by K. C. Archer
Teddy forced her attention to the man before her, understanding that she’d been summoned for a reason. “Who are you?” she asked again.
“My name is Derek Yates.” He watched her for a beat, looking for something—a glimmer of recognition, perhaps—before his expression tightened. “You don’t even know who I am. You know even less than I thought you would.”
“About what?”
“About all of us. Me, your parents—Marysue and Richard Delaney. Clint.”
Marysue and Richard. Her parents. It was the first time she’d heard their names. “You knew my parents?” She slumped into the chair across from him.
“I met you once, too. But you wouldn’t remember.”
“Prove it,” she said.
With his wrists still shackled together, he managed to reach into the pocket of his shirt and produce a worn black-and-white photograph. He set it on the table between them and pushed it toward her. Teddy spared it a quick glance. Then she did a double take. It was the photograph she’d seen in her dream.
She stared at the man before her and understood why he had looked so familiar. She’d seen him in the picture. And what was more, she understood that the picture was real.
“I’m like you, Theodora. And your parents. Fighting for what’s right. Only I stood up to the wrong person, defied orders. And now I’m here—with a life sentence for a murder I didn’t commit.”
“If you’re fighting for what’s right, how did you end up in prison?” she asked.
“Sometimes right and wrong aren’t black and white.” He leaned back in his chair. “Sometimes decisions can’t be so morally . . . easy.”
“Who put you here?”
He tapped his index finger to the photo, chains brushing together with each movement. “Someone who takes his morality very seriously.”
Teddy looked at the picture. He was pointing to someone she knew. Clint. Her mind raced. If Clint put this guy away, he must have been guilty.
Yates’s gravelly voice sounded in her head: Corbett would love to believe that.
His thin mouth became even thinner, and he continued aloud: “And falsified the evidence to do it.”
Teddy looked down at Clint’s faded image, his wide shoulders and easy grin forever captured in time.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “Clint wouldn’t . . . He’d never . . .” Though she wanted to believe that he was the last person on earth who would do anything so compromising, she had firsthand knowledge that he was capable of withholding information. Teddy reexamined the photograph, now realizing that if it was real and not a dream, Clint had kept an even bigger secret.
He didn’t just know that her parents were psychic; he’d been their friend, and he’d kept that from her. She felt anger build inside her. Teddy glanced up at Yates, who sat back in his chair, looking patient, as if he had all the time in the world for this conversation.
“What do you know about Clint and my parents?” she asked.
“Quite a bit,” he said. “Unlike Clint, I’ll tell you. But first I need you to help me in return.”
Teddy didn’t yet know if she could or would help this man, but he had something she needed, and so she went along, at least for now. “Start at the beginning.”
“I was ordered to kill an army general by the name of Keith Sheffield.”
“Why?”
“His political and military views were in direct opposition to my organization’s. He had to be eliminated.”
“Assassinated.”
“Use whatever term you like. The point is, I refused the order. No one expected that. I had been a good soldier until then, like the rest of them.”
“The rest of who?” Teddy said. “Psychic assassins?”
He smiled. “You could call them that. I went from being an asset to an inconvenience. So I became the scapegoat. Someone else was brought in to do the job, and they framed me. Then Clint made it his personal mission to see that I was put away for the rest of my life.”
Yates went on to explain that there was an FBI videotape exonerating him and proving that someone else had committed the murder. Clint had seen it and knew the truth but had deliberately hidden the tape.
“Why would Clint falsify evidence?” Teddy asked.
“Because he believes I’m dangerous.”
“And why would he believe that?”
“Because I am.” He said it plainly, like a fact. Like you’d say “It is sixty degrees outside” or “The sky is blue.” Teddy didn’t doubt the statement for a minute. Yates put his finger on the photograph again, tapping her father’s face. “They thought your father was dangerous, too. That’s why they killed him.”
Teddy went cold. “I was told my parents died on the highway, in a multicar collision.”
“Your father died at Sector Three.”
Her father had been murdered. Teddy didn’t think she could feel something for someone she had never met, but now she ached for all the memories she’d never have. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “They killed him? Who are they?”
“The people who ran Sector Three. Government people. Military people.” Yates reached forward as if he wanted to hold Teddy’s hand, but his chains caught him before he could touch her. He pulled his hand back, frustrated. “To them, we’re weapons, to be used and discarded at will.”
“I don’t understand,” Teddy said.
“You mean why would the government want to train psychics?” Yates let the question hang unanswered. It didn’t need a response.
“So Sector Three also trained psychics for government positions?” Teddy asked.
Yates smiled. “At first that’s what we were led to believe. It was a research facility, designed to help us control our gifts. But it was more like a laboratory, and we were the experiment.”
“Are you saying that Whitfield—”
“I’m saying that things aren’t always as they seem. It’s easy to think that the people in charge have your best interests at heart. But whether it’s Sector Three or Whitfield, there’s always a bottom line. And trust me, your interests are not the bottom line.”
Teddy ran through the list of things Clint refused to talk about: the theft of the blood samples; the missing students; her genetic history. And there was more: the insistence on student anonymity; the deliberately vague school website; the over-the-top security. All supposedly for their own protection.
“I know why your blood sample went missing.”
“How do you know about that?”
His dark eyes glittered. “You are the child of two powerful psychics who once trained at Sector Three. You are of utmost importance to our organization.”
Was he saying that his organization had stolen her blood?
“There were three couples who had children while we lived there. They’d all be around your age now.”
That was the link that connected her, Brett, and Christine. They were all children of psychics, experimented on at Sector Three. “Why tell me all of this? What’s the catch?”
“Help me get out of here. Once I’m free, I’ll help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“I can help you find her.”
Teddy blinked. “Find who?” she asked.
Yates slid his hands off the table, and the sound of the scraping chains gave her goose bumps. “Your mother.”
Teddy stared at him. She was tempted to tell him she knew exactly where her mother was—at home in Las Vegas. Then she realized he wasn’t talking about the mother who had raised her. “My mother is dead.”
“I can assure you that Marysue Delaney is very much alive.” Yates cocked his head. “And I’m willing to wager my freedom that somewhere deep down, you know that, too.”
Teddy thought of the yellow house, the woman at the stove and her lullaby. She narrowed her eyes. “If she’s alive, why didn’t she come back for me?”
“And put you at risk? She was protecting you. The only way to do that was to give
you a new name, a new family, a new home.”
Before Teddy could ask another question, Yates lifted his finger to his lips. He turned his head to one side as though alert to voices she couldn’t hear.
“Your friend Kate is finishing with McDonald now. You need to go.” He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and set it atop the photo. “My attorney’s contact information. The location of the FBI video file I need is written on the back. You should be able to access it on Agent Stavros’s hard drive.”
She didn’t bother asking how he knew Nick’s name.
“Forward the video to my attorney. He’ll take care of the rest.”
Teddy heard chairs scraping from the room next door. She rose and headed toward the door. She didn’t want Yates to think she’d give in too easily, though in her heart, she knew that she’d do anything for more information about her birth parents.
“Ask Corey where his Bruins hat is,” Yates said.
She didn’t question him. Right now she’d do anything he asked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“I MADE IT CLEAR FROM the start that you’d each have thirty minutes to talk to him.” Nick said.
“This isn’t just a dumb competition,” Teddy said. “I need five minutes.” Well, she hoped she’d be able to do it in that amount of time. She wasn’t sure how long it would take. She just knew she needed to convince Nick to let her back into that room.
“Let her talk to him,” said Kate. She had circles under her eyes, and her skin was pale. She looked like all the fight had been sucked out of her.
“What did you say, Atkins?” Nick asked.
“Teddy’s right,” Kate said. “What if I said that I had a flash of claircognizance when I was in there and I saw that Teddy going back in was the key to closing this case?”
“Did you?”
Kate shrugged. “Only one way to know.” When Nick turned toward a guard stationed by the door, Kate winked at Teddy.
Nick pulled Teddy aside. He lifted his right hand as if he wanted to pat her arm, then stopped. He cleared his throat. “Same strategy you had before. He shared more with you than Atkins.” Teddy nodded.
Corey was still sitting at the table when she and Nick walked in. He looked up, surprised. “I thought we were finished.”
“I just had another question to ask, if that’s okay?” Teddy said, trying to make her voice syrupy-sweet.
“Yeah, sure.” He smiled at her.
She summoned up his Facebook profile picture in her mind’s eye, remembering the Bruins hat low on his head. “So, you know how I said I can help find that memory for you?”
She closed her eyes and reached out to Corey’s mind, sinking into the inky darkness. She saw the white Victorian house again, the details sharper than before: now she noticed that the paint was scuffed on the wooden siding; the floorboards were broken on the porch; the windows were dusty.
“Yeah,” Corey said.
“I need you to try really hard. You had a few beers, right?”
“Yeah,” Corey said.
In her mind’s eye, Teddy walked closer to the house, up the creaky stairs. She knew who Corey was now, a mystery no longer. Before she even placed her hand on the handle, it swung open.
“She made such a big deal over a few beers.”
Inside the house, Teddy turned and saw an old-fashioned linoleum kitchen, a small living room with a lumpy denim couch and a large TV. “A few beers. That’s nothing. I get it, Corey.”
Teddy walked toward the TV and turned it on. She flipped through the channels, through memories: Corey fishing with his father, looking through a copy of Romeo and Juliet in a classroom. Finally, she saw Marlena, and she watched as the night played out differently than he described it. Corey was yelling.
“Did you try to explain that to her?”
Corey raised his hands, cuffs catching against the table. “I don’t remember.”
Teddy watched the TV screen: Corey grabbed Marlena by the wrist. She pulled away. Then his hands were around her neck.
“Maybe she wasn’t a very good listener,” Teddy said.
Corey didn’t say anything more.
In her mind’s eye, Teddy walked closer to the TV. Marlena clawed at the air, Corey’s truck, Corey. She couldn’t breathe. Just like Jillian in the library.
“Then what happened?” Teddy said.
“I don’t remember.”
And suddenly, she was there, living the moment as Corey was. She felt the humid air on her skin. The warm night surrounded her. Marlena was on the ground now. Then he was hauling her into his truck. Driving her to the wetlands. Dumping her into the water. Teddy looked to her left, saw the Bruins hat fall off of Corey’s head and into a bank of tall spike rush by the water.
Teddy shook her head, breaking the connection. She was in one place now. Looking into the eyes of a murderer.
“So why the Bruins? They’re UCLA’s team, not yours.” Teddy knew all the California sports teams like the back of her hand. Not that the gambling knowledge had served her until now. “You were wearing the hat that night, right? We have the picture from Facebook.”
Corey swallowed. “I like the team. That’s not a crime.”
“It is a crime if we find the hat in the wetlands, Corey. Which we will.” Teddy pushed her chair back, legs scraping against the floor. She stood up to leave.
He sprang forward, jerking the chains with him over the table. “I didn’t—it was an accident. I didn’t mean to kill her.”
The room went silent. All three of them realizing what he’d just admitted.
“No, I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t.” Corey looked from Teddy to Nick. “Hey, you guys told me that you were here to help. My dad hired you. My lawyer would’ve been here otherwise. This isn’t . . . This shouldn’t count.”
She didn’t need to see how the rest of it played out. Her heart was breaking—both for Marlena and for the Corey whom she’d thought she knew. The boy she’d thought was innocent, stuck in San Quentin, until she’d actually met him and looked into his soul.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
TEDDY SAT SILENTLY IN THE front seat of Nick’s car. As she glanced out the window, she didn’t see the San Francisco Bay; instead, the wetlands from Corey’s memory surfaced in her mind’s eye—and Marlena’s face as Corey’s hands wrapped around her throat. Teddy’s own hands started to shake, and she slid them underneath her thighs to still them. When she tried to get Corey’s memory out of her head, other images rushed to replace it: Yates in handcuffs, the photograph, the Sector Three symbol. She may have solved one case today, but she would have to sort through a past she still didn’t understand—her own.
When they reached the San Francisco pier, Teddy shut the car door and boarded the ferry without a word.
“Teddy, you okay?” Nick’s voice interrupted her thoughts. She hadn’t even realized they had arrived on Angel Island. She made her way down to the dock. Nick followed. Kate was well on her way back to campus.
April played havoc with the normally placid bay. Waves churned against the rocky cliffs. Teddy had expected Nick to wonder whether she was all right. She hadn’t expected him to ask. Nor was she prepared to see such genuine concern in his eyes. It threw her.
“Teddy?”
She chewed her bottom lip, not sure where to begin. Or, for that matter, if she should say anything at all. But the temptation to tell someone else what had happened—or at least part of what had happened—was too strong to resist.
“What did you see?” he pressed. “Do you remember?”
She’d never seen a dead body, let alone a murder. What she knew would haunt her forever: seeing the fear in Marlena’s eyes just . . . cease to exist. She would have expected death to be gradual, not sudden. One moment Marlena was there, fighting, alive. The next, she wasn’t.
Teddy wasn’t conscious of moving toward Nick. Or maybe he was the one who moved toward her. Somehow her body was pressed up against his. And she just stayed there
. His shoulders were broader than she’d imagined, the muscles beneath his shirt harder, more defined.
She finally pulled herself together and took a deliberate step back. “We already knew that Marlena was strangled to death,” she said. “Jillian had that communion back in the library. But when I was with Corey, I accessed his memories. I . . .”
He studied her. “Yes?” he prompted.
Teddy struggled to put the experience into words. “I was right there with him and Marlena in the wetlands.”
Nick’s brow furrowed. “It’s hard. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get easier. That’s the job, Teddy. When it gets easier, it’s time to quit.” He let out a breath. “I called in the tip. We have people tracking his hat. And officers working on a full confession with his lawyer present—” He paused. “I wanted to ask you back there. How’d you know about the handwriting? It was a neat trick.”
Teddy stiffened. “Just a hunch.” She didn’t want to tell Nick that she had met a man named Derek Yates; she wanted to ask Nick about Yates without telling him about Yates.“I’m still in shock, honestly. We assumed he was innocent,” she said. “For a time it seemed you did, too, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken on the case.”
Nick sighed. “I never like to see an innocent person put away. It’s our job to be sure.”
This was her opening. “So it’s possible for an innocent man to be convicted of a crime he didn’t commit?”
He gave a reluctant shrug. “Yeah. Of course. Cops screw up. Witnesses make mistakes. Juries get it wrong. It’s not something anyone wants to happen, but—”
“What if they did?”
“What?”
“What if that’s exactly what they wanted to happen?” She looked at him, wondering if she should go on. But she wanted to know. She needed to know. “What if evidence was altered in order to force a conviction? To lock away someone who knew something he shouldn’t know?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Nick held up his hands, palms facing out, like a traffic cop intent on slowing her down. “What you described between Corey and Marlena wasn’t planned. Now you’re saying that Corey was framed because he knew something he shouldn’t?”