Whisper of Evil

Whisper of Evil by Kay Hooper Page A

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Authors: Kay Hooper
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers
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electrical impressions behind, energy that's absorbed by the place where the events occur, and I have the knack of sensing and interpreting that electrical energy."
    Max spoke carefully. "Isn't sensing electrical energy a long way from envisioning an image of a dead man?"
    "Is it? The mind interprets the information it's given and translates that into some form we recognize and understand. What happened in this room had a form, a face, a voice—and all that survived as energy. As a memory. Just the way you recall a memory of your own, I can recall the memory of a place. Sometimes quite vividly, and sometimes only bits and pieces, images, feelings, scattered and unclear."
    "Okay. Assuming I can accept all that, explain to me why that particular scene—your father walking through a kitchen he must have walked through a million times—is what this room retained. Why that? Out of everything that must have happened here in decades, all the emotional scenes and crises so common in every kitchen everywhere, why was that very normal scene important enough to retain?"
    "Because it wasn't normal. What my father was feeling when he walked through this kitchen then was… incredibly intense. He was emotionally devastated."
    Max frowned. "You felt that?"
    "Sensed it—some of it, at least. It was difficult to get a fix on his emotions, simply because he was overwhelmed by them himself. But I know he was distraught, in shock, that he'd just discovered something he could hardly believe was true."
    "Something she should have told him, isn't that what you heard him say?"
    "Yes. Given the calendar I saw, that must have been when he found out whatever it was that made him disinherit Hailey. He died in late May, and he'd changed his will just a few weeks before that, not long after she left."
    Still frowning, Max said, "So why do you believe he was murdered? No one suspected it was anything other than a heart attack."
    "Yes, but there was no one here to suspect, no one to question. All the rest of the family was gone, not on the scene to wonder. He had no close friends. It looked like a heart attack; he was the right age for one and had been warned by his doctor that his habits and temperament put him into the high-risk category. And with no other unexplained deaths before then to put anyone on guard…"
    "I understand why no one here would have suspected a murder, but how can you
     
    be so sure he was killed? Did he think he was going to be, fearing for his life in that scene you envisioned?"
    For the first time, realizing, Nell felt a chill. "No, he had no idea," she said slowly. "No fear or worry. His mind was entirely focused on the shock he'd had, but he wasn't in the least afraid or concerned for himself. It was… I must have picked up on something else. Sensed something else."
    "Like maybe the killer?"
    She drew a breath. "Like maybe the killer."
    Nate McCJurry was scared.
    He hadn't been at first. Hell, he'd barely paid attention when Peter Lynch had died, and as for Luke Ferrier, well, Nate had always expected something bad to happen to him.
    But when Randal Patterson's death had exposed his S&M leanings, Nate had started to get nervous. Because he had something in common with Randal. And, he was beginning to think, with the others as well.
    Not that Nate had any big secret, not like those other guys. He hadn't broken the law, and he didn't have any whips or chains in his basement or skeletons in his closet. But sometimes a man had things he wanted to keep to himself; that was perfectly natural. Perfectly normal.
    Unless there was a madman running around punishing men for their sins, that is.
    He was nervous enough to install a security system in his house, paying double to have it done quickly when, the installation guy had told him, the company was backed up on work because so many orders had come in.
    So he wasn't the only nervous man in Silence.
    And at least he could claim it was just good business to protect oneself. After

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