Conduit

by Angie Martin

  Emily briefly reconsidered their intrusion on the memorial service. The invasion into the victim’s private life on probably the worst day in their family history made her feel a little guilty, but if they could find something, even one small clue to lead police to find the man who took her life, it was worth it.

  She turned away from the rain-streaked window and toward Cassie. “How do you propose we go about this?”

  “We can’t tell them we’re working with the police,” Cassie said. “They might not open up to us if they think we’ve got anything to do with this investigation.”

  “Maybe we can say we’re old friends and just go from there. Since Diane went to high school here in Wichita, it will be easy to say we know her from back then and kept in touch over the years.”

  “Great idea. She was right around our age, so that will work. Which high school did she go to?”

  “East.”

  Cassie groaned. “I used to date a boy from East back in high school and let’s just say those are not good memories.”

  “I remember him. Joshua something, but you called him something else—”

  “The Frog,” both women said in unison, followed by laughter that generally accompanied memories of their teenage antics.

  “Why is it that most of your stories start with a guy you used to date?” Emily asked.

  “What can I say? I’m rather experienced in the dating arena.”

  “I don’t think that’s something to brag about, at least not in public.” Emily pointed to the stoplight a block in front of them. “Turn left up here.”

  “I know how to get there,” Cassie said. “I also used to date a boy from Holy Spirit in high school.”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “You need some sort of dating consultant to get to the bottom of your inability to settle down. Speaking of which, what happened with Stephen last night?”

  “It was actually beautiful and poetic. I gave him an earful, he gave me an earful of excuses, and then his wife called my cell phone while we were arguing.”

  Emily’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open.

  “I didn’t recognize the number so I answered it. I never do that, but I was so tired of listening to him that I thought it was a good way to get out of the conversation. She had checked his cell phone records because she suspected something was up. She didn’t know my number and saw it quite a bit on the bill so she gave me a ring. I got to tell her right in front of him that he was out on a date with me.”

  “Surely you told her you just found out he was married.”

  “Of course! I’m not one for angry, vengeful wives coming to my door unannounced. I told her she could either keep the sorry bastard or divorce him, but that I was a private investigator and I’d be glad to take her case for a much reduced fee if she needed help with the latter.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’d give me a call in the next few days.”

  “You are the only person I know who is able to solicit business in the oddest situations.”

  “Gotta make a living somehow.” Cassie steered the car into the parking lot of Holy Spirit Catholic Church and maneuvered into an open parking space toward the back of the lot. She turned off the engine, but made no move to exit the car.

  Emily scanned the sea of parked vehicles. “It’s packed.” she said. “At least we’ll have our choice of people to talk to.”

  “Over the years, we’ve had to misrepresent ourselves in a lot of places,” Cassie said, “but this is probably the grimmest of settings to do our dirty work.”

  “Under the grimmest of circumstances.”

  “I wish I could disagree with you.” Cassie gave a strained smile. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Despite having never taken someone from their home, let alone in the middle of the day, David found taking Jillian quite easy. Walking to his car, she didn’t make a sound, call for help, or attempt to fight him. Persuaded at gunpoint, she climbed into his backseat without argument, where he administered the Ketamine to keep her out for the duration of the car ride.

  Although he was at his best, the top of his game since he started, the ease with which he stole Jillian away from her home was more than a well-executed plan. It was fate. He was meant to take her and she would get him closer to Emily.

  Back at his farmhouse, Jillian waited for him in the soundproof basement. David took a short glass out of the cupboard next to the kitchen sink and placed three ice cubes in it. He poured Maker’s Mark over the ice, filling the glass. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he lifted the glass to his lips, the start of his pre-killing ritual. The whiskey burned his throat and warmed his insides with the peace that always came before the kill.

  He sat the glass down on a napkin on the table and picked up the knife he had placed there earlier. David twirled it back and forth in his fingers, mesmerized by the glint of the sharpened blade under the yellow glow of the kitchen light. In a few hours, the knife would slice against Jillian’s skin, occasionally burying itself into her body. For now, Jillian sat in the cold, dark basement in solitude. The fear of what could happen to her would build inside of her until it bubbled over in unrestrained emotion and controlled her every thought. Only then would it be time for him to continue the task of connecting with Emily.

  David didn’t start out as a killer, nor did he ever intend to be one. In middle school he embraced his darker side, one he explored through vivid fantasy, but he never thought his fantasies would seep into his reality. The fantasies were just that, and killing a person was something other people did. People who were much different than him.

  His psychic abilities came to him very early, at the young age of eight. His successful father was too busy with his career as a neurosurgeon to notice or even care that anything was amiss with his only child. His mother’s social escapades kept her away from the house and out of David’s life for most of his childhood.

  The absence of his parents didn’t bother him much. A popular child at the exclusive private school where his parents enrolled him, he spent his days in the company of his many friends. His popularity surprised him given that he didn’t like his classmates. The only time any twinge of emotion penetrated his stoic life was at night alone in his bed, engulfed in his fantasies.

  As he grew older, David learned more about his psychic abilities. While very powerful, they were stunted in growth. Even though he kept his gift hidden and didn’t know anyone else like him, he practiced his talents on a regular basis. He tried to connect with friends at school, with girls he thought were cute, even with perfect strangers passing by on the street. Each time, he fell far short of his potential.

  During his senior year in high school, he one day inexplicably heard the thoughts of his mother without trying. His father had been in the middle of a complex surgery, one that he had bragged would launch him into the annals of medical history, when his heart decided it wasn’t time for him to be a hero surgeon. The heart attack turned the doctor into a patient, and he was rushed out of the operating room while another surgeon took his place at the table.

  As they sat in a sterile waiting room for news on his father’s condition, David’s mother reached for his hand. When they touched, he heard something. He thought he was mistaken when he heard her speak, since her mouth did not move with the words. The sound, however, did not resonate in his ears, but in his mind.

  Before that moment, he could sense the occasional emotion, but now he heard thoughts, and the thoughts of his mother surprised him. He had always assumed her relationship with his father to be a sham, one of convenience and of monetary worth only. What he heard contradicted everything he believed.

  She continued holding David’s hand tight until a doctor, whom David recognized as a regular guest of the parties in their home, came out to give them the news of his father’s death. They had tried everything, but the damage to his heart was too great to save him. The doctor was sincere in his apologies, but David w
as not sincere in his grief.

  His mother gripped his arm for support. With her hysterical tears came a blizzard of thoughts he latched onto. Distressed by his father’s death, she didn’t know how she would live without him. The discovery that his mother loved his father came second in surprise to being able to read her thoughts. It didn’t take long for him to understand what triggered this sudden growth in his abilities: extreme emotion.

  He had been around emotional people countless times, but it was extreme emotion that made his gift everything he knew it could be. He had to explore this aspect to reach his potential, and he soon figured out how to make the most of his gift.

  Two weeks after his father’s demise, David’s mother demonstrated just how much she couldn’t live without him. The day after his anticlimactic eighteenth birthday, David found her in bed with her wrists slit. Her blood dripped into growing pools under each wrist, red drizzling down the comforter and onto the carpet.

  He sat in her plush, rose-covered reading chair for several hours and watched the blood current stop flowing. A glaze formed at the top of the puddles, like gravy sitting too long in the china boat at Thanksgiving dinner. The blood fascinated him, forcing him into a hypnotic state while he stared at it. The only place he had seen so much blood was in his mind, entrenched in a wonderful fantasy.

  Watching his mother’s lifeless body grow cold, his lack of emotion after his father’s death and throughout much of his life continued. Staring at her body stirred no grief. No remorse surfaced for not getting enough time with her. No surge of excitement overcame him at being free of both his parents to do as he wished. Just the thrill of studying the alluring blood.

  Before he called 911, he gathered emotion into his voice. He had learned over the years to create emotion by mimicking others, and he spent countless hours watching television shows and movies in order to learn emotion. If he didn’t display the appropriate reaction to situations, others would find him odd and might even suspect him of doing bad things. Duplicating what he saw others do in various situations worked well for him.

  His tactics helped him succeed in school, not just with a perfect grade point average, but in making friends and having girls follow him in hopes of being his girlfriend. Throughout high school, he only dated a few times and never kept a steady girlfriend. Even though people surrounded him, he could never get too close to anyone and risk them finding out the truth about his faux life.

  After high school, David disappeared. He withdrew from the world, determined to hone his abilities. He didn’t need to go to college or find a job, a benefit that left him plenty of time to begin his experiments. His parents both came from old money and his mother hadn’t managed to spend even a tenth of it. They left him enough to last several lifetimes, and David didn’t require much to survive.

  He traded his childhood home in Los Angeles for a secluded location in Montana. His work required solitude, and rural Montana provided just that. He paid cash for a ranch, though he gave no thought to ever farming vegetables or raising cattle. With the closest town over thirty miles away and his ranch sitting on almost one hundred acres, he had plenty of privacy.

  For the next five years, he stalled at developing his gift. He only ventured out when he needed groceries or supplies. These little trips into town did not allow him to feed off emotions of others. From time to time, he picked up a girl for a one-night stand to satisfy his physical needs, which in turn sparked his gift, but he had no other use for women.

  He conducted research on the Internet about psychics, but mainly found farce websites with vague horoscopes and readings he could get for $1.99 per minute. Unable to find anything about real psychics, David tried to live a normal, solitary life and not think about his gift. He focused instead on criminal justice, learning everything he could about investigations, crime scenes, and forensics. He wanted to be prepared in case he ever needed to carry out one of his fantasies.

  One evening, while heading back from town with a car full of groceries in anticipation of an imminent winter storm, David stopped off at a rest stop. He didn’t need to use the facilities, but an invisible force drew him there. He parked next to the only car in the parking lot and followed his intuition.

  When he saw the young woman’s long hair glow red under the dimly lit entrance to the restrooms, he knew what called him to stop. She turned her head back and forth, studying the map encased by hard plastic on the wall. From his many stops at this place, David knew the plastic container over the map had long since eroded with weather blemishes, making it difficult for anyone to decipher the mishmash of roads on the paper underneath. This girl would never find her desired route on that map.

  David acted like he didn’t notice her. He breezed past her and walked into the men’s restroom. He waited a few moments inside the stale bathroom with his hand pressed to his nose to block out the myriad of distasteful smells, then flushed the urinal to keep up appearances.

  As he ran water over his hands in the stained sink, his stomach knotted, but he couldn’t determine the source of his anxiety. The prospect of interacting with this woman who he sensed from a distance aroused his dormant gift and excited him. Even in the restroom, he sensed her thoughts. Though skewed and difficult to read, her thoughts formed a picture in his mind of the girl staring at the map for answers to unknown questions.

  He tugged open the heavily graffitied door and exited the restroom, happy to see the girl still standing there. She turned to him, and he gave a polite smile, but did not speak for fear he might spook her if he initiated conversation.

  “Excuse me, sir?” The woman’s strong voice was void of any timid strains, despite being in the company of a strange man in the dark of night at an empty rest stop. Urban legends and warnings given to young women about the dire things that occur at rest stops didn’t seem to frighten her.

  “Hi,” David said, leaving his smile in place.

  The girl smiled back, with a bit of sensuality lurking underneath the ordinary gesture. She moved toward him with purposeful, catlike movements. “Are you from around here?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, adding a bit of Southern twang to his tone. Women tended to trust men with a Southern accent. If she believed him to be a good old boy, she would have no reason to be afraid.

  She tilted her head and gazed at him with wide, dollish green eyes, a look that probably worked on many men in bar settings. “Do you know of any hotels around here?” She twirled strands of her hair between her fingers. “A motel would work fine, too. I can’t afford much right now so a motel might be best, just nothing too dirty.”

  David knew of at least three motels about fifteen miles up the interstate. All were clean and most likely in her price range. He had visited all of them in the past after picking up a girl at a bar. “I’m afraid there’s not too much around here. Maybe about an hour or so from here.”

  The girl pursed her lips in a sorrowful, yet attractive manner. “The radio says there’s quite a storm heading in and I’m afraid I might be stuck if I can’t find anything.” She dug her cell phone out of her coat pocket and waved it at him. “Not much in the way of cell service, either.”

  There was no cell service anywhere between here and his ranch, though David didn’t bother with that technology. The absence of cellular phones in his life helped keep him off the grid. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “Out to Seattle.” A girlish, flirty laugh floated his way. “I know it’s a dreadful time of year to drive this part of the country, but my friend is getting married and airline tickets were too pricey given the bridesmaid dress I had to buy.” She inched closer to him. “Besides, I thought the scenery might provide some interest.”

  “It’s sure beautiful right here,” David said, looking her over. He wasn’t lying. At about 5’3, even with her heavy winter coat on he could tell she didn’t weigh much over 105. A beautiful girl, she knew how to use her looks to get what she wanted. Right now, she wanted him.

  B
ut there was something he wanted much more from her than a one-night stand at a motel. His abilities raged inside of him, fully awake for the first time since his mother’s death. This frail beauty standing in front of him, staring at him with lust-filled eyes, brought life back into his veins. He had to get her back to his ranch and learn why she had this effect on his gift.

  “The storm is coming quick,” he said. “I was just making the long journey back from town with enough groceries to ride it out.”

  “I’m not sure what to do. I might have to sleep in my car tonight and hope to make it out of here tomorrow.”

  David extended his hand. “My name is David,” he said. Despite inserting his introduction in an odd part of their conversation, he decided to disarm her of any lingering suspicions before suggesting she come to his ranch.

  She slipped her slender, gloved hand into his and said, “I’m Julie.” Even through the leather, her touch made his powers stronger. He could only imagine what touching her skin would do for him.

  “Well, Miss Julie,” he said, his fake, thick accent propelling every word, “you can’t sleep in your car overnight. Even if you leave the car running with the heater, you’ll possibly run out of gas and freeze to death. Can’t have that happening.”

  “Maybe I can make it ahead of the storm to one of those motels you mentioned. An hour, you say?”

  “You’ll never make it in time. The storm is almost here. The store I went to is in the same town with the motels, and they were battening down the hatches as I left. It’s not going to take much longer before it overcomes us here.”

  Julie pouted. “I knew I should have flown to Seattle. I always seem to have the worst luck.”

  He rubbed his chin. “My ranch isn’t far from here, about forty-five minutes. I have an extra bedroom. It’s not much, but it’s warm. There’s plenty of food and a hot shower as well.”

  The corner of Julie’s mouth turned upward in a seducing manner. “I suppose I’ll have to take you up on that. I can pay you whatever—”