Judson studied the photo. “I recognize you. Who are the others?”
“It’s a group shot of the members of Evelyn’s research study. She kept it thumbtacked to her bulletin board. The fact that it had been ripped off the board and dropped on the floor bothered me for some reason.”
“Ballinger is not in the picture.”
“She was the one who took the photo. Three of the people in that picture are dead. Mary Henderson, the blonde on the left, Ben Schwartz, the man standing next to her, and Zander Taylor. Taylor is the good-looking dark-haired man in the first row.”
“You’re standing next to a serial killer.”
She shuddered. “Don’t remind me. His goal was to take us down in the order in which we were posed in the picture. It was all a game to him. He was annoyed because he had to make me his third target. He said I had interfered with the proper sequence of play.”
Judson’s eyes heated. So did his ring. “He told you that?”
“Shortly before he went over the falls. Yes.”
“All right, we’ll finish this conversation later. Let’s take a look at the scene.”
Gwen kept her talent tamped down so that she would not see the ghost in the mirror. She reached around the corner of the door frame, found the wall switch and flipped it.
Shock lanced through her when she registered the chaos inside the office. Desk drawers and cupboard doors stood open. Books had been swept off the shelves. Files had been pulled out of the metal cabinet and dumped on the floor.
“Good grief,” she whispered, stunned.
“I take it things didn’t look like this when you got here this morning?” Judson said.
“No,” she said. “Someone searched this room sometime after I left today.”
She was already tense and on edge. Her startled response to the scene in the office kicked up her talent. It was an intuitive reaction. Before she could suppress it, she was looking into the mirror.
The ghost appeared in the glass.
“Well, you knew that this was going to get a lot more complicated, didn’t you, dear?” the ghost said. “That’s why you brought along your very own psychic investigator. I must say, he looks interesting. Definitely a high-end talent. I do hope he’s competent.”
“You and me, both,” Gwen said under her breath.
“What did you say?” Judson asked.
“Nothing.” She dragged her attention away from the mirror, lowered her senses and looked at him. “Talking to myself. I do that sometimes. Bad habit.” She swept a hand out to indicate the overturned office. “What happened here?”
“I’ll go out on a limb here and say that it sure looks like someone was searching for something he expected to find in Evelyn’s office.”
“No kidding.” She paused, frowning. “Maybe the killer didn’t find whatever he was after on her computer so he came back to take another look.”
“I don’t think so.” Judson prowled deliberately through the office, stopping briefly to brush his fingertips across the top of the desk. “I think we’re dealing with someone else. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection between the second person and the killer, though.”
“What makes you think that there was a second person here?”
“There’s a lot of desperation and growing rage in this space. Whoever conducted the search started out with a high level of urgency and left in a frustrated fury.”
Gwen was fascinated. “You can sense all that?”
“Sure,” Judson said, “providing the emotions were laid down with a lot of intense energy as they were in this case. It’s what I do, Gwen.”
“All right, let’s think about this. If there was a second intruder, maybe he was searching for whatever was on the computer or the cell phone, in which case he didn’t find it because the killer got to the information first.”
“That’s a reasonable assumption.” Judson crouched on the floor and shuffled through the folders that had been dumped on the carpet. “Some of these files go back thirty years.”
“I told you, Evelyn devoted her life to the study of the paranormal. But in the end, she was never able to prove anything to mainstream science.”
Judson opened several folders and examined the contents. “Looks like most of her research was focused on dreams.”
“Much of it was, yes. That’s why she and I became so close. I met Evelyn when I was in high school at the Summerlight Academy. She was a counselor there, the only one who really understood my psychic side. My aura vision is linked to my lucid-dreaming ability.”
“Yeah?”
She flushed, remembering how bad things had gone that night in Seattle when she had made the mistake of offering to fix his dark dreams.
“Never mind,” she said quickly. “It’s complicated, believe me.”
“I believe you.” Judson got to his feet with the languid grace of a tiger. “You and Ballinger stayed in touch after you left Summerlight?”
“Yes.” She watched Judson move through the room. “Well? What do you think? Did Evelyn die of natural causes because of the shock of a random home invasion? Or was she murdered?”
Judson stopped in the vicinity of the space where Gwen had found Evelyn’s body. Energy heated the atmosphere.
“She was murdered,” he said quietly. “No question about it.”
Gwen thought she was prepared for that answer. It was the same conclusion that she had arrived at that morning. Nevertheless, Judson’s matter-of-fact certainty made her catch her breath.
“By paranormal means?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Damn, just like last time.” Gwen made fists with her hands. “I was hoping I was wrong.”
Judson did not respond to that. Instead, he did another short circuit of the room and stopped again near the desk.
“What?” she asked. “I can tell that something isn’t coming together for you.”
Judson met her eyes. “Ballinger died here, where I’m standing. But I’m almost positive that the killer was not physically close to her when she died. He was standing over there, near the door.”
“Oh, crap, are you sure?”
He gave her a politely patient look. “Analyzing crime scenes is what I do, Gwen.”
“Yes, I know. Sorry, it’s just that—never mind. I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“In my experience, it takes a very strong talent to overwhelm another person’s aura and stop the heart,” Judson said. “I’ve met very, very few psychics who can generate that much firepower and even fewer who can focus their talent so that it can be used as a lethal weapon. In those rare situations, the killer almost always needs to have physical contact with the victim. But there are exceptions.”
A chill feathered her senses. “Yes, I know. You think that whoever murdered Evelyn used a paranormal weapon of some kind, don’t you?”
“That’s the only explanation that works for this scenario. According to what Sam and his lab techs have discovered, psi-based weapons have to be used at fairly close range. They aren’t very powerful or accurate beyond a range of about twenty feet.”
Gwen took a long breath and let it out slowly, with control. “I’ve heard the Coppersmith R-and-D lab does research in that field.”
“Paranormal weapons have other limitations, as well. They can only be activated by someone who possesses some talent. And if they are crystal-based technology, they have to be tuned to the wavelengths of the individual who intends to use it. There are other issues, as well. Naturally occurring crystals that can be weaponized are extremely rare. Sam has tried growing them under lab conditions, but he’s had only limited success.”
Gwen wrapped her arms around herself. “Still, such weapons do exist.”
Judson met her eyes across the room. “You sound like you’ve had some personal experience.”
“Two years ago Zander Taylor used a paranormal weapon to murder Mary and Ben.”
Judson frowned. “Are you certain of that?
”
“Yes,” she said. “Because he tried to use it on me, too. Now it looks like Evelyn has been killed in the same way. It’s as if Zander Taylor has come back from the grave and brought his damned camera with him.”
“What camera?”
“That’s what his dreadful device looked like, a small camera. Just point and shoot.”
Judson watched her for a long moment.
“How did you escape?”
“We were in the lab. There’s a great deal of energy in that place. Something went very wrong when Zander tried to use his camera. The device sort of exploded, I think.”
Judson gave her a politely skeptical look. “Sort of exploded?”
“It’s hard to explain. All I know is that he suddenly started screaming. He ran for the falls and jumped.”
“That’s all there was to it?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re a damn good liar,” he said. He smiled. “I like that in a woman.”
Eight
“When did you start talking to yourself?” Judson asked.
He’d held the question back until after the waiter had brought two glasses of wine to the table. The name of the restaurant was the Wilby Café. It featured a typical Pacific Northwest menu that ran the usual gamut from salmon and Dungeness crab cakes to steak. The establishment’s most outstanding virtue in his opinion was its convenient location. The café was located within walking distance of the Riverview Inn.
He could tell his question caught Gwen off guard. That had been his intention. She was expecting to be interrogated on the subject of Zander Taylor and the camera weapon. He’d get around to that eventually but he preferred the indirect route. It was usually easier to get straight answers out of people if they didn’t see the questions coming. He’d spent enough time in Gwen’s company now to know that she had long ago learned to keep secrets.
When it came to keeping secrets, he thought, they had a lot in common.
Gwen paused, her wineglass halfway to her lips, and looked at him for a long, considering moment. He didn’t care about the delay. He could sit here and look into her eyes forever. He realized that he was still a little jacked. Not like he could shut down completely around her, he thought. Something about Gwen kept him on edge and heated his blood as well as his senses.
For a while he wondered if she was going to answer the question. She had a right to her privacy, but, damn, he wanted to know more about her. And he knew that the talking-to-herself thing was not just an old habit.
She reflected a moment longer. In the end she took a sip of wine and set the glass down very precisely on the table.
“I wasn’t talking to myself today,” she said. “I was in a waking dream, talking to Evelyn’s ghost in the mirror.”
She watched him, waiting for his reaction.
“Huh.” He ran through the possible scenarios. “The ghost is some sort of dreamstate image manifested by your intuition?”
Gwen relaxed visibly. Her eyes cleared and she smiled. “Yes. That’s exactly what happens when I see the ghosts. But it’s almost impossible to explain that to people because it sounds like I’m claiming to have visions.”
“Which is exactly what is going on, when you get right down to it.”
“Sort of, yes.” She eyed him, once again wary. “You don’t appear too freaked. Most people look at me funny when I tell them about the ghosts. My aunt said I mustn’t ever tell anyone about the visions. She said I should learn to ignore them. But after she died, I went into the foster care system. Eventually I made the mistake of confiding in a counselor. Everyone concluded that I was seriously disturbed. The next thing I knew, I landed in the Summerlight Academy. By the time I graduated, I had learned to keep my secrets, believe me.”
“When did the ghost visions start?”
“When I was about twelve. They got stronger as I went through my teens.”
“That’s about the age when Emma, Sam and I came into our talents,” he said.
“I’d see the ghosts in unexpected places, almost always on some reflective surface,” Gwen said. “The first time it was a mirror in an old antique shop. I was terrified. Somehow I knew that it was not a real ghost, but in a way, that just made the experience more unnerving.”
“Because you wondered if you were crazy.”
“For a time, yes,” she said. “So did everyone else around me. But it was Evelyn who helped me to understand that the visions are actually lucid dreams that occur when I’m awake. I can go into a lucid dream on purpose. But the energy laid down at the scenes of violence seems to trigger the ghost dreams.”
“A lucid dreamer is someone who knows when he or she is dreaming, right? The dreamer can take control of the dream.”
“Yes.” Gwen took another sip of wine. “It’s not an uncommon experience. A lot of people occasionally have lucid dreams. But in my case, the talent is linked to my psychic intuition and my ability to see auras. I’ve come to the conclusion that seeing ghosts at old murder scenes is actually just a side effect of my type of paranormal sensitivity.”
“How did you figure out that the ghosts were always at old murder scenes?”
“After the first few instances, I went online and researched the locations where I had seen the ghosts. It didn’t take long to find out that in most cases there was a record of a murder or unexplained death in the vicinity. My intuition was picking up some of the psychic residue and interpreting it as a vision of a ghost.”
“The energy laid down by violence is powerful stuff,” he said. “A lot of people are sensitive to it, even those without any measurable talent. Almost everyone has had the experience of walking into a room or a location that gives off a bad vibe.”
“I know. But in my case the reaction is a little over-the-top.”
“How bad was the Summerlight Academy?” he asked.
“I was miserable at the time, but looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was very lonely at first and I was scared, but I soon met Abby and another talent, Nick Sawyer, there. The three of us bonded. I’m not sure why. We just did. We stuck together until we graduated, and we’re still very close. We’re family. The other good thing about Summerlight was that I met Evelyn there. She was the one who helped me deal with my talent.”
“But most of the time you use it to do your psychic counseling work.”
“I prefer living clients.” She smiled over the rim of the glass. “They pay better.”
That surprised a laugh out of him. “I can see the upside.”
She stopped smiling and wrinkled her nose. “But living clients are also incredibly frustrating. I can pick up a lot of impressions when I view their auras, but those impressions are not helpful if I can’t get context. To obtain that, I need cooperation from my clients. That isn’t always forthcoming.”
He raised his brows. “Are we, by any chance, talking about me now?”
“We are.”
“I’m not one of your clients,” he said very softly, very deliberately.
“True,” she agreed. “But that could change. I’ve got room on my schedule.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Fine. Be like that.” She finished off the rest of her wine and set the glass down. “Your dreams, your problem.”
“That’s how I look at it.”
“At least you’re not one of those clients who pays for dream therapy and then fails to take my advice.”
He smiled. “Does that happen a lot?”
“Oh, sure, all the time. Clients book a session, spend forty minutes telling me about their dreams to give me context, I do an analysis, put them in a trance and help them rework the dreamscape until we discover the unresolved issues involved. Then we talk about the issues and I offer advice. The clients go away and return a month later complaining about the same problems.”
“Because they didn’t follow your advice?”
“It’s very frustrating.” Gwen shook her head. “I suppose
I should be grateful for the repeat business but—”
She broke off because he had started to laugh. She watched him, her eyes widening with a mix of curiosity and bemusement.
He was even more surprised by his laughter than she was. It had been a while since he’d been able to laugh like this. A couple of people at a nearby table turned to look at him.
He finally settled into an amused smile and reached for a chunk of bread.
Gwen narrowed her eyes. “What’s so funny?”
“You, the psychic counselor, wondering why people pay you for advice and then ignore the advice,” he said around a mouthful of the bread. “Talk about naive. But it’s rather sweet when you think about it.”
“Excuse me?”
“People ask for advice all the time. They go to their friends for it. They talk to virtual strangers at the gym. They pay doctors, shrinks, therapists and psychics for advice. But very few people actually take the advice unless that advice happens to be something they are already inclined to do.”
“That’s a very insightful comment.” She wrinkled her nose. “Still, it’s one thing to have a person reject my help flat-out like you did. It’s something else altogether when people pay you for expensive dream therapy and then ignore it. Do you know how disheartening that is?”
“Sure, I’m a consultant, remember? The pay is good in my line, but almost no one ever follows a consultant’s advice.”
She furrowed her intelligent brow. “I hadn’t realized that.”
“Look on the bright side: at least we both get paid for the advice we give.”
“There is that.”
The waiter put the plates of broiled salmon down in front of them and departed.
Gwen examined the salmon for a few seconds and then looked up.
“Do you think we’ll be able to find Evelyn’s killer?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“You sound very certain of that.”
He shrugged. “The case looks simple enough. It will take a while to sort out, but it’s just a matter of following up on the leads. Plenty of those.”
“I wish you had been around two years ago when Zander Taylor was stalking the people in Evelyn’s research study. Maybe he could have been stopped before he killed Ben and Mary.”
Dream Eyes dl-2 Page 6