by Kay Hooper
So he could touch the telepath’s mind.
Play with it a bit.
He didn’t need touch or even line of sight, but he did need to be close enough. He wasn’t sure exactly what his limits were, since this wonderful ability was fairly new to him, but he had sensed her when he’d reached the alley, so that had been close enough.
Until Annie Duncan picked the alley as a shortcut.
He couldn’t believe she’d done that. Couldn’t believe she hadn’t even worn her gun.
Stupid bitch deserved to die.
But he hadn’t liked killing her. Too messy. And not part of his plan.
He stood in the shower for a long, long time as soon as he got home, soaping his body again and again, using the hottest water he could stand. It hurt some of the scars still not completely healed, but he didn’t mind pain. If he’d minded pain, he’d probably be dead or addicted to painkillers by now.
He was neither.
The pain had only made him stronger.
And given him The Gift.
A Gift he intended to use to its fullest. After all, why else had he been singled out?
That was one of the things he’d wanted to discover in touching the mind of the telepath: how she had received her gift. But that information, that memory, had been buried deep, and he hadn’t been able to find the event that must have changed her life.
Not yet, at least.
He’d have to try again.
But he’d have to be even more careful now. Even more cautious in what he did, how he moved. Cops went insane when one of their own was murdered, he knew that. They’d be out in force every night, and they wouldn’t hesitate to start shooting if a shadow moved the wrong fucking way.
The darkness that had been his friend could become his enemy, if he wasn’t careful.
But he wasn’t done yet. He still needed to figure the telepath out. And that other one, the odd one who had somehow reached into Annie Duncan’s dead mind and found too many details of her death.
That was . . . strange. Unnerving. That was a kind of Mind Trick he didn’t understand. And didn’t like.
There should be rules, after all. Even about Mind Tricks.
Especially about Mind Tricks.
He soaped up his body one last time, finally sure he had rid himself of the stink of blood and death.
There were plans to be made.
And he was running out of time.
—
“WOW,” ROBBIE SAID. “I gather she was right.”
“Was she ever. I was majoring in law enforcement, so remaining silent about something like that really went against the grain. I asked her if I could stop it, alert the police, do something, but she said some things had to happen just the way they happened. This was one of them. Nothing I could do to change the outcome.”
Robbie and Dante exchanged glances.
“What?” Sarah asked. “Don’t believe me?”
“Oh, we believe you,” Robbie said immediately. “It was the other thing you said your grandmother said. That some things have to happen just the way they happen. It’s sort of the mantra of the Special Crimes Unit.”
“You mean you deal with that kind of shit all the time?”
“Yeah. Not fun.”
“Frustrating, I call it. And not a little bit scary when it comes to killers. One of the girls on my campus who was killed about two months later was a friend. She was his third victim, first college student. I never knew she was dating him, so I never got the chance to warn her. And I would have, no matter what Gran said. But . . . The police got close once or twice, but it was still almost two years before they caught that bastard.”
“Please tell me he was convicted,” Robbie begged.
“Of ten counts of first-degree aggravated murder and aggravated assault. They couldn’t prove he killed the first two victims, but the police were sure, and I think they convinced the families at least enough to give them some peace. In any case, he was arrested, charged, and with his guilt being a foregone conclusion, everybody agreed to a plea deal that locks him up forever and a day.”
“Not long enough to bring any of his victims back, but better than a death penalty.”
“I agree,” Sarah said. “Even if the system was working smoothly, which it most definitely is not, with the death penalty you get months, even years, of appeals, and after all that a few brief minutes of a needle or a gas chamber or the chair or whatever—and it’s done.” She paused, adding, “I always thought killers should be locked away in tiny cells with nothing to do but think about their crimes until they die.”
“I agree,” Robbie said.
“I’m not arguing,” Dante said, but absently, his attention back on his computer.
Robbie looked at him with a frown. “You sound preoccupied. What are you doing?”
“Reviewing the security videos from the courtyard where Luna Lang vanished—and the ones inside the Tyler house. Tyler really did get a top-notch security system: great outside cameras, and inside cameras covering all the common spaces and every single bedroom doorway—but the inside cameras are programmed to be on only from eleven P.M. to six in the morning, unless someone changes the programming. Outside, twenty-four-seven. And the outside cameras cover all the windows as well as the doors. Outside lighting is excellent, and on a timer from dusk to dawn.”
“That’s certainly extensive,” Robbie said. “If not a little paranoid. But given what happened . . . Did the FBI lab do a good job of enhancing the videos?”
“Tyler’s system is digital, so much clearer than your usual security cameras to begin with. The ones in the apartment complex courtyard were your garden-variety middle-grade cameras, slightly out of focus and grainy. The lab improved them considerably.”
He still sounded preoccupied. Robbie looked at Sarah, then said to him, “Dante? What is it?”
“Mmmm.”
“Dante, use your words.”
He looked at her rather blankly for a moment, then said, “You know the woo-woo stuff with car doors being open but photographed as closed, and footprints being visible but photographed as not being there at all?”
Robbie groaned. “Don’t tell me we have more useless information from those recordings.”
“No,” Dante said. “Not useless. I think. But I’m damned if I can figure out what I’m looking at.”
Robbie and Sarah immediately left their files and came to peer over his shoulders at the computer screen. He was using a split screen, and rewound both videos so he could start them at the right point. Then he started the tape on the left side of his screen, at normal speed.
They saw Luna Lang, the young, attractive wife and mother, dressed casually in jeans with her hair tied by a ribbon at the nape of her neck. She was walking briskly along the courtyard walkway to go to her neighbor’s condo. Everything about her looked utterly and completely normal.
Then normal stopped.
She stopped. Very abruptly. There was no sign of anyone else. No movement. And for several moments, she just stood there, her back to the camera. Then she turned and suddenly looked directly up at the camera. Her face was expressionless.
Like the face of a doll.
“Anybody else just feel a chill?” Sarah murmured.
“Oh, yeah,” Robbie responded, her gaze fixed on the screen.
Luna Lang moved quickly toward the camera, a visual that was disconcerting in and of itself. It was well above her head, and it was also obvious that she stood on something, though what was difficult to tell. But as they watched, she slowly changed the angle of the camera. Still wearing absolutely no expression, eyes blank.
She apparently got down from whatever she’d been standing on, disappearing from that camera’s range for a few seconds. But then she reappeared on a second camera, which showed her holding a lightweight metalli
c outdoor chair.
Seconds later, she was adjusting that camera as well, moving it slightly, slowly. There was a quick glimpse of her as she got down and moved the chair.
And then nothing.
Sarah swore under her breath. “There wasn’t a blind spot. Not until she moved those cameras. How could we have missed that? How could the security guards have missed it?”
Dante answered readily, even though he still sounded a bit preoccupied. “On the original video there was some static, just a few seconds of it, not uncommon enough to worry the guards at the time. And one section of that walkway looks pretty much like any other section. But once Mrs. Lang disappeared . . . that’s why Jonah had it sent out for enhancement. This is what the enhancement uncovered.”
The two women exchanged looks, and it was Robbie who said steadily, “He was controlling her. Somehow, he controlled her, made her change the angle of those cameras. Maybe even made her come to him.”
Sarah straightened slowly. “She sure as hell wasn’t herself. I knew—know—Luna Lang. She’s very expressive, always has been. But this . . . I’ve never seen a human face so blank. Even the dead have more expression.”
Robbie said, “If that’s his psychic ability, mind control, then it’s definitely unique. Human minds just aren’t that easily controlled. I mean, magicians and mentalists make it look easy, and the reality of hypnosis has convinced more than one person that it must be easy to actually control another mind just by suggestion—but they’re wrong. Almost no one can be hypnotized against their will, and even those that want to and can be can’t be forced to do anything their conscious minds would reject. And psychics can’t be hypnotized at all.”
“Really?”
“There are more psychics in the world than you might expect, and the SCU has studied a good number of them. Enough to conclude with fair certainty that psychics can’t be hypnotized.”
“Even by another psychic?”
“Especially by another psychic.”
“But you said he was in your head. Earlier, before you guys went out and found Annie.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s bugging me. I still don’t believe I was hypnotized, but he was definitely in my mind. Maybe trying to find out how much control he did have.”
“And it was enough to scramble your memories?”
“Not scramble, exactly. Everything made sense, it was just . . . it played out a different way, and I knew that wasn’t right.” She scowled. “Damn, this is difficult to explain. Especially when I haven’t figured it out myself.”
Dante said steadily, “Want another puzzle piece to add to the rest?”
“Not really,” Robbie said, but leaned down again to look at the other side of the paused split-screen. “Nessa?”
“Yeah. Watch.” He set the video in motion.
The camera was placed up high so that it covered the entire large kitchen as well as the space beside it, what designers called “keeping rooms” but which were basically just open dens with fireplaces and TVs.
“That light over the island stays on all night. And there are night-lights along the hallways and stairs, mostly because it’s a habit of Nessa’s to get up. I asked,” Dante said. “The cameras can go to infrared if the rooms go totally dark, that’s how the system’s programmed, but—well, just watch.”
There was no movement for a few seconds, and then a little girl in print pajamas, her long hair hanging down her back and her favorite stuffed animal under her arm, came barefoot into the kitchen. She put her toy on the center island, used a strategically placed kitchen stool to climb high enough to reach an upper cabinet, and got a glass for herself.
She filled the glass from the refrigerator’s dispenser, then stood sipping for a moment or two.
Then she went completely still.
“Shit,” Robbie breathed.
“Wait for it,” Dante said, still steady.
The little girl’s head tilted slightly, as if she were listening to someone. Then she put her glass on the island, walked around the island and to a distant corner—and appeared on a different camera, this one in what looked like a mudroom.
“The light isn’t normally kept on in there at two in the morning,” Dante said. “Which is when this recording was time-stamped.”
They could all see the door that probably led to the garage, see the security keypad beside it—
And then everything went black.
“She didn’t go near a light switch,” Sarah said. “How long—”
“Ten seconds,” Dante said. “The room stays totally dark for ten seconds, and then—”
And then the lights in the room came back on. Nothing looked disturbed. The door was still closed. The security keypad was still blinking the red light that indicated it was active.
Nessa was nowhere to be seen.
“I reviewed recordings from all the other cameras,” Dante told them. “Inside and outside the house. The only cameras that record Nessa when she gets up are in the great room and the mudroom. You don’t even see her in the hallway outside her bedroom, or on the stairs. You see her come into the kitchen, and you see her in the mudroom heading for the door. And then she vanishes.”
“You don’t see her in the garage?”
“No. Infrared recordings for out there during the night: two cameras, one trained on the door to the mudroom, the other trained on the double garage doors. No motion at all recorded out there. No sign of Nessa once she leaves. However she leaves.”
Robbie straightened and then moved restlessly away from the computer. “Well, it had to be the same, somehow. The same as Luna Lang. He got her to do whatever it took to make herself mysteriously vanish. Sarah, you guys printed the security keypad?”
“All of them.” Sarah had also straightened. “Nessa knew the code, but Caroline and Matt said she almost never touched the keypad. Still, we checked. Smudges mostly, what you’d expect from keypads touched two or three times a day by at least two people. And the smudges were only on the numbers that are part of the code.”
“I guess the cameras were out of her reach.”
“Very much so. And the nearest ladder was in the garage, high on a rack. A ladder much too heavy and unwieldy for a ten-year-old girl to manage.”
“Even if she’d had time.” Her frown deepening, Robbie swung around to look at the other two. “Time. Jonah said none of the clocks were affected in the Tyler house.”
“The videos are time-stamped,” Dante said. “That was something else I checked to make sure. No missing time on the recordings. When the mudroom goes dark for ten seconds, the camera’s clock keeps time. It doesn’t stop or slow down. Neither do any of the other clocks.”
“So,” Sarah said, “whether Nessa got herself out of the house or he got her out, it was managed without somehow tampering with any of the cameras.”
“Or maybe,” Jonah said from the front doorway, “that’s exactly how he got her out. By tampering with the cameras.”
ELEVEN
Robbie stared at him, still frowning. Then her frown cleared, and she swore under her breath. “We’ve been missing the obvious, haven’t we?”
“I think we were meant to,” Jonah said, closing the door and coming the rest of the way into the big room. He still looked tired, but it was clear his mind was working just fine. “Want to spook an entire town, have people disappear seemingly into thin air. Which any decent magician can do.”
“No mirrors or trap doors,” Sarah offered, still frowning.
“Who needs mirrors or trap doors when he can hack into a security system?” Jonah said.
“Goddammit,” Dante muttered. “You’re right; at the Tyler house, that’s the only thing that makes sense. And all he had to do at the condo complex was insert a line of code for a few seconds of static and then have Mrs. Lang move a couple of cameras a few inches.”
“So not too difficult to hack,” Robbie noted.
“Not difficult at all. Now, the Tyler house, that would have been a lot harder. That would have taken some skill. Sounds almost impossible. Until you remember that security systems are designed to keep people out. Not in.”
Dante was rubbing his jaw absently. “Yeah, okay, but it still would have taken some skill to orchestrate the garage and outside cameras so the images remained frozen long enough for Nessa to get out and away, and yet keep the time stamp going.”
Jonah nodded toward the evidence board, where the shadow of a man’s outline represented their unsub—with no information beneath it. “So now we know three things about him. Can’t really prove he’s psychic, not in a courtroom. But now we know he’s good with computers and understands security systems. I can name off the top of my head a couple dozen men who barely know how to use their cell phones.”
“It’s a good start to the profile,” Robbie said. “Now we’re beginning to understand this guy.”
“Wait a minute,” Sarah said. “Luna looked hypnotized. And we didn’t see anyone around her.”
Robbie sighed. “He wasn’t within sight of me when he was messing with my memories. But that didn’t stop him from doing a pretty fair job, despite my shields. I seriously doubt Mrs. Lang had any shields at all. So . . .”
“She would have been easy,” Jonah said. “Nessa certainly would have. The only one of the others I would have called strong-minded is the judge.”
“Contrary to popular opinion,” Robbie said, “the more intelligent someone is, the easier they are to hypnotize. I’m guessing our psychic unsub would have been able to handle the judge too. At least long enough to get him away from his fishing site and maybe trussed up in the trunk of a car.”