Z groaned. “Me, too. The FBI should give us a ‘get out of school free’ pass for this. How are we supposed to concentrate on homework when we’re doing something a million times more important?”
Gabby was thinking the same thing. Patricia said they needed to sit tight for at least the next twenty-four hours while the FBI lab tested the bracelet to see if there was any physical evidence on it. But Gabby couldn’t turn off her thoughts for the next twenty-four hours about what had happened at the Cytology office and the cabin.
“Maybe you can get a vision of all the homework answers,” Z quipped.
Gabby laughed and got out of the car. She zipped up her jacket, the image of the bracelet so etched in her mind that she barely felt the torrent of rain pouring down on her.
She slipped her key into the lock and immediately heard her father call out. “Who’s there?” There was a surprising edge to his voice.
“Just me,” Gabby said.
Her parents looked up at her in shock. They were at the dining room table with her younger sister, Nadia, surrounded by flyers, markers and poster board.
“You’re just getting home now?” Her dad glanced at her mother for an explanation.
“I didn’t realize she wasn’t here,” her mom said. “When I got back from gymnastics with Nadia, I just assumed she was in her room.”
Not that Gabby could blame them. Usually she did come home at precisely 3:47 each day, retreating to the sanctuary of her bedroom where she could perform her rituals without Nadia’s prying eyes or the disheartened stares of her parents. After more than a year of attempting to “cure” her with possible solutions from fruitless drug regimens to hypnotherapists, they’d ultimately given up.
Now, they were expecting an explanation.
“I … uh,” Gabby faltered. Thankfully, her eight-year-old sister piped up.
“We’re making posters for Twinkie,” Nadia announced, dressed in her leotard and track pants. She pulled out a red permanent marker and meticulously outlined the photo of a cat in the middle of the poster.
Nadia’s beloved mackerel tabby had gone missing two days earlier, sending her parents into a level of stress they normally reserved for Nadia’s gymnastics meets. The same kind of stress they used to have over Gabby’s ice-skating competitions.
“So where were you?” her mother prodded.
“Just … doing homework at the library.” Gabby was surprised at how easily the lie rolled off her tongue.
Both her parents were stunned into silence. She braced herself for the additional questions and wished she had planned some kind of explanation for her sudden change in behavior.
“I think we’re going to find Twinkie tomorrow,” her little sister said, immediately drawing her parents’ attention back.
“Sweetie, even if we don’t find Twinkie right away, it’s important you don’t let it ruin your mental preparation for the meet on Friday,” her mother said.
Gabby’s father nodded seriously. “We need those scores to be in the top fifteen percent.”
“Do you think it’s worth it to do a session with Frank?” her mother wondered. Because every fourth-grader needed a sports psychologist.
It was the first time in almost two years that she’d come home at a time other than exactly 3:47, and her parents had already moved on. The lack of interest was a new low, even for them.
Gabby walked to the staircase. She’d always thought if she could just get better, if she could shake off the tentacles of her OCD, her parents would begin to care about her again. That things would go back to the way they used to be. But now she was realizing that they didn’t forgive weakness. She should have remembered that from her figure- skating days. The competitions where Gabby did well, placing somewhere in the top three, meant she could look out at the crowds and see her mom beaming proudly. When she’d emerge after the medals were handed out, her parents would wrap her into tight hugs, and her father would always suggest stopping for ice cream on the way home.
All the fawning made it that much worse when she didn’t place.
Her mom and dad weren’t monsters. They didn’t yell at her from the stands or scream on the way to the car like some of the other ice-skating parents. But the gaping absence of affection was almost worse. As if she had ceased to be their daughter. In fact, once her mother had even said as much. After a meet where Gabby had fallen right in the middle of her first combination, a rookie mistake to say the least, her mother had looked at her through the rearview mirror in the car and insisted, “That wasn’t my daughter out there today. Gabby Dahl has known how to stick a single axel since she was six.”
Gabby knew her mother was trying to make her feel better. Acting as though some alien had momentarily inhabited Gabby’s body was supposed to give her confidence for the next time. She wasn’t the one who had fallen. It was an impostor’s fault. Instead, all Gabby had heard was that she wasn’t their daughter. She hadn’t performed well enough to earn that connection. A few weeks later, the OCD had started, with small compulsions at first, building slowly and steadily, until it had finally overtaken her life.
And now, even though she’d made such an obvious stride by deviating from her routine, her parents still wanted nothing to do with her. Now that her veneer of perfection had been shattered by years of odd behavior, her parents would always see Gabby as damaged goods, irredeemable, not worth the number of gym meets and billable hours it would take away from them to try again. The realization stung more than she thought it would. She imagined telling her parents that she was working with the FBI. They wouldn’t believe her — that much was for sure. But would they even care?
Gabby shut the door to her small pink-and-white room filled with old skating trophies and the novels she ingested like candy. For the last few years, reading had been her only escape, the only time she felt free from OCD.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which she was rereading for the third time, beckoned from her nightstand, but after the long afternoon at Cytology and the cabin, Gabby still had hours of homework to do. She flipped open her chemistry textbook to the page on acid-based reactions. Now that she didn’t have to focus on highlighting sentences in multiples of three, studying was going to take half the time. She tried to focus on her chemistry book. Acid-based reactions. Acid-based reactions. She read the three words over and over until she came to a definitive conclusion.
Who cared about acid-based reactions?
An unfamiliar sound jolted Gabby away from chemistry: her cell phone. She’d barely used it before the past few days. She pulled it from the side pocket of her backpack to find the caller ID read JUSTIN.
“Hello,” she answered, hoping her voice didn’t sound as nervous as she felt. Back in junior high, she’d spent hours on the phone with her friends, giggling about boys they liked and whatever happened at school that day. But now the only person she could really count as a “friend” at school was Ali Hanuman, whose parents didn’t allow her to socialize after school hours lest she stray from her path to becoming valedictorian.
“Uh, Gabby … hey …” Justin said.
“Hey.”
Justin cleared his throat. “I think I might have dialed you by accident.”
Gabby was surprised to feel a burst of disappointment. “Oh, okay, then.”
“But, uh … since I have you on the phone, how are you? With everything that happened this afternoon. Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah, I’m fine.” The vision she’d had was haunting her, but otherwise … yeah. “I’m still kind of in shock with everything else, though. It’s hard for me to believe this is really happening.”
“Me, too,” Justin admitted. “It’s kind of cool, but kind of …”
“Crazy,” Gabby supplied.
“Gotta go, bye,” Justin abruptly announced. As the phone beeped in Gabby’s ear, indicating the call had ended, she wondered if she�
��d somehow said the wrong thing.
She was starting to think she would never finish her chemistry when her phone beeped.
Sorry. My mom just got home. Had to deal.
Was she supposed to text something back? She didn’t want him to think she was ignoring him.
After a few false starts, Gabby settled on OK.
It was probably the lamest text message in the history of texts, but at least it was a reply.
Her phone beeped almost instantaneously. I’ll see you tomorrow.
A full smile spread across her face. Sounds good.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Patricia wasn’t usually an early riser, but this morning she found herself pacing around the tiny living room of her rented apartment well before five o’clock, willing the phone to ring with an update from the Albuquerque field office. Though she’d sent the bracelet they found at Lily’s cabin to the techs just the day before, she was anxious to hear back about the forensic results.
Lily had come to her in a dream again last night. Luckily, it was one of the better ones. She and Lily were laughing together in their old lab, Lily’s blond hair glistening under the fluorescent lights. They’d spent hundreds of late evenings there together, breaking only when Robert would stop by to drop off a takeout dinner for them. It didn’t feel like work when they were feeding off each other’s energy, one of them always saying exactly what the other one was just thinking. That was the friend Patricia preferred to remember. Lily before her life turned upside down. Before the mess with Sam. Before she’d left the FBI, abandoning Patricia. Before she’d taken up residence in Cedar Springs, letting her scientific brilliance languish while she pursued a life of simple crafts. Patricia knew her candles had been a local favorite, but Lily was a genius. She was wasting her talent.
A dream analyst would probably say Patricia kept having these dreams because she had unresolved feelings about Lily’s death. That she was feeling guilty. Well, of course she was. She and Lily had once been inseparable. As the only two female chemists in their entire division, they were initially drawn together by their gender, sharing the frustrating stories of professors who had underestimated their abilities. But they also shared a drive to innovate. Lily was the only person at the FBI who didn’t think Patricia was too intense in the lab because Lily was the same way. How could you be too intense when you were responsible for creating chemical compounds that could be tools for justice and change the world? The serum certainly hadn’t happened overnight, of course. In fact, it was a byproduct of something else she and Lily had been developing — a drug for the FBI that would allow people to access repressed memories after witnessing a crime. After several dozen trials, Patricia and Lily found there was one consistent side effect: extrasensory clairvoyant bursts. That’s what gave them the idea to construct a new drug with those side effects as the primary goal. It could help with missing persons cases, cold cases, anything that had reached a dead end. They isolated the compound causing the clairvoyant side effects, and after months in the lab, barely sleeping, barely speaking with anyone else, they finally did it.
And Lily had been tortured and murdered by someone who wanted to get his hands on their work.
Patricia owed it to Lily to find out who was responsible. Not just because of her remorse over the fact that she and Lily hadn’t spoken in years. Or her survivor’s guilt after Lily’s murder. But because she knew that Lily would have wanted Patricia to do every single thing in her power to get the serum back.
Patricia left her apartment at seven, only to find that Nash had beaten her to Cytology. She nodded at him, impressed that a twenty-two-year-old had such a strong work ethic. But considering who his father was, Nash probably felt he had to prove himself twice as much as anyone else. Patricia knew Nash had blazed an unconventional path to the FBI — testing off the charts as a child and developing a natural athleticism not usually found in tandem with an extraordinary analytical mind. Given the initial incident that had put him on the FBI’s radar, it was no wonder he’d been tracked by the bureau and recruited right out of high school.
She walked into her glass-enclosed office and returned to her notes from the cabin. She wasn’t sure how the waitress wearing the bracelet in Gabby’s vision fit in with the case. She could have been Lily’s friend or Lily’s enemy. Either way, at least they now had some kind of lead. Patricia believed in her serum more than anyone, but even she was surprised by how well the five teens had performed right out of the gate.
Suddenly, her computer rang with a video call from Carl Plouffe, her supervisor at the bureau.
The knots in her stomach tightened. Please have the results for the bracelet.
“Carl,” she answered crisply as his pale face filled the screen.
“Patricia. Any other progress to inform me of?” Plouffe asked.
Patricia tried not to snap. “Not in the last twelve hours. We’ve been waiting for your analysis of the bracelet we found.”
“For God’s sake, Patricia, the world doesn’t stop while you wait for evidence to be examined,” he said. “We can’t waste any time.”
Carl Plouffe was more worried about his trajectory toward the top of the FBI than the fact that there was a murderer running loose with a covert mind-altering serum. He wanted Patricia to solve the case so he could get the credit.
“I’m concerned you’re not fully grasping the gravity of this situation,” he continued, glaring at her from the screen.
“Of course I am.”
“Then why didn’t you destroy that serum like you were supposed to?”
Patricia did her best to suppress a scream. There was no point getting trapped in this conversation again. Yes, she and Lily had been asked to destroy the serum ten years prior when Carl and the new administration had come in, part of an organizational overhaul that took out several of Patricia’s former supervisors. She couldn’t fathom why they would have wanted to destroy something of such value. “Dangerous,” the paper pushers at the top of the FBI hierarchy had called the serum, exposing their fear of anything in the clairvoyant realm. They also didn’t see the point if they couldn’t use it on adult FBI agents. Despite all her and Lily’s tinkering, there was no getting around the fact that the serum was effective only on younger, developing brains. But after all the years of difficult work, they were just supposed to throw the serum away because their new supervisors lacked imagination?
Instead, she and Lily divided up the serum, each securing her own cache off FBI premises. Lily had left the bureau shortly after that, but Patricia had always held out hope that a new field office director, one with more vision, would finally see the power behind the serum and hail its return.
“I don’t think I can apologize any more,” Patricia replied tersely. After Lily was killed, Patricia had decided that the potential consequences of the serum being stolen were too monumental to deal with on her own. There was no telling what kind of death and destruction could potentially come next. A domestic terrorist group able to use their psychic abilities to wreak havoc and stay a step ahead of the law. A foreign guerrilla movement or any other group who wanted to use the serum for their own gain. The serum could cause a national or an international emergency. Patricia knew more than anyone the allure of the extrasensory … and how valuable a tool it could be.
“Do you need more resources?” Plouffe asked. “Anything to put an end to this disaster.”
“I don’t need anyone else,” Patricia replied. “Ryan Nash has proven tremendously helpful.” It was the truth. Regardless of his storied background, she’d been skeptical at first that someone so young had been assigned to the case. However, their working relationship had quickly fallen into place.
Plouffe cracked his knuckles. “Okay. Well, we did run the bracelet found at the crime scene.”
He’d had the forensic results this entire conversation and he waited to reprimand her for five minutes before
telling her?
“There were no fingerprints we could identify … but we did find traces of blood.”
Patricia leaned forward.
“The blood belonged to two different people, we believe. One was unidentified. Not in our database.”
“And the other?”
“A ninety-nine percent match to Lily Carpenter.”
* * *
Nash could see Patricia talking to Plouffe as he sat at his desk, running searches on restaurants and bars within a five-mile radius of the Belvedere Inn, the motel the waitress in Gabby’s vision had visited.
He himself had spoken to Plouffe on only one occasion — the day he had been recruited. But he had a suspicion that Plouffe was always watching him from behind the scenes, that he was the one who had signed off on the series of difficult but plum assignments Nash had received over the last few years, despite his young age. Maybe he was just testing him, but Nash was always determined to rise to the occasion.
He stopped typing for a second to massage his rotator cuff, his right arm slightly sore from rebuilding the steps that Justin had blown to pieces at Lily’s cabin. It was important that the police not notice the difference in their crime scene. The cops were aware that the FBI was conducting its own investigation into Lily’s murder, but the flow of intelligence was not exactly a two-way street. Director Plouffe had chosen not to inform the police about the serum since it’s very existence was classified. The sore shoulder was worth it, however. That bracelet was the first solid clue they’d had in weeks … if you could call a psychic vision “solid,” something Nash was still wrestling with.
When he’d first been assigned to the case, he’d been doubtful that Patricia’s plan would work. Their afternoon at the cabin had forced him to reassess. Gabby’s “vision” was so specific that it was hard to dismiss. But he couldn’t accept these new clues at face value yet, either. He was still interested in finding tangible evidence. Would Lily’s cryptic statement to Sabrina somehow begin to make sense? Could they actually find the waitress Gabby had “seen”?
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