Free Deathscape by Dana Marton Page A

boyfriend?” While the idea of DaRosa’s hands on her had angered him, the idea of Blackwell’s hands on her disturbed him on a deeper level. “Is he worth a charge of accessory to murder? Is he that good a fuck?”
    Her eyes widened with shock, and she recoiled from him as if he’d physically struck her. If her reaction made him feel like a bastard, he wasn’t willing to acknowledge it.
    “ I don’t know him,” she protested in a voice filled with despair.
    “ So you just saw me in your mind?”
    She nodded.
    Judging by the look in her eyes, she hated him as much at this moment as he hated Blackwell. She was welcome to it. “And?”
    “ I recognized the rock and the creek. I knew where you were.”
    * * *
    Jack Sullivan thought she was in league with a serial killer. And, stupidly, to convince him she was innocent, she had blurted out her darkest secret. Oh God. She would have done anything to undo that, to erase her words.
    Soon everyone would know that something was seriously wrong with her. And then she would never get her daughter back. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, dizzy with the anxiety and anger that gripped her.
    She had to make Sullivan believe her, accept that she had nothing to do with the killer he was looking for. He seemed dead set on pinning a slew of murders on her. Or accessory to murder. Nausea bubbled in her stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut for a second.
    To think that she’d been scared of Bing. For Bing, the case was a job. For Sullivan, it was personal. He was aggressive and crass and relentless and—
    “ Have you tried to find any of the others?” He glanced back at the pictures, then at her again, his face hard, his eyes narrowed. He had a look of emptiness about him, as if he’d left his soul in that grave and brought only the darkness with him. He had no right to bring that to her house.
    She wanted to curl up into a ball and howl with the unfairness of it all. “I didn’t know where the others were. Only you. And I knew you weren’t dead.”
    “ How?”
    She pointed at the painting with a frustrated gesture. It was so obvious. How could he not see it?
    He picked up the painting, looked at it for a few seconds; then he looked at the rest of the canvases. “I don’t look like the others.” He paused. “Why did you come?”
    If only she hadn’t. She’d been scared out of her mind. “I thought…”
    He waited her out.
    “ I thought if I saved you, maybe I wouldn’t see another…vision, ever again.” She had expected relief, some sort of absolution and an end to the nightmare that had kept her bound for over a year now. Instead, she’d gotten Jack Sullivan with all his disapproval and suspicions, and his ability to reach to the deepest, darkest core of her.
    He kept his face inscrutable, leaving her no way to tell if he believed anything she told him. She wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t happening to her.
    The first time she had painted a lifeless body, she’d thought it some sort of a fluke, another symptom of the depression that had followed the accident on the reservoir. The landscape she’d planned on painting kept changing as she was compelled to change the location of the trees, add a road, take out the barn she’d meant to have as the focal point. She’d painted that first body, an older woman, in a trance, horrified when she’d stepped back at the end.
    After the second time it’d happened, a black teenager, she packed up her paints and canvases and decided not to paint for a while until whatever was going on in her mind blew over. Her shrink upped her antidepressant. It didn’t help, made her slightly manic, keeping her up night after night with nothing to do.
    The third body she’d seen in her mind, a man in a UPS uniform, she’d been determined not to paint. But her hands moved on their own, dragging out her supplies. She’d been terrified enough after that to throw the rest of her blank canvases and paint tubes into the