What the hell did this guy want from her? Jeremy wondered.
“Any ideas at all?” Joe asked her, then frowned as he glanced at Jeremy. “She’s come up with some real leads for us in the past,” he said flatly.
She thinks she’s a psychic! Jeremy wanted to shout. A psychic. And he was a believer in good old-fashioned investigations, the kind that took time and turned up real evidence. Then he forced himself to stop and think about his reaction, and he was puzzled suddenly by his own attitude. If intuition could solve crimes and save lives, it would be great. He started examining his own feelings, thinking about the way he almost resented the easy flow of words between Rowenna and Joe, and the way his hackles had gone up so quickly on Joe’s arrival. He would be really disappointed in himself if the reason was something as petty as professional jealousy.
But it wasn’t, and he knew that now.
His mind flashed back to the unease he’d felt when Joe had called him about Rowenna and her empty gas tank earlier that day. Was that the kind of intuition she was talking about? No, his had made sense. He hadn’t known then that there was a killer on the loose, but he had known that Mary was missing. It made sense to worry about another young, attractive woman who was alone and in a vulnerable position. On the other hand, he hadn’t batted an eye when Brad had said he felt sure Mary was still alive, that he would sense it if she were dead. But Mary was Brad’s wife. It made a certain kind of sense to think they might have some kind of deep and inexplicable connection. But Rowenna didn’t know Mary, so making the leap to believing her intuition was something else again.
He glanced at Brad. Joe Brentwood had told his officers to make sure that every farmer in the vicinity checked his scarecrows.
Because there could be more dead women.
Because one woman was definitely missing.
Mary.
He could only hope that Brad hadn’t thought of the same thing.
But Rowenna obviously had, because she looked at him then, as if reading his thoughts. Talk about intuition…
“I believe that Mary is still alive,” she said softly, fervently.
“She has to be,” Brad said passionately. “We need to be doing something. Going through the cornfields with a fine-tooth comb. Looking for that man—looking for Damien.”
“Son, we have every law enforcement officer in the area looking for both your wife and that guy Damien, or whatever his real name turns out to be. There’s nothing you can do right now.”
“There has to be,” Brad said. He stood up suddenly.
“Brad,” Rowenna said worriedly.
“I’m just going for a walk. I’m going to walk these streets until he shows up. Because he is going to show up.”
Jeremy stood up, too. “Brad, if you find him…”
Brad let out a long sigh. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to beat him up or anything. I’m a cop, remember?”
“Not here, you’re not,” Jeremy reminded him.
“But I know how to hold someone until he can be taken in for questioning by someone who is a cop here. Look, I’m not going to go nuts on the guy, I swear it. I’m just going to find my wife,” Brad said.
“We’ll walk with you,” Rowenna said, standing.
“I’ll get the check,” Jeremy said.
“All of you, take care,” Joe said warningly, and looked at Rowenna. She nodded slightly, and Jeremy knew some kind of a communication had just passed between the two of them. He felt his irritation rising again, and he knew he had to let it go.
If the two of them thought they had some sort of shared-intuition thing going, he wasn’t going to change it.
And he wasn’t going to allow himself to go off like a madman, either.
Not when he needed to stay in Joe Brentwood’s good graces.
He paid the check, and found Brad and Rowenna out by the dock, looking out at the night and at the boats listing gently in the water. It was a peaceful scene.
They started walking, passing the House of the Seven Gables, quiet now by night, only a few lights on. They moved on past closed shops, then reached the pedestrian mall and veered off to walk down toward the cemetery, locked behind its gates now for the night.
The wall around it wasn’t high, though. A determined three-year-old could scramble over it.
They looked in, and the graves were silent and eerie by night, the moonlight falling over them, shadows sweeping like living things around the centuries-old markers.
Jeremy paused, even as Rowenna and Brad moved on, their arms linked, their heads bent toward one another in conversation.
Jeremy knew that what puzzled him was the proximity of the cemetery to so many businesses where, on Halloween, even at the end of the day, there must have been hundreds—if not thousands—of people around at any given moment.
Even as dusk had fallen.
Especially as dusk had fallen and Halloween night had arrived.
How had someone spirited Mary out of the cemetery? How was it that no one had seen her being taken? Had she left willingly?
What was he missing?