“But why would he choose to die like that?”
This remained the toughest part of the equation and the most difficult for her to accept. But over the years since his death, she believed she had worked out a possible explanation, for whatever it was worth now.
“I think Tom was afraid of getting old. He was afraid of being handicapped in some way, afraid that I would die first and leave him alone. So he chose a death in which he went out fast at the age of forty-two.”
“Why didn’t you see it coming?”
“I did.” She told him about the repeating dream she’d had during her pregnancy with Annie, nearly four years before Tom was shot. “By the time it was happening, though, I didn’t recognize it as the dream until it was too late.”
“Look, if you’d rather not do any more of this, I’ll understand.”
Another choice. If she walked away from this, her life would be easier, she could return to her usual routines, the hard knot of fear in the pit of her stomach would vanish. But she might feel she’d cheated Tom by not pursuing it to the end. She desperately needed closure, a resolution, before she could move on with the rest of her life.
“I’d like to keep doing this, Shep, giving you whatever impressions I get. But I can’t if we’re sleeping together.”
He looked over at her. “Why not?”
Because it would betray Tom. Because it would dilute the passion of her memories, of her loss. “Because it might confuse whatever information I pick up about this man.”
“So I either accept it or no deal?” His voice sounded injured. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s not an ultimatum. I’m just telling you what my limits are.”
“You’re doing this because I didn’t tell you about the green shoelaces.”
“I’m doing what I can live with.”
He didn’t say anything. The streets of Fort Lauderdale blurred in her peripheral vision. She leaned into his silence, trying to read him, but ran into a wall he had erected when she’d walked out of his town house. She couldn’t tune in on him. In some oddly perverted way, it balanced things between them. She rejected an intimate relationship and now she couldn’t read him.
He pulled into One World’s parking lot, but didn’t turn off the engine. “I’ll give you a call sometime tomorrow,” he said.
His voice sounded cold, detached, completely indifferent. He had become someone else, that man from the London life, the seafaring merchant. Mira got out of the car and watched as the Porsche sped off, a streak of silver in the October light.
Part III
The Talents
“Psychic abilities are being developed in government-sponsored research programs in both the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet, despite decades of research that has produced better and better results, most people have been led to believe that psychic abilities and experiences simply do not exist, or at least are beyond their understanding.”
—Russel Targ and Keith Harary, The Mind Race
Chapter 16
Mira woke suddenly, her eyes seizing the dark, frantically searching for some small bit of light. But blackness suffused the air and pressed down against her chest like a giant hand, trapping her against the mattress.
An electrical blackout, she thought.
But she couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that someone watched her. She sat up and patted the mattress around her, certain she would find one of the cats. She didn’t. She patted her way across the mattress to the nightstand, slid the drawer open, groped for the flashlight. She turned it on and shone it around the room, through the doorway into the hall.
Nothing. She slid off the bed and moved quickly across the hall to Annie’s room. She had kicked off the covers and thrown her arms out to her sides, as if to receive something. Seuss, her little guardian, had curled up alongside her legs and lifted his head when the beam of light hit him. He yawned, flopped over, went still again. Seuss would sense it if something were in the house.
Her animals were her eyes and ears.
Mira went into the kitchen. The battery-operated clock on the wall read almost five. Outside, the moon had set and the streetlights had gone out. The dusting of stars cast enough illumination for her to see the surrounding houses and the fence around the neighborhood pool at the corner.
The phone rang, startling her. She hurried away from the window to answer it before it pealed again and woke Annie. She guessed it was Nadine, struggling with a bout of insomnia, but hoped it was Sheppard.
“Hello?”
“I knew a Morales once,” whispered a male voice. “Tom Morales. I had to hurt him because he interfered, if you don’t back off, Mira, I’ll hurt you, too.”
A pain exploded in her right temple; it felt as if dozens of needles had been stabbed into her skull at once, all in the same spot. The agony literally knocked the air from her lungs. She wrenched back, her hands flew to her head, the flashlight clattered to the floor, and the receiver banged against the wall.
The pain raced across her forehead, then melted like hot wax over the top of her skull. A thick, debilitating nausea swept through her, her stomach heaved, she barely managed to make it to the sink before she threw up. She splashed cold water on her face, but the pain kept throbbing. Hot splinters of glass pierced her eyes.
Ice, she needed ice. She lurched blindly toward the refrigerator, yanked open the door to the freezer. She groped for a handful of ice, wrapped a dish towel around it, held it against her forehead. She stumbled back to the counter, leaning into it for support, and tried to breathe deeply. But with every breath she drew in, the pain burned and burned, a bright, cruel flame between her eyes.
She sank to the floor, rubbing the ice pack over her face, the back of her neck, holding it between her eyes, where the pain now burned like heat. An unbearable pressure filled her skull; it was as if her brain had suddenly expanded and now pushed against walls of bone, struggling to burst free. She felt a warm stickiness just under her nose. Blood, Christ, it was blood. Like Sheppard. She suddenly knew the source of this powerful energy emanated from the dangling receiver.
Her head spun, she couldn’t get to her feet. So she crawled over to the wall, yanked on the cord, and the phone popped off the wall and crashed to the floor.
As the pressure in her skull eased, something dark and incredibly powerful swept through her. She felt invaded, penetrated, violated, as though invisible hands had thrust down deep inside her brain, probing it, scooping her skull raw and empty, until it was just a husk of bone and bloody tissue.
Mira started to sing. She sang any stupid ditty that sprang to mind: Row your boat, jingle bells…it didn’t matter. Over and over again, she repeated the same tunes, the same words, faster and faster…
She heard a sharp popping sound inside her head as the presence flew away from her. If felt as if her skull had been punctured, releasing pressure, agony, the presence itself.
For seconds she didn’t move, couldn’t move. She sucked air in through clenched teeth, every muscle and fiber in her body pulled taut in anticipation of another assault. But nothing happened.
Mira reached for her flashlight, gripped the corner of the counter, and pulled herself to her feet. Blood streaked her hands and arms, spots the bright, deep red of menstrual blood trailed across the floor. Mira quickly sat down again, scooped up her ice pack, tilted her head back, and pressed the ice to her nose.
He is able to project his consciousness in a highly unusual way … dear God, was this what Nadine’s channeled buddy had meant? It amounted to psychic attack, something she’d heard and read about but which, until now, she’d dismissed as a colorful myth.
When the bleeding stopped, she made her way into the bathroom. Her hands trembled as she washed the blood off her face and hands and arms. But she could still feel him on her skin, inside her head. She turned on the shower and scrambled under the spray without removing her T-shirt.
Her fingers twitched tightly
around the bar of soap, she rubbed frantically at her body. Not enough. She felt dirty, spiritually raped. She stripped off her clothes, scrubbed herself with a long back brush, washed her hair. It helped, but she still didn’t feel clean.
She slammed her fist against the faucet, turning off the water, and quickly got out. She jerked the towel off the rack, picked up the flashlight, and hurried into her den. Sage, she needed sage. It would purge the rooms, a spiritual enema.
Mira searched the shelves along the east wall that held most of her psychic tools and found a single cluster of sage. She broke it into four smaller clumps and lit one in the kitchen, her den, her bedroom, and outside of Annie’s door. Smoke drifted through the rooms, the scent calmed her. After a while, she put the phone back onto the wall. A bright, tiny point of pain burned at the crown of her head as she punched out Sheppard’s home number.
7:55 A.M. She drove the Explorer toward school, an ordinary event. The sun shone now, cars crowded the road, the only menace was traffic. But she felt weird, disconnected. She kept glancing at Annie, reaching out to touch her hair, her arm, a reassurance that she was real.
Annie finally said, “You okay, Mommy?”
“Tired, that’s all. Just tired.”
Psychic attack. The very term smacked of superstition, New Age dogma. Years ago, Tom’s mother had told her about an incident that had happened to her when she was a young girl in Cuba. Her black nanny, from whom she eventually learned the secrets and rituals of santería, had been attacked psychically one night by a powerful mayombero, a practitioner of the black arts. She’d gone into convulsions and nearly died. Mira had never believed such a thing was possible. Until now.
How does he know about me?
She continued to puzzle over this after she’d dropped Annie at school and drove on toward the store. An hour later, she still felt deeply unsettled, as if she’d waded out to a sandbar at low tide and now the tide had risen and water slowly swallowed the sandbar.
Mira went through the messages on her desk, most of them concerning the street fair, but her mind fixed on the man’s voice. I’ll hurt you.
Cards, she thought. The cards would talk to her about what had happened. She needed to feel them in her hands right now, needed their language, their reality, their mystery, their unerring truth. She brought out one of her favorite decks, Tarot of the Cloisters, a stunning round deck with a stained glass motif on each card. She shuffled it a couple of times, asking silently about the incident, then pulled one card.
Hanged Man.
It was one of the seven cards Sheppard had found at Steele’s. Did it refer to the man who had killed Steele and Tom and psychically attacked her and Sheppard? It made sense, but terrified her at a level too deep for words. She couldn’t defend herself against someone like this, someone with the ability to affect living matter.
Telekinesis, psychokinesis—the label mattered less than the ability itself, the least common of all types of psi and the most difficult to test in a laboratory setting. In Mira’s opinion, Uri Geller remained the most controversial telekinetic, what with his spoon-bending and watch-stopping stunts and the accusations that he was just a clever trickster. But there had been others.
In the sixties, a Brazilian healer, Arigo, had astounded American physicians with his apparent ability to transmute pain and cure diseases in his patients. Nina Kulagina, a Russian woman whom some Western researchers and parapsychologists considered the best telekinetic in the world, could reverse the spin of a compass under rigid laboratory conditions.
But this? Someone who could actually harm another at a distance? Who could rupture vessels in a sinus cavity? Create such excruciating pain in the skull? What the hell kind of power was that?
“Just one card?” asked a voice behind her.
Mira spun around in her chair. Lenora Fletcher strode over to the desk in brown khaki slacks, a red cotton print shirt, and brown flats. She carried a large shoulder bag with many zippered compartments. She moved through Mira’s office with the easy confidence of someone who believed she had every right to do so. It didn’t just irritate Mira, it pissed her off big time.
“Learn to knock, Agent Fletcher.”
“I knocked. You didn’t hear it.” She plucked a card from the fan of cards on the desk and dropped it face up in front of Mira. “There’s the real answer.”
The Moon. Deception. Disillusionment, feelings of foreboding. But the card also symbolized feminine power, the psychic, the hidden.
“How long have you been reading tarot?” Fletcher asked, lighting a cigarette.
“I own a bookstore,” Mira said, gathering up the cards. Fletcher ignored that part of it. “A bookstore owner who reads tarot.”
“I teach tarot. I’ve also taught yoga, natural healing, the I Ching, and astrology. So maybe you should burn me at the stake while you have the chance.”
Fletcher laughed, a rich, robust laugh that surprised Mira. “Wrong century, too bad.”
“So what is it you want?”
“I’m a little vague on why you were at Dr. Steele’s yesterday.”
“I’m sure Detective Sheppard can tell you whatever you need to know.” She set the deck of cards in her briefcase and pushed to her feet.
“I’m asking you.”
Mira faced her. They stood eye to eye, with the smoke from Fletcher’s cigarette drifting toward her. Myra waved her hand through it and jerked her thumb toward the NO SMOKING sign on the wall. “I’d appreciate it if you’d smoke outside. Excuse me.”
She started out of the room, but Fletcher said, “Just a minute.” Said it in a tone of voice that could cut through two miles of ice in seconds. “Let’s get straight on the basics. As of today, the FBI is in charge of the investigation into Dr. Steele’s murder.”
“So?”
“That means the sheriff’s department has to turn over everything related to the case to us. That would include whatever you picked up psychically at Steele’s home.”
“Who says that’s why I was there?”
Her smile flashed in a blur of white, perfect teeth. “You’ve helped local cops in the past. Your most recent—”
Mira interrupted. “I know my own history. And I didn’t pick up anything at Dr. Steele’s home.” Then she carefully plucked the butt from between Fletcher’s fingers, dropped it to the floor, ground it out with the heel of her shoe. When it was dead, Mira picked it up and handed it to her. “Next time smoke outside. I really need to get to class.”
Fletcher slipped the crushed cigarette into her pocket, smiled like she had all the answers, and left without another word.
Pete Ames had a secret.
He sat on the other side of their cramped office, gloating like a cat with a dead bird buried under the carpet. He held a pastry in one hand and smacked his lips as he chewed with his mouth open. Sheppard finally gave up pretending that he didn’t notice Ames’s deplorable table manners.
“Christ, Pete. Shut your goddamn mouth when you chew.”
He shut his mouth, but his gloating smile didn’t vanish. “You heard the latest?”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“A fed named Bruce Laskin marched into the captain’s office at seven-thirty this morning and informed him the FBI is taking over the investigation into Steele’s murder.”
Sheppard saw his future sucked down the drain; his stomach did a steep roll. “On what grounds?”
“The abduction of Rae Steele.”
“What abduction? There hasn’t been any ransom demand.”
Ames shrugged and bit into his pastry again, some sort of flaky croissant that oozed stuff the same color and consistency of pus. Sheppard felt nauseated just looking at it; he imagined the shit building up in layers inside of Ames’s arteries. In twenty years or less, Ames would be a candidate for open heart surgery.
“Look, Shep, I’m just passing on the rumors. I had to give him the phone log, so by now he knows abou
t the psychic’s call.”
“He knew about the psychic call because of the statement in the paper by an unnamed source, Pete.”
Before Ames’s lazy computer of a brain had a chance to process the remark, Sheppard got up from his desk and walked down the hall to Gerry Young’s office. He paced back and forth across the room, the receiver mashed to his ear, and gestured for Sheppard to sit down. He felt too restless to sit. His future had backed up into shit’s creek, Mira had been psychically attacked, Rae Steele’s mother had been breathing down his neck, he needed a goddamn vacation.
Elizabeth Baylor had called him shortly after he’d spoken to Mira this morning and demanded to know what he and the rest of the department were actually doing about tracing her daughter. What leads did they have? How much longer did he expect this to take? Why hadn’t she been apprised of where things stood and where they were going?
Sheppard, strung out from lack of sleep, anxiety, and every other thing that had gone wrong since Steele’s death, had been tempted to hang up on the bitch. But he figured if he did, he might get his pink slip sooner. So he played the public relations routine, trying to mollify her. Yes, Dr. Baylor. No, Dr. Baylor. We expect something to break soon, Dr. Baylor.
Forget Baylor.
He focused on the view below. The river glinted off to the left, the bridge started to open, a line of cars snaked away from it on either side: life reduced to a game of tiddly winks.
“I was just about to buzz you when that call came through,” Young said.
Sheppard turned. “Is it true? Some dork named Laskin from the Bureau?”
Young touched a finger to his mouth and motioned toward the door. They walked into the hall, over to the water fountain some distance from Young’s office. “Yeah, it’s true. What I know right now for sure is that Steele was involved in a high security government project. I’m not sure what it concerned. But Laskin wants your file on Steele.”
The Hanged Man Page 17
