They stood in a semi-darkened room, much preferred by Dr. Desinor whenever she went into trance. She'd known absolutely nothing of the case in Georgia save what she'd read in the papers, which was very little, and even the application Parlen had made to Dr. Desinor's psychic detection unit of the FBI had had to travel through a paper labyrinth the size of a botanical maze in order for Parlen to gain paranormal assistance for his investigation. The application itself was intentionally sketchy, seeming just a routine application for Headquarters assistance, no one wanting to draw undue attention to the fact the FBI was in any way involved in paranormal studies or psychic detection.
Even before touching the note, which she'd never seen before this moment, Desinor knew the perpetrator was an amateur. The note was a patchwork of large and small words, cutout block letters from slick magazines, tabloids and the Ladies Home Journal, telltale signs of a poor education and weak grammar showing through nonetheless, such as the use of a double negative in the third sentence, and a subject-verb-agreement error in the last sentence. Of course, the errors might well have been put in on purpose, to throw the police off. A linguist would be looking for a poorly educated man, possibly an unskilled laborer, possibly of Southern origin and a low socioeconomic background. Hardly facts which would nail a suspect.
The bad guy or guys had foolishly used Scotch tape, which left a variety of prints from several fingers and thumbs, but none of these had found a match in the world's largest fingerprint bank here at Quantico, further proof of the cherry quality of the culprits.
Now that all the usual FBI measures had failed, Parlen had come to Kim Desinor. And why not? What did he have to lose? No one would even know, so there was no chance for embarrassment. The ransom notes had stopped. Leads were now gone as dry as Sahara soil. The prints remained useless without a match. The ransom note itself was now only an annoying reminder to Parlen that his field office in Georgia had failed miserably in Decatur.
A last-resort, last-ditch effort that Parlen had little belief in was what it had all come down to, in the person of Dr. Desinor, a Ph. D. in psychology and sociology who also juggled psychic powers here in the Behavioral Science Division of the FBI. Psychic powers were ostensibly not part of her working repertoire, however, or so the public was to be made to believe. For the past ten years, use of psi powers under any FBI umbrella had been not only downplayed but denied outright. There didn't appear to be any change in this policy on the horizon, so funding continued by the grace of the budgetary gods above, and lately, they weren't looking too kindly on Dr. Faith and her small office.
“ Back away from me, both of you,” she instructed the two men in the room with her-Benton, her aide and student, and Parlen, the skeptical agent. Benton was studying under her, while Parlen was following orders, transporting the goods from Decatur, Georgia, where the manhunt for the missing bank executive, Harold Michael Sendak, continued under a cloud of criticism and hopelessness. The abductors had been so frightened off, it appeared, that Sendak must be dead by now, the case now eleven weeks old.
Kim Desinor felt the ransom note speak to her immediately. There was something about the weave and fiber that was quite alive with energy, although it was simple copier paper with no special qualities about it. Still, it sent out an image, sharp and piercing, into her mind. A life force had left an indelible mark on the paper, and it was desperately but haltingly attempting to speak to her.
Dr. Desinor took in a deep gasp of air, breathing in the life force, taking it inside her, filling her mind with its resolute images while the more amorphous, peripheral images floated off like flotsam on a river. She forced herself to ignore the smoke and unfocused mirror images for the main event.
The room, with its stark white walls, was sealed to prevent any undue noise or disturbance while she worked, although there remained one thick glass window looking into Dr. Desinor's crowded office, where the shelves were overflowing with volumes dealing with psychiatry and psychology and psychic powers. The room was soundproof and a camera was mounted near the ceiling which recorded every session, including today's. Here there were no phones, no buzzing intercoms or other office disturbances. There wouldn't even be any other people, save Benton, if Parlen hadn't insisted on being here. His damned negative thoughts rose like heat off a Texas-Louisiana highway during a drought, further obscuring her grasp of the images fighting for dominance in her psyche.
When she felt a breakthrough, all other sensory paths were completely shut down, sometimes for only a moment, sometimes for minutes at a time. She felt no other bodies or heat sources in the room, and she could not hear anyone's whisper and she saw no faces. Nor did she see the camera or the walls or the window or the light flashing on her phone in the office next door.
Suddenly, she was no longer truly in the little cubicle; she was several hundred miles away, in Decatur. She first heard the whispering of voices, not from Benton or Parlen, but from Georgia. Meaningless back-scatter, jabbering gibberish, the mumblings, grumblings and ravings of maniacs-ghost voices, some psychics insisted. She believed them to be the emanations of the past, imprinted on the object, in this case the ransom note, now being replayed in her head via the antennae of her fingertips. Nothing mystical or supernatural about it, so far as she was concerned. Simply a heightened sixth sense of higher awareness, like the higher memory of a computer.
The voices sounded at first like a foreign tongue, but they just needed to be adjusted, tuned into, so to speak.
She believed her “power” an inborn instinct that gave its owner the ability to increase or heighten all the normal senses into one forcefully focused laserlike sense, a gift or a curse, however one chose to look at it, however one chose to use it, or be used by it.
The voices sounded like tolling bells without harmony, clanging into one another, disjointed and chaotic at first; the images welling up from the paper made no direct sense either. Usually, if anything formed, it was symbolic, which in and of itself would remain pointless, like the cradle she now saw… What was the cradle, and why was it so still and flat and unable to rock?
“ Cradle… I see a cradle…” she said aloud.
Parlen's eyes widened and he muttered, “Cradle? What kind of cradle?”
“ Strange cradle… cradle of death, not life…”
“ What do you mean, cradle of death?”
“ Stone cradle… stones and cradle…”
Parlen's eyes widened and he said in a near-whisper, “You mean Craddle…Craddle Storage? What about it?”
Benton shushed the agent.
Kim Desinor was coming clear on two salient points: Sendak had been buried alive but aboveground, possibly in a crypt, and the ransom note had been handled by more than one person before she herself had touched it. Whether an eager investigator or an accomplice, she could not yet say. Even so, the number 1 kept insinuating itself like a brand across her brain. It was so persistent that she decided there must only be one criminal mind at work. But then, who else had handled the document?
Was the picture cluttered by an overzealous officer of the law, perhaps Parlen himself? Everyone at the FBI had been extremely careful to provide an unbreakable chain of custody for the Georgia document.
Still, she sensed the ransom note had been handled by a large man with evil intentions and someone smaller, milder, someone leaning toward the color green, a person with a rainbow aura around… her. She had something to do with the number /. It was definitely a female, and she held a deep-seated remorse, powerful frustrations and guilt capped tightly in a bottle, her heart trapped in a bottle, a vessel of some sort. The bottle was her body.