"I don't know. I see what I see in a total flash: body, emotions, the situation. Once I saw the dead guy's pet, or maybe I just picked up on that from the dying person's thoughts. I don't see the person who caused that death."
"Just tell us everything you do know," Klavin said.
I looked from one to the other, suspiciously. They would listen, sure, and then give me those long-suffering looks that said they didn't believe a word I'd said. I'd had investigators tell me that before. "Oh, please, any little detail will help…." Then it was like, "Oh, that's all you can do? What good is that?"
"We promise we'll be respectful," Klavin said, interpreting my look correctly. "We realize you've had trouble with law enforcement agents in the past."
I thought about it. I thought about the check Twyla Cotton had tucked into my hand the night before, the check that was over and above the amount we'd agreed upon for finding her grandson. I thought about the families crowded into the church, the grief and fear. Balanced against ridicule from men I'd never see again, that ridicule seemed like nothing.
So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes to help me concentrate, and looked into one of the graves again. I picked the one closest to the road. I pointed at it on the drawing. "This is Tyler," I said. "He's been tortured. His skin was cut off in strips. He was raped. Clamps were put on his testicles. He was ready to die and welcomed death, because he knew no help was coming. The cause of death was strangulation. Some time in the recent past, he'd broken his leg."
There was a quick intake of breath from one of the agents. I didn't open my eyes to see which one. Tolliver took my hand, and I gripped his hard. In my mind, I walked to the next grave. "Hunter," I said. "Whipped, fucked, branded. He thought someone would come, right until the end. Lived for two days. Hypothermia." Hunter had died in weather like this, cold and damp. The November abduction, I guessed. "No broken bones. He had…scoliosis." I saw the curve of his spine, shining below me.
It went on, the litany of torture and death. Sex and pain. Young men, used up and discarded. The two transient boys had had no particular bone problems, but the locals had…except for Jeff McGraw and Aaron Robertson. So that was fifty percent. The broken bones were a dead end.
They'd died of a variety of reasons. Most of the reasons were oddly passive, like the strangling and hypothermia that had killed Tyler and Hunter.
"Passive?" Klavin sounded indignant. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and patted his nose. He'd caught a cold probing around the killing site. "Abducted, tortured, raped. That sounds pretty damn active to me."
"That's not what I'm trying to express," I said. "They were let to die. They weren't stabbed or shot or poisoned, something that would cause instant, sure death. Hunter was just left there, and he died. Maybe weather interfered with their visits, maybe he—the killer—was bored with him. The strangulation—well, you can change your mind at the last few seconds on that, too."
"I see what you mean," said Stuart. "Like the death was kind of an afterthought, or an experiment."
"Like the pleasure didn't come with the death, but with what lay before," I said. "The pain was the attraction. And once they were all used up, and there wouldn't be any more reaction from them, they were no good anymore." But that wasn't quite right. Stuart's comment about it being an experiment was closer to the thought I was trying to express.
Tolliver looked nauseated.
"That's not what we're getting from the other psychic," Klavin said in challenge. "She says that the killer sat and watched for the moment of death, taking an ‘orgasmic' pleasure from it."
"Then Xylda's probably right," I said instantly. "I'm not a psychic, and she is. Or maybe…" But then I stopped. Both the agents were looking at me with that expression I knew so well. It said, as clearly as if they'd spoken out loud: Watch her. She's going to back and fill and try to dovetail her imaginings with the story the other freak told us.
"Did you ever think," I said very slowly, very reluctantly, "that there might be two killers?"
They were both goggling at me. I can't interpret the living nearly as well as I can the dead. I'd done well with the two state agents so far, but I had no idea what their faces were saying now.
"That's all I can tell you," I said, and I got up to leave. Tolliver hastily got to his feet, too. "Can we leave town?" I asked. "Whenever we choose?"
"As long as you let us know how to reach you, you and your brother can hit the road," Stuart said, in a tone that implied he'd be glad to see the back of us.
"I'm not her brother," Tolliver said. He sounded as angry as if they'd been arguing about it for the previous hour.
Stuart looked surprised. "All right, then. Whatever," he said, shrugging. "You two can go."
I was so astonished by Tolliver's outburst that I had to fumble to gather up my purse and follow him out. He almost left me in his cloud of dust. He proceeded clear on out of the station, with me trailing behind. With a little awkwardness with the doors, I was slowed down enough that I just reached him when he got to our car. He was standing with his hands on the hood, glaring down at the gray paint. The remaining newspeople were shouting at us, but we completely ignored them.
I had no idea what to say. I just stood there and waited. I would have gotten in the car, but he had the keys in his hand. The mist in the air began to get heavier, become almost-rain. I was miserable.
Finally he straightened up, and without a word to me, he clicked the doors open. I stepped down from the curb to the door on the passenger side, opened it and got in, pulled it closed. Thank God it was my left arm that was out of whack. Still silently, Tolliver leaned over me to pull my seat belt around and click it shut.
"Where?" he said.
"The doctor's office."
"You hurting?"
"Yes."
He took a deep breath. He held it for a minute. Let it out. "I'm sorry," he said, leaving it open as to what he was sorry about.
"Okay," I said, not really sure what ground we were walking on. I had a few ideas. Some of them were more frightening than others.
Tolliver had pinpointed the location of the doctor's office earlier on one of his drives to and from the hospital. Dr. Thomason's red brick office was small, but the parking lot contained at least six cars. When I went in, I anticipated a long wait. The man who was not my brother went up to the window, told the woman behind it who I was and that I'd seen the doctor at the emergency room.
"We'll have to work her in, hon, it may take a little bit," she said, reaching up to push her glasses back on her nose. Then she patted her helmet of sprayed hair lightly, to make sure it was still in good shape, I guess. Tolliver was working his old magic. He brought back a clipboard with forms to fill out.
"Apparently, we'll have plenty of time to do this," he said, for my benefit. I was in a blue molded plastic chair against the far wall, and he came to join me. In the waiting room with us were a young mother and her baby, who was blessedly asleep, an elderly man with a walker parked in front of him, and a very nervous teenage boy, who was one of the tribe of foot jigglers.
A nurse in teal came to the door and called, "Sallie and Laperla!" The young mother, hardly more than a teenager herself, got up with the infant carrier cradled in her arms.
"I wonder if she knows La Perla is a brand of underwear," I murmured to Tolliver, but that barely got a smile from him.