“What’s happening?”
“Good question.”
Hollis looked at Mallory, then back at the other two. “Guys, come on. People are beginning to stare. Pablo and Bobby look real nervous. Or real embarrassed, I’m not sure which. What’s happening?”
After a moment, Isabel turned her head to look at Hollis. “I don’t want to sound like a country song, but I can feel his heart beating.”
“I know she didn’t eat breakfast,” Rafe said, also looking at Hollis.
“And he’s uneasy because-” Isabel turned her head abruptly to stare at Rafe. “Jesus, why didn’t you tell me?”
“You know damned well why I didn’t tell you,” he replied, meeting her gaze.
“It was your abilities manifesting themselves physically. Which, remember, is a rare thing but not unheard of. In your case, probably caused by guilt because you believed you should have stopped him after the first murder. The blood of the innocent, literally on your hands.”
“I realize that. Now. Before we talked yesterday, the possibilities were a lot more creepy.”
“So that’s why you were blocking me. That was the part of you I couldn’t get at?”
“I’m guessing yes. Isabel, I was waking up with blood on my hands every morning and had no idea where it had come from. Women were dead. Other women were missing. You were offering me theories of a serial killer who could be walking around most of the time not knowing he was a murderer. So I was afraid I was blacking out.”
“And killing blondes? I could have told you there wasn’t a chance in hell of you doing that.”
“Well, I was… afraid to ask.”
“Guys,” Hollis’s voice was just this side of strident.
Isabel looked at her partner, frowned slightly, and then let go of Rafe’s hands. “Oh. Sorry. We were… somewhere else.”
“I noticed. Where were you?”
“In a galaxy far, far away,” Rafe murmured.
“You really are beginning to talk like me,” Isabel told him.
“I know. Spooky, isn’t it?” He took her arm and guided her toward the yellow crime-scene tape on the highway side of the clearing. “I say we head back to the station before the heavens open up.”
Hollis and Mallory went with them, wearing almost identical expressions of baffled interest.
“Blood on your hands?” Mallory said to Rafe. “You were waking up with blood on your hands?”
“Yeah, for the past few weeks.”
Hollis muttered, “Man, have you got a great poker face.” And waited until they were outside the crime scene to add, “If somebody doesn’t tell me, right now, what’s going on-”
“I’m not so sure I can.” Isabel shook her head. “All I really know is that everything’s different.”
“Different how?”
“The voices are back. But… very, very quiet. Distant.”
“What about Rafe’s shield?”
“It’s still there. Here. I think we punched a couple of holes in it, though. I told you I wasn’t sure I could explain.”
“And I should have listened,” Hollis said.
Addressing his patrolmen, Rafe said, “You two can take your lunch break and then head back to the station; unless you hear otherwise, follow your assignments on the board for the rest of the day.”
“Right, Chief.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No watchdogs?” Isabel asked.
“I’m your watchdog,” he replied. “Mallory, if you’ll ride back with Hollis?”
“Sure.”
By the time they reached the parked vehicles, they saw that the media had vanished, along with any curious passersby.
Isabel said, “Did the weather happen to mention that the storms today and tonight could be mean ones? The sort to keep golfers off courses and reporters with electronic equipment indoors?”
Rafe nodded. “We’re not in the Southeast’s tornado alley, but close enough.”
Isabel didn’t say anything else until they were in the Jeep heading back to town, and then her voice was tentative. “Back there at the scene when we… did whatever it is we did, I got a flash of something. That box. The box of photographs. We have to find it. The answer is in there, I know it.”
“If it’s in a bank under an assumed name-”
“I don’t think it is. I think we’ve missed something.”
Rafe frowned as thunder boomed again. “We’ve checked all the properties she owned.”
“Have we?” Isabel turned in her seat to look at him. “Jamie had a secret life. A secret self. And she hid her secrets very, very well. What if, once Hope Tessneer died, Jamie decided to bury all the secrets for good?”
“We found her playhouse,” Rafe reminded her.
“Yeah, but Jamie didn’t count on dying herself. I think if she’d been granted just a little more time, we wouldn’t have found anything but an empty storage building there. And nothing at all of her secret life.”
“Wouldn’t she just have burned everything? I mean, if she had wanted to destroy the evidence of that other life.”
“She didn’t want to destroy it. Destroy the strongest part of herself? No way. It would have been like cutting off her arm, or worse. She wanted to bury it. To put it where nobody but she would ever find it. Look, when Hope’s body turned up missing-and I’m still convinced the killer took it from wherever Jamie had put it-she had to know someone else knew about the death. She had to be afraid that at best the body would turn up and it would be traced back to her, or-possibly worse from her point of view-that someone could be planning blackmail.”
“So,” Rafe said, “she would have wanted to remove any possible evidence of their relationship.”
“Of all her secret relationships. If we found one, we’d find them all; that’s what she would have thought. So she started to move, and fast. Listed her properties for sale, maybe started shifting money she wasn’t supposed to have, between accounts we weren’t supposed to know about.”
“We’ve got people checking area banks today.”
“Maybe they’ll at least find evidence of those secret accounts. But I don’t think they’ll find the box. I think Jamie was planning to leave this place, or at least go on a long vacation somewhere until Hope’s body turned up and she could determine whether she was going to be suspected of murder.”
“And spent the final days of her life trying to erase or hide all the secrets,” Rafe said.
“Exactly. I think she found or created a place to bury the Mistress for Hire. The box of photos went there right away, especially since she must have suspected Emily of snooping. The stuff in her playhouse would have followed, but the killer got to her first.”
“Okay,” Rafe said. “I’ll buy the theory. But how do we find out where this hiding place is? We’ve tapped every source we have, short of going door to door and asking every soul in Hastings. What else can we do?”
Isabel drew a deep breath. “We ask the one soul who knows.”
The heavens took their own time in opening up. By three that afternoon, it was twilight, with a hot wind blowing gustily and thunder rolling as though it had miles and miles to go. Flashes of lightning provided eerie strobelike images of very little traffic on Main Street, and clusters of media camped all around the town hall across from the police station. Print media, at any rate; most of those with electronics to consider had, as Isabel predicted, wisely chosen to remain indoors.
“You can feel the nerves,” Mallory said, gazing out the window of the conference room. “Even the reporters. I don’t have any extra senses, and I can feel it.”
“Extra senses make it worse,” Hollis told her. She was sitting at the conference table, both elbows propped on it and her hands cupping her face. “My head is throbbing in the weirdest way.” She yawned as if to clear her ears. “And I feel like I’m going up in a plane.”