Face Off (16 page)

Suddenly, the scene cleared in Jessie's mind, as she followed Suzanne's directions. She gasped in wonder as she ordered her mind to obey and it actually did her bidding. It was as though she had taken several steps backwards—like moving from near the stage of a movie theater to the last row. Whereas before her mind could only take in small areas, now she was seeing the entire scene.

“That's it, Jessie!” Suzanne gave the girl's hand a tight squeeze. “You're doing it!”

“He's shaving her eyebrow off!” Jessie gasped. “Can you see it?”

“Yes. I'm seeing what you are seeing.” They both watched as Clark began applying makeup to the girl's face.

The girl started to scream, and Clark hit her again. “Silence, you whore!” they heard him yell at her, then they watched in horror as he swung some type of cleaver down at the girl.

Jessie dropped Suzanne's hand and covered her mouth to stifle a scream. She began shaking her head violently from side to side to make the vision go away.

Suzanne grabbed Jessie's hands. “No, Jessie! You can't quit now. You're too close. Bring it back.”

Jessie shoved, trying to remove her hands from Suzanne's death grip. “No. No more. It's too horrible, I don't want to see any more!”

Suzanne's tone was determined as she refused to release Jessie. “You have to get past this. I know it's hard. I've had to do it hundreds of times when I've been helping the police. If I could do this for you, I would, but I get nothing when I touch the cable. It has to be you, Jessie. Just reach deep down inside you and find the strength to face it. You have to, Jessie. For Amy.”

At the mention of her sister's name, Jessie stopped pushing against Suzanne. Her knees started to buckle, but Suzanne held her up. “You can do it, Jessie. Take a few deep breaths. Concentrate. Take hold of the cable again. Clark has been here. He has worked with this cable. It is your lifeline to him.”

Jessie reached down and caught the cable again with her hand. When she saw the fright on the girl's face and heard her screams, she sucked in her breath and went by it.

“Good, Jessie! Keep going. What else do you see?”

The scene unfolded for the two psychics, and they could see Clark as he lined small bottles up along beside the body of the girl they had just watched him kill. He began opening bottles and smearing a liquid on the victim's torso.

“What is he doing?” Jessie whispered.

“I don't know. See if you can get a better picture of the bottles.”

Jessie concentrated hard, panning around the bottles every way she could. “It's no use,” she said to Suzanne. “The bottles have some kind of a white sticker on them, with typing, but I can't see what it says.”

“Okay, Jessie. Now go wider than just Clark. Look at the room. Pull your mind around the room, then out the door. Look for anything that will tell you where they are. A street sign. A number on the house. Anything.” Suzanne was aware the young psychic had gone farther, faster, than she had any right to hope for. Learning to control the visions was not something a psychic picked up overnight.

Suzanne could feel the tension as Jessie forced her mind deeper into the scene. “You don't care about Clark now, Jessie,” Suzanne coaxed. “The room. Empty your thoughts of Clark and the girl. It's the room you care about. You are there in the room. Look around. Make a circle with your head, because you are going to see it all.”

Jessie swayed as she tried to concentrate on the room. She forced her mind away from Clark and the girl and onto their surroundings. Suddenly, she saw another person. A little girl with long dark hair was standing across the room, watching. “Oh, no!” Jessie gagged as she spoke. “There is a little girl in the room! He's got a little girl!”

Suzanne's mind picked up the image of the child as Jessie saw her. She appeared to be about four or five years of age, with matted, long brown hair, and a tear-streaked face.

“Oh, God, Jessie. Why is she standing there like that? What has he done to her?”

The minute Suzanne spoke, the image vanished. At once, they were back at the carnival, the connection broken.

“Try again, Jessie!” Suzanne ordered. “We need to go back.”

Jessie picked up the cable once again, but nothing happened. Whatever she had tuned in to was gone. She knew the end had come, at least for the moment. Suzanne, holding her hand, knew it, too. “All right. Don't worry, Jessie. We'll walk around, talk with some of the other workers, and see if maybe there is a trailer Clark used when he was working here. It will come back. Your mind just got overloaded with the horror of it all, and shut down.”

Jessie looked at Suzanne in a new light. “How could you keep on doing it? It's horrible! When all those little girls were killed in Omaha, how could you keep putting yourself back into the scene? Didn't it make you nuts?”

Suzanne put an arm around Jessie's shoulders. “Sweetie, it does make me a little crazy. I can't deny that. But think how I would feel if I knew I could stop a killer and did nothing because putting myself into the scene would leave me sick and shaken for days.
That
would make me crazier—to know other little girls had died because I refused to act.” As she said the words, for the first time in many months, Suzanne realized the truth of her statement. She had done what she had to do in Omaha. She had done what the police asked her to do. It was time she quit beating herself up over the outcome.

*   *   *

Randal Clark obeyed the man with the lighted baton and drove into the carnival parking area with the Toyota Camry he had hot-wired. Only instead of parking with the license plate out toward the road, he backed into his allotted slot, inching the Camry backward until it almost touched the front of the car in the space behind him. No sense in making it easy for them.

He had gotten rid of the trash bags but had kept on the fake beard. He didn't want any of the carnies to recognize him. After all, he had at least two police cars full of officers providing his alibi back at his apartment. He checked his wristwatch. It was a little after ten. Perfect. In all likelihood, Sam would be smashed by now.

Clark bought his ticket and entered the midway. They had obviously found someone to take over his job. The big rides were up and going. It didn't concern him. He knew he was the best juice man in three states. Any electrician could get the rides going. It was knowing what to do in a crisis, when the rides broke down, that earned him the big bucks. Let the roller coaster stall out with cars of people stranded high in the air and see how fast they wanted him!

Clark stopped at one of the booths and purchased a corn dog and a large Coke. He had finished both by the time he reached Sam's trailer. It took him exactly one minute to drive one of Sam's own filet knives into his heart, retrieve his box from the freezer, and slip out the door into the night. Sam, who had been passed out on the kitchen table, never knew what hit him. Clark, who waited to inspect his package when he was away from the trailer, realized that it was exactly as he had left it. Sam had neither opened the package nor informed the police of its existence. For just an instant, Clark felt a twinge of guilt for killing him.

*   *   *

At the exact moment that Clark plunged the knife into the old man, Jessie went cold inside, fear numbing her senses. All she knew was that at that very second, Clark was killing. It wasn't a flashback, or the recreating of a scene as before. The white-hot energy exploding from the periphery of her vision told her the event was happening right then. She grabbed Suzanne's hand. “He did it! I think he just stabbed Amy!”

“Oh, no, Jessie.” Suzanne pulled the girl into her arms, aware that people had stopped to stare at hearing her strange words. “Are you certain?”

Jessie's voice rose as Suzanne half carried, half dragged, the child out of the stream of traffic to the back of a booth. She shook the hysterical girl. “Stop it, Jessie. Get out of the scene.”

“He's here! Clark is here! At the carnival!” Jessie turned wild eyes on Suzanne. “We didn't find Amy in time! He came back for her, just like I said he would. And he killed her! He killed her!”

“Wait a minute,” Suzanne spoke quickly. “You first said you
thought
he had stabbed Amy. That indicates you weren't sure. Did you actually
see
her? Please, Jessie, don't freak out on me now. Try to calm down.”

Jessie's hands shook as she held tightly to Suzanne, forcing her mind back into the other realm. Suzanne could feel what the girl was trying to do. “Jessie, please. You are too upset to go back. Let it go,” she whispered. “Let it go.”

Jessie felt as though her heart were going to explode from her body, but she kept pushing her mind toward Clark. Then she saw a small, silver trailer and a bearded man leaving it with a small box under his arm.

Suzanne saw it, too, and conceded that perhaps this was something Jessie needed to know. “The trailer, Jessie. Open the door and go into the trailer. You can do it. Your powers are strong. You have to know this!
Open the door, Jessie.
”

Jessie steadied herself. In her mind's eye, she pictured the door to the trailer opening and herself floating in. Almost immediately, she saw the old man slumped over the table, the knife still sticking out of his back.

Jessie turned dead eyes toward Suzanne. “It wasn't Amy,” she said, and fainted.

Chapter Sixteen

Suzanne checked her watch, then settled down on her couch to wait for the
Noontime with Nora
show. Jessie was still sleeping, for which Suzanne was thankful. It had been nearly one o'clock before they had gotten home the night before. At Suzanne's insistence, Harry and Jim had arrived at the carnival and conducted a trailer-to-trailer search for the man Jessie had seen in her vision. She would never forget the look on Harry's face when they emerged from the right trailer. It had seemed to Suzanne that he somehow held her responsible for the old man's death. “What were you doing here?” he had yelled at her. “Are you nuts? Are you trying to arrange for the Matthewses to lose
both
their daughters?”

“No, no,” Suzanne had stammered, baffled by his anger. “We were always together. I wouldn't have let anything happen to Jessie.”

He had ordered another officer to return with them to the precinct for their statement. “Get their story, and then get them home,” he had spoken bluntly to the officer. Suzanne had not heard him add, “And have someone watch her apartment until I get this sorted out. We don't know what really happened here yet, or what the killer saw.”

It was at the precinct that Suzanne and Jessie heard for the first time that Randal Clark had not left his apartment all night.

“But that's not true,” Jessie had tried to explain. “It was Clark I was searching for in my mind. It
had
to be him, sir. Beard or no beard.”

Suzanne was used to the look which passed between the officers. She and Jessie exchanged knowing glances and gave up trying to explain.

Suzanne sat straight up on the couch, arching her tired back to try to relax tight muscles. It had been quite a night. She picked up the remote control, hitting the button for sound as she saw Nora Myerson walk onto the set. Nora was soon introducing two mothers who pleaded with the public to help in locating their daughters. One girl was seventeen, the other twenty. Both were home and family oriented, both active in their churches, and when their pictures appeared on the screen, it was obvious to Suzanne that they were both attractive blondes, but in a natural, home-spun way.

Nora Myerson's face filled the screen. Ordinarily, Suzanne didn't watch this show. Nora had always seemed too much like a watered down version of Tammy Faye, for her liking. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she pleaded with the good citizens of Kansas City to be on the lookout for the bodies of the missing girls. She closed with an appeal to the public to call the police with any information, no matter how trivial, that might aid in the capture of the butcher, now that the main suspect had been released.

“Oh, brother!” Suzanne said the words aloud. She had worked with the police enough over the years to know the nightmare this kind of announcement would cause. When hundreds and hundreds of tips flooded the police, it was impossible to keep on top of them. Sometimes important leads got lost in the shuffle. It was almost always a disaster.

*   *   *

“Get me four more phone lines in here,” Caswell barked as he snapped off the television. “And see if you can free up eight rookies to man the phones and handle people coming in. It's going to be a zoo around here.”

*   *   *

Patrick rushed from the back room to pick up the ringing phone. It never failed. Let him leave the front for a minute, and the dang phone always rang. “McFadden Costume Shop,” he spoke pleasantly into the phone, nevertheless. “And how can I be helping you, now?”

“Yeah. Do you rent nuns' costumes?” the voice on the line asked.

“Yes,” Patrick answered. “That we do, now. How many would you like, and for when?”

“No, no. I'll tell you why I'm calling. I'm trying to locate a young woman who rented a nun's costume yesterday morning. One of my men happened to see her, and thought she would be perfect for a new play I'm putting on. Her name is Richards. Suzanne Richards. But we can't find a listing for her in the telephone book. All we know is that she rented a costume from somewhere. She's real good looking and tall. I'd say about five feet eight or nine inches. You rent a costume to anyone who looked like that?”

“Well, sure and if I didn't.” Patrick smiled. “And I agree with you, I surely do. She's pretty as a picture and has a smile that would light up Ireland. That she does.”

“So you have her phone number and address?”