Running Hot

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.

Let him look. So what if I’m scared? He should be scared, too.

“I don’t know the name of whatever he was using,” she said, “but I’m very sure it was illegal. It had a weird effect on him. It gave him a new kind of talent, one he definitely did not have before he started taking the drug. It’s hard to explain, but—”

“Shit,” Luther said, interrupting her very softly. “Nightshade.”

Startled, she turned to face him, her own senses flaring. His aura flashed with a cold, controlled excitement that did not show on his face. She knew he was running hot, not just psychically but physically. Adrenaline.

“What is Nightshade?” she asked warily. “Some new street drug?”

“No. It’s the code name that Fallon gave to a new organization of rogue sensitives that has managed to re-create the founder’s formula.”

“The formula?” She was beyond startled, she was stunned. “But that’s just an old Society myth,” she managed weakly.

“Not any longer. Hunting down Nightshade operatives and identifying the group’s leaders is J&J’s number one priority these days. Everyone in the agency knows that.”

“No one told me anything about Nightshade.”

“Probably because Fallon considers you temporary help. But I’ve got a hunch your status in the firm just got changed but good. What do you know about Nightshade?”

Careful. You don’t have to tell him everything.

Who was she kidding? Her private Pandora’s box of horrors had just been opened. There was no stuffing the bad news back inside. Her survival instincts kicked in. She hastily assessed her options and decided there were two. She could disappear again, a risky proposition because she had a hunch that J&J would pull out all the stops to hunt her down. The second option was to cooperate in the hunt for Nightshade. It was a dicey maneuver but if she was very careful, she might be able to pull it off without revealing her own secrets.

She straightened her shoulders, the decision made. She would give Luther the information that might be helpful to J&J. But she didn’t have to throw herself under the bus.

She had one very big factor going for her in the equation, she decided. J&J clearly needed the data that she could supply. That gave her some negotiating power. If worst came to worst, she could work with that.

“I told you that until I joined the Bureau of Genealogy, I worked as a librarian in a large corporation,” she said.

“Crocker World.”

“Right. A lot of my time was spent doing Internet searches that were commissioned by various executives, including Mr. Crocker. On a few occasions I was called into the executive suite to deliver the results of my research.”

“Martin Crocker summoned a librarian into his office?”

There was irritation and impatience in Luther’s voice. He didn’t believe her.

“Mr. Crocker was a strat talent. People like that love background and research. The more facts and details they can gather before they make a decision, the better. I did a lot of work for him.”

She was pleased with the way that came out. Let him look. Every word was true.

“Go on,” Luther said.

“During the years that I worked at headquarters in Miami, I saw Mr. Crocker many times.” More truth.

“On your trips upstairs to the executive suite,” Luther said without inflection.

Damn. Was he buying this or not?

“What I’m trying to tell you is that I had several opportunities to examine his aura,” she said. True.

“What made you do that?”

The question threw her for a couple of seconds. Why would the company librarian care about the boss’s aura?

“I suppose,” she said simply, “because he was Martin Crocker. In the world in which he moved, he was a rock star. And he was my boss.”

“I assume you profiled him?”

She nodded and concentrated on the horizon. “He was a complicated man. Driven.”

“Were you attracted to him?”

“Not in the way you mean.” More truth. “But I suppose you could say I admired him. Everyone in the company respected his business abilities. He was Martin Crocker, after all. He built an empire.”

“Go on.”

“During the last few months of his life, Crocker was working on a major project. He requested a number of detailed searches.”

“All of which were hand delivered by you?”

“Yes. I made a number of trips to the executive suite and on several of those trips I saw Crocker. Something changed in his aura during that time. I noticed the dark energy waves. They were small, almost undetectable at first. But they grew stronger as the weeks went by.”

“What did you think was happening?”

She folded her arms very tightly. “It occurred to me that he might be developing some sort of mental illness that was psychic in origin. Something about his dark energy scared the living daylights out of me.”

He considered that a moment. “Okay, it’s spooky stuff, I’ll give you that.”

“One day when I was summoned to the executive suite, I noticed two men going into Crocker’s office. Both gave off bad vibes. You couldn’t miss them, not if you were an aura talent.”

“You checked out their patterns.”

“Sure.”

“And?” he prompted.

“And I saw the same dark energy patterns in their fields.”

“What did you do?”

“Started working on my résumé. What else? I’ve been around enough freaks in my life to know when it’s time to bail. But before I could land another job, the news broke that Crocker had disappeared while on a trip to his private island. There was a lot of speculation. If you followed the story, you know that everyone had a theory. There were rumors. Some of them hit the papers.”

“What rumors?” he asked.

“That Crocker was involved with some drug lords and there was a falling-out. That was when I assumed that Crocker himself was doing drugs.” Okay, that was a minor tweaking of the truth.

“The theory was that the drug lords got rid of him?”

“It wasn’t exactly an off-the-wall conclusion,” she said. “Crocker World was headquartered in Miami, after all.”

Luther was silent for a long time, his expression cop-hard. Quickly she reviewed her story. It sounded tight. She was satisfied with it, especially given the fact that she’d had only a few minutes to put it together. It helped, of course, that most of the facts were true, including the rumors about Martin’s involvement in drug trafficking.

She risked a peek at Luther’s aura. Her heart sank. He believed parts of her story but not all of it. Maybe it was time to pull out one of the handful of identities she had constructed from the Society’s genealogy files and disappear. Good thing she hadn’t gotten a dog. She was surprised by how much the thought depressed her, though. One night with Luther and she had begun building a fantasy of happily ever after. She, of all people, should have known better.

“I’m going to call Fallon,” Luther said.

He took out his phone.