by TL Schaefer
Lunatic Fringe
TL Schaefer
Table of Contents
Title Page
Lunatic Fringe (CASI, #3)
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
About the author
The CASI Series
The Mariposa Series
The Fated Fae Series
Stand Alone Titles
Writing as Keira Ramsay
LUNATIC FRINGE
Colorado Academy for Superior Intellect (CASI), Book 2
By TL Schaefer
Published by Terri Schaefer
Copyright 2020
Cover by Sweet ‘N Spicy Designs
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at [email protected].
All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. www.tlschaefer.com
Dedication
FOR JENN AND SARAH – I remember getting the idea for this series in the San Francisco airport a million years ago. It wouldn’t be the book, or series, it is without you.
For Jaycee – you captured the whole series so beautifully and make my website the bomb!
And as always, to August... You put up with me disappearing into the office for hours on end and nod encouragingly whenever I start throwing out ideas that make absolutely no sense to you. I love you!
Prologue
NINE MONTHS AGO, DALLAS...
It was hot, close, and a little bit stinky in the crowded bullpen. Normal. It should have felt normal.
Mrs. Corina Beagley sat in the molded plastic chair next to my desk, ebony face flawlessly made up, peach-colored raw silk pantsuit impossibly unwrinkled, bearing impeccably composed. Inside she was a roiling mass of emotion that picked me apart one molecule at a time.
Or at least that’s what it felt like.
I concentrated on doing the job. On getting the information I needed from her that might help nail her brother’s killer.
My partner, a jaded old guy who’d just transferred over from Vice, had taken one look at Mrs. Beagley and disappeared to get coffee, leaving me with the hardest part of any case, working the family.
Bastard. It wasn’t the first time he’d done it, but it would be the last.
Corina answered my questions patiently, as if she had all the time in the world, but the storm inside was building, building, building. My skin tingled, a thousand imaginary ants crawling over me.
I barely stifled the instinct driving me to reach out a friendly hand, to offer a comforting touch. Instead, my fingers twitched now and again, like live wires were running beneath my skin.
The first tear barely dared to mar her perfect face, but then it was joined by a second, a third, and the storm broke.
Her emotions crashed over me in a wave, first making me recoil in shock, then beating at me so relentlessly I pushed back in my chair, anything to put distance between the two of us. But her grief, it followed me, plucking with sharp fingers until I was backed against a wall, almost blinded by the bombardment. And then I broke with her.
Chapter One
WHAT CAME BEFORE...
“You’re such a pretty kitty.” My voice soothed as I ran my hands over the old cat’s scraggly fur. I knew it was dying.
Summers in Texas were really hot, and this old guy had been out too long in it. His sides heaved, but as I ran my hands down the length of his body, he began to calm, and a few seconds later a purr rumbled his chest.
I felt it when he passed and cried a little before I wrapped him in a dishtowel and buried him in the backyard, just out of view from the kitchen window.
Mama and Papa worry about me when I help animals cross the Rainbow Bridge, say it’s making me too quiet for a girl my age. They say it when they don’t think I can hear, though.
They don’t know I feel everything the animals do or that I take a tiny bit of them inside me to ease their pain. It’s as natural as breathing, something I’ll never stop doing as long as I live.
There’s too much pain in this world to not help wherever I can. I see it every day on the news I’m not supposed to be watching, and in the halls of my elementary school.
When I grow up, I’m going to be a veterinarian, I’m going to help those who can’t speak for themselves. I’m going to make a difference.
Now, Dallas...
The coffee in my travel mug was supposed to be top of the line, guaranteed to supercharge me and everyone within a two-foot radius of the cup. I’d brewed a triple-strong dose this morning before leaving the house, but even that much caffeine couldn’t make the day more palatable.
Smelled good, though.
The faded red door of room twenty-three of the no-tell motel across the potholed street was my assignment today, as I waited to document the conclusion of a little afternoon delight.
Around me, spring was trying to assert herself a few weeks early, evidenced by the dip and sway of yellow daffodils too peppy for the chilly, thin air. And for the neighborhood.
I cheered her on. I was tired of winter, tired of exhaustion riding me like a pissed-of jockey. Tired of smiling when all I wanted to do was collapse into dreamless sleep.
My ass was numb, and my brain was on shutdown. Partly because a bitch of a nightmare had jolted me out of sleep at 0300 again, but mostly because I was bored beyond reason.
Or at least I kept telling myself that.
Sitting stakeout in a crummy fifteen-year-old four-door with an on-again-off-again heater that smelled vaguely like feet had never been my favorite thing when I was a detective with the Dallas Police Department. As a struggling PI, I liked it even less.
Today’s case bored me out of my skull, but it gave me something to do. Something to occupy my mind. Take away the urge to obsess about the dream I keep having over and over and over.
I leaned forward to check the focus on the compact digital camera suction-cupped to the dash. My surveillance subjects should be out of the cheapo hotel room soon. I was hoping for a big old smooch on the doorstep. That would be the cherry on top of an already open-and-shut case. Then I could move on to the next one.
Yay me.
My mentor told me that even when you made the bigs, it still sucked.
Why was I even trying? Surely I could get a job doing something else, anything else.
But joining the Air Force at eighteen and becoming a cop had set the course of my adult life, and until the last nine months it had suited.
Now everything felt wrong, like yoga pants that were just a bit too tight.
Across the street, my cheaters exited the room, and just as I’d hoped, exchanged a torrid kiss that seemed to go on and on.
Even the sight of them playing tonsil hockey made me weary.
Cut, and that’s a wrap. I reached for the camera to shut it off when a flurry of activity from
the parking lot caught my eye, and I sat back, waiting, watching.
A dark-haired woman burst out of a compact sedan, her face mottled and angry, her voice strident as she yelled expletives at my adulterers. She strode toward the couple with furious, purposeful strides, a baseball bat in hand.
I was out of the car and halfway across the street before I remembered I wasn’t a cop anymore, and by then it was too late.
The couple disappeared into the motel room, and the woman I assumed was the wife of one of the cheaters began beating on the door like it was her only mission in life to get in.
I caught the bat on a backswing, pulled it out of her hands and threw it aside.
At the end of the row of rooms, the manager stuck his head out the door.
I looked at the woman, who’d whirled around, putting her back to the door in a defensive posture, hands up against the threat I posed.
From afar her face had looked red with anger, but up close I could see the coloring was from fading bruises. A split lip. A black eye.
I hollered down to the manager. “Call 911.”
Then I looked at her and held out my hand, bracing for what I knew would happen when her skin skimmed mine. The flood of sensations came whether I wanted them to or not, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to tamp them down. Nothing to stop me from experiencing her every feeling.
But it didn’t matter that I’d be in a funk for hours, that everything around me would become too bright, too loud, too everything, because this woman was hurting. Her physical wounds were superficial, but even from a few steps away I could feel her emotions battering at her skin, trying to escape.
There was no way I could let her shoulder the burden alone.
“I’m Monica. I’m a PI. I have him on tape, and he’ll never be able to do this to you again, unless you let him.”
Her chin firmed up, then trembled in defiance as tears filled her eyes. “Damn right he’ll never do this to me again. I’ll cut off his dick first.”
I smiled, made sure she saw my teeth. “Good girl. Now let’s go down and wait for the cops. You can make a statement to them, and I’ve got evidence he was cheating, for what it’s worth.”
She stared at my hand as if tempted to lean on a stranger, but in the end she firmed up her shoulders and turned, her movements almost military in their precision, and headed to the manager’s office.
Relief coursed through my every pore. Today I’d stay me, stay Monica, instead of consuming other people’s emotions one touch at a time.
I was feeling almost jaunty as I hoisted the bat over my shoulder, took a deep cleansing breath and followed her.
When a squad car came rolling into the lot, I was quick to hand over the bat to one of the officers and leave him my card, explaining who I was and what I was doing there. And with each word the adrenaline slowly faded.
The senior cop riding shotgun gave me a nod. If I remembered correctly he’d been on the job for about five years. As Homicide, I’d worked a few cases with him, enough for him and his partner to give me the benefit of the doubt.
I promised to send them a copy of the digital video file on my camera within the hour, as soon as I’d informed my client. No one had come to harm in the here and now, and they’d be doing paperwork long after I sent them the file.
It was all good. But I was even more exhausted now than I’d been this morning.
I returned to my beater, turned off the camera, removed it from the dash and placed it carefully in the padded bag. Thank God the memory on the card I used was ginormous. Then I texted my client, made an appointment to meet him in an hour.
At least today I’d get paid.
I hadn’t wanted my client to be proven right, but the anticipation had given me a purpose, something to do.
And now? Now the job was over, with nothing to focus on, nothing besides terror as I contemplated coming not-so-slowly unraveled.
This had been a nice diversion from the merry-go-round that had become my life, but now it was over, and I was back to being me.
THE DALLAS STREETS were typically crowded as I piloted my Escalade to the Foudy estate.
I’d finished up the paperwork on my adultery case, delivering the evidence to one very pissed, tight-lipped husband. A second copy had gone to the local precinct—not my old one—in case the battered wife needed it.
And with that, my day was done and I could spend some time with Tori.
Having to visit her at my ex-in-laws was uncomfortable as hell, but couldn’t be helped.
Joe and I had given our marriage what seemed like the hundredth try right before he and Tori moved out, a last stab, but it was as if the dynamic that made our marital indifference bearable had shifted.
The spark that made us an item thirteen years ago and brought Tori into the world had long been extinguished.
Then the nightmares began, my screams curdling the air. Or at least that was the way Joe described it before they left. Tori was almost always in tears afterward as well, which made me die a little inside because I’d caused her pain.
And so Joe had suggested they spend some time with his parents, give them quality time with Tori. I agreed, even though it gutted me.
Two months later, after a continuous stream of dreams where I woke with a throat sore from screaming, I filed for divorce. Because in order to have a life with my kid, I needed to fix myself.
It wasn’t much of a leap to figure out there was no way to fix my marriage. Because I missed Tori like there was no tomorrow, but Joe? Not so much.
Lawrence and Elizabeth hadn’t asked many questions when their son and granddaughter moved in. They were thrilled to spend more time with Tori. Dollars to donuts they’d thought Joe and I were finally separating—and then they’d been proven right.
The separation, and then divorce, hadn’t been acrimonious, or even contentious, but almost apathetic, which told both of us something about the state of our union.
Even after Joe and Tori moved back to his parents’ place, and then after the papers were signed and Tori’s custody was a done deal, he’d tried to take care of me, in the weird way we’d fallen into. Mutual support, pseudo-friendship in the name of our child.
The house we shared was mine as long as I wanted to live there, and if I left, half of the proceeds would come my way. Which I’d protested—Joe had bought it, after all—but he’d won that round.
Yeah, Joe could be an ass, but since the divorce he’d been more of a husband to me than he’d been in a very long time. I wished I could say the same was true of me.
If my therapy had worked, we all might be back together, maybe giving it another try, for Tori if nothing else.
This situation all fell squarely on me and it sucked.
Regardless of our living conditions in the here and now, I never missed meeting Tori after school. Joe and Lawrence were still usually at the law firm that bore the family name, and Elizabeth and I got along well enough. We weren’t the other’s favorite person, but we really didn’t need to be.
I keyed in the alarm code on the gates leading into the exclusive community, then pulled in front of the palatial home.
I’d never been comfortable with Joe’s wealth, and he was rich in his own right, not just from inheritance and trusts.
The house we owned together was comfortable, tastefully finished, but that was for Tori’s sake. I’d have been just as likely to crash in a little suburban fifties ranch or rambling historical home than I was in a McMansion.
Valentina opened the door for me, her uniform impeccably pressed, as always. She was a walking stereotype, and from the eyerolls we’d shared over the last few months at the Foudy’s eccentricities, she knew it, but the money had to be excellent, and I’d never seen Elizabeth treat her with anything more than a rich person’s absentmindedness.
Who even had a housekeeper like her anymore? One who answered the door and served dinner and did the laundry? It never failed to make me uncomfortable.
You’
d think with my kid living there, I could just wander in, but Lawrence and Elizabeth were nothing if not sticklers for propriety. Therefore, I’d become a doorbell ringer. I could tell Valentina thought it was a load of crap too, so I just shared a smile and yet another shrug with her and headed to the family room.
It was Tori’s things, strewn about only as a pre-teen can drop them, that made the meticulously decorated room homey. She’d kicked off her shoes by the couch and her backpack took up one corner of the same sofa.
She sat, legs crossed, in the middle of the couch, her auburn hair shining like a halo around her bent head. Her thumbs flew as she texted madly.
I just looked at her, my heart so full I thought it would burst. My daughter, the only thing I was really living for at this point.
Dammit, I would beat this thing that had invaded my head. I’d do it for me. For Tori. I’d even do it for Joe.
Elizabeth cleared her throat behind me, and when I swung around to greet her, I saw the expression on her face, a look of commiseration I’d never seen before. I was almost struck dumb. She knew, she understood. Maybe not what I was going through, but that I loved Tori more than anything in the world, just as she loved Joe.
I swallowed past sudden tears and gave her a nod, then moved to sit next to Tori. “Hey sweetie, how was school?”
She looked at me through Joe’s vivid amber eyes and began chattering about her day, about the intricacies of middle school social mores. Her bright voice and attitude were one hundred percent Tori. I wondered where she’d gotten it from. Certainly not me, and not Joe either.
I’d once heard myself described as “a cold, hard bitch,” and had taken pride in the description. Joe wasn’t much better, in fact, he and his father were the dictionary definition of sharky lawyers. Not that they were unethical or anything, they were simply quite excellent at what they did, and had a true passion for it.
So while she got Joe’s eyes and my diminutive height, where Tori got her bubbly attitude, especially on the cusp of being a teenager, was a mystery I’d just as soon not delve into. Instead I’d bask in her innocence, in her inherent sunniness, treasure every second I spent with her, and work that much harder on getting myself out of crazytown.