Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [74]
“Until you met Bishop.”
“Until I met Bishop. By then, the only thing I was sure of was that there had to be a reason I could do what I did, a reason why I heard the voices. A reason why that evil hadn't been able to destroy me, hard as it tried.”
“A reason you had survived.”
“Yeah. Because there had to be a reason. They call it survivor's guilt. You have to get through that, find some purpose in your life. Figure out how you lived when those around you died. And why. I didn't know those answers.
“I drifted through college until my friend was killed. Julie. She died horribly, suddenly. There one day, gone the next. Before I could even begin to grieve for her, more women were dead and their killer had vanished.”
“The second traumatic event in your life,” Rafe said. “And the second time you encountered evil.”
Isabel nodded. “I hadn't seen it coming then either, that was what hit me hardest. These voices that told me things never told me I was going to lose my best friend. That was when I decided to become a cop. I still didn't know how to channel or use the voices—or how to keep myself from being locked away in a padded cell somewhere if I did. But I knew I had to try. I knew I had to look for that evil face. And destroy it when I found it.”
Dana had finally grown tired of Joey's whining and sent him back to Columbia—but she had also ordered him to make the drive back to Hastings on Sunday morning. And when he whined about that, she reminded him that news was a twenty-four-seven business and if he didn't like it he could go use his supposed camera skills elsewhere.
As for Dana herself, she had elected to keep her room at the inn. There were several women staying there, including the federal agents, and it felt safer there.
If anywhere could feel safe in Hastings.
Dana didn't apologize even to herself for being so jumpy, especially since Cheryl Bayne had disappeared. If this maniac was killing anybody who got in his way, anybody who offered a threat to him . . . then Dana now had two strikes against her. She was blond and she was media.
It was enough to make any woman jumpy, and never mind the additional worry of too many guys prowling around town with guns stuck in their belts, also jumpy as hell—
“Hi.”
Dana nearly came out of her skin. “Christ, don't do that!”
“Sorry.” Paige Gilbert shrugged apologetically. “Like you, I just came out for ice.” She was holding an ice bucket in one hand.
Dana looked at her own bucket and sighed, continuing around the corner of the hallway to the alcove where the ice machine lived on this floor of the inn. “Why're you staying here?” she asked the other woman. “You live in Hastings, don't you?”
“I live alone. So I thought I'd stay here at the inn for the duration.”
Dana scooped ice, then eyed Paige. “But you aren't a blonde.”
“Neither was—is—Cheryl Bayne. And then there's the body they found today.”
Wary, Dana said, “I know they found one. Been dead a while, I heard.”
“Yeah.” Paige scooped ice into her bucket and straightened, adding, “My sources claim she was brunette.”
“Brunette.”
“Yeah.”
“Did your source also say she was . . . tortured?”
“Mangled.”
“The difference being?”
Paige hesitated, then said, “Tortured means she was alive when it happened. Mangled means she was dead.”
“Oh, shit.”
“I've got a bottle of scotch in my room. Want some?”
Dana didn't hesitate. “Bet your ass I do.”
Rafe didn't push his luck by asking too many questions. He knew Isabel had been exhausted even before the evening began, and by the time she'd confided the unspeakable tragedies in her life, it was obvious what she needed more than anything was sleep and plenty of it.
So he took her back to the inn, some instinct urging him to maintain the physical contact between them as much as possible. He was still holding her hand when they walked up the steps to the wide, old-fashioned porch.
Absently, she said, “This place couldn't decide what it wanted to be when it grew up—a bed and breakfast or a hotel.