Dream Eyes (10 page)

“Without context you can’t interpret what you see. You’ve made that clear. Tell me what you saw in Taylor’s aura.”

“I saw the kind of energy that I’ve come to associate with drug addiction. But I didn’t see any indications of an actual drug in his aura. I mentioned the bad energy to Evelyn, but she said as long as he wasn’t using at the time, she wasn’t going to kick him out of the study. She reminded me that a lot of people with psychic talents end up experimenting with drugs at some point in an attempt to self-medicate. Sensitives often think they’re going crazy. Sometimes they go to a doctor who thinks they’re disturbed and puts them on medication. Either way, drugs are often a factor when it comes to dream therapy.”

“The bottom line being that the indications of addiction were not a serious red flag.”

“No, especially since he showed no obvious signs that he was on drugs at the time. It was only later that I realized it wasn’t drugs that he was addicted to—it was the killing.”

“The ultimate game for a full-blown psychopath,” Judson said.

“Game is exactly the right way to describe how Taylor viewed his kills. Evelyn and I were convinced that there had been many victims before he got to Wilby.”

A van that had been driving down the street abruptly veered into the parking lot. The headlights pierced the night. The vehicle was moving much too fast and it was coming straight at them.

Judson was already reacting. He seized Gwen’s arm and swept her into a protected zone created by two parked cars.

The van slammed to a halt less than three feet away. There was just time enough to read the words
Hudson Floral Design
before the driver’s-side door shot open. A woman dressed in jeans, boots and a faded cotton shirt leaped out. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She ignored Judson and fixed her full attention on Gwen.

“I heard you were back,” she said. Rage and long-smoldering pain seethed in the atmosphere around her. “I also heard that Evelyn Ballinger is dead and that Oxley found you in the house with the body. Sounds like you’ve gone back to your old habits.”

“Hello, Nicole,” Gwen said.

She kept her voice low and soothing, intuitively trying to counteract some of the other woman’s anger. But she knew there was little hope of success. She was aware that Judson had gone ominously still. He stood very close and a little in front of her, partially shielding her with his body. She wanted to tell him that there was no immediate physical threat, but she wasn’t altogether certain that was true. It had been two years since she had last faced Nicole. On that occasion Nicole, sobbing hysterically, had vowed vengeance.

Nicole rounded on Judson. “Rumor has it you’re the new boyfriend. Better be careful. People around her have a bad habit of dying.”

“Take it easy,” Judson said.

“She murdered the man I loved two years ago and a couple of other people as well. I’ll bet she killed Evelyn Ballinger, too.” Nicole’s voice rose. “Stick around long enough and you’ll be her next victim. And watch what you eat. She uses poison, you see, so it always looks like a heart attack or an accident.”

“That’s enough,” Judson said. This time he put an edge on his words.

His ring heated a little, and Gwen was aware of an unnerving, deeply ominous sensation.

Nicole gasped and stepped back, startled. She turned quickly, searching the parking lot with an anxious expression, as if looking for something that might be coming up behind her. When she saw nothing, she burst into tears and turned back to face Gwen.

“How dare you come back here as if nothing ever happened?” she got out between sobs. “How dare you, bitch?”

She swung her hand in a vicious slap aimed at Gwen’s face. Judson moved slightly, just enough to get in the way of the blow. He absorbed the impact on one broad shoulder. The scary heat in the atmosphere escalated a couple of degrees.

Nicole whirled and fled back to the van. She got behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. The vehicle careened out of the parking lot and shot off down the street.

The disturbing energy dissipated.

Gwen watched the taillights of the van until they disappeared. Eventually, she allowed herself to take a breath. Judson clamped a powerful hand around her arm and drew her out from between the parked cars.

“Who was that?” he asked. He sounded very matter-of-fact, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.

“Nicole Hudson. She owns a florist shop here in town.”

“I saw the sign on the van. She was Taylor’s lover?”

“Yes. She blames me for his death. She never believed that he was a suicide. She thinks I killed him.”

“I got that impression,” Judson said. “You have quite a reputation in this town, don’t you?”

“You have no idea.”

Ten

W
hen Judson and Gwen walked into the lobby, Riley Duncan looked up from whatever he was doing at the front desk. He gave Gwen a stern frown.

“Had a complaint from a guest on your floor, Ms. Frazier,” Riley said. “The lady in three-oh-five says your cat is bothering her.”

Gwen frowned. “How could Max bother anyone?”

“She said he meows loudly whenever someone walks past in the hall. I went up there to check and she’s right. I could hear him on the other side of the door. Three-oh-five says the noise creeps her out. She doesn’t like cats. She’s afraid the cat will get out of the room and trip her up on the stairs.”

“I’ll keep Max away from her,” Gwen promised. “Once he knows I’m back tonight, I’m sure he’ll stop meowing. I think he’s having abandonment issues. Evelyn raised him from a kitten, and he doesn’t understand that she’s gone forever.”

“Probably doesn’t like being cooped up in a hotel room, either,” Riley said. “Cats are territorial, you know. They don’t adapt well to new environments.”

“I’m aware of that,” Gwen said. “But I couldn’t leave him out there all alone at the house. There’s no one around to feed him.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in adopting him?”

“I’m not a cat person,” Riley said. “Take him to the pound.”

He went back to his computer screen.

Gwen and Judson went up the stairs. The meowing started when they reached the third floor. It reverberated down the hall. Gwen winced, took out her key and hurried forward. When she opened the door Max was waiting. He dashed through the opening.

“Max, no,” Gwen said. “Come back. “

Judson leaned down and scooped up the cat. “You don’t want to go running off like that, Max. She’s the one with the food. Not that you need any. You are a little on the hefty side. Do you lift weights?”

“Evelyn said that he’s part Maine coon cat,” Gwen said. “Maybe a
lot
Maine coon cat.” She switched on the lights.

Max twitched his ears, but he allowed himself to be carried back into the room. Judson set him down on the floor while Gwen closed and locked the door.

“What are you going to do with him?” Judson asked.

“Take him back to Seattle, I guess, unless I can convince someone local to take him in, which is probably unlikely. Max does not have what you’d call a warm and cuddly personality.”

“He looks tough.”

“He is tough. But Evelyn loved that cat. I’m not going to take him to the pound, and if I turn him loose back at the house, he’ll go feral. Cats that go wild don’t do well.”

“In that case, it looks like you’ve got yourself a cat,” Judson said.

“Probably.” She looked at Max. “Of course, if you take it into that blocky head of yours that you were born to be free, I promise not to stand in your way.”

Max ignored her. He went into the tiled bath and took up a position next to his empty bowl. He glared at her from the doorway.

“Okay, okay,” she said. She opened the minibar and took out the eggs. She cracked two into Max’s bowl. “But don’t blame me if you get too chunky to escape.”

Judson went to the minibar. “How about a nightcap while we talk?”

“Good idea. I could use a drink after that encounter with Nicole.”

Eleven

S
tart at the beginning,” Judson said.

Gwen settled into the oversized wingback chair and contemplated the gas fire on the hearth. The dancing flames cast a warm glow over the small space, but she could not seem to shake a deep chill. Max was stretched out on the cushion beside her. The low rumble of his purr was a comforting sensation against her thigh.

She searched for a place to begin.

“There’s no way to know how many people Zander Taylor killed before he found his way to Wilby,” she said. “And no way to prove that he murdered anyone. Evelyn and I did some research after he died, but it wasn’t easy trying to trace his comings and goings. Neither of us was a professional investigator. But we found hints of what looked like a pattern.”

“How did you piece it together?”

“Zander was very friendly—quite chatty. He talked a lot about how good it was to be hanging out with other people like himself, people who had real talent. He went on and on about how many phony psychics there were in the world. After he . . . died, Evelyn and I made up a partial list of all the places he had mentioned in his conversations. Then we went online to check the local business directories for those locations.”

Judson nodded appreciatively. “You searched for people who advertised psychic services and then you tried to match the names with local obituaries?”

She glanced at him, surprised. “Yes, exactly. We couldn’t think of any other way to go about it. I mean, it’s not like you can go online and search for a genuine psychic private investigator. Zander was right about one thing—lot of frauds out there.”

Amusement briefly lit Judson’s eyes. “Maybe Sam and I should run some ads offering psychic investigations. We’re the real deal.”

She smiled. “The problem is that your ads for Coppersmith Consulting would look exactly like the ads run by the frauds and fakes.”

“So it comes down to, how do you convince people that you’re a real psychic investigator? You’re right. That’s tricky.”

“It was a very time-consuming process, but in the end Evelyn and I found enough matches—deceased fortune-tellers, palm-readers and other storefront psychics who had all died unexpectedly of natural causes—to convince us that Taylor had murdered a lot of people. We stopped searching for victims because there didn’t seem to be much point continuing.”

“Did Taylor tell you about his kills there at the end when he tried to murder you?”

“Yes. He was thrilled with himself because here in Wilby he was at last hunting real psychics, not the phonies.”

Judson drank some of his brandy. “Killing other people of talent made the game more of a challenge.”

“He said he thought it would be harder to kill genuine psychics, but it turned out that real talents were no more difficult to murder than normal people.”

“When did you get suspicious that there was a killer in your midst?” Judson asked.

“Immediately after the first murder.” Gwen stilled her hand on Max’s furry side. Memories of that first terrible day flooded back. “I found Mary’s body out at the lodge. She was lying on the floor near one of the workbenches at the back. I somehow knew she hadn’t had a heart attack or an aneurism. There was something about the way she was positioned that told me she had tried to run. At least, that’s what the ghost was telling me.”

“You saw her ghost at the scene?”

“Yes, in the walls of the mirror engine,” Gwen said. She resumed stroking Max, who twitched an ear and purred louder.

“What’s the mirror engine?” Judson asked.

“The most exotic piece of test equipment that Evelyn constructed. It was her pride and joy. She built it primarily for me. She thought she could use the engine to measure and record the energy patterns that I generate when I go into my talent. Mary died near one of the mirrors, and that’s where I saw her ghost.”

“Did you pick up anything else?”

“Nothing useful,” Gwen admitted. “I’ll give Oxley credit for conducting a fairly thorough investigation. After all, Mary was only in her mid-thirties and there was no indication that she had a chronic underlying illness. But in the end, Oxley couldn’t find anything. The medical examiner ruled that she had died of a heart attack.”

“You found the second victim in the same place three weeks later?”

“Yes. Ben died near the mirror engine, too. My intuition told me that, like Mary, he had been trying to flee when he went down. But again, the authorities called it death by natural causes. In his case it was a little more believable because Ben had severe asthma and some other health issues. I realized I was in trouble on that occasion. I could tell that Oxley’s cop instincts were stirring.”

“Two dead bodies within one month, both found in the same location by the same person, would have that effect on any cop,” Judson said.

“I talked to Evelyn. By then we were both very certain that someone had targeted her study subjects. She immediately canceled the project and warned everyone in the group. Most of the subjects panicked and left town.”

“But you didn’t leave Wilby?”

“No, I kept thinking there was something I was missing in the lab. I went back to take another look. Zander showed up. As soon as he walked into the lodge, I saw his aura. He was really jacked and terribly excited. The dream energy was bad, unwholesome. Wrong. I just knew that he was the killer. And he knew that I knew.”

“What happened?” Judson asked.

“We were alone in the lab. He started talking, playing his game with me. He told me that he had planned to take us down in the order in which we appeared in the group photo. He said I’d ruined the plan and spooked the herd. That’s what he called us, the herd. He said that because I’d interfered in his hunt, he was going to have to get rid of me out of order even though he had scheduled me to be last.”

Judson watched her with dangerously hot eyes. “Go on.”

“Zander reached into his jacket and took out what looked like a small digital camera and aimed it at me. He told me he had used it to kill Mary and Ben and a lot of phony psychics. Now it was my turn. He aimed the camera at me and started stalking me. I felt an icy sensation. My heart started to beat harder. I couldn’t catch my breath. I started to run. He laughed and told me that was what the others had done. He said that the chase was the best part. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I fled into the mirror engine. He followed me. And suddenly he was screaming.”