Dream Man Read online

  “Thanks.” Trammell cautiously tasted it, eyeing Dane over the rim. “It was a long night, but not a bad one. Well? Did you find out anything interesting yesterday?”

  “Quite a bit. For one thing, let’s say I’m not as skeptical as I was before.”

  Trammell rolled his eyes. “What about Marlie? What’s she been doing for six years?”

  “Trying to recover,” Dane said briefly. “Arno Gleen beat her, tried to rape her, and when he couldn’t, he killed the kid in front of her. According to Dr. Ewell, the trauma of it severely damaged, maybe even destroyed, her paranormal abilities. Evidently this vision about the Vinick murder is the first psychic tickle she’s had since then.”

  “So the psychic stuff is coming back to her?”

  Dane shrugged. “Who knows. Nothing else has happened.” Thank God. “I talked to her last night, asked a few more questions about what she saw in the vision, and she remembered a couple of details.”

  “Like what?”

  “The guy is about six feet tall, he’s in very good shape, and he isn’t from the South.”

  Trammell snorted. “That really narrows it down for us.”

  “It beats what we had before.”

  “Agreed. Anything beats nothing. That’s assuming we accept a psychic’s vision for leads, because a court sure as hell won’t accept her as evidence.”

  “What choice do we have? There is nothing else. This guy didn’t leave a clue. I’ll take any lead I can get, and worry about proof when we find him.”

  “Actually,” Trammell said slowly, “we’ve already talked to someone who fits that description.”

  “Yeah, I know. Ansel Vinick. He’s as strong as a bull, and even though he’s lived in Florida for over twenty years, he still has a midwestern accent.” He hadn’t been surprised; very few people who weren’t raised in the South ever managed to get the accent right. The movie and television industries never had. “But my gut says he didn’t do it.”

  “He had opportunity.”

  “But no motive. No boyfriend, no insurance. Nothing.”

  “Maybe an argument that got out of hand?”

  “The medical examiner didn’t find any bruises on her that would indicate blows. She wasn’t just killed, she was slaughtered.”

  “The textbooks say that when there are that many stab wounds, the killer was really pissed at the victim. And that is he spends a lot of time doing it, he probably lives in the neighborhood. You know the numbers as well as I do: Eighty percent of the time, when a woman’s killed, it’s her husband or boyfriend who does her in. And a lot of the time, the killer is the one who calls the police when he ’discovers’ the body. Vinick fits into all of the categories.”

  “Except for the first one. If they were arguing, no one knows anything about it. The neighbors didn’t hear anything, they always seemed to get along fine, and Vinick didn’t act unusual in any way at work that night. And she was raped, but there wasn’t any semen. Marlie says the perp wore a rubber; why would Vinick bother? She was his wife, for Pete’s sake. Finding his semen in her wouldn’t be incriminating. What really bothers me,” he said, thinking hard, “is her fingers. Why chop off her fingers? We haven’t found them. There wasn’t any reason to cut off her fingers, unless—”

  “—she scratched him,” Trammell finished, dark eyes shining intently. “She scratched him, and he knew about DNA profiling. He cut off her fingers so forensics couldn’t get a skin sample from under her nails.”

  “Vinick was wearing a short-sleeved shirt that morning,” Dane recalled. “Do you remember any scratches?”

  “No. It’s possible he could have had some on his chest or upper arms, but the hands and lower arms are the most likely location.”

  “Don’t forget the cut screen in the bedroom. If Vinick had done it himself, to make it look like a forced entry, wouldn’t he have made it more obvious? He didn’t strike me as a subtle type of guy, anyway. And everything that Marlie told us dovetailed with what we found at the scene. It wasn’t Vinick.”

  “Wait a minute,” Trammell said. “Marlie didn’t mention the fingers, did she?”

  Dane thought about it, then shook his head. “No, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of detail anyone would forget.” The omission troubled him, and he made a mental note to ask her about it that night.

  “All the same, I’d feel better if we talked to Vinick again,” Trammell insisted.

  Dane shrugged. “It’s all right with me, I just feel like it’s wasted time.”

  Trammell tried several times that day to get in touch with Mr. Vinick, between the hundred other things they had to do, but there was no answer. He called the trucking company where Mr. Vinick worked, and was told that he had been off all week, and all things considered, they really didn’t expect him to return to work for at least another week.

  “The funeral was yesterday,” Dane said. “Maybe he’s staying with friends. Hell, of course he isn’t staying in the house. Forensics is finished with the scene, but would you want to sleep there?”

  Trammell grimaced. “Guess not. But how are we going to get in touch with him?”

  “Ask one of the neighbors. They’ll know.”

  It was late afternoon when they pulled up in front of the Vinick house. It had a closed, unoccupied look. The yellow crime scene tape had been removed, but the house still looked set apart, made forever different from its neighbors by the violence that had happened within. A car was parked in the driveway, and Dane recognized it as the one that had been sitting there last Saturday morning. “He’s here.”

  They knocked on the front door. There was no answer, no sound of movement inside the house. Trammell went around to the back door, with the same results. All of the curtains were pulled, so they couldn’t see in any of the windows.

  Both doors were locked. They banged again, identifying themselves. Nothing.

  Dane walked next door. A woman came out on the porch at his knock.

  “I’m Detective Hollister,” he said, flipping his ID wallet open. “Have you seen Mr. Vinick? His car is here, but we can’t get anyone to the door.”

  She frowned, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “No, I haven’t seen him since the funeral. I went to it; just about everyone on the street did. She was such a nice lady. I don’t know when he parked his car in the driveway. It wasn’t there late yesterday afternoon, but was when I got up this morning.”

  “You haven’t seen anyone over there at all?”

  “No. Of course, I haven’t been here all day, but no one has been there that I’ve seen.”

  “Thanks.” Dane nodded in good-bye and walked back to the Vinick house. “I don’t like it,” he said, after telling Trammell what the neighbor had said. “How do you feel about forced entry?”

  “I think we’d better,” Trammell said soberly. “If we’re wrong, we’ll grovel and apologize and pay for the damages.”

  They went around back. The top half of the kitchen door was small, diamond-shaped panes of glass. Dane pulled out the Beretta and used the butt to knock out the corner pane closest to the doorknob. He was always surprised at how hard it was to actually break out a window. Shattered glass tinkled on the tile floor inside. Carefully wrapping his hand in a handkerchief, he reached inside and unlocked the door.

  The house was hot, and foul with the odor of death that had been closed up inside it. The silence was almost physical.

  Dane unwrapped the handkerchief from his hand and held it over his nose. “Shit,” he muttered, then raised his voice. “Mr. Vinick? Detectives Hollister and Trammell.”

  Nothing.

  The smell seeped through the cloth. It wasn’t the cloying, sickeningly sweet odor of decayed flesh, but a pungent smell of human waste underlaid with the metallic scent of blood, both old and new. Dane’s stomach knotted. He cursed again, quietly, and stepped inside.

  The living room was empty; he had expected it to be. The walls were still splattered with Mrs. Vinick’s blood, the stains turned