Free The Fifth Victim by Beverly Barton Page B

to you before?”
    She nodded. “Many times.”
    “How long will it—”
    “Several hours.”
    “Rest. I’ll stay right here.”
    “Dallas?”
    “Yes?”
    “From time to time, try the phones. Jacob needs to know.”
    “About your dream?”
    She nodded. “About the second sacrifice.”
    Again, the blood ran cold through Dallas’s veins. Damn! Half a dozen wild thoughts went through his head. The second sacrifice…the second sacrifice.
    “Genny?”
    When she didn’t respond, he glanced down at her and realized she had fallen asleep. He lowered her arm down beside her, then eased off the bed and paced around the bedroom. Drudwyn’s keen eyes followed his every move.
    “What’s going on with her, boy?” he asked the dog.
    Drudwyn rose, came forward, and halted at Dallas’s side. Two concerned gazes met, locked, and exchanged an odd sense of understanding. Both would protect Genevieve Madoc to the death.
    “Hell,” Dallas cursed under his breath. Protect this woman to the death? Where had that thought come from? What was wrong with him? He barely knew her, had met her only hours ago.
    Dallas shoved back the lace curtains at the long, narrow windows and gazed outside at the dawn light creeping up and across the horizon, spreading a pale pink glow over the dark gray sky. The snowstorm must have ended sometime during the night, but as best he could make out in the semi-darkness, a blanket of white covered everything in sight.
    Letting the curtain fall back into place, Dallas closed his eyes and tried to think straight. He had allowed this situation—being marooned for a night with a good-looking woman who somehow had very quickly put the hoodoo on him—to muddle his thought processes. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Genny was a witch who had cast a spell over him.
    Dallas chuckled. Yeah, sure. A witch? He didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t experience with his five senses. If he couldn’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or feel it, then it didn’t exist. In the real world in which he lived, there were no witches, no faith healers, no ghosts, no psychics, no guardian angels. That sort of stuff was for saps, for the poor misguided souls who couldn’t cope with reality.
    He glanced around the room. Feminine, but not frilly. Antique furniture. Lace curtains. Pale pastel colors blended with white. When he spied a large, comfortable-looking chair in the corner, he went over and sat, then lifted his big feet onto the round ottoman. A chill rippled through him, reminding him he was bare from the waist up. He dragged the white crocheted afghan off the back of the chair and wrapped it around him.
    As soon as the phones were working, he’d put in a call to a wrecker service and get his rental car hauled out of the ditch, then he’d thank Genny for her hospitality and get the hell out of here as fast as he could. His business was with Sheriff Butler, not Butler’s bewitching cousin.
    He needed to make a definite connection between Susie Richards’s murder and Brooke’s murder. Over the past eight months, since his young niece had been brutally killed, he had spent every minute he wasn’t working to try to unearth any evidence that might point to her killer. Sacrificial killing was not unheard of; in fact there had been more in the United States than Dallas had suspected. Many had been connected to some sort of pagan devil worship, but certainly not all. Over the past eight years there had been twenty-four unsolved cases involving murders that were very similar to Brooke’s. And the oddest thing about twenty of these murders was that they appeared to have taken place in sets of five.
    With Teri’s and Linc’s assistance these past few months, Dallas had put together a startling hypothesis: someone sacrificed five women living in the same area over a period that averaged between three to six weeks, then disappeared only to show up in another region a year or two later and repeat the same