Superstition (42 page)

Joe checked on the threshold.

“Good morning, Joe. Want coffee?” Leonora greeted him with a thin smile. She was wearing a zip-up robe in pale green, her hair was slightly squashed on one side, and her face was pale and devoid of makeup. Still, except for the difference in age and weight, she looked enough like Nicky that Joe realized that he could have picked her out anywhere as Nicky’s mother.

Nicky, on the other hand, was fully dressed. Her bright hair gleamed in the early-morning light that poured in through the windows, and she was wearing makeup and a sunny yellow blouse. What she wasn’t wearing was a smile. In fact, she looked him over with fairly obvious dislike.

“Thanks, yeah, I’d like some,” Joe said.

“Pot’s on the counter. Help yourself.” Nicky’s first words to him of the morning were uttered in a clipped voice that told him they were still on the outs. Well, fair enough. He headed toward the counter where the coffeemaker waited.

“Nicky.”
Leonora started to rise, her tone making her daughter’s name a reproof. Joe had been around the South for long enough to know that a polite hostess never just told a guest to help himself, especially not in a snippy tone.

“I got it,” Joe said, and since he was already at the counter, Leonora sank back in her seat, although not without a censorious glance at Nicky.

“I’ve been trying to convince my pigheaded daughter that she needs to get away from here,” Leonora said as Joe filled an earthenware mug with coffee, returned the coffeepot to its spot, then took a sip of the strong, hot brew.
Great coffee,
he thought appreciatively—and, more important, he needed the caffeine. Badly. “Maybe you can add your thoughts to mine.”

“He already did, mother.”

Joe turned around, mug in hand, and met Nicky’s eyes. “For all the good it did, right? But I’ll say it again, just for the record: I think you ought to take a vacation somewhere until this guy is caught.”

“Oh, me, too,” Leonora seconded eagerly.

Nicky gave them both an impatient look.

“No,” she said. “I know you both think I’m in danger, and I may be. But if this guy wants to kill me, there’s no guarantee he won’t turn up wherever I go, where I won’t be expecting him, so I won’t be on guard.At least here I’ve got twenty-four-hour police protection. And I can help catch him, which is the only way I’ll ever be truly safe.”

“But Nicky . . .” her mother said in a piteous tone.

“I’ll be all right, Mama.” Nicky stood up, dropped a quick kiss on her mother’s cheek, and headed for the door. As she reached it, she looked back over her shoulder at Joe. “I wrote out a list of everyone I know who had my new phone number, by the way. Check your e-mail. It’s there.”

“Wait a minute,” Joe said, putting his cup down on the counter. “Where are you going?”

“It’s after seven, and my bodyguard should be here. I’d offer you a ride but”—she smiled caustically at him—“remember the rules: You conduct your investigation, and I’ll conduct mine.”

With that, she went out the door.

“Oh, dear,” Leonora said with an unmistakable smidgen of pride, as Joe cast a quick look out the window behind him. Sure enough, there was Bill Milton in his cruiser. “When she gets her dander up like this, there’s just no doing anything with her.”

Joe watched her greet Milton, then get into her car. It was a beautiful morning, all sunshiny and bright, and so far as he knew the killer hadn’t attacked anyone in broad daylight yet. And she would have a police escort throughout the day. . . .

“She’s safe enough.” He turned back to look at Leonora. “For today, at least.”

“It’s just . . . I worry,” Leonora’s face was troubled. “I have this
feeling
. And I’m blocked, which I’ve never been before in my life. I hate to think what it might mean.” She met his gaze. “The truth is, I’m afraid for Nicky.”

So am I,
Joe thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. Instead, he carried his coffee cup over to the table and sat down. A thought occurred: Maybe he could get more information out of Nicky’s mother than he could out of Nicky herself.

“You know,” he said, smiling at Leonora, “one thing’s been puzzling me. Ever since Sunday’s show, I’ve been trying to come up with a source for those screams. . . .”

JUST AS NICKY had expected, the press descended on Pawleys Island like flies on a corpse. By midweek, practically every entertainment tabloid in the business had sent a team. In what was apparently a slow news cycle, the Lazarus Killer seemed to have captured the public’s imagination. Print reporters, radio reporters, and TV reporters all vied with each other to be the first to come up with a new angle on what
The National Enquirer
called “a real-life horror story.” The linking of a fifteen-year-old triple murder with two new murders, plus ghosts and poetic communications from the killer, proved especially irresistible to the TV group, all of whom were after the same thing Nicky was herself: a sweeps victory for their show.

Fortunately, with Nicky’s local connections, she continued to have the inside track. She and Gordon filmed everywhere. Neighborhood gossip yielded so many leads that it was going to take weeks to follow up on them all. Nicky personally worked only the most promising. The rest were turned over to the police department, which was swamped to the point that the entire team, not just Joe, looked as though they were running on caffeine fumes and desperation. Another advantage Nicky had was that none of the other reporters had a psychic medium for a mother. Leonora, whose performance in the first show was still airing in the promos for upcoming segments, was a smash hit.

“This is
great,
” Sarah Greenberg enthused to Nicky in an excited phone call. “The numbers are really going up. And we’re getting lots of e-mail about your mother. We definitely want her in the final segment. Sid even said something about offering her her own show for next fall.”

That was one of those good news/bad news situations. Leonora was pleased that she’d managed to reconnect with her audience, as she put it, intrigued by the possibility of a fall show—but she was still blocked. But she was nonetheless willing to help with the case. With the assistance of friends and neighbors, Nicky was gathering items belonging to the victims. Besides Karen’s blazer, she had a watch of Marsha Browning’s that had been left at the Seaside Resort Jewelry Shoppe for repair, and a blouse of Lauren Schultz’s, donated by her parents. She had contacted Becky Iverson’s mother, who was now divorced from her father and living in Colorado, and had agreed to send an article of Becky’s clothing. So far, Nicky hadn’t gotten a response from Tara Mitchell’s family, and if she didn’t hear from them soon, it would be too late for something of Tara’s to be included in the spot. Leonora was going to use the items to try to channel the victims as soon as the package from Becky’s mother arrived, and Gordon was going to film it. If it turned out well, Nicky would put the bit on the show.

How cool would it be if one of the victims came through and identified the killer on TV?

“Don’t count on it,” Leonora warned her dryly. “Even under the best of conditions, spirits aren’t usually that direct. And as far as I’m concerned, these definitely aren’t the best of conditions.”

The weather was increasingly hot and dry as May raced toward June. The tropical ambience of the island grew more pronounced as vines and flowers and trees burst into glorious bloom. Yards turned emerald green. Swimming pools sparkled under the sun. The sky was bluer, the ocean was smoother, and the mood of the island was as jittery as a kid in a dentist’s chair.

Everybody, including Nicky, seemed to be looking over their shoulders, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, the sense of dread grew until it was as palpable as the increasing humidity.

Tension hung in the air right along with the smell of the sea. With each day that passed, Nicky could feel it tightening like a rubber band being slowly stretched. All anybody wanted to talk about was the murders. Everywhere she went—grocery store, gas station, post office—people would gather round her, asking her for the latest news. Joe was apparently subject to the same treatment, with the added stress of having a pack of reporters liable to descend on him without warning.

“Get the hell out of here!” he bellowed at a team from Court TV that invaded the police station on Wednesday afternoon. Nicky knew this because she, like much of the rest of the country, saw the outburst on TV.

“You want to be nice,” she warned him that night. It was just after eleven p.m., and he walked into the kitchen at Twybee Cottage, looking haggard and exhausted and spoiling for a fight. As he was continuing to spend his nights in their study—although, from the look of him, he wasn’t getting much sleep—Nicky saw him pretty much every morning and every night, as well as occasionally during the day when their paths crossed while they were conducting their pointedly separate investigations. They were still very much on the outs, and from the look he gave her as she offered him her advice on handling the press, they were going to stay that way.

“Screw being nice,” he said. Then, as Leonora walked into the kitchen, he responded to her offer of a cup of soup and a sandwich with a tired smile that had been nowhere in evidence when he had addressed Nicky, and a perfectly pleasant “No, thanks.” Following Nicky from the room, he added, in the same low, growly tone as before, “I tried being nice. It didn’t work. Now they’re everywhere I turn. They’re hounding me, they’re hounding my men, they’re hounding the whole damned community. I can’t make a move without somebody shoving a camera in my face. They don’t deserve nice.”

“Your call,” Nicky said with a shrug and headed for bed, the glass of juice for which she’d entered the kitchen in hand, leaving him to the tender mercies of her mother, who seemed to be developing a completely misplaced fondness for him. At the foot of the stairs, though, she paused to glance back over her shoulder at him. “But if you’re not nice to them, they’ll keep playing gotcha with you until they’ve, um, got you.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

The next time Nicky saw him was on TV. She was in Linney’s Bar down on the waterfront, talking to a waitress about a man who had ordered a martini some fifteen minutes before Nicky had gotten the call from the Lazarus Killer while she’d been with Joe on the beach. As the big front window of Linney’s Bar overlooked the stretch of sand leading up to the hotel complex, and the man was unknown to anyone in the bar, it seemed like a decent tip. The waitress was in the midst of describing how suspiciously the man had behaved, when something—a familiar voice, a sixth sense, something—caused Nicky to glance at the small TV behind the bar and get an eyeful of Joe, shirtless and bleary-eyed, framed by the back door of a small blue bungalow, a heaping plate of food in hand as he talked to a
pig
.

18

C
LEARLY, the shot had been filmed around twilight, probably the previous day. Stripped to the waist as he opened his glass back door and stepped outside, Joe was all ripped muscles and bronzed skin, with a nice wedge of black hair in the center of his chest. He was lean, sinewy, without an ounce of extra flesh, but his bones ensured that he was still a big man, tall, with broad shoulders and a wide chest that tapered to narrow hips. His jeans rode low, revealing an impressive six-pack and a nice inny navel.

Yum
, Nicky thought appreciatively, picturing the shot being freeze-framed and mounted on the walls of countless schoolgirls.

Of course, that was before he started talking to the pig. The camera pulled back, and there it was beside him on the wooden deck, practically dancing on its four little hooves, staring up at the plate in Joe’s hand. It was attractive, she supposed, at least as attractive as pigs got, black, a little taller and a whole lot fatter than a basset hound, with floppy ears; a cute, round snout; and a little corkscrew of a tail that wagged madly. But it was still a pig.

“All right,” Joe said to it, sounding bad-tempered. “You want this? Fine. Here you go. Think I can eat it with you watching me? Hell, no. What kind of pig eats ham sandwiches and pork and beans anyway?”

And he set the plate down in front of the pig.

Watching, you had to balance the hunkiness quotient, which was mouth-wateringly high, against the looking-ridiculous quotient, which was also high.

As the issue hung in the balance, Joe straightened and seemed to see the camera for the first time. His face changed in an instant from merely irritated to downright livid.

“What? Who the . . . ? Get that camera out of here! Get off my property!”

Charging across the deck, presumably to confront the still-filming crew, he almost tripped over the scuttling-to-get-out-of-the-way pig.

Nicky had to laugh and groan at the same time.

But as the accompanying story focused on the ineptness of the police department’s investigation, it really wasn’t that funny. At least, she was sure that from Joe’s perspective it wasn’t.

Later, as they once again did their ships-that-pass-in-the-night thing in the hall of Twybee Cottage, Nicky couldn’t resist saying, “I saw you on TV today. I didn’t know you had a pet pig.”

Joe’s mouth twisted sardonically. “Honey, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

That, Nicky reflected as she sat upstairs at her desk, working into the wee hours because now only exhaustion allowed her to sleep without terrible dreams, was undoubtedly true. But she knew enough about him not to worry about the Lazarus Killer somehow getting to her while he was spending the nights in her house.

And that, she decided, was a whole lot.

The thing was, with all the news crews that were now on the island, they all constantly ran into each other everywhere they went. Some of her fellow reporters Nicky already knew, some of them she didn’t, but a camaraderie of sorts developed among them, along with a fierce sense of competition. Two of the teams resorted to bringing in their own psychics, who, while Nicky hadn’t heard anything about them being blocked, didn’t seem to be having any more luck in identifying the killer than Leonora was having. Most, though, continued to follow various police officers and public officials around, doing what they called “guerrilla filming” as the cops went about their jobs of interviewing witnesses and tracking down leads, and the officials went around talking about things like how the killings were likely to affect the upcoming high season. Still, with so many teams rehashing the same information, producers started screaming at their reporters to bring them something fresh. Friday passed, then Saturday, then Sunday with its broadcast of
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
. The ratings were up again: they were at 32 now. The powers-that-be were excited, calling to offer congratulations, sending flowers, cheering Nicky on. Meanwhile, the island held its collective breath. Just six days had separated the murders of Karen Wise and Marsha Browning, and yet ten days had passed in which the killer had done nothing. As the new week began, much of the reporting, therefore, started to focus on the island itself and the personalities of the people involved in the case.