The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,30

broken out on his forehead. Then he realized something else: he had an erection. The first one he’d had in ten years.

Trembling, he stepped out of the room and shut the wall behind him. He wondered about the faceless, nameless people he had envisioned, some in the sling, some writhing on the floor. He wondered what the governor would have thought of Mayor Larry Carver if he’d been able to see what Joel just experienced. Probably would have strangled him with that blue ribbon. But then, who knew? Maybe the governor had been a guest here. Maybe the governor had even been in the sling. Maybe the governor had liked it.

Joel bent down to grab the newspapers he had scattered over the floor and began stacking them. He stopped. All of the papers had to do with Sarah Jo McElvoy. He looked at a front-page story from April: Girl Still Missing. Sarah Jo smiled up at him from the color picture—a school portrait most likely—that accompanied the article, and Joel felt a chill up his spine. The stories started with her disappearance and went right up through finding her body last week. He shuffled through the pile. There were dozens of them, all stories from the Cedar Hill Post-Dispatch, from front-page articles to small stories buried farther in the paper.

Suddenly, the red room didn’t seem quite so sexy. He began to wonder exactly what had happened in there.

Was the mayor involved in this? Had the mayor taken that girl? If so, what had he done with her? To her?

He wondered if he had missed something in those visions, if there was some small part that had gotten by him while he was lost in the flood of ecstasy. But he didn’t think so. He could try it again, grab the sling and search his feelings again, but the visions before were so murky—more physical than visual, and nothing really clear except Larry Carver’s moaning face.

And besides, now he was afraid. If there were something to all this, if the mayor were somehow involved in the girl’s death, Joel wasn’t sure he wanted to find out this way. Not in a dank, musty basement surrounded by dark shadows and a pulsing strobe light.

He looked again at the clipped articles in his hand, wondering if he should go to the police, doubting that he ever could, knowing he would never be able to convince them of anything. What would he say to them? There was no way he would ever tell them about his ability, and even if he did they would never believe him.

Perhaps he could just tell them about the room, about the articles. Maybe it would throw some suspicion this way. He debated taking a few of the articles to show the police, but then decided against it. Anyone could cut things out of the paper; that certainly didn’t make a murderer. But he had to admit it was still strange.

He finished stacking up the newspapers and moved on to his real work, his fingers trembling.

Not surprisingly, his erection was gone.

* * *

1:40 PM

Halloran and Chapman stood at the edge of the cemetery with Chief Pettus, watching the mourners file back to their cars from the green tent set presumptuously amid the gray headstones. Today, Sarah Jo McElvoy was finally being laid to rest in Our Lady of Peace Gardens. Halloran got just a glimpse of Sarah Jo’s mother; she was wearing dark glasses against the intense summer sun and had a fresh cigarette between her lips. A lady in a navy blue suit—who was probably Mrs. McElvoy’s age but looked much younger—was helping her toward the funeral home limo. A couple of news reporters were shouting questions at them, holding microphones as far over the caution tape as their arms would stretch. Mrs. McElvoy and her friend in the blue suit sailed past them without stopping, almost like jaded Hollywood celebrities.

The whole thing looked like a circus. Television cameras and newspaper reporters were everywhere, and Halloran was grateful Pettus had stretched out the yellow tape as a boundary for the media. Since Carmelita Santos’s disappearance had been made public, Cedar Hill had become a national news story. All three networks had converged on the town, and not to be outdone, CNN and Fox News had also set up shop. Several patrolmen were stationed around the scene, just in case anything got out of hand.

All three men surveyed the crowd of mourners, looking for anyone who seemed out of