The Unseen

The rest of the scene played itself out, just as it had earlier that day.

When the man squeezed the life out of the woman, she went limp. He picked her up and threw her down, the same way he had before.

Then they both disappeared into the darkness. Seconds later, light began to show from the bathroom and the room resumed its earlier appearance. She’d been unable to move; she’d really never wakened.

A tiny light seemed to hover directly in front of her. She realized she was seeing a woman’s face. In dream, in vision, in half sleep, in the tormented corners of her mind, she saw a face. She thought it would be Rose Langley, the pathetic creature murdered in this room.

But it wasn’t. It was a face she’d seen in a picture that day.

The face of the missing girl, Vanessa Johnston. She wasn’t smiling now. She was sad. She looked at Kelsey and whispered, “Too late.”

Too late, too late, too late…

There was a whir of flapping black wings in the room, and the sound they made seemed to mock the words that had been spoken.

Too late, too late, too late…

The flapping stopped, and the wings seemed to merge and create a shape.

A man.

She saw him only as a silhouette at first. Then he turned to her, his expression grave. It was Logan Raintree, so tall and lean and solid, his face like chiseled marble, his hazel eyes alive and burning.

“You saw a man?” he asked her.

She heard wings again, and now she seemed to be outside. The black birds, the crows, settling all around them, on the ground, the benches and the nearby power lines and poles.

And then he was gone, and the darkness swept around her.

When she woke in the morning, she remembered her dream about the murder of Rose Langley, her vision of Vanessa Johnston.

And the appearance of Logan Raintree in her room.

Surrounded by crows.

* * *

The Bexar County morgue was large, and a special room had been set aside for the victims who might have been associated with a single killer.

Jackson Crow did have all the right connections. Logan had been at the morgue often enough in years gone by, and he was familiar with various members of the staff. But he’d never seen anything like the way people scurried for Jackson Crow, nor had he been there when an entire facility was dedicated to one pursuit.

There were eight gurneys in the room. Each had a sheet draped over the length of a body.

One sheet was almost flat. He assumed it covered a victim who was little more than bones.

One of the bodies had already been in the morgue, along with those of Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. Five others had been exhumed. They walked from gurney to gurney with Dr. Frazier Gaylord, medical examiner. He carried a clipboard with his notes on the remains of Chelsea and Tara—and the unknowns. The unknowns, of course, had been buried by the county and exhumed by the county, but they had numbers rather than names. Gaylord was thorough in his discussion of each one. Logan kept silent as he followed Jackson and Kelsey. The first body was skeletal and the second had no discernible features. Medical reports indicated that all the women had been between twenty-two and thirty-five; none had borne children. Hair proved to be of every color. Five had been Caucasian and two were Hispanic. One, according to Gaylord, was Asian—Logan didn’t ask what had given him that impression. The girl still had a pretty face beneath the damage and decay. “Or possibly American Indian?” he suggested.

“No, I believe she was Chinese,” Gaylord told him. “Based on the set of the skull and the cast of the eyes. There’s enough left…as you can see.”

Kelsey O’Brien hadn’t said a word. He liked that about her. If she had a question, she asked it. If she didn’t, she listened. Absorbed.

“I’m puzzled as to why you’ve put these deaths together,” Gaylord mused, looking at Jackson Crow, “since the cause of death isn’t consistent.” He glanced at his notes. “There are nicks on this woman’s skeletal remains, suggesting that she was stabbed to death. Broken hyoid bone in the next one suggests strangulation. The young woman over there—” he pointed to the farthest gurney “—was drowned. So, we have, in our collection of Jane Does, two strangulations, three stabbings and a drowning. And, then, of course, we get to the bodies of the two young women who have been identified, Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. This is a big city, and that means big-city crime. These poor souls might have encountered any member of the criminal element. Or they might have been murdered by someone in a fit of anger.”