“Not the brightest bulb on the tree, huh?”
“No.”
“Any chance that’s Eubanks?”
She shook her head. “Not unless the profile I was given was very badly flawed, which I doubt.”
Luther watched the driver open the rear door of the car. Another man climbed out. He looked to be in his late thirties, tall and square-jawed with a too-perfect tan that could only have come out of a spray can.
Grace drew a sharp breath and tensed again.
“That’s Eubanks,” she whispered. “High-level strat talent. Everything else fits, too.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“What’s with the rogue waves?” he asked.
She turned her head very quickly, stunned. “You can see them?”
“No offense, but I think they’d be hard to miss. I’ve seen some crazy people in my time. A lot of them have an erratic pulse in their auras. But not like those.”
Eubanks left the luggage to the driver and the bell staff, ignored the lei offered by the greeter and walked quickly toward the front desk.
“Junkies develop bizarre patterns, too,” Grace said hesitantly.
He studied Eubanks, thinking about that possibility. “A heavy user will throw off a lot of weird vibes. But in my experience, junkies’ auras resemble those of the crazies. You get a lot of what look like misfires or short-circuiting going on. The pattern is inherently unpredictable and makes it hard for the normal wavelengths to resonate, at least not for very long.”
“But this is a regular, repeating pattern,” she said, still speaking in that odd, soft tone. “A consistent rogue wave.”
“Which sounds like an oxymoron.”
“Why do you think Eubanks brought a hunter along?” she asked.
“Probably for the same reason that I’m here with you. The hunter is a bodyguard.”
He watched the way the hunter quartered the lobby, checking out each sector. The bodyguard’s gaze passed lightly over them and then moved on. There was no flicker of alarm in the pattern.
Grace seemed to relax a little. “He didn’t pay any attention to us.”
“Like you said, he’s not that sharp. Whatever the case, you’ve done your job. Time to get you off this island.” He hated the thought of sending her back to that little town on the Oregon coast, but he sure as hell did not want her anywhere near Eubanks.
“We’re not done yet,” she said. “You need me to help profile that hunter we ran into last night, remember?”
“The situation has become complicated.”
“I can do complicated.”
“You’re not going to do it here,” he said.
“You need a partner,” she insisted. “And I’m the only one handy. Eubanks is a very, very dangerous man and so is that hunter.”
“I know the cane doesn’t make a reassuring impression, but I do know how to do this kind of stuff.”
“I am well aware of what you can do,” she said. “I saw you in action last night. But you’re not crazy.”
That was interesting. “You think Eubanks is?”
“I think,” she said carefully, “that there’s something more than a little off about him, just like there is something off about his bodyguard.”
“The rogue waves?”
“Yes. I think you should stay away from both of those men.”
His first reaction was to start brooding over her obvious lack of confidence. Okay, so he wasn’t in the best of shape at the moment. Then it occurred to him that she was genuinely worried about his safety. He wasn’t sure how to take that. Go with the positive, he thought. She cares enough to be concerned.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “You know, instead of flying home to Eclipse Bay, you could go back to Honolulu and wait for me there. I won’t be here long. As soon as I phone Fallon, he’ll make arrangements for Eubanks to be put under long-term surveillance. I’ll hang around, see if I can find that hunter and then—”
He broke off because he realized she was not listening. Her attention was no longer on Eubanks, who had received his card key and was already striding impatiently toward the elevator lobby, the hunter by his side. Instead, she was watching another new arrival, a woman who had just gotten out of a white limo.
An executive, he decided, watching the woman direct the bell staff with an authoritative air. She was accompanied by a muscular man dressed in an ill-fitting jacket.
The woman ignored the proffered lei, just as Eubanks had done, and walked briskly through the lobby toward the front desk.
“Look at them,” Grace said urgently.
“I am looking at them. What is it?”
“
Look at them.”
“Right.” Obediently he jacked up his senses again.
The woman’s aura flared, a cold array of icy blues and glassy greens.
“Wouldn’t be a good idea to get between her and whatever she happened to want,” he said mildly. “Had a captain like that once. All he cared about was getting into the commissioner’s office. He left footprints on the back of everyone who stood in the way.”
“I doubt if your captain’s aura looked like hers.”
And then he saw the pulses—short little stabs of darkness that crackled through the blues and greens, briefly altering the resonating patterns. The rogues were not identical to those in Eubanks’s and the hunter’s aura but there was a distinct similarity.
He switched his attention to the woman’s companion and saw the same bad energy.
“Hunter,” Grace said. “Incomplete, like the other one.”
“Another bodyguard. That explains the bad jacket. He’s carrying.”
“Carrying what?”
“A gun.”
“Oh, right.” She assumed a knowing air. “Definitely carrying.”
Another vehicle halted at the entrance. This time two men got out. One of them supervised the unloading of a set of golf clubs. The other headed for the lobby.
“High-level probability talent and his bodyguard,” Grace said. “Same dark energy spikes in their fields.”
“What the hell is going on here? I’ve never seen anything like those weird rogue waves.”
“I have,” Grace said softly.
“I did get that impression.” He reached for his cane. “You and I need to talk.”
FOURTEEN
“What the hell is going on and what do you know about it?” Luther asked. He used his flat, unemotional cop voice.
She’d had enough for one day. Her temper spiked. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a suspect that you’ve got cornered in an interrogation room.”
He looked at her, eyes veiled by his dark glasses, and said nothing. He waited the way cops and psychiatrists did sometimes, hoping you’d get nervous and start talking.
They were standing in the shade of the very same tree that had concealed them the previous evening when he touched her for the first time. But it wasn’t the precious memory of what had happened the night before that slammed through her now. It was the fragment of the Martin Crocker dream that had awakened her that she found herself remembering.
She concentrated on the ocean while she composed her thoughts. Luther had a right to know whatever she could tell him about the auras of the strange group that had just arrived. But she was under no obligation to confess all her secrets. It wouldn’t be the first time she had lied to a cop. She could do this.
“I once knew someone else whose aura developed a similar disturbance,” she said quietly.
“Go on.”
“You know this would be a whole lot easier if you played Good Cop instead of Bad Cop.”
“Talk to me, Grace.”
“This man I knew, the rogue waves, as you call them, started to appear after he began taking a drug.”
“What drug?” Luther did not stir beside her but she knew that he had heightened his senses. He was watching her with his other vision, searching for signs of anxiety, fear, anger or any other strong emotion that might signal to him that she was lying or evading.