A Glimpse of Evil

by Victoria Laurie

  I gasped, looking in the distance as the rays just beyond our view shimmered a rich orange against the outer hills. “Ohmigod!” I whispered.

  “And that,” Dutch said, pointing in the opposite direction. “That is where our living room will be. We’ll have lots of windows with blue shutters, and we’ll be able to watch the sunset when we share some ice cream.”

  Tears welled in my eyes, and I had to blink them away to see where he pointed next. “Right there is where the garage goes, and there’ll be enough room above it for his and her offices.”

  I could hardly breathe and a small sob escaped me. “Oh, Dutch,” I squeaked.

  But my lovely man wasn’t finished with the surprises. No, he had one left, as I discovered when I realized his arm had looped around my middle and in his hand was a velvet black box. “And this is the ring that I had planned to give to you the day we arrived here in Austin, but Brice beat me to the surprise by proposing to Candice first. I decided to wait until that fanfare died down a little to make sure it was special for you, but now that we’re headed to D.C. next week, I don’t think I can wait a minute longer.” He paused for just a moment to reach over and gently open the box to reveal an enormous emerald ring. “Abigail Cooper,” he asked formally. “Love of my life, would you make me the happiest man on earth and marry me?”

  I tried to say yes, I really did, but my voice had left me the moment I realized he was showing me the vision I’d had of our life together in that two-story Tudor with a kitchen that faced east, and a living room that faced west.

  After several feeble attempts at a yes, I finally settled for nodding vigorously and covering him with kisses.

  Turn the page for an excerpt

  from Victoria Laurie’s

  next Psychic Eye Mystery

  EYE SPY

  Coming from Obsidian in July 2011.

  For the record: burying a dead body is a lot more work than it looks like on TV.

  Also for the record, burying a dead body while wearing a clingy evening gown, heels, and in the pouring rain—darn near impossible. Of course, I had help, which could be why we eventually got our dearly departed dude six feet under. (Okay, so maybe it was more like three feet under, but who’s really measuring at that point?)

  “I think that’s good,” said my oh-so-gorgeous fiancé as he patted down the mud on top of the long mound of dirt covering our dead guy.

  “Thank God,” I said, holding my hands palms up to let the rain wash some of the mud off. And that’s when I realized my engagement ring had slipped off. “Son of a beast!” I gasped. (Yes, I’m still not swearing, which, at times, proves most inconvenient.)

  “What?” asked my sweetie.

  Before answering him, I dropped to all fours and began to feel frantically around in the mud. “My ring! I’ve lost my ring!”

  My fiancé threw aside his shovel and came to squat down next to me. “When?”

  Tears welled in my eyes, and my heart raced with dread. “I’m not sure,” I admitted, still scratching at the mud with my fingernails.

  “Abigail,” he said gently, “if it’s in the grave, we’re not going to find it now. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But—!” I began.

  “No buts. Now come on. They’ll catch on that we’ve killed him any minute now, and they’ll be looking for us. We have to put some distance between us and them.”

  I was still crying, however, and I couldn’t get over losing the most precious thing I owned. “Please, Rick?” I begged. “Just give me a minute to look. I promise if I don’t find it in—”

  And that’s as far as I got before the woods all around us erupted in gunfire. Rick pulled me to him protectively. I stared into his deep brown eyes as he growled, “Move!”

  He got no further argument from me; we surged forward, and I followed right next to him as we darted through the underbrush. We ran for probably a quarter mile, and I tripped and slipped almost the entire way in my heels. Thank God I’d passed on the stilettos and gone with a modest two-inch heel. The darn things had no traction, however, and if Rick hadn’t been holding my hand, I’m sure I wouldn’t have made it that far that quick.

  We stopped to catch our breath and listen for signs of a chase behind us. I did my best not to quiver in fear while he scanned the area around us. In the distance I could hear the occasional pop of a gun, but nothing seemed close, and for that, I was grateful. I eyed my sore, muddied, and blistered feet, and wished that my black pumps were ruby red and I could click them together and go back home.

  “You ready to move again?” Rick asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  No, I thought.

  “I can see a structure about twenty yards that way,” he told me. “I think it might be a hunting lodge or a log cabin. We can make it there and hide out till nightfall. It’ll also give us some shelter from this rain.”

  “Yippee,” I said woodenly.

  Rick smiled in sympathy and took my hand. “Come on, babe. It’s not far.”

  Now, you’re probably wondering what mess I’d gotten myself into this time—right? Let me take all the suspense right out of it for you. It was a doozy!

  It all began three weeks prior to our mad dash through the forest, to a time when I was feeling . . . well . . . patriotic.

  Of course, when you have three high- ranking members of the FBI, CIA, and armed forces telling you that your country needs you, it can be a powerfully convincing argument.

  You see, six weeks ago, there was a breach to our national security that was of epic proportions. Something was stolen that was so crucial to our country’s safety that it left each and every one of us vulnerable.

  What was it? you ask. Well, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.

  Ha, ha, ha! Kidding! I’ll divulge all; but let me at least start again at the beginning, which, for me, was on a beautiful late April day in downtown Austin, when I was called to a meeting at the FBI office, where I was a civilian profiling consultant. That’s really just a fancy way of saying that, as a professional psychic, I assisted the FBI by pulling warm clues out of the ether on cases that had long since gone cold.

  At this particular meeting were my sweetheart—assistant special agent in charge Dutch Rivers—his boss, Brice Harrison; his boss, Bill Gaston; and a lieutenant colonel with the air force, along with some steely-looking dude from the CIA.

  During the course of that meeting, it became evident that something of great importance had been stolen off a military base and was then summarily smuggled out of the country. The good news was that the item had been traced to Canada. The bad news was that everyone agreed it would not be there for long.

  Now, naturally, our government wanted its property back, and so they’d sent two CIA agents to retrieve it. Those agents’ true identities were discovered, however, and I understand that their demise was swift and most unpleasant—something I’d rather not think about, actually.

  Anyway, when it became evident that the task of retrieving the article in question was more formidable than first imagined, Bill Gaston thought of me.

  I debated the idea of becoming a spy for two whole minutes—something in hindsight I’m still sort of regretting—but I’d agreed, and Dutch and I had flown to Washington, D.C., the following week.

  We’d been met at the airport by a lanky young agent with red hair and lots of freckles. He reminded me of Opie from The Andy Griffith Show. “Agent Rivers and Ms. Cooper?” he asked, spotting us immediately from the faces in the crowd surrounding the luggage carousel.

  Dutch extended his hand. “Agent Spencer?”

  Opie shook Dutch’s hand warmly. “Yes, sir,” he said, offering me a nice smile too. “Our car is this way.”

  We trailed behind Spencer, toting our luggage to a waiting black sedan. I swear, if the FBI ever wants to blend in right, they need to add a few Priuses or something less conspicuous to their fleet.

  Spencer loaded my bag into the back of the trunk, and we were on our
way. “Are we going to headquarters?” Dutch inquired.

  Spencer shook his head. “No, sir,” he told us. “I’ve been told to bring you to the CIA central office.”

  I gulped. I grew up at the height of the cold war, so I still think of the CIA as an agency staffed with seriously scary people willing to do anything for the cause. But I held my nerves in check—I mean, I didn’t want to appear all fidgety and nervous on my first day of spy school. How uncool would that be?

  We arrived at the CIA central office, and Opie handed us off to a female agent dressed in a smart black pantsuit and a crisp white shirt; she had no emotion on her face whatsoever.

  She took us through security before seeing us to a large conference room, where nearly a dozen men and one woman were already seated.

  The lone woman stood when we entered, and I noticed she was at the head of the oval table. “Good morning,” she said cordially. “Agent Rivers, Ms. Cooper, please come in and join us.”

  The agent who’d shown us in backed out of the room and closed the door. I felt Dutch’s hand rest on my lower back as he guided me to the only two available seats left at the table. My mouth went dry as I took up my chair, but when I saw Bill Gaston sitting across from us and smiling warmly, I breathed a teensy bit easier.

  It struck me then that the table was arranged somewhat by rank. The woman at the head of the table was obviously running the show, and she was flanked by two gentlemen, who I’d guess were in their midfifties; they seemed full of authority. The authority vein trickled down the table from there.

  I also couldn’t help noticing that everyone appeared quite interested in me, as so many steely eyes were focused my way. I could also see a little disappointment in a few of them as they assessed me from head to toe. Not the first time I’d experienced that reaction and, likely, not the last.

  “Welcome to Washington,” said the woman at the head of the table into the silence that followed our sitting down. “I’m Christine Tanner, and I’m the CIA director of intelligence here in D.C.”

  I smiled and nodded to her, and Dutch did the same. And that was it for pleasantries, because Tanner promptly sat down again and clicked a button, which caused the conference room to go dark except for the projection of a slide onto a screen at the other end of the room. “Ms. Cooper, as you have cleared our security background checks, we feel it wise to educate you on the nature of the security breach we encountered three weeks ago.”

  I focused on the slide, which showed an areal view of a large air force base. “This is a military outpost in southern Utah. On the morning of April sixth, during a routine flight test, one of our military drones went missing.” I heard a click, and a new slide showed the image of an unmanned drone aircraft like I’d seen on the news used in air strikes against enemy militant fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, although this one looked much smaller in scale.

  “The pilot claimed that midway through the test flight, the operating system on the drone failed, causing it to stop responding to his commands and eventually crash somewhere out in the desert.”

  So far I was following. The air force had lost a drone. Got it.

  “It is not unheard of for the operating systems on these aircraft to fail, and because these drone are very expensive to replace, as well as the importance of what this particular drone was carrying, an extensive search was immediately conducted to retrieve whatever remained of the drone and its cargo.”

  I looked at Dutch; he was focused on Tanner in a way that suggested there might be something more to this missing-drone story. “After we combed through the area where the drone was believed to have crashed, no evidence of it could be found, which is why the military began to suspect the pilot’s story.”

  A little way down from me and to the right, the lieutenant colonel who’d come with Gaston to recruit me in Austin shifted in his seat uncomfortably. Into the slight pause that followed Tanner’s last statement, he said, “I personally requested that the pilot come in for a polygraph. But when he failed to show up, we went looking for him. We found him on the floor of his shower, shot through the head at point-blank range.”

  “Suicide?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No,” he told me.

  “Obviously, we no longer suspect there was an operational issue with the drone,” Tanner added. “We believe the pilot was coerced or bribed into delivering our drone into enemy hands.”

  I furrowed my brow. Why was one missing drone causing so much uproar?

  Gaston seemed to read my mind, because he spoke next. “It’s more than just a missing drone,” he told me. “Agent Tanner, why don’t we allow Professor Steckworth to explain?”

  Gaston’s eyes had settled at the end of the table on a small man with salt-and-pepper hair and a nose much too big for his small square face. He cleared his throat when all eyes turned to him, and nodded to Tanner, who clicked her remote to project another slide on the screen. It was a photo of a man young enough to be a college student; he was somewhat unremarkable in appearance, except for the fact that enveloping him on all sides was the most beautiful cloud of color I’d ever seen. “Oh, my God!” I gasped, already understanding what I was looking at.

  “Do you know what you’re seeing?” Professor Steckworth asked, staring keenly at me.

  I nodded. “You’ve captured the image of his aura.” In my mind’s eye, when I focused only on the young man in the photo, I too saw a cloud of color, though it wasn’t nearly as vivid as what I was seeing on the screen.

  Professor Steckworth smiled. “Yes, very good, Ms. Cooper. Your own abilities allow you to see auras, I take it.”

  “Well . . .” I hesitated, not wanting everyone to assume my eyesight was clogged with images of color, color everywhere. “It’s less that I see them and more that I sense them in my mind’s eye. If I close my own eyes and focus, I can imagine, if you will, what someone’s aura looks like.”

  “Excellent,” Steckworth said, and I noticed a few knowing glances exchanged around the table before the professor motioned to Agent Tanner, and she clicked forward again . . . and again . . . and again, and in every slide was the picture of another person wearing a different set of colors that varied in degrees of intensity and vibrancy. I knew why they were showing me the photos. “Each one is unique to the person,” I said. “Like a fingerprint.”

  Professor Steckworth nodded again. “Indeed.” He then seemed to want to talk at length and looked to Tanner, who nodded to him. “You see, twenty years ago, I had the most astonishing encounter with a woman who claimed to be psychic. I was working on my PhD at the time, and her abilities so impressed me that I made her the focus of my thesis.

  “This woman was also an artist, and for a mere pittance, she would paint your portrait and include your individual aura. Of the hundreds of portraits I viewed of hers, no two were alike, and that began my quest to see if I could prove that auras really existed.

  “What I discovered was that each and every human being emits a certain electromagnetic frequency made up of individual wave patterns unique to that person—no two frequencies are alike, not even with identical twins. I then worked with the psychic to match colors to each wavelength and was able to develop a digital photography software to capture the overall effect. I call the system Intuit.”

  “Amazing,” I whispered, completely fascinated by the photos and the professor’s story.

  The professor took a sip of water and continued. “As my research and applications turned more promising, the air force became more and more intrigued, and when I needed funding to continue Intuit’s development, they provided me all I needed in return for the exclusive use of the system. Even then I could see the far-reaching benefits of my research, and as a former marine, I readily agreed.

  “Along the way to developing Intuit, I made several key discoveries using the software, which could prove most useful to our national security. What my research team and I discovered was that when we scanned in a still photograph of test subj
ects, our software was unable to detect or produce an aura image. However, when we scanned in a video image, the software was able to capture the aura.” The next slide showed a short clip of an infamous terrorist, and it left me stunned. The United States’ Public Enemy Number One was surrounded by a bubble of color—mostly gray, black, and red, and then my own intuitive radar began to put the pieces together. “The drone was carrying Intuit,” I whispered.

  In answer there was a click, and the next slide revealed an areal view of that same air base from before, and on the ground were little blobs of vivid color.

  I gasped.

  “Jesus!” whispered Dutch.

  “The drone was carrying the only prototype of the technology as well as a homing device and a small dummy missile,” said Professor Steckworth. “We dubbed the prototype Intuit Tron, and it had reached its final testing phase before being deployed on the morning it disappeared. This is the last image it recorded in fact.”

  The professor fell silent, and in the room, you could have heard a pin drop, but then Tanner clicked the remote again and a clip of our president’s last State of the Union Address began playing. Two seconds in, I saw the man I’d voted for and fully supported surrounded by a huge bubble of brilliant blue, green, and lavender. In that moment I believe my heart skipped several beats, and my stomach felt like it had fallen down to my toes. There was another click, and the slide moved to a clip of the British prime minister, then the French president, and on and on with each allied national leader’s aura vividly portrayed.

  It took me several seconds to realize I’d stopped breathing.

  The lights came on then, and I squinted in the brightness, while my mind raced with the possible horrible implications of having this particular technology in the wrong hands. “Now do you understand why your country so desperately needs someone with your talents, Ms. Cooper?” asked Tanner

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said gravely. “Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it.”