Read Stealing Shadows for Free Online

before he kills again."

    Finally her gaze lifted to meet his, and there was something lurking in the depths of her eyes that made him flinch. Something small and hurting.

    "All right," Cassie said quietly. "I'll get my jacket."

    "So?" The sheriff wasn't openly hostile, but close. "Let's have it."

    They were in Mart's office, seated side by side in the visitors' chairs in front of the old slate-top desk that had been his father's, and the sheriff was already in a nasty mood because his people had found absolutely nothing useful at the crime scene.

    And he didn't believe in psychic bullshit, he justdidn't.

    "I can't tell you much more than I already have," Cassie said. "The killer is male – "

    "How can you be so sure of that?" Ben asked. "You said identity isn't a conscious thing. Is gender?"

    "Sometimes. But in this case…" She avoided his gaze, fixing hers on the hands clasped in her lap. "When he was watching her… planning what he would do to her… he was… aware of his erection."

    It was the sheriff who reddened slightly and shifted in his chair, but his voice was sharp when he said, "This wasn't a sexual attack."

    "They're always sexual attacks."

    "This woman was not touched sexually," he insisted. "Preliminary reports say no semen was found anywhere on or near the body. For Christ's sake, she still had her panties on."

    "That doesn't matter. He was in a state of sexual excitement when he stalked her, and he achieved release when he killed her."

    "My God, you were in his mind during all that?" Ben said, startled.

    "Yes. When he first went after her and then again, after he'd tied her up and was… was ready to hurt her. That time I was with him for a few minutes. It didn't take long, and just as he killed her I… managed to breakaway."

    Ben wondered what it must be like to observe – maybe even experience intimately – the orgasm of an insane killer, and thought it was undoubtedly one memory Cassie would happily part with. For the first time, he began to truly understand what lay behind her haunted eyes.

    Monsters indeed.

    The sheriff had something else on his mind. "So he tied her up, did he?"

    "Not with ropes," Cassie said. "A belt, I think. For her wrists. He didn't tie her ankles. He – he made her sit with her legs apart."

    "Why? "Ben asked.

    "It was… part of the pose somehow. Part of what he needed to see. He was taunting her. He kept… he kept putting the knife between her legs and threatening to put it inside her. He wanted her to be afraid. She was. She was terrified."

    "You know this because you saw it," Matt said.

    "Yes."

    "Through his eyes."

    "Yes, Sheriff."

    The sheriff was looking at her squarely, his gaze narrowed in suspicion. "I'm having a hard time understanding this, Miss Neill. You claim not to know the murderer. So how is it you're able to see what he does? Know what he was feeling? Do you alwayspick up the thoughts and plans of strangers? Like a bad filling picks up stray radio signals?"

    She shook her head and explained what she had explained many times before. "Maybe I touched something he touched. That's most likely."

    "Touched something like what?"

    "Like… a door he'd just passed through. Something on the shelf of a store. A theater seat he'd been in the night before. Or I might have bumped against him in the grocery store. Our eyes might have met for a moment on the streets. But – "

    Ben interrupted. "Eyes meeting? Something so… impersonal?"

    Cassie's head turned slightly toward him, but her gaze remained on her hands. "It's… a question of connecting. I've never been able to – to read anyone without some kind of connection. It's almost always a physical touch, either of the person or something the person came into contact with recently. An object. A bit of clothing."

    "But eyes meeting?" Ben repeated. "Two strangers on opposite street corners – it could be as brief and simple as that?"

    "Ben, do you mind?" the sheriff said.

    "It's an