Текст книги "The First Prophet"
Автор книги: Kay Hooper
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“It’s all right, Uncle,” the younger man said, in the loud voice one used to speak to the hard of hearing. “No customers.”
The old man grumbled but returned his attention to the television and a morning game show.
The younger man moved to the front window and gazed out at the Mercedes only now pulling away. He watched it until it moved out of his sight, then returned to his place behind the counter. He glanced at the absorbed old man, then reached for the phone and punched in a long number.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said when the call was answered. “They’re on their way to the lake.”
It was nearly four that afternoon when Sarah came out of the cabin’s single bedroom. It was a rustic cabin only in the sense that it was constructed of logs and river rock; it had all the modern conveniences, including plenty of hot water Sarah had used in her shower, and a television connected to a small satellite dish on the roof.
The television was on, turned down low and tuned to MSNBC. But Tucker was watching another screen. He had his laptop set up on the coffee table and was obviously working on something. But he immediately looked up when Sarah came into the room.
“Working on the book you’re going to get out of this?”
“No, something else. You look much better.”
“A few hours’ sleep and a shower can do wonders,” she agreed. “Did you manage to get any rest?”
“A little.” He didn’t elaborate. “You should eat something.”
“You’re always trying to feed me,” she said, nevertheless heading for the corner of the great room devoted to the kitchen.
“Well, aside from the fact that the fit of your clothes says you’ve lost some weight recently—weight you didn’t need to lose—it’s also a good idea for people on the run to follow the soldier’s maxim. Eat when you can, because you never know when you’ll get another chance. Goes for sleep too. Basic survival training.”
Sarah didn’t reply to his comment about her weight; the too-loose fit of her clothing was obvious, and she knew it. Instead, she poured herself a cup of coffee and said, “I’m not really hungry, so I think I’ll wait awhile. If you got stuff for a salad we can have later, I’ll fix that.”
“I did.” He smiled slightly. “Need to keep busy?”
“Don’t you? What are you doing?” She came around the breakfast bar dividing the kitchen from the rest of the room and perched on the arm of an overstuffed chair at a right angle to the couch where he sat.
“Sleuthing.”
“Ah. And what are you sleuthing?”
Tucker smiled again. “The case of the missing psychics.”
Sarah thought about that, her gaze on the laptop’s screen. “There’s wireless Internet out here?”
“Via the satellite dish, so it’s not the fastest, unfortunately. But it gives us some access. You can find out almost anything if you know where and how to look, and I don’t mean just using Google. The real trick is having enough firewalls and other protection to ensure nobody else catches you looking.”
“Which you have.” It wasn’t a question.
“In these days of highly visible social networking, it pays to be at least a little paranoid, especially if you create intellectual property vulnerable to theft. I protect my work as best I can, and that includes whatever I happen to be researching.”
“So, have you found out anything?”
He leaned back on the couch and linked his hands together over his flat middle, frowning now. “So far, I have more questions than answers. I’ve been checking newspapers in major cities, looking for missing persons believed to have some kind of psychic ability. I’ve gone back more than ten years, so far, and checked half a dozen cities.”
“And?”
“Come see for yourself.”
Sarah moved over to sit beside him on the couch, keeping a careful few inches of space between them. She held her coffee cup in both hands, and looked at the laptop’s screen. There was what looked like a brief newspaper article accompanied by a photo of a young woman. She had to lean forward to read the article. It was dated March 17, 2008.
Carol Randolph, 16, vanished from her Phoenix home yesterday. She had apparently returned safely from school, since her backpack and other articles were found in her room, and the remains of her usual afternoon snack were in the kitchen. There were no signs of a disturbance, no indication that a stranger had forcibly entered the house. No ransom note has been found.
Police are asking that anyone with any knowledge of Carol and her movements yesterday please come forward. Carol is five feet seven inches tall, with long blond hair usually worn tied at the nape of her neck. She was last seen wearing a blue sweater and jeans.
Sarah looked at Tucker, very conscious of his nearness. “What makes you think she was psychic?”
“The program I’ve set up cross-references missingperson and accident reports with available police reports. They had added her school records to their files, and in those records were comments from several teachers about the girl’s ‘unusual abilities.’ Also a few highlights from a psychological profile I shouldn’t have been able to access; her parents took her to a shrink just before she vanished because they were worried about her, and had been since she was small. She ‘knew things’ she wasn’t supposed to know. Sound familiar?”
“Very.”
“Yeah. Anyway, the shrink believed she was a genuine psychic, recommended the parents take her to be evaluated at Duke University or one of the other legitimate programs set up to study parapsychology. They never got the chance.”
“Are you supposed to be able to access police reports?”
He smiled. “No.”
She decided not to ask. “I see. So—you did find a missing psychic.”
“Not just one.” Tucker leaned forward, his shoulder brushing hers, and tapped a few keys, then leaned back again so that Sarah could see the screen. Another article appeared, this one dated September 12, 2009.
Thomas Kipp, 30, has been missing from his Miami home since last Thursday. A popular teacher at Eastside High School, Kipp had been recently reprimanded by the school board for unconventional teaching methods after parents complained that he was spending too much time on New Age topics as well as such controversial subjects as parapsychology.
His students claim that Kipp had a “knack” for predicting the future, though no evidence exists to support this.
Police have no leads in the disappearance.
Sarah nodded slowly. “Another missing psychic.”
“There’s more,” Tucker said, and reached past her to tap a few keys briskly. On the screen appeared another newspaper article, this one dated August 12, 2006.
A Nashville man was killed yesterday when his car went out of control and crashed into a concrete embankment. Due to the resulting fire, tentative identification was confirmed by dental records. The deceased was Simon Norville, 28, a part-time carpenter who claimed to be a psychic and frequently augmented his income by reading tarot cards for tourists.
Alcohol is suspected as the cause of the accident.
“But he was killed,” Sarah said. “He isn’t missing.”
Silently, Tucker leaned forward and tapped keys again. This time, the article was dated April 24, 2007.
Philip Landers, 34, was killed Saturday when a friend’s twin-engine Cessna he was piloting crashed moments after takeoff near Kansas City. Landers, a struggling artist, earned extra income in carnival work, proclaiming himself to be a mind reader.
Alcohol is suspected as the cause of the crash.
“They’re eerily similar,” Sarah admitted, “but—”
Still silent, Tucker keyed up yet another article, this one dated July 2, 2010.
Beverly Duffy, 40, was killed yesterday when her Los Angeles home caught fire and burned to the ground. Ms. Duffy, locally famous for reading tea leaves and selling “love potions,” had recently and correctly predicted the San Jose earthquake, which had garnered her considerable media attention.
Friends say the attention upset her.
Investigators suspect a careless cigarette for the fire.
“A house fire,” Sarah murmured, shivering as she thought of her own gutted home.
“One more body burned beyond recognition,” Tucker said.
She leaned a little away from him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that either you psychics are peculiarly accident-prone, or else something very suspicious is going on. You’re dropping like flies.”
He reached out to the computer again, this time holding a key down so that Sarah could watch article after article scroll slowly past. She couldn’t read the individual articles, but words and phrases jumped out at her.
Car crash…accidental electrocution…lost while skiing…drowning…house fire…a fall from a ladder…robbery…plane crash…apparently struck by lightning…fell while mountain climbing…vanished while hiking…body burned beyond recognition…no body found…no body recovered…
The deaths and disappearances ranged back more than ten years and were spread over dozens of different cities in states from coast to coast. And there were so many of them.
“All psychic?” Sarah whispered.
“So they—or those closest to them—claimed.”
She looked at him mutely.
Tucker raised a hand as if he would have touched her, but let it fall and leaned back on the couch. “I wanted to see if it hit you the same way it did me. Obviously, it did.” His voice was dispassionate.
“All…accidents. Manufactured accidents?”
“I’d say it was a good bet.”
“Then someone is killing some psychics—and taking others.”
“I’m afraid so. They all look like accidents or simple disappearances, Sarah, nothing overtly suspicious about any of them—until you start tying them together. You saw a fraction of the number of articles I’ve found so far. In every major city I’ve checked, at least a dozen psychics have been killed or turned up missing in the last ten years. Now, I don’t know a lot about the law of averages, but assuming the psychic population of this country is as small as I think it is, there seem to be a disproportionate number of them dying or vanishing.”
“And nobody’s noticed?”
“Why would they? Like I said, the deaths all look accidental—or at least explainable. Nothing to alert law enforcement or catch anything more than the momentary attention of the public. And scattered over years. The way people always die in big cities, and with depressing regularity. Nothing to send up a flag or make anybody look closer, especially given the huge territory and sheer number of law enforcement jurisdictions involved. I was looking for a pattern, but I knew what that pattern was supposed to be. And I found it—no natural deaths. No heart attacks or strokes or cancer. Most of these psychics were young, under fifty, and all of the ones who died, died violently.”
Sarah drew a breath and got to her feet in a slightly jerky motion. Avoiding his intent gaze, she carried her cold coffee back to the kitchen area and poured it into the sink. Chilled, she refilled the cup with hot coffee. Still not looking at Tucker, she said, “What about the disappearances?”
“Well, bear in mind that I’m just getting started on this. Given a few days or, better yet, weeks, I bet I could really turn up something. So far, what I’m finding is that the psychics who’ve disappeared tend to be younger than the ones killed—I’m talking kids and teenagers in many cases. For those under eighteen, the police end up calling some of them runaways and most of the rest unsolved abductions. No witnesses, no good suspects…and no bodies ever found. And, let’s face it—those kinds of cases, unless the kid is famous, just don’t linger in the headlines. They’re too damned common these days, even with Amber Alerts keeping them in the news for a while.”
“I know. Pictures on milk cartons.”
He nodded soberly. “Exactly. Unsolved and, after a while, with no leads, little hope, and precious little manpower to devote to them, pretty much going cold. Most of the families try to keep the searches going, keep the public aware, but…other people move on. And those kids are just plain gone.”
Donny Grant was big for his age, which is why the other members of his Richmond neighborhood baseball team had elected him to be center fielder. He threw too wildly to be a pitcher, but his long legs could cover a remarkable amount of ground quickly, which, as any true baseball fan could tell you, counted for a lot.
Still, he didn’t really like to run, so maybe he didn’t move fast enough when his best bud, Gabe Matthews, hit a rocket to deadaway center field. The vacant lot wasn’t big enough to hold it.
“Go get it, Donny,” their pitcher Joe Singer yelled disgustedly as he watched Gabe happily kick the half-full cement bag that was second base as he passed. “I ain’t got another ball, you know!”
“I thought you had at least two,” Gabe shouted, and cackled at his own wit as he jumped on home plate with both feet.
“Fuck you!” Joe turned and put his hands on his hips as he watched Donny pick his way gingerly through the gap in the old board fence as he went after the home-run ball. “Shake a leg, Donny!”
Donny needed very little encouragement to move faster. He didn’t much like the adjoining vacant lot, overgrown with weeds and brambles and rumored to be the site of drug deals and the occasional gang brawl.
So he moved quickly, bent over as he swiped at the ground with his glove in a wide arcing motion. Where the hell was the thing? It couldn’t have gone much farther, surely—
“For Christ’s sake, Donny!” Joe yelled again.
Donny half turned in order to yell back a choice insult he’d just thought up, and promptly tripped and fell flat on his ass.
Jeez, this place has more roots and vines than a jungle. He put his ungloved hand down to boost himself up, and froze for an instant before instinctively jerking his hand up. That wasn’t a vine, and it sure as hell didn’t feel like a root.
He looked down and for a moment had no idea what he was looking at. Then he got it.
Oh. A woman’s hand.
He knew it was a woman’s hand because the nails were painted a pretty pink color. And there was a ring on one finger, a delicate little rose; it was caked with dirt now, of course, but still pretty.
She seemed to be almost pointing up at him, her pointer finger extended while the others were gently curled. Pointing at him, almost beckoning him to come closer. Without thinking, he bent closer.
That was when he realized that her wrist ended at the ground because the rest of her was under it. That was when he realized she was dead.
That was when Donny Grant wet his pants and began to scream.
SEVEN
Slowly, Sarah said, “Then…we are talking about a conspiracy.”
“I hate to admit it, and I can’t even begin to imagine why it’s happening, but I think so. It would take more than one person to cover up any murder or disappearance, and by definition that makes it a conspiracy. I can’t think of another explanation.”
“Who?”
Tucker let his breath out in a long sigh. “I don’t know. But if this is an organized effort, we’re talking something so big and complex that it almost defies belief. It does defy belief. Think of the cost. Think of the manpower. I mean, they have to be…monitoring the media, for one thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sarah, how do you think they found out about you? Six months ago, you were mugged, but there was no mention in the papers of psychic ability. It was just later, weeks ago, that the Richmond papers picked up the story. And what happens soon after? You realize you’re being watched. And your house burns down. And somebody comes in the night to kill you.”
“You mean they’ve got people just…reading the papers looking for mention of psychics?”
He nodded toward his computer. “The high-tech version. Using computers and keywords, you can search through a hell of a lot of newspapers, blogs, and other social media even in a single day. Could be an automated system. But even so, you need people to monitor, to weigh and consider what they find—and do something about it. A lot of people, assuming they don’t go after one psychic at a time. It would have to represent a huge investment.”
“So what’s the payoff?” she realized.
“Exactly. Why are they taking some psychics—and killing others? What are they doing with the ones they take? What is the threat, or the reward, that makes these actions necessary? In other words—what the bloody hell is going on?”
To Sarah, the possibilities were terrifying. It was one thing to believe that an anonymous someone was after her, but to suspect that her enemy was organized on a national scale, ruthless and frighteningly efficient, and had been taking and killing psychics for more than a decade, was the most chilling thing she had ever even imagined.
She avoided his steady gaze and looked into her coffee cup instead, and said the first thing that came into her head. “Lewis was a cop. If even cops are involved in this…if even cops are expendable…then how can we begin to fight them?”
“We begin with information,” he answered promptly. “We gather the pieces and put them together until we have a complete picture, until we understand what’s going on.”
“While we’re on the run from them?”
Tucker shrugged. “We may be running from them—or running toward something that might help us understand who they are and what they’re doing. We won’t know until we get there.”
“I still think…I’m still afraid that the end of this journey for me will be death.”
“I know,” he said. “I think that’s why you can’t see where it is we’re supposed to end up. You don’t want to see, because you’re afraid you’ll die there. But you won’t, Sarah. Margo’s fate as you saw it was changed. Your own fate as you saw it will not happen the way you saw it. We’re going to change it.”
“You’re so sure of that.”
“Positive.”
But I’m not. I think this is all part of the plan. We’re like rats in a maze, pleased we’re finding our way and unaware that at the center there’s a trap instead of cheese…
Melissa Scanlan picked up the phone before it rang, and said absently, “Hi, Sue. What’s up?”
“Don’t do that!” Susan Devries ordered in a harassed voice. “I hate it when you do that. Let the phone ring at least once before you pick it up, dammit!”
“Sorry,” Melissa said ruefully. “I usually remember, but…never mind. We can’t go to the dance tonight, Sue. There’s weather moving in, and we have a cow out and ready to calve. Joe wants me to help him look for her. It’ll probably take us hours to find her.”
“You might at least wait for me to ask,” Sue said, mild now. “Bad weather?”
“Snow. I think.”
“You’re usually right about that. Okay, I’ll tell Tom. Be careful out there, Melissa.”
“Always. Bye.” Melissa glanced out the kitchen window as she pulled on her gloves. It was still calm out there. Too calm. The weather service said it’d stay that way, but she knew better. It was one of the things she could predict with near-one-hundred-percent accuracy—the Wyoming weather.
She went outside in the cold late-September air and joined her husband in the main barn, where he already had their horses saddled.
“Still sure?” he asked, always a man of few words.
Melissa nodded. “Should start about dark. We only have a couple of hours to find her, Joe.”
“Then let’s move.”
She swung herself into the saddle, reflecting with pleasure that Joe never disbelieved her. And he never made her feel like a freak. His grandmother had had the Sight, and Joe considered himself fortunate to have married a woman who also had it.
They split up not far from the house, with Joe heading off to the east and Melissa going west. With bad weather coming, they couldn’t spare any of the hands to help in the search; the men were already working hard to get the other stock into safer areas. Unfortunately, the particular cow that was about to calve had a habit of hiding herself away for the duration, and she was both very valuable and a favorite of Melissa’s.
It took Melissa half an hour to work her way out to the place where the cow had hidden last time. It was a low-lying area, thick with brush, and the worst kind of place for a cow and calf to be during a snowstorm. It was also an extremely difficult area for a horse to pick its way through.
At first, that was why Melissa thought her horse was edgy. Because this was a bad place to be stuck with a storm coming, and animals often seemed to know when trouble loomed in their simple lives. So when her gelding shied nervously when the increasing wind rustled bushes nearby, she didn’t worry too much about it. Especially since she heard a cow bleat mournfully at about the same moment.
It took her ten more minutes to home in on the cow, and when she reached her she was relieved that no calf was present yet. She reached for her rope and dismounted, and in a soothing voice said, “You idiot cow, what’s the matter with you? You should be close to the house, not way out here with a calf and snow coming—”
Belatedly, she realized two things. That the gelding was backing away nervously, trailing the reins that should have made him stand still as per his rigid and reliable training, and that the cow was tied.
“What the hell?” Melissa took a hesitant step toward the cow, staring at the thick rope that bound her to a tree. She very obviously was not about to calve, and the scuffed ground all around her testified to her restless attempts to move away from the tree.
Bait. Bait for you.
She didn’t know where that inner voice came from, but Melissa instantly dropped her rope and turned back toward her horse, one hand reaching for her rifle and the other for the walkie-talkie hanging from the saddle horn.
She never touched either one.
Her horse came back to his stable just minutes before the storm hit, wild-eyed and lathered. The missing cow also returned.
But Melissa Scanlan didn’t.
When Tucker woke abruptly, his internal clock told him it was still well before dawn, probably three or fourA.M. He had been asleep since just after midnight and had no idea what had awakened him. He listened intently for several minutes, one hand under his pillow grasping the .45 just in case, but heard nothing to alarm him.
He finally relaxed a bit—though not completely. He had the idea he’d never be able to relax completely again. What he had discovered so far about the seeming conspiracy to kill and kidnap psychics had shaken him far more than he had allowed Sarah to see. At least, he hoped she hadn’t seen. Or sensed. She needed him to be sure of himself, he thought. Her belief in fate was so strong that he had to be equally strong in insisting they could avert the future she had seen for herself.
Even if he wasn’t sure.
How in hell were they supposed to fight an enemy that was organized on a national scale? An enemy with resources they couldn’t begin to match, with more manpower and undoubtedly some kind of uber-efficient communications network. An enemy ruthless enough to murder a cop—and smart enough to get away with it. How could that enemy be fought? How?
The fire he’d built the night before was no more than glowing embers in the rock fireplace, and he lay there on the couch watching them dim and brighten. Once awake, his mind refused to shut itself off again.
He wondered whether Sarah was sleeping. After seeing all those news clippings, she hadn’t had much to say. And she had kept a careful distance between them. Physically, emotionally, and mentally.
Or maybe the mental distance he felt was due to his own wariness. The more convinced he grew that Sarah was a genuine psychic, the more he could feel himself getting…still inside. And watchful. He didn’t want to withdraw from her but couldn’t seem to help himself.
Pushing that out of his mind for the moment, Tucker thought of all the charlatans he had met over the years, so many of whom cheerfully plied their trade in carnivals and malls and psychic “fairs” around the country, and knew those people were not threatened by anything but the occasional suspicious police officer. He was certain, however, that if he had been able to meet any of the people on the growing list of dead and missing, he would have found them genuine. The fakes and phonies stood in no danger from this; people with true psychic abilities were the targets.
Which meant, he thought, that the people behind this had some way of determining the genuine from the fake. Or…did they simply watch and wait, as they had apparently watched Sarah, until they could decide? That was possible, maybe even likely. He thought of watchers all over the country observing potential psychics, checking off items on a list until the total added up to “genuine,” and felt a spreading chill.
Jesus Christ—the enormity of the thing.
And it was so damned inexplicable. Why psychics? Were they a threat to someone, or did their abilities make them somehow valuable? That was the question he felt needed to be answered, and it was the most elusive—because dead or missing psychics offered no answers, and as far as he could tell, nobody else had bothered to ask.
He could remember reading of long-ago experiments in this country and others, when it had been theorized that psychics could be used in some fashion as weapons or deterrents to weapons, but those experiments—as far as he knew—had proved worse than useless. Only a handful of genuine psychics had been able to control their abilities in any real sense, and nobody had really known what to do with them. They could not, after all, stop bullets or prevent bombs from blowing up. And their predictions had been erratic at best.
But that had been back during the Cold War, when paranoia and suspicion had compelled more than one government to attempt unconventional means of attaining and maintaining power over others. Things were different now.
Weren’t they?
Tucker shifted restlessly on the couch. Whoever was killing and taking them, the list of psychics was turning into a long one. No wonder Sarah had grown so quiet. In his research so far, she was one of a much smaller list made up of psychics who had lived normal lives well into adulthood before some trauma—usually a head injury—had left them struggling to understand new and baffling abilities. That alone would have been enough of a strain for anybody without finding out she was also a target of some mysterious conspiracy.
And on that smaller list of new and untried psychics, most had wound up dead in some “accident” within months of the birth of their new abilities.
Tucker turned over onto his back and stared at the dark, beamed ceiling. Sarah was in deadly danger. And the only thing standing between her and the people who would kidnap or kill her was him.
“So how’re you gonna stop them, Mackenzie?” he muttered aloud.
He didn’t know.
Realizing suddenly that sleep was not going to return, he sighed and sat up. Glancing toward the bedroom door automatically, he stiffened when he realized it was open. He was on his feet before he decided to be, gun in hand and senses flaring.
If they had snatched her right out from under his goddamned nose—
A moment later he relaxed. One step away from the couch had brought the sliding glass doors into view, and through them he saw the moonlit deck and Sarah standing at the railing gazing out over the lake.
Tucker hesitated, then stuck the automatic into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and shrugged into the flannel shirt he’d earlier removed. His boots were nearby, and he put those on as well before heading for the glass doors.
He paused there, his hand on the handle, and for several moments studied her through the glass. She stood much as she had the first time he’d seen her, with her arms crossed over her breasts and hands moving slowly up and down her upper arms as though to warm chilled flesh. But she hadn’t been cold then, not from the weather. From something inside her. And it was the same inner chill now, he realized. Sarah wasn’t cold.
She was alone.
For the first time, he realized that for all her passive acceptance of his company, Sarah had never stopped being alone.
She was as shut in herself as she had been that first day, isolated within walls of wariness, remote in a way he didn’t really understand. And inside her were thoughts and feelings and terrors she had not put into words. Perhaps had not dared put into words. But they were there. Buried deeply. Locked away from him and anyone else who wanted to be close to her. Looking at her, he had the sense of things moving slowly and with terrible deliberation underneath a frozen stillness, like an ocean under ice.
Tucker drew a breath and opened the door, wondering how he could reach her. Wondering whether he could reach her.
It was chilly out on the deck, but not actually cold here at the end of September. In fact, it seemed warmer here than it had been in Richmond, and Tucker didn’t bother to button his shirt as he joined Sarah at the railing.
Before he could speak, she did, almost idly. “I knew when you woke up. Isn’t that strange?”
“Maybe not,” he said slowly. “Maybe not for you.”
She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, and definitely wide awake as she glanced at him. “That makes you uneasy.”
It did, as a matter of fact, but he denied it. “Of course not.”
Her smile, clear in the moonlight, held a twist of bitter certainty. “Oh, no? Then what about this: I’m changing, Tucker.”
“Changing how?” He was cautious, not only because of what she was saying, but because he realized he had caught her at a raw moment when she might reveal more than she wanted to.
She turned her gaze back to the lake and put her hands on the deck railing as if she needed something to hold on to. But her voice remained steady. “Whatever was born in me six months ago is…growing. Bigger. More powerful. Affecting my other senses and even the way I think. I…know things I shouldn’t know. Not because I have a vision, but just because. I feel things I don’t understand and can’t explain.”
“Sarah—”
“I’m changing. I don’t know how to stop it. And I don’t know what I’ll be when it’s over.”
Tucker had always assumed it would be a cool thing to see the future, and God knew it would be helpful and less painful to see one’s mistakes ahead of time and have a shot at not making them. At least that was what he had always thought. But he was beginning to realize that the future might not be such a cool thing to see after all. Not when monsters lurked there. Not when all you saw was death, and danger, and frightening things. He had never seen anybody with haunted eyes until he had looked into Sarah’s the night she’d had a vision of men coming to kill her.
