Runaway Fate: Moonstone Cove Book One

by Hunter, Elizabeth

  “Easter? Do you want her to stay through Easter?”

  Megan’s eyes were wide. “She has her own room in that mansion. It doesn’t much matter whether I want her there or not. She’s there.”

  Katherine faced forward. “Well… obviously she loves you and she wants to take care of you. That’s really wonderful when you think about it.”

  Megan had pulled up to a light and was staring at her. “I’m making you help me,” she said softly. “Just for saying that.”

  “Making me help you with what?”

  “The decorating. All of it.”

  Katherine considered that, along with her complete lack of life experience with seasonal decorating. She had to admit she was slightly curious. “Do I get chicken pot pie?”

  Megan pursed her lips. “That could probably be arranged.”

  She shrugged. “Then I can help with some decorating.”

  Megan patted her hand before they pulled away from the light. “Oh, you sweet, innocent child.”

  “Just think, now that you have telekinesis, decorating a roof display is going to be so much easier.”

  “Okay… that is a good point.”

  Chapter 27

  Justin McCabe’s lawyer was a man with weary eyes and a guarded expression. “Ms. Carpenter—”

  “Alston Carpenter.” Megan had freshened up in the car and held her hand out confidently. “And this is Professor Katherine Bassi from Central Coast State.”

  “You were also there at the fitness center on that day.”

  “Yes.”

  Megan continued, “We’re not here to do anything but help Justin.”

  “You understand my skepticism obviously.” He looked around the empty room. They were the only three there. “I hope you understand. Mr. and Mrs. McCabe decided at the last minute that they didn’t want to be here, but they did tell me that I could meet with you on their behalf.”

  “Think of us as allies,” Katherine said.

  “You’re the woman who tackled Justin at the gym.”

  “Yes. But please know that I believe if he had been aware of his actions, Justin would never have committed a crime.” Katherine would never forget the confusion and sorrow in that boy’s face. “I am confident there’s another explanation.”

  “Okay.” The weary eyes turned suspicious. “I understand you want Justin’s phone?”

  “Yes.” Katherine pulled out her laptop. “I want to clone it. We think there might be a connection between Justin and three other students who have all committed random acts of violence in the past six months due to an app that they downloaded as part of a research study.”

  “Megan gave me a quick rundown on the phone. I’m not sure how much you’ll discover on it. According to the Moonstone Cove Police Department, it’s a brick.”

  “What do you mean it’s a brick?”

  “They think it was water damage, but they don’t know how it basically drowned when it was in his pocket.” The lawyer pulled out a black smartphone in a Ziploc bag. “They even sent it home with us when he was released into psychiatric custody. They took the SIM card and told us the rest of it was completely useless.”

  Katherine held out her hand. “Well, I guess we’ll see.”

  * * *

  They drove away disappointed.

  “Yep,” Katherine said. “Completely useless.”

  “Are there, like, computer science experts that might be able to do something with it? A programmer? My seventeen-year-old daughter? I’m just saying, she’s constantly attached to hers, so maybe she has a way of absorbing information by digital osmosis.”

  Constantly attached…

  The vision came to her quickly. There was a man walking out onto a porch, limping a little and holding a hand flat to his abdomen as if he’d just had surgery. He sat and stared at the corral in front of his house. She could hear a flag flapping in the distance.

  “Katherine?”

  Her ears popped. “Megan, do you need to get home right away?”

  “Why?”

  “I just saw someone we need to talk to. Mario might be the key.”

  “Mario?”

  She put her phone to her ear. “Abby’s boyfriend. He might not have been part of the study, but he was living with someone who was.”

  Megan’s eyes lit up. “Great idea!”

  “Hello?”

  “Baxter!” Thank goodness he’d picked up. “I have a favor I need to ask.”

  * * *

  After more than a little cajoling on Baxter’s part, Mario agreed to speak with them at his parents’ home in Nipomo. They drove through acres of farmland and horse ranches before they found the simple white ranch house beneath a grove of cottonwood trees. It overlooked a white-railed horse corral.

  Sitting on the porch was a tall, long-legged young man with bronze skin and curly dark hair. He sat up and waved as they approached.

  “Please don’t get up!” Katherine shouted as they approached. “Please. I know you’re still recovering.”

  He waved and sat back down, holding his abdomen. “Thanks, Katherine.”

  “It’s good to see you.” She smiled. “Even under these circumstances. This is my friend Megan.”

  “Nice to meet you.” He nodded toward the door. “My mom said if you want anything to drink, just knock and she’ll bring you whatever. Sorry, she’s watching my nieces and nephews today, so she’s gotta stay with them.”

  “Maybe it’s better that she doesn’t come out, because I wanted to ask about Abby.”

  The pain was evident in Mario’s eyes. “Baxter said you’d want to talk about her.”

  “First off, I need to know, did you have any inclination that—”

  “Nothing.” His voice broke a little and he cleared his throat. “There was nothing. I’ve gone over everything in my head so many times, but there’s just… nothing.” He breathed out the last word. “You know Abby. She was… sunshine.” Mario looked heartbroken. “I was the pessimist in the relationship, you know? She was always upbeat. I used to tease her if she got mad because…” The corner of his mouth turned up. “I’m not gonna lie, it was so cute it made me laugh. She hated that.”

  “She hated it?”

  “Not like that.” His eyes turned inward. “We were good, Abby and me. It was good.”

  Whoever had sabotaged these students belonged in jail. For a very, very long time.

  “Mario,” she started, “I know you’ve talked to the police about it, but can you tell me what Abby’s demeanor was that day? Had she been drinking? Did she appear to be under the influence of anything?”

  “She had a beer with lunch. Just one. So nothing like that. She never took drugs, just her prescription or allergy medicine sometimes.”

  “And later?” she asked. “When it happened?”

  He cleared his throat. “If I had to describe the way she was when it happened… It was like she was possessed. Her eyes were open, but there was nothing behind them.” He kept his voice low. “Don’t mention that to anyone because I honestly think my mother and father believe that she was actually possessed. They haven’t said that—they don’t want to look superstitious—but nothing else makes sense.”

  “What if I told you we think we know what might have happened and it had nothing to do with Abby’s feelings for you? It didn’t have anything to do with Abby at all.”

  He frowned. “What? Really?”

  Katherine took a deep breath. “Abby was part of a study last year, right? The one about anxiety?”

  He shook his head. “The police tried to get me to blame this shit on her meds, but I am telling you, that girl never abused her medication. She never had a weird reaction in all the time I knew her. No sleepwalking or altered states. Nothing like that. Like, how many people do you know on Xanax and shit? That was all she took. Fucking Xanax. Or… I don’t know, the generic of that one, I think. She’d been on it a long time.”

  “But the study she did wasn’t related to her medicat
ion, right? It was related to biofeedback.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “She talked to me about it before. Said there were no side effects. It was kind of like a meditation thing.”

  “Biofeedback involves a laboratory component where Abby would have been hooked up to sensors to make her aware of her body’s reaction to stressors. Then, combined with that, there are visualizations that she would have done after the in-person treatments, and then she would report back on her independent exercises. That was part of the study.”

  “Yeah. That sounds right.”

  Megan piped up. “Do you remember her checking her phone a lot?”

  Mario frowned. “I mean… no more than usual. Everyone checks their phone, right?”

  “Did she have different reminder tones or alarms for the reporting app for the study?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’ve never thought about it before, but if I think back, yes. Her regular text tone was like… a lightsaber noise.”

  “Oh, I remember that!” Katherine grinned. “She showed me how to get it once, but then I thought it would feel like copying her if I got it, so I didn’t.”

  Mario smiled a little. “I remember that dinner. Yeah, but for the app, it was some kind of chiming noise. Kind of like wind chimes.”

  “And do you remember her getting those regularly?”

  “Oh yeah. I used to tease her about it.” He shook his head. “I teased her that her boyfriend was calling. Not that she ever cheated on me, but she liked the meditation part of the study so much I called it her boyfriend because whoever narrated that part was a dude.”

  “So there was a guided visualization part of the app with someone narrating?”

  “Yeah. She’d usually just go in another room twice a day when it chimed, but every now and then she’d get the notification at an odd hour and she’d do it then. Or if she was stressed about something.”

  “What about that day?” Katherine asked. “Did you hear the chimes then?”

  “On the day she attacked me?” He frowned. “Yeah. I told the police even. I heard that notification once, and then again like five minutes later. I thought maybe she was ignoring it even though she was in the bedroom. But then maybe fifteen minutes later, she comes out of the bedroom, goes to the kitchen, takes the trash out to the corner, comes back, and…” Mario clammed up. “You know the rest.”

  It mirrored the timeline of Kaylee’s notifications too. One notification and then another five minutes later, then an erratic outburst fifteen minutes after that.

  “Thank you, Mario.” Katherine rose. “For what it’s worth, I know Abby loves you, and I think there’s a logical explanation for all this.”

  Chapter 28

  “Could a guided meditation really do all that?” Megan asked as they were driving back to Moonstone Cove. “Could it make you do something that completely out of character?”

  “It seems like a stretch, but you have people who have willingly allowed this program access to their brain. Mario said the voice was male,” Katherine muttered. “Greg Hammond. He helped write the app. He was the administrator. It had to be him.”

  “Why though?”

  Isn’t it always personal?

  “Sarah Jordan’s incident was months before any of the others.” Katherine pulled out her phone and called Sarah.

  The phone picked up after three rings and a man answered. “Jordan Ranch.”

  “I’d like to speak to Sarah Jordan please. Tell her it’s Professor Katherine Bassi from Central Coast State.”

  “She’s out of the house right now. Probably be back in an hour or two. Can I take a message?”

  “I have a question for her. If you could have her call me back as soon as she’s able, I would appreciate it.” Katherine told the man her number and hoped Sarah would call her back. “What if it was all an experiment for him too? What if Greg targeted Sarah for some reason, trying to use her participation in the study to manipulate her?”

  “And it worked, so he tried it on other people? Why?”

  “I don’t know that part yet.” Katherine picked up her phone again. “We need to call Detective Bisset.” She dialed the number of the Moonstone Cove Police Department and put the phone on speaker. “Detective Bisset please.”

  “One moment.”

  After a few minutes, a male voice came over the line. “This is Drew Bisset.”

  “Detective Bisset, this is Katherine Bassi again. Before you hang up, I want to tell you that we’ve discovered a link between all four students who’ve had violent incidents in the past few months.”

  “Did you say four?”

  “I told you about Sarah Jordan weeks ago.”

  He was silent for a moment. “You’re saying they’re connected?”

  “Obviously. This most recent incident was averted; there was a student who was on top of a building at the university last week and something bad was going to happen. Her name is Kaylee Ivers. You can ask campus security about it if you wish. I was there.”

  “You were there?”

  “It was another odd coincidence, but I know this girl from one of my laboratories and she is the last person who would—”

  “Professor Bassi, I appreciate you trying to help, and I know you care deeply about the school, but—”

  “They were all part of a study, Detective.” She pressed forward when he fell silent. “Sarah, Justin, Abby, and Kaylee. They were connected to a seemingly harmless biofeedback study that utilized an app on their smartphones. Tell me something—was Abby’s smartphone damaged like Justin’s was?”

  He was silent for a long time. “How did you know his phone was damaged?”

  “I have my sources. Was Abby’s phone damaged?”

  He huffed out a breath. “She dropped it in the sink in the kitchen before she attacked her boyfriend. Water damage.”

  “That’s convenient. There was an app on her phone to help her with the visualizations she’d been practicing for the study. She received two notifications from the app prior to her violent outburst. Her boyfriend told you about them, about the wind chime noise, but I imagine you didn’t realize the significance.”

  “Professor Bassi, are you saying that a meditation app caused these people to commit violence? Isn’t it usually the opposite of that?”

  Katherine took a deep breath. “This study carefully pinpointed deep-seated sources of an individual’s anxiety or fear, and then someone exploited that fear through guided visualizations that caused the students to react in the opposite way they normally would.” She pressed her eyes shut. “Think of it as a form of very intense hypnosis.”

  “You know, my brother used that to quit smoking, but I don’t see him going off and trying to stab someone after a session.”

  Katherine covered the phone with her hand and said, “Did everyone’s brother quit smoking via hypnosis?”

  “No,” Megan said. “But I had a cousin—”

  “Seriously?” She uncovered the phone and continued speaking to Detective Bisset. “Instead of calming them down, the visualizations played on their fears, eventually causing them to lash out, probably as a form of self-defense. Then, like hypnosis, they forgot what they’d done.”

  “And you think a phone app can do all that?”

  “Detective Bisset, if you can think of another explanation for normal kids to be committing violent acts like this, I’d love to know it.”

  He sighed. “Who made the app?”

  “Two people, a graduate student who helped run the study, Greg Hammond, and one of the professors, Alice Kraft.”

  Detective Bisset was silent.

  “You know one of those names.”

  “Give me your phone number, Professor Bassi.” Drew Bisset’s voice was grim. “If I have any other questions, I’m going to call you.”

  “Are you going to look into Greg and Alice Kraft? While you’re at it, can you get a warrant or something to search the server at the behavioral science building? I think they were also usin
g the app to data-mine the students without their permission and—”

  “Your number, Professor Bassi. Please.”

  She gave him the information, and he hung up the phone. “He knew one of the names.”

  “My money is on Greg.” Megan shrugged. “Don’t know why; just feeling kinda anti-man right now.”

  “That’s understandable. I’m leaning toward him because he’s the app administrator. So if there were special messages pushed out to only a few students, he had to know about it. But I’m not sure that Alice Kraft wasn’t involved too. She’s the one who wrote the app. She has far more experience in computer programming. It’s her specialty. So there’s no way Greg could have included all the extra data mining without her knowing about it.”

  “I may have to stop hanging out with you so much,” Megan said. “My brain hurts.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Is it too early for wine?”

  Katherine smiled. “Let’s go by North Beach Coffee and get a drink. Maybe take a walk. We’ll both feel better and we can clear our heads.”

  * * *

  One hot caffe latte and an iced macchiato later and Katherine and Megan were walking along the boardwalk that bordered North Beach Drive and listening to the sound of waves as the sun glinted on the water in the distance.

  The ocean was at low tide, and outcroppings of tide pools and mussel-festooned rocks littered their corner of the cove. Seagulls squawked overhead, and plovers ran across the kelp-strewn beach.

  “I’m starting to love it here,” Megan said. “There’s been about a dozen times since Friday where I’ve thought, ‘That’s it. I’m packing up and moving back to Atlanta.’”

  “I wouldn’t blame you. When bad things happen, it’s understandable to seek familiarity. I would miss you, but I’d completely understand.”

  “But then I’d be pulling the kids out of their new schools, which they like. And taking them away from their father. He wouldn’t fight me, but… I don’t know. I don’t want them to be lying, cheating assholes like him, but I also don’t want them to not have a father, you know?”