Without thinking twice, Blake rushed forward, raised his arm and fired at almost point blank range into the police officer's chest. The man fell back so fast his uniform hat flew off. Blake paused and took aim, firing a second round into the sergeant's face. With a quick pause to scoop up the dead man's hat, he took off, running past the dumpsters to where his car was parked down the block.

So slick it had been-like something out of the movies. He'd hit the cop and been gone before any of the others could make it out the door.

It been even more thrilling to sneak into O'Hern's room at the hospital.

She was waiting for him, as if she realized she was his accomplice, his partner in crime.

Other than the one word, he hadn't spoken to her. It was too early, he felt, and they didn't really need words. He had made his point, had seen the gleam of terror in her eyes.

She now knew she belonged to him. He would take her, when he was ready. No. When she was ready.

When he'd started this, he'd known it was suicide. But he'd been thinking about suicide off and on for a long time. He wanted to die; he needed to die. Needed to stomp out the firestorm gaining strength in his head. Thoughts and images and urges that made it impossible to pretend to be normal.

Oh, he had tried, tried for years. To be the good boy, the perfect soldier, the worker bee. Each day, he'd don his uniform as if it were a Halloween costume, designed to mask the monster. Each morning, he'd force his face to mirror the plasticine Barbie and Ken smiles that everyone else found so natural. Each second, he'd use all his energy to go through the motions, to control his quick-fire urges to slash and burn everyone and everything he saw.

It was all getting so damned hard. He couldn't do it, not for much longer. Then, after what happened with the cop two months ago, he realized he didn't have to. Didn't have to keep worrying about going back to prison, about getting caught thinking and doing things he shouldn't.

It didn't matter. Because the wonderful, freeing, absolute joy about killing yourself was that you were in control. You decided when and where and how.

After the bitch cop in September, Blake finally understood what he wanted. He wanted to let the monster loose, set it free on the ones who had always acted so smug and superior, the ones with the power.

Yeah, he was going to die, no doubt about that.

But he wasn't going to die alone.

CHAPTER 15.

Josh and Hershey returned to the duplex and climbed the steep porch steps to his half of the house. Hershey pawed at the door as Josh fumbled the keys in his chilled fingers before finally getting it open. The dog ran in, throwing himself onto the comfortable chair beside the TV.

Josh shed his outer layer of clothes and clicked on the TV as he stretched out on the floor. Tried to pretend that his life was the normal, boring routine he lived before last Friday night when Kate O'Hern had crashed into his peaceful existence. He was in the middle of a set of crunches when the nightly news began.

The announcer described a shooting behind a local bar. What made it newsworthy was that this particular bar had been inhabited by over thirty police officers at the time of the killing. The victim had been a police sergeant named Philip Conrad.

Josh jumped to his feet, turned up the sound and watched as the camera panned over the grisly scene, following the body bag being loaded into an ambulance. The gunman escaped. More details later. He clicked through the channels, hoping he'd heard the name wrong.

It couldn't be. There had to be a reasonable explanation.

The phone rang.

"Dr. Lightner?" It was Adams, the resident on call at Three Rivers. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but it's O'Hern, sir. She seems to have gone psychotic. I was going to restrain and medicate her, but she kept insisting that we call you, and well, she is a police officer, sir, so I-"

"What exactly seems to be the problem?" Had Adams witnessed one of her spells?

"Well sir, she's delirious. She claims that the man who shot her was in her room here at the hospital tonight. And she keeps yelling at someone named Conrad to look out-it's all quite bizarre. I've ordered restraints and some Haldol, but the charge nurse insisted that I speak to you first."

"You ordered what!" Josh's mind filled with an image of Kate strapped to her bed, her mind clouded by drugs.

"Sir, if you confirm my orders for the charge nurse, I'll take care of everything-"

"You'll take care of nothing," Josh snapped, louder than he intended. "I'm on my way in. Don't give her anything until I get there."

"Yessir."

Josh hung up, grabbed his coat and car keys and was out the door seconds later. At the hospital he found the nurses' station empty.

He stalked down the hall to Kate's room, determined to give Adams a piece of his mind. Even if Kate had another of her hallucinations, there was no reason to restrain her.

The door to her room stood half open. The room was dark except for a swath of light spilling out from the bathroom. Josh stood in the doorway, his pulse pounding with anger and anxiety, then felt his heart lunge against his chest wall.

Kate's bed was empty.

He rushed inside the room. The door slammed shut behind him. He spun around.

She stood in the shadows, clutching the extension rod from her IV pole, ready to swing it like a club. Her eyes were wide, jaw clenched, sweaty hair plastered around her face.

"Kate?" His heartbeat smoothed back into a normal rhythm when he saw she was unharmed. "What happened?"

The metal rod slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor with a clatter. Her body teetered, ready to follow her makeshift weapon. Josh ran forward and caught her in his arms.

"What the heck is going on?" he asked as he held her upright with one arm and pulled the lower part of her IV pole with the other. She had hooked her urine bag and the chest tube drain to the handle of the pole. Her body shook in his arms, sweat poured from her.

"I thought he might come back," she said in a breathless voice as he half-carried her to the bed. She sank back against the pillows with a grunt of pain.

He flicked the lights on. She was ashen, panting with exertion. "Who? Adams? What did he say-"

"No. Not Adams. The shooter. He was here."

"Here? You mean in another of your-er-visions?"

Her glare nailed him like a laser. "No. I mean here. In this room."

Josh stared at her in disbelief. The killer couldn't have been here-he was half way across town busy killing another cop.

He should have done something about her delusions sooner, should have never let it get this far. Should have never let himself get personally involved.

There were reasons for the rules. He turned away, busying himself with re-connecting the medical paraphernalia she had stripped away.

"Did you really think you could face down a killer with a metal rod as your only weapon?" he asked, wanting her to see how deranged her thinking was. He plugged the monitor leads dangling from beneath her gown back into the machine and reached past her to turn it on.

A pitcher of water sat on the shelf beside the monitor. A large, white funeral lily dangled over its side.

The sound of her sharp inhalation drew his attention back to Kate. Her face had grown even paler. She reached out her good hand and gripped his arm with a white-knuckled grasp. "Don't touch it," she said. "He must have left it."

Josh looked from the solitary blossom to her. Her eyes pleaded for him to believe, the rest of her face was set in a rigid mask of nonchalance. The racing of her heartbeat on the monitor proved her indifference was a lie.

She was trying so hard to be strong, to be brave. Yet it was so painfully clear that whatever had happened tonight-whether a confrontation with a killer or a psychotic breakdown-terrified her. He covered her hand with his.

"Did he hurt you?" The shrinks would tell him not to encourage her if she was delusional, but damn it, she was so scared.

Her eyes closed for a brief moment as she relaxed back against the pillows. When she returned her gaze to meet his, he saw gratitude there. Josh felt his own heart speed up in response.

"Should we call the police?" he asked.

"I already did. They'll be here any moment."

"What happened?"

"I was asleep, but I woke, knowing there was someone in the room, even though it was dark."

He nodded, giving her hand a squeeze of encouragement. Hating himself for breaking the rules, despite knowing better. She would be devastated when the shrinks started to challenge her delusions, and he was making things worse by letting her think he bought into her psychic visions.

"I could feel him standing over me, watching me. I froze. Then," her voice broke a little, "I felt water."

"Water?" he asked, surprised. Acid burned the back of his throat and he wondered if maybe he was wrong about what had happened here tonight.

"Yes. His finger was wet, and he traced the sign of the cross on my forehead, my lips."

"That sign of the cross stuff-does that mean what I think it does?" he asked, his apprehension growing. His jaw clenched as he stared at the funeral flower.

This wasn't a delusion or a bad dream or anything else he could fix.

"The last rites."

CHAPTER 16.

Before she could explain anymore, there was a knock on the door and two uniformed police officers entered. Kate introduced Lightner to Tabitha Rowen and her partner, Marc Scher. Scher went to perform a quick search of the area, leaving Rowen to get the full details from Kate.

Tabitha led Kate through the events of the night. Kate appreciated her fellow officer's lack of recrimination-right now she had enough for both of them.

"I should have tried harder to claw him, scratch him," she told Tabitha. "We would have had DNA, run it through CODIS."

Tabitha flipped her notebook shut and buttoned it into her pocket. "He might not be in the system anyway."

"You were lucky he didn't hurt you or anyone else," Lightner put in, speaking for the first time since the interview began.

Kate had forgotten that he still held her hand. Both she and Tabitha stared at him.

"Luck had nothing to do with it," Kate said, surprised by how bitter her voice sounded. "If the shooter wanted to do more, I couldn't have stopped him."

Lightner squeezed her hand so tight her fingers grew numb. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated with fear as her words sank in.

"It's not going to happen again," he said as if he were the one used to carrying a gun and defending civilians.

Kate exchanged glances with Tabitha, mortified by the half-smile that crossed the other officer's face.

Damn. She tugged her hand free of Lightner's, tried to sit up straighter, act professional. As professional as she could be lying helpless in a bed. At least Tabitha wasn't treating her like a victim.

"How long after Conrad did he come here?" she asked Tabitha.

Lightner stiffened at the question. Kate could tell that he didn't like the connection she was making. Tough. As long as she still had her badge, she was a cop and no skel was going to come off the streets, threaten her and get away with it.

"Less than a hour." Tabitha frowned, her gaze moving from the bright bushel of flowers Conrad had brought to the single funeral lily. "This is one cold customer."

"Any leads?" There would have been dozens of cops at Rob's wake, surely someone saw something. But Tabitha was silent, merely shook her head.

"Maybe he'll come back here again," Kate offered. "You guys could set up-"

That brought Lightner to his feet. "No way. I'll not have a patient of mine used as bait, not to mention the danger to the staff and other patients. You got lucky once with this maniac, Kate-don't go looking for trouble."

Twice, Kate thought. She'd gotten lucky twice with the shooter. Maybe that was the point?

She felt close to something, but the door opened before she could pursue the thought. Carter, his eyes narrowed in a combination of concern and frustration, entered.

"I checked all the security tapes. Nothing," he said by way of greeting. "You mind going over it one more time for me, Kate?"

Tabitha relinquished her spot beside the bed to Carter. "I'll go check on Scher, see if anything popped during his canvass."

Carter nodded his approval and turned his stare on Lightner. Kate watched as the two men squared off in a silent duel of wills.

Lightner gave her hand one last squeeze. "I'll go see about a new room for you, Kate."

Carter waited for the door to close behind Lightner. "Looks like you got yourself a fan. You know, he sat at your bedside all that first night."

"I heard you did too," she reminded him, hoping he would drop the issue. Lightner's feelings for her, whatever they might be, were the least of her worries right now.

Carter pulled out his glasses and opened his notebook. "Start at the beginning," he ordered. "Give me everything."

Kate did as he asked, holding back nothing except her visions-they couldn't be used as evidence and didn't add anything useful anyway. When she finished, Carter blew his breath out in a disgruntled sigh.

"Not very helpful, is it?" she said. "Don't you guys have anything to work with?"

"Nothing except the ballistics from the first shooting. He used a shotgun on Conrad, but we're assuming it's the same guy who visited you as well."

She wished she had seen her midnight visitor's face. "Think it could be a pair, working in tandem?"

"I wish I knew. So far the ammo has led us nowhere." He pushed his glasses to the top of his head and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Conrad visited you earlier. Your secret admirer obviously had no problem getting in here either."