Whisper of Evil Read online

  “Why not? Everybody in this town has seen me showing off my pictures, so there’s nothing odd about it. They’ll probably assume I’m just showing you pictures I took of you.”

  “Yeah, but if the wrong person is watching—or even hears about it—it could make him suspicious. Might make him think your candid camera caught him doing something he really, really doesn’t want the law to know about.”

  After a moment, Shelby said, “Okay, dumb of me. But the damage, if there is any, is done, so you might as well look at them.”

  Unwilling to betray any undue interest to those watching eyes, Justin leafed through the photos quickly and then handed them back to her with a faint smile for the benefit of the observers. “I agree they could be important. But the sheriff talks to lots of people in this town every day; odds are he would have talked to each of the murdered men as well.”

  Shelby put the photographs away once again in her bag and tried to keep her expression neutral. She wasn’t really afraid, but Nell had warned her to be very, very careful, and she was pretty sure Justin was right about this being a mistake. Still, since it was done, there was nothing to do but push on. “Yeah, but if you’d checked out the back of each of the photos, you would have found a date penciled in. I pulled all the negatives and checked each shot.”

  “And?”

  “And Ethan talked to each of the murdered men the day before that man was murdered. What are the odds of that happening, Justin?”

  “Long,” he said slowly. “Very long.”

  “Oh, my God,” Hailey whispered, for once clearly shocked. Seeing the image of her sister—and Nell had no idea how she appeared but guessed she looked ghostly—watching what was an intimate and disturbing argument between Hailey and a lover had to be a deeply unsettling experience, especially since Nell had been gone more than ten years at that time.

  What could Hailey have thought then? That she was experiencing something fairly common in the annals of the paranormal, a visitation from a recently deceased family member? Had she thought Nell had come to her at the moment of her death, to say good-bye?

  Part of Nell wanted to try to say something to Hailey, to assure her that she was not dead, merely— what? Merely visiting from the future?

  It lasted only a moment, because even in her hesitation Nell was too shocked not to instinctively draw back, to fight to get herself out of the vision and back to the present. What she saw dimmed almost immediately, Hailey’s shocked face vanishing in a darkening haze that grew darker and darker, and for a scary, seemingly infinite period of time Nell felt herself swallowed up by something black and immense.

  Something that wasn’t as empty as it should have been, because she wasn’t alone there. Someone ... something ... was nearby, watching, nearly touching her ... reaching for her....

  Desperate, driven by an overwhelming certainty that if it touched her she would die, Nell fought to wrench herself free of the smothering darkness. It seemed to take every ounce of will and energy she possessed, the way an extreme physical effort demanded that the very fibers of muscles tear themselves apart in the struggle to do what was demanded of them.

  And then she was free of the darkness, the past, back in the present with a suddenness that was almost as frightening as the vision itself had been. A blinding pain exploded in her head and she heard herself cry out.

  She had never in her life had a headache like this one. The pain was incredible, as if something was trying to bore its way into her brain or out of it, something hot and ominous—

  “Nell.”

  “Evil,” she murmured as she opened her eyes. At first, all she saw was darkness, but it lightened rapidly until she was staring at a dark blue shirt and black leather jacket.

  “Nell, for Christ’s sake—”

  She could dimly feel Max’s hands gripping her upper arms, and when she looked up at him she saw that he was pale and grim-eyed. It wasn’t until he reached to grasp her wrists that she realized both her own hands were pressed to either side of her face, hard, almost as if she were trying to ... keep something in.

  “It’s not a blackout this time, is it?” Max asked, gently pulling her hands away from her face.

  “Umm ... no,” she said finally, her voice hardly more than a whisper, because anything louder hurt. “Dizzy. I think ... I think I’d better sit down for a minute.”

  Max guided her a few steps to a bench at the foot of the Lynches’ bed. It was only then that she saw Ethan, leaning back against the dresser with his arms crossed over his chest. He was expressionless, but he was also a bit pale, just as Max was.

  Nell managed a shaky laugh. “I guess I put on quite a show, huh?” She kept her voice quiet.

  “Well, you could use some glitter or neon lights to jazz things up, but the dead silence and thousand-yard stare were pretty goddamned effective.” Ethan looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes you were a zombie.”

  “What?”

  Max sat down beside her. “I’ve been trying for the last ten to bring you out of it.”

  “I suggested a slap,” Ethan offered, “but Max said no.”

  “Why were you in so deep?” Max asked Nell, ignoring the other man’s comment.

  The dizziness had passed, but Nell’s head still hurt and it was difficult to think clearly. “It ... I ... I wasn’t here.”

  “Funny, it looked like you were.”

  “Ethan, shut the hell up, will you please? Nell, what are you talking about? If you weren’t here, then where?”

  “Yeah, tell us where,” Ethan invited.

  If she had been granted a few minutes of peace and quiet in which to think, Nell might have made a different choice. But with Max’s insistence and Ethan’s rather mocking attitude added to the throbbing pain in her head, she acted on impulse.

  “I’ll be happy to tell you where,” she said, staring straight at the sheriff. “As soon as you tell us how long your affair with Hailey lasted.”

  The silence was acute and went on for several beats, with Ethan staring back at her without a blink. Then finally, slowly, he said, “She told you.”

  “I haven’t communicated in any way with my sister for nearly twelve years, Ethan. And nobody else knew, did they? Hailey insisted on secrecy.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t know,” Max murmured.

  Ethan glanced at him, then returned his gaze to Nell. “Yeah, she insisted on secrecy. Never would tell me why. No reason for us to hide it, after all. We were both over twenty-one and free. My marriage was over by then, and she wasn’t seeing anybody else. At least not publicly. And it only lasted a couple of months.”

  “So how did you find out about her and Peter Lynch?” Nell asked. At first, she didn’t think he was going to answer, but finally he did.

  “I think she wanted me to find out. We were at my place and she needed something from her purse, I forget what. Asked me to get it for her. The purse had a zippered inner pocket that was open, with a photograph sticking up out of it. It was a shot of her and Peter.” His face twisted slightly. “They were playing some kind of sex game. She was dressed up to look like—a schoolgirl. I guess because he liked them young.”

  Nell had seen too much of Hailey’s sexual exploits by now to be much shocked, but she did feel a jab of pain for her sister. Something about the way Ethan spoke of her said it could have been a serious relationship with him, maybe even a lasting relationship. Nell wondered if Hailey had known that, if she had deliberately destroyed what might have been.

  And if so, why? Because she felt undeserving? Because by that point there had already been far too many scars on her body and soul from the games of sadistic men? Or because she had known that any real relationship was impossible while Adam Gallagher lived?

  Steadily, Nell said to Ethan, “How long have you known that Hailey is the common factor in these murders?”

  “I don’t know it’s true even now,” he said immediately. “As far as I know, she was never involved with George Caldwell.”
/>   “But the others? Lynch, Ferrier, Patterson. You knew she had been involved with each of them.”

  He hesitated. “Like I said, I found out about Lynch long before he was killed. Long before Hailey left. As for the other two ... Ferrier got drunk and bragged to me once that he’d had a few enjoyable nights with Hailey over the years. Not an affair, apparently, just sex now and then, whenever neither of them was involved with anybody else.”

  “And Patterson?”

  Ethan shrugged. “Once I saw all that shit in his basement, I knew Hailey had probably been involved with him.”

  “Because of her scars? The whip marks, the cigarette burns?”

  He flinched. “Yeah.”

  Even with her head pounding, Nell was focused very intently on the sheriff, trying to get a sense of him that would tell her, once and for all, if she could trust him, could eliminate him as a suspect. His involvement with Hailey made him even more of a suspect, at least on the face of it and assuming Hailey was indeed the common factor in the murders, but Nell had a hunch it was a lot more complicated than that.

  She didn’t like exposing his private life to others, even to Max—who, for all his anger and the longstanding bitterness between him and Ethan, would never pass judgment on his stepbrother’s life or choices—but she didn’t feel she could back off, not now. She had to know.

  “You never asked her about the scars. Why?”

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “Because I saw it, Ethan. I saw the fight you had with Hailey more than a year ago. Was it January? February? In a living room, I’m guessing your apartment. You had obviously just found out about her relationship with Lynch, and you were upset. Hailey was ... pretty brutal in what she said to you. But she made a point of saying you’d never questioned her about the scars. She obviously thought she knew the reason why, but I’m guessing she was wrong. Wasn’t she?”

  For the first time, Ethan was clearly shaken. “Jesus. You talk like you were there.”

  “I was. Just now, I was. Answer the question, Ethan. Why did you never ask Hailey about the scars?”

  “Because I thought I knew how she got them.”

  “You thought it was our father.”

  He nodded, the movement as jerky as his voice was. “It made sense, at least to me. Both your mother and you running off like that, so obviously scared of him, Hailey’s scars ... even the way she talked about Adam, as if she worshiped him—and hated his guts at the same time. It was all just so goddamned extreme. None of the scars was recent as far as I could tell, and I thought—I believed—she had been abused as a child. I tried to get her to talk about her childhood, but she wouldn’t. Got touchy as hell. She wouldn’t talk about her life at all to me and made it plain that if I pushed I’d be pushing her right out the door. So I stopped trying.”

  Max stirred slightly but said nothing, and when Nell glanced at him she realized that since he knew neither of the Gallagher girls had been sexually abused by their father, he was wondering about the visit to the Patterson basement and what Nell had seen there.

  She looked back at Ethan, hesitated, then abruptly made up her mind about him. Every instinct and every sense she could lay claim to told her that Ethan Cole was not a murderer, and if she couldn’t trust those instincts and senses then she needed to find a new line of work. Quietly, she said, “Our father never abused us that way. Hailey got the scars from Patterson. She was—very young when she was first involved with him.”

  “How young?” Max asked, obviously still recalling Nell’s shock in that basement.

  Reluctantly, she said, “It looked like—twelve or thirteen. No older than that. Just about the time we lost our mother.”

  Ethan looked a little sick, but he was enough of a cop to catch the significance of what Nell said. “Looked like? You saw that too?”

  “Yeah. I ... paid a quiet little visit to the Patterson house.”

  “And saw the basement.”

  Nell nodded. “What I tapped into there showed me their ... relationship.”

  After a moment and with no conviction in his voice, Ethan said, “It’s all bullshit. You couldn’t possibly have seen that any more than you could have seen Hailey with me.”

  “I couldn’t possibly. Except that I did.”

  “It doesn’t even make sense,” he protested, his voice rising. “You told me yourself that what you see are the memories of a place. I was never with Hailey here, so how could you—what the hell did you call it?—tap into any scene between her and me?”

  “It’s a good question,” Max noted quietly.

  “And I wish I had a good answer.” Nell sighed. “I don’t know how I was able to do that, Ethan. Maybe because I was concentrating on Peter Lynch and you were here—and I followed that link to a scene between you and Hailey when you were discussing Lynch.”

  “Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense,” Ethan snapped.

  “Look, I’m sorry I can’t tie it all up nice and neat for you. But the truth is that we’re only just beginning to understand how psychic ability works, and there are still a hell of a lot more questions than answers. I can’t explain how I was able to see what I saw—I only know that I saw it. That I was there, in the past, a witness to that scene between you and Hailey.”

  “Which,” Max pointed out, still quiet, “is something new for you. Right? That the memory you tapped into belonged to a different place?”

  She nodded. “It felt different right from the beginning. I had to ... push harder, use my energy in a different way. Maybe I pushed myself too far somehow.”

  “And right into Ethan’s memories?” Max offered.

  Ethan swore. “Well, if that isn’t creepy as hell, I don’t know what is. Even if it were possible. Which it isn’t.”

  Remembering her sister’s shocked gaze, Nell was tempted to explain to them both just how different this “vision” had been. But her head was pounding and she was tired—and there was still one more thing she had to do today.

  She got to her feet, not protesting Max’s help or objecting to the grasp he maintained on her arm. And when the wave of dizziness passed, she said, “Ethan, you’ll have to lose the deputy. There’s something I have to show you.” She looked up at Max. “Something I have to show both of you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The house that had belonged to Pearl Gallagher was never much to shout about, just a little four-room, tin-roofed shack the old lady had insisted on not updating because she liked things simple. The only modern amenity it had ever boasted was indoor plumbing, and that was only because Adam Gallagher had insisted anything less just wasn’t sanitary.

  Still, it had served Pearl well as a sanctuary, and it perhaps wasn’t surprising that the house had not long survived her.

  There wasn’t much left. The cinder-block foundation was really the only thing left standing, surrounding the charred remains of wooden studs and beams that had collapsed inward, and twisted tin, and the bits and pieces that had survived oddly intact—like a kitchen sink that sat perfectly level and surprisingly clean within a mostly burned-out butcher-block counter. And the old brass headboard that reared up in what had been the bedroom, surrounded now by the incinerated remains of the roof that had fallen in.

  “Why am I here?” Ethan demanded, hands on his hips as he surveyed the ruins. Neither he nor Max appeared to notice that the place had been somewhat disturbed recently, and if either had, they doubtless would have assumed vandalism.

  “So I only have to tell this once.” Nell forced a smile, small though it was. She gently pulled her arm free of Max’s grasp and moved to face both men. “The night of the prom, I came out here to Gran’s house to show her my dress. She didn’t answer when I knocked, so I let myself in. I could hear the shower, and I decided to wait a few minutes, until she came out. I really wanted her to see my dress.”

  Nell fell silent, and even though she thought she was expressionless, there must have been something in her face, because Max stepp
ed toward her.

  “Nell?” His voice was low, worried.

  She forced herself to go on, to speak as calmly as she knew how. “I’d had visions before, but they’d been quick, fleeting things mostly. Scenes I could easily recognize and had learned to accept as part of my life. Part of the Gallagher curse. Nothing especially dramatic or tragic, just unsettling. But that night ... I saw something unlike anything I’d ever seen before.”

  “What?” Ethan demanded, fascinated despite himself.

  “I saw the scene of a murder.” In a voice steady with hard-won detachment, she described what she’d seen, the blood and signs of a violent struggle, the body lying so twisted she wasn’t able to see the face.

  “So you don’t know who it was?” Ethan said.

  “Yes. Yes, I know. I knew then.”

  “How, if you couldn’t see the face?” Max asked.

  “There was a locket. A silver locket I recognized.” Nell turned and led the way around to the rear of the ruins, where many years before, an old-fashioned root cellar had been dug out of the ground just a few yards from the back door. “I knew the body must have been buried or hidden nearby. I wasn’t sure where to start looking, especially after all these years—and after that vision I had out in the woods.” She glanced at Max, and he nodded.

  “You saw someone carrying the body of a woman. So that’s why you weren’t concerned that it might be a future death; you knew it had already happened.”

  “I was pretty sure it had. But in that vision, the body was being carried toward this house on a stormy night, and I knew she—she had been killed here, inside. I thought he might have been planning to bury the body somewhere else but couldn’t because of the storm. So he brought her back here.”

  Ethan stared down at the warped and splintered old doors of the root cellar. “You’re telling us there’s a body down there?”

  “I came out here this morning to look around. I’d forgotten the root cellar; it was virtually hidden by an old toolshed most of my childhood and never used. But after I’d poked around inside the house for a while, I remembered. The doors were padlocked, but I got rid of the lock.”