Superstition (39 page)

Nicky rarely thought about her father, because remembering the laughing man whose favorite she had been hurt terribly even after the passing of so many years. But her mother’s words brought him sharply back, and for a moment, she had to grit her teeth against the pain.

“And you,” Leonora continued softly. “My precious little red-haired baby. You were
my
clone. Sometimes I think that’s why we’ve always sort of butted heads. From the moment you were born, I couldn’t believe how much alike we were. And not just in looks. You had this wonderful, wild imagination like mine, and a fiery, spunky disposition”—Leonora’s voice dropped to a near-whisper—“and, unlike Livvy, as a young child, you showed real signs of being psychic.”

“What?”
Nicky’s hands clamped around the edges of the covers. Her eyes stayed fixed on her mother’s face. The words hit her like a shock of cold water. Whatever she had expected, it was not that. But deep inside, in some barely comprehended atavistic place in her soul, she knew that what her mother was saying was true,
had been
true.

“You repressed it,” Leonora said. “The gift. I’m positive you had it, but after your father died, you didn’t want it anymore. You refused,
refused
, to acknowledge that you could see anything, or feel anything, or know anything that was not of this corporeal world.”

Nicky sucked in air. The memories were rushing in, almost attacking her, agonizing memories of a smiling, blond-haired man standing at the helm of a twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser he named the
Anticipation
because all week while he worked as a banker he anticipated the weekend, which he would spend on his boat with his family. But on this particular weekend, both Nicky and Livvy had been recovering from strep throat, and they and Leonora had stayed home, leaving him to go out alone. He’d kissed them good-bye and gone. Nicky’s next vision of him had been on the deck of the boat, which was racing frantically toward shore as huge black clouds rolled across the sky toward it. The waves had picked up until the boat was being tossed around like a toy. There was a sharp
crack
as the hull smashed into rocks, and then the boat went down. She had seen it going under, seen the deck being swamped by torrents of cold, dark water. . . .

“Daddy.” Not even aware that she was doing it, Nicky reached for her mother’s hands, clutching them tightly, her eyes wide with horror. “I saw Daddy—”

Her voice broke, and she felt the sting of tears in her eyes.

“I know.” Leonora’s grip on her hands was firm and comforting. “I remember. The night your father died, before we knew anything was wrong, you woke up screaming. When I ran into your bedroom, you told me your daddy was drowned, and described everything that had happened, down to the color of the shirt he was wearing when he died. He’d changed after leaving home, you see, so you would have had no way of knowing. But you were right.”

“It was yellow,” Nicky breathed. Her throat ached, her heart pounded, and she felt a horrible, wrenching grief. It had happened so long ago—why did it still hurt so much?

“Yes.” Her mother’s hands tightened. “You didn’t speak for days. Then, when you finally began to recover a little, you were angry—with yourself, and especially with me. Oh, for a long time. Don’t you remember? It was as if you blamed yourself for not being able to do anything to save your father even though you saw what was happening, and blamed me for giving you the gift that allowed you to see it. And you would never, ever talk about what you’d seen that night again. You were so . . . closed to it that after a while I just let the whole thing slide, because it obviously disturbed you so much. From that day to this, as far as I know, you never had another psychic experience. I always wondered if the gift might resurface in you one day.”

“I don’t want it,” Nicky said with difficulty around the lump in her throat.

“Sometimes,” Leonora replied, “neither do I.”

There was so much sadness in her mother’s voice that even as she blinked back tears, Nicky sat up and hugged Leonora fiercely. Leonora hugged her back just as hard, and they stayed like that for a long time.

“SO, THIS is where we are,” Joe concluded his overview of the Marsha Browning investigation. He was standing in the police station’s grimy squad room in front of an oversized dry-erase board on which he’d scribbled a crude timeline of the crimes, starting with Tara Mitchell and ending with Marsha Browning. The fifteen-year gap he’d marked with a huge question mark, which he stressed that they needed to answer. His remarks were addressed to his assembled police force minus Randy Brown, who, having had a strong enough alibi to convince Joe that he couldn’t possibly be the killer, had been dispatched to babysit Nicky. It was Sunday evening, about six p.m., a time when ordinarily at least two-thirds of the force would have been off duty and he, personally, would have been kicking back with TV, some food, and maybe a brew. But under the circumstances, everybody was working basically around the clock, himself included. Given the small size of the force, the urgency of the situation, and Vince’s insistence that the whole thing be kept as quiet and contained as possible, this was the way things were going to stay for the foreseeable future—or until they caught their perp. At the moment, the guys were nodding as they scarfed down the last of the pizza that a local franchise had sent over gratis as a kind of morale booster, and Joe was getting ready to give out the next day’s assignments.

“Cohen and Locke, you’re still working that list of recent parolees within the target area, trying to find them, checking their alibis; Milton and Parker, you’re canvassing the neighborhood around the Old Taylor Place for any kind of word on suspicious persons who may have been in the area on either the eighth or the fourteenth; also, you are looking for a dog that might have been howling in that same vicinity on those same dates; Hefling and Roe, you’re going door-to-door around Marsha Browning’s house, asking about possible suspicious persons that may have been sighted within the last few days; Krakowski, you’re compiling a list of female residents of the island who live alone, which we need ASAP; O’Neil, you’re going over land- and cell-phone records for both victims; and the rest of you are taking care of anything else in the way of normal police work that may come up. Any questions?”

There were a few, and Joe answered them to the best of his ability. As they finished up, his troops pushed back their plastic chairs and went their separate ways. Some of them returned to their desks while others exited the building.

Joe was headed home. He had a few phone calls to make that needed to be placed in private. After that, he meant to grab a shower and then probably start cross-checking the information they had put together on the Marsha Browning murder with what they had on the Karen Wise case and then the old Tara Mitchell file. It wasn’t difficult work, but it was time-consuming, and you had to know what you were looking for, which was why he was reserving that task for himself.

“So, you think we should warn our lady citizens who live alone to start locking their doors?” Milton asked, falling into step beside Joe as they walked out the back door. The last shimmers of daylight were fading away, and the fronds of the palmettos that surrounded the parking lot rustled in the quickening breeze. A couple cruisers were already pulling out of the lot, and the smell of their exhaust hung in the air.

“That would probably be a good idea.” As he headed toward his own car with Milton still keeping pace beside him, Joe tried to keep the dryness out of his voice, with indifferent success. In his opinion, any woman living alone who didn’t lock her door needed to have her head examined, but he knew that given the relaxed culture of the island, there would be some who needed reminding, even under the circumstances.

“And we should tell them that we’re going to be doing regular drive-bys just to check on them,” Milton said.

“Absolutely,” Joe replied, and lifted a hand in farewell to Milton as he headed away toward his own car.

“Chief Franconi.”

Hearing his name uttered in an unfamiliar near-shout, Joe glanced around sharply. There seemed to be at least three separate streams of people racing his way from the street in front of the building. A lightning survey identified a lone woman who was waving her hand at him while she yelled his name, a male-female team, and a male-male pair in which one of the men had a camera balanced on his shoulder.

Joe stopped and stared.

“Is it true that the Lazarus Killer claimed another victim last night?” Having outpaced the competition by a stride, the woman reached him first. She was carrying a tape recorder, but Joe didn’t need to see it, or hear her panted question, to realize what he was dealing with: the press. He started walking again, fast.
Jesus Christ, how had word gotten out so fast?

“No comment,” he said.

“Is this the same guy who killed those girls fifteen years ago?” That question came from a man. Joe heard a faint whir and realized that the TV camera was pointed at his face.

“No comment.”

Thankfully, by this time he had reached his car. Pressing the button on his key ring, he unlocked the door.

“Is it fair to say that there is definitely a serial killer stalking Pawleys Island?”

“No comment,” Joe repeated for the third time, wrenched open the door, and slid inside. They were still shouting questions as he peeled rubber out the back side of the lot, and he had a feeling that he should be thankful they had all apparently parked out front, on the street.

Vince was going to love this, Joe thought dryly as he drove home and picked up his phone to alert the mayor before he, too, could be ambushed.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Vince groaned. “This is all the fault of that damned show. I knew I should have stopped them filming that first night, but no-o-o, you wouldn’t let me. Now look what’s come of it. It’s a goddamned disaster. Do something!”

Then he slammed down the phone.

Joe made it home unmolested, parked out front, and went inside, losing his coat and tie as soon as he got in the door. Just to make sure nobody was going to be taking pictures through the windows, he drew the curtains before he turned on the lights. Then he went into the kitchen, grabbed a Bud Light from the fridge, and settled down at the table to make some calls.

The first one, to the friend who was tracing the Lazarus508 e-mail for him, drew a blank. He left a message saying that he would be forwarding a second e-mail for the same treatment, and hung up.

The second call, to another old friend, fared better.

“I need you to enhance an audiotape for me,” Joe said. “ASAP. It’s not long—less than a minute. A few garbled words I need to be able to understand.”

“You got it,” his friend said. “Send it along.”

“Will do.”

Joe disconnected and started to place call number three. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Brian saunter into the kitchen. Everything—from the sound of his boots on the vinyl floor to the texture of the blue jeans the guy was wearing to the too-long dark blond hair that kept falling over his forehead—looked real. Nothing blurry, nothing ethereal. No woo-woo at all.
Real
.

Joe paused in the act of punching in the number. “Get the fuck out of my life,” he said, and meant it.

Brian stopped walking and grinned at him.

“Ah-ah. That’s not very nice,” he said, and waggled an admonishing forefinger at him.

That was so much like something the son-of-a-bitch would do that Joe felt his heartbeat speed up. Either he was talking to a ghost, who was talking back, or he was having the mother of all hallucinations. Neither possibility boded well for his long-term sanity.

“I’m nuts,” Joe muttered, his eyes still locked on Brian. “I’m fucking nuts.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Brian said cheerfully, and resumed his amble toward the back door. “But you’re making progress. At least we’re speaking again.”

“You’re dead,” Joe said, knowing even as he did it that he was going to hate himself later for violating the ignore-it-and-it-will-eventually-go-away strategy he’d been operating under for the past eighteen months or so. Blame it on Nicky and her ghost-happy family. Apparently, she was managing to get under his skin in more ways than one.

“So?”

“What do you mean, ‘so’?
You’re dead.
Go to heaven. Or hell. Or wherever. I don’t give a shit. Just go.”

“Careful. You’re going to hurt my feelings.”

Joe stared at him. Brian was looking wistfully at Joe’s beer. Watching him, Joe picked up the bottle, put it to his lips, and took a long chug.

“Asshole,” Brian said without malice as Joe swiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Asshole”—God, how many times had he heard Brian call him that? In just exactly that tone, too.

“If you’re really there,” Joe said in a voice gone slightly hoarse all of a sudden, “then make yourself useful for once and tell me who the hell is killing these women.”

“
What
, do I look like I have ESP? How the hell should I know?”

“So, what are you doing here?”

“Ah. I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that.” Brian gave him one of his patented wide, shit-eating grins.

“I’m your guardian angel, pal.”

Joe’s mind boggled.
Brian
as his guardian angel? The universe couldn’t be that messed up.

“Bullshit.”
He clapped his hands down flat against the tabletop and rose from his seat so abruptly that the chair fell over with a crash behind him. “This is all a bunch of
bullshit
. I’ve got some kind of weird brain damage. There’s nobody here.
I am all alone in this damned kitchen.
”

A knock sounded at the back door. Joe, silenced mid-rant, looked past Brian to see Dave with his face pressed practically up against the glass, peering in through the window at him. Beyond Dave, it was full night now, which made Joe wonder with some alarm just how long he’d been ranting and raving in his kitchen. Maybe he’d suffered some kind of seizure or something.