An Excerpt from
A BURNING TOUCH
by Patricia Ryan
Three Years Ago
“What do you think you’re doing?”
India eyed her husband warily as she unbuckled her sandals by the back door. “Just going for a walk.”
Perry closed his eyes. That vein on his forehead started pulsing.
He had never understood why she liked to go off all by herself for these long walks along the shore. And on this particular late August afternoon, not only were storm clouds gathering over Cape Cod Bay, but there was company to entertain. His mother and sisters had just arrived for one last visit before he closed up the summerhouse for the season.
“All I want,” he said between clenched teeth, “is for you to play the role of the gracious hostess for three, maybe four, hours. You’re my wife. Do you think you can manage to stick around and act the part for just one damn afternoon?” He raked his manicured fingers through his prematurely gray hair, then smoothed it back in place.
When she’d married Perry—had it really been just ten months ago?—that steel-colored hair had been one of the things she’d found most attractive about him. He’d reminded her of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. She’d never in her life known any man as sophisticated and worldly, and she couldn’t believe her good fortune when, after a dazzling six-week courtship, he’d asked her to be his wife.
But recently, between the hair and that tight-lipped, censorious scowl of his, he was reminding her more and more of her father. When he launched into one of his increasingly frequent lectures on her image and behavior, the resemblance became downright eerie. Last night, as she lay in bed, she’d found herself imagining what it would feel like to pack her things, get in her little blue Mazda, and drive away. All by herself. It had been a remarkably satisfying fantasy.
“I’ll be back in half an hour,” she said carefully as she kicked off the sandals and squatted down to roll up the legs of her jeans. “Please, Perry. I’ll play whatever role and act whatever part you want when I get back. But right now I need thirty minutes for myself, and then I can—”
“No!” He yanked her roughly to her feet and shook her. “Right now you need to serve some drinks to Mother and Kitty and Gracie. They’ll never change their opinion of you if you don’t stop running off whenever they—”
“They’ll never change their opinion of me, period.” She twisted out of his grip and rubbed her arms. His rough handling of her was a recent unnerving development, causing her to wonder whether that ultracivilized facade of his was just that—a facade. “They act like I’m something they want to swat away.”
“If you’d only try—”
“I’m not one of them.” She lifted her chin, but her quavering voice betrayed her frustration, her growing sense of futility. “You didn’t marry a debutante from Newport, Perry. You married a middle-class lawyer’s daughter from humble Mansfield, New Jersey. I’m not a socialite, I’m a veterinarian, a working woman. I have a career and goals and interests that have nothing to do with the polo circuit or cotillions. Your mother and Kitty and Gracie are just going to have to learn to accept that.”
Turning toward the beach, she took a deep breath and added, “And so are you.”
* * *
Maybe I should head back, India thought, inspecting the sky. It was menacingly gray over the water, but still blue overhead. She turned and looked back toward the house. Even at this distance, she could make out Perry, all in white, and the three willowy blondes, in pastel linen sheaths, leaning on the railing of the upstairs deck. The late afternoon sun polished their bronzed limbs and glinted off their silvery martinis. A ripple of female laughter wafted toward her on the salty breeze.
She sighed. Just ten more minutes, then I’ll go back. She checked her watch and continued walking, reveling in the precious solitude, a solitude she had coveted since childhood. Only when she was alone was there no role to play, no image to project. She gave herself over to the caress of warm sand beneath her bare feet, the reassuring cadence of waves slapping the shore.
Ten minutes later, she decided, I’ll go back when it starts to rain. A soft rumble rolled through the air, but the sun still shone. She had time before the storm hit.
When she reached the public beach, it was deserted. The parking lot, off to her right past the dunes, was empty. A sudden discharge of thunder crashed all around her, and she jumped.
All right, all right, I give up. With a grudging acceptance of the inevitable, she turned and took a step toward home.
* * *
India opened her eyes.
She lay on her back, rain pelting her. Beneath her she felt; not sand, but hard concrete pavement. Panic raced through her when she tried to move her arms, then her legs, and couldn’t. She could barely breathe, and her heart hammered crazily in her chest. The rain skewered her with pain.
A thunderclap detonated overhead, followed by dazzling rivulets that crackled across the darkened sky.
I’ve been hit by lightning, she thought with amazement. Inch by inch, she lifted her head. Looking around, she saw that she’d been thrown a good twenty yards, from the beach into the parking lot. When she lowered her head, pain clamored inside her skull.
Some time passed before her extremities regained enough feeling for her to be able to heave herself into a sitting position. Looking down, she saw blood, lots of it, on herself and the pavement. Everything hurt. She knew she’d cracked one or two ribs, and maybe her collarbone. When she could lift her right hand, she gently touched her face, and winced. The left side felt swollen and sticky.
The closest house was a cedar-shingled rental cottage a couple of hundred feet away. A red station wagon sat in front, and there were lights on in the windows. She tried to stand, but the soles of her feet were charred, and the pain was excruciating. So she crawled with agonizing slowness in the rain, over concrete and then sand, until finally—after what seemed an eternity—she reached the front door of the cottage. She collapsed against it and tried to knock, but neither hand would form a fist. Her attempt to cry out was useless, too; she had no control over her throat.
Again and again she shoved her shoulder against the door, until finally it opened, and she tumbled onto a braided rug.
“Oh, my God!” a woman’s voice cried as India slipped into unconsciousness. “Frank! Call 911!”
* * *
She came to, and realized she was moving. Luminous fluorescent tubes streaked by overhead and she watched them with a kind of hypnotic detachment. A muffled rumbling surrounded her, and the air smelled coldly antiseptic. She surmised that she lay on a gurney being wheeled through the corridor of a hospital, and felt a sense of overwhelming relief.
They’ll take care of me here. I’ll be okay.
She lapsed in and out of consciousness several times over the next few hours, dimly aware of them giving her an EKG and a lot of X-rays. They injected her with painkillers and antibiotics, cleaned her wounds, treated what they called exit burns on the soles of her feet, and set her collarbone. She had left home without any ID, so they kept asking her for her name, but her mouth wouldn’t form the words properly, and they couldn’t make sense of the sounds that came out of her. They gave her a pencil with which to write, but her fingers wouldn’t close around it.
Even in her near insensible haze, she became increasingly aware of something odd happening whenever someone touched her. A flickering image, like a TV picture with bad reception, would hover in her mind’s eye and then dissolve before she could make sense of it. A bewildering array of feelings accompanied the images. What troubled her most was that something about this phenomenon was strikingly familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite place why. Weary and confused, she decided the electrical signals in her brain had gone haywire when the lightning zapped her. She hoped the effect was temporary.
Finally they wheeled her into a room and left her alone. She fell asleep, only to be awakened during the night by one of the nurses, a middle-aged woman with hair like a shiny yellow helmet.
“Are you India Cook Milbank?”
India nodded. “Y-yes.” She grinned, delighted as much by her ability to voice a word as by the fact that they knew who she was.
The nurse nodded to someone in the hall, who entered the room—Perry. For the first time in a long time, she was actually glad to see him, but when he got a good look at her, his eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open. Well, what could she expect? She knew what she must look like. Despite their recent difficulties, his was a comfortingly familiar face. She found herself reaching out to him, and he hesitantly took her hand.
The TV in her mind instantly clicked on. She saw her own face, in jittery patterns of light and dark, gazing into the “camera”—into Perry’s eyes. She saw the discolored swelling, the lacerations on her cheeks and forehead, the singed black hair in tangled disarray, and knew without a doubt that this was exactly what Perry viewed.
Not again. Suddenly she understood, with horrible clarity, what was so familiar about this ability to conjure up ghostlike pictures in her mind, pictures of other people’s thoughts. She had had this ability before, a long time ago, and it had nearly ruined her life. Now the lightning had reawakened it.
To see herself through Perry’s eyes was bad enough, but there was more. A wave of disgust swelled within her, pure and powerful and uncomplicated by feelings of love or tenderness or affection of any kind. What she felt—or rather, what Perry felt and transmitted to her by his touch—was simple repugnance. He viewed her not as a loved one to be comforted, but as a thing to be dealt with. An irritating thing. An ugly thing. A disgusting thing.
“India! You’re hurting me! Let go!” Her grip had tightened involuntarily. She tried to loosen her fingers, but they wouldn’t budge. He tried to shake her off. “Let go, damn it!”
The nurse managed to pry her fingers open. “There, now. Isn’t it nice to have your husband here? I can make up a cot if you’d like, and he can stay the night. Wouldn’t that be—”
“G-get him out,” India gasped, her voice a thick slur. Perry and the nurse exchanged a look, but she didn’t care. “L-leave me alone, Perry.”
“Now, dear.” The nurse rested a hand on her arm, and India saw her own face, wild-eyed and terrified, and knew what the nurse was thinking... A good strong sedative...
“N-no!” She swatted clumsily at the nurse, wincing at the pain that coursed through her. “G-go away! Don’t touch me!”
Perry closed a hand over her shoulder. She saw herself again, felt his revulsion again. “India, stop this. Now!” He turned to the nurse. “Can’t you give her something?”
“Don’t touch me!” India screamed, writhing and flailing at him. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” Other people came into the room. Strong hands held her down while she struggled, her mind a kaleidoscope of disjointed images and sensations. Someone gripped her arm painfully. She felt an icy scrub of alcohol, followed by the sting of a needle.
“Leave me alone,” she moaned as her muscles relaxed and her eyelids grew heavy. “I just want to be alone. That’s all I ever wanted.”
Chapter 1
Detective Lieutenant James Keegan bounded up the back steps of the Mansfield, New Jersey, police station, threw open the door, and sang out, “Honey, I’m home!”
The desk sergeant, leathery Al Albonetti, glanced up from his paperwork without moving his head or altering his perpetually bored expression. “Morning, Lieutenant. Captain wants to see you, some lady’s waiting for you in your office, and, uh...” His gaze slid toward an elderly woman scowling in the corner.
“It’s about time, Keegan,” she growled as she pulled a steno pad from the pocket of her parka and flipped it open. Sylvia Hazelett was a wizened little bird of a woman, but she had the voice of a three-pack-a-day teamster.
The detective unbuttoned his trench coat with one hand and held the other palm out as he backed away. “Sorry, Sylvie, but I’m late this morning as it is, and—”
“A five-minute interview, Jamie.” She slipped on the reading glasses that hung around her neck. “I go to press tomorrow, and the Courier’s just a weekly, so if I wait to get this story, it’ll be dead news by the time my readers see it.”
“What story?”
Sergeant Albonetti sighed. “That’s what Captain Garrett wants to brief you on, Lieutenant.”
“The arson story,” Sylvie said.
He groaned. “Don’t tell me—”
“Another note came this morning,” the sergeant said. “Signed ‘The Firefly,’ same as the other three. Says he’s gonna do it again sometime this week.”
“Shit,” Jamie hissed. The first note had come three weeks ago, the eleventh of October to be exact. Four days later, in the middle of the night, the contents of the Dumpster behind the Stop ‘n Save went up in flames. Everyone had been relieved that it wasn’t worse. A few days later, there’d been another note, followed by another, somewhat more destructive, fire. The framework of a house under construction in an upscale subdivision had been torched. People started to get nervous. The third note had precipitated a flurry of anxious speculation as to the Firefly’s next target. It turned out to be Little Eddie’s, a roadhouse on the edge of town. The single-story clapboard structure had swiftly burned to the ground in the wee hours of the morning, a week ago. Thankfully, the arsonist had waited until after closing time to set the blaze. So far, his attacks had claimed no human victims, and Jamie wanted to end them before that changed.
Sylvie clicked her pen. “Each fire’s been a little more ambitious than the last. Do you expect that trend to continue?”
“What do you think?” Jamie asked.
She peered at him over her reading glasses. “I think you better catch this guy before he barbecues the whole town.”
“That’s excellent advice, Sylvie. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
She grabbed his arm. “Everyone in town knows you’re in charge of the arson investigation. You’ve been pulled off everything else, right?” Jamie nodded. “Then I can’t help but wonder if the woman who’s waiting for you upstairs has something to do with the case. Maybe she knows something about the note that came today.”
With a sigh, Jamie turned to Sergeant Albonetti. “Does she?”
“Dunno, Lieutenant. All’s I know is, she showed up at the front desk about forty-five minutes ago, asking for you.”
“I saw her,” Sylvie interjected. “Quite the hot ticket—for Mansfield, anyway. Black hair, shades. Looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. What do you think—is she here about the arson case?”
Jamie shrugged. “I guess there’s a better than even chance. If you want to wait around till after I talk to her—”
“I don’t ‘wait around’, Keegan.” She tucked her notebook away and took off her glasses, a mischievous spark in her eyes. “She’s probably just one of your conquests, anyway.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “One of my conquests? You overestimate my appeal, Sylvie.”
“Honey, you’re tall, dark and handsome. Not to mention employed. That’s a winning formula all by itself, but throw in that nice Irish brogue—”
“I don’t have a brogue.”
“You do, just a residual one. I mean, it doesn’t sound like you just got off the boat. You came here, what—a good ten or fifteen years ago, right?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Oh. Well, it’s very slight. It comes out mostly when you’re all worked up over something. That’s what really puts you over the top. I guarantee you there are a dozen women in Mansfield alone who’d sell their souls to be able to pour your Cheerios in the morning.”
“If you run into one, would you get me her number? It’s been a while since I’ve had my Cheerios poured.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Hard to believe.”
He grinned. “I’m saving it for you, Sylvie, but you persist in playing hard to get.”
“I wondered why you were always undressing me with your eyes.”
“Lieutenant.” Sergeant Albonetti cocked his head toward a lanky, shirtsleeved figure leaning against the doorframe of the roll call room.
Jamie nodded. “Captain. You wanted to see me?”
“Take your time, Lieutenant.” Twenty years in Mansfield, New Jersey, hadn’t made much of an inroad in Sam Garrett’s lazy Texas drawl. With his weather-beaten face and thick shock of salt-and-pepper hair, he looked every inch the displaced, aging cowboy. Glancing from Jamie to Sylvie, he said, “I can wait till you’ve finished attempting to seduce Ms. Hazelett.”
Sylvie zipped up her parka. “If I weren’t twice his age, I’d give him a run for his money.” She strode purposefully out the door.
Garrett’s expression sobered. He held up a sheet of paper. Jamie walked over and took it from him. It was a photocopy of a note that had been spelled out, like the last one, with letters snipped from magazines: “My matchbook is whispering to me. Something burns this week. The Firefly.”
Garrett said, “The original’s at the lab with the documents examiner, but I can tell you right now, he’s not gonna find a damn thing we can use. There won’t be any prints, of course.”
“Not unless he suddenly decides to slip up. So, what have we got?”
“We got us a pyro who means to torch another building in Mansfield sometime between tonight and next Monday. If he sticks to his favorite M.O., he’ll strike in the early morning hours and use kerosene as an accelerant. Am I missing anything? It’s your case.”
“He probably uses matches, rather than a cigarette or a candle or some other igniter that would delay the flames till he’s had a chance to get away.”
“How do you know?”
“He just told us so, in his note.”
The captain grunted. “Smart-ass.”
“But other than that—” he shrugged “—I don’t have a clue. No useful evidence, no motive.... Where the hell do I start?”
“Why don’t you start with that visitor I hear you’ve got waiting for you upstairs? Find out what she wants. If there’s any connection whatsoever to this case, I suggest you get to the bottom of it, pronto.”
Jamie folded up the photocopy and stuck it in a pocket of his coat. “You got it.”
Upstairs, he poured two foam cups full of coffee, then stood outside the glass door of his tiny office, studying the woman seated on the little metal chair in front of his desk. When his aunt Bridey had taught him how to do this, she’d called it “sizing up the mark.” Years later, when Professor Mayhew had taught him the same skills for use in criminal investigation, he’d called it “visual preanalysis of the interviewee.” Whatever you called it, it amounted to the same thing, a cataloging of the subject’s features and actions in order to pinpoint various characteristics. In Aunt Bridey’s case, the characteristics she looked for were wealth and gullibility. Professor Mayhew had expanded this list to include trustworthiness, cooperativeness, secretiveness—anything that might help or hinder the police detective in his work.
By Jamie’s estimation, the woman waiting for him was thirty to thirty-five years of age. She had chin-length black hair, pale skin, a slender frame, and looked to be of medium height. She wore faded blue jeans, but that was the only color on her body. Her turtleneck, boots and shoulder bag were black, as were the Ray-Ban sunglasses that hid her eyes from view and the dyed shearling coat hung on the corner rack. She even had on black leather gloves, although it was just early November, and a mild day at that.
Also, she’d been indoors for almost an hour, so why the gloves? Or the sunglasses? People communicated with their hands and eyes. To cover them up like that was an unmistakable signal: Leave me alone.
The signal was echoed in her posture—legs tightly crossed, arms wrapped around her torso. Ditto the all-black attire, as if a spot of color might draw too much attention to her. But if she wanted to be left alone, why’d she come here, of all places?
Well, that was his job, right? To find out.
He opened the door and set the cups down on his desk. “Good morning. Sorry you had to wait so long.”
She nodded stiffly without altering her wary posture. He wondered where all that tension was coming from.
He extended his hand. She glanced at it, then at his face—damn, he wished he could see her eyes—and then at the foam cups.
“Is one of those for me?” she asked softly.
After a moment, he lowered his hand. He gave her one of the cups, thinking police station coffee was unlikely to improve her mood any. She accepted it without removing her gloves, her other arm still hugging her mid-section. Her voice was soft, with a cultured accent that pegged her as an educated northeasterner.
He took off his trench coat and hung it on the rack next to hers. “Sugar? Cream? Well, not cream exactly, but we’ve got some kind of white powder that turns this stuff gray, if you want.”
“Black is fine.”
Should have known. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “I’m James Keegan.”
“Yes, I know, Lieutenant.”
Uh-huh...
She raised her cup to her mouth and blew on the hot coffee. Her lips were the only part of her face he could get a good look at, so maybe that’s why he zeroed in on them. They were perfectly shaped, like the painted lips on a porcelain doll. If she had lipstick on, it was one of those dreary lip-colored shades. He wondered why women spent good money for colors that didn’t look like anything, when for the same price, they could have a nice three-alarm red.
Seating himself behind his desk, he took a sip of his own coffee, and winced. Damn. Should have blown on it.
He pulled his little blue spiral notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “The usual thing would be for you to tell me your name now. It’s a custom we earthlings have.”
A slight pause. He saw her swallow hard. “Jane, uh—”
“Doe?”
A faint wash of pink colored her cheeks.
With quiet authority he said, “If you give me a false name, I’ll know it before the words are out of your mouth. Miss... Mrs.”
“Doctor.”
He sat back and allowed himself a small smile. “Mrs. Doctor.”
Ah. Her mouth twitched, just for a second there. “Dr. Cook,” she said in a resigned tone. “India Cook.”
He plucked a ballpoint from the cracked Donut Hut coffee mug that served as his pencil jar and wrote India Cook and the date on top of the first clean page in the notebook. “I don’t suppose you’d make up a name like that. What kind of doctor are you?”
She frowned at the notebook. “Do you have to write everything—”
“Absolutely. Now, would you mind answering my—”
“I’m a veterinarian. I specialize in cats.”
“Really?” He wrote it down. “I hate cats.”
“That probably means you’ve got something to hide.”
He squinted into her sunglasses. “Excuse me?”
“A fear of cats—”
“I didn’t say I feared them.”
“—often indicates that a person secretly—”
“Speaking of hiding things, Dr. Cook, would you mind losing the shades?” She stiffened slightly. He gestured toward her sunglasses with his pen and said, “Take them off. Please. I like to see a person’s eyes when I talk to them.”
She hesitated just long enough to make him really curious. He began to wonder if she had a black eye—or maybe some kind of disfigurement. It was possible, what with the way she hid behind those glasses. A vague sense of guilt and trepidation gripped him as she lowered her head and slowly—very slowly—reached up, slid the glasses off, and settled them on top of her head. When she looked up and met his gaze, his breath caught in his chest.
Her eyes were... He’d never seen anything like them. They were incredibly striking, a heart-stopping coppery brown fringed with sooty lashes. Slightly heavy-lidded, they tilted up just a bit at the corners. Eyebrows like black brush strokes arched dramatically above them, disappearing into her bangs.
God, she was beautiful, sensationally beautiful. He hadn’t realized, he’d had no idea. With those shades on, you couldn’t tell, but now...
Was that why she wore them? So men wouldn’t swallow their tongues every time they laid eyes on her? So they wouldn’t gawk at her... the way he was gawking?
Suddenly self-conscious, he cleared his throat and looked away, realizing he’d maintained eye contact just a tad longer than Professor Mayhew—or Aunt Bridey—would have thought advisable.
“Thank you,” he murmured. To cover his awkwardness, he bent his head over his notebook and wrote for a few seconds, then silently read it back to himself: Most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.
Get a grip, Keegan. He flipped that page over to expose a fresh one, then looked back up at India Cook and smiled in a way that he hoped would strike her as cordially professional.
She blinked, then returned his smile—for about a nanosecond—and then dropped her gaze. Noticing her coffee cup as if for the first time, she raised it to her mouth and took a sip, then glanced back at Jamie, and away again.
She was blushing.
This was getting interesting.
Too interesting. He had a job to do, and here he was exchanging flirtatious body language with a semi-spooky cat doctor who may or may not be here to provide him with information about a series of arson attacks that was seemingly both unpreventable and unsolvable.
Go for the no-nonsense approach, Keegan. Pretend she’s... He smiled to himself. Pretend she’s Sylvie.
He looked her straight in the eye, then abruptly looked away.
She wasn’t Sylvie.
“Lieutenant?” Little lines of puzzlement formed between her brows.
“Dr. Cook?”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“Of course. I was just waiting for you to... feel comfortable enough to...” Jeez, Keegan. This is embarrassing! “I mean, I wanted you to feel... that is, if you have any information... about... anything...”
With one hand she nervously fingered the collar of her turtleneck. “I have information about a crime.”
“A crime?” Maybe she did know something about the note. He fumbled in his desk drawer, came up with his little microcassette recorder, and set it for voice actuation. “Good. Great.”
When he looked back up, he saw that her gaze was riveted on the recorder positioned in the middle of his desk. Her pupils contracted to tiny black pinpoints, making her eyes glow like newly minted pennies. Something had upset her, and you didn’t have to be Einstein to know what it was.
“Look,” he began, “I need to tape this—”
“Then I need to leave.” She set her coffee cup on his desk and stood up.
“What? You can’t just—”
“Are you going to try to keep me here against my will?” She snatched her coat off the rack and turned toward the door.
He stood and circled the desk. “Wait a minute. You can’t leave.”
He closed his hands over her shoulders just as she grabbed the doorknob. She gasped and flinched, then stumbled back into a corner, holding her coat in front of her like a shield. Jamie instantly raised his hands in a placating gesture, noting how her eyes registered a flicker of fear before she managed to compose her features.
Keegan, you idiot! Something had happened to her, something bad. No woman reacted this way to being touched unless she’d been victimized. Had she been assaulted? Raped? Was that why she was here? Mentally beating himself up for his lack of insight, he backed slowly away from her and opened the door.
“There,” he said soothingly. “You can leave any time you want. I won’t try to keep you here, and I won’t touch you again. I promise.” Often in an interview or interrogation situation he had to feign sincerity; this time it was all for real. He felt ashamed, incompetent.
“Would you rather discuss this with a woman detective?” he asked.
Her eyebrows rose fractionally. “That won’t be necessary.”
Good. He wanted the opportunity to redeem himself. From the bottom of his heart, his only desire was for her to feel safe with him, to confide what had happened to her, to let him help her. He felt an almost personal interest in coming to her aid—curious, given that he’d just met her.
Returning to sit behind his desk, he motioned to her chair. “Please stay, then. You can put your sunglasses back on if you want.”
She looked toward the door for a moment, then reached up and pulled the shades down over her eyes. Keeping the coat bundled in front of her, she sat down.
Jamie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It would be a miracle if he could reestablish trust with her now, but he had to try. “Can you tell me... what happened?” With his notebook in his lap, he swiveled his chair around so that he’d be looking at the wall, and not directly at her. That should help.
“All right.” He could hear the hesitation in her voice, and his heart went out to her. He kept his gaze averted. “It was a week ago that I noticed a new cat out back. I have this shed in back of my house, and when the weather started to get cold, I put a heater in there for the stray cats I feed. Anyway, I noticed a new one, a black-and-white shorthair. It looked like a tom, but I couldn’t get close, because every time I approached the shed, all the cats would scatter.”
Cats? Wondering where all this was leading, Jamie said, “Let’s back up for a second, if you don’t mind. Your house, where is it? Do you live in town?”
“On the outskirts,” she said. “About a quarter mile from the roadhouse.”
He glanced at her sharply. “Little Eddie’s? The place that burned down last week?”
“Yes. My house is number four Crescent Lake Road.”
He wrote down the address. “Have you lived there long?” he asked, thinking he would have noticed her before this if she had. Mansfield, although ostensibly a city, was really little more than a small town that had grown just a bit too big for its britches. He knew almost all of its residents by sight, if not by name.
“I moved in on the first of September,” she said. “It was my father’s house. I grew up in it. He died last spring, and left it to me.”
He snapped his fingers, awareness dawning. “You’re Henry Cook’s daughter!” She nodded. Henry had defended a fair share of the bad guys Jamie had apprehended during his decade on the Mansfield police force, but that wasn’t why Jamie had hated the man. The problem was Cook’s personality. He’d been one of those self-righteous, my-way-is-the-only-way types who’d always kind of made the hair on the back of Jamie’s neck stand up. When he’d died, Jamie hadn’t mourned him.
But his daughter probably had. “My condolences,” he said.
“Thank you.”
He consulted his notebook. “So you moved here two months ago. Where’d you live before that?”
“New York for the past three years.” She hesitated. “Newport, Rhode Island, before that. During most of the year, that is. We traveled a lot, and we had homes elsewhere.”
We. It hadn’t even occurred to him that she might be married. His gaze automatically sought out her left hand, but her wedding ring, if she wore one, was hidden under the glove. The disappointment he felt stunned him. My God, he’d only met this woman, and here he was, jealous as a schoolboy of some husband from Newport, Rhode Island, with “homes elsewhere.”
He noticed how her gaze followed his to her left hand. “I’m divorced,” she said.
He brightened. “Ah.” For God’s sake, Keegan. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
He stifled a smile and said, “Go on about the cat, if you would.”
She fiddled with the strap of her shoulder bag. “After a while I noticed that he seemed to have a slight limp. Finally, yesterday, I managed to catch him. I brought him into the examining room—I practice out of my house—and discovered that all four paws and part of his right rear leg were burned. I dressed the burns and started him on antibiotics.”
Jamie stopped writing and turned to look at her. “Burns.” She nodded. “Are you sure? I mean, they were old wounds by that point—”
“Phoenix showed up a week ago, right after the road-house burned down.”
“You call him Phoenix?”
She nodded. “Because he rose from the ashes. His fur was singed. He even smelled vaguely of kerosene. He was there at Little Eddie’s when it burned, I’m sure of it.”
“So this is what you came here to tell me about?” She nodded. So. She hadn’t been assaulted, after all. Not recently, that is; from her skittishness about being touched, he’d bet there’d been some kind of victimization in her past. A lamentable situation—and all too common—but one which had nothing to do with the arson case. And that’s what all his faculties had to be concentrated on right now.
She took a deep breath. “But there’s more.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’d prefer... I’d prefer if you didn’t write down the rest of this.” To his surprise, she lifted her hand and slipped off her sunglasses, then looked him in the eye, imploringly. God, she was gorgeous. “Please,” she continued. “It was hard enough for me to come here. I kept thinking someone would recognize me, and find out...”
“Find out what?”
A pained look settled over her beautiful features. “I don’t want to be the town freak, that’s all. I just want to tell you what I know and then walk out of here and be left alone. That’s all I want—just to be left alone—but I’m afraid if people find out what I’m going to tell you...”
“Dr. Cook. India.” He adopted an expression of frank sincerity. If it was part of his detective’s bag of tricks and not quite the genuine article... well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had to play a part to gain a subject’s trust. He just wished he didn’t have to employ such artifice with this particular subject.
He stole a glance at the voice-activated tape recorder lying on the middle of his desk and saw the little red Record light go on as he said, “If you don’t want me to take notes, I won’t take notes.” He deliberately closed up his notebook and returned it to his inside pocket. “Why don’t you tell me what you came here to tell me? It’s only the two of us.”
She looked him right in the eye and actually bit her lip. He noticed her fingers twisted together in her lap and felt unnervingly like the big bad wolf. “Please promise me you won’t think I’m crazy.”
He smiled indulgently. “I won’t think you’re crazy.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “I... sense things. I get... readings, if you will, off of people and animals, even inanimate objects. Psychic readings.”
He just stared at her, his expression carefully neutral, although he felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. Psychic, for God’s sake. She was telling him she read minds. Crazy? He wished he thought she was crazy.
Crazy, he could handle. Crazy, he could understand, work with, even sympathize with. But psychic? She had to be kidding.
She was, in a way, he supposed. Wasn’t lying a kind of bastard cousin to kidding?
Why her? Why India Cook, of all people, with her ethereal eyes and her air of mystery and fragility? He’d found her deliciously intriguing. He thought back to Bridey and remembered the way she would reinvent herself for her more important scams, adopting a new persona carefully designed to push that particular sucker’s buttons. Of course he’d found India Cook intriguing. He’d been meant to. She knew exactly what she was doing, this one, and she did it very, very well.
He rose, went to the door, and said coolly, “Thank you for your time, Dr. Cook. If we need to speak to you again, we’ll get in touch.”
Her eyebrows drew together just a bit, before she set her jaw and eyed him coldly. She put her sunglasses back on, but made no move to rise. “I don’t like being dismissed, Lieutenant.”
“And I don’t like being conned, Doctor.”
Her perfect lips opened and then shut. “I can’t believe you’re being such a Philistine about this.”
“And I can’t believe you’ve taken up such a big chunk of my valuable time—and yours—with this.”
She crossed her arms and stared him down, a stubborn tilt to her head. “I do have psychic powers, Lieutenant. I’ve had them for three years. Also as a child for a while—”
“Dr. Cook, you picked the wrong detective to come to with this tale.”
“You’re the detective in charge of the arson case. I read it in the Mansfield Courier.”
“And I’m the detective who will never, while there’s a sun in the sky and fish in the sea, ever believe a word of all this.”
“Why not?” she challenged.
Careful. “I have my reasons.” He gestured toward the door. “Now, if you’ll please—”
“Fine. I don’t need this.” She rose and crossed to the open doorway, then stopped abruptly and stood with her back to him. After a moment, she shook her head almost imperceptibly. “I can’t do this. I can’t just walk out without telling you what I know. If he sets another fire, and I could have done something to stop it...” She turned, took her seat again, and lifted her chin. “Five minutes. Just hear what I have to say, then I’ll leave. Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of here.”
He sighed heavily, then sat down behind his desk and waved a hand toward her as if to say, Go ahead.
She licked her lips, normally an indication of nervousness. Was she worried that she hadn’t rehearsed her part well enough? Or maybe she just figured the sight of her pointed little tongue flicking out to moisten those china doll lips might get under his skin, just a little, might make him start thinking with his hormones instead of his head. Well, it wouldn’t work. True, she was an attractive woman. Were it not for this little revelation about her “powers,” he could see indulging in a passing fantasy about that nice wet mouth of hers... he might wonder if her lips were as soft as they looked, her tongue as clever. He might imagine kissing her, imagine how she tasted, imagine her tasting him and wanting more. She might unbutton his shirt and taste his throat, his chest, his belly, then reach for his belt...
“Are you listening, Lieutenant?” she asked.
He shifted in his chair, staggered by the speed with which he’d become so incredibly hard. Zero to sixty in three seconds. “Yes. Of course. You were saying...”
“That I experience two kinds of extrasensory perception. The first happens when I touch a living thing, a person or animal. I can sense their thoughts, even pick up visual images of the things they see or have seen. That’s telepathy. The second is when I get a reading off of an inanimate object. Those readings are much less refined, just leftover energy from whoever touched the object before me. That’s—”
“Psychometry,” Jamie supplied.
A heartbeat’s pause. “Yes. You know about psychic phenomena?”
“Oh, yes,” he said sarcastically, arousal waning swiftly. “I know all about it.”
She studied him for a second and then went on. “When I first touched Phoenix, to capture him, I got an instant image of flames leaping up all around him. I felt his terror, his helplessness. Later, as I was cleaning and dressing his burns, I saw a man’s face—young, with dark hair. And there was some kind of basement or workroom in an old brick building, with strange wrought iron railings on the stairs—but that’s not what was on fire. I don’t think the fire had happened yet.”
A gust of laughter escaped him. “You got all that from a cat?”
She squared her shoulders. “They were unusually powerful readings, very detailed. Intense emotions create the strongest energy. And I was especially susceptible to Phoenix’s terror. I’m... a little phobic about fire. More than a little. When I was five, I was trapped in a burning barn. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since. It’s probably my strongest fear, and it’s exactly what Phoenix experienced at the roadhouse.”
Jamie stood up. “Thank you again. Dr. Cook, for coming in to make this report.”
“I’d recognize him again,” she said. “The young man with dark hair. I’d know that face anywhere. Shouldn’t I look at mug books or something?”
Maybe she can bring the cat in, and have him look, too. “No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” He stood by the door. “As I said before, if we need you, we’ll call.”
A few seconds passed, and then she stood up, reached into her bag, withdrew a business card, and handed it to him, careful not to touch him. “Not that I think you’ll use it. Goodbye, Lieutenant.”
After she left, Jamie picked up the little recorder, rewound the tape, and punched the Play button. He heard his own voice: Good. Great. A pause. Look, I need to tape this... He fast-forwarded. That’s all I want... Her voice. Just to be left alone... but I’m afraid if people find out what I’m going to tell you...
She had that right.
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