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K ylie felt the sweat running down her spine, a part of the cold clamminess that had taken over her system as she sketched to the best of her ability for as long as she could. Even then she had to collapse. She sank down against one of the walls, tears streaming down her face, as she stared at the frozen remnants of the carnage around her.

An absolutely horrific day, and a horrific thing to even contemplate happening, and yet it had happened. It was a done deal. A crazy mess. So many dead, and for what? She didn’t know, but she knew a story was here. Something was here. She just didn’t know what it was, and a part of her didn’t really want to find out.

She sensed so much sadness, so much pain, so much fear, and all she could do was sit here and put a pencil to paper. Yet that made it easier, much easier. It was that one step removed, that one step away from being directly connected to it all.

A kindly paramedic stopped in front of her and crouched to ask her in a low voice, “Are you okay?”

She gave herself a firm shake then mustered up a smile and whispered, “I don’t think any of us will be okay after this.”

The older woman nodded. “I’ll go home and hug every person I know and love because we never have any guarantee that tomorrow will ever come.”

And, with those fated words, the woman stood and headed to where her partner was waiting. It wasn’t long before the older woman left. Kylie watched the EMT go, wondering at the compassion in her tone, and realizing this was a classic case of somebody who was in the right place, doing the right job, for the right reasons. Kylie could hope for that for herself. All she wanted was peace, and yet peace ended up being the one thing she never seemed to find. How terrible was that?

Kylie wanted to do so much in her life. She thought she could do so much, and yet here she was, once again, not cowering in a corner, yet almost. She still sat against the wall, trying to ease the energy flowing through her. She shook her hand out several times and then noted she had attracted the captain’s attention, as he strode toward her.

He crouched in front of her, an odd look on his face.

She waved him off. “I’m fine. My hand is just cramping.”

He nodded. “Not to mention all the chaos around us.”

“That… hurts everyone here.”

“It does, indeed, which is why we need your help.”

Something odd was in his tone, and she just raised her eyebrows and eyed him. “I’m pretty sure your detectives are all over it.”

“They absolutely are,” he confirmed with a nod, then looked at her quizzically. “Are you picking up anything unusual here?”

She stiffened ever-so-slightly, not sure what he meant. Surely not the way she interpreted it. Shaking her head, she replied, “Outside of the carnage, outside of the complete lack of care, the shooter was happy to have victims, any victims, preferably as many as possible. He took great delight in having shot two people with one bullet.… Other than all that,” she said, trying to clear her throat, “no.”

His gaze narrowed and then intensified with a shimmer.

She raised an eyebrow back at him. “Is that not what you were expecting?”

He gave half a snort. “That’s kind of what I was expecting.” He stood, looked around. “I’m heading back to the station. As soon as you’re finished, send the sketches to me.” He didn’t say anything else and walked away.

She stared after him, wondering just what he expected. What was anybody expecting from her? She didn’t know. God knows she tried to stay out of any conflict.

Her aunt had taught her well. Conflict didn’t do any good for anybody, and it usually ended up with one person getting hurt, and that was usually Kylie. Her aunt had been a very domineering and uncompromising woman, and you did as she said or else. And always the or else got Kylie. There hadn’t been a whole lot of love in her life, and there certainly hadn’t been any joy. She’d been shoved out into the world as soon as the aunt feared anything would make Kylie happy. That was just one of those extra memories in life that she chose not to dwell on. She was long rid of her aunt, and yet she still didn’t know even the beginnings of why she’d ended up there, with her, in the first place.

Her aunt told Kylie that she’d been dumped on her doorstep, and any decent person would have taken her in, but that was the extent of what her aunt’s kindness would allow her to do. And yet, for the same reason, Kylie had been brought up with Aunt Agatha. Kylie had had a roof over her head and food on the table, and she did get through school. So, she could hardly blame the woman, as Agatha had at least done that much, and Kylie would be forever grateful—but not grateful enough to maintain contact with such a negative and toxic influence. Not that Agatha wanted it anyway. Agatha didn’t like so much or couldn’t handle so much about Kylie that her aunt tossed Kylie out into the world when she was about eighteen, including final instructions.

“Now, don’t come back.”

Of course Kylie didn’t return. What would she come back to? It’s not as if Agatha wanted Kylie. Her aunt had never married and sure, it was easy to say, No wonder , since she was such a miserable old woman. Yet something was also very sad and lonely about her aunt. Not that Agatha wanted anybody’s pity or, indeed, anybody’s friendship from all Kylie could see.

Out on her own had been a really hard awakening in life, but Kylie had already been well tuned into her aunt’s proclivities for not so much the constant nastiness, but more of a general distancing. As far as Kylie knew, her aunt had moved, as she was wont to do often. Even if she still lived in the same place that Kylie had shared with her, it wasn’t a place that Kylie could call home. She’d never been welcome to call it home. It had been the place where she had been allowed to sleep and eat, but that was it.

She shook her head as she slowly made her way to her feet, still shaking out her hand as she realized just how sore she would be later today. She glanced down at her sketchbook and froze, after basically filling it. As far as her hand was concerned, it was beat, but she was only stopping because she had no more paper to draw on. That was something completely bizarre in her world. She didn’t remember having completed this many sketches at one time before, and certainly never this quickly.

She wandered around the now nearly quiet space, as forensics continued to collect as much evidence as they could. There would be mountains and mountains of it here. She kept looking to see if she had missed anything else, anything that she still needed to sketch, and yet all she felt was that sense from before that she was good. She had done what she could do, and she could leave now. She wanted to leave. God, she wanted to leave. A part of her was desperate to just get out the front door and to run as hard and as far away as she could. Yet she wasn’t sure that would be allowed in this case.

Finally, with a sense of completeness, something she always had to wait for, she walked out the front into the reporters and journalists, the blast of cameras flashing in her face. She quickly made her way to her vehicle, got into her car, and left. She wasn’t even sure where to go, and so she drove around for at least a good twenty minutes, while she tried to reorient herself to the world, dragging herself away from the carnage she’d left behind.

She ended up heading back to her office. She had a small single room in the basement of the police department. Even there it was hard to work sometimes, but she preferred it over being with people who would constantly stop to look at what she was doing. Art was not necessarily private when you worked for the police force, but it sure as hell was something that Kylie didn’t want people questioning her about, at least not until she was done evaluating it, not until she had absolutely every bit and piece in place.

Nobody ever commented to her about her loneliness down here, or about her need for privacy. The captain had given her the room, had asked her if it would work, and had left her to it. It was really just part of a storeroom. Nobody came down here but her. The hardest thing was the lack of natural light, and she admitted that she often took her drawings home to finish them, where she could step out into the sunlight and see them. Sometimes they revealed things she didn’t really want to see either. Maybe it was better that she stayed down in the bowels of the earth, where even fewer people had a chance to view her sketches, especially those that she didn’t want viewed.

If anybody would have grabbed her sketchbook right now, they would see horrors that she hadn’t intended on unveiling, yet sketches her soul needed, sketches her soul craved, all as a way to process everything that had just happened. However, they weren’t necessarily anything anybody else would understand, and Kylie had met more than a few people who were completely turned off by the weird art that she did for a living. Rarely did she find anybody who even considered these police sketches as art, and even more rare was anyone who could simply accept them for what they were, crime-scene drawings.

Back in her office, she sat down with a hard thump , absolutely hating how dark and dingy her world looked at the moment. When her phone rang, she glared at it and shook her head, sending out a mental message. No .

And a mental message came back. You can’t keep hiding .

“Oh, hell yes, I can,” she muttered into the air.

A half laugh came back. No, you can’t .

She groaned, picked up the phone, and hit Redial. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice exhausted and barely able to get the words out.

“You need to rest and recuperate.”

“I was trying to do that when somebody interrupted me.”

“No, you weren’t. You were trying to shove it all underneath, to ignore it, as if you could walk away from this completely unscathed.”

Tears clogged her throat, as she whispered, “If that’s what I was just doing, you would know that absolutely no way can anybody walk away from that unscathed.”

Stefan’s tone was filled with compassion as he whispered, “I know, and that’s why I’m calling. I’m worried about you, Kylie.”

She shook her head. “I don’t even know why you bother.”

“Because I care, and you know that.”

The smile in his tone was evident. “Sure, I know that.” She wiped away her tears. “But is this what you do with failed psychics?”

“How are you a failure?” he asked. “More about milestones than hurdles to me. You’re just struggling to accept what you can do.”

“Of course I am,” she stated. “I don’t want to deal with dead people.”

He laughed. “A lot of us deal with dead people. They’re not scarier than live people.”

“And I’ll go right back to the conversation we just had,” she snapped. “Have you seen how bad real people are?”

“Yet you can’t just hate them en masse,” he noted, “because they’re not all the same.”

Kylie sighed, shaking her head. “Right,… but it doesn’t take long for one nasty asshole to ruin it for everybody else.”

“You’ve had that one nasty asshole experience, and you’re ready to throw in the towel and not have anything to do with anybody,” he pointed out. “And I get that. But now, as long as you keep protecting yourself, I’ll leave you to do your thing, but you were leaving yourself wide open there today.”

“No, I wasn’t. Not deliberately at least,” she muttered, as she tried to collect herself. “But sometimes I don’t have the same control as you do. Just because you can walk among the dead and not have them completely turn your life upside down doesn’t mean all of us can.”

“I understand that, but I also know…” He hesitated.

That silence struck her just as badly as his words. “You know what?” she growled, ready to drop into that mood again.

And again she heard the smile in his tone as he replied, “I also know that resisting doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.” And, with that, he disconnected.

She glared down at the phone, knowing what he meant, but also not willing to take that step. The fact that she’d even been sent out there today was enough to drive her crazy. She didn’t need that; her soul didn’t need it. Hell, nobody needed that. Nobody needed to see the carnage of what one person could do to others. There had to be some law against it.

At that, she broke into hysterical laughter because, of course, there were laws against it. Plenty of them. There were a lot of laws against killing people, but the persons committing the crimes didn’t give a shit. They were either in so much pain or were so twisted up inside that all they wanted to do was hurt others. Therefore, that, of course, is what ended up happening. People wanted to hurt others, and then just lashed out and took down as many as they could in the hopes that it would ease their pain inside. If it didn’t, good riddance to the world. It was almost always followed by good riddance to the perpetrators too, also not something Kylie particularly wanted to dwell on.

She got up, and with her small coffeemaker, made herself a small pot and stared out her small window. At ground level, all she could do was stare out at the feet of the people walking past. She was even with the back alley, staring at the parking lot and delivery vehicles. Most of the time that was exactly where she wanted to be. Except right now, all she could see were the same images at the casino that had twisted and whirled through her mind as she had sketched, as if a madwoman. And now, the last thing she wanted was to check out her drawings because they would show things that nobody else would see, just her, and that was a nightmare she wasn’t ready to open.

Even as she stared outside, her energy started to calm. It should have calmed a lot earlier than this, but she was grateful to see the shift finally happen. She could almost hear Stefan’s voice in the back of her head, saying, I told you it would .

She groaned. “Do you always have to be such a know-it-all?”

Then came a shout of laughter that echoed around her room, and, of course, that was the other advantage of being here, alone in her dark little dingy corner. This way nobody else would think her crazy for talking to herself. She knew she wasn’t talking to empty space, but that didn’t mean anybody else did.

She sure as hell didn’t want anybody to understand who she was talking to either. Stefan liked his privacy just as much as she did. Or she thought so, but he kept poking his nose in her business, so maybe not. Again his gentle laughter rolled through her room, and she groaned, scrubbed her eyes, and sank down to the floor, seated against the wall. She slowly put herself into a meditative state, where she worked at cleansing away all the images that she knew would haunt her forever. But no way she could work and do what she needed to do with all that chaotic energy still clinging to her.

It took several long minutes before she got into the right space, and then a good thirty minutes later before she could get the whiff of blood and gore out of her mind. Just as she stood back up again and gave herself a mental shake to get back to her drawings, a knock came on her door, and it opened. She looked up to see Porter walking toward her.

She stared at him. “What the devil are you doing down here?” she asked him.

He looked around and frowned. “What the devil are you doing down here?” he asked in the same blunt tone. “This isn’t an office for an artist.”

“No, but it’s the office I have, so don’t mind me.” She gave a wave of her hand, as she sat in her desk chair. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to check on you,” he replied briskly, his gaze narrowing.

When she looked up at him, she asked, “So, you do know this is my office?” He blushed a bit, and that brought a smile to her face. “I’m fine.”

He nodded. “You’re always fine,” he said casually, but no bite was in his tone.

She frowned at him and asked, “Any particular reason why you’re worried?”

“No, I just saw you there.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “I’m pretty sure you could have asked any one of us who were there the same question, and you would have had the same sense of something wrong.”

“I know that,” he said, as he looked around. “You don’t even have a visitor’s chair.”

“That’s because I never get any visitors,” she quipped, with a note of humor.

His gaze flipped her way and then back around, before he took a position leaning against the wall.

“Did you guys catch the shooter?”

He shook his head. “No, SWAT went through his mother’s house, where he lived, only to find that his mother is dead as well.”

Kylie slowly lifted her gaze to his and frowned. “He killed his mother?” she asked, shocked.

His gaze narrowed. “We don’t know that for sure. All we can say is that his mother was also deceased, shot while in her home, in her own bed.”

“Was she ill by any chance?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow and asked in a cutting tone, “Does it matter?”

“No, but, if she was still in bed, I just wondered if he considered it a good thing to put her out of her misery.”

“Potentially,” Porter conceded, “but that still doesn’t make it right.”

“Of course it doesn’t make it right,” she agreed. “I’m just trying to find a reason for what he did.”

“Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason,” he replied, his gaze still intense as he stared at her.

She nodded. “I’m not looking for an excuse,” she murmured. “I guess I just want to try to understand.”

“Sometimes there is no understanding it either,” Porter noted.

“I know,” she whispered. She pulled her sketchbook toward her, looked over at him, and stated, “I do have work to do, so is there anything else you need?”

He frowned at her and then at the sketchbook in her hand. “I really want to see those.”

“No, you don’t,” she declared, “and nobody sees them until I’m ready.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “You’re always very closed off around your work.”

“Of course I am,” she stated sharply. “As far as I can tell, so are you. You share information when you need to share information, but you certainly don’t volunteer it.”

His eyebrows shot up, and then his gaze narrowed, as he studied her face. “That’s quite a judgment, considering you don’t know me.”

It was quite a judgment, and, if she were smart, she would have kept her mouth shut. “I suspect it’s very typical of all detectives,” she added in an effort to cover her tracks and to get out of a big gaffe. She didn’t know him very well at all, so making that statement would cause all kinds of speculation on his part.

He nodded slowly. “And that is true, but it’s an interesting thing for you to say.”

“Not really,” she replied, with a headshake. “Ignore it. I’m not myself.”

“The fact that you aren’t yourself and yet said that makes me wonder if finally some of your defenses are down and if maybe some of us can get in behind them.” When she stiffened and glared at him, he went on. “And I can see how that comment really disturbs you.”

“How would you feel if somebody made a similar comment to you? Would it not put you on the defensive?” she asked, stone-faced.

He considered the point, while she stared at him. “You’re right,” he admitted, a bit placated. “I guess that’s probably guaranteed to get anybody’s back up, isn’t it?” He laughed. “It’s amazing just how much communication matters when it comes to this stuff because it seems too easy to put people on the wrong footing, even if it’s not intended.”

“That’s true,” she murmured. “On the other hand, sometimes what we think isn’t intended really is intended, and we’ll have to sort it out ourselves.”

He frowned at that. “Okay, that’s getting even more discombobulated.”

“Why don’t we just agree we both said something we shouldn’t have and be fine with it?”

“Okay.”

“Good,” she replied, with a note of humor and a hint of sarcasm. “Now that we have sorted that, did you have a particular reason for being here?”

“Nope, other than checking in to confirm you’re okay,” he stated, with a smile. “The answer to your particular question is… no. I don’t have any reason for being here. On the other hand, it does seem as if you were pretty knocked for a loop today.”

“I was,” she acknowledged, “and I would think my humanity is what kept me going in this case.”

“Of course it is,” he agreed. “Enough things happen in our world that can send us flying, but a mass shooting where you watch such heartache…”

“I think it was the callousness,” she pointed out, cutting him off, “that really threw me. The fact that he didn’t care if that old man had an old woman at home, a wife who now gets to spend her last few days, weeks, maybe months of her life, mourning somebody taken so quickly—or the family with the child killed by the same bullet as the father.… It’s almost as if the shooter took joy in it, a wildness, a carefree I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude.”

He studied her for a moment. “That’s an interesting take.”

“I don’t know if it is valid or not with this shooter,” she declared. “I just know it wasn’t as random as I expected.”

He frowned at her and asked, “In what way was it not random?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Other than my gut feeling, I can’t really explain that right now. I would have to go through my drawings first and see.”

“Your drawings?”

Her gaze flashed to his face, him eyeing her, a quizzical look in his gaze. “Yes,” she repeated, peeling her gaze off his. “My drawings.”

“I really want to see those drawings,” he stated, his gaze dropping to the sketch pad in front of her.

“So do I. However, I’m not ready to share them yet. I have to be a little more centered before I review these initial sketches, in order to not prejudicially judge what I see on the page.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Porter murmured. “Now I’m even more fascinated by what’s on the page.”

“A lot of it may not make any sense to you yet,” she noted, “and that is something I have to sort out.”

“When will you have that sorted?” he asked. “Because I really want to see them.”

“I don’t know. The captain asked for them quickly, but…”

“But you have to sort through them yet.”

“Yes,” she replied, not sure that she should give away as much as she had. “I know I’m peculiar. After all, I’m an artist.”

“But this is hardly a work of art.” Porter stared at her, confused, as if he wasn’t getting the point of it.

“Yet it is a work of art. I think that’s the point people are missing. You may not see it that way, but it is a work of art.” He stared at her, confused. She added, “I’m not talking about my viewpoint, but his. To him, to the killer, this was his work of art. And just as my art is important to me, his art is important to him.”

“And yet”—Porter slowly straightened and neared her desk—“you just stated it wasn’t random.”

She frowned, then nodded. “I did say that.”

“And now you’re saying it was the shooter’s work of art.”

“Yes, it was a work of art from his viewpoint,” she agreed, yet shaking her head. “And, no, I don’t know how to express that any better at the moment, so give me a little bit of time. I’ll go through what I have, what I’ve done, what I’ve created, and I’ll see if I can come up with a better explanation.”

“I know you have to show this to the captain,” Porter stated, “but I want to see it too.”

“And you will,” she promised, “but…” She left it at that.

He sighed. “You have to go through it first.”

She gave him half a smile. “Yes, I do.”

“Fine,” he muttered, his tone back to business. “Just let me know when you’re done because I want to be here.”

“For what, the unveiling? It’s hardly that kind of art.”

“No, but it feels as if, to you, something really important is in it, and, if there is, I really want to see that.” And then he quickly disappeared through her doorway, and she heard his footsteps receding down the hallway. Somehow he’d left her with an added sense of disquiet, as she stared at the sketchbook that even she didn’t want to open.

*

Neil waited for Porter at the end of the hallway. “She’s weird, isn’t she?”

He shot him a hard glance. “Just different.”

“Oh no, no, no, don’t say different. Different always means you’re interested.”

“I didn’t say that.” Porter gave his partner a stern look. “Come on. We have one hell of a case to work on.”

“Not really. An APB is out on our casino killer, so cops everywhere are looking for him. The guy shot his mother for Christ’s sake, and, if you ask me, he’s probably been a fuckup from the beginning. For me, it’s a pretty open-and-shut deal. Even for the unrelated school shooting,… the cops are out looking for that kid too. Both shooters caught on video. However, forensics are spread thin, so there won’t be other answers for a while.”

“Maybe,” Porter muttered, as he thought back to what Kylie had told him.

Neil shook his head. “Don’t make it more complicated than it is. It’s bad enough already. We don’t need any theatrics to go with it.”

“Not planning on theatrics,” Porter stated.

“Yes, you are. I can see it all over you.”

Porter snorted at that. “You can’t see shit, and we both know it. You’re due for your eye test anyway. We’ll go get that done, if need be, since clearly you need new glasses.”

“Don’t change the subject on me. My eyesight has nothing to do with it,” he argued. “I can see your face just fine. She’ll mess you up bad, so just don’t go there.”

“And who said I was going anywhere?” Porter asked in exasperation, but in truth he found something very fascinating about Kylie. He didn’t understand what, how, or why, but no doubt something was unique about that woman. Even as he thought about it, and the comments she had made about her drawings and the artwork and the artistry behind the shooting, he had to wonder. “Do you think the casino shooting was random, or was it just somebody out there creating, I don’t know, a piece of art?”

Neil looked at him in shock and then snorted. “Jesus, I don’t know what the hell she told you, but there is no art in this fucked-up murder mess.”

“Maybe not, but… our shooter created a hell of a masterpiece, didn’t he?”

“That was not a masterpiece. That was just one major fucked-up mess, so don’t put any good or beautiful connotation to it.”

“I wasn’t,… but I have to wonder what was in his mind when he went on that rampage.”

“It sure as hell wasn’t anything nice.”

They strolled back to their desks, which faced each other in the main bullpen area. As Porter walked over to his desk, he threw himself into his chair and stared at his computer, his mind still consumed with the concept of this mass murder being a work of art somehow, at least from the shooter’s point of view.

“Don’t go there,” Neil reminded Porter, his tone sharp.

One of the other guys looked over and snorted. “ Uh-oh , trouble in paradise with you two?”

Neil shook his head. “Hell no, the two of us are absolutely wonderful. Aren’t we, darling?” he teased.

The other detectives laughed. “You two act just like an old married couple. All you do is bitch and complain.”

“Ha. If that’s all me and my wives did,” Neil shared, “I would still be married to my first one.”

That set off a round of jokes and laughter from everybody. Neil was on his third marriage, but that one was just about over as well. He never seemed to understand why he kept finding women who didn’t appreciate anything about him. Yet it seemed he was always choosing women who were there for a good time but not for the long haul. All he really wanted was to settle down and to have a family and seemed to think that’s what he was doing with each and every marriage. Still, somehow he ended up with women who had completely different ideas on what their relationships would look like.

Porter studied his friend and partner, Neil. Porter had been with Neil for all three marriages—or rather all three divorces —with the third strike coming on fast. Each time Porter kept telling Neil to not go in that direction, to not marry this one, and that it wouldn’t be what Neil wanted, and each time he had forged ahead with each marriage, so sure he had found true love this time, and the woman in question would be there for him. Sadly true love hadn’t lasted for Neil, not even close, and Neil had been heartbroken each and every time.

Porter had met each of Neil’s wives and had to admit they were all beautiful, collected, powerful women. Yet somewhere along the line, this major disconnect happened over what Neil wanted and what each wife wanted.

Porter had even been best man for the last two weddings. And now all he saw was the shambles of Neil’s personal life, and Porter couldn’t understand how Neil kept coming back to the same nightmarish mess of marriages that were doomed to fail. Neil was a good man, but he was also judgmental in many ways. In his mind, one way was right, the other was wrong, and nothing in between was to be considered. For Porter, he always felt something resided in between. He just didn’t ever tell his friend what that in-between compromise was.