“Keep talking, Genevieve.”
“It was as if I were Lori Star. It was Sunday night. The night she disappeared. Oh, God, Adam, I might have been having that nightmare right when…right when she was actually being killed.” She gasped. “I saw her on the news, and that’s what she was saying. That it was like she was the driver of the car on the FDR. She felt anger and…intent. Malice.” She stopped speaking. Her skin was crawling, and she wanted to go back, to pretend that she hadn’t said what she had, that the horror would just go away.
“That’s good,” Adam said gently.
“Good?” she protested, horrified.
He smiled sadly. “You may be able to tap into the victim.”
“Tap into the victim?” she repeated.
He nodded. “Anything else?”
“What the hell else do you want?” she demanded.
“Anything else?” he repeated firmly.
“No.” She realized that she was lying, that she didn’t want to go any further, but she knew she had to. She groaned. “Yes.”
“Talk to me, please,” he said.
She inhaled. “Earlier…when I was leaving tonight, I kept feeling as if there were someone in the garage…someone in the shadows. Or more…as if the shadows themselves were someone. Does that make any sense?” she asked.
“Oddly enough, in a way it does,” he told her, then rose. “Well, I’m going to get some sleep.”
“What?”
“I’m not exactly a spring chicken, you know. I need to get some sleep,” he said. “And your mother has been kind enough to have a room made up for me here.”
“Just like that?” she demanded. “You drop these…bombshells on me, and then you go to sleep?”
“Tomorrow will be a long day.”
“Oh, so you can see that it will be a long day?” She wondered why she sounded so resentful. She was the one who had called him, after all.
She was frightened, that was why.
“Adam…”
“Joe will need help tomorrow,” he said, and left the room.
Admittedly, he was angry.
What the hell had he done to cause Genevieve to call Adam Harrison? About him.
He’d never told a soul about speaking to a dead man on the highway—except for the med tech who had assured him that the man was dead, and he wouldn’t have said a thing then, either, if he’d known. He sure as hell had never told anyone about the corpse on the Gurney at the morgue.
When he left O’Malley’s, he didn’t head for his car. He had too much on his mind to go home right away, so he walked. He loved walking, and New York was the city for it. And as he walked, he tried to be rational.
Okay, rationally, he hated the fact that Genevieve had called Adam. Regarding him. There were far more serious matters at hand—tonight’s attempt on Sam’s life, for one thing. The police had suggested that the news not be shared with the news media or anyone else, except for on a need-to-know basis. There was no escaping the fact that there was a serial killer out there, one with either a real or feigned Poe fetish, and holding some information back would help them separate the real killer from the pretenders who were bound to come forward.
The killer was real and needed his concentration. So think about that, he told himself. He’d tried to eliminate at least some members of the New York Poe Society board by examining their alibis for the afternoon and evening when Thorne had been killed. Now the process of elimination would be easier, because he could find out where each of them had been this evening around seven, the night of the car crash and the night Lori went missing, then cross reference everything and eliminate more of them from his suspect pool.
They’d all been at O’Malley’s tonight, but where they had they been beforehand?
He would find out, he thought grimly. Of course, that didn’t mean he would have the killer in his sights. It was still possible that the killer was someone else, and there were millions of people out there in New York to choose from.
But not a million people that Thorne Bigelow would trust.
Joe suddenly realized that his steps had led him back to Hastings House.
Once again, it was closed, since it was only open at night for special functions, as it had been the night Matt was killed at the gala held to celebrate the house’s rebirth as a museum. That night Matt had died and Leslie had touched the other side, but she had returned….
For a year.
Enough time in which to capture his…what? His heart? Or his soul?
As he stood there on the sidewalk, he noticed that the gate was ajar. “No,” he said aloud.
But he couldn’t stop himself. The compulsion was too great. He told himself it was his own determination to prove that nothing was going on that science couldn’t explain, but…