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“Okay.” I gesture at the bed. “I saw Lynesse there. He was hacking her with an axe. She was terrified.”
It feels like a stupid thing to say. What person isn’t terrified when they are dying.
She goes to beside the bed and bends down to look at something. “Huh,” she says. “Good catch.”
First I see just a patch of dark blood near the dust ruffle, and then I see the handle of a weapon is sticking out. Remi carefully lifts the dust ruffle a few inches. The weapon is an axe.
My sense of satisfaction lasts only half a second. I turn to the wall beside the door and point at DCK’s mark. “It wasn’t DCK,” I tell her. “See how there are no gouge marks? It’s a copycat.”
Her eyebrows draw together. She goes closer to scrutinize it. She looks as disappointed as I had felt when I had first realized. “Dammit,” she says.
She snaps a photograph of it with her phone and taps out a text message.
“Was that to Storm?” I ask.
She nods. “We were told it was DCK. I suppose it’s good news if it isn’t. From a press perspective I mean.”
“I suppose you’ve got more chance of catching the killer now,” I say miserably.
DCK is the one I wanted to catch. I consider whether he might be trying to trick us, but I know immediately that it is just wishful thinking. DCK loves to boast about his kills. He has a signature style. He would never ever leave a fake mark on one of his own kills.
Silly misery guts. This is fantastic news, says the little voice inside my head. You had a wager. And if it’s not DCK, you’ve got a much better chance of catching him, haven’t you?
I realize she is right. It only makes me feel a tiny bit better. I really had wanted to catch DCK.
You can get him next time, she says grimly. And if you really want to feel all heroic, this killer is just as evil. He had no right to take Lynesse’s life. You remember that.
Her words make me feel better. Lynesse deserves justice just as much as Magda does.
Vengeance, insists the little voice. Lynesse deserves vengeance. Trust me, it’s far tastier than justice.
“You would tell me if you saw the killer in your vision, wouldn’t you?” says Remi.
I nod.
She looks satisfied. “You get any more impressions from the bedroom?”
I shrug. The revelation that this was not DCK has left me feeling rather dejected.
“Then we’d better head downstairs,” says Remi crisply. “If you want to cover that before Leo gets back from speaking to the fiancé.”
I look at her gratefully. Nice to know someone is on my side. “Do you think I could speak to the fiancé?” I ask hopefully.
Remi gives a brief snort of laughter. “No. I recommend you give the witnesses a wide berth. Storm is sure to find out. And it would make him really mad.”
We go downstairs together. I see the skeevy crime scene tech through a doorway, snapping pictures of the kitchen. I’m glad he is not in the lounge. I don’t particularly want to talk to him.
Remi seems to sense I need a moment to mull things over. She leaves me standing near the base of the stairs, from where I watch her walk around the lounge. She takes a close look at two wine glasses on the coffee table but does not touch them. She eyes up the couches and the luxuriant textured cushions on them. I feel a pang. Lynesse Jones had been sitting on those couch and laughing with the dead man just minutes before they were killed.
Remi glances at me enquiringly. I shake my head. Nothing yet. I should do what she is doing and walk around. I follow in her footsteps.
“It is best if you don’t touch anything,” she says. “Want some gloves?”
I shake my head. I don’t think touching things through plastic gloves will help. I suspect my gift works best with skin-to-object contact. I feel pretty useless without it.
Remi, with her thin rubber gloves on, is poking around the large hardback books on a side-table. They look like they’re more for effect than for reading. I glance at a huge canvass image on a wall. It is a pixelated painting of a nude woman’s body, her head out of shot.
One entire wall of the room is a huge window overlooking an outdoor area where there is a beautiful rectangle of a perfect-blue pool and some pristine wooden deckchairs beside it that look like they belong in some sunny holiday spot. This house is like a little piece of heaven. An entire universe away from my own one-room studio apartment.
