Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [7]
An I.D. folder dropped onto his blotter as he sat down, his visitor taking one of the chairs in front of his desk.
“Isabel Adams,” she said. “Call me Isabel, please. We're pretty informal. Nice to meet you, Chief Sullivan.”
He picked up the folder, studied the I.D. and federal badge inside, then closed it and pushed it across the desk toward her. “Rafe. Your boss saw the profile, right?” was his terse response.
“My boss,” she answered, “wrote the profile. The updated one, that is, the one I brought with me. Why?”
“You know goddamned well why. Is he out of his mind, sending you down here?”
“Bishop has been called crazy on occasion,” she said in the same pleasant, almost careless tone, not visibly disturbed by his anger. “But only by those who don't know him. He's the sanest man I've ever met.”
Rafe leaned back in his chair and stared across the desk at the special agent sent by the FBI to help him track and capture a serial killer. She was beautiful. Breath-catching, jaw-dropping gorgeous. Flawless skin, delicate features, stunning green eyes, and the kind of voluptuous body most men could expect to encounter only in their dreams.
Or in their nightmares.
In Rafe's nightmares.
Because Isabel Adams was also something else.
She was blond.
The voices were giving him a pounding headache. It was something else he was getting used to. He managed to unobtrusively swallow a handful of aspirin but knew from experience it would only take the worst edge off the pain.
It would have to be enough.
Have to.
Still exhausted from the morning's activities, he managed to do his work as usual, speak to people as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Nobody guessed, he was certain of that. He'd gotten very good at making sure nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary.
You think they don't all see? Don't all know?
That was the sneering voice, the dominant one, the one he hated most and heard most often. He ignored it. It was easier to do that now, when he was drained and oddly distant from himself, when the only thing for him to do, really, was wait for his next opportunity.
They know who you are. They know what you did.
That was more difficult to ignore, but he managed. He went about his business, listening whenever possible to the nervous gossip. Everybody was talking about the same thing, of course. The murders.
Nobody talked of anything else these days.
He didn't hear much he hadn't already known, although the speculation was amusing. Theories, most of them absurd, abounded as to why the killer was targeting blondes.
A hatred of his mother, for Christ's sake.
Rejection by a blond girlfriend.
Idiots.
The pharmacist downtown told him there'd been a run on hair color, that those women trying blond as an option were going back to their natural colors.
He wondered if the natural blondes were considering changing, but thought probably not. They liked the effect, liked knowing men were watching them. It gave them a sense of power, of . . . superiority.
None of them could imagine dying because of it.
He thought that was funny.
He thought that was funny as hell.
2
RAFE SAID, “Please don't tell me the general idea is for you to be bait.”
“Oh, I'm probably too old to tempt him.”
“If you're past thirty, I'll eat my hat.”
“Salt and pepper?”
Rafe stared at her, and she chuckled.
“I'm thirty-one. And, no, that isn't the idea. I'll do a lot for king and country, but I don't have a death wish.”
“Done anything to piss off this Bishop of yours?”
“Not lately.”
“Has the profile changed?”
“Not as far as this animal's fixations go. He's still after white females with blond hair, and he's likely to stay within the age range of twenty-five to thirty-five. He apparently likes them smart and savvy as well as strong, which is an interesting twist on the stereotypical image of helpless dumb blondes as victims.”
Rafe said something profane under his breath.
Ignoring that, Isabel went on briskly, completely professional now. “He's someone they know or at least obviously