Read Face of Fear for Free Online

strong, healthy sexual drives, but Graham had put a new and sharper edge on her desire.
    She carried the glasses of Remy Martin into the den. She sat beside him on the sofa.
    After a moment of silence, still staring at the fire, he said, “Why the interrogation? What was he after?”
    “Prine?”
    “Who else?”
    “You’ve seen his show often enough. You know what he’s like.”
    “But he usually has a reason for his attacks. And he’s always got proof of what he says.”
    “Well, at least you shut him up with your visions of the tenth murder.”
    “They were real,” he said.
    “I know they were.”
    “It was so vivid... as if I were right there.”
    “Was it bad? Bloody?”
    “One of the worst. I saw him ... ram the knife into her throat and then twist it.” He quickly sipped his brandy.
    She leaned against him, kissed him on the cheek.
    “I can’t figure this Butcher,” he said worriedly. “I’ve never had so much trouble getting an image of a killer.”
    “You sensed his name.”
    “Maybe. Dwight.... I’m not entirely sure.”
    “You’ve given the police a fairly good description of him.”
    “But I can’t pick up much more about him,” he said. “When the visions come and I try to force an image of this man, this Butcher, to the center of them, all I get are waves of ... evil. Not illness, not an impression of a sick mind. Just overwhelming evil. I don’t know how to explain this—but the Butcher isn’t a lunatic. At least not in the classical sense. He doesn’t kill in a maniacal frenzy.”
    “He’s chopped up nine innocent women,” Connie said. “Ten if you count the one they haven’t found yet. He cuts off their ears and fingers sometimes. Sometimes he disembowels them. And you say he isn’t crazy?”
    “He’s not a lunatic, not by any definition we have of the word. I’d stake my life on it.”
    “Maybe you don’t sense mental illness because he doesn’t know he’s sick. Amnesia—”
    “No. No amnesia. No schizophrenia. He’s very aware of his murders. He’s no Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’ll bet he’d pass any psychiatric examination you’d care to give him, and with flying colors. This isn’t easy to explain. But I have the feeling that if he is a lunatic, he’s a whole new breed. No one’s ever encountered anything like him before. I think—dammit, I know— he’s not even angry or particularly excited when he kills these women. He’s just—methodical.”
    “You’re giving me the shivers.”
    “You? I feel as if I’ve been inside his head. I’ve got a chronic case of shivers.”
    A coal popped in the fireplace.
    She took hold of his free hand. “Let’s not talk about Prine or the killings.”
    “After tonight, how can I not talk about them?”
    “You looked wonderful on television,” she said, working him away from the subject.
    “Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Sweating, pale, shaking—”
    “Not during the visions. Before them. You’re a natural for television. Even for movies. Leading-man type.”
    Graham Harris was handsome. Thick reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes, heavily crinkled at the corners. Leathery skin with sharply carved lines from all the years he had spent in an outdoor life. Five-ten; not tall, but lean and hard. He was thirty-eight, yet he still had a trace of boyish vulnerability about him.
    “Leading-man type?” he said. He smiled at her. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll give up the publishing business and all this messy psychic stuff. I’ll go into the movies.”
    “The next Robert Redford.”
    “Robert Redford? I was thinking maybe the next Boris Karloff.”
    “Redford,” Connie insisted.
    “Come to think of it, Karloff was a rather elegant-looking man out of makeup. Perhaps I’ll try for being the next Wallace Beery.”
    “If you’re Wallace Beery, then I’m Marie Dressler.”
    “Hi, Marie.”
    “Do you really have an inferiority complex, or do you cultivate it as part of your charm?”
    He grinned, then sipped the brandy.