“The simplest thing,” Isabel said, “is not always the smartest thing.”
“I am not going to stand by while you’re dangled on a goddamned hook.”
“I told you, I’m not next on his hit parade. But somebody else is. Some woman is walking around in your town right now, Rafe, and a killer is stalking her. My partner and I are up to speed on this investigation. Bishop thought we were the best team to send down here, and his success rate, our success rate as a unit, is over ninety percent. We can help you catch him. Send me back, and the next team has to start from scratch. Do you really want to waste that time, especially when this killer is averaging a victim a week so far?”
“Shit.” He stared at her grimly. “I’m taking a hell of a lot on faith here. This psychic stuff.”
“At least you didn’t call it bullshit,” she murmured. “That’s usually the first reaction.”
Ignoring that, he said, “I’m supposed to be okay with you being on our killer’s list because you assure me you aren’t next. That we have time while he stalks his next victim and, not incidentally, finds out enough about you to feel that he knows you. So he can kill you.”
“That pretty much sums it up, yeah.”
“Convince me. Convince me that this clairvoyant knowledge you have is genuine. That it’s something I can trust.”
“Parlor tricks. It always comes down to parlor tricks.”
“I’m serious, Isabel.”
“I know you are.” She sighed. “You sure you want to do this?”
Suddenly wary again, he asked, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because the best way for me to convince you is to open up a connection between us and tell you things about yourself, your life, your past. Things I couldn’t possibly know any other way. You might not find that very comfortable. Most people don’t.”
“Women are dying, Isabel. I think I can endure a little psychic reading.”
“Okay. But when we speak of this later-and we will-just remember that I tried to warn you. I get bonus points for that.”
“Fine.”
She held out a hand, palm up, and Rafe hesitated only an instant before placing his hand on hers. He nearly jerked away when their flesh touched, because there was a literal, visible spark and a definite, if faint, shock. But her fingers closed over his strongly.
Matter-of-factly, she said, “Well, that’s new.”
Rafe wanted to say something about static, but he was busy having another of those strange feelings, just as he’d had when she walked into the press conference, but much, much stronger. That a door had opened and a fresh breeze was blowing through. That everything around him was in sharper focus, more real than it had been before. That something had changed.
And he still didn’t know if it was a good change or a bad one.
Isabel didn’t go into some kind of trance or even close her eyes. But her eyes did take on that abstracted expression he had noticed before, as if she were listening to some distant sound. Her voice remained calm.
“You have an unusual paperweight on your desk at home, some kind of car part encased in acrylic. You prefer cats over dogs, though you don’t have either because of your long working hours. You’re allergic to alcohol, which is why you don’t drink. You’re fascinated by the Internet, by the instant communication of people all over the world. You’re a movie buff, especially interested in science fiction and horror.”
Isabel smiled suddenly. “And you wear a particular style of jockey shorts because of a commercial you saw on TV.”
Rafe jerked his hand away. “Jesus,” he muttered. Then, getting back on balance, he added somewhat defensively, “You could have found out any of that. All of it.”
“Even the jockey shorts?”
“Jesus,” he repeated.
She was looking at him steadily, her eyes still faintly abstracted, distant. “Ah, now I understand why the idea of an FBI unit made up of psychics didn’t throw you. Your grandmother had what she called ‘the sight.’ She knew things before they happened.”
Rafe looked at his hand, which he had been unconsciously rubbing with the other one, then at her. “You aren’t touching me,” he noted in a careful tone.
“Yeah, well. Once a connection is made, I tend to pick up stuff from then on.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, varying the oath somewhat.
“I tried to warn you. Remember, bonus points.”
“I still don’t- You could have found out most of that some other way.”
“Maybe. But could I have found out that your grandmother told you on your fifteenth birthday that your destiny was to be a cop? It was just the two of you there at the time, so nobody else knew. You believed it was weird, she was weird, because you hadn’t thought of being a cop. The family business was construction. That’s what you were going to do, especially as you’d been swinging a hammer since you were twelve.”
Rafe was silent, frowning slightly.
“She also told you… there would come a point in your life when you would have to be very, very careful.” Isabel was frowning herself now, head slightly tilted, clearly concentrating. “That there was something important you were meant to do as part of the destiny she saw for you, but it would be dangerous. Deadly dangerous. Something about… a storm… a woman with green eyes… a black-gloved hand reaching… and glass shattering.”
He drew a breath. “Vague enough.”
Isabel blinked, and her green eyes cleared. “According to what our seers have told me, visions often come that way, as a series of images. Sometimes they prove to be literal, other times it’s all symbolic. The green-eyed woman could be a jealous woman or someone who resents you or someone else. The black-gloved hand a threat. The storm, violence. Like that.”
“Still vague,” he insisted. “Any of that is something a cop deals with regularly.”
“Well, we’ll see. Because I have more than a hunch that what your grandmother saw was this point in your life-otherwise I probably wouldn’t have picked up her prediction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Patterns are everywhere, Rafe. Events touch other events like a honeycomb, connecting to one another. And seeming coincidences usually aren’t. I may pick up some trivial information unrelated to what’s going on at present, and not all the stuff I get could even be called hits, but I’m focused on this investigation, this killer-and when that’s the case it almost always turns out that most of what I get is relevant to what’s going on around me at the time.”
“Want to use a few more qualifiers?”
She smiled at his exasperation, though it was more rueful than amused. “Sorry, but you’ve got to understand we’re in frontier territory here. There aren’t a whole lot of absolute certainties. Conventional science pretty much sneers at psychic ability, and those who were brave enough to test and experiment found themselves dealing with an unfortunate commonality among psychics.”
“Which is?”
“Very few of us perform well under laboratory conditions. Nobody really knows why, that’s just the way it is.” Isabel shrugged. “Plus, the tests tended to be poorly designed because, to begin with, they didn’t know what they were dealing with. How can you effectively measure and analyze something without even knowing how it works? And how do you figure out how it works when you can’t make it work within a controlled situation?”
“Somebody must have known, or you wouldn’t be here. Would you?”
“The SCU wouldn’t exist if Bishop hadn’t been highly motivated and exceptionally driven to figure out how to use his own abilities to track and capture a serial killer years ago. Once he was able to do that, he believed other psychics could be trained, that we could learn to use our abilities as investigative tools. And that those tools would give us an edge. We’re proving it works. Slowly, carefully-and with setbacks now and then. We’re also learning as we go.