Found You by Mary Sangiovanni Page B

her nightgown splattered with blood. Sticky puddles of blood—not quite foot-or handprints, but vaguely and eerily reminiscent of them—formed a haphazard halo around her. The door against which her bloody cheek was pressed was intact; smeared in blood on the large pane of glass above her head were two words.
    “My face.” It wasn’t exactly the same kind of message as the others, but…
    But wait. Something …
    Steve frowned, spreading the photos of Carrington, Henshaw, Kohlar, and Peters. The photo of Peters’ bedroom showed a mirror in the corner of the picture, just a sliver of it, reflecting the bed and a black fedora on it. Steve scanned the report again, but there was no mention of a hat on the bed or anywhere else in the room. He squinted at the picture of Carrington’s back yard. Again, reflected in the glass of the sliding glass door, a blackish shape very much like a hat sat on the grass a few feet away from the body. And again, Steve searched the report for a mention of it in the scene and found nothing.
    He let out a long, slow breath, and with the emptying of his lungs, there rushed in a horrible realization, a connection staggering in its implication.
    The thing in the jail cell downstairs, that freakish faceless figure that had threatened him and stolen his gun, had worn a hat. A black fedora. Like in the pictures.
    He closed the files slowly and looked up and around the office with a kind of new awareness and the half-formed idea that maybe he’d get caught.
    Caught? Doing what, going over old cold cases? What’s wrong with that? Nothing. Nothing at all .
    But it felt wrong. It felt to Steve like the information contained in those files was a secret meant only for the cops from Lakehaven, the cops born and bred there.
    Which was stupid. He was a part of the police force at Lakehaven. If he discovered something that might break a case, something like, say, a black fedora, then wasn’t it his obligation to investigate?
    And what are you going to tell them ? the little voice in his head asked accusingly. Gonna tell them that the boogeyman in the black hat made all your bad guys disappear from their jail cells, just so he could tease you about being gay? Gonna take that right to the chief, are you? How about telling him that after it threatened to see you dead, it just disappeared from a secure jail cell itself ?
    Steve slid the files under a stack of papers on his desk, feeling a little sick. Just beneath the surface of fully formulated thoughts, he was only vaguely aware that it couldn’t be work-stress hallucination if there really was a connection to these other cases. Not unless they all suffered from the same mental twitch.
    It obviously hadn’t worked out well for them. But Steve didn’t think too hard about what that meant for him.
    Shirley poked her head into the station room then and said, “Steve, hon? Someone here wants to report something. Intruder. I’m going to send her back to you. Cool?”
    “Sure.”
    A minute or two after that, a woman came through the doors, clutching a purse. She had a smooth, soft face with large eyes and a pretty bow of a mouth, and she hovered just to the left of being a bit more than full-figured. Steve supposed she struck him so because of the way she moved—a practiced, almost stiff kind of gait that didn’t bend too far in either direction, that was carefully reigned in to avoid jiggle. It reminded him so much of a girl he’d known in college, one who’d explained why she sat a certain way, or posed a certain way for pictures, how the tilt of a head could minimize the look of multiple chins and a turn of the hips deemphasize their wideness. That discomfort, that lack of freedom of movement, this woman possessed in every step.
    Carefully, she sat down on the chair on the other side of Steve’s desk.
    “Hello, ma’am. My name is Detective Corimar. What can I do for you this morning?”
    Her eyes swept the room before she settled on his face.