The Killing Vision (13 page)

Her question momentarily threw him off guard.  “I…we
did some work for him yesterday at his house.  I’m with Cable-Com.  The cable
company.”

She nodded again.  “Did he need to pay you for
something?  Do you have an invoice I can give him?”

 “No,” he said, working to keep his voice steady. 
“I just came by to make sure he was happy with everything.”

She scribbled on a pad.  “I can leave him the
message that you came by.”

“Look,” he said, his composure beginning to slip a
bit, “I’d just like to see him, okay?”

She put down her pen and gave him that cold smile
again.  “I’m sorry, but he’s not here.”

Joel felt his whole countenance fall.  “He’s not?”

“No.  He’s out of town at a meeting.  Left this
morning.  I’m afraid he won’t be back in the office until tomorrow.”

Joel stared at her, and part of him wanted to say
insanely, “I’ll wait,” just to wipe that distant smile from her face.  But
instead he said simply, “Tomorrow?”

She nodded.  “Is there anything else I can do for
you, Mr. Roberts?”

He shook his head, turning for the door.  “I guess
not,” he said.  “Just…give him the message.”

Back in the lobby he took a seat on a bench and
watched the passersby for a little while, wondering what to do next.  After a
few moments, it came to him.  He headed outside and down the street to the
police station.

* * *

10:40 AM

Halloran had been buried in paperwork all morning,
mostly stuff he’d neglected the past few days while he and Chapman were roaming
around Cedar Hill.  He had checked for any updates on the Santos girl, and when
there was nothing new, he made a small note of it in his report and resumed
work on his backlog.  So when Camron stuck her head in his office door and told
him he had a visitor, he welcomed the break.

He looked up from his desk to see a huge bear of a
man in a Cable-Com uniform stepping through his door.  The guy looked young, in
his twenties, but his eyes seemed ancient and wounded.  “Lieutenant Halloran?”

Halloran stood.  “That’s me,” he said, offering his
hand.

The big man looked at it, then down at Halloran’s
desk.  “Sorry, I don’t shake hands.”

Halloran forced his expression to stay neutral.  This
was going to be interesting.  He motioned to the empty chair across the desk. 
“Have a seat.”

As the man sank into the chair—gracefully for such a
large guy, Halloran thought—he cleared his throat.  “My name is Joel Roberts,”
he said.  “I work for Cable-Com here in town.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Roberts?”  Halloran had
pulled out a legal pad and a pencil, ready to take notes.

“I understand you’re on the Sarah Jo McElvoy case.”

Halloran froze.  He looked at the man across the
desk.  “That’s right.”

Roberts’ face was unreadable.  “I think I may have
found something interesting.”

Halloran sat up straight.  “Go on.”

“Wade—that’s my brother—the two of us work for the
cable company.  Yesterday we were running a new outlet in Mayor Carver’s
house.”

Halloran listened as Roberts told his story—how
while working a job at Mayor Carver’s house he had stumbled upon a secret room
with a sex sling, about finding a pile of newspaper clippings relating to the
McElvoy girl’s disappearance.  Halloran took notes of it all, a sensation of
both dread and excitement prickling at his neck.  When Roberts finished
speaking, Halloran laid his pencil down gently.  “So you think the mayor may
have something to do with this?”

Roberts looked at Halloran, then glanced away.  “I
don’t know,” he said.  “I just thought I should tell you what I found.”

Halloran looked at his scrawled notes.  “Did your
brother…”

“Wade.”

“Did Wade see any of this?”

Roberts shook his head.  “No.  I never even told him
about it.”

“Why not?”

The big man looked at his hands.  “I don’t know.  It
was just…too creepy.”  He opened his mouth to say something else, then stopped.

“Yes?”

Roberts chuckled humorlessly.  “Wade’s got a big
mouth,” he said. 

“I see.”  Halloran looked down at his notes.

Roberts was watching him anxiously.  “Do you think
it means anything?  I mean, you
will
follow up on it, right?”

Halloran set his pencil down on the pad.  “Mr.
Roberts, right now we can’t afford to ignore any leads we might get.  All I ask
of you is that you not tell anyone what we talked about here today.  Agreed?”

Roberts nodded.  “Sure.”

“You realize we have another missing teenager in
Cedar Hill.”

“How could I not?” Roberts said.  “It’s all over the
TV and the radio.”

Halloran studied his face, looking for any signs of
instability.  But there were none.  Just those dark, haunted eyes.  “Mr.
Roberts, be assured that we will check this out.  And in the meantime, you hear
of anything else that may help us, please don’t hesitate to call me.”  He slid
one of his business cards across the desk and Roberts took it.  “Thanks for
coming in.”  He reached across the desk to shake the man’s hand, then remembered. 
“Any particular reason you don’t like to shake hands?”

A struggle of emotions flashed across the big man’s
face.  “Just a hygiene thing,” he answered.  “I have a phobia about germs.”

When Roberts had gone, Halloran sat looking at his
notes, his mind playing through all his conversations with Carver.  The mayor
seemed like a rock-solid guy, genuinely concerned about both girls and how the
situation was impacting the community.  Still, sometimes the most stable
individuals could snap and do the most atrocious things.  Could it be possible
that Larry Carver was involved in such a heinous thing?

He needed to talk to Chapman.  And to the chief. 

* * *

11:00 AM

Joel emerged into the sunlight, squinting in the
brightness.  He felt like such an idiot.  Coming here and talking to Halloran
was probably a bad idea.  He was sure Halloran thought he was a wacko.  Those
notes he had taken were probably already wadded up in his trashcan.

He crossed the street and headed down the sidewalk
toward the small lot where he had parked.  The air was cooler today, not so
heavy.  A velvety breeze stirred the air with the scents of pine and
fresh-mowed grass.  Across town, the bells in the courthouse tower were chiming
the hour.  If he hadn’t been so preoccupied he might actually be enjoying his
time out.  He snapped on his sunglasses and trudged on, trying to ignore the
heaviness he felt in his chest.

“Joel!”

He spun around to see a young woman moving toward
him, waving, her blonde hair dancing about her face.  It took him a moment to
recognize her, and then he suddenly remembered her from the group on Sunday. 
“Dana?”

Her smile grew broader as she reached him.  “Hi! 
What’re you doing?”

He shrugged.  “Just taking care of some business.”

“It’s good to see you again,” she said, and he could
tell she meant it.  “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you much Sunday.  What
did you think of the group?”

He smiled.  “It was all right.”

“Kind of overwhelming at first, huh?”

“Yeah.  Kind of.”

“Will you come back?”

He looked at her, into her deep blue eyes.  “Maybe.”

She looked at her watch.  “Hey, you wanna have
lunch?  I’m supposed to meet some friends at Gidalfo’s, but I’m just really not
in the mood.  There’s a little deli right over here.  If you’re hungry, that
is.”

He stared at her dumbfounded.  A beautiful,
vivacious young woman was asking him to lunch.  He laughed.  “Sure,” he said.

* * *

The place was Parrothead’s.  The décor was early
patio—plastic lawn chairs and tables with colorful umbrellas.  Murals on the
walls depicted beach scenes and stuffed exotic birds swung from the ceiling. 
Jimmy Buffett—who seemed to be the whole inspiration of the place—sang on the
sound system.  Their waitress brought drinks in brightly colored plasticware.

“Isn’t this place a blast?” Dana said.  “I discovered
it during my freshman year.  I love Jimmy Buffett.”

“Me, too,” Joel said.  “I saw him in concert once.”

“Really?  How was it?  I’ve heard his shows are
pretty wild.”

Joel laughed.  “Well, the audience was anyway.  Most
everybody was drunk.”  He didn’t tell her about being pressed up against
everyone on the way out of the stadium, how the barrage of thoughts and images
hitting him from all sides was so crushing that he was in tears by the time he
reached the parking lot.  How after that night he’d never again gone where
there was a chance he might get caught up in a crowd.  Not even to the movies.

Dana took a sip of her Diet Coke.  “So what’s your
claim to fame?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know, your talent.  Your sensitivity.  Me, I
can read objects.  Just like my mom and dad.  Most everybody in the group can
do that.”

“Yeah, I can do that, too,” Joel said.  “Sometimes. 
Mostly I can read people—their thoughts and feelings, things in their past.” 
Dana gave him an alarmed look and he laughed.  “I can’t just read their minds
or anything,” he said quickly.  “I have to touch them first.”

“I can’t read everything,” Dana said, stirring her
ice with her straw.  “It has to have some kind of emotional attachment to it. 
Jewelry, clothing, stuff like that.  Money is the absolute worst; there’s so
much desperation linked to it.”

“I’ve never picked up anything off money before,”
Joel said, amazed.

“You’re lucky.”

Joel unwrapped his straw and took a sip of his
Coke.  “So what can some of the others in the group do?”

Dana thought for a moment.  “Well, there’s Deb, of
course.  She can pick up things from places—voices and feelings, not really
visions so much.”

“That’s got to be a bitch,” said Joel.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the two of us, we can at least avoid touching
things when we go someplace.  It would be pretty awful to be bombarded by stuff
all the time.  It’s only happened to me once or twice.”

“I asked her about that once,” Dana said.  “She told
me it was kind of like having a ringing in your ears.  You just get used to it
after a while, and you learn how to tune it out.  Plus, I don’t think she picks
up stuff just from driving down the street or going into the grocery.  There
has to be some real feelings to the place.”

Joel nodded.  “I understand.”  He thought of Mayor
Carver’s basement, of the secret room and its sling.  He shuddered.  “Emotion
seems to be the key to all of it, doesn’t it?”

“She doesn’t really talk about it much,” Dana said,
staring at the table.  “I know that she had a breakdown as a teenager.  Had to
be hospitalized for a while.  That was after a class trip to Gettysburg.”

“Gettysburg?  The battlefield?”  God, Joel thought,
that must have been horrible.  He remembered his experience at the museum, and
tried to imagine how a teenage girl would feel being assailed by the horror and
sensations of thousands of Civil War soldiers.  He couldn’t even begin to
understand how Deb must have felt, in spite of his similar experience.  “She
must have lost her mind,” he said.

Dana nodded.  “She just about did.”

Their waitress brought their sandwiches, and Joel
bit into his greedily.  “What about the others?” Joel asked between bites.

“Well,” Dana said, tearing open her bag of potato
chips, “There’s Joseph, the old guy.  He and Barry can both see the future.”

Joel stopped chewing.  “Really?  Both of them?”

Dana nodded.  “I think Joseph’s comes and goes.  But
Barry…”

“What about him?  Father Michael said he’s had some
rough times.  That he tried to kill himself.”

“Yeah,” Dana said softly.

“What happened?”

“Well, I only heard him talk about it once,” Dana
said.  “It was one of the first times I’d been to the group, and it just about
terrified me.  I was almost too scared to go back.”

Joel’s curiosity was brimming.  “What did he say?”

“He was living in Memphis with his fiancée.  They’d
been together about two years, and they were in the middle of planning their
wedding.  One night, out of the clear blue, he had a vision of her being
murdered.  Stabbed to death, actually.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yeah.  He didn’t know what to do.  It was the first
time he’d had a vision.  He didn’t know if he should tell her because he didn’t
want to upset her.  And he wasn’t sure it was even real.  He just about lost
it, worrying over it.  In the end, he told her about it, and they just kind of
laughed it off.”  Dana fell silent and took a sip of her drink.

“I don’t have to guess how it ended,” Joel said.