But it came again. A rustling. Ghosts—in her experience—didn’t rustle brush and leaves the way that the living did. Someone flesh and blood was out there—between her and her house.
Had she even shut the door? If she went back, was she in just as much danger?
It came again. The sound. Someone was moving closer to her.
The rustle again, and then...
The evening sunlight trickled weakly through the trees. It created shadows that moved and writhed as the soft breeze of near-dusk shifted branches and leaves.
But the dark form was real.
A man was standing there, clutching something tightly in his hand.
A knife?
Her heart seemed to stop.
And then slide back into action.
What to do? She hadn’t even brought out her hockey stick!
Slip back into the trees? Head for the road?
Run for your life! she warned herself.
She suddenly heard the sound of a car out on the road, slowing....
It was Rocky, coming to pick her up.
But would he arrive in time?
All she had to do was scream and he would find her. Save her.
Too late!
He moved. The figure lurking in the green shadows of the trees moved closer.
Coming toward her.
A scream rose in her throat.
8
The beautifully wrought silver pentagrams had to be a crucial clue, Rocky thought.
But it hardly took a brilliant mind to know that. The trick was in figuring out what they meant. Were they a straightforward indication that witchcraft was involved, or were they a cold-blooded attempt to cast suspicion on the innocent Wiccan community?
Jenna had looked at him with narrowed eyes when he’d asked her to cross-reference purchases of similar pentagrams with the remaining names on the suspect shortlist, then amended it to the entire list of dark-SUV owners, “Just in case.”
“Do you know how hard it was to discover which of the people on that list had purchased athames?” she’d asked him. “First you have to do the credit search and get their card numbers. Then you have to search for places where athames are sold and break down their sales records item by item. And now you want pentagrams,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “Half the people who come to Salem buy a pentagram.”
“But we’re only looking for people who are already on our radar,” Rocky told her. “Not every tourist who’s come through in the past thirteen years.”
Sam laughed and told Jenna, “Hey, I’ll help.” He looked at Rocky. “I understand what you’re doing, but remember that some of the facts and figures we get may not mean anything.”
Rocky nodded. He liked Sam, just as he really liked every one of the agents in Jackson Crow’s Krewes. He liked the way they worked. They all had one another on speed dial and felt comfortable calling any time of day or night if a clue appeared, and when they were on an active case they got together at least once every twenty-four hours to discuss where they were so far and where to go next.
“In the end,” Sam said, “sometimes it all comes down to instinct. And we’re already running these searches based on your instinct, aren’t we?”
They were. But they weren’t relying just on instinct. They’d talked things through, and tomorrow Sam, Jenna and Angela were going back to the two recent crime scenes, while he and Jane revisited the place where Melissa had been killed, though that killing had been thirteen years ago and the odds of finding anything helpful were remote.
“But about tonight...why don’t you fill us in on your friends?” Sam had asked him, before he and Jenna lost themselves in the data. “Tell us what to expect.” Because of his legal career, he tended to approach things in a linear and straightforward way.
Now, as he drove toward Devin’s house, Rocky reflected on the plans for tomorrow. They would look for physical evidence. But more than that, they would search for clues that might not be physical.
Does it come down to me to solve this? he wondered. Was that really why he was back, all these years later?
It occurred to him that he should probably be grateful that he was still in California working a set of drug-related murders when Carly Henderson was killed. If he hadn’t been, he might be his own prime suspect.
Did this case really go back that far? Did it have something to do with events from thirteen years ago?
But how and why? It was unusual for a potential serial killer to just stop at one murder and not pick back up until years later.
Unless Melissa Wilson had been a separate case and whoever was killing now was simply taking his or her guidelines from the details of her murder to throw them off the track.
Not likely, he told himself. There were just too many unreleased details that had been exactly the same in all three murders. So if they were dealing with a copycat...
Then it was someone who had seen Melissa Wilson dead.