Wade glared at him. "You know. You all know."
"Then tell me."
"Juan Merinchez and the rest of those spics."
Wade seemed to be lost inside Mark's mind.
"And Juan deserves to die, doesn't he?" Redington asked.
"He's already dead, you worthless piece of shit. Somebody had to handle it."
"If he's dead, then where's his body?"
"Eddy's Junkyard, in the trunk of a 'sixty-seven Fairlane."
Redington went to the door quickly and spoke to someone outside. Then Officer Taylor was taken away from the little room on the other side of the mirror.
"Wade," Redington said, "are you all right?"
Ugly pictures moving like worms crawled around the inside of Wade's skull. He couldn't stop shaking or get up off the floor. Redington yelled out, "Somebody get me a glass of water!"
A uniformed policewoman came in with a paper cup. Redington held it to Wade's mouth.
"Drink this."
Cold water splashed between Wade's teeth. "Why did you do that to me?"
"We had to know. To be honest, I don't think I believed what Van Tassel said about you."
He leaned down to help Wade get up.
"Don't touch me!"
Redington pulled back slightly, withdrawing his hand. "I know you're thinking that none of this is fair. Not to you. Not to Mark. But our psychologist did an extensive evaluation and found him fit and ready for duty. Mark's been running around with a badge and a gun for two weeks now. Is that fair? Is that right?"
Wade's head was beginning to clear. "No," he whispered. "He shouldn't have a gun. He's dangerous… and racist. But he doesn't care about very many people, not even his wife. He cared about Christopher."
"That doesn't give him the right to kill someone."
"Did you know he'd killed Merinchez?"
"I had a pretty good idea. We just needed a body. And you may just have given us that."
Less than an hour later, two officers found Juan Merinchez's body in the trunk of a 67 Fairlane exactly where Wade had seen it in Mark Taylor's mind. Wade left the precinct as quickly as possible, flew home, and never checked back to find out what happened to Taylor. He didn't want to know.
Long ago, Wade had learned to slowly examine his feelings. Letting them all in at once caused poor or quick judgments. The experience in Mark Taylor's mind never left him. Those thoughts had been the ugliest string of images he'd ever seen. They would be with him always. But then anger set in… and guilt. That psychologist must have been blind. What if Inspector Redington had flown Wade out to California a few days earlier, before Mark Taylor had killed Merinchez? Could the situation have been averted? Perhaps Merinchez would still be alive, and Mark wouldn't be facing murder charges. Or back even further, what if Wade had actually been working under cover with Mark and Christopher? Could he have picked up that Merinchez had grown wise and then helped avoid Christopher's death at all? What if?
The questions never left him for long. After receiving a master's degree in developmental psychology, he went on to a PhD in criminal psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Shortly before graduation, he applied to twenty-seven police departments around the country for a position as staff psychologist. He was offered three, and finally accepted a place in Portland, Oregon, because the department seemed friendly but overworked and in need of someone like Wade.
Wade wished to be needed.
"We'll miss you," Dr. Van Tassel said, smiling, "but I think you've made the right choice. You thought I wanted you to be a professor or a scientist, didn't you?"
"Sometimes, yes."
"It's your gift, Wade. We can study it and write about it. But you've been searching for something else your whole life. Perhaps you've found it. Come home for Christmas."
With the first phase of his life over, Wade moved smoothly into the next. He found a loft-style apartment that would have cost him twice as much in Denver. The weather wasn't to his taste. It rained a lot. But the trees were green, the city was old but not too old, vogue but not too vogue. He thought he could be happy here.
The job was difficult at first. He was responsible for the files on forty-four men and women. In spite of his own innate ability, there was a mountain of red tape to be danced around every time someone gave him cause for concern, especially when Captain McNickel wanted the officer in question back on the street.
A rookie named Joe Tashet got stabbed in the side while running down a fleeing mugger. After healing up and receiving a clean bill of health from a medical doctor, he was handed over to the police psychologist.
"No way," Wade stated flatly to Captain McNickel in private. "He's terrified. It's all too new. Give him a little more time."
"We don't have any more time. Unless you tell me he's going to piss on the street and then shoot a couple of old ladies, I need him back out tomorrow."
"What about his partner? Is it fair to send someone else out with a panicked rookie cop?"
"He needs to get back on the horse, Sheffield."
McNickel was the only person who refused to call him Dr. Sheffield.
But Wade found that understandable. After all, he was barely twenty-seven and looked even younger. It would be hard for a crotchety old geezer like McNickel to refer to him by a title like "doctor."
What Wade didn't like or understand was McNickel's constant refusal to accept sound diagnoses. But the Joe Tashet case ended some of those problems.
Less than a month after Joe's psych evaluation, his partner was shot and killed by a drunken husband as the two officers were investigating a domestic battle. At the first sign of a gun, Joe bolted, leaving his partner with no backup.
McNickel listened to Wade more often after that.
Some of Wade's fantasies and expectations never came to pass. He didn't work under cover. He was occasionally asked to evaluate suspects and appear in court, but McNickel ordered him to "play down the psychic bit and just do your job."
Wade was often tempted to look inside McNickel's head and find out what made the old man so bad-tempered. Maybe his sex life was lousy… though Wade's own hadn't exactly been fireworks either. His job kept him hopping. Most of his duties consisted of helping exhausted, bored, and/or disillusioned cops whose work lives were drastically invading their home lives. Time passed quickly.
On November 7, 2005, at 5:32 P.M., Wade met Detective Dominick Vasundara, a transfer from New York. Wade was finishing up some paperwork in his office late that afternoon when a deep voice sounded from the open doorway.
"Captain told me to see you."
Looking up, Wade saw a man of medium height and stocky build, with stubble covering his wide jaw, and short black hair. He was dressed in faded jeans and a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. The man wasn't large, but somehow he seemed to block the entire doorway.
"Can I help you?" Wade asked.
"Yeah, I'm Dominick. I don't know what you can do. The captain told me to see you on my way out. Something about starting a file."
Wade was tired. He'd had a long day, and the last thing he wanted to do was start a new file. He should already have this guy's records anyway.
"Are you a transfer?"
"Yeah, New York."
"Really? Did you request to come here?"
"All that stuff's on my application."
At that, Wade instantly entered Dominick's mind. He was too beat to play verbal volleyball.
Expecting the new arrival to simply sit there for a few seconds dripping in attitude, Wade read a few normal, sexually motivated images before he saw surprise flicker across Dominick's face.
"What the…?" He blocked Wade. "Stay out of my head."
"Did you feel that?" Wade sat up, startled. "Could you feel me focusing in on your thoughts?"
"What do you think I am, stupid?"
"No, but you shouldn't have been able to-"