Whisper of Evil (15 page)

"It must have been a couple of years later that it caught fire and burned to the ground before anybody could get to it. The fire chief figured it was a lightning strike."

Dryly, Nell said, "And nobody was much surprised, right? That God finally struck down the wicked?"

He grimaced. "I did hear one or two people calling it a judgment. She went out of her way to make people afraid of her, Nell, you know that."

"She was an eccentric old woman who kept to herself because the visions she lived with terrified her." Surprised at her own ferocity, Nell made an effort to hold her voice even. "Some people never adjust. She didn't. She saw tragedies she couldn't change and tried to hide from them. It's not her fault that other people didn't understand."

After a long moment, Max said, "You're right. I'm sorry. Look, this path is the shortest way to the bayou, but if you'd rather ride out past your grandmother's place first—"

"No, thanks. I'd just as soon go directly to the bayou."

"Okay. This way, then."

Nell followed him as he took the alternate trail, sparing the other one only a brief glance. Sooner or later, she'd have to go there, of course, force herself to stand and look at that burned-out shell of a place. And remember. But she preferred to do that alone.

She had to do it alone.

"Did he have what?" Sue Caldwell stared at Justin with bewildered eyes. "A secret place?"

"Well, did he have a place he liked to keep just to… store things he didn't want to show other people, let's say." Justin made his voice even, soothing.

Her pale face flushing suddenly, Sue said, "If you mean did he have some horrible little hiding place like Peter Lynch had, the answer is no. My husband did not have any dirty secrets, Detective Byers."

Highly conscious of the little black notebook he was still carrying around with him, Justin nevertheless quickly assured her that he'd intended to imply no such thing. "But even the best of men have things they don't want to be… public knowledge. A stash of old magazines, maybe—something like that."

Stiffly now, Sue said, "I wouldn't know about that, Detective. He certainly never had that sort of thing when he lived here with me."

Since he knew they stood a snowball's chance of getting a warrant to search the house George Caldwell had moved out of nearly three years before his death, Justin hadn't even bothered to ask. Plus, he figured any man with a secret blackmail game going would have made damned sure he had his evidence close by—not hidden away in a house with his estranged wife.

And after having spent more than half an hour talking to her, Justin was also convinced that Sue Caldwell hadn't known her husband at all. She struck him as one of those unimaginative people who took everything at face value, a discarded wife still honestly bewildered as to why her husband would have left her and virtually certain he would have come home eventually.

Blunt now, Justin said, "Forgive me, but is it true that your marriage broke up over another woman?"

"No, it is not," she said flatly, eyes bright with indignation. "George was having a midlife crisis, that's all. He bought that little red car, started taking trips all over the place and wearing flashy clothes, just the sort of thing you'd expect. He was about to turn forty and he couldn't stand the thought of losing his youth. But there was no other woman. I would have known if there had been."

Justin wondered, but didn't challenge her assertion. "I see. And you can't think of any enemies he might have made either during your marriage or after he moved out?"

"Certainly not. George was a fine man, everyone said so." She sniffed suddenly. "A fine man. It had to be that maniac everybody's talking about, the one who killed those other men. Because there was no reason, just no reason, to kill George."

Justin knew denial when he heard it; no way was Sue Caldwell willing or even able to believe her husband might have had a nasty little secret that could have gotten him killed. She could lump his death in with those of the other men only because some "maniac" was doing the killing, murdering without rhyme or reason, and the fact that the other victims had led secret lives did not, of course, mean that George had as well.

Figuring he wasn't going to get anything else from the widow Caldwell, Justin made soothing noises once again and began to take his leave.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled his car into the parking lot of the apartment building where Caldwell had lived, and sat there for a few moments, brooding. They had searched the apartment. Questioned the neighbors. Gone over his little red sports car with a fine-tooth comb. Searched his office at the bank, the lockbox he'd kept there.

Nothing.

But if George Caldwell had been a blackmailer, then somewhere there had to be the evidence of it. He had to have kept some kind of proof against his victims, whatever it was he had held over their heads to induce them to pay him.

Justin was still uncertain as to whether he believed the killer himself had sent the notebook to him. It seemed most likely. Which would logically mean, he thought, that the killer was not among the blackmail victims; why provide the police with evidence that would furnish a motive for murder?

Then again, it might be a dandy little diversion. With several blackmail victims to choose from, the killer might have decided he'd be lost in the crowd and draw no more attention from the police than any of the others. A hide-in-plain-sight choice. That made a certain amount of sense.

Of course, it could also be true that exposing Cald-well's sins might have been more important to him than protecting his own ass, and sending the notebook to one of the cops was the only way he could accomplish that. Which certainly argued an obsession amounting to mania,

Justin pulled the little black notebook from an inner pocket and thumbed through it slowly. There had been, of course, no fingerprints whatsoever. He'd used his own latent kit to dust every goddamned page, without getting so much as a smudge. Which certainly screamed "planted evidence." Or else a man who was very, very careful.

He wasn't absolutely positive the handwriting was George Caldwell's, so that was still a question mark. And since he had to consider the whole blackmail scheme a possibility rather than a probability, the only way he could justify continuing to explore the theory was by telling himself that knowing why George Cald-well died would tell him more than the death of any of the other victims had.

He really believed that. So he kept pushing onward and kept studying the damned notebook.

Now that he'd had time to consider, he could name at least two possible matches for nearly every set of initials and sometimes three or four, but the only way to be certain who had been blackmailed—assuming anyone had—was to find the evidence Caldwell would have had to use against his victims.

And Justin had to search carefully, because he didn't dare risk Sheriff Cole finding out what he was looking for; so far, Ethan Cole was the only match Justin had been able to come up with for the initials E.C. Which meant he couldn't tell the sheriff about this little black book. Not yet, anyway, not until he was able to rule out Cole as a possible blackmail victim.

And a possible murderer.

He looked up again to study the apartment building where George Caldwell had lived, then flipped a mental coin, sighed, and got out of his car. If Caldwell had been a blackmailer, somewhere there would be evidence of it. There had to be.

If Justin could only find it.

"It was last September," Max reminded Nell as they stood some yards from one of the few bayous in the immediate area, studying very faint marks on a patch of sandy ground. "To their credit, the cops pulled the car out on the other side and tried to be careful not to disturb any possible evidence here, but I'm surprised you can still see anything after all this time."

She knelt down and traced the sharp edge of one tire track with her finger. "This is what's left of the tracks? No other vehicle has been here?"

"I doubt it, given how hard it is to get a vehicle in here, but there's no way to be absolutely positive. For what it's worth, I came out here the next day, and as far as I can tell these are the original tire tracks from Luke Ferrier's car."

"According to the report, the initial conclusion was suicide, right?"

"Right."

"Then later it was decided that Ferrier might have been drugged and the car deliberately pointed at the water."

"Yeah."

Nell half closed her eyes, trying to bring what she was feeling into focus. She expected it to be difficult with Max so near, and it was, but even so there was something… off. It felt strange, different from what she was accustomed to, from what it should have been. Almost as though she were trying to sense through a veil. Whatever lay on the other side was so dim and vague it was like the whisper of an echo, and groping toward it tentatively was frustrating.

"Nell?"

"Wait. There's something…" She concentrated for what felt like hours, then finally rose with a sigh. "Dammit."

"What?"

"It's too vague to get hold of. Whatever happened out here happened fast, too fast to leave much of an energy signature." She frowned down at the tire track. "But that track tells me he was probably trying to stop the car before it went into the water, otherwise the marks wouldn't have lasted this long or been this deep."

"Then it wasn't suicide—

and he wasn't unconscious when the car went in."

"That idea always bothered me a bit, that the killer made sure Ferrier was out cold before he killed him," Nell confessed. "Doesn't really match up with the other three victims. In fact, if you assume Caldwell saw his killer and knew he was about to be shot, then you can argue that all four suffered either physically or emotionally just before they died."

"You're not including your father in the group?"

Nell shook her head. "For now, no. Whatever certainties I feel, the fact is that there's no evidence my father's death was anything but natural, much less that this killer was also his murderer. Unless and until I can find that evidence, I have to consider his death as separate from the others." She shrugged. "Maybe he just pissed somebody off and paid for that with his life. He was… very good at pissing people off."

Max's eyes narrowed, but he didn't question the comment about her father just then. "But the other four deaths were planned, and in detail. And all of them suffered. Part of the punishment?"

"It would make sense. It also might explain why the first of them, Peter Lynch, was the only one who probably wasn't in the killer's presence when he died. Killing by remote control, at a distance, might have been a kind of failed experiment. Maybe the killer thought it would be safer, I don't know. But despite the physical agony that Lynch went through being poisoned, it obviously wasn't enough for the killer. Wasn't a satisfying enough punishment. He wanted to be there. He wanted to watch."

"Christ." His mouth twisting slightly, Max added, "Like some kind of ghoul."

"He's killed at least four men, Max, and possibly five. I'd say death was unquestionably one of his… interests."

"And you still say he's a cop?"

"Bishop says it's likely. I agree." Without waiting for him to comment on that, Nell moved away and began to study the area with a critical eye. Remote: There wasn't a house or even a pasture fence to be seen. Nearly inaccessible: The car had been driven from the highway through what were basically a few clearings in the woods strung together to form the suggestion of a roadway, so horseback was indeed the best way to get to this side of the bayou.

This section of the bayou wasn't even visible from the highway, and in fact Ferrier's car had been discovered only because of a couple of teenagers riding by on horseback.

"What signs point to the killer being a cop?" Max demanded. He stood without moving, hands in his pockets, frowning very slightly as he watched her.

Nell could feel him watching her but tried to make her voice detached and impersonal when she answered him. "The biggest red flag is how careful he's been to vary his killings. There's been nothing impulsive about these four murders, nothing spur-of-the-moment, so it's clear he's planning every step. The fact that he's been careful not to establish any kind of pattern that might help the police I.D. him says he knows and understands police procedure. Even more, he's pitting his skills and intelligence against the adversary he knows best—other cops."

"Catch me if you can," Max said slowly. "Catch me if you're good enough."

"Exactly. He's testing their mettle. And there's a personal edge to that, a sense that part of his plan is to… humiliate the police. Make them look bad in their inability to catch him. I wouldn't be surprised if a future victim—assuming we don't stop him—turned out to be a cop. I think he has a personal grudge against someone in the sheriff's department."

"That your idea, or Bishop's?"

Nell thought there was a personal edge to that question, but all she said was, "It's a feeling I've had since I came back here. There's nothing concrete to base it on."

"Just a feeling you trust."

She nodded. "Just a feeling I trust. A lot of what I do is based on that sort of thing."

"Hunches. Intuition."

"You know it's more than that."

He nodded, but said, "Still, it sounds like you're doing a bit of profiling on your own. FBI training?"

"We've all spent a little time in Behavioral Sciences, and most of us have some kind of psychology training under our belts. It's like with any other kind of hunting; you have to understand your quarry if you intend to catch him." Nell shrugged, then moved back toward the woods where their horses were tied. "In any case, there's nothing here I can tap into. What about Fer-rier's house? Isn't it still standing empty?"