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Letting Butch's hand fall back in his lap, she reached up and brushed her lips across the firm muscles of his jawline. "Things are already out of hand," she whispered. "So maybe we'd both better go inside."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The dream overtook Joa
They didn't answer, but even without being told, Joa
"You stop that now!" she shouted. "You shouldn't do that. It's not nice."
One of the boys turned and peered at her over his shoulder. Then his mouth twisted into an ugly, gargoylelike smile. He laughed and pointed, and the other boys looked, too, while Joa
She reached the outside of the tightly knit circle. "Let me in," she shouted. "What are you doing?" As she tried to see over one boy's shoulder, he seemed to swell before her very eyes, growing upward and upward until he towered over her. She went to the next boy, and the same thing happened. One at a time, the boys transformed themselves into huge, thick-limbed giants. They closed ranks and shouldered her out of the way, but now there was a sound coming from inside the circle-a terrible whimpering.
"Please stop now," Joa
One of the giants whirled around and glared down at her. "Mothers?" he said. "Mothers? We don't need no stinkin' mothers." He laughed. Then, with a shrug, he turned and walked away. One by one, the others followed. Joa
At first she couldn't tell what it was. But when she stepped closer she realized it was a child: Je
The horrifying dream dissolved as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch. In the nightmare's absence, the keening; awful scream remained.
"Joa
"Yes," she said, "I'm okay," but her heart was hammering inside her chest. Sweat-soaked bedclothes clung to her naked body. Unbidden tears filled her eyes while a sob choked off her ability to speak.
Butch encircled her with both arms and held her against his chest. "Do you want to talk about it?"
Joa
"Someone in your dream did this?" Butch asked. His warm breath lingered on her ear.
"No," she said. "The serial killer we're tracking. The real one. I talked to an FBI profiler named Monty Brainard. He says we're dealing with a spree killer."
"But the killer was in your dream?"
"No, there were boys in my dream. I thought they were pulling the legs off frogs. But when I got close enough to see, it turned out they had Je
"Boys had Je
"I do," Joa
"Don't worry," Butch said, sounding now as though lie was more than half asleep. "It was only a dream. We'll talk about it in the morning." With that he reached across and switched the light back off.
Joa
In the familiar confines of her kitchen, with the lights on and with coffee slowly bubbling into the pot, the dream receded from her consciousness, but it left behind a strange sense of both uneasiness and comprehension. Monty Brainard and her subconscious mind had dealt with the same problem and arrived at the same answer. The killer was a young man, little more than a boy. A man/boy with no sense of right or wrong, and with a video-game player's concept. of life and death.
Intuitively, Joa
There was always a chance that the evidence techs would discover a usable fingerprint. In the old days, latent finger-prints could help convict a known perpetrator, but they had been virtually useless in identifying unknown criminals. Now, though, with the help of AFIS-the Automated Finger-print Identification System-that had changed. By using computers, it was possible to compare points of similarity on unidentified prints to those of millions of prints, often booking prints, that had already been loaded into the system. With the computer searching for similarities, it was sometimes possible for a crime-scene fingerprint to lead directly to a named suspect.
AFIS made the odds of that happening better, but it wasn't foolproof. For one thing, assuming Monty Brainard's assessments were right about the killer's previous run-ins with law enforcement, his prints were likely to be in the system. The problem was, he was also being extremely cagey about not leaving prints behind. Even if a usable print existed at one of the crime scenes, Joa
So how do we do this in a timely ma
When the coffee finished brewing, she poured a cup.
Then after do
Monty Brainard claimed the killer was a loner. Maybe Frankie Ramos had been his one real friend-a fatal offense which had also qualified him as victim. But were there other acquaintances, other people who ran in the same crowd? They might not have been as close to the killer, but that didn't mean they didn't know him. Whoever those people were, they might very well suspect what the killer had done. They'd be scared now, worrying that perhaps they, too, had moved from the role of pal to potential victim.
The answer, when it came, seemed to materialize directly out of the steam wafting from Joa
"You're up bright and early this morning, Sheriff Brady," Stu told her.