Jeremy and Joe sat talking over coffee in a café near the hospital where Adam was undergoing tests while they waited for word on his condition, and for the business card and the substance on it to be analyzed for prints and DNA. Joe sounded disgusted as he told Jeremy, “The organizers and the mayor and everyone involved with the Harvest Festival had a meeting last night, but they say we’ve got someone in custody and they’ve already paid for the kiddie rides, ponies, union electricians, yada yada yada, so they’re not going to pull the plug. But we’ll have every officer we can muster on duty, and all the neighboring departments have offered to send men, too. But if Adam’s not our guy and the killer’s the master of disguise he seems to be, I don’t see how we’re going to spot him.
“We’re getting FBI help soon,” Joe added glumly. “They’ll be sending someone out from the Boston field office as soon as they can spare a man.” Joe looked at him quizzically all of a sudden. “What were you doing way out there yesterday, anyway?”
“Lights.”
“Lights?”
“Ginny MacElroy told me she’d seen lights—like UFOs—out there.”
“Out of the mouths of…well, not exactly babes, huh?” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “I probably would have thought she was just going a little senile and seeing things. I sure as hell wouldn’t have raced out there to investigate,” he admitted.
The man looked tired, Jeremy thought. No wonder. He hadn’t stopped since all this had begun.
“Joe, the fax you sent me last night, the one of everyone who was in the bar the night Dinah Green disappeared—your name and two of your men’s names were on it.”
“Yeah, but none of us ever noticed her.”
“But you sent me your name.”
“I sent you every name. Hell, so I’m a suspect now?”
Jeremy lowered his head, trying to hide his grin. “Well, you are a local.”
“Touché. You’d have disappointed me if you hadn’t been honest.”
The two of them sat in gloomy silence for a few minutes, and then Jeremy asked, “So none of your men has seen any sign of Eve Llewellyn?”
“No,” Joe said. “Adam swears he never saw her, doesn’t know where she is. Says he went to see Rowenna at the History Museum, then started back to the store. He doesn’t remember anything else until he found himself sitting in the cemetery. That’s his story. He’s like a mass of jelly. Terrified that he’s the killer, but he keeps swearing that he would never in a million years hurt his wife, that he doesn’t believe he’d hurt anyone. But like I said, the fact that we have him in custody has the festival committee convinced that it’s safe to go on.”
“You don’t think its Adam, do you?” Jeremy asked him.
“Hell if I think I know anything at this point. This used to be a nice town that had gotten past its sad history and made a nice living off a bunch of modern-day wiccans who draw the tourists…. A serial killer who thinks he’s the Devil…” He shook his head in what looked to Jeremy suspiciously like defeat. “That’s way beyond anything we’ve ever had to deal with here.”
Just then his phone buzzed. When he finished the call, he turned to Jeremy and said, “Come on. The shrink had a neurologist checking Adam out. Let’s go see what they found.”
“Is he insane?” Joe asked the psychiatrist the minute they got into the room where she and the neurologist were waiting to meet with them.
“Not in the least,” the woman, Dr. Detweiler, said. “He’s been tormenting himself because he didn’t know what was going on, but he’s not suffering delusions of any kind and he doesn’t show the signs of being a classic split personality, to use the layman’s term. In talking to him, I felt that the man was dealing with a physical problem, so I called Dr. Lauder,” she went on, nodding toward her colleague.
“We still have tests to run,” Dr. Lauder said. “And the results on the tests I’ve done so far aren’t all in yet, but I believe he is suffering from a rare form of epilepsy. He doesn’t go into physical spasms, as in the classic form of the disease, but parts of the brain shut down, leading to so-called blackouts. There isn’t a cure, but there is medication. You can talk to him now, if you’d like.”
Adam was under guard in the hospital. He was in restraints, and he looked like hell.
But he was clear-eyed, and he spoke rationally when he saw them.
“Any sign of my wife?” he asked miserably, as soon as they entered.
“No, I’m sorry,” Joe told him.
“I would never hurt her,” Adam whispered. “I love her. That’s why I was so afraid.”
“Adam, we found a business card from your store out where we found four more bodies,” Jeremy told him.
“I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have blacked out that long. Could I?” The look in his eyes was horrified, pleading. “Oh, God, if I did do it, I want to be executed.”