Line of Sight

by Rachel Caine

  “I—” His voice caught, rusty in his throat. He tried again. “It was another vision. In the van. They stopped for gas.” He was shaking, and he didn’t look good. Katie eased back into the bench seat opposite him, frowning. “My God, that was—it was different. Stronger. Look, one of the girls—the one I’m in contact with—tried to get away. She didn’t get far. The thing is, the attendant at the gas station—” He stopped again and ran his hands over his eyes as if trying to scrub away the memory of what he’d seen. “He’s dead. He saw her and he tried to help, and they killed him.”

  That was very specific. Utterly, incontrovertibly subject to fact-check. She sat frozen, staring at him. Of all the things she’d expected, she hadn’t expected this.

  She found her voice. “How did they kill him?” Another thing that was incontrovertible.

  “Shot him.” Stefan squeezed his eyes shut again. “They shot him in the head. He went down….”

  “Stefan, look at me.” Katie kept her tone soft and low, and leaned forward toward him. He opened his eyes and focused on her. She felt a shock run through her, a desire that had nothing to do with attraction or lust and everything to do with a need to help. He seemed so vulnerable just now. So…surprised. “Did you get any sense of the time this happened?”

  “Now. Just now. It’s—well, it feels like real time.”

  Over his shoulder was a big retro diner clock, hands sweeping silently through seconds; Katie focused on it and noted the time.

  “Do you know where?”

  “Interstate 8, the off-ramp to Smurr. I keep telling you people—” He stopped, swallowed and visibly composed himself. “Sorry. That wasn’t—pleasant.”

  No kidding. If he was delusional, if he’d had a mini-seizure, that wasn’t pleasant, either, but at least he’d given her something to check. Something concrete. “Wait here,” she said and slid out of the booth. The two police officers were still sitting in their cruiser across the street, watching the two of them; somehow, she’d expected that. The slightly taller one leaned out of the driver’s-side window as she approached.

  “I need you to dispatch the Highway Patrol out to a gas station on Interstate 8, at the exit to Smurr,” she said.

  The officer blinked. “Ma’am?”

  “Please.”

  He gave her one of those you’re-crazy-but-you’re-afed-and-it’s-no-skin-off-my-nose looks—she knew those well—and got on the radio.

  “Tell them to call my cell phone when they get there,” she said, and gave him the number. His partner jotted it down and nodded. “I’ll be in there.” She pointed back at the diner, then turned and jogged back to the diner. Stefan hadn’t moved. He was staring down into his coffee cup as if it were the open pit to hell.

  She’d seen that look before. She slowed as she approached, studying him. Whether he was delusional or not was still an open question, but whatever he was, he wasn’t a liar. She knew that look far too well, and she’d seen it on the faces of victims and witnesses to violence.

  Con men wouldn’t bother to fake it.

  Katie put her hand on his shoulder. Stefan looked up at her and forced a smile. “Sorry for the drama,” he said. His voice was getting back to normal, but still a little uneven. “I’m not usually this weird, I swear.”

  There was still a possibility—however remote it seemed—that he was playing her. If he was a plant from the bad guys, they could have agreed on a timetable…but this murder, if actually true, sounded spur of the moment, not planned. Still. Better to be careful. Her grandmother had always said you catch more flies with honey…and Stefan was nothing if not sweet, tempting, golden honey.

  She needed to be sure he stayed put, while the police checked out the scene. For lack of anything better to do, she began to clean up the spilled coffee on the table, then took out a menu from the holder. “Hungry?” she asked. She was—an unavoidable demand of a body pushed too far, for too long.

  Stefan looked briefly sick, and shook his head. “I couldn’t eat. Not after that.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Besides, if you’re really hooked into one of these girls and getting psychic impulses, I don’t need you dropping because of low blood sugar.”

  “Look, I just saw somebody get shot in the head! I don’t think I’m really up for a hamburger.”

  Put that way, it did sound revolting. “Then at least get a piece of pie and some milk. Milk will settle your stomach.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Well, I do. Believe me. Special FBI training.” She’d puked her guts out after her first real crime scene, as a trainee, and one of her instructors—Hibbard, she thought—had taken her to a place around the corner and forced pie and milk on her. It had worked.

  “Well,” Stefan said, “so long as it’s government approved, I guess I’d better comply.”

  Stefan couldn’t tell if this woman believed him. That was unusual. He could almost always read people instantly, but FBI Special Agent Katie Rush was a whole different thing. Too controlled, too interior, too cool. He felt a compassion buried deep inside her, at odds with her thousand-yard police-issue stare, but that didn’t tell him what she really thought, especially about him.

  She probably thought he was nuts, he concluded. He would have, in her shoes. He tried not to take it personally.

  God, that last vision had been horrible. His pulse was still racing erratically, his heart pounding. He’d thought for a second that he’d been about to pass out, when he’d come hurtling back from that bloody, catastrophic vision, and it had only been Katie’s voice calling his name that had held him upright.

  That, and the humiliation of passing out in front of one of the most attractive women he’d ever seen, much less talked with. She looked fiercely capable; he doubted she’d be much impressed by him doing a face-plant on the table.

  She looked up from her menu and gave him a little crook of her lips—could barely be called a smile, but somehow, it transformed her. It softened her face and made it luminous, almost angelic, and woke an appealingly wicked glint in her eyes. He fell in love with her eyes, and the one corner of her mouth that pulled higher than the other. And her skin. She had gorgeous matte-satin skin.

  She’d said something. He blinked. “Sorry?”

  “Pie. What kind of pie?” she asked.

  He cleared his throat, retrieved a sticky plastic-laminated menu from the holder on the table and pretended to be interested in the choices. “Sharing food. Does that make this some kind of a date, Special Agent Rush?”

  When he glanced up, she was still smiling, but it had changed slightly, a Mona Lisa echo he wasn’t sure he could decipher. She focused on her menu while he was still wondering. It confused him. What was she waiting for? She didn’t seem like the kind of person who would sit around for a leisurely dinner if she had hard information about where two abducted girls might be, or at least, had been recently.

  Of course. She hadn’t believed him, or at least, she was waiting for confirmation one way or the other. She’d gone out to ask the cops in the cruiser to dispatch someone to the gas station. So this was a stalling tactic. And she was charming him to disarm him, in case he might decide to get up and try to leave before she had hard facts as to his truthfulness. And/or sanity.

  He had to admire her for her dedication.

  Well, since they were being so polite, he might as well get a decent piece of pie out of it.

  The tired-looking waitress wandered over, and Stefan ordered a slice of coconut meringue pie, and—as Katie suggested—milk. He expected Agent Rush to order a salad—it seemed to be de rigueur for women on dates, even pretend dates, these days—but then again, she was from the Midwest, not SoCal.

  She went with a hamburger. Once the menus were out of the way, she avoided his gaze, choosing to meticulously line up her hard-used tableware and inspect the interior of her coffee cup, from which all coffee had been safely extracted.

  She was just—he hated to think it about someone as
potentially, catastrophically dangerous as an FBI agent—cute.

  And you’re thinking like this to keep your mind off of other things, some traitor voice in his head reminded him, and just like that, the whole vision was back, vivid and violent.

  Fear. Darkness, then pain as the girl was forced to her knees and then to her feet. She’d run, she’d gotten loose and run but her balance was off because of the bonds on her wrists, and she’d tripped and gone sprawling on the still-warm concrete, bathed in the harsh white lights of the gas station awning.

  The attendant had ducked out of the booth and yelled, “Hey, you leave her alone!” She’d whimpered deep in her throat, unable to scream or warn him, and had to stand and watch, just watch, as one of the black-masked men slipped up from the side, extended his arm, and a sharp pop echoed through the desert.

  Blood spattered the plate glass window as the attendant fell. No time for the horror because hands were dragging her, off balance, back to the van….

  He jerked and pressed his hands flat against the table, furious with himself. He’d never had this problem. He’d become a street magician because it was fun, it was challenging and it required razor-sharp mental and physical control, and now he was reduced to a trembling wreck. Couldn’t cut a deck one-handed to save his life.

  “You all right?” the strict goddess across the table asked. He didn’t look up.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine. So what’s the next step? What do you do now?”

  “It’s already being done,” she said. “You’ve given us a lead. Once we verify it, we’ll be moving quickly to seal off the area and isolate the van. We’re trained for this. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Only you don’t believe me,” he said, very quietly, and looked up to meet her eyes. “Right?”

  Silence. Katie was good with silence; she used it as a tool. Growing up in the Blackman household had been an exercise in coping with controlled chaos, day in and day out. Silence…wasn’t part of Stefan’s life experience.

  She finally said, “I want to believe you, Mr. Blackman. But I can’t afford to blindly trust anyone. There are two girls’ lives at stake.”

  It was, he had to admit, a valid point, but it was still irritating. In his entire life, Stefan had never not been trusted by a woman. Of course, he wasn’t generally trusted by cops, and an FBI agent was a kind of white-collar cop, but still, it rankled. Women liked him.

  Maybe he was losing his touch.

  “If you’d just listen to me, we could do it faster,” he said. “I could try to tell you exactly where the van was.”

  She looked intrigued. “How? Psychometry?”

  “What’s psychometry?”

  “Touching an object that belongs to one of the girls.”

  The waitress came back to refill their cups; Stefan leaned back to avoid being splashed. “You know more than I do about it. Not my bag.”

  “So what exactly is your bag?” A cop’s question, delivered casually but no less important for all that.

  “Didn’t you check me out already?”

  “I know that you’re from Los Angeles—”

  “Venice Beach, actually. I just work in Los Angeles part of the time.”

  “—and that you’re involved in film and television.”

  “As a consultant.”

  “And I know that you’ve had a couple of arrests for fraud,” she said.

  Ah. He’d been wondering when that would come snarling up out of the dark to bite him in the ass. She delivered it with perfect poker-faced impartiality, and waited for his reaction.

  He nodded. “True,” he said. “I have been. I work the streets in Venice Beach as a magician—not a psychic. But from time to time, really obnoxious people won’t take no for an answer, they want me to be psychic on demand. Those guys deserve a first-class prognostication, don’t you think? Something to tell them how to invest their money wisely? It’s not my fault they buy some dog of a stock and get burned. Being wrong’s not illegal. Besides, all of the charges were dismissed.”

  She thought it over. “If you don’t bill yourself as a psychic, why do they seek you out for advice?”

  “Because the Blackman name comes with baggage.” He sighed. “My grandfather was a famous psychic. So was my grandmother. My mother is a psychic to the stars, she’s got quite a reputation. Even my dad is a pet psychic. So I’m a psychic by association, and some people just won’t take ‘not interested’ for an answer. When they get pushy, I sting. But it’s not fraud. It’s their own greed getting the better of them.”

  Which, he was well aware, was the basis of any con game, but he hoped she could see the difference. He couldn’t tell. It unsettled him that she was so self-contained.

  “Mr. Blackman—”

  “Stefan.”

  She didn’t blink. “Mr. Blackman, let’s just say that regardless of how you explain it now, it doesn’t exactly enhance your credibility. You see that, don’t you?”

  He gave up. “Yes.” Luckily, he was saved from groveling by the arrival of her hamburger and his pie. Both looked surprisingly delicious, and he was shocked to feel a sudden wave of hunger, verging on starvation. They fell to eating without another word, except for a few subvocal moans of pleasure from Agent Rush, which made him forget a little bit about the horror show inside of his head and wonder what it might take to get her to moan like that over things other than food. A very diverting question.

  He was tempted to moan over the pie, which was excellent, but he didn’t want her to think he was easy.

  They’d both taken the last bites when her cell phone rang. Stefan swallowed and sat back, tense and still, as Agent Rush flipped open her phone. “Rush.”

  Silence as she listened. He couldn’t tell what was going on in her head, though he could read a confusing turmoil of feelings radiating like a fever. He wanted to touch her. Touching her would make things clearer. There might be other side benefits to it, too….

  She said a terse thanks and hung up. Stared at him with those lovely, impenetrable eyes.

  “Mr. Blackman,” she said, “the Highway Patrol tell me that there is a dead man at a Conoco station at the Smurr exit. Shot in the head. They estimate he’s only been dead half an hour, at most. I’m going to need you to come with me.” She signaled the waitress for the check.

  “And the van?” he asked.

  “The Highway Patrol are working to close off all exits from the area. They know their job. We’ll get them, but I may need your help.”

  “So you believe me.”

  “Let’s just say that I don’t see any other way you could possibly have known what you did, other than what you’re telling me. That doesn’t mean I completely buy into the whole psychic theory, just that I’m willing to listen to what you have to say.”

  He felt a surge of hope and adrenaline. Somehow, some way, this was a good thing. He was sure of it.

  Chapter 7

  T hey drove in silence, watching scenery flash by in the street-lit darkness. Next to Katie in the passenger seat, Stefan Blackman looked uncomfortable—justifiably so. This ride was probably a good reminder of how fast “material witness helping the police” could turn to “prime suspect.”

  Even with lights and sirens clearing the way, it took nearly an hour to get to the Smurr exit, but it was visible a long way off from the cluster of police cars, flashers lighting up the night. Stefan looked pale in the red-blue-red glow, and his throat was working nervously.

  “You can stay in the car if you want,” she said, and he looked over at her and smiled. It wasn’t a very convincing smile.

  “No, I can’t,” he said. “Look, maybe I can be of some help. I feel like I should at least try.”

  Katie pulled the sedan in with a metallic squeal of brakes and coasted to a stop just inches from a Highway Patrol vehicle.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. The engine ticked as it burned off heat, and the entire car shook with a sudden gust of wind that blew a dry rattle of san
d over the hood. “This isn’t your job.”

  Stefan didn’t look at her. He looked stone-faced, staring at the confusing blur of flashing lights, the busy knot of people behind the fluttering crime-scene tape.

  “Guess it is now,” he said and got out of the car.

  The air was cooling fast, dry and thin as it stung sand in her face. Katie took a breath and turned toward the Highway Patrol officer who was approaching.

  “FBI?” he asked, scanning her top to toe. She nodded and produced credentials without being asked. “You want to see the body?”

  “First, tell me what you’ve done to find the van,” she said.

  “How’d you know it was a van?” he asked and doffed his hat to smooth back his thick, iron-gray hair. He had a face as creased and brown as a leather bag, and his name tag said MENCHACA. “We just found that out on the surveillance tape.”

  “I had some tips.” She didn’t look toward where Stefan was standing. He looked ill at ease enough without any help from her.

  “Good for you. We don’t have the plates, but we’ve got the make and color from the camera. We’ve already set up stops—Hawkins! Get me a map!”

  “Sir!” Another officer set off at a trot and returned about a minute later with an accordion-fold laminated map that he spread out over the hood of the cruiser.

  “We set up stops here, here, here and here. Problem is, there’s lots of farm roads, back roads, rough trails, though I wouldn’t call that damn van any damn off-roader—they could go around us if they have half a brain. I don’t have the manpower to cover every cow path from here to the border.” Menchaca shook his head. “Kidnapping, huh? That’s what the Glendale PD said.”

  “Two young girls,” Katie verified. “At least one of them saw the shooting.”

  Another head shake, world-weary and grim. “A shame.”

  “Could I take a look—” she glanced quickly at his rank, indicated by the pins on his collar “—Captain Menchaca?”

  “Sure. Forensic team’s still en route, so don’t touch and stay outside of the tape.”