It was Rafe who said, “So if the reasons were powerful enough, or the-the psychic desperate enough to protect himself or herself from some perceived attack, then the shield would be even stronger than… normal.” He felt odd just using the word-hell, any of these words. But Paige was nodding, again matter-of-factly.
“The human mind has a hundred ways to protect itself, and it’ll use whatever it can whenever it has to. Fear creates energy, just like any other strong emotion does, just like psychic ability itself does. A psychic’s mind virtually always uses that extra energy for some kind of wall or shield.”
“Except for Isabel.”
Isabel shrugged. “We’ve never been able to figure out why my abilities won’t shield themselves.”
Rafe looked at her oddly. “No?”
“No.” She frowned at him. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason.” But when he looked back at Paige, he lifted his brows slightly.
“Even those of us with extra senses can be incredibly blind to some things,” she said. “Keep doing that, by the way. It’s working.”
Isabel looked from one to the other of them, baffled. “What’s he doing?”
“Reaching through his shield.”
“He is?”
“I am?”
Paige nodded. “I’m sure you’ll both figure it out. Problem is, there’s this killer, which doesn’t give you a whole hell of a lot of time in which to do it.”
“Any advice?” Isabel asked wryly.
“Yeah. Hurry.”
Hollis propped her elbows on the table and pressed her fingers against her eyes. “God, I’m tired. What time is it, anyway?”
“Nearly nine,” Isabel told her. “I was ready to call it a day hours ago.”
Rafe looked at her but didn’t say anything, just as he hadn’t said much since they’d left Paige at the motel. Isabel had filled the silence-and possibly tried to distract him-by briefly discussing Ginny’s situation, a matter Rafe was kicking himself for having completely missed and one he wasn’t at all sure how to handle.
Oh, yeah, he was psychic. Sure he was.
In any case, Isabel had offered a few suggestions, and Rafe was more than ready to accept her counsel and approve her plan. He just wished she was as forthcoming with advice regarding this peculiar new ability he supposedly had.
Hell, she hadn’t even mentioned it since they’d left the motel, and that bothered him more than he wanted to admit. He knew Isabel was dealing with issues of her own at the moment, and he knew he was a complication in her life. He was even reasonably sure that the simplest thing he could do would be to leave her alone to sort out what she had to.
But as Isabel herself had said, the simplest thing wasn’t always the smartest thing.
So what was the smartest thing?
Studiously not looking at him, Isabel said, “Okay, we’re agreed that the note doodled by Tricia Kane suggests she was one of Jamie’s clients.”
“More than suggests,” Hollis said. “The only thing on that old highway of any interest is Jamie’s playroom.”
“Agreed, but that doesn’t mean Tricia was a client. We don’t know why she was meeting Jamie. Hell, maybe she was painting her.”
“There were no sketches of Jamie or anybody who looked like her among Tricia’s work. Besides, do you really think Jamie would commission a painting of herself in full S amp;M ensemble?”
“No.”
“Then what other reason could they have for meeting there?”
“Maybe Tricia was interested in buying the building. It was one of those Jamie planned to sell after what happened with Hope Tessneer.”
“We checked that out,” Mallory said. “At least as far as we could. Jamie kept her official appointments in her date book, and that included appointments to show her own properties during the last couple of months. No appointment listed for May sixteenth.”
Rafe spoke finally, saying, “Odds are, Tricia was a client. Or a potential client. You did say at least one of Jamie’s partners could have been from Hastings.”
Isabel nodded. “I did say that, yes.”
Hollis looked from Isabel to Rafe curiously. There had been no opportunity to discuss what they had found out from Paige, since both Mallory and Ginny had been in the room and other officers had come and gone fairly steadily, but it didn’t take a sixth sense to feel the tension between them.
Hollis had been debating whether to tell them about the visitation from Jamie, though she had pretty much decided just to tell Isabel later, when they were alone. After all, it wasn’t as though she could provide anything new in the way of information or evidence.
Rafe said, “Then Tricia might have been a regular.”
“Another Hastings blonde with a secret sexual life?” Isabel leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “And it seemed like such a nice little town.”
“I said the same thing,” Hollis murmured.
“It was a nice little town,” Rafe said. “And will be again. Just as soon as we catch this bastard.”
“And all we’ve got to help us catch him,” Isabel reminded the group at large, “is a fairly useless profile and what we know about the victims.”
“You haven’t revised the profile as you’ve gotten deeper into the investigation?” Rafe asked Isabel almost idly.
“Not really. This guy leaves so little behind that the only real thing we have to study are the victims he kills. All single white females, all smart and savvy, all successful. Beyond that, and until now, all we really had connecting them was the color of their hair. Cheryl Bayne’s disappearance puts the importance of that into question-definitely.”
“But even before then,” Mallory said, “we found Jamie’s secret. And her secret playroom.”
Isabel nodded.
“Which could have been an aberration as far as the victims go, having absolutely nothing to do with the killer or his motivations. But then Hope Tessneer’s body turned up, having very likely been a… toy… for our killer after she died, probably accidentally, and probably at Jamie’s hands. Connection. And now this note, which is a pretty fair indication that Tricia Kane was or planned to become involved in Jamie’s S amp;M games.”
“Another connection,” Rafe said.
“But there is absolutely no sign that Allison Carroll led anything but a perfectly traditional sex life. Also no sign that she even knew either of the other victims.”
Rafe shook his head. “Maybe we missed something. Or maybe there was nothing there to miss. Maybe she was as good at keeping secrets as Jamie was. As Tricia was.”
“Regarding Tricia, there were no regular withdrawals from her bank account in the last few months,” Mallory noted. “But that isn’t to say she might not have sold some of her sketches or paintings for cash. A couple of her friends mentioned that she’d sold things to them. She could have paid Jamie without leaving any trace of the money.”
“Yeah,” Isabel said, “but how did she find Jamie? I mean, how did she know the services were available? I doubt Jamie advertised in some bondage magazine.”
“Word of mouth?” Rafe suggested. “A referral from another client? All these women had something to lose in the sense of not wanting their… extracurricular activities to be made public. Jamie could have been pretty sure of their silence.”
“Still, she would have wanted to have control-” Isabel broke off with a frown, then continued. “Wait a minute. The photos we have show Jamie unmasked. What if that’s the reason Emily took those particular photos? Because they were the only ones that showed Jamie’s face?”
Finishing her supposition, Rafe said, “What if Jamie was always masked when she met clients? Except for the client she trusted, the one in the photographs?”