AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sheriff Carter smiled softly. “Are you up for a few more questions, Gina?”
Gina took a sip of the lemonade. “It’s good stuff. Thanks for bringing it.”
Sheriff Carter looked almost bashful. He turned to Valerie. “I have a thing with making lemonade … eh … It’s …”
“Sweet,” Valerie found herself saying before snapping into a more professional tone. “Miss …”
“Please, call me Gina,” the woman said as Carter wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
“Gina,” Valerie continued. “We were told you saw the killer. Is that right?”
“I don’t know what I saw,” she said, grimacing. “It … it moved like a shadow out there on the hill.”
“Was it a man, a woman?” Will asked.
“A man, I think,” she said, nervously. “But he was silhouetted against the sky. I just saw the shape of him. But I knew …”
She trailed off and looked distantly at a patch of peeling wallpaper.
Valerie felt so sorry for the woman. What she had seen had broken something inside of her. Trauma was often brought sharply into focus by shock.
“The man chased you?” Charlie asked.
“Yes …” she said, shivering. “I’m not sure, but I think he had a knife or something in his hand.”
“Did you see him interact with the victim at all?” Valerie inquired.
“No,” Gina said, letting out a slight sob. “He’d already done his dirty work.”
“So, you didn’t actually see him kill the victim …” Valerie pondered out loud.
“No,” answered Gina, sipping some more of the lemonade. “But you don’t have to be a detective to know evil when you see it. And whatever I saw up on that hill was evil, pure and simple. Have you never had that feeling with the FBI … I mean when you come face to face with a killer?”
Valerie knew exactly what Gina meant. It was an aspect of her work as a profiler that was usually brushed under the carpet. Agents weren’t allowed to have superstitious assertions about how they knew things. That had to be done with hard empirical facts.
But that didn’t change the fact that Valerie hadfeltevil before: in places, in people, and in events. She wasn’t sure if it was a force in the world, but she felt it, nonetheless. That wasn’t good enough for a courtroom, but that feeling had tipped her off on more than one occasion to a killer hiding in plain sight.
“I’ve felt it,” Valerie answered. “A few times. But we can’t rule out that the man you saw wasn’t just a passerby.”
“How did you get away?” Charlie asked, again pushing the questioning onto more solid ground as he always did.
“I … I don’t know,” she said. “I ran for my life. He definitely followed at first. But then …”
“What happened, Gina?” Will asked, gently.
“I saw a flock of white birds pass by me and then he was gone.”
“A flock of birds?” Valerie asked.
“I … I know it sounds silly,” said Gina. “But it felt to me like they were sent from heaven to protect me. I’m not one to be too religious. But they appeared, and he ran off, like he was frightened by them.”
“Ornithophobia,” Charlie mused out loud.
“Charlie,” Will said with surprise. “That’s correct. How do you …”
“On one of my tours in Afghanistan,” he answered. “I had a buddy who was terrified of birds. It didn’t come out until we were in the field, and it made him lose his mind. It’s crazy how something like that can break somebody. Something so irrational in an otherwise rational person.”
Valerie thought for a moment of her own illness, her own hallucinations. They had been kept at bay for the most part recently, but they were still lurking. Stress would bring them out. She couldn’t rule out the possibility that Gina’s flock of birds were precisely that: a hallucination brought on by stress.
