don’t know. I think she was stabbed.”
“No, I meant how are you here?”
Cass knew what he meant, but there wasn’t an easy answer. She certainly didn’t want to elaborate with the woman, Ethel, she’d come to learn was her name, and her dog sitting next to her.
“My Muffy found her. My Muffy was very brave,” the woman interjected.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dougie replied politely. “Very brave. The PPD thanks you very much for calling this in and for waiting so that we can question you. If you would head over to the officer with the blond hair, he’s got some questions for you.” Dougie pointed to one of the uniformed cops, who looked to be just out of school. Surely someone so young wasn’t able to handle the responsibility of standing between evil and the rest of society? Someone with a job like that should at least be shaving, Cass decided. Then again, given her youthful appearance and the fact that Ethel called her honey as if she were soothing a child, she guessed she couldn’t throw stones.
“Just tell him everything you saw and heard. And don’t leave anything out,” Dougie said.
Ethel nodded slowly as if to suggest that she took her civic duty very seriously. “Of course I will.”
Cass stood and reached for the woman’s elbow, helping her to her feet even as Dougie reached for the woman’s other arm. On legs that probably weren’t as steady as they had been when she’d set out that morning, Ethel managed the few cement steps until she was back on the sidewalk. “You’ll catch the person who did this? That’s your job.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Satisfied, Ethel led Muffy to the blond kid in the blue uniform.
Once she was out of earshot, Cass asked, “Does the PPD thank me, too?”
“No,” he growled softly. “The PPD wants to know what the hell you’re doing here.”
How could she tell him? What would she tell him?
There was a monster in my mind.
To her it sounded a lot like having one under your bed or one in your closet. Like the kind of nightmare a child might have. Only she wasn’t a child and it, whatever it was, hadn’t been a nightmare. She was pretty sure of that now.
She was afraid that Dougie, despite all his good intentions to be open-minded where she was concerned, wouldn’t get it. He might believe she spoke with the dead, but this was asking too much of anyone.
“I think you must be grumpy because they got you out of bed.”
“Absolutely I’m grumpy but not because of a lack of sleep. It’s the lack of answers that’s annoying me right now. Talk to me, Cass.”
She took a breath and tried to explain. “I had a thing. A weird thing. I felt…”
Fear. A deep and gut-wrenching fear of the dead, something she’d never felt before. And a darkness. She’d felt that, too. Beyond the beast, there had been inky blackness rather than the hazy fog she’d become used to.
As if the horns hadn’t been sinister enough.
No, there was no point in telling Dougie this. Not when she couldn’t explain what it meant.
“I heard a dog barking,” she said. “I came out here, followed the sound and there she was.”
“That’s not even remotely convincing.”
Cass shrugged. “It’s the best I can do for now. Let’s just say…I had a gut feeling.”
“Right.” He snorted somewhat disgustedly. “Look, I’ll let it go for now until I can pull all the facts together. But we’re eventually going to have to talk about this. Whatever happened to this girl…”
“She had her tongue cut out, Dougie.”
He didn’t bother to issue the standard police line that nothing was certain and that until evidence was gathered and analyzed nothing would be accomplished by leaping to conclusions about the relationship between two seemingly unconnected victims. She knew better.
“I don’t have to tell you to keep this quiet.”
That made her laugh. “Who am I going to tell?” Her world consisted of about three people, one of whom was standing in front of her.
“I’m just saying we don’t need the press…”
“Dougie? It’s me. I’m not going to talk to the press. Ethel you might have to talk to.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Two women, a few blocks apart, both missing their tongues and no signs of sexual assault. This doesn’t smell right.”
“At least one thing is for sure,” she reminded him. “You know now that Malcolm McDonough didn’t kill his sister.”
“Great,” Dougie muttered unenthusiastically. “Mr. Connections goes free, but there’s a wacko loose in the city.”
“A psycho-city wacko,” Cass repeated, recalling his description from last night.
Dougie looked back to the stairwell where they were finally bringing the body up. That they had tried to be careful with her was obvious, but the body bag was still covered in the woman’s blood.
“Definitely.”
Chapter 5
Cass walked through her front door and instantly started shivering. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d been, almost numb from it, until the warmth had started to creep back into her skin. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking, running out of the house barely dressed late in October.
Actually, that was the point. She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been reacting and she found the idea unsettling.
To combat the cold, she found a sweater in her bedroom and then went back to the kitchen to make some soothing lemon tea. Five minutes, that’s all she wanted. Five minutes to not have to think about anything.
But that wasn’t going to happen. The image of the woman’s body being carted off haunted her. Then, as people came outside ready to start their day, a crowd had gathered around the scene, as tends to happen when there is trouble. Neighbors spoke about the woman, talked about suspicious characters that she called customers. Apparently there was no boyfriend in the picture, no obvious enemy. Nobody that anyone could instantly finger as a murderer, anyway.
After an hour of Cass sticking to her story about simply hearing the dog, Dougie had relented and let her go. It wasn’t as if telling him about the monster was going to get him any closer to the person who did this. Trace evidence, detective work, finding out whatever link there was between Lauren and the palm reader—that would be helpful to him.
Ghostly monsters in her head…not so much.
Cass dipped her tea bag and sighed. She was lying to herself and she wasn’t very good at it. The real reason she hadn’t told Dougie about it was because she didn’t
