Trinity (23 page)

36

Anderson stood talking to the new agent. They looked through two-way glass at the man, bound in a straitjacket. He stared at the white wall, once-piercing ice blue eyes dull and staring. His mouth hung open, slack.

“Tele-what?” the new agent said. The badge at his lapel identified him as Agent Johnson.

“Telekinesis. He can move things with his mind. Gotta keep him drugged to the teeth. It broke his mind, though. Poor sonofabitch babbles about aliens, non-stop. They got his mother, he says, and now they’re after him.”

“What’d you charge him with?” Johnson asked.

“Can’t try him. He’s crazy. Look at the guy. But he killed several people, including a state trooper and his wife. Killed another guy in front of me, using the mind thing. The man is a threat. Guys like him are why we ought to have kept the death penalty around.”

Johnson went to the window.

“I’ll take the case from here.”

“With what the psychiatrists have him on, it’s unlikely he’ll ever really wake up. If he comes back, he can kill all of us, even from that jacket. They’re putting a bed in at Juniper Hill for him, and they’ll keep him on this dose forever. Would be kinder to put a bullet in him.”

“Did you know him?” Johnson asked.

“Met him once. Near the end. Guy seemed terrified.”

“I would be.”

“His girlfriend, Kate Fulton—”

Johnson checked the file. “Sister of deceased trooper Rich Fulton?”

“Yeah. Reads like a soap opera. She loves him. So he must not have been a terrible guy. She visits him, holds his hand, talks to him. Stuck by him when he was in the penn, with him now. I’d watch her.”

Johnson nodded, looking at the black and white photo of her, smiling at the camera. He looked at the next photo of one Valentine Slade. He looked a lot different in the candid black and white, eating an ice cream and grinning. Johnson bet that grin had knocked the ladies dead. The next page was Slade’s mug shot. Even there he smirked at the camera, cocky and ready to take on the world.

Johnson looked up at the man in the straitjacket. No sign of that smile now. He closed the folder and shook Anderson’s hand.

“So there are no aliens, right?” he asked.

Anderson gave a condescending chuckle. “Nope. No aliens. Some really weird shit, but no aliens.”

Johnson smiled at him, and left the psychiatric facility for his car, a black Monte Carlo.

He started the engine and waited for a moment.

Sure, Val killed the body. But he didn’t kill the Alpha inside. And now Val was out of reach, locked up again. No subtle way to get him out of the facility. And no promise the meds they kept him on hadn’t destroyed his mind.

But it didn’t matter.

Johnson opened the folder on the passenger seat and looked at Kate’s photo. Someone had a baby bump. The DNA he needed would be as strong in the child as it had been in the father.

He’d start slow. Be a friend. A sympathetic shoulder for her to cry on in her time of loss. Then they’d be more than that. She’d have the baby, and it would be his.

Johnson eased the Monte Carlo out of the parking spot, and headed it for Lott.

He had a meeting with Miss Fulton to attend to.