Of course, there was the possibility he’d received that thought projection from the girl because she was somewhere in the close vicinity of that supermarket parking lot—a fact that would also be very good to know.
Bach waited as patiently as he could for his car to be searched at the entrance to OI, and when the gate finally opened for him he went significantly above the campus speed limit as he buzzed up the hill and then over to the main housing building.
Anna Taylor had been given apartment 605. High floor. Great view. It was a three-bedroom—one room for her, one for her little sister, and one to emphasize the perks that would come when she gave Nika permission to enroll in the training program here.
When, not if.
There was no way Anna could afford a three-bedroom apartment out in the real world. No way at all.
Bach parked and beeped his car locked as he ran toward the more modern architecture of the building that had been lovingly dubbed the “barracks.” The nickname had been given by someone who obviously had never in his or her life lived in military housing. Still, it had stuck.
The guard at the door ran her security wand over Bach—the security team had long since learned that waving him through was a surefire way to get canned.
She did a thorough job, and even though he used the time both to stretch out his back and exchange some quick texts with Analysis—they’d found info on a Devon Caine and were attempting to locate a current picture—he was tapping his toe by the time it was over. When she told him he could go in, he thanked her for her thoroughness, but then headed for the elevators at a run.
One opened right away, and he pushed the button for the sixth floor. It took too long to get there, so when the doors finally opened again, he dashed down the hall.
Apartment 605 was an end unit—he knew it well since he lived directly above it, on the top floor. He could feel Anna’s presence—she was awake—so he leaned on the buzzer.
The intercom clicked on almost immediately.
“Did you find Nika?” Anna asked, no doubt having ID’d him through the peephole, then added, “I can’t open the door. I think I’m locked in.”
She was. But Bach used his mind to click the lock open and there she stood, hair slightly rumpled, looking at him with such hope in her eyes and on her pretty face.
“We haven’t found her yet,” he said, “but we’ve got a possible new lead. May I come in?”
“Of course.” She stepped back and as he went inside, he saw that she’d done as he’d instructed and unpacked. She’d flattened the empty boxes that had held her few belongings, and they leaned in a neat stack against the island counter that separated the big kitchen from the rest of the main living area. “What kind of lead? Do you know where they took her?”
“Actually, this is going to sound a little crazy,” Bach realized as he took off his coat and put it over the back of one of the counter’s stools, “but I just had an unusually vivid … dream.”
“A dream?” she repeated, frowning slightly.
“Yes, I know, maybe not just a little crazy, am I right? At least not in the world you’re used to.” A framed photograph was on the coffee table in front of the sofa and he picked it up after he sat down.
In the picture, Nika was a toddler, which meant that Anna had been close to Nika’s current age when it was taken. A woman who had to be their mother, with slightly darker skin but the same wide smile, held the younger girl on her lap as Anna hugged them both.
It was true that the two sisters looked very much alike, but there was a somberness, a seriousness in Anna’s brown eyes that had been absent in the SAT images Bach had seen of Nika.
He looked up from the photo at the real Anna, who now had her arms tightly folded across her chest as she stood there, gazing at him with unconcealed dismay.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but are you honestly telling me that your lead is from a dream that you had …?”
“Telepathic powers include something called thought projection,” Bach explained. “It’s a highly advanced skill, and we’ve only documented cases sent and received at close proximity—where the sender and receiver were mere yards from each other. The visual images sent can be remarkably realistic. And detailed. And yes, I do believe the projection I received, just a short time ago, was from Nika.”
He could see, just from the expression on Anna’s face, that she was unwilling or unable to understand.
So he quietly told her about the nightmare he’d had in the supermarket parking lot—about the scar-faced man and the room filled with screaming little girls.
Anna slowly sank down in the leather chair opposite the sofa as he described the badly stitched port in Nika’s arm.
When he ended with the scar-faced man’s casual disposal of Zooey’s body and his words to Nika about a man named Devon Caine, Anna silently spoke the name along with him.
He sat forward at that. “Did you receive the projection, too?” he asked, intrigued.
She nodded. “I thought it was a nightmare.”
“It’s possible Nika was somehow subconsciously projecting to you, and you then projected to me—” Bach cut himself off. Even though the idea that a thirteen-year-old girl had the power to project to not just one person but two, across great distances, was fascinating, how it happened was a mystery they’d focus on later. Right now … “May I?” he asked as he reached out to Anna with his mind. His silent request was more specific. May I check to make sure there were no other details in this projection that we both might have missed or overlooked …? It would help if I could combine our two memories.
She nodded, her eyes wide as she gazed back at him.
It was unnerving and oddly intimate to be looking directly into the eyes of a person whose head he was entering. He usually turned slightly away, or even closed his own eyes to avoid the forced intimacy.
But this time he didn’t. Turning away felt too much like he was abandoning her, and he wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t.
And as Bach moved into Anna’s mind, he felt all of her trepidation, her confusion, her disbelief, her attraction. Yes, she was definitely attracted. She was also afraid of him still—afraid to trust him, to believe him. And yet she was willing and even eager to let him in—if it was going to help them find her sister.
He moved into her memory centers, and there was that name again—Devon Caine—and a glimpse of the brightly lit hallway on the other side of the door outside the room where Nika was being held. He saw numbers on the side of the trash container that the scar-faced man had wheeled into the room—a two and a one, but the rest were obscured. He saw an image of that same man’s deformed face that was so clear he could have drawn it. And he would draw it, with Elliot’s help. The doctor possessed a natural artistic ability that Bach didn’t share, despite countless years spent trying to hone those skills. Music had always been more Bach’s thing, but it was far less practical given his line of work. He just couldn’t imagine that the day would ever come when he’d play Rhapsody in Blue or a Mozart piano concerto to woo some joker down from some mental ledge.
But maybe this man with the scar isn’t real. That was Anna, interjecting and pulling him back on track as she followed his thoughts. He was far more tired than he’d believed, and it was a good thing he hadn’t wandered into thoughts of—
He cut himself off abruptly, but Anna was focused and didn’t notice. Maybe he’s just a symbol of the danger that she’s in, she continued. If Nika’s projections are subconscious—and it’s hard to believe that she knows how to do this—isn’t it possible that this is, I don’t know, just a nightmare that Nika had? Couldn’t it all just be fantasy?
“I don’t think it’s a dream.” Bach answered her by speaking aloud, even as he gently pulled out of her. She gasped, just a little, at his sudden departure, and he added, “I’m sorry, I should’ve warned you that I was going to—”
“No,” she said quickly, “it’s just odd. It’s going to take some getting used to.”<
br />
“It’s really not something I’ll be doing all that often,” he tried to reassure her. “And … you can see that—now that you know what it feels like—it’s not going to happen without your knowledge. Again,” he added somewhat lamely, since he had not only invaded her mind but had also put his own thoughts in it, completely without her knowledge, simply to get her into his car. He quickly pushed on, bringing them back to the vision they’d shared. “I don’t think Nika was dreaming. It was too linear, Anna. Too real. Too organized—dreams tend to jump and shift.” He put it as clearly as he could. “I believe that Nika was projecting what she was actually experiencing and seeing.”
“So that name—Devon Caine …?” Hope was back in her eyes.
“I’ve already sent a request to Analysis,” Bach told her. “We’re working to track him down. We’ll bring him in and find out what he knows.” He didn’t tell her that he believed Devon Caine was also the man responsible for raping and murdering a girl at the mechanic’s garage in South Boston. That headline could wait until they had the man safely in their possession.
“He called Nika a fountain,” Anna remembered from the vision. “The man with the scar. What did he mean by that?”
“They took your sister’s blood,” Bach explained, “and they no doubt tested it and discovered that she’s an abundant source of the crucial ingredient needed to make oxyclepta di-estraphen. The good news is that they’ll keep her alive. The bad news is that they’re going to try to keep her in a near-constant state of terror, which is really bad news for the girls in the room with her.”
“Oh, God,” Anna breathed. But she took a breath and sat up a little straighter. “So … What now?”
“We run some tests,” Bach told her. “I want to see if you’ve got any powers that we might have missed, since it’s highly unusual for a non-Greater-Than to receive a projection of any kind. At the same time, I’ll see if maybe I’m the one whose integration is spiking, or … Maybe it’s all Nika. We’re going to gather as many facts as we can. I know it’s early and you haven’t had much sleep, but if you’re willing, we could go into the lab and—”
Anna stood up. “I’m willing. Just let me get my sneakers.”
Rickie Littleton was in the Oasis Restaurant on Route 9, up by the Chestnut Hill Mall. He was eating their $14.99 Recession Special breakfast, the way he always did when he was flush.
He didn’t recognize Mac when she walked in—but then again, he wouldn’t. Through the years, she’d worked hard to make sure that he never saw her. Up until now, it had served OI to use Littleton as an informant of sorts, following him and gathering information when needed.
Up until now.
She could’ve kept her distance, let him finish his breakfast, and then trailed him around the city for a few days to see where he went and who he talked to. But a few days would seem like an eternity to their missing little girl, and picking Littleton up and bringing him in meant that they’d know everything that he knew in a matter of minutes. That’s how long it would take for Bach to stroll through the drug dealer’s mind.
So Mac sat down at the counter next to him, her charm set on stun.
Still, he didn’t even look up from his plate until she said, “Don’t you hate it when they undercook the bacon?”
He looked a little surprised then, because, really, what woman in her right mind would initiate a conversation with someone who looked and smelled the way he did? But then she gave him a flash of the Rolex and gold-and-diamond bracelet that she’d borrowed from OI’s local bank box, specifically for this purpose. As she pulled the sleeve of her jacket back down, Littleton’s second glance at her was filled with understanding. She was here to score some Destiny.
“I’ve had both items appraised and I’m fifty dollars short,” she told him, catching her lower lip between her teeth in a move that she knew he’d find hypnotizing. She didn’t have to work to sound desperate—she just had to think about the child who’d died at the garage that this man owned. Either Littleton was a murderer and rapist, or he’d let his murdering rapist friend use his place for his evil deeds. “I was hoping we could …” She lowered her voice even more. “Trade?”
His yes was in his eyes, even as he returned some of his attention to shoveling his home fries into his mouth. “I’ll be done here in five.”
“My car’s out in the lot,” she told him as she slid off the stool and headed out the back door.
There was no way he wasn’t going to follow her. But just to be safe, as she left the establishment she nodded at Diaz, who was lurking near the Dumpster. And when he nodded back, she knew he’d used his power to jam shut the restaurant’s front door, so that no one could enter or leave any way but through the back.
Mac climbed into the driver’s seat of the car that Diaz had traded for his bike when she’d called him after guessing—correctly—that Littleton had taken at least part of his payment for Nika’s capture in product.
When she’d hit Chestnut Hill, she’d picked up on his emotional grid almost immediately.
She was glad to be right, because she hadn’t picked up an empathic reading on Nika at the abduction site—the stretch of sidewalk where the little girl had been grabbed.
Sometimes, after trauma, the remnants of a person’s emotional grid were so loud that Mac could search for that person and pick them out of a proverbial crowd, even though she’d never laid eyes on them before.
But it was hard to do that if the event had occurred outside versus indoors, and as she’d stood on the spot where Nika had been attacked, she’d felt almost nothing. A mere glimmer of fear.
She’d found Nika’s phone, broken, in the street, but that hadn’t told them anything they didn’t already know, and she’d picked up nothing from touching the plastic.
Mac now rolled down the heavily tinted window and pulled the car up so that she was idling near the restaurant’s back door.
And here came Rickie Littleton, his hood up and his hands in his pockets. He spotted Mac right away and she smiled at the dirt-wipe and he didn’t look away.
Because he didn’t look away, he didn’t see Diaz coming up behind him.
One hand on Littleton’s shoulder was all it took for Diaz to zap the dealer into full submission.
Mac was already out of the car. She opened the back door and helped catch the unconscious scumbag and throw him neatly into the backseat. Part of her was pissed off that, despite all of her various skills and tricks and talents, it was the simple fact that she had a vagina that had most expedited Littleton’s capture.
It bothered her that she still struggled to control her powerful telekinetic skills, even after years of training. While Bach and Diaz could use their minds to pop open a window or door lock, she was limited to larger, less precise movements. She could blow a hole in a building just by thinking about it, sure. She could toss an adversary across a city street. She could turn up a thermostat so that the heat would kick on in a room.
But she couldn’t set the thing precisely at seventy-two degrees, the way Bach or Diaz could. She’d invariably turn it up as high as it could go, and then have to make the adjustment in person, by hand.
And if she tried to hold a man’s arms behind his back, creating a force-field version of handcuffs in order to subdue him? More than likely, she would dislocate both of his shoulders in the process.
Her telekinetic fine motor skills were for shit. She still spent hours working on her control. Her current project was a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, done entirely by moving the tiny pieces with her mind. She’d been working on it for three weeks now, and had accidentally sent the damn thing flying around the room—destroying the part that she’d already pieced together—five separate times. What a pain in her ass.
Bach had commented that this was also an exercise that provided a workout for her patience.
No shit, Sherlock.
Here and now, Mac had already used one of the plastic restraints she always carried to cuff Littleto
n’s hands behind his back. She stepped away after closing the door behind the scumbag and said, “See you back there.”
Diaz nodded as he climbed behind the wheel. He was already out of the parking lot as Mac took one last look around, checking to make sure no one had witnessed their little kidnapping.
There were people coming into and out of the drugstore next door, and others pulling into the parking lot, but no one was anxious or upset—at least not about anything having to do with Rickie Littleton.
There was a woman who was frantic about her four-year-old’s devastating illness, and a despondent elderly man with terrible arthritis whose wife had died last month, and who was now unable to get his run-down car to start. Neither of them had eaten in several days. Their problems were so much more severe than Mac’s, and she kept her emotional shields down longer than she usually would have, just to remind herself of that.
The fact that she’d met some random guy with a nice smile, a guy she had to stop sleeping with because they were both going to work in a place that not only frowned on fraternizing, but encouraged across-the-board sexual abstinence …? And yeah, okay, that was just a handy excuse for Mac not seeing Shane again. In truth it was more complicated—more about her not wanting to use him like he was just another toy for her amusement.
But whatever the reason was, the bottom line was that she and Shane were history.
And boo-freaking-hoo. She was going to have to sacrifice a little immediate gratification and a whole lot of hot sex.
And that was a great big nothing on a cosmic scale that included starvation, pain, dead spouses, and dying children.
Life would go on.
She’d deal.
She always did.
Besides, even if she’d gone ahead and met Shane next week for dinner and a massage—and more of that awesome sex, let’s be honest—it wouldn’t have been long before the guilt kicked in, big-time. Shane Laughlin was no Justin. And even if she could have pretended, since the man was blacklisted and couldn’t find a job, that letting him live in her apartment was an act of generosity and kindness on her part, she would have eventually done the right thing and let him go.
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