“Did Taylor tell you about his kills there at the end when he tried to murder you?”
“Yes. He was thrilled with himself because here in Wilby he was at last hunting real psychics, not the phonies.”
Judson drank some of his brandy. “Killing other people of talent made the game more of a challenge.”
“He said he thought it would be harder to kill genuine psychics, but it turned out that real talents were no more difficult to murder than normal people.”
“When did you get suspicious that there was a killer in your midst?” Judson asked.
“Immediately after the first murder.” Gwen stilled her hand on Max’s furry side. Memories of that first terrible day flooded back. “I found Mary’s body out at the lodge. She was lying on the floor near one of the workbenches at the back. I somehow knew she hadn’t had a heart attack or an aneurism. There was something about the way she was positioned that told me she had tried to run. At least, that’s what the ghost was telling me.”
“You saw her ghost at the scene?”
“Yes, in the walls of the mirror engine,” Gwen said. She resumed stroking Max, who twitched an ear and purred louder.
“What’s the mirror engine?” Judson asked.
“The most exotic piece of test equipment that Evelyn constructed. It was her pride and joy. She built it primarily for me. She thought she could use the engine to measure and record the energy patterns that I generate when I go into my talent. Mary died near one of the mirrors, and that’s where I saw her ghost.”
“Did you pick up anything else?”
“Nothing useful,” Gwen admitted. “I’ll give Oxley credit for conducting a fairly thorough investigation. After all, Mary was only in her mid-thirties and there was no indication that she had a chronic underlying illness. But in the end, Oxley couldn’t find anything. The medical examiner ruled that she had died of a heart attack.”
“You found the second victim in the same place three weeks later?”
“Yes. Ben died near the mirror engine, too. My intuition told me that, like Mary, he had been trying to flee when he went down. But again, the authorities called it death by natural causes. In his case it was a little more believable because Ben had severe asthma and some other health issues. I realized I was in trouble on that occasion. I could tell that Oxley’s cop instincts were stirring.”
“Two dead bodies within one month, both found in the same location by the same person, would have that effect on any cop,” Judson said.
“I talked to Evelyn. By then we were both very certain that someone had targeted her study subjects. She immediately canceled the project and warned everyone in the group. Most of the subjects panicked and left town.”
“But you didn’t leave Wilby?”
“No, I kept thinking there was something I was missing in the lab. I went back to take another look. Zander showed up. As soon as he walked into the lodge, I saw his aura. He was really jacked and terribly excited. The dream energy was bad, unwholesome. Wrong. I just knew that he was the killer. And he knew that I knew.”
“What happened?” Judson asked.
“We were alone in the lab. He started talking, playing his game with me. He told me that he had planned to take us down in the order in which we appeared in the group photo. He said I’d ruined the plan and spooked the herd. That’s what he called us, the herd. He said that because I’d interfered in his hunt, he was going to have to get rid of me out of order even though he had scheduled me to be last.”
Judson watched her with dangerously hot eyes. “Go on.”
“Zander reached into his jacket and took out what looked like a small digital camera and aimed it at me. He told me he had used it to kill Mary and Ben and a lot of phony psychics. Now it was my turn. He aimed the camera at me and started stalking me. I felt an icy sensation. My heart started to beat harder. I couldn’t catch my breath. I started to run. He laughed and told me that was what the others had done. He said that the chase was the best part. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I fled into the mirror engine. He followed me. And suddenly he was screaming.”
“He saw something in the mirrors?”
She took a deep breath and buried her fingers in Max’s fur. It was time to choose her words very, very carefully.
“I told you, there was a lot of energy in the atmosphere that day. I was in my talent and so was Taylor. There was the additional energy of the camera, too. The mirrors are designed to enhance the effects of psi. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think Taylor saw things in the mirrors—maybe the images of some of the people he murdered.”
Judson’s expression sharpened. “He saw ghosts in the mirrors?”
“Yes, I think so. He shouted at them. You’re dead, damn you. Why don’t you stay dead? He started firing that strange weapon at the mirrors. There was a flash of brilliant light. It looked like a real camera flash or a strobe light except that it was hot psi. I could sense it. The energy bounced off the mirrors—straight back at Zander. He started screaming. He turned and ran out the front door of the lab. He kept running and he kept screaming, and when he got to the falls, he threw himself into the water. I ran out behind him. I was in time to see him go over. I will never forget the look in his eyes.”
She stopped talking. For a time Max’s rumbling purr was the only sound in the room.
Judson contemplated the fire. “Do you think that it was the reflected energy from his own weapon that killed Taylor?”
“That’s the only explanation that makes any sense. All I can tell you is that in those last moments he went stark staring mad.” She paused. “I sometimes have a few bad dreams of my own, especially at this time of year.”
Judson’s brows rose. “You can’t fix your own bad dreams?”
“I haven’t been able to fix these,” she said. “As a strong lucid dreamer, I can usually structure a dream to some extent. The trick to handling a bad dreamscape is to find a way out. But I haven’t been able to find an escape route through my Zander Taylor dream. So it keeps repeating. August seems to be the worst month.”
“Because that’s when the deaths occurred.”
“Yes.”
She stopped talking, waiting for the other shoe to drop—waiting to find out if Judson was going to buy her heavily edited version of events. She had told him the truth, she reminded herself. Just not quite all of it.
To her surprise, he reached across the small space between them. His strong, warm hand closed over hers.
“I don’t have any helpful advice to give you,” he said. “You don’t ever forget watching someone die. Doesn’t matter if the bastard deserved it. Violent death exacts a psychic toll from anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. I see that in my work and I’ve experienced it firsthand. No one is ever the same afterward. If the events of two years ago didn’t give you a few bad nights, it would probably mean that you were missing something vitally important in the part of you that is supposed to make you a decent person. It’s only the monsters that can kill without paying a psychic price. That’s what makes them monsters.”
She looked at him. “I’m the one who is supposed to be the psychic counselor here.”
“Yeah, well, that’s all the counseling you’re going to get from me because I don’t have anything else to offer. I’ll warn you up front that what I just said isn’t going to be any help in the middle of a bad night. All you can do is remind yourself that it was the outcome that matters. You saved not only yourself but all of the people Taylor likely would have murdered in the future. You take that information and you move forward.”
“I get the feeling you’ve given yourself the same lecture recently.”
“Yeah.”
“Is it working for you?”
He looked at her and said nothing.
“Right,” she said. She drank some more of her brandy. “You need closure, too.”
He ignored that. “There’s no doubt that it was Taylor’s body they found?”