Stealing Shadows (11 page)

"You mean the easy targets? The homeless, the disturbed or mentally disabled, those with criminal records?"

"Yes."

"Not many." Ben picked up his cup and sipped the hot coffee, leaning a hip against the counter as she did. "We don't have homeless in any real sense. The churches in the area are pretty good at helping people in need. As for the disturbed or disabled, there are a few of those middle-aged men you see in most small towns, not 'slow' enough to be unemployable, but not bright enough to be trained for anything but pushing a broom. And there's one woman who's been a well-known character in this town for at least ten years. She escapes her son's watchful eye from time to time and wanders around downtown picking up invisible things from the sidewalk." Ben paused and shook his head. "Nobody knows what she thinks she's picking up, but if you try to stop her, she cries as if her heart's breaking."

Cassie looked down at her coffee. "The wreck of a life."

"Her son says she just went away one day."

"I wonder why," Cassie murmured. "Something like that, there ought to at least be a trigger."

"If something definitive happened, I don't know what it was. The family keeps pretty much to themselves, and they don't welcome questions. It's a common enough trait around here."

Cassie nodded distractedly. Then she seemed to rouse herself from pity and focus on the practical. "I would say she seems an unlikely target, but those men… The sheriff might want to keep an eye on them."

"He will. We've both seen a crowd turn ugly and start looking around for a target. That isn't something you forget, believe me."

"What about people with criminal records?"

"We have our share. The habituals commit mostly petty stuff though – housebreaking, fighting with their neighbors or their girlfriends' ex-lovers, drunk and disorderly. The sort of troublemakers who have their own bunks in Matt's jail and make regular visits on Saturday nights. As for anything else, crimes of real violence are rare around here. I've prosecuted a couple of manslaughter cases, but liquor and spite were involved both times. Convenience-store holdups, a few half-assed bank robberies over the years. But no crime to even hint there's someone living here in this town – or this county – who's capable of butchering three women." Ben sighed. "That high-tech forensics van Matt managed to wring out of his budget last year was mostly gathering dust. Until Thursday."

"So there's no one target a panicked town would immediately look to."

"Not that I know of."

"Except for me."

He waited until she looked him in the eye, then agreed. "Except you. But I'd say the possibility of anything happening to you because of that is very slight. Cassie, I don't doubt that when word finally gets out about you, there'll be suspicion. But in all honesty, even a panicked town would have to be totally out of its collective mind to suspect you of three especially vicious murders. It doesn't always take muscle to kill, but Jill studied karate as a kid, and Ivy quite obviously fought like a wildcat. You couldn't have killed them, and it's obvious."

"A reasonable argument. But the need to blame that grows out of panic is seldom based on logic, and you know it."

"I know it. Even so, I doubt anyone will seriously suspect you. Oh, they'll look at you and talk about you and wonder, and you'll probably get at least a few nasty phone calls accusing you of being a witch or worse, but I don't believe this town will condemn you as a killer."

Cassie returned her gaze to her coffee.

"He's the one you have to worry about. That madman out there. The threat to you is from him."

"I know."

"I talked to Matt about it this afternoon, and he's agreed to say nothing to anyone about you helping us. Neither will I, of course. The longer we can keep it quiet, the less chance there is of the bastard finding out about you."

She smiled faintly. "So you think we've got – what? – forty-eight hours or so before the whole town knows?"

Rueful, he said, "About that, probably. Secrets do tend to get out in small towns."

"Well, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it."

"Just be careful, will you, please?"

"I will." She raised her cup in a small salute. "Thanks for sending out the security people, by the way. The place is like a fortress now."

"I wish I could believe it would keep you safe."

Cassie met his gaze fleetingly and set her cup on the counter with a sound of finality. "I'll be fine."

Ben might have obediently taken his leave, but she reached up to brush back a strand of hair, and once again the gesture drew his attention to her bandaged hand.

"You're bleeding," he said.

Cassie looked at her hand, where a thin line of red stained the white gauze. "Damn."

He put his cup on the counter and stepped toward her, reaching out without thought. "Let me look – "

She took a step back. "No. No, thank you. I can take care of it myself."

Ben forced himself to stand still. "Cassie, you're so tired, I seriously doubt you could read anybody right now. But whether you can or not, somebody needs to look at that cut. Me or a doctor, take your pick. I can have one out here in half an hour. Of course, he'd probably insist on a tetanus shot. They usually do. Better to be safe than sorry, they say. Me, on the other hand, I'd more than likely just put on fresh antiseptic and re-bandage it. But it's your choice."

Cassie stared at him. "Did anybody ever mention that you can be officious as hell sometimes?"

"Matt likes to mention it." Ben smiled.

She smiled back, if a bit tentatively. Then she drew a breath and visibly braced herself. "All right."

Determined not to make a big deal out of it in his own mind as well as hers, Ben asked briskly, "Where's your first aid kit?"

"In that cabinet by the back door."

"I'll get it. Sit down at the table and start taking the bandage off, okay?"

By the time he joined her with the kit, she had the gauze unwound, revealing a long, thin slash across her palm that was bleeding sluggishly.

Cassie said, "Funny, I didn't notice before. The cut exactly follows my fate line. If I were superstitious, I'd probably worry about that."

"Do you tell fortunes too?" Ben asked lightly, removing what he needed from the first aid box.

"I've never been able to predict the future. I told you that when we met. But my mother could, and I was told Aunt Alex could."

"Really? I heard a couple of odd stories about her seeming to know things she shouldn't have known but just chalked it up to rumors. She was so seldom in town that few people knew her except to say hello."

Cassie shrugged. "I don't know the extent of her abilities. My mother refused to talk about her, and her own instances of precognition were few and far between."

"So her principal ability was like yours, the ability to tap into another mind?"

"Yes."

Judging that the time was right, Ben said, "Let's see that hand." And immediately added, "So, do you have a secondary ability?"

Cassie's hesitation was almost imperceptible. She placed her hand palm up in his and said steadily, "If I do, I haven't discovered it yet. But then, I haven't looked."

Ben held her cool hand in his and kept his gaze on it as he wiped fresh blood from the wound, but virtually all his attention was focused on her voice, his awareness filled with this first physical touch. "Why haven't you looked? Afraid of what you might find?"

"Let's just say that the primary ability is enough to deal with. I don't want another."

Ben nodded, then said, "I don't think this is deep enough to need stitches, you were right about that. I'll put on some antiseptic and a fresh bandage. You said you cut it on a broken glass?"

"Yes. A clean glass. So no fear of tetanus."

Ben opened a tube of antiseptic and began to apply the cream to her hand. Unwilling to allow a silence to grow between them, he said, "Earlier, you referred to your ability as 'the sight.' That's an ancient name for it, isn't it?"

"I suppose. It was always called that in my family."

He glanced up from her hand. "Always?" She was looking at him with an unusually steady gaze, her eyes impenetrable and her expression calm; he had no idea whether she was able to read him, and he didn't feel her gaze as he sometimes did. Was it because she was actually touching him?

Cassie nodded slowly. "It's like one of those stories you see in fiction. I'm not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, but the sight has been in my family for generations, almost always handed down from mother to daughter."

"What about the sons?"

"There haven't been any in the last few generations of my mother's line. Further back, I'm not sure. According to the family stories, it was a female gift exclusively."

Ben smiled. "Maybe to level the playing field?"

"The boys got the muscle and the girls got the sight?" Cassie smiled as well. "Maybe."

He returned his attention to her hand, putting a clean gauze pad in place over the wound and then winding gauze around her hand to secure it. "So if you have a daughter, she's likely to be psychic."

"I suppose," Cassie said.

With more reluctance than he Wanted to show or admit to himself, Ben released her hand. "All done. That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." He kept his voice light. "So, could you read me?"

Cassie didn't answer for a moment, gazing down at her hand as she flexed the fingers slowly. Then she looked up, a very faint frown between her brows. "No. No, I couldn't."

"Not at all?"

She shook her head. "Not at all. A very… closed book."

Ben was a little surprised at first, but then wondered if he should have been. "Like I said, you're probably too tired to read anybody tonight."

For an instant her eyes seemed to bore into his, and he felt that touch again, still cool but so firm this time that he almost glanced down to see if she had reached across the table and laid her hand on his chest.

Then Cassie was smiling just a little, and her voice was casual. "You're right. I am tired."

"I'll go, and let you get some rest."

Cassie didn't protest. She walked him to the front door. "It would probably be a good idea for me to see Miss Jameson's house tomorrow. I don't know if I'll be able to pick up anything, but I should try."

"I'll come get you – since you're without a car. Early afternoon all right?"

"Yes, fine."

"Good. Sleep late, okay? Get some rest."

"I will. Good night, Ben."

"See you tomorrow."

Cassie watched him until he reached his Jeep, then closed the door and locked it, and set the security system. She went back to the kitchen, put away the first aid kit, and rinsed out the used coffee cups, the actions automatic. She hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, but wasn't hungry now and definitely didn't want to bother fixing anything.

Her hand ached, but that was her own fault. It hadn't been hurting until she'd dug her nails into the gauze to reopen the wound just before calling Ben's attention to it.

For all the good it did.

She hadn't really suspected Ben of being the killer, but she'd seen too many outwardly decent men with black souls to discount anyone, at least until she was able to see inside their minds. Unfortunately she had not been able to read him – and she was afraid it was not because she was tired.

He had walls, solid and strong ones.

The kind of walls that few nonpsychics ever needed to build unless they had experienced some sort of emotional or psychic trauma.

Had Ben? Was there, in that seemingly open and honest man, some secret hurt or experience that had left him guarded and wary at the deepest levels of himself? Nothing in his background suggested that, but Cassie knew only too well how inadequate was the public information about a life lived.

It was the most likely explanation, that Ben's walls came from some injury or bitterly learned knowledge in his past. The only nonpsychic guarded minds she had encountered had owed their walls to trauma rather than to design.

He was not psychic.

He was also not the killer.

Cassie owed that certainty partly to her psychic ability. It had come to her as she had watched him gently examine her hand – the sudden memory of the killer who had stood over Jill Kirkwood, gloved hand raised to plunge the knife into her body.

His sleeve had fallen back, revealing his wrist, and on the inside had been a distinct scar.

Ben had no such scar.

It was a relief, but Cassie was not much cheered by it. She dreaded the coming days. Though Ben had shown some awareness of and sensitivity to the fact that this wasand would be an ordeal for her, he couldn't really understand what it would cost her.