straight out of a horror movie.”

“It wasn’t pretty.” An understatement if he’d ever made one. Freddie patted him again, this time on the shoulder, and went about her business. Dane turned back to his.

Detective work was mostly boring; it involved a lot of talking on the telephone, going through papers, or going out to talk to people face-to-face. Dane had spent the last few
hours involved in the first two activities. Usually Trammell handled this part of the job better than he did, being more patient, but this time he had set himself to it with grim determination. What had happened to Nadine Vinick should never happen to anyone, but it really pissed him off that Marlie Keen had all but rubbed his nose in her knowledge of it.