He pulled within fifteen feet of the garage and killed the engine. As he opened his car door, he heard the mechanically smooth rumblings of the garage door starting its ascent. It eventually reached its zenith, uncovering the back of a late model BMW 7-series. In the next instant, he heard the BMW's motor crank, and then saw its backup lights flash on. The car proceeded to inch back before suddenly screeching to a jerky halt.
Bennett had gotten out of his car and was walking the remaining length of the driveway toward the garage.
Helen hopped out of her car. “Dennard, is that you?” She ran to him, throwing her arms around his neck. “Why didn't you call?”
He hugged his sister fiercely. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well, it is a surprise. A wonderful, wonderful surprise!” She stayed in his embrace a while, as if to savor the warmth of a brother she saw far too little. The night air had gotten colder as the temperature continued dropping. But neither sibling seemed to notice or care. After a few moments, Helen pulled back from the embrace. “I better call and cancel my meeting.”
“No, no,” Bennett said. “Don't go cancelling your plans. I can visit Mark and the children while you're at your meeting.”
“Children? What children?”
“MJ and Veronica.”
Helen smiled. “My, you have been away a while.”
“It's only been a year.”
“Try two years and even then I don't think either of them would have appreciated being called children.”
Bennett laughed. “Well, let's not tell them. I imagine Veronica's away at college, but MJ's home, right?”
“No one's home,” Helen said. “Since Veronica graduated from college, she rarely comes home. MJ's with friends on a weekend ski trip and Mark's out of town on business.”
“Graduated from college?” he repeated.
“Yes,” Helen said. “Last May, you don't remember?”
He lightly tapped his forehead. “Yeah, of course I remember. It just slipped my mind. She got my card, didn't she?”
“Yes, she got it and she sent you a thank you note. But she'd rather had you there.”
Bennett frowned. The thank you letter was probably in the growing pile of mail in his house in Landover. He'd made a mental note to go through it the next time he made it home. He'd assumed most of it was just shred-ready junk mail anyway. All his bills were paid online and personal mail like thank you notes were rare events indeed. “I wish I could have been there. But I'll make the next one. She's getting her master's in psychology, right?” He was pleased with himself for remembering.
“Yes, she wants to combine it with her undergrad double majors in psychology and criminal justice. I think she eventually wants to follow in your footsteps.”
He beamed. “ICE, really?”
“I don't know if it'll be that particular agency; but I got a feeling she's thinking federal in some capacity.”
“That's great,” Bennett said, before suddenly recalling what she'd just said about Mark and MJ not being home. “A weekend ski trip? But it's only Wednesday.”
“MJ's school has back to back teacher workdays and the football team has an open date. It's like a high school fall break. So, he and his friends took off for the mountains.”
Bennett looked gloomily up at the house. “You mean to tell me no one's in this big house?”
“Not at the moment. But that should be good news for you. It will give you a chance to have a little peace and quiet. I know you've been running ragged with that job of yours. My meeting should only take a couple of hours. When I get back, we can catch up.” She hugged him again and then walked back to her car. “You still remember the alarm code?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Your initials divided by two plus seven.”
She smiled appreciatively and got back into her car, backing it up slowly before stopping beside him. The car window slid down. “The spare key is where it's always been. I haven't changed much inside, so you should be able to find what you need. Oh, Mark bought a new seventy-inch flat screen for his man hut.”
“You mean cave,” Bennett corrected.
“Whatever,” she said. “It's just a playpen for grown men if you ask me.” She laughed and continued backing up the car. Very quickly, she was gone, leaving Bennett standing alone in the driveway and suddenly aware of how cold it'd gotten.
The man-cave was located in the basement on the other side of a home gym. He walked through the gym, past a free weights bench and a treadmill, and arrived at the cave's entrance. The sign on the door read:
No admittance: Age 25 & under
Please remove your shoes
The sign included a picture of a cartoon man sitting on a recliner with his feet kicked up and his toes wiggling. Bennett smiled and removed his shoes, placing them near the door. He went inside and his feet immediately sank into lush carpet the color of green grass. He flipped on a light switch and looked around in amazement. The room never ceased to impress. It looked as if it'd been carved out the side of a stone mountain. The walls appeared made of rock. He could hear something akin to water running down a brook. In the center of the room was an L-shaped leather couch with two leather recliners as endpoints. To his right was the bar area, which he knew was stocked with various beers and liquors and a hoard of junk food. And at the front of the room was Mark’s latest crown jewel.
The remote was in the pocket of one of the recliners. He sat down, kicking up the footrest. He turned on the TV and marveled at the pure hugeness of it. He flipped through the channels, trying to relax. But it wasn't long before the memories of his family, spurred on by the emptiness of the house and undeterred by the testosterone-inducing man-cave with its flashy theater-sized big screen TV, quickly overwhelmed him. He'd only kidded himself. He was not ready to face the memories. His week off work had not been his idea anyway. His supervisor had insisted, no, had ordered that he take the week off. It was also to include almost daily confabs with a therapist, but Bennett had been able to ward off that aspect of it with his promise to spend time with his sister's family.
“Just as long as you're not holed up somewhere alone and drinking,” his supervisor had said.
The fears concerning Bennett drinking alcohol during his week off had been unwarranted. He no longer touched the stuff. Sure, he'd drunk a lot shortly after the plane crash that had snatched his wife and daughters away from him. But he'd just as soon quit. The initial high of the alcohol had been good. It was the aftermath of drunkenness that he couldn't deal with. Reality was made much worse after the realization that insobriety had lied. Nothing was okay. Nothing was going to be all right. At least it wouldn't be for a while. He couldn't wait for 'a while' with alcohol, especially since alcohol usually brought along its own set of problems.
He'd tried therapy, too. And just like alcohol, it'd initially been good. The therapist had encouraged him to talk about his feelings. What losing his family had meant to him. At first, he'd thought it was a stupid request. What had she thought losing his family felt like? As if he'd won the freaking lottery? He'd lost a beautiful wife, his soul mate. After only five years together, she was gone and so were his two daughters, Kelsey and Melanie, who at only four and three years old, had their lives unceremoniously snuffed out. It was devastating, almost indescribable. But eventually he had described it. And amazingly, putting words to the ache in his heart and the unexpected void in his life had been, well…therapeutic. He talked, and he talked, and he talked. And talking for a while had been good. But eventually talking had given way to frustration, because no amount of talking could ever answer the simple question of why.
The physical cause of the crash had soon been determined. It had been due to pilot error. After hitting significant turbulence, the first pilot had overused the rudder, losing control of the plane and crashing it into the Appalachian Mountains. Everyone on the plane, including Bennett's wife and daughters, perished. But in the three years since that fateful day, Bennett had yet to get a satis
fying answer to the other 'why.' Why had his wife and daughters been on that plane in the first place?
He knew the surface answer to the question. Elise's mother had fallen ill, and so Elise and the girls were flying to Nashville to stay with her for a while. But the answer to the deeper 'why,' the one below the surface, still proved elusive.
He could still see the woman's face. She was a black woman and appeared to be in her mid-forties. Tears streamed down her face, smudging her makeup. Bennett had just escorted Elise and the girls to the metal detectors at the airport. After his family had gone through the scanners, he waved bye to them one more time before turning to leave. That was when he heard the commotion coming from another detector. The woman had already made it through when she'd suddenly grabbed her bag and screamed, “I'm not getting on. Something bad is gonna happen.”
It was five years after 9/11 and everyone was still on edge and very much sensitive about terrorists, particularly when it came to planes. Though Bennett had been off duty, he went with the TSA agents as they escorted the woman to an interrogation room. The woman's name was Brenna Jackson. She answered their questions forthrightly. No, she didn't know anything about any terrorists attacking the plane. No, she herself most definitely wasn't a terrorist. But yes, something was going to happen to the plane. No, she couldn't be more specific. All she knew was that she was not to get on that plane to Nashville.
Forty minutes later, Brenna Jackson was still in TSA custody when the plane went down, forever changing Bennett's life. For the next two months, Jackson would undergo tremendous scrutiny. But the NSTB's investigation into the crash was conclusive—pilot error. Brenna Jackson, it seemed, had simply had a premonition that had ended up saving her life.
But why hadn't he had that premonition? Why hadn't he or Elise for that matter, had an inkling that the plane was doomed? The question ate at him. The therapist tried to get him to move on, to focus on something else. But he couldn't. He couldn't shake the fact that Brenna Jackson had somehow known that the plane was going down. She'd known! But how? He interviewed her a few additional times, but her answers remained the same. She didn't know how she'd known. She'd just known.
“I had a feeling. No,” she corrected herself, “it was more than a feeling. It was like a deep force was around the plane. The closer I got to it, the more I felt it. After I went through the metal detectors, it was almost like me and the plane were opposite sides of a magnet. I tell you, I couldn't have gotten on that thing even if I'd wanted to.”
He'd felt no such force and he'd had no ominous feeling. Of course, he wasn't the one going to ride the plane. Elise was. And he'd never know if Elise had felt something and had chosen to ignore it or hadn't felt anything at all. He asked Brenna if she'd felt anything the night before the plane crash and she said that she couldn't remember if she had or not. But if she had, it was clearly not as strong a feeling as the one she'd had at the airport.
Bennett got up and walked over to the bar area. He scrounged around, eventually finding a can of mixed nuts. He took the nuts back to the recliner, pouring himself a handful along the way. He flipped through the channels again and landed on one showing NFL highlights.
After the 2001 terror attacks, the president and congress vowed that such horrific acts would never happen again on American soil and thus had enacted the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 better known as, the Patriot Act. Most people only paid attention to the controversial aspects of the act, including its mandating roving wiretaps, the indefinite detentions of immigrants, and the authorization given to the FBI to search a person's email, phone, and financial records without a court order. But what the act also did was to put everything on the table to help root out terrorists before they could carry out their extreme acts of violence. Everything included the potential use of psychics.
During his investigations following the attacks, Bennett had discovered that there were other “Brenna Jacksons.” Dozens of people had premonitions warning them to not get on the planes or go into work on that fateful day in September. Dozens of people's lives were saved by some uncanny force. Some even claimed to have had visions of the planes flying into the buildings. Initially, neither Bennett nor the government had given these claims much credence. But after his family had died in the crash that Brenna Jackson had successfully avoided, he spearheaded the effort to use paranormal activity in terrorism prevention. Psychics and premonitions were real. He was as certain of that as he was in his belief that whoever had killed Phillip Beamer had inside knowledge of Beamer's planned attack.
Bennett had considered all possible motives for Beamer's murder and nothing made logical sense. Although Beamer was on the government's radar, there wasn't an expectation that he'd commit a terrorist act anytime soon. Of course, the dead man's computer files indicated they'd been dead wrong in that assumption. Still, it didn't negate the fact that Beamer had not been considered an immediate threat. And even if he had, it was unlikely the government would have authorized the taking of an American's life on home soil, suspected terrorist or not.
There existed a possibility that Beamer's own organization had taken him out. But Beamer had kept a meticulous journal. According to it, everything was proceeding according to plan. There didn't seem to be a practical reason for a terrorist group to eliminate one of its own days before he was to commit its bidding.
A random killing had also been discussed. But even that appeared unlikely considering that killings just didn't occur in Buckleton, random or otherwise. No, the likely scenario surrounding Beamer's death was the one that was hardest for a rational person to believe. Someone with psychic-like ability had either killed Beamer or had had him killed. Outside of Beamer's terror group, only a psychic could have known what he'd been up to.
Bennett poured a few more nuts into his mouth. As he chewed, he wondered where Father McCarthy fit into all of this. He thought again about the cryptic message, 'McCarthy Knows,’ which was on the back of the priest's card found amongst Beamer's belongings. Bennett didn't know the extent of the priest's knowledge, but he would venture a guess that it was a lot more than the priest had let on. But why would a Catholic priest hold back from the US government what, if anything he knew about a possible terrorist attack?
It was yet another question that he couldn't fathom the answer to. But he was going to have to start finding answers soon, because he was also certain of a couple of other things—another terrorist attack on American soil was inevitable. And the country would use any means necessary in order to thwart it, including the use of Catholic priests and psychics.
CHAPTER TEN
Piedmont Imaging Center was located in the North Dale Shopping Plaza in Charlotte, about an hour's car drive from campus. Josh had explained to Kallie that the center offered the university free usage of its facilities in exchange for a small financial stake in any potential future profits the program might garner stemming from its brain and behavior research. The plaza was anchored at one end by a Target and on the opposite end by a Michaels. Piedmont Imaging was dead center, snuggled between a shoe boutique and a store specializing in the resale of used clothes. Josh parked his Taurus next to a cart-return bin and then the three of them—he, Kallie, and Veronica Ross—hustled out of the car and went inside. A pretty receptionist smiled pleasantly at them as they waltzed past her and through a door leading to the backrooms where the MRI scanner was located.
Josh set Kallie up in a little side room where she was shown a fifteen-minute video about MRI and fMRI. Although she'd gone with her mother a couple of years ago when her mother had had her MRI scan, Kallie hadn't known that MRI stood for magnetic resonance imaging or that fMRI stood for functional magnetic resonance imaging. In fact, before the video she hadn't known there was even such a thing as fMRI. After the video was over, Veronica came into the room and had her fill out a questionnaire similar to the one that had been discussed on the video. The series of
questions were to determine if she had any issues, such as prior surgery, ear abrasions, or metal in or on her body that would affect her being inside the scanner. It didn't take her long to check off the long list of 'no' boxes.
After she finished the questionnaire, Josh led her into another room. This one was adjacent to the room where the scanner was located. It was a tight little room with a glass window, through which the scanner was clearly visible. “The images will be captured here,” Josh said, pointing to two computer monitors on a table.
“Oh cool,” Kallie mumbled. She watched as Veronica sat down in front of one of the monitors, and then Kallie followed Josh into the adjoining room.
“I trust that this big boy needs no introduction,” Josh said. He stood next to the MRI scanner. The machine looked like a big, plastic spool of thread. “This is going to be just like the video, except, of course, for one exception which I'll explain in just a minute. You're going to lie on this table, and we'll put this coil over your head.” The coil looked like a storm trooper helmet, except that this one came with a mirror attached. He explained that the mirror was not for her to look at herself, but instead, while she was inside the scanner, she'd be able to see anyone standing at the end of the table. Next, he pointed to a plastic ball that was connected to the scanner by a short, white cable. “If you want to stop the test for any reason, just squeeze that. It's called a panic-ball.” After Kallie nodded her understanding, he continued. “The coil also has a microphone and earphones attached. You'll be able to talk to and hear us.” He waited for a heartbeat. Then he resumed, “After you're all set up on the table, it'll retract into the scanner. Once the imaging begins, it's going to be loud. Some people equate it to a jackhammer digging into the road. But as the video explained, it's just the magnetic field doing its thing. But unlike in the video, we will not be doing a fMRI scan today.” According to the video, a fMRI scan was basically an extension of a MRI scan. Except in the case of a fMRI, she'd be given a call button to select her response to a series of questions or choices, which would enable the scanner to detect what area of her brain was responsible for different activities or thought patterns. “Instead, we're going to do a 'resting state' scan.”
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