Dream Man

Trammell was watching Dane’s face rather than looking at Marlie. “You have it bad yourself, partner,” he said softly.

“Yeah,” Dane murmured. “I do.” So bad he was never going to recover.

“I thought it was just a case of the hots, but it’s more than that.”

“Afraid so.”

“Wedding bells for you?”

“Maybe.” He smiled crookedly. “I’m still not her favorite person, so I’ll have to work on that. And we have a killer to catch.”

He continued on into the kitchen, where he went through the cabinet drawers in search of a screwdriver. All kitchens, in his experience, contained a junk drawer, and that was the most likely place to find a screwdriver since he couldn’t imagine Marlie having an actual toolbox. Her junk drawer, bless her neat little heart, was more organized than his flatware, and lying there in its own clear plastic holder was a set of screwdrivers. He could picture her carefully selecting the appropriate tool, using it, then sliding it back into its place in the holder, never getting them out of the order they’d been in when she’d bought them. He took the entire pack, and the small hammer lying there.

She woke as he used the hammer to tap the pin out of the second hinge, sitting up on the sofa and pushing the heavy curtain of her hair out of her face. Her eyes were heavylidded, her expression still showing the remoteness of mingled fatigue and shock. Dane gave her an assessing glance and decided to let her have a moment to herself. She sat quietly, watching with only mild interest as they removed the damaged door and replaced it with the new one.

It wasn’t until they were finished that she said bemusedly, “Why did you change my door?”

“The other one was damaged,” Dane explained briefly as he gathered up the tools.

“Damaged?” She frowned. “How?”

“I kicked it in last night.”

She sat very still, slowly reconstructing the memories, putting details into place. “After I called you?”

“Yes.”

There was another pause. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I didn’t intend to worry you.”

“Worry” wasn’t quite how Dane would have described it. He had been in a gut-twisting panic.

“Do you remember my partner, Alex Trammell?”

“Yes. Hello, Detective. Thank you for helping replace my door.”

“My pleasure.” Trammell’s voice was more gentle than usual. It was obvious that Marlie was still struggling to get things together.

“Have you heard anything yet?” she asked.

He and Trammell exchanged a quick look. “No,” he finally said.

A faraway look drifted into her eyes. “She’s just lying there. Her family doesn’t know, her friends don’t know. They’re going about their routine, happy and oblivious, and she’s lying there waiting to be found. Why doesn’t someone call or go by, just to check on her?”

Dane felt uncomfortable, and Trammell did, too, restlessly shifting position. They were more objective about bodies, especially bodies that might not even exist. They saw so many of them that they were hardened, for the most part thinking of the bodies as victims but not as individuals. The possibility of another murder victim had them both worried, because of the implication of a serial killer on the loose in Orlando. For Marlie, however, it was personal. She didn’t have that inner wall to protect her.

“There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “Unless you can give us a name or a location, we have nothing to go on, nowhere to look. If it happened, someone will eventually find her. All we can do is wait.”

Her smile was bitter, and not really a smile. “It happened. It’s never not happened.”

He sat down beside her. Trammell took a chair. “Can you think of any details, something you didn’t tell me last night? Not about the killing, but about the location. Could you see anything that might give us a clue? Is it a house or an apartment?”

“A house,” she said instantly.

“A nice-looking house, or a slum?”

“Very neat, good furnishings. One of those larger-screen televisions, on a pedestal.” She frowned, rubbing her forehead as if she had a headache. Dane waited. “Cypress.”

“Cypress? There’s a cypress tree out front, a park with cypress trees, what?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t really see it. He just thought it.”

“That’s a big help,” Dane muttered.

“What did you expect?” she snapped. “That he’d think, ’Now I’m breaking into this house at so-and-so number on so-and-so street, where I’m going to rape and kill Jane Doe?’ Nobody thinks like that, everything’s more automatic and subconscious. And I’m not telepathic anyway.”

“Then how did you pick up on a cypress tree?”

“I don’t know. It was just an impression. This guy is an unbelievably strong broadcaster,” she said, trying to explain. “He’s like a superpowerful radio station, overriding all the other signals.”

“Can you pick him up now?” Trammell interjected, his eyes bright with interest.

“I can’t pick up anything now. I’m too tired. And he probably isn’t broadcasting.”

“Explain,” Dane said briefly.

She glanced at him, then away. His attention was focused on her so intently that she almost couldn’t bear it, because the lure of it was so strong and she was afraid to give in.

“His mental intensity builds as he gets closer and closer to the kill. Probably he can’t maintain that level of rage for very long; he couldn’t function at anything approaching normality if he did. So the only time his mental energy is strong enough for me to read is right before and during the kill, when he’s at his peak. I lose him shortly after that; I don’t even know how he leaves the scene.”