Why?
If only she’d been able to talk to Oliver, if only she hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave her mother’s house. What would it have taken to give her brother five minutes of her time? Guilt was still eating at her when she spied two of her brothers huddled together beneath the branches of a large sequoia tree planted near the parking lot.
“Give me a second,” she said to Travis and crossed a patch of grass and shrubs to get close to them. Robert, though not on duty, and Shea, still relieved of his, had shown up separately and had answered questions thrown at them by the police, the same questions that had been asked of Shannon.
Did they know anyone who would want to do this to Oliver?
When was the last time they’d seen him, talked with him?
Did they know anything about his personal life? Lovers? Friends? Enemies?
Had anyone been angry with him?
What had been his regular routine?
Had he strayed from it?
How did they know to come here? Or, in Shannon and Travis’s case: How did they find the body? Why did Shannon want to talk t
o her brother at one in the morning? Why wouldn’t it wait?
White-faced, shaking their heads, lips thin and pressed together in something between rage and despair, her two brothers were still reeling at the loss of Oliver.
“Both twins,” Robert said, his eyes downturned. “Gone. And Mary Beth, poor Mary Beth.”
“It looks like the same perp,” Shea confided, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. Robert nodded, then hit Shea’s arm with the back of his hand. “Can I bum one of those?”
“Sure.” Shea’s dark gaze slid from Shannon to focus on the bell tower, but Shannon figured, like her, his thoughts were a million miles away. He handed Robert a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights. Robert, hands trembling slightly, shook out a filter tip and lit up.
“Of course it’s the same psycho,” Shannon said. That was the one thing she was certain of. The only thing. “There couldn’t be two maniacs running around, trying to kill off members of our family, making weird burned marks as some kind of sick calling card.”
“You think that’s what he’s trying to do?” Robert asked.
“Don’t you?”
“Then why Mary Beth? And why…Why not…?” He let his question drift away.
But she caught his drift. “Why not kill me the night he had a chance?”
“Yeah.”
Good question, Shannon thought, not for the first time. Why had she been attacked and spared?
A mistake?
She didn’t think so. Killing her would have been easy that night. All the murderer would have had to do was turn the sharp tines of the pitchfork on her rather than beat her with the handle.
A warning, then?
No, this guy struck fast and hard. The grisly murders of Mary Beth and now Oliver had been meticulously planned.
A glimpse of the future?
She inwardly shrank. The killer wanted her to know fear. Dark, soul-clawing terror. And he’d managed that.
And tonight…Witnessing Oliver’s death scene had been mind-shattering. Seeing her brother swinging softly from a crossbeam—blood staining his palms, a short wall of flames surrounding him as he’d been suspended overhead—had burned into her brain. She’d screamed, her stomach had wrenched, her knees had given out, and it had been all she could do not to throw up.
After cutting Oliver down, Travis managed to drag the would-be priest’s body out of the circle of flames, but no amount of resuscitation attempts had worked. Oliver was dead. Grotesquely murdered. The EMTs hadn’t been able to revive him and the police had discovered, after the flames were extinguished, that the ring of fire surrounding his swinging corpse hadn’t been a ring at all, but a star missing several points. Numbers, marked as they had been on the backpack and mirror, had been drawn in kerosene and probably burned first, before the final shape had been lit around his body. The shape had been similar to the other drawings except in this case one more spoke, the upper right-hand point as you looked at the star, was missing. In its stead had been a number four: