She searched for a place to begin.
“There’s no way to know how many people Zander Taylor killed before he found his way to Wilby,” she said. “And no way to prove that he murdered anyone. Evelyn and I did some research after he died, but it wasn’t easy trying to trace his comings and goings. Neither of us was a professional investigator. But we found hints of what looked like a pattern.”
“How did you piece it together?”
“Zander was very friendly—quite chatty. He talked a lot about how good it was to be hanging out with other people like himself, people who had real talent. He went on and on about how many phony psychics there were in the world. After he . . . died, Evelyn and I made up a partial list of all the places he had mentioned in his conversations. Then we went online to check the local business directories for those locations.”
Judson nodded appreciatively. “You searched for people who advertised psychic services and then you tried to match the names with local obituaries?”
She glanced at him, surprised. “Yes, exactly. We couldn’t think of any other way to go about it. I mean, it’s not like you can go online and search for a genuine psychic private investigator. Zander was right about one thing—lot of frauds out there.”
Amusement briefly lit Judson’s eyes. “Maybe Sam and I should run some ads offering psychic investigations. We’re the real deal.”
She smiled. “The problem is that your ads for Coppersmith Consulting would look exactly like the ads run by the frauds and fakes.”
“So it comes down to, how do you convince people that you’re a real psychic investigator? You’re right. That’s tricky.”
“It was a very time-consuming process, but in the end Evelyn and I found enough matches—deceased fortune-tellers, palm-readers and other storefront psychics who had all died unexpectedly of natural causes—to convince us that Taylor had murdered a lot of people. We stopped searching for victims because there didn’t seem to be much point continuing.”
“Did Taylor tell you about his kills there at the end when he tried to murder you?”
“Yes. He was thrilled with himself because here in Wilby he was at last hunting real psychics, not the phonies.”
Judson drank some of his brandy. “Killing other people of talent made the game more of a challenge.”
“He said he thought it would be harder to kill genuine psychics, but it turned out that real talents were no more difficult to murder than normal people.”
“When did you get suspicious that there was a killer in your midst?” Judson asked.
“Immediately after the first murder.” Gwen stilled her hand on Max’s furry side. Memories of that first terrible day flooded back. “I found Mary’s body out at the lodge. She was lying on the floor near one of the workbenches at the back. I somehow knew she hadn’t had a heart attack or an aneurism. There was something about the way she was positioned that told me she had tried to run. At least, that’s what the ghost was telling me.”
“You saw her ghost at the scene?”
“Yes, in the walls of the mirror engine,” Gwen said. She resumed stroking Max, who twitched an ear and purred louder.
“What’s the mirror engine?” Judson asked.
“The most exotic piece of test equipment that Evelyn constructed. It was her pride and joy. She built it primarily for me. She thought she could use the engine to measure and record the energy patterns that I generate when I go into my talent. Mary died near one of the mirrors, and that’s where I saw her ghost.”
“Did you pick up anything else?”
“Nothing useful,” Gwen admitted. “I’ll give Oxley credit for conducting a fairly thorough investigation. After all, Mary was only in her mid-thirties and there was no indication that she had a chronic underlying illness. But in the end, Oxley couldn’t find anything. The medical examiner ruled that she had died of a heart attack.”
“You found the second victim in the same place three weeks later?”
“Yes. Ben died near the mirror engine, too. My intuition told me that, like Mary, he had been trying to flee when he went down. But again, the authorities called it death by natural causes. In his case it was a little more believable because Ben had severe asthma and some other health issues. I realized I was in trouble on that occasion. I could tell that Oxley’s cop instincts were stirring.”
“Two dead bodies within one month, both found in the same location by the same person, would have that effect on any cop,” Judson said.
“I talked to Evelyn. By then we were both very certain that someone had targeted her study subjects. She immediately canceled the project and warned everyone in the group. Most of the subjects panicked and left town.”
“But you didn’t leave Wilby?”
“No, I kept thinking there was something I was missing in the lab. I went back to take another look. Zander showed up. As soon as he walked into the lodge, I saw his aura. He was really jacked and terribly excited. The dream energy was bad, unwholesome. Wrong. I just knew that he was the killer. And he knew that I knew.”
“What happened?” Judson asked.
“We were alone in the lab. He started talking, playing his game with me. He told me that he had planned to take us down in the order in which we appeared in the group photo. He said I’d ruined the plan and spooked the herd. That’s what he called us, the herd. He said that because I’d interfered in his hunt, he was going to have to get rid of me out of order even though he had scheduled me to be last.”
Judson watched her with dangerously hot eyes. “Go on.”
“Zander reached into his jacket and took out what looked like a small digital camera and aimed it at me. He told me he had used it to kill Mary and Ben and a lot of phony psychics. Now it was my turn. He aimed the camera at me and started stalking me. I felt an icy sensation. My heart started to beat harder. I couldn’t catch my breath. I started to run. He laughed and told me that was what the others had done. He said that the chase was the best part. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I fled into the mirror engine. He followed me. And suddenly he was screaming.”
“He saw something in the mirrors?”
She took a deep breath and buried her fingers in Max’s fur. It was time to choose her words very, very carefully.
“I told you, there was a lot of energy in the atmosphere that day. I was in my talent and so was Taylor. There was the additional energy of the camera, too. The mirrors are designed to enhance the effects of psi. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think Taylor saw things in the mirrors—maybe the images of some of the people he murdered.”
Judson’s expression sharpened. “He saw ghosts in the mirrors?”
“Yes, I think so. He shouted at them. You’re dead, damn you. Why don’t you stay dead? He started firing that strange weapon at the mirrors. There was a flash of brilliant light. It looked like a real camera flash or a strobe light except that it was hot psi. I could sense it. The energy bounced off the mirrors—straight back at Zander. He started screaming. He turned and ran out the front door of the lab. He kept running and he kept screaming, and when he got to the falls, he threw himself into the water. I ran out behind him. I was in time to see him go over. I will never forget the look in his eyes.”
She stopped talking. For a time Max’s rumbling purr was the only sound in the room.
Judson contemplated the fire. “Do you think that it was the reflected energy from his own weapon that killed Taylor?”
“That’s the only explanation that makes any sense. All I can tell you is that in those last moments he went stark staring mad.” She paused. “I sometimes have a few bad dreams of my own, especially at this time of year.”
Judson’s brows rose. “You can’t fix your own bad dreams?”
“I haven’t been able to fix these,” she said. “As a strong lucid dreamer, I can usually structure a dream to some extent. The trick to handling a bad dreamscape is to find a way out. But I haven’t been able to find an escape route through my
Zander Taylor dream. So it keeps repeating. August seems to be the worst month.”
“Because that’s when the deaths occurred.”
“Yes.”
She stopped talking, waiting for the other shoe to drop—waiting to find out if Judson was going to buy her heavily edited version of events. She had told him the truth, she reminded herself. Just not quite all of it.
To her surprise, he reached across the small space between them. His strong, warm hand closed over hers.
“I don’t have any helpful advice to give you,” he said. “You don’t ever forget watching someone die. Doesn’t matter if the bastard deserved it. Violent death exacts a psychic toll from anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. I see that in my work and I’ve experienced it firsthand. No one is ever the same afterward. If the events of two years ago didn’t give you a few bad nights, it would probably mean that you were missing something vitally important in the part of you that is supposed to make you a decent person. It’s only the monsters that can kill without paying a psychic price. That’s what makes them monsters.”
She looked at him. “I’m the one who is supposed to be the psychic counselor here.”
“Yeah, well, that’s all the counseling you’re going to get from me because I don’t have anything else to offer. I’ll warn you up front that what I just said isn’t going to be any help in the middle of a bad night. All you can do is remind yourself that it was the outcome that matters. You saved not only yourself but all of the people Taylor likely would have murdered in the future. You take that information and you move forward.”
“I get the feeling you’ve given yourself the same lecture recently.”
“Yeah.”
“Is it working for you?”
He looked at her and said nothing.
“Right,” she said. She drank some more of her brandy. “You need closure, too.”
He ignored that. “There’s no doubt that it was Taylor’s body they found?”
“None. Evelyn and I both knew him and so did Nicole. All three of us identified him.”
“Did anyone come forth to claim the body?” Judson asked.
“No. It was Nicole who arranged to have Taylor cremated.”
“What about the weapon?”
“The camera?” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to it. I think about it a lot. I try to see it in my dreams. Evelyn and I went back to the lab the following day to look for it, but we couldn’t find it. We assumed that it went into the river with Zander, but I’ve never been entirely sure of that.”
“What makes you think it didn’t get lost in the water?” Judson asked.
“I’ve replayed that scene over and over again in my dreams, using my talent to take a closer look. I could swear that Zander did not have anything in his hands when he ran outside the lab and went toward the falls. I think he dropped the camera somewhere inside the lab. I thought I heard it hit the concrete floor, but I might be wrong. But like I said, Evelyn and I searched that whole place the next day and we didn’t find it.”
“And now Evelyn Ballinger has died in a way that is very similar to the deaths of the two people who were killed by the camera weapon.”
“Yes.”
“You said you didn’t go back to the lab until the next day,” Judson continued. “That leaves an entire night during which someone could have searched the lab.”
“But that would mean that someone else knew about the weapon and what it could do. It means that person knew where to search for it after Zander’s body turned up in the river.” Gwen caught her breath. “It means someone was aware that Taylor was murdering people with a crystal-based weapon and that he intended to murder me that day.”
Judson’s ring flashed with dark energy, but his expression did not change. “Yes,” he said. “We’re talking about an accomplice who may have decided to continue playing the game.”
“But no one else in the study group has died in the past two years. Evelyn and I kept track.”
Judson’s did not take his eyes off the fire. “You said that Mary Henderson and Ben Schwartz were both victims of Taylor’s kill-the-psychic game and that Taylor liked to see his prey run. He intended for you to die running, too.”
“Yes. The chase excited him.”
“What I sensed today at the scene told me that Ballinger’s killer did not see her as a player in a fantasy game. He definitely got a rush out of the kill, but he was under control at the time, not excited the way I think he would have been if he had considered that murder a game.”
“You could perceive that much?”
“It’s the nature of my talent,” Judson said. “I can sense the emotions the killer experienced when he made the kill.”
She shivered. “It’s as if you get a snapshot of the killer’s mind.”
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“Tough talent. Must make for a lot of bad dreams.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes shadowed. Eventually he turned back to the fire.
“My talent doesn’t make for good dreams or stable, long-term relationships,” he said.
She recognized it for the warning it was and smiled.
“Welcome to the club,” she said.
He smiled. “There’s a club for people like me?”
“People like us. I’ve got dream disorder issues, too, and they make stable, long-term relationships very difficult. Impossible, in my case.”
“Yeah?” Judson looked intrigued.
“You’d be amazed how fast a guy can run when you tell him that you see ghosts. In fact, men I have known have fled, screaming, into the night.”
Judson’s teeth flashed briefly in a wicked smile. “Sounds interesting.”
“You think I’m joking, don’t you?”
“Sure, but I get your point. You’ve had a few problems with long-term relationships. Good to know I’m not the only one.”
There was no reason to tell him that she had not been joking, she decided.
“I think we can both blame our relationship problems on our talent,” she said instead.
Judson nodded. “With the exception of Sam, no one else in my family understands. My mother and my sister are convinced that I’ve got major commitment issues. Their theory is that I’m obsessed with hunting bad guys, that I’m somehow addicted to using my talent. They’re afraid, long-term, that will damage me psychically if not physically.”
“Well, you’re going to have to find a way to deal with it because you need to hunt,” Gwen said without stopping to think. “Your talent drives you to it, just as mine makes me see ghosts. It’s not like either of us can just stop perceiving what we perceive.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not like we have a choice.”
“I’m not sure we’d want the choice. As hard as it is sometimes, I can’t imagine that either of us would want to come upon a crime scene and not know that something bad had happened there. It would be like walking through a graveyard or across an old battleground and not sensing the dead and the dying under our feet. It would be . . . disrespectful, don’t you think?”
He was surprised. Then his eyes tightened at the corners in a thoughtful expression. “Yes, that’s exactly how it is for me.”
“What about your father? Does he understand?”
“Dad tells himself and everyone else who will listen that my problem is that I just haven’t found the right woman. But deep down he’s worried that I won’t get lucky the way he did with Mom and that it’s his fault.”
“Why?”
“He feels guilty because he’s pretty sure the problem is my talent,” Judson said. “He blames himself.”
“Because he thinks you acquired your talent from his side of the family?”
“Because he knows I got it from his side.” Judson’s mouth kicked up at the corner. “Hell, it’s the truth. He’s probably responsible for Sam’s and Emma’s psychic abilities, too. But it’s not his fault he got hit with a heavy dose o
f paranormal radiation forty years ago.”
“Is that what happened?” she asked.
“It’s a long story, but the bottom line is that Dad was caught in an explosion in an old mine back in his prospecting days. We have reason to believe that there was a lot of paranormal energy released in the blast. Sam and Emma and I are convinced that the ultra-light altered his DNA in a way that affected all three of his future offspring.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” she said. “I have no idea where my talent came from. I never knew my parents. They were killed shortly after I was born. The aunt who raised me swore it didn’t come from her side of the family. That would have been my father’s side. But, then, Aunt Beth had a few issues of her own.”
There was a long silence. Max rumbled on.
“How have you handled your relationship issues?” Judson asked after a while.
“Mostly I just avoid them.”
“The issues?”
“No, the relationships. It’s easier that way.” She stretched and settled deeper into the chair. “Well, now that we’ve established that neither of us is good long-term commitment material, maybe we should get back to our investigation. You said you didn’t think that Evelyn was a victim of some terrible fantasy game. What does that tell us?”
“That she was killed for a very pragmatic reason.” Judson got to his feet and went to the window. He stood looking out into the night. “You knew her better than anyone. Do you have any idea where we can start looking for her secrets?”
“Maybe,” Gwen said.
She rose from the chair and crossed the room to take the photo out of her tote. She brought the picture back to show him what Evelyn had written on the back.
“Mirror, mirror,” he read.
“I think I may know where she hid at least one very important secret,” Gwen said.
Twelve
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