about what happened to Tina sooner than you think. And then maybe he can find some peace.”
A flutter of apprehension tightened Daniel’s gut. She was right. If Jesse Phillips had killed Melissa and Alice and the other women who’d died here in Birmingham, he could be the man Daniel had spent the last few years of his life trying to find. The long search for justice-for redemption-could be over.
Then what?
He tabled the unnerving question and retrieved the warm plates of food. He grabbed a couple of forks from the drawer by the sink and carried everything to the table, setting the shrimp dish in front of Rose. “Eat.”
She picked up the fork and pushed the shrimp around the plate. “Daniel, if you don’t believe I’m seeing death veils, what’s the alternative? I’ve been right about four murders-how do you explain that?”
He put down the fork he’d just picked up and looked across the table at her. “How long have you seen veils?”
Her brow wrinkled. “I think I was five or six when I saw the first true-love veil.” Her lips curved. “On my parents. I didn’t know what it was then, of course. I just remember seeing it made me feel safe.”
“That early,” he murmured, surprised. He’d figured she’d been older, maybe entering her teens. Five years old was pretty early to have that sort of facility for understanding human behavioral cues.
Then again, a child with parents who loved each other might know, instinctively, that their being together was something right and special. He’d known it about his own parents, hadn’t he? Felt, from a young age, that they were more than just two people who loved him. They’d been a unit. A team. When his father had died six years ago, his mother had turned into someone he didn’t know anymore, a half person who had to learn how to be whole all over again.
And he’d done nothing to help her, choosing to deal with his own loss by running. Just as he always had.
Guilt stabbed him low in his chest.
“I figured out what the true-love veils were later, when I discovered boys,” Rose added, a smile in her voice if not on her lips. “I dispensed boyfriend advice to my older sister Lily and her friends. I was always right. It freaked some of them out-most of them. Lily got so mad at me for driving away her friends with my weirdness.”
“I thought she had some weirdness of her own.”
“She did.” Rose stabbed a shrimp and held it up in front of her, studying its plump curve. “But, by then, she was hiding it. Hiding from it, I guess I should say.”
“So you gave good advice to the lovelorn.”
“Uncannily good,” she said, her voice dry. She put the fork back on her plate, the shrimp still impaled. “Sometimes people didn’t want to hear that they were making a mistake.”
“How did it work?”
“The veils?”
He nodded.
Her brow crinkled with thought. “I just…saw them. One person’s face superimposed over another person’s face.”
“The faces of soul mates.”
The crinkle in her brow deepened. “I always thought so.”
“Until the Granvilles.”
Her gaze darted up to meet his. “McBride told you about that?”
“No. I learned about that from the mayor of Willow Grove.”
A look of dismay flitted over her face. “You called the mayor to check up on me, too?”
“Early on. Before you and I-” He didn’t finish.
“How is Mayor Chamberlain?”
“Talkative.” Daniel twisted his fork in the lo mein noodles on his plate, forcing himself to eat, though his earlier hunger had faded into a sort of queasy emptiness.
Rose picked up her fork again and ate the speared shrimp. The next few minutes passed in silence as they slowly made a dent in the food on their plates.
Finally, Rose put down her fork. “McBride didn’t believe in Lily’s visions when they first met.”
Daniel took a sip of tea. “I know.”
“He had his reasons-good ones.”
“His daughter’s kidnapping,” Daniel guessed, making an intuitive leap.
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m surprised he told you about that.”
“He didn’t.”
“Then how-”
“I’m a criminal profiler, Rose. I connected the dots.” He smiled. “Did you think I had some sort of psychic gift?”
He must have used the wrong words or the wrong term, because she stiffened.
“I’m not scoffing at you,” he said quickly.
Her lips tightened. “Yes, you are.”
He caught her chin, forcing her to look at him. “No, I’m not. But, I guess, I am trying to make a point.”
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look away, either, so he continued.
“I think you’re a profiler, too.”
Her eyes ticked open a little wider.
“Untrained, unorthodox-but isn’t that really what you do? Don’t tell me the true-love veils or the death veils do it all. Insight doesn’t just pop into being, fully formed like a gift from God. What you saw in those people-call it whatever you want-came from you. Your instincts. Your insights. Your ability to read human behavior, body language, verbal cues, all of it. You had it, and then, when you got it wrong with the Granvilles, you lost faith in it. So you think they went away.”
“I
“You didn’t think you could trust your instincts about relationships, anymore, after what happened with the Granvilles.”
He could tell by the look in her eyes that he was right. He pushed forward, needing her to understand what was becoming so plain to him the more he thought about it. “You lost faith in your instincts, so you didn’t see true-love veils anymore.”
“You think I never saw true-love veils, at all,” she murmured, her back straightening. “You think I was just reading body language and-and that’s where I’m not following.”
“Did you ever stop believing in magic?” he asked, meeting her wary gaze. “When you were a kid, I mean.”
She looked down at her plate. “You think I’m delusional.”
“No, I think you have a different definition of insight.”
She shook her head. “I know what insight is. Insight is what tells me you’re scared to death of buying into anything you can’t measure or quantify or stick under a microscope.” She leaned toward him. “What happened, you saw Bigfoot in the woods and all the other guys laughed at you?”
Now she was spooking him. “I saw the ghost of my grandfather at his funeral,” he said. “Or, what I called a ghost at the time. But, now I know, I imagined seeing him because my memories of him were so strong and my emotions were so high.”
“So the veils are my mind’s way of explaining what my intuition is trying to tell me?” She arched one dark eyebrow. “I’ll give you this-it’s an elegant explanation. Simple, but broad, covers any number of possible phenomena. Of course, it would work better if I were still twelve years old, but-”
The trill of a cell phone interrupted her. She fell silent, her gaze tangling with his. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, checking the display. It was Steve, working late. He thumbed the phone on. “What’s up, Steve?”
“I found something interesting about Jesse Phillips. I’ve e-mailed it to you. See what you think and call me back if you want me to keep digging.”
Daniel hung up and looked at Rose. “I’ve got mail.”
ROSE PEERED OVER Daniel’s shoulder, scanning the e-mail from his assistant. “He changed his name?”
“Looks that way,” Daniel murmured. “Twelve years ago he was Jesse Pennington.”
“Is that significant?”
“Maybe.” Daniel jotted a quick note to Steve, asking him to dig deeper into the background of Jesse Pennington
