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“The ME tends to make the decision on whether a weapon was used in a homicide or a suicide, but, of course, we need a body.”
Catherine’s lips pressed into a line. “You’re going to force this investigation, aren’t you?”
Savannah stared at the knife for a long moment, then slowly picked the plastic bag up. “I’ll take this back to Detective Stone, and we’ll go from there.”
Catherine seemed to want to say something else, but she let it slide. “What did Cassandra say to you?” she asked instead.
“She said her name was Maggie and that she told you he was coming. That he came for Mary, and he was coming for you and maybe even me, too.”
“She said that?” Catherine whispered.
“Who is this he? Does he have anything to do with the DNA you’re looking for on the knife?”
“Cassandra sees things, but they’re not always accurate,” she said, in complete denial of her own body language, which was reflecting her intense fear.
“She knew I was carrying my baby for someone else.”
It was a role reversal. Now Savvy was the one intimating that she believed in the women of the Colony’s gifts, and Catherine was the skeptic. The two women stared each other down.
Finally, Catherine declared, “Cassandra has a flair for the dramatic. No one’s coming for us. And certainly not for you, Detective.”
“That’s good to hear.” Deciding it was time to stop talking in circles and get on with the Donatella investigation, Savannah got to her feet and said, “I’d better get going.”
“You’ll test the knife?”
“I . . . yes. I’ll bill you.” She walked around the table, out of the kitchen, and toward the rough-hewn front door, sensing Catherine behind her. Turning, she saw that Catherine’s eyes were following the bag in her hand, as if she was afraid to let it out of her sight. “I’ll talk to Detective Stone about it, too.”
“Thank you.”
“As I said, he may ask to exhume Mary’s body if he thinks a crime’s been committed.”
“There’s no reason for that,” Catherine stated quickly. “If Detective Stone wants to take things that far, have him get in contact with me.”
She opened the door and accompanied Savannah down the flagstone path to the gate, unlocked it, waited for Savvy to pass through, then relocked the gate before turning back to the lodge. Savannah climbed into her vehicle and looked back at Catherine’s stiffly held spine as the older woman reentered the lodge.
Who is he? she wondered again, her gaze sliding toward the knife inside the plastic bag, as she sensed in her bones that there was some real threat out there and tried like hell to shake the eerie feeling that had been with her since she first stepped through the gate of Siren Song.
CHAPTER 4
The bar was crowded with would-be cowboys and girls in skintight dresses, along with a few after-work businessmen, who had ripped off their ties and were knocking back shots, as if trying to prove they were twice as macho as any of the men wearing jeans, boots, hats, and oversize belt buckles. It was a rockin’ Thursday night at the Rib-I, a Portland steak and baked potato restaurant and bar, whose logo was spelled out in ropelike orange neon and encircled by a lasso.
Yes, the Rib-I was class all the way, and Charlie—no, that wasn’t his real name, but it was the only one he gave out—was pretty sure every fucker in sight would be worth more to the world if he were six feet under. With that thought in mind, Charlie wondered how many he could kill. How long it would take. How much forethought. He didn’t plan to ever get caught, and so mass murder or even serial murders were problematic, something to avoid. But recently he’d gotten the killing urge and gotten it bad. It was powerful, almost sexual. Well, actually, it was sexual. He had to beat off almost immediately after every last choking sound. He didn’t care how they expired. He just liked staring into their eyes, their damned souls, and watching them suck in those last tortured breaths, and then, man, the hard-on was so huge and uncomfortable that with a few quick strokes he was spewing like a volcano.
Now . . . there was danger in that. DNA danger. He’d learned to carry around ziplock bags, just in case he wasn’t somewhere safe.
It was a strange phenomenon, he thought as he sipped his beer. He’d never really understood his own power, but it was always there, always with him, an old friend. In his youth he’d worked his power on animals that he wanted to befriend. It ran through him with the heat of blood in his veins, and the zing of energy down his nerves. It was a power he couldn’t explain, though he’d tried to several times, the last time to his adoptive mother, who had looked pained and a little frightened while he struggled to name his power, and then had simply changed the subject. But by then he was sixteen and as horny as he could be.
To hell with befriending animals, he’d decided; he wanted sex. One night he moved up close to his mother and said softly that he wanted her, and he let his own invisible power slide over to her. When she stared at his lips and the look of horror slowly fled from her face, to be replaced by something else, he knew he had her. He moved forward and pushed her unresisting form onto the couch, and he screwed her every which way but loose, and she clasped him to her and howled with her head thrown back and her spine bent in a U, her legs locked around his back, meeting his thrusts with a body that jerked and stiffened and begged for more. The next day she threw herself off a freeway bridge, but he was gone by then, starting his vagabond new life, where he lured women with a wink and a smile, and by the time he was through with them, they’d given him everything they had and more. He stuck with a professor’s daughter through three terms of college and then moved on to the professor herself. He could have gotten a degree in business without hardly trying, but he got bored with the whole thing and quit before achieving that goal.
Which was why he was wondering if he should hook up with more of those academic types. Hmmm. He took another swallow from his long-necked bottle and saw a redhead checking him out. She was kinda swaying to the twangy country music—a come-on that he ignored for now. There was something desperate
about her, and he didn’t need desperate.
He knew his looks dragged them in. Of course he knew. But it was his power that really got them going, a power he struggled to keep under leash. Sometimes when he looked at the turn of a woman’s calf or the soft curve of her breast or the rounded lushness of her buttocks, he just couldn’t help himself, and he just let it out. They couldn’t say no to him. Sometimes they didn’t want to at first; sometimes he was just too impatient. But they couldn’t say no. He’d been trying very hard to put a lid on the whole damn thing, because he didn’t want to move anymore; he was still enraged over that last relo. He didn’t want to have to keep leaving just because some crazed husband or boyfriend thought it was time to take care of Good Time Charlie, so he’d had to put a lid on his power for a while. It was while he’d been in this state of weird abstinence that he learned what it felt like to kill.
Mother . . . fucker.
As he relived that last fatal encounter, his dick jumped up as if electrified, and he suddenly had the boner of all boners. He looked around for the redhead, but she’d disappeared, so he had to move up next to a chick wearing a short denim jacket and low-cut jeans, whose hair was bleached white with black roots, and he let a little of his power out so she wouldn’t object when he pressed himself into her butt and rubbed a little. She jerked away at first, then snapped around to look at him, a snarl on her lips, and he smiled and said, “C’mon, gimme some sugar,” and she said, “Fuck you,” a little breathlessly, and then she was all over him, twisting and squirming, and he had to put a stop to it right there or get thrown out on the street.
