3

GODDAMMIT, YOU TOLD ME being bait for this bastard wasn’t the idea.”

“It wasn’t the plan. It was always a possibility, of course, but it wasn’t the plan.”

“Isabel-”

“Besides, it isn’t that clear-cut. I said I was on his A-list, but I’m not next. He gets to know his victims before he kills them, Rafe. He doesn’t know me. Not yet. And he won’t come after me until he does. Or thinks he does.”

“Are you willing to bet your life on that?”

She didn’t hesitate. “To catch this bastard? Yes.”

Rafe took a step toward her. “Have you reported it to your boss? Does he know you’re on the A-list?”

“Not yet. I’m scheduled to report in later today. I’ll tell him then.”

“Will you?” His doubt was obvious.

Isabel chuckled. “Rafe, our unit is made up of psychics. You don’t keep secrets, or withhold vital bits of information, when half the team can read your mind. Very few of us have been able to keep anything important from Bishop no matter how far away we were.”

“Have you?”

Isabel took a last look down at the ground where Tricia Kane had died, then started toward him with a slight gesture to indicate they might as well walk back to his Jeep. “I thought so once. Just after I first joined the unit. I thought I was being very clever. Turned out he’d known all along. He usually does.”

Rafe didn’t say anything else until they were in the Jeep and he had turned the air-conditioning on full-blast. “The simplest thing to do,” he said, “is to have you recalled and somebody else sent down here. Somebody who won’t draw this bastard’s attention.”

“The simplest thing,” Isabel said, “is not always the smartest thing.”

“I am not going to stand by while you’re dangled on a goddamned hook.”

“I told you, I’m not next on his hit parade. But somebody else is. Some woman is walking around in your town right now, Rafe, and a killer is stalking her. My partner and I are up to speed on this investigation. Bishop thought we were the best team to send down here, and his success rate, our success rate as a unit, is over ninety percent. We can help you catch him. Send me back, and the next team has to start from scratch. Do you really want to waste that time, especially when this killer is averaging a victim a week so far?”

“Shit.” He stared at her grimly. “I’m taking a hell of a lot on faith here. This psychic stuff.”

“At least you didn’t call it bullshit,” she murmured. “That’s usually the first reaction.”

Ignoring that, he said, “I’m supposed to be okay with you being on our killer’s list because you assure me you aren’t next. That we have time while he stalks his next victim and, not incidentally, finds out enough about you to feel that he knows you. So he can kill you.”

“That pretty much sums it up, yeah.”

“Convince me. Convince me that this clairvoyant knowledge you have is genuine. That it’s something I can trust.”

“Parlor tricks. It always comes down to parlor tricks.”

“I’m serious, Isabel.”

“I know you are.” She sighed. “You sure you want to do this?”

Suddenly wary again, he asked, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because the best way for me to convince you is to open up a connection between us and tell you things about yourself, your life, your past. Things I couldn’t possibly know any other way. You might not find that very comfortable. Most people don’t.”

“Women are dying, Isabel. I think I can endure a little psychic reading.”

“Okay. But when we speak of this later-and we will-just remember that I tried to warn you. I get bonus points for that.”

“Fine.”

She held out a hand, palm up, and Rafe hesitated only an instant before placing his hand on hers. He nearly jerked away when their flesh touched, because there was a literal, visible spark and a definite, if faint, shock. But her fingers closed over his strongly.

Matter-of-factly, she said, “Well, that’s new.”

Rafe wanted to say something about static, but he was busy having another of those strange feelings, just as he’d had when she walked into the press conference, but much, much stronger. That a door had opened and a fresh breeze was blowing through. That everything around him was in sharper focus, more real than it had been before. That something had changed.

And he still didn’t know if it was a good change or a bad one.

Isabel didn’t go into some kind of trance or even close her eyes. But her eyes did take on that abstracted expression he had noticed before, as if she were listening to some distant sound. Her voice remained calm.

“You have an unusual paperweight on your desk at home, some kind of car part encased in acrylic. You prefer cats over dogs, though you don’t have either because of your long working hours. You’re allergic to alcohol, which is why you don’t drink. You’re fascinated by the Internet, by the instant communication of people all over the world. You’re a movie buff, especially interested in science fiction and horror.”

Isabel smiled suddenly. “And you wear a particular style of jockey shorts because of a commercial you saw on TV.”

Rafe jerked his hand away. “Jesus,” he muttered. Then, getting back on balance, he added somewhat defensively, “You could have found out any of that. All of it.”

“Even the jockey shorts?”

“Jesus,” he repeated.

She was looking at him steadily, her eyes still faintly abstracted, distant. “Ah, now I understand why the idea of an FBI unit made up of psychics didn’t throw you. Your grandmother had what she called ‘the sight.’ She knew things before they happened.”

Rafe looked at his hand, which he had been unconsciously rubbing with the other one, then at her. “You aren’t touching me,” he noted in a careful tone.

“Yeah, well. Once a connection is made, I tend to pick up stuff from then on.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, varying the oath somewhat.

“I tried to warn you. Remember, bonus points.”

“I still don’t- You could have found out most of that some other way.”

“Maybe. But could I have found out that your grandmother told you on your fifteenth birthday that your destiny was to be a cop? It was just the two of you there at the time, so nobody else knew. You believed it was weird, she was weird, because you hadn’t thought of being a cop. The family business was construction. That’s what you were going to do, especially as you’d been swinging a hammer since you were twelve.”

Rafe was silent, frowning slightly.

“She also told you… there would come a point in your life when you would have to be very, very careful.” Isabel was frowning herself now, head slightly tilted, clearly concentrating. “That there was something important you were meant to do as part of the destiny she saw for you, but it would be dangerous. Deadly dangerous. Something about… a storm… a woman with green eyes… a black-gloved hand reaching… and glass shattering.”

He drew a breath. “Vague enough.”

Isabel blinked, and her green eyes cleared. “According to what our seers have told me, visions often come that way, as a series of images. Sometimes they prove to be literal, other times it’s all symbolic. The green-eyed woman could be a jealous woman or someone who resents you or someone else. The black-gloved hand a threat. The storm, violence. Like that.”

“Still vague,” he insisted. “Any of that is something a cop deals with regularly.”

“Well, we’ll see. Because I have more than a hunch that what your grandmother saw was this point in your life-otherwise I probably wouldn’t have picked up her prediction.”

“What do you mean?”

“Patterns are everywhere, Rafe. Events touch other events like a honeycomb, connecting to one another. And seeming coincidences usually aren’t. I may pick up some trivial information unrelated to what’s going on at present, and not all the stuff I get could even be called hits, but I’m focused on this investigation, this killer-and when that’s the case it almost always turns out that most of what I get is relevant to what’s going on around me at the time.”

“Want to use a few more qualifiers?”

She smiled at his exasperation, though it was more rueful than amused. “Sorry, but you’ve got to understand we’re in frontier territory here. There aren’t a whole lot of absolute certainties. Conventional science pretty much sneers at psychic ability, and those who were brave enough to test and experiment found themselves dealing with an unfortunate commonality among psychics.”

“Which is?”

“Very few of us perform well under laboratory conditions. Nobody really knows why, that’s just the way it is.” Isabel shrugged. “Plus, the tests tended to be poorly designed because, to begin with, they didn’t know what they were dealing with. How can you effectively measure and analyze something without even knowing how it works? And how do you figure out how it works when you can’t make it work within a controlled situation?”

“Somebody must have known, or you wouldn’t be here. Would you?”

“The SCU wouldn’t exist if Bishop hadn’t been highly motivated and exceptionally driven to figure out how to use his own abilities to track and capture a serial killer years ago. Once he was able to do that, he believed other psychics could be trained, that we could learn to use our abilities as investigative tools. And that those tools would give us an edge. We’re proving it works. Slowly, carefully-and with setbacks now and then. We’re also learning as we go.

“What we’ve found through sheer trial and error in the field is that our abilities function best when we’re focused on something compelling-such as a murder investigation. But that doesn’t mean we can flip a switch and get exactly the piece of information we need. As with everything else in life, we have to work for it. It’s still trial and error.”

“So, bottom line, your best guess is that because you picked up what my grandmother told me over twenty years ago it means what she saw has something to do with what’s happening in my life today. This investigation.”

“It’s a good bet, based on how my abilities have worked so far. Plus, logically this’ll probably be the toughest case of your career, assuming you don’t move to a big city and deal often with violent killers. And though I can’t speak to the specifics of your grandmother’s vision-yet-I can tell you it’s going to be dangerous as hell tracking and catching this killer.”

Listening to her tone as well as the words, Rafe said, “You picked up something else out there where Tricia Kane was killed, didn’t you? What was it?”

She hesitated just long enough to make the internal debate obvious, then said, “What I picked up out there confirmed something I suspected even before I came to Hastings. This town is just his latest hunting ground.”

“He’s killed before?”

“In at least two previous locations. Ten years ago, he butchered six women in Florida. And five years ago, six women in Alabama.”

“Blondes?” Rafe asked.

“No. Redheads in Florida. Brunettes in Alabama. We have no idea why.”

“And nobody caught him then.”

“Lots tried. But he hit quick-one victim every week, just like here-and then he vanished. Typical serial killer cases, if there is such a thing, usually drag on months, years, and it takes time to get law enforcement organized once a pattern is even noticed. But this monster hit and vanished before the task forces could even get up and running. And he didn’t leave so much as a hair behind to help I.D. him, so they had almost nothing to work with.”

“Then how do you know it’s the same killer?”

“The M.O. The profile. The fact that Bishop himself worked on the second set of murders-one of his very few unsuccessful cases.”

“I wasn’t told about any of this in the initial profile.”

“No. The first profiler wasn’t a member of the SCU. And even though the two earlier sets of murders came up on the computer as possibly connected, he discounted them because it was believed at the time that the most likely suspect was killed trying to escape police in Alabama. His car went off a bridge. But they never found the body.”

“So do you and Bishop believe he didn’t die-or that the suspect the police were chasing wasn’t the killer?”

“We believe the latter, actually. The man the police were after had a few violent crimes on his rap sheet, but neither Bishop nor I was convinced he had the right psychological makeup to be the clever serial killer we were after.”

“So he kills his six victims, lays low for five years, and then starts up all over again. That’s a hell of a cooling-off period.”

“And unusual. We believe he uses the time to relocate and get to know the people around him. We also believe there’s always a trigger, as I said. Something sets him off. Something always sets him off.”

Again, Rafe heard a note in her voice that made him wary. “There’s another reason you believe this is the same killer. What is it?”

Isabel answered without hesitation. “Standing where Tricia Kane was murdered, I felt him. Just the way I felt him five years ago when I first encountered Bishop and joined the team. And the way I felt him ten years ago when he killed a good friend of mine.”

It was nearly midnight when Mallory Beck pulled herself reluctantly from bed and began getting dressed. “Dammit. Where on earth did my bra get to?”

“Over there by the bookcase. You could stay, you know. Spend the night.”

“I’m back on duty at seven,” she said. “First big meeting of our task force, FBI agents included, starts at eight. That’s off the record, Alan.”

“Mal, I’ve told you before, anything you say to me privately is off the record.” His voice was patient. He propped himself up on an elbow and watched her dress. “I’m not going to cross that line.”

She was reasonably sure he wouldn’t. But only reasonably sure.

“Okay. But I still need to go home. I won’t sleep much if I stay here, and I want to be rested tomorrow.”

“You don’t have anything to prove, you know. To these FBI agents, I mean. Or to Rafe. You’re a damned good cop, everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, well, being a good cop hasn’t been enough so far, has it?”

He frowned a little as he watched her, wondering as he so often had in the last few months if he would ever really know her. It was undoubtedly part of the attraction as far as he was concerned, he knew that very well; there was so much of her beneath the surface, and his instinct was to dig, to explore and understand.

She wasn’t making it easy for him.

Maybe that was part of the attraction as well. Plus the mind-blowing sex, of course. Either it was sheer natural talent, or else Alan had to take his hat off to the men in her past, because Mallory was something else in bed.

Addictive was the word that came to mind.

“You can’t blame yourself,” he said finally.

“To Protect and Serve. It says that on the sides of our cruisers and Jeeps. It’s what we get paid for. Our entire reason for being, so to speak.”

“It’s not a one-woman police force, Mal. Let some of the others carry the weight.”

“They do. Especially Rafe.”

“Yeah, give him his due. He wasn’t too proud to yell for help.”

Mallory sat down on the bed to put her socks and shoes on, eyeing her lover. “We’ve both known him a long time. Pride is never going to be his downfall.”

“No. But failing to trust himself might be.”

Since she’d had the same thought herself, Mallory could hardly disagree. But she felt uncomfortable on several levels discussing her boss with Alan, so she simply changed the subject. “I’m sorry I missed the press conference today. I hear you cracked up the room.”

“Rafe did-with a joke at my expense. I gather that gorgeous blonde he left with is one of the FBI agents?”

“Mmm. Isabel Adams-and I better not see that name printed in the paper unless and until it’s released officially.”

“You won’t, dammit.” Still, Alan couldn’t stop asking questions. “She’s not down here alone?”

“No, she has a partner. Another woman. I haven’t met her yet.”

“Did it occur to anybody at the Bureau that sending a blond female agent down here at this particular time might be a little dicey?”

Mallory shrugged. “They wrote the profile. I have to assume they know what they’re doing.”

“I bet Rafe is pissed.”

“You’ll have to ask him about that.”

“Jesus, you’re pigheaded.”

“It’d be more polite to call me stubborn.”

“And less accurate. Mal”-he leaned over to grasp her wrist before she stood up-“is something wrong? I mean, aside from the obvious maniacal-killer-stalking-Hastings thing.”

“No.”

That mild syllable didn’t give him much room to maneuver, but he tried. “I know you’re preoccupied. Hell, we all are. But sometimes I get the feeling you’re not even here.”

“I didn’t hear you complaining a little while ago. Even though I always wonder when a guy calls out God’s name instead of mine.”

Refusing to be sidetracked, Alan said, “You barely caught your breath before you were up and dressing.”

“I told you. I have to go to work early.”

“If you’d leave some stuff here, you could spend the night occasionally and still get to work early.” He heard the note of frustration in his own voice, and the familiar resentment prickled inside him. Why does she make me do this?

“Alan, we’ve been over this. I like my own space. I never leave any of my stuff at a man’s apartment. I don’t like sleepovers except for vacation trips out of town. And I’m not real comfortable being in bed with a reporter in the first place. Conflict of interest rings a rather ugly bell.”

Her patient tone grated, but he managed to keep his own voice calm. Even careless, around the edges. “It’s that last that really bugs you, and don’t think I don’t know it. You don’t trust me, Mal. You don’t believe I can separate my work from my personal life.”

“Why should you be different from the rest of us?” she asked dryly, pulling away from him and rising to her feet. “My job is in my head twenty-four seven. And so is yours. We’re both career people. We live on takeout and caffeine. Half the time our socks don’t match, and when we realize it we just buy new socks. We do our laundry when we run out of clean clothes. And when the biggest, baddest bad to ever hit Hastings rears its ugly head, both our careers kick into high gear. Right?”

“Right,” he agreed reluctantly.

“Besides, let’s not kid ourselves. Neither one of us is looking for anything more than a few hours of stress-busting sex every week.” She smiled down at him. “Don’t get up. I’ll let myself out. See you.”

“Good night, Mal.” He remained where he was until he heard the front door of his apartment close. Then he fell back against the pillows and muttered a heartfelt “Shit.”

Outside Alan’s apartment building, Mallory stood on the sidewalk for a moment breathing in the slightly breezy but otherwise mild night air. It was a well-lighted sidewalk close to downtown Hastings, and Mallory shouldn’t have felt particularly threatened.

The breeze intensified suddenly, blowing an empty soft drink can across the sidewalk a few feet away, and Mallory nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Shit,” she muttered.

She could hear the trees whispering softly as the wind stirred their leaves. Hear the occasional swish of a car passing a block or so away. Crickets. Bullfrogs.

Her name.

Not that she really heard that, of course. It was just that she had the uneasy feeling she was being watched. Even followed sometimes.

She’d been conscious of it for some time now, days at least. At odd moments, usually but not always when she was outside, like now. If she were a blonde, she would have been getting really nervous about it; as it was, the sensation just made her wary and a lot more careful.

And jumpy as hell.

She had to wonder if this killer, like so many she’d read about in the police manuals, kept an eye on the cops as they investigated his crimes. Was that it? Was some wacko watching gleefully from behind the bushes, congratulating himself on his cleverness and their incompetence?

If so, maybe it made sense that he’d concentrate on one-or more-of the female officers rather than the guys. She made a mental note to herself to ask some of the other women in the department if any of them had been aware of this creepy feeling. And if they had, or maybe especially if they hadn’t, she’d have to ask the FBI profiler about it.

The gorgeous female blond FBI profiler.

Mallory knew Rafe was pissed and unhappy about that; he’d never been a man to hide his feelings. But she also knew that Isabel Adams had somehow managed to persuade him to accept her presence in the investigation.

And it hadn’t been by batting her baby greens at him either.

No, there was a lot more to this than sex appeal; she knew Rafe too well not to feel sure that his reasons for accepting Isabel were logical and completely professional. She was still here because he believed she was an asset to the investigation. Period.

Which wasn’t to say he was immune to the effects of a beautiful face, green eyes, and a body that looked really good in clingy summery clothing. He was a man, after all.

She half laughed under her breath but kept a wary eye on her surroundings as she unlocked her car and got in. Then again, she thought, maybe she wasn’t being quite fair to Rafe. Maybe having her own man problems at the moment made her overly sensitive to undercurrents.

Not that Alan was being particularly subtle. Mallory was somewhat bemused to find herself, for the first time in her adult life, on the traditionally male side of things in their relationship: she was the one who was perfectly happy with casual sex a couple of times a week, no strings or promises.

Alan wanted more.

Sighing, Mallory started the car and headed off toward her own apartment on the other side of town. It was relatively easy to push Alan and the various problems he presented to the back of her mind, at least for the moment, because in the forefront there was still the vague but persistent feeling that she was being watched.

All the way home, she couldn’t shake the feeling, even though she didn’t see anyone following her. Or anyone in the vicinity of her apartment building. She parked her car carefully in its slot in a well-lighted area and locked it up, then kept her key-chain pepper spray in one hand and her other hand resting on or near her weapon all the way inside and up to her apartment.

Nothing.

No one.

Just this nagging feeling that someone was watching every move she made.

Once inside, Mallory leaned back against her locked apartment door and softly muttered, “Shit.”

“Let me get this straight.” Isabel rubbed the nape of her neck, staring at her partner. “You met Caleb Powell in that coffee shop on Main Street, and you spilled all that stuff I picked up at Tricia Kane’s apartment?”

“Not all of it.” Hollis shrugged. “Just some… selected bits. I told you, he didn’t want to talk to me. And from the jut of his jaw, I’d say he wouldn’t have been willing to talk to any of us. So I got his attention. What’s wrong with that?”

“Did he ask you how you obtained this information?”

“Yeah, but I distracted him. More or less.”

“Hollis, he’s a lawyer. They don’t get distracted, as a rule. Not for long, anyway. What happens when he starts asking questions?”

“I don’t think he will. He wants to find out who killed Tricia Kane. Besides, you told Chief Sullivan.”

“As closely as we’ll have to work with Rafe and his lead investigator on this case, he had to know. So will she. But a civilian?”

Hollis sighed, clearly impatient with the discussion. “Somehow I don’t think a lawyer finding out we’re psychics is going to be our major problem. I’m new at this whole thing, and you might as well have a bull’s-eye target on your back. In neon.” She stood up. “Since we have that early meeting in the morning, I think I’ll go back to my own room and get some sleep, if you don’t mind.”

Without protest, Isabel merely said, “I’ll be up and ready for breakfast at seven if you want to meet me here.” The small inn where they were staying didn’t provide room service, but there was a restaurant nearby.

“Okay. See you then.”

“Good night, Hollis.”

When she was alone in her room again, Isabel got ready for bed, brooding. Just as the night before, she barely noticed the uninspired, any-hotel-in-any-town-U.S.A. decor, and out of habit she filled the silence by having the air-conditioning on high and the TV tuned to an all-news network.

She hated silence when she was in an unfamiliar place.

She had put off calling Bishop, undecided despite what she’d told Rafe as to what she intended to report. So when her cell phone rang, she knew who it was even without the caller I.D. and answered by saying, “This is supposed to be one of those lessons you’re always saying we have to learn, right? A reminder from the universe that we don’t control anything except our own actions? When we’re able to control them, that is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bishop replied, calm and transparently unconvincing.

“Yeah, yeah. Why team me with Hollis? Answer that.”

“Because you’re the one most likely to help her through this first real test of her abilities.”

“I’m not a medium.”

“No, but you understand how it feels to be forced suddenly to cope with abilities you never even dreamed were possible.”

“I’m not the only other team member who wasn’t born a psychic.”

“You’re the best adjusted.”

“That’s an arguable statement. Just because this stuff no longer scares the hell out of me doesn’t necessarily mean I’m all that well adjusted.”

“I didn’t say well adjusted. I said best adjusted.”

“Which only proves my point. I would think you’d want somebody well adjusted to help Hollis.”

“You’re going to keep arguing about this, aren’t you?” Bishop said.

“I thought I might.”

“Are you asking me to recall Hollis?”

Isabel hesitated, then said, “No. Dammit.”

“You can help her. Just listen to your instincts.”

“Bishop, we both know mediums are fragile.”

“And we both know how difficult it’s been for us to find a medium for the unit. They’re rare, for one thing. And, yes, they’re emotionally fragile. Most can’t handle the job, and those who can tend to burn out quickly.”

“So far,” she reminded him, “we haven’t found a single one who was able to gain information for us by contacting murder victims. I mean an agent. Bonnie did it, but she wasn’t an agent. When she grows up, though-”

“She still has a lot of growing to do. Right now, she’s preoccupied with being a teenager. It’s not the easiest time of life, remember? Especially when you’re gifted.”

“Or cursed. Yeah, I remember. Bonnie aside, the few mediums we’ve found and tried to bring into murder investigations have either been terrified of opening that particular door or else didn’t have enough strength or control to do it in any way helpful to us.”

“Which is another reason you’re teamed with Hollis and why she’s in Hastings. She’s strong enough to handle the work, and her control has been steadily improving.”

“Maybe, but her field experience is zilch. And she’s not ready to open that door, not yet. Strong or not, she’s one of the scared ones. She doesn’t show it, unless you count the chip on her shoulder, but she’s terrified of facing death.”

“Can you blame her? She fought like hell to keep death at bay on her own account hardly more than six months ago. Willingly opening that door and confronting what’s on the other side is going to be the hardest thing she’ll ever have to do.”

“Yeah, which is one reason I don’t think she’s ready for this job, not yet. Look, I’m as sympathetic as anyone about what Hollis has been through, but-”

“She doesn’t need sympathy. She needs to work.”

“She isn’t ready to work, if my opinion counts for anything.”

“She believes she is ready.”

“And what do you believe?” Isabel challenged.

“I believe she needs to work.”

Isabel sighed. “This killer is vicious. The attacks have been vicious. If Hollis is even able to nerve herself to open the door, she’s going to find a hell of a lot of terror and pain barreling through at her.”

“I know.”

“I can’t push her, Bishop.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Just be here to catch her when she falls?”

“No. Don’t focus on that. It’s not what this is about. You investigate your case. Hollis is intelligent, curious, intuitive, and observant, and that plus the training we’ve given her means she’ll be an asset to the investigation. If she’s able to use her psychic abilities, we’ll find out in a hurry whether she can handle the fallout.”

“And whether I can. She could end up a basket case.”

“Possibly, but don’t count her out. She’s exceptionally strong.” Bishop paused, then added dryly, “The more imperative problem, I’d say, is that this killer you and I are both all too familiar with has noticed you this time around. For all we know, he may remember you. In any case, you’re on his hit list.”

“Damn,” Isabel said.