Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

“Come on. If everyone up there was really psychic, why wouldn’t they win the lottery instead of getting paid a few Jacksons at a time?”

  “This is a psychic fair. It’s community outreach. Personal readings cost a lot more than a few Jacksons.”

  “Not an argument in their favor.”

  “And psychic abilities don’t necessarily work that way. How’s your eyesight?”

  Damn, but he had expressive eyebrows. “Come again?”

  “You’ve got pretty good eyesight, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So tell me who’s standing in front of the Eiffel Tower right now.”

  He snorted. “I couldn’t say.”

  Faith folded her arms, trying to look severe. “I thought you had good eyesight. Were you conning me when you said you had good eyesight?”

  “But,” he countered, clearly enjoying himself, “if I got on a plane and flew to Paris, I could describe anyone in front of the Eiffel Tower. Why wouldn’t one of those psychic types get on their imaginary plane and fly wherever they needed to go to get a good look at tomorrow’s lotto numbers?”

  Which left Faith with nothing better than, “It doesn’t seem to work that way.” It sounded lame, even to her ears. “And then there’s karma.”

  They scowled at each other. Then Roy tried a different angle. “So how good a rep did Krystal Tanner have? As a reader, I mean.”

  “She was one of the best.” And she was. You’re so lonely, she’d told Faith during that first reading, and that without even touching her. Because you sense so much, you try not to sense anything at all. You haven’t found your soul mates yet—or they haven’t found you. You’re scared to let people know your secrets. So’s the woman who raised you…your mother…?

  “Who else is considered good?”

  Faith gave him a few names, most of whom were upstairs, several of whom were published. “Then there are some who don’t do the public fairs.”

  “Name one.”

  “Celeste Deveaux, I guess—she was a lousy fortune-teller, but she’s supposed to be an excellent medium. She doesn’t like doing readings for people whose grief is still fresh, so she avoids walk-in readings like this. There’s a witch who goes by Hecate who’s the real deal, but she’s out of state right now.”

  He actually had his notepad out of his pocket, writing these down. “A witch. Great. Give me more.”

  No, she thought, annoyed with his pushiness as well as his cynicism—and still, damn it, noticing his thick wrists. Then she had a truly bad idea. An unmistakably bad idea.

  So why did it appeal so strongly?

  You’re playing with fire. Don’t even think about it.

  “Come on,” wheedled Roy, turning on the charm. He would never be a model, not with the tired eyes, definitely not with that nose. But something about him…“Someone. Anyone.”

  By now, the alternative would have been to bite her tongue off. “She’s not well known, but I’ve heard rumors of someone in town who’s supposed to be very good. Very, very good. It’s a Greek name…Cassiopeia? No, that’s not it….”

  He sat up. “Cassandra?”

  She widened her eyes. He liked innocence? Well here was innocence. “That might be it.”

  Roy was gritting his jaw so tightly as he shook his head that she feared he might break some teeth. Wow. He really didn’t like Cassandra, did he?

  Better to know that now, she guessed. “Not that I’ve ever seen the woman. Apparently she keeps to herself.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve heard something.” Like that, he was leaning over the table again, warm and demanding and coffee-scented. Practically leaning over her. Practically touching. “Tell me what you’ve heard.”

  Caught now, she would have been glad for almost any interruption.

  She still felt a cold horror wash through her as she recognized something—a footstep, a heartbeat—behind her.

  The killer was here.

  And he was feeding.

  Chapter 5

  Faith spun in her chair and stared at the red-carpeted lobby, where at least two people had just left the hotel. It had been him. She was sure it had been him!

  “And now I’m talking to myself,” muttered Roy, behind her.

  She didn’t bother stopping to explain. She slid off her bistro chair and took off out of the bar.

  “Hey!” Roy yelled. But Faith was busy racing across the oriental rug of the lobby, putting her shoulder into the revolving door, stepping out into the spattering rainfall that was New Orleans in August. She looked one way.

  Nothing.

  She looked the other.

  Nothing. Rather, there were plenty of people heading in both directions, umbrellas hiding their faces or heads bent against the rain. This was the French Quarter! Tourists wandered, enjoying the rain like they might a special effect in a theme park. Partygoers hustled, trying to keep their good clothes dry. A trumpet player on the corner ignored the rain to wail out a tune reminiscent of Al Hirt, with a hat by his feet for wet tips. The air was thick with the perfume of plopping raindrops on hot concrete, underscored by the scent of the nearby river, of ice cream and soft pretzels, of wisteria from a nearby courtyard. But whatever Faith had sensed inside had faded.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  She’d felt him going in this direction! It wasn’t like he could suddenly ditch his unique heartbeat, like someone pulling off a mask…was it?

  “What the hell was that?” The words, immediately behind her, didn’t startle her anywhere near the way Roy Chopin’s hands, catching her damp arms, did.

  Oh, God! Like an exposed power line.

  Faith stiffened, but not in time to escape the sudden burst of energy that sizzled through her, the emotions, the images. Someone fed him home cooking on a weekly basis. He liked beer. He spent too much time around the jail and the station and on the streets. His underlying edge of violence was a constant problem for him. He’d had sex sometime in the last month but that’s all it had been, sex, he didn’t love the woman—

  With a mew of protest, she wrenched away from him, spun to face him.

  Then she saw how his eyes widened, how he raised his spread hands and took a step back as if to show her he was unarmed despite the belt holster. She smelled his sudden guilt and confusion. That’s when she realized how she’d hunched down into herself at his touch. Like some kind of frightened victim.

  Deliberately she squared her shoulders, raised her chin, even if it felt like she’d snap something, forcing herself back into a posture she didn’t yet feel. So much for being normal.

  Roy Chopin kept his distance, lowering his hands slowly, clearly meaning to convey how harmless he thought he was. He squinted against raindrops in his eyes. “You okay there, Corbett?”

  But he was looking at her as if she wasn’t okay at all.

  “I…I don’t like being touched,” she said, blinking back against the wet. Her voice sounded only a little husky from sheer mortification. There was a statement that would win dates, for sure. “You startled me.”

  “I’m sorry.” The hands were by his sides again. He was starting to relax, to breathe again, hair dripping across his forehead. She’d scared him.

  “No, I’m sorry. I know it’s weird.”

  “I didn’t touch you till you were already out here,” he said. For a minute, she was confused. Then he said, “You just ran off. What’s up?”

  He wasn’t just confused about her reaction to his touch. He was confused about how she’d bolted.

  I sensed the killer. Then I didn’t.

  “I thought I heard something,” she said, which was at least true, if lame.

  He was feeding. The thought came to her again—but what had it meant?

  The fear, when it hit, hit hard. Absinthe! Moonsong!

  Evan!

  She spun for the hotel again—but luckily, before she could put the icing on her embarrassment cake, Butch Jefferson came through the revolving door. “Now what are you two doing out here i
n the wet?” he demanded, the seriousness in his gaze contradicting his friendly tone. “Son, I got something upstairs you should see.”

  Chopin gave her an after-you gesture, so they headed inside in detective-Faith-detective order.

  It was a handwritten note. Someone had found it at the empty table where Krystal would have “read.” Their shout of alarm had drawn the attention of others.

  Now too many bystanders clustered and whispered, while Butch and Roy studied the piece of Biltmore stationary without touching it.

  “‘She was delicious,’” read Roy, frowning. “‘The next one will be even tastier.’”

  The whispering of the psychics and guests and hotel staff became something closer to a group moan—a noise with too many words to retain any individuality, merely distress. But they were communicating the same fear, something Faith had already half guessed herself.

  Hadn’t she suggested the killer might come here to scope out more victims?

  “He’s a serial killer,” she whispered, giving voice to what the others were murmuring amongst themselves…kind of like she did with her informative calls as Cassandra.

  “No,” said Roy firmly, standing. “There’s no proof of that. He’s just trying to get as much mileage as he can off of the one killing we do know about.”

  “But—”

  “This is a note, not a body,” he insisted, while Butch used tweezers to lift the page into a Ziploc bag from his pocket. These detectives came prepared. “Don’t buy into his game, Corbett. It’s what he wants folks to do.”

  He was feeding, thought Faith again—and now it made sense. The killer had been high on the fear he’d created. That’s why he’d left the note—to create fear. That’s what she’d heard in his pulse, in his heartbeat.

  She shivered.

  Roy made a disgusted sound. “You’re wet. You want my jacket?”

  “No.” She managed to stop him before he could shrug it off. “I should probably get my roommates home. It looks like things are closing up early, after this.”

  “They were in the main ballroom the whole time, right? As long as they didn’t see anything suspicious, head ’em out.”

  “Thank you for the coffee.”

  Roy was frowning at the now-bagged note, holding it up to the light. He wasn’t even looking at her. But he said, “Seven okay?”

  That took Faith by surprise. “What?”

  He slid his gaze from the missive to her, mouth threatening again. “Tomorrow night. Date. Seven?”

  Despite her attack of the heebie-jeebies out front? The only thing more embarrassing than the idea that this was now a pity date was the idea of him knowing she knew it was a pity date. “Okay,” she said, as they both turned to their own particular duties.

  Butch looked immensely pleased with himself.

  Faith had never been to a funeral before. She had no family besides her mother—no grandparents, no great-aunts or uncles, nobody whose passing would have required she attend their services. Since she and her mother tended to move every few years, she rarely made friends long enough to see one of them die. So she wasn’t sure how Krystal’s memorial service compared to other funerals.

  But she knew she hated it.

  The grief was palpable—grief from Krystal’s parents, who’d come to collect the body; grief from all her friends; grief from some members of the community who’d shown up without even knowing Krystal, just as a way of expressing their anguish and outrage over this murder in their city.

  That last group made Faith wonder if perhaps moving every few years hadn’t been a good enough excuse for not attending funerals in the past, after all.

  Butch Jefferson and Roy Chopin were there, too, though they stayed in back. Faith supposed they were taking note of who attended. She remembered from a criminal psychology class that some killers liked to see the results of what they’d done.

  In any case, the detectives’ solemn distance seemed respectful, and Faith knew she could count on them to notice anything suspicious. She kept her focus on the people who needed her more. Her roommates. The family.

  Once the last songs had been sung and the casket had been carried to a waiting hearse for its drive to Texas, Faith had to go home and shower before she could bear to go back to work.

  “Welcome back,” greeted Greg with his characteristically vague smile, once he noticed she was there. “I’m afraid there’s a pretty good backlog of forms for inputting.”

  “Gee, thanks. You need to make me take time off more often,” Faith teased weakly. But it felt good to settle in at her desk and take care of a good chunk of the work, her fingers clattering softly over the keyboard. It felt good to make progress on something and, more important, it felt normal.

  As close to normal as her life got, anyway.

  Not that it would ever stay that way.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” Greg announced, after a lunch break that Faith had worked through. He sat on the corner of her desk, like he had before, and smiled at her over his wire rims. “We didn’t get any full prints off last night’s letter. Other than the prints of the woman who found it, that is. It goes to graphology next.”

  He held up the see-through bag with the Biltmore note inside.

  She was delicious….

  “Can I see it?” When he handed the bag to her, Faith knew she’d have to stall in order to figure out how to do this as subtly as possible. “What do you suppose the handwriting analyst will find?”

  Even forensic scientists who specialized tended to dabble in other areas of the job.

  “Chances are it’s a man’s handwriting,” said Greg. “Although that’s never a hundred percent. The left slant could indicate low self-esteem, maybe a personality that’s trying to hide the truth about himself. The lower the t-bar, the lower the goals this guy sets for him—what are you doing?”

  Faith had used his distraction to unseal the bag the slightest bit and take a whiff of the note. It was him. She was almost sure of it. She suspected that if she touched the note, she could be positive, but that would be far too suspicious.

  Evidence, around here, was sacred.

  “I was wondering if he used one of those smelly inks,” she lied.

  Greg took the bag back from her and resealed it, but he smiled with bemused patience as he did. “The labs will also give us that, don’t worry.”

  Faith returned his smile, glad he was so easy about things, and turned back to the computer—but Greg didn’t stand up. “Faith,” he said.

  She turned back to him, surprised at this break from their usual patterns of conversation. “Yes?”

  “I was wondering…would you let me take you out to dinner? We could discuss everything you’ve been through lately, make sure you’re in a good place….”

  She stared at him. Her mother sometimes said that when it rained, it poured, and she’d just run into the perfect illustration. Two invitations for dates in less than twenty-four hours.

  And one from Greg?

  He was even older than Roy Chopin—by almost another decade!

  “Never mind,” he said quickly, standing. “It was a bad idea.”

  But was it? She’d liked how it felt when he touched her face the other day, the edge taken off his energy by his latex gloves. She liked how his hands always smelled of balloons.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t like she could ask him to wear latex gloves on a date. And he really was old enough to be her dad. She may have desperately missed having a father figure growing up, but that didn’t mean she should date one.

  “I’m sorry,” she started, past the uncertain ache in her throat.

  “Forget I asked. Really.”

  “It’s just that—we work together. It would be awkward.”

  He nodded. “And I’ve kept you from work long enough. Will you come find me if the detectives working the Tanner case call? I want to give them an update on the prints we lifted.”

  “Will do.” She wanted to say more—mostly, she
wanted to apologize again. But she suspected that would only make it worse, so she went back to work, as if nothing was wrong. This was by no means the first date she’d ever turned down.

  Just the first date she’d ever turned down with someone she genuinely cared about.

  And instead she’d agreed to a date with Roy Chopin?

  The minute she thought about it, butterflies started again. Was she an idiot? She might say something that told him she was less than normal. She might say something that told him she was Cassandra! Even if neither of those minor disasters took place, she had to worry about what would happen if he tried to touch her and she shrank from him like a beaten dog. Or what if he didn’t try to touch her? This was a date, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t there be at least minimal touching?

  Faith had tried to date, in high school. It had been a disaster. Teenage boys were all about sex, and unlike most teenage girls, she’d been able to tell that from their scent, their temperature. She was intrigued by the idea of sex, but she’d barely managed the few kisses she’d tried without recoiling from heavy doses of Too Much Information. How could she ever manage more? By the time she’d started college, she’d pretty much given up.

  Last year, her junior year at Tulane, she’d met a nice guy named Jesse. Jesse seemed to really like her, not just the idea of sex with her. He’d said they would go as slowly as she needed. They started just by holding hands. Once she got used to his presence, the contact didn’t open up a new screen in her head every time they touched. Then they moved onto a few careful kisses. She’d thought she was falling in love. For a few weeks it was as if the whole world had a glitter about it, as if she had a chance at normalcy, at human contact, at last. She’d even started looking forward to doing more than kissing….

  Then he’d shown up for a date smelling like his study partner, smelling like fresh sex. When she’d accused him of cheating on her, then challenged his denial, he’d said there was no way she could tell that. He’d called her a freak….

  It wasn’t long after that ugly breakup that she’d sought out the local psychics, hoping they might have some answers. Why was she the way she was? They hadn’t known. But at least they’d had a place for her. She’d dropped out of school after that semester—she could always finish her degree when she was sure what she wanted. And she hadn’t gone out with a man since.