Mind Tricks (13 page)

“So,” Jennie finally said, “we’re
reading an article from a Portland paper about this guy’s employee’s murder,
and him being a ‘person of interest.’ Sounds to me like a married man, for
once, might be a better choice for a new boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend. Plus, I
don’t think he did it.”

“You don’t think he did it…or you
know
he didn’t do it, my psychic sister?”

“I don’t think he did it,” Emma
admitted. “I mean, I’ve spent some time with him, and—”

“Argh! All right. Let’s review some
of your dating history. What were the names of the three guys you dated in
college? And why did you dump them?”

Argh
was right. Did she have to go through this? She knew better than Jennie how
badly she had mistaken them. “They were David, Antoine, and Matty.” Emma took
another swallow of beer. Darn it, her bottle was empty. How had that happened?
She leaned sideways to yank another out of the fridge, popped off the cap, and
slumped back into her chair. “David stole things—sometimes girls’ underwear out
of the laundry, sometimes cash out of wallets. Antoine was okay, though.
Mostly.”

“Sure, if you think that dating one
of your friends behind your back was okay.”

She didn’t, but in comparison to
the others’, Antoine’s sin was mundane. Lots of people had someone waiting in
the wings before breaking off a relationship. Too bad Antoine hadn’t had any
intention of breaking off either relationship, the two-timing jerk.

“And Matty,” Jennie reminded her.

“Yeah, Matty. Matty, ah, didn’t
respect women.” A date rapist. Emma shivered. In the midst of making out with
him, she’d caught a glimpse of a past act of date rape. She got him out of her
dorm room as soon as possible and broke up with him the next day. He’d been her
most recent boyfriend, eight years ago. Eight loooong years ago.

“And now you’re dating a guy
practically accused of murder,” Jennie said. “What are the odds that he’s
innocent, given your past success with men?”

Emma sat up straight and smacked
the beer bottle on the table with a
thunk
,
startling Brutus into lifting his head. “That’s not fair to Jake or me. Plus,
Jake approached me, not the other way around. So you can’t blame my bad dating
history on him.” However, now that she thought about it, every one of the three
guys she’d dated in college had approached her, too. So that wasn’t the best
argument for Jake’s innocence.

Jennie sighed on the other end. “I
don’t care about being fair to him. He’s not my sister. I’m worried about
you
, Emma. Why can’t you take a quick
peek inside his skull to find out if he’s innocent or guilty, just to keep
yourself out of a bad situation?”

She’d tried. And she hadn’t seen
anything. But he was innocent. He was so convinced of it that she was, too.

She could try again….But if she
wanted this new friendship, this shared attraction, to turn into something
more, then she wanted to stay out of his head.

“Everyone’s guilty of something,
Jennie, whether it’s stealing underwear or lying to his mother.” Emma sagged in
her chair, suddenly weary. “I don’t want to see that. I get to keep my secrets.
Everyone else should be able to keep theirs, too. My time in Maryland taught me
that.” And also taught her to keep her head down, her mouth shut, and her
probing “gift” out of other people’s brains.

“Even if the secret is murder?”

“It’s really not an issue in this
case—Jake’s innocent. But I wouldn’t want to go into a murderer’s head. Do you
think I want to see a person being murdered from the killer’s point of view?
And it’s not just watching that; it’s feeling what the killer felt.” Another
swallow of beer. Maybe it was the alcohol, but she was going to tell Jennie
something she’d never said outright, though she suspected Jennie knew. “You
remember when I accidentally looked into Trisha’s dad’s head and saw that he
was raping her?” Not that Jennie would forget. The outcry their family had
raised against him—an outcry based only on Emma’s accusation—had led to the
community rallying around Trisha’s dad and shutting out Emma’s family. Hate
mail was slid under their door, feces were smeared on their car windows,
editorials printed in the paper… They had essentially been run out of town. And
that hadn’t been the worst of it. “Well, it wasn’t like I was observing it from
a corner of the room and able to shut my eyes. I was in his head. And I could
feel every sick, disgusting urge. Knew that he made Trish put on her younger
sister’s clothes and then slowly take them off. Saw that he liked—”

“Stop!” Jennie’s harsh breathing
cut through the line. “Jesus Christ. You saw all that in, what, three seconds?”

“It was at the forefront of his
thoughts. After all, he was considering whether he could force me to join in.”

“God, what a sicko.”

“No kidding. Too bad Trish didn’t
kill him instead of herself.” Trisha had been able to live with her father’s
occasional visits to her bedroom. She hadn’t been able to live with the
whispers, horrified giggles, and quickly cut-off conversations at school after
Emma had accused her father of rape.

A few months after Emma’s family
had moved away, Trish had hanged herself in her childhood tree house.

“His thoughts were a pretty
terrible thing to see—to feel,” Emma said. The words didn’t nearly encompass
the hell she’d briefly descended into when she’d been sucked into the man’s
head.

“Still, Emma. We’re talking about
murder. Isn’t that a good reason to make sure that any secrets Jake has are
only minor ones? What if you hadn’t tapped into Trisha’s dad’s thoughts? Maybe
he would have raped you, too. You have to protect yourself here. You need to
either look into his thoughts or stay away.”

But there were other considerations
besides privacy. The last thing she wanted was a reputation for being a
mind-reader or a psychic. Even if Jake swore to keep silent about her talent,
she couldn’t trust that. The secret always came out. Knowing a real psychic was
like knowing about adultery—too juicy a tidbit to keep to yourself.

Two years ago, the folks in Emma’s
new neighborhood in Maryland had found out about her “gift” due to a pair of
loose lips that should’ve been firmly shut, and the town had quickly branded
her a witch. Amazing, in this day and age, but she’d had the graffiti on her
house to prove it.

Anyway, she was convinced Jake was
innocent. So she had no need to read his mind.

“Forget Thanksgiving,” Jennie said
abruptly. “You should come out here to visit us now.”

Emma tapped her fingers against her
lip, tempted. The chaos of her sister’s house would eclipse her worries about
Jake, about word of her psychic gifts getting out, and about the murder
investigation. But it would all be waiting here for her when she got back.
Dealing with it would be only deferred, not magically accomplished during her
vacation.

“Thanks for the invite. What about
the beginning of September instead? I’ll look at ticket prices this week.”

Jennie sighed. “All right. Call or
e-mail me with whatever dates look good to you. But in the meantime, stay away
from that Jake Vant. He sounds like nothing but trouble, Emma, whether he’s
guilty or innocent. And…” Jennie’s sentence trailed off as if she was
rethinking what she’d planned to say.

It was a habit that drove Emma
nuts. “And what?”

“And…if you do peek into his mind
and find out that he’s guilty, be very, very careful. Because you’d be the only
one who could stop him from getting away with murder.”

Her arms tingled with a wave of
chills. She tried to rub them away. “I know.” Yet she still wished he’d stayed
this evening. Because he
was
innocent.

“I have to put Jeff to bed,” Jennie
said. “Be good, and I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bye.” Emma hung up and then dumped
the rest of the beer in her bottle down the drain. Any more alcohol, and she’d
be trying to talk herself into reading Jake’s mind for the sake of justice,
freedom, the American way, blah blah blah, and whatever other rationalizations
she could churn up in her busy brain.

Maybe Jennie was right, and she
should just stay away from him.

Her stomach cramped at the thought.
No. She
liked
him. He made her laugh,
even while he was going through this crazy murder investigation. That took a
special guy.

Jake was different from the other
men she’d dated. Somehow, someway, she could make this work.

The intercom lit up, catching
Jake’s eye.

Christ, what now? Within the last
hour he’d lost another boat order and an infuriatingly incompetent reporter had
tried to pepper him with questions designed to make him admit to Ginny’s
murder.

He glared at the phone console.
Maybe it was his lawyer, calling to tell him that after meeting him this
morning, she’d decided not to take his case. That would be a nice cap to the
day.

But the real reason for his
irritation wasn’t these headaches but the way he’d had to leave Emma last
night. This murder investigation and the police running it were screwing up the
best thing that had happened to him in years.

Samantha’s voice echoed from the
intercom. “Your mom’s on line four.”

He groaned as he reached for the
handset. Undoubtedly she was going to push to fly up sooner. “Mom?”

His mom didn’t pull any punches.
“We’re worried about you.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Do the police have another
suspect?”

“No—not that I know of. But I met
this morning with my new lawyer, Marilyn Howsing, and she’s clearly more versed
in criminal investigations than Halliburt. She admitted I was in trouble, which
was a good start, and then talked about how to fix that.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Stop talking to the police,
basically. Make them work at finding enough evidence to press charges. She
agrees that the DA must not think the police have enough to work with yet,
otherwise I’d be arrested already.”

“So you might be in the clear, it
sounds like.”

He nearly let her believe that. It
would be so much easier. But his mom wouldn’t appreciate being coddled or kept
in the dark, and he wasn’t accustomed to lying to her.

“I’m not clear yet. Problem is,
Mom, I still have no idea what I did or where I was that night. For all I know,
I could have been sitting next to Ginny in her car when she was knifed.”

She sucked in an audible breath.
“That’s a terrible thought.”

“I know. If I could have stopped
Ginny’s killer but didn’t—”

“I wasn’t talking about that! I was
imagining you so close to being killed yourself. I couldn’t bear it if—”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but
he could read where it was going. One of her three sons was in a coma, and one
had disappeared months ago with no word. In a way, Jake was the only son she
had left.

She sighed and changed the subject.
“Wasn’t Mickey looking for a hypnotherapist for you?”

Jake had completely forgotten that.
“He said he was. I’ll ask him about it today.”

Suddenly he didn’t want to talk
about this anymore. Being a suspect preyed on his mind every minute, and he
needed a distraction. Luckily, Samantha chose that moment to show up in his
doorway and make a hang-up-the-phone motion with her hand. “Mom, it looks like
I have to go—”

Detectives Cooperman and Millhouse
appeared behind her, and Jake hissed out a swear. This was
not
the distraction he’d hoped for. His mother squawked in his
ear—more surprised than offended, he knew. “Sorry, Mom, but the police are
here. I’ll talk to you later.”

Her voice rose in pitch. “Are they
there to arrest you?”

Cooperman’s granite face gave
nothing away. Only one way to find out. “Are you arresting me?” Jake asked the
detective.

“We’re saving that pleasure for
another day,” Cooperman drawled.

Nice. Cooperman must’ve graduated
with honors from intimidation class. “No,” he said into the phone. “I’ll call
you back after they leave, Mom.” Before she could argue, he hung up.

Then he stood and came around the
desk, approaching the men in the doorway until he was only a few feet away.
Samantha, looking apprehensive, moved as if she’d leave, but Jake motioned her
to stay. He hadn’t killed Ginny. He had nothing to fear from the police or from
gossip inspired by their visit. Or so he kept telling himself. “So why are you
here?” he demanded of Cooperman.

“We’re trying to track down a few
loose ends. We want to go through Ginny’s office.”

Just the pair of detectives? The
team that had gone through his house two days ago had included technicians
taking fiber samples, fingerprints—the works. “You have a warrant?”

“Nah. This is just a quick
peek—nothing formal. But we need your permission.”

Nothing formal, his ass. If they
found something, they’d sure as hell be happy to “formally” use it against him
in court.

His refusal must have been on his
face, for Cooperman added, “Don’t you want to do everything possible to help us
get your coworker—and former girlfriend’s—killer?” Cooperman twitched a silvery
eyebrow skyward. “Letting us into her office would do that.”

The man was just baiting him. “I do
want you to find Ginny’s killer,” Jake replied, icy cold. “But I need to think
about myself and my other employees. Give me a moment to call my lawyer.”

Cooperman heaved a sigh. “We don’t
have all day.”

“Then come back tomorrow and ask
again,” Jake snapped.

Making a big production of being
patient, Cooperman leaned against the doorframe and began to chat quietly with
his sidekick, Millhouse, while Jake dialed Howsing’s number.

“Tell them no,” she said when he
was only halfway through his explanation. “I’ll be blunt with you. I don’t care
nearly as much about finding out who really killed that woman as I do about
keeping you out of jail. And that means keeping the police out of your offices.
So ask them nicely to leave, and put me on speakerphone while you do it. I’m
going to record this.”