"But why aren't you doing more to catch him? Roadblocks, or searching with dogs, or—"
Bishop cut him off. "No trail was left for dogs to follow. And roadblocks can only catch a suspected killer when he's trying to leave town. This one lives here."
"You can't possibly know that."
"It's my job to know that, Mayor. The killer lives in Gladstone or the surrounding area. He's been very careful not to leave evidence we can use to find him. And we're not likely to catch him unless he makes a mistake."
MacBride looked pained. "That's blunt enough."
"It's the truth."
"But... to make a mistake, wouldn't he have to—"
"Kill again. Yes, I'm afraid so." Bishop paused a beat. "So in instituting the curfew, Sheriff Knight has done the only thing she could do to protect the young people of Gladstone. And, in the meantime, we're studying what information we have and are using every scrap of knowledge and experience we have between us to look for and interpret even the most minute detail of the crimes. We will catch him, Mayor. It's only a matter of time."
MacBride glanced again at the bulletin board and said, "I hope so, Agent Bishop. I hope so." He waved Miranda back when she would have gone to the door to show him out, and quietly left the conference room alone.
In an admiring tone, Tony said, "Why didn't I think to tell him it was only a matter of time? That perked him right up."
"Shut up, Tony."
Tony grinned at him, then looked at Miranda and sobered. "Sorry, Sheriff. Nobody knows better than me how serious this is. It's just... I don't deal well with elected officials as a rule."
"Present company excepted, Agent Harte?" she said lightly.
"Present company excepted," he said promptly.
"Then make it Miranda, all right?"
"I'd love to, if you return the favor."
"Tony it is."
"Thanks. So — Miranda — has the canvass of the area around that well turned up anything?"
She shook her head. "Alex is still out with his team, but so far nothing. No one who lived in the area will even admit to having been awake or out of bed between four and six A.M., much less to having seen or heard a car — or anything else."
Tony looked at Bishop and grimaced. "Well, it was a long shot."
Bishop nodded. "A very long shot."
"Reassuring words to the mayor aside," Miranda said, "do we have something useful? Fact, conclusion, speculation . . . hunch?"
"All we know today that we didn't know yesterday," Bishop said, "is that none of the surrounding law enforcement agencies have any similar crimes on their books — solved or unsolved."
"Another indication that he's local," Tony said, taking a chair at the table.
"Which we were virtually certain of anyway," she pointed out.
"Yeah." Tony shrugged. "And I can't see we're going to get anything else unless Sharon comes up with something useful in testing the Ramsay boy's bones. Or unless we're overlooking something
about one of the other victims."
"I'd be surprised if all of us had missed anything important. We have all the information we're ever likely to get from the victims. In this life, anyway." Miranda looked at Bishop and said dryly, "Have a good medium on the payroll?"
He took the question seriously. "We've never been able to validate a medium in any credible sense. Talking to the dead isn't an easy thing to prove scientifically."
"I guess not."
Bishop hesitated, then said casually, "I seem to recall that sort of thing was Bonnie's particular talent. Seeing ghosts. Does she still?"
Miranda stiffened. In a very quiet voice, she said, "Bonnie is not part of this. You don't see her, you don't talk to her — in fact, you don't go anywhere near her. Is that clear?"
"She's a teenager, Miranda." The scar on Bishop's cheek stood out starkly. "If for no other reason than fitting the victim profile, she is part of this."
"No. Not as far as you're concerned. You stay away from her." She looked at Tony. "All of you stay away from her." Then she walked out of the room.
"Brrrrr." Tony half zipped his jacket and thrust his hands into the pockets. "I guess we stay away from Bonnie."
Bishop grunted and turned grim eyes to the bulletin board. "If we can. For as long as we can."
Tony looked at him curiously. "Does her sister have more than one ability too?"
"Probably. They all did. But Bonnie was only a kid when I knew her, no more than eight, and her abilities were still developing."
"But she saw ghosts?"
"So she said."
"Her family believed her?"
"Yeah, they believed her." Bishop's voice was suddenly flat. "They were a ... remarkable family."
"Sorry, boss. Didn't mean to rake up old—"
"Memories? They aren't old and you didn't rake them up, so don't worry about it." Bishop stared at the bulletin board, trying to fill his mind with details of the killings and nothing else. "If I could just figure out what the killer needed from the Ramsay boy ..."
"You think that's the key?"
"Could be. I'm certain it's a detail vital to understanding the bastard."
"Assuming we don't catch him quick enough, what about his next victim?"
"Male," Bishop said. "Late teens, probably. Strong, maybe even aggressive, but definitely masculine. By all appearances he won't seem vulnerable, and no one could ever think of him as a victim."
"Why?"
Bishop tapped the yearbook picture of Lynet Grainger. "Because of her. She tempted him, Tony, and he didn't want to be tempted. He won't trust himself to grab another girl, not yet. First he'll have to prove to himself that he's powerful and in charge. Prove to himself there's nothing sexual about what he's doing. So he'll pick an older boy, someone he could never feel a sexual attraction to and one who won't be easy to subdue. If he hasn't already chosen him, he will soon. He won't want to spend too much time with his own doubts, letting them prey on his confidence. And he won't kill this boy quickly, not like Lynet. He'll need to make this one suffer a long time."
From the doorway, Miranda said quietly, "Sometimes you're just too goddammit smart for your own good, Bishop."
He and Tony looked at her, alerted by something in her voice. Strain showed in her grim eyes and in the straight, hard line of her mouth.
"We have another missing teenager," she said.
By nine o'clock that night, they were reasonably sure that eighteen-year-old Steve Penman was not going to return from some unannounced trip or errand wondering innocently what all the fuss was about. He had last been seen shortly before four o'clock, when he had dropped off his sixteen-year-old girlfriend at her home. He'd made sure to get her home before curfew, Amy Fowler numbly told the sheriff and FBI agents, so she'd be safe. Then, not restricted by the curfew himself, he had headed back toward town to pick up something at the drugstore before he reported to work at the paper mill for the six o'clock mini-shift.
When he hadn't reported to work, his supervisor, as requested by the Sheriff's Department, had immediately notified his parents. They had called the sheriff.
His car was found parked near the front of the drugstore, but no one inside remembered seeing him come in. Deputies were questioning other merchants, and the sheriff had gone on the radio to request calls from anyone who had been downtown between four and six and might have seen anything unusual.
The phones were ringing off the hook, but the calls were only from concerned citizens saying they had seen nothing.
"How could he just vanish like that?" Miranda was absently rubbing her temples. "How could he have been taken against his will without a sound or any kind of commotion, without even being noticed? The kid's six feet tall, and he was wearing his bright blue football jacket. Not what you'd call invisible. If he got to town just after four, it wasn't even dark yet."