"A woman, Mrs. Emma … shit. I've read too many names in too short a space of time."
"Was it an unusual name?" Edward asked without a single change of expression.
I frowned at him and leaned across the table, lying on it to reach the reports. I shuffled through them until I found the one I wanted. "Mrs. Emma Taylor said, 'The night just felt awful. I just couldn't stand being inside. She goes on to say, 'Outside the air was suffocating, hard to breathe.»
"So?" he asked.
"So I want to talk to her."
"Why?"
"I think she's a sensitive, if not a psychic."
"There's nothing in the reports that say she's either."
"If you have the gift and you ignore it or pretend it's not real, it doesn't go away. Power will out, Edward. If she's a strong sensitive or a psychic that has neglected her powers for years, then she'll be either depressed or manic. She'll have a history of treatment for mental illness. How serious will depend on how gifted she is."
He finally looked interested. "You're saying that having psychic ability can drive you crazy?"
"I'm saying that psychic ability can masquerade as mental illness. I know ghost hunters that hear the voices of the dead like whispers in their ears, one of the classic symptoms of psycophernia. Empaths, people who draw impressions from other people, can be depressed because they're surrounded by depressed people, and they don't know how to shield themselves. Really strong clairvoyants can spend their lives getting visions from everything they touch, unable to turn it off, again seeing things that aren't there. Psycophernia. Demonic possession can mask itself as multiple personality. I could give you examples for the next hour matching mental illness with different types of power."
"You've made your point," he said. He sat up and didn't seem the least bit stiff. Maybe the floor was good for his back. "I still don't understand why you want to talk to this woman. The report was taken by Detective Loggia. He was very thorough. He asked good questions."
"You noticed that he took more time with why people left than the rest of the cops, just like I noticed it."
Edward shrugged. "Loggia didn't like the way everyone cleared out. Too damn convenient, but he couldn't come up with anything that tied the people together into a conspiracy."
"A conspiracy?" I almost laughed then stopped at the seriousness in his face. "Did someone actually suggest that an entire upper-middle-class to more-than-middle-class neighborhood conspired together to kill these people?"
"It was the only logical explanation for why they all left within thirty minutes of each other on the night of the murders."
"So they investigated all these people?" I asked.
"That's where some of the extra paperwork comes from."
"And?" I said.
"Nothing," Edward said.
"Nothing?" I made it a question.
"A few neighborhood squabbles over kids destroying the flowers, one affair where the husband that turned up dead was banging the next door neighbor's wife." Edward grinned. "The neighbor was lucky that the other man got cut up in the middle of a string of serial killings. Otherwise, he'd have been the top of the hit parade."
"Could it have been a copycat?" I asked.
"The police don't think so, and believe me they tried to make the pieces fit."
"I believe you. The police hate to let a good motive slide since most of the time motive isn't even one of their top priorities. Most people kill over stupid things, impulse, screw motive."
"Do you have a logical reason why all these people would vacate their houses just at the right time for the killer, or killers, to make their move?"
I nodded. "Yep."
He looked up at me, a slight smile on his face. "I'm listening."
"It's very common in hauntings for people to be uncomfortable in the area where the ghost is strongest."
"You're saying ghosts did this?"
I waved a hand. "Wait, wait until I'm done."
He gave a small nod. "Dazzle me."
"I don't know if it's dazzling, but I think it's how it was done. There are spells that supposedly can make a person uneasy in a house or a place. But the spells I read in college were for one person or one house, not a dozen homes and twice that many people. I'm not even sure a coven working together could affect that big an area. I don't know that much about actual witchcraft of any flavor. We'll need to find a witch to ask. But I think it's moot. I just mentioned it as a possibility."
"It's a possibility the cops haven't come up with yet."
"Nice to know I haven't entirely wasted the last five hours of my life."
"But you don't think it was witches," Edward said.
I shook my head. "Witches of almost any flavor believe in the threefold rule. What you give out comes back to you threefold."
"What goes around comes around," Edward said.
"Exactly, and no one is going to want this shit coming back on them three-fold. I would have said they also believe in 'do what you will, only harm none, but you can have bad pagans just like you can have bad Christians. Just because your belief says something is wrong doesn't mean someone's not going to break the rules."
"So what do you think caused them all to leave their homes just when our killer needed it?"
"I think whatever is doing this, is big enough and powerful enough to simply arrive on the spot and want the people to go, and they went."
Edward frowned at me. "I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
"Our monster arrives, knows which house it wants, and he fills the rest of the houses with dread, driving the other families out. That takes a hell of a lot of power, but to then turn around and shield the murder house so that that one family doesn't flee, that's truly impressive. I know some preternatural critters that can throw a sense of unease around them. Mostly I think to keep hunters at bay. But I don't know anything that can cause this kind of controlled panic."
"So you're saying you don't know what it is," he said, and there was just a tinge of disappointment in his voice.
"Not yet, but if this is true, then it rules out a hell of a lot of things. I mean some vampires can throw out fear like this, but not on this large a scale, and if they could do the other houses, they couldn't shield the murder house."
"I know a vampire kill when I see it, Anita, and this isn't one."
I waved my hands in the air as if clearing it. "I'm just throwing out examples, Edward. Even a demon couldn't do this."
"How about a devil?" he asked.
I looked at him, saw he was serious, so I gave him a serious answer. "I won't go into how long it's been since anyone saw a devil, a greater demon, above ground, but if it were anything demonic, I'd have felt it today in the house. The demonic leave a stain behind, Edward."
"Couldn't one that was powerful enough hide its presence from you?"
"Probably," I said. "I'm not a priest, so probably, but whatever is mutilating these people doesn't want to hide." I shook my fiend. "It's not demonic, I'd almost bet the farm on it, but again I'm not a demonologist."
"I know that Donna can help us locate a witch tomorrow. I don't think she knows any demonologists."
"There are only two in the country. Father Simon McCoupen, who has the record in this century in this country for number of exorcisms performed, and Doctor Philo Merrick, who teaches at the University of San Francisco."
"You sound like you know them," Edward said.