Dream Man

by Linda Howard

  “Call the Orlando Police Department,” Dane said tersely. “Ask for me.”

  “No. If you want any information about Ms. Keen, you’ll have to apply for it in person. With the proper identification, of course. Good-bye, Detective.”

  The receiver clicked in his ear, and Dane hung up with a curse. Trammell said, “No luck?”

  “He wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Any reason why?”

  “He said he doesn’t give out information over the phone. If I want to know anything about Marlie, I have to go to Boulder and talk to him in person.”

  Trammell shrugged. “So what’s the big deal? Go to Boulder.”

  Dane gave him an irritated look. “The LT is going to be tickled that she’s really a psychic, but there’s no way he’ll authorize a plane ticket just for a background check on someone who isn’t a suspect.”

  “You won’t know until you try.”

  Ten minutes later, he had the answer he’d expected. Bonness was indeed elated that his hunch about Marlie had turned out to be accurate, and he even gloated a bit that he must have a touch of psychic ability himself. Dane barely managed to restrain himself from rolling his eyes at that. But no way could the lieutenant justify the cost of sending Dane to Colorado to check out something that didn’t really need checking out. They already had all the verification they needed, didn’t they? He dismissed the six missing years as being unimportant. The budget was tight, and they needed all the resources they had to be used tracking down criminals, not snooping into the private lives of people who weren’t doing anything wrong.

  But those six years were important to Dane. “Do you have any objection if I take off tomorrow and go on my own?”

  Bonness looked startled. “You mean pay your own way?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Well, no, I don’t guess there’s any problem, except that you’re in the middle of a murder investigation.”

  “This is related. And the investigation isn’t going anywhere. We have no evidence, no motive, no suspects.”

  Bonness sighed. “Take off, then. But just tomorrow. I want you back here by Friday morning.”

  “No problem.”

  Dane returned to his desk and told Trammell what was happening, then got on the phone again. He had to call three airlines before he found an available flight. After booking his ticket, he called Professor Ewell again and tersely informed him when he would be arriving.

  Dane felt naked without the Beretta, but since he wasn’t traveling in any official capacity, he reluctantly left it at home. He couldn’t make himself travel without any weapon, though; he carried a pocketknife that was only a little larger than normal, with nothing else about its appearance that was out of the ordinary, but which had a single blade made from an alloy stronger than steel. The knife also had perfect balance, a requisite for a throwing knife. Throwing a blade was an arcane little skill he had taught himself, on the theory that it might come in handy someday. The knife wasn’t the equal of a pistol, but it was better than nothing.

  He was a nervous flier. It wasn’t the flying itself that got to him, but the strain of being trapped in a small space with so many strangers. He couldn’t leave old habits behind, couldn’t draw a boundary between on-duty and off-duty. He was the same man regardless. That meant he automatically watched everyone, subconsciously noting any erratic behavior, studying appearance, constantly evaluating the situation. The situation was boring, but that didn’t mean he could stop. Just as sure as he let his guard down, something bad would happen; it was an unwritten law.

  He had taken the earliest flight out. Because of the two-hour time difference between Orlando and Colorado, he arrived in Denver well before lunch. He had no luggage, so all he had to do was go to the car-rental desk and lease a car for the day. Boulder was about twentyfive miles to the northwest, interstate all the way.

  Once in Boulder, he stopped to look up the address of the Institute and ask for directions. With one thing and another, it was twelve-thirty when he drove up to the Institute. There were no fences, no gates; his policeman’s eye noted that the security measures were skimpy, at best. There was an alarm wired to the door, but nothing any third-rate burglar couldn’t disarm. INSTITUTE OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY was neatly painted in large block letters on the double glass doors. He pushed the doors open and noted that there was no tone to signal his entrance. It looked as if anyone could walk in off the street.

  About twenty feet up the hallway was an office on the left, the door open. Dane approached it and stood for a moment in the doorway, silently observing a neat, middle-aged woman in front of a computer, typing a letter while she concentrated on what she was hearing through the headset plugged into her ears. Dane cleared his throat, and she glanced up, a smile breaking like sunshine. “Oh, hi. Have you been waiting long?”

  “No, I just have walked up.” She had a very cheerful face, and he found himself smiling back at her. This place seemed to be as short on formality as it was on security. “I’m Dane Hollister, Orlando PD. I’m here to see Professor Sterling Ewell.”

  “I’ll give him a call to let him know you’re here. He was expecting you, so he brought his lunch today instead of going out.”

  The artlessness of that reply made him smile again. Her brown eyes twinkled at him. “He’s my husband,” she confided. “I can deflate his dignity if I want to, not that he gives a hoot.” She picked up a phone and punched two numbers. “Sterling, Detective Hollister is here. Okay.”

  She hung up the phone. “Go on back to his office. I would take you myself, but I’m swamped today. Take the next corridor to the right, and his is the office on the right at the very end of the hall.”

  “Thanks,” he said, winking at her as he left. To his amusement, she winked back.

  Professor Ewell was a tall, barrel-chested man with thick white hair and a lined face that wore his years with grace. Like his wife, he seemed a very cheerful man, and he wasn’t very big on formality either. He was wearing an ancient pair of chinos and a faded chambray shirt, and his feet were clad in scuffed boots. Dane immediately felt a sense of kinship, for the professor evidently ranked clothing fairly low on his list of priorities. His blue eyes were bright with intelligence and humor, but he regarded Dane very sharply for a long minute before some hitherto unnoticed suspicion faded away.

  With a jolt, Dane understood. “All of that about tabloid reporters was bullshit,” he said. “You’re …” He paused, unwilling to accuse the professor of being something he didn’t really believe in.

  “Psychic,” Professor Ewell supplied benignly. He waved a large hand at a comfortable-looking chair. “Sit down, sit down.” When Dane had complied, he resumed his own seat. “Not very much,” he said. “Nothing like some of the people I work with. But my one small talent is that I’m very good at reading people when I meet them in person. Because of that, I don’t give out any information over the telephone. My long-distance instincts are deplorable.” He smiled ruefully.

  “No reading minds, or anything like that?”

  The professor chuckled. “No, you can relax. Telepathy definitely isn’t one of my talents, as my wife will gladly tell you. Now, tell me about Marlie. How is she?”

  “I’d hoped you would give me information about her,” Dane said dryly.

  “You haven’t asked anything yet,” the professor pointed out. “I have.”

  Dane was torn between impatience and humor. There was something in the good doctor that reminded him very much of an impudent six-year-old. He let humor get the upper edge, and gave in to the professor’s air of expectancy. “I don’t know what I can tell you. I’m not her favorite person,” he admitted, rubbing his jaw. “When I saw her yesterday morning, she told me not to set foot on her property again unless I had a warrant.”

  The professor sighed blissfully. “That’s Marlie. I was afraid the trauma might have permanently damaged her. She can be very patient, when she wants, but sometimes she can be a bit t
esty, too.”

  “Tell me about it,” Dane muttered, then latched on to what had just been said. “This trauma you mentioned; was it when Gleen kidnapped her?”

  “Yes. It was horrible. Marlie was in a catatonic state for a week, and didn’t speak for almost two months. Everyone thought, including her, that she had lost all of her psychic abilities.” Bright blue eyes studied Dane. “I assume, from your interest in her, that those abilities have returned.”

  “Maybe.” Dane didn’t want to commit himself to anything.

  “Ah, I see. Skepticism. But you’re intrigued enough by what she told you to take a flight to see me. It’s okay, Detective; skepticism is not only expected, it’s healthy. I’d worry about you if you automatically believed everything you’re told. For one thing, you’d be terrible in your job.”

  Dane firmly returned the conversation to the subject. “About the kidnapping. There was a newspaper article saying that she’d been beaten.” Ruthlessly he kept himself from imagining details; he’d seen too many results from beatings, and didn’t want to picture Marlie in that condition. “There’s been nothing else about her since then. Are you saying the injuries were so severe—”

  “No, not that at all,” Professor Ewell interrupted. “I don’t mean to downplay the severity of her injuries, but she was fully recovered from them well before she started talking again. In this case, it was the mental trauma that did her the greatest harm.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  The professor looked thoughtful. “How much do you know about parapsychology?”

  “I know how to spell it.”

  “I see. From that, I take it that most of your information about it is gleaned from television shows and fortune-tellers in county fairs.”

  “Just about.”

  “Well, discard all of what you think you know. I’ve always thought that the basis of it was very simple: electrical energy. Every action and every thought uses electrical energy. This energy is detectable. Some people are sensitive to bee stings; others are sensitive to energy. There are degrees of sensitivity, with some people being only mildly sensitive and a very few being ultrasensitive. I don’t see why the issue has to be confused with hocus-pocus, though of course, there are charlatans who wouldn’t know psychic ability if it bit them on the ass—” The professor broke off, and gave Dane a sheepish look. “Sorry. My wife says I get carried away.”

  She was right, too. Dane smiled. “I understand. Now, about Marlie—”

  “Marlie is exceptional. Most people have some extrasensory ability, and call it hunches, gut instinct, mother’s intuition, whatever they’re comfortable with. Their degree of ability is mild. Some are a bit sharper than that. A few others are even more sensitive, to a degree that can be tested. And then there are the rare ones, like Marlie. She’s the most sensitive receptor I’ve ever seen. To give you a comparison, most people are biplanes, some few are Cessnas, and Marlie is a high-performance fighter jet.”

  “You’ve tested her, of course?”

  “My God, Marlie’s been tested almost continuously since she was four years old! She could be fractious even then,” he said fondly.

  “What exactly are her—er, talents?”

  “Mainly, she’s an empath.”

  “A what?”

  “Empath. She’s empathic. She feels others’ emotions, so much so that an ordinary drive on a crowded street could make her scream with frustration. All those feelings bombarding her, from all directions. She described it once as a blend of screams and static, at high volume. The biggest problem she had was controlling it, blocking it out so she could function normally.”

  “You said mainly. What else does she do?”

  “You said that as if she’s a trick pony,” the professor observed, his tone disapproving.

  “No offense meant. I won’t lie and tell you that I’m buying all of this, but I’m interested.” And that was an understatement if he’d ever made one.

  “You’ll come around,” Professor Ewell predicted with a certain amount of malicious satisfaction. “All of you do, once you’ve been around Marlie any length of time.”

  “Who is ’all of you’?”

  “Policemen. You’re the world’s most cynical people, but eventually you won’t be able to deny what she can do. Back to your question: She’s also a bit clairvoyant, though certainly not to the same degree that she’s empathic. She has to concentrate to block her empathic abilities, something she had never quite managed to completely do, while she has to concentrate to use her clairvoyance.”

  “You mean she predicts that things will happen?”

  “No, that’s precognitive.”

  Dane rubbed his forehead, feeling a headache come on. “I don’t think I have all of this straight. I’ve always thought a clairvoyant is someone with a crystal ball, predicting the future.”

  Professor Ewell laughed. “No, that’s a charlatan.”

  “Gotcha. Okay, an empathic person is someone who receives and feels the emotions of other people.”

  The professor nodded. “A clairvoyant senses distant objects, and is aware of events in distant places. A precognitive is someone who knows of events in the future. A telekinetic is someone who can move physical objects with the force of their minds.”

  “Spoon benders.”

  “Mostly charlatans.” The spoon benders were dismissed with a wave. “I won’t say that one or two don’t have telekinetic talent, but for the most part it’s just showmanship. None of the extrasensory abilities can be neatly categorized, because capability varies from person to person, just like reading ability.”

  “And Marlie’s particular blend of talents made her good at finding people?”

  “Mmmm. Extraordinary. Her empathy was so strong that, when she focused on one particular person, she would … well, she called them ’visions,’ but I’ve observed her during the events, and I would use a stronger word than that. A vision is something that can be easily interrupted. It was as if her mind would leave, though of course, it didn’t. But she would be totally taken over by the event, so completely in empathy with the subject that she was aware of nothing else. Terribly draining for her, of course. She would virtually collapse afterward. But while she was linked, she would observe enough about the surroundings to pinpoint the location, and she always managed to fight off the exhaustion long enough to pass the details along to the local law enforcement officers.”

  “What else happened with Arno Gleen?”

  Professor Ewell’s face changed, his expression that of mingled pain and hatred. “Gleen was a monster. A pedophile, a sadist, a murderer. Little boys were his favorite. He would kidnap them, take them to a remote place, abuse them for a day or two, then kill them. Unfortunately, there are no secrets in a small town, and when the sheriff called Marlie for help, the news was all over town before sundown. The next day there was a prominent article in the local newspaper about her, mentioning her successes and when she would arrive. Gleen was waiting. As soon as he caught her alone, he grabbed her.”

  “But if she’s as empathic as you say she is, why didn’t she sense him?”

  “By that time, she had learned how to block, and she automatically did it whenever she was in a town. It was the only way she could function. And there are some people who naturally block their own transmissions; maybe Gleen was one of them. Maybe he was simply a sociopath, and didn’t feel anything for her to pick up. She’s never said. In fact, she’s never discussed it at all.”

  Dane was beginning to get an ugly feeling, one that was all too likely. “Did he rape her?” His voice was low and harsh.

  The professor shook his head. “He couldn’t.”

  Dane exhaled, his eyes closing briefly.

  “But he tried.” The professor looked down at his hands, his mouth tight. “He took her to where he had his latest victim stashed. The little boy had been horribly abused. Gleen had him tied to a bed. I believe the child was about five years old. Gleen dumped Marlie on t
he floor, stripped her, and tried to rape her. She wasn’t a little boy, though, so he couldn’t achieve the necessary erection. Every time he failed, he would hit her, working himself into a greater rage. Maybe he thought inflicting pain would arouse him enough. But it didn’t, and in a frenzy he turned on the child. He stabbed the little boy to death in front of her. There were twenty-seven puncture wounds in the child’s face, chest, and abdomen. And all the while Marlie was linked with the child. She felt him die.”

  8

  DANE FELT AS IF HE HAD BEEN SCRAPED RAW ON THE INSIDE. HE didn’t have to imagine what Marlie had gone through. He was a cop; he had seen too much to ever have to rely on his imagination to supply details. He knew what beatings really were. He knew what stabbings looked like. He knew how much blood there was, how it spread and spread and got all over everything, even your dreams. He knew how the little boy had sobbed and screamed, had seen in other children’s faces his terror and despair, his pain, his utter helplessness.

  Marlie had endured that. And when she had had the vision of Nadine Vinick’s murder, what had it cost her to see those images again? The similarity was sickening.

  At some point during the visit with Professor Ewell, his healthy cynicism had gone south. The germ of possibility had been planted. He didn’t like it, but despite himself, he accepted that Marlie had “seen” Mrs. Vinick die. Maybe it was a one-shot deal. According to the professor, after Marlie had recovered from her injuries and the emotional trauma she had suffered, she had had no extrasensory abilities at all. For the first time in her life, she had been able to live normally. It was something she had always wanted to be able to do, but the price had been horrendous. Even after six years, she was still paying it. Now Dane knew why there were no boyfriends.

  It made him all the more determined that he would change that situation.

  Objectively he could be a little amused at the range of conflicts that were clouding his mind and tangling his guts. He’d always been able to hold himself a little apart, unaffected by most of the worries that gnawed at other cops. Subjectively he wasn’t enjoying it worth a damn. He didn’t believe in paranormal stuff, had always laughed at those who did. Now he found himself not only halfway believing, but trying to figure out how he could use Marlie to find Mrs. Vinick’s murderer.