Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [12]
“Sounds painful for her.”
“It was. Emotionally. She went home for lunch that day and found him packing to leave. That's when he told her he was going. Until that moment, she'd believed they would end up married.”
“Since then had she ever talked about a particular man?”
“I don't think she was even dating. If so, she never mentioned it. She was concentrating on her painting when she wasn't at the office.”
“Do you know if anything unusual had happened lately? Strange phone calls or messages, someone she'd noticed turning up wherever she went, that sort of thing?”
“No. She seemed fine. Not worried, not stressed, not upset by anything. She seemed fine.”
“There was nothing you could have done,” Hollis said.
Caleb drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh, I have no illusions, Agent Templeton. I know how quickly random acts of violence can snuff out lives, no matter how careful we think we are. But those acts tend to be committed by stupid or brutal people, for stupid and brutal reasons. This is different. This bastard is pure evil.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
She smiled an odd, twisted smile, and her blue eyes had an equally strange, flat shine to them that made Caleb feel suddenly uneasy. “I know all about evil, Mr. Powell, believe me. I met it up close and personal.”
Thursday, 3:30 PM
Isabel stood gazing around the clearing where Tricia Kane's body had been found. It was mostly in shade now that the sun was no longer directly overhead, which she appreciated since the day was hot and humid. She was conscious of Rafe Sullivan's scrutiny, but she had been at this too long to allow him to distract her.
Much.
Both the blood and the chalk used to mark body position and location had been washed away by the rain, but she didn't need either to know exactly where Tricia Kane had suffered and died. She looked down just inches from her feet, her gaze absently tracing the shape of something—someone—that was no longer there.
She had been here, in this sort of place, so many times, Isabel thought. But it never got any easier. Never.
“He got her in the back,” she said, “then jerked her around by the wrist and began driving the knife into her chest. The first blow to her chest staggered her backward, the second put her on the ground. She was losing blood so fast she didn't have the strength to fight him off. She was all but gone when he began stabbing her in the genital area. And either her skirt came up when she fell, or else he jerked it out of the way when he began stabbing her, since the material wasn't slashed. He pulled the skirt back down when he was done. Odd, that. Protecting her modesty, or veiling his own desires and needs?”
Rafe was frowning. “The ME says she died too fast to leave any bruises, but he told me privately he felt she'd been jerked around and held by one wrist. It wasn't in his report.”
Isabel looked at him, weighing him for a moment, then smiled. “I get hunches.”
“Yeah?” He crossed powerful arms over his chest and lifted both eyebrows inquiringly.
“Okay, they're a little more than hunches.”
“Is this where the special in Special Crimes Unit comes in?”
“Sort of. You read the Bureau's brief on our unit, right?”
“I did. It was nicely murky, but the gist I got is that the unit is called in when a judgment is made that the crimes committed are unusually challenging for local law enforcement. That SCU agents use traditional as well as intuitive investigative methods to solve said crimes. By intuitive I gather they mean these hunches of yours?”
“Well, they couldn't very well announce that the SCU is made up mostly of psychics. Wouldn't go over very well with the majority of cops, considering how . . . um . . . levelheaded you guys tend to be. We've discovered through bitter experience that proving what we can do is a lot more effective with you guys than just claiming our abilities are real.”
“So why're you telling me?”
“I thought you could take it.” She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Was I wrong?”
“I'll let you