Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [39]
Her brows disappeared up under her bangs. “Scoop you? What old movies have you been watching?”
Refusing the bait, Alan merely said, “It'll be dark soon. I think if I were a blond TV reporter, I'd want to be inside. Behind a locked door. With a gun. Or at least some muscle.” He eyed the cameraman sardonically.
“I hear you have some muscle of your own,” she retorted. “Police muscle. Sleeping with a cop, Alan?”
“If I am, it's hardly newsworthy,” he said dryly, showing no outward sign of an inward flinch. Mallory was not going to like it if this news was common knowledge, dammit. “Unless your station prefers tabloid gossip over substantive news.”
“Don't sound so superior. You were the first print journalist to use the phrase serial killer, and however you intended it, it sounded gleeful and excited in your article.”
“It did not,” he found himself countering irritably.
“Go back and read it again.” She tucked an errant strand of blond hair behind her ear, smiled at him gently, and wandered off toward a magazine journalist here to research serial killers.
“Here you go, Alan.”
He jumped, and frowned at Paige Gilbert, who was holding out a tissue to him.
“Jesus, don't sneak up on people. And what's that?”
“I thought you might need it. For the spit in your eye.”
For just an instant, he was blank, but then he glanced after Dana and scowled as he looked back at the radio reporter. “Ha ha. She was just being all superior because she's a talking head on the six o'clock news.”
“Not today she wasn't,” Paige murmured.
“None of us has had much to report today,” he reminded her.
“True. But you might as well have canary feathers smeared all around your mouth. Come on, Alan, give it up. You know we'll find out sooner or later.”
Alan made a mental note to stop playing poker with Rafe and a few other of their friends; obviously, his serious lack of a poker face was why he had lost so much imaginary money to them.
“I'm done for the day,” he informed Paige. “And even though this is your first really big story, if you want some advice from a veteran, you should go home and get some sleep as well. You never know when you'll get that call that pulls you out of bed at two in the morning.”
Paige gazed after him, then jumped slightly herself when Dana said at her elbow, “He knows something.”
“Yeah,” Paige said. “But what?”
The rented car she and Isabel were sharing was parked near Caleb Powell's law office, so Hollis was able to make it that far. Once locked inside, though, engine and air-conditioning running, she sat behind the wheel and watched her hands shake.
Bishop had warned her that until she learned to fully control her abilities, the door that devastating trauma had created or activated in her mind was likely to open up unexpectedly. And that the experiences were apt to be particularly powerful ones in the midst of a murder investigation when several people had died recently and violently.
But all the months spent in the relative peace of Quantico, learning how to be an investigator, learning about the SCU, plus learning all the exercises in concentration, meditation, and control, had given her a false sense of security.
She had thought she was ready for this.
She wasn't.
First seeing Jamie Brower in the conference room, and now this. Seeing Tricia Kane standing near the desk where she had worked in life, less clearly visible than Jamie had been, oddly dreamlike but obviously trying to say something Hollis hadn't been able to hear.
Why couldn't she hear them? Before, it had been a voice in her head and only the sense of a presence, at least until the very end. Not . . . this. Not these misty images of people—souls—trapped between worlds. No longer alive, but not yet gone, standing in the doorway between this life and the next, the doorway Hollis's own traitorous mind kept opening for them. Talking to her.
Trying to talk to her.
Hollis hadn't expected this.
Not this.
She didn't know how to cope with this. She didn't know if she wanted to even try to learn to cope.
She