Dante nodded, visibly relieved. “It’s just that we’ve seen the mood of small towns change drastically with something like the murder of an officer. Bad gets worse in a hurry.”
“I’ve seen it too. So has Jonah. We won’t let that happen here.”
“Good enough.”
Sarah frowned, her mind shifting to other questions. “We’re sure it’s a man?”
Dante looked at her steadily. “You, Robbie, and Samantha are the only ones of us we can be sure touched, in some way, the mind of this bastard. What does your gut tell you?”
“Male,” Sarah said immediately, while Robbie nodded agreement.
“Not sure why in my case,” Robbie added. “There really wasn’t a sense of personality. In fact, for most of it I wasn’t aware of a presence at all. Just that confusion of memories that didn’t mesh.”
“Because he was just testing you,” Dante guessed. “Unlike with Sarah, he didn’t need you to remember something that didn’t happen. Also why he didn’t threaten you, I bet. He didn’t, right?”
“No.” Robbie frowned. “The first time I was even really aware of him was when I sort of snapped back—and I saw Officer Duncan stagger out onto the sidewalk. I knew her killer was behind her, in that alley, and I knew he was the one who had been rearranging my memories. But it was knowledge, not a sense of him. Maybe just a cop’s knowledge that you can’t move more than a few steps, if that, with your throat cut.” She looked at Dante. “When Sam gets back here, we really need to know everything she saw and felt when she touched Officer Duncan. And I mean everything. She may have the best sense of the killer, even if she didn’t see him.”
“Because she touched the memories of a dead woman.” Sarah shivered visibly. “I thought my gran could be creepy at times with what she knew, but that beats anything I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s unsettling to watch. Even to think about,” Robbie agreed. “The FBI has a lot of scientific types on the payroll, including a whole slew of medical doctors, and they study us regularly. What Sam can do is, so far as we know, unique. None of our telepaths have been able to do it, and if mediums like Dante see or sense the dead, that’s a whole different thing.”
“A dead person’s brain has energy,” Sarah said, almost as if she wanted to listen to how it sounded out loud. It obviously sounded creepy, because she shivered again. “Damn.”
Robbie shrugged. “I don’t really understand the science of it—except for a physics lesson Bishop has drilled into all of us: Energy can’t be destroyed, only transformed.”
Sarah looked at her with lifted brows.
“Death doesn’t destroy the energy in the brain. That’s all our thoughts are, electrical impulses. Synapses firing—or whatever the hell is going on in there. We are creatures of electrical energy, more or less. That electricity doesn’t stop because the heart does, because the lungs are no longer drawing in oxygen. That’s why true brain death, the complete lack of electrical impulses in the brain, is one of the standards used to declare certain death. From what I’ve been told, the brain’s energy, especially in cases of violent death, lingers from a few moments up to as much as half an hour. I dunno, maybe it takes that long for the brain to realize the body is already dead.”
“Oh, jeez, that’s even creepier,” Sarah told her.
“Stick with us and you’ll get creeped out plenty,” Dante murmured.
“Something to look forward to,” Sarah said. “Or not. I say we get busy with these files. It would be nice to be able to show some progress before the others get back.”
“I hear that,” Robbie said, and opened a file.
—
THE SOUND OF breathing so close to her in the darkness kept Nessa frozen for a long, long time. She even held her breath, as long as she could, though all that did was convince her that there was more than one person nearby.
Breathing.
Not a sound of movement. Nobody talking. Just the soft, whispery sounds of breathing.
Wait . . . is it the missing people?
And if it is . . . did I get taken too?
That was more terrifying than even the darkness. Because some of the missing people had been missing for weeks, and nobody had been able to find them. Half the town had gone out on searches to help the police, but nobody had been found. Mr. Sully and his dogs had gone out almost every day, until even the dogs looked thin and discouraged, and Chief Riggs had ordered it stopped.
They’d keep looking, he had told them. But it would be the police, and the FBI agents coming to help—
Wait. I know Chief Riggs told Mr. Sully to rest his dogs. And I know he talked to everybody crowded into the school gym that day, just a few days after that man was taken at the theater.
But . . . he didn’t say anything about FBI agents then.
Did he?
As scared as she was, Nessa had the notion that getting her memories straight was terribly important. It mattered somehow, and not just to her.
There had been that meeting . . . and all the adults had been frightened, holding tight to their children. She’d thought her daddy’s grip would turn her fingers white. And the adults had asked what they could do, how they could be safe when even the police didn’t know who was taking people away, or even how.
Chief Riggs had told people not to buy more guns, Nessa remembered that. If they had guns and knew how to use them, fine, that was for home protection, but he didn’t want people carrying their guns around, and he didn’t want anyone getting a gun unless they took the police training course he insisted on before people bought guns. And right now his people were too busy to be teaching those courses.
Besides, having a gun wouldn’t have kept anyone from being taken, that was what he’d said. Staying home at night was what they should do. If they had dogs, make sure the dogs were inside with them. Keep their porch lights or other yard lights on all night long, maybe even install some motion-sensor lights so if anybody came into their yards, the lights would come on. Make sure their doors and windows were locked, and an alarm would sound if the glass was broken.
Nobody had said that the people who were taken had not been taken from their homes. She thought they were afraid to say it. Because they wanted to believe home was safe.
She wanted to believe home was safe.
Nessa knew that her daddy, like so many others, had bought an even better security system than they’d had before. She didn’t much like cameras inside the house, and her mama hadn’t either, but her daddy had said safety was more important and it wasn’t like he was putting cameras in bedrooms or bathrooms.
Yes. Yes, she remembered all that. Was sure of all that.
She was sure that her mama had taken her to school rather than let her take the bus like before. And picked her up. Lots of mamas and daddies had been doing that, and the teachers had made sure who was picking them up and checked their names off on the lists on their clipboards. The teachers had even talked to them about being careful where they should have been safe, about the buddy system and not being alone, not even in school.
Nessa had done just as she’d been told. Because it was scary, people just being taken like that. Even though no kids had been taken, it was scary.
Only . . .
Maybe a kid had been taken now. Maybe she had been taken.
In the awful darkness, alone even though she could hear others breathing, Nessa tried her best to remember being taken. She’d been so careful, just like everybody told her to be. Never alone, and safe inside the house her daddy had made safer. Daddy had talked about getting a dog, and she’d been excited about that.