"I won't apologize for who and what I am."
"Have I asked you to?"
"Sometimes it feels that way."
He shook his head. "Even though you haven't told me everything, I know enough to understand that you didn't have many choices fifteen years ago. Life in a carnival over life on the streets? No question you made the better choice."
Samantha waited for a moment, then said, "You aren't going to ask, are you?"
"Ask what?"
"Ask what happened to leave me, at the age of fifteen, with just those two choices." She kept her voice steady.
He hesitated visibly, then shook his head once. "This isn't the time to get into-"
"Like I said, we're running out of time. I honestly don't expect much more, not for us. You aren't in my future, remember? And if all we have is now, then I'd just as soon get all the skeletons out of their closets where we can both see them. Just in case we ever do meet again. Or just in case we never meet again."
"Sam, you don't have to do this."
"You don't want me to do this," she said, knowing only as she spoke that it was the literal truth. "Because it'll make it harder for you to walk away if I do."
He frowned slightly but didn't protest that statement.
She turned a bit on the bed in order to face him more fully and clasped her cold hands together in her lap. "Have a seat. This may take awhile."
Lucas came away from the window and did sit down on the other side of the bed, but said, "It's late. You're tired, I'm tired, and we have another long day tomorrow. We have a killer to hunt down, Sam."
"I know. Remember what I said that first day? You can't beat him without me."
"Because you can piss me off?" he asked.
She drew a breath, too tense to be able to see any humor now. "Because I make you listen to things you don't want to hear. You refuse to let yourself feel pain or fear until you have absolutely no other choice. So I'm not giving you a choice."
"Sam-"
Ignoring the beginning of protest, she said steadily, "I was six when I became psychic. It happened the first time he threw me against a wall."
Jaylene watched the same news report and grimaced as she turned off the TV in her room. She wasn't surprised when her cell phone rang a summons just minutes later.
She checked the caller I.D., then answered with, "You saw the news report, huh?"
"Yes," Bishop said.
"Uh-huh. And just how long have you been close by?"
"Long enough."
Jaylene sighed. "I had a hunch there was more going on than you were willing to say. I mean, I know you sometimes send in a watchdog or two without alerting the primary agents, even someone working undercover, but you don't often turn up personally when another team member is leading an investigation."
"This killer has more than a dozen notches on his belt, Jay, and he's shown no signs of even slowing down. Or of conveniently wanting to be caught. He has to be stopped, and here."
"No argument. But why the cloak and dagger? Why not just tell us you're involved?"
"Because the killer's focus is on Luke-and I'm too recognizable to the media."
Jaylene knew that the latter, at least, was quite true; he had a memorable face and presence, did Bishop, and it was only very rarely possible for him to work undercover.
"You think if you showed up publicly, the killer would shift his focus?"
"No. I think he'd leave Golden and try to take his game elsewhere. He knows about us, Jay. About the SCU. And if any other team members showed up publicly, he'd very likely come to the conclusion that we had a decided edge in his game. A psychic edge."
Thoughtful, Jaylene said, "And yet he lured Sam here. Think he doesn't believe she's genuine?"
"My guess is exactly that. Her involvement in the investigation three years ago was more or less a public fiasco, at least from the media's reporting of it; anyone reading those reports would probably decide she was a phony."
"So he wanted her here as a… distraction… for Luke?"
"Why not? Even if that angle didn 't work, chances were good the media would grab on to Samantha as a good story and at the very least add to the tension. Among the investigators and the townspeople."
"Making it even harder for Luke to concentrate." Jaylene frowned. "Yeah, but if this guy really is matching wits with Luke, why work so hard to turn the game to his own advantage? I mean, why not a level playing field?"
Bishop said, "A nicely sane, competitive mind would want that, yes. But a sociopath? He just wants to win, and never mind fair play. He wants to prove, in his own mind, that he's better than Luke. Smarter, stronger. Manipulating people and events is just another way he's doing that."
"So we were being naive in even trying to figure out his rules."
"I'd call it an exercise in futility."
"Guess you're right. Sam said something about broken minds not working the way we'd expect them to."
"She's right about that. The only thing we can know for sure," Bishop said, "is that he has a personal grudge against Luke."
"I assume you're checking on that?"
"We've already gone back through his cases in the last five years, and nothing looks promising in the way of a lead. Harder to find out about his cases before he joined up, but we're working on that." Bishop paused, then added, "I don't know if Luke could remember anything helpful, but it wouldn't hurt to steer him in that direction."
"He doesn't talk about his past, you know that."
"Doesn't talk about it with a vengeance, yeah. But I'm hoping Samantha has had some effect."
"Oh, she's having an effect. I'm just not sure, when all's said and done, what that effect will be." It was Jaylene's turn to pause, and then she said, "Straight out, boss-did you get in touch with Sam, or did she get in touch with you?"
Bishop sighed and murmured, "It really is hell trying to keep information away from psychics."
"That isn't an answer."
"She got in touch with me."
"It's that vision she had in the beginning, isn't it? The one that made her decide to take the bait and come to Golden."
"Yes. That's all I can tell you, Jaylene. And more than Luke needs to know right now. He also doesn't need to know that Galen is keeping an eye on you whenever you're alone or that I'm anywhere near Golden."
"More secrets from my partner?" She sighed.
"I wouldn't ask if I didn't believe it was important."
"Yeah, you don't need to remind me of that."
"No," Bishop said. "I didn't think I did."
Lucas had expected something bad. Samantha was too intelligent to have bailed out of any kind of normal family life, even at an age when hormones and youthful stupidity tended to rule far too many decisions and actions.
So he had expected bad. He hadn't expected this.
Those dark, dark eyes never left his face, and her voice was steady, almost indifferent, as if the telling meant nothing to her. But he could see the tension in the hands knotted together in her lap, and he could see the pain in her pallor.
See it. But not feel it, not feel her pain.
Only his own.
"He was my stepfather," she said. "My real father was killed in a car accident when I was still a baby. My mother was the type of woman who had to have a man around, had to feel she belonged to someone, so there was a succession of uncles while I was a toddler. Then she met him. And married him. And I don't suppose she knew in the beginning that he liked to drink, and that drinking made him mean. But she found out. We both found out."
"Sam-"
"I don't remember what set him off that day. I don't even remember being thrown against the wall, not really. I just remember waking up in the hospital and hearing my mother anxiously telling the doctor that I was clumsy and kept falling down the stairs. Then she put her hand on my arm, patting it, and I… saw what had happened to me. Through her memories. I saw myself flung against the wall like a rag doll."
"A head injury," Lucas murmured.
Samantha nodded. "Severe concussion. Kept me in the hospital for more than two weeks. And I still have horrendous headaches sometimes, lasting for hours. So bad they literally blind me."