Running Hot

TWENTY-FOUR

By the time they were in the car and headed toward the airport, she had recovered enough from the initial shock to succumb to a sense of resignation. Maybe she was just too exhausted to resist. No, she decided, the truth was that she simply didn’t want to lie to Luther any longer. She wasn’t sure what was going on between them. She was afraid to use the word “love” to describe the bond. It was too soon and she’d had too little experience with that particular feeling to be able to recognize it on sight. But whatever it was, she wanted desperately to trust him.

She peeled the lid off the coffee cup. “Do you think Mr. Jones knows that I didn’t tell him the full truth about what I did with my aura today?”

“Who knows?” Luther did not take his attention off the road. “He’s damn good at connecting dots, though, so you’d better assume he suspects more than he let on.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“Probably because it didn’t suit him to say anything. Fallon is not what you would call the communicative type.”

She slumped lower into the seat. “Damn.”

“The real question is why didn’t you tell him what you can do with your talent? After all, you want to be a real J&J agent. Why not try to impress the boss?”

She gazed glumly out at the sugarcane fields. “Keeping my secret is an old habit. You know how it is. You don’t go around advertising what you can do, either.”

“What happened a year ago? Whatever it was must have been pretty dramatic. Were you assaulted?”

“He tried to kill me with some sort of flash of energy,” she said quietly.

Luther’s profile hardened. “The guy who attacked you was a sensitive, too?”

“Yes. I fought back with my talent. When he realized he couldn’t murder me with his psychic-blast trick, he became enraged and tried to throttle me. I was running hot at the time, jacked to the max trying to defend myself. Something happened when he touched me. It was as if the energy that he was projecting at me rebounded back on him. The next thing I knew he was dead.”

Luther was silent for a moment. She waited for what she knew would come next.

“You said he hit you with some kind of psychic energy?”

“Yes. He could focus it somehow. It was incredibly painful. I could feel it killing me.”

“Fallon told me that one of his agents encountered a Nightshade operative who could make a person unconscious with a blast of energy. It happened a while back on a case in Stone Canyon, Arizona. The talent was drug-induced. The operative was injecting the formula at the time.”

“The man who tried to murder me was also on the drug,” she said, letting the rest of the truth spill out. “He told me it gave him the power to kill without a trace.”

Luther whistled softly. “Well, I’ll be damned. You killed Martin Crocker, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Let me take a wild guess here. You were not the company librarian.”

“I was his butler.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That was my official title,” she explained. “No one pays any attention to the hired help, you see. Afterward, the newspapers barely even mentioned the fact that I had died in the same boating accident. It was as if I had never existed, which was fine by me.”

“I seem to recall that the search-and-rescue team found Crocker’s boat drifting aimlessly in the water. How did you escape?”

She shuddered, remembering the horror and the grim determination to survive that had ridden her hard that night.

“What the searchers didn’t know, what no one except Martin and I knew, was that Martin kept a small inflatable boat on the island to use in case of an emergency. I waited until after dark. Then I got Martin’s body into the cruiser and took it partway back to the main island. I released the body into the water and left the cruiser to drift. Then I got into the inflatable.”

Luther said nothing but he reached over and gripped her hand very tightly for a few seconds, letting her know that he understood both the horror and the will to live.

She took strength from his touch. “The inflatable was unmarked. There was nothing to link it to Martin or to me. I dumped it offshore. The next day I took a commercial flight back to Miami using a fake ID.”

“You already had the new ID in place?”

“Along with a small suitcase full of bare necessities. I’d carried both with me everywhere for days.” She swallowed hard. “I knew Martin better than he knew himself. It was a matter of when, not if, I’d need the ID and a change of clothes.”

“You weren’t just Crocker’s butler, were you? What else did you do for him?”

“I was his personal profiler,” she said. “I read the people with whom he did business, his mistresses and everyone else who came in contact with him.”

“The ultimate bodyguard.”

“I identified his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses. I told him who he could trust and warned him when someone was plotting against him.”

“How long were the two of you a team?”

“Twelve years.”

“Were you lovers?” Luther asked tonelessly.

“No. Neither of us was attracted to the other in that way. I wasn’t his type. In the end he told me he had always found my talent a little scary. For my part, I knew from the start that Martin wasn’t capable of anything remotely close to real love or commitment. But we were partners and friends of a sort. I trusted him because I knew he needed me and I knew he understood that.”

“What happened?”

“Everything changed after he started taking the drug.”

“Why did he try to kill you?”

“He decided that he didn’t need me any longer. But I knew all his secrets. As he explained, that made me a serious liability.” She shook her head, still amazed. “He actually believed all the lies that the Nightshade people told him, including the myth that the drug would lengthen his life span.”

“Why did you create the corporate librarian history for yourself when you went into hiding? Why not fire up a whole new identity, one with no connection to Crocker World?”

“I went with the old theory that the best lies contain a measure of truth. Also, I knew everything about Crocker World, including how to access the computerized personnel files and create an employment record that would stand up to close scrutiny. It worked, too. I made it through a J&J background check.”

Luther smiled slightly. “If Fallon ever discovers that, he’ll have an attack of the vapors.”

She turned her head quickly. “Are you going to tell him?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Thank you.” She drank some more coffee.

“What really happened that day that Martin Crocker and his butler disappeared?” Luther asked.

She told him everything. When she was finished he was silent for a long time.

“Do you believe me?” she asked when she could stand the suspense no longer.

“Yes.”

She peeked at his aura and knew that he was telling the truth.

“One more question,” he said. “If you were worried that someone might someday find out that you killed Crocker, why in hell did you apply for a job within the Society? You had to know that you’d be surrounded by people endowed with various kinds of psychic talents. Your secret would be at risk every day.”

“I wasn’t sure if the people who recruited Martin would get suspicious about his death and come looking for me. I also knew from what Martin told me that the organization you call Nightshade is a group of renegade psychics. I figured the one bunch they might want to steer clear of is the Arcane community.”

“So you decided to hide in the heart of the Society.” Luther’s mouth curved faintly. “I like it. Talk about a gutsy move.”

“There was another reason why I applied for the post in the Bureau of Genealogy,” she said quietly. “I’ve always heard that when you’re in real trouble, you run home.”

“So?”

“The Society is the closest thing I have to a family.”