Or maybe the mental distance he felt was due to his own wariness. The more convinced he grew that Sarah was a genuine psychic, the more he could feel himself getting…still inside. And watchful. He didn’t want to withdraw from her but couldn’t seem to help himself.
Pushing that out of his mind for the moment, Tucker thought of all the charlatans he had met over the years, so many of whom cheerfully plied their trade in carnivals and malls and psychic “fairs” around the country, and knew those people were not threatened by anything but the occasional suspicious police officer. He was certain, however, that if he had been able to meet any of the people on the growing list of dead and missing, he would have found them genuine. The fakes and phonies stood in no danger from this; people with true psychic abilities were the targets.
Which meant, he thought, that the people behind this had some way of determining the genuine from the fake. Or…did they simply watch and wait, as they had apparently watched Sarah, until they could decide? That was possible, maybe even likely. He thought of watchers all over the country observing potential psychics, checking off items on a list until the total added up to “genuine,” and felt a spreading chill.
Jesus Christ—the enormity of the thing.
And it was so damned inexplicable. Why psychics? Were they a threat to someone, or did their abilities make them somehow valuable? That was the question he felt needed to be answered, and it was the most elusive—because dead or missing psychics offered no answers, and as far as he could tell, nobody else had bothered to ask.
He could remember reading of long-ago experiments in this country and others, when it had been theorized that psychics could be used in some fashion as weapons or deterrents to weapons, but those experiments—as far as he knew—had proved worse than useless. Only a handful of genuine psychics had been able to control their abilities in any real sense, and nobody had really known what to do with them. They could not, after all, stop bullets or prevent bombs from blowing up. And their predictions had been erratic at best.
But that had been back during the Cold War, when paranoia and suspicion had compelled more than one government to attempt unconventional means of attaining and maintaining power over others. Things were different now.
Weren’t they?
Tucker shifted restlessly on the couch. Whoever was killing and taking them, the list of psychics was turning into a long one. No wonder Sarah had grown so quiet. In his research so far, she was one of a much smaller list made up of psychics who had lived normal lives well into adulthood before some trauma—usually a head injury—had left them struggling to understand new and baffling abilities. That alone would have been enough of a strain for anybody without finding out she was also a target of some mysterious conspiracy.
And on that smaller list of new and untried psychics, most had wound up dead in some “accident” within months of the birth of their new abilities.
Tucker turned over onto his back and stared at the dark, beamed ceiling. Sarah was in deadly danger. And the only thing standing between her and the people who would kidnap or kill her was him.
“So how’re you gonna stop them, Mackenzie?” he muttered aloud.
He didn’t know.
Realizing suddenly that sleep was not going to return, he sighed and sat up. Glancing toward the bedroom door automatically, he stiffened when he realized it was open. He was on his feet before he decided to be, gun in hand and senses flaring.
If they had snatched her right out from under his goddamned nose—
A moment later he relaxed. One step away from the couch had brought the sliding glass doors into view, and through them he saw the moonlit deck and Sarah standing at the railing gazing out over the lake.
Tucker hesitated, then stuck the automatic into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and shrugged into the flannel shirt he’d earlier removed. His boots were nearby, and he put those on as well before heading for the glass doors.
He paused there, his hand on the handle, and for several moments studied her through the glass. She stood much as she had the first time he’d seen her, with her arms crossed over her breasts and hands moving slowly up and down her upper arms as though to warm chilled flesh. But she hadn’t been cold then, not from the weather. From something inside her. And it was the same inner chill now, he realized. Sarah wasn’t cold.
She was alone.
For the first time, he realized that for all her passive acceptance of his company, Sarah had never stopped being alone.
She was as shut in herself as she had been that first day, isolated within walls of wariness, remote in a way he didn’t really understand. And inside her were thoughts and feelings and terrors she had not put into words. Perhaps had not dared put into words. But they were there. Buried deeply. Locked away from him and anyone else who wanted to be close to her. Looking at her, he had the sense of things moving slowly and with terrible deliberation underneath a frozen stillness, like an ocean under ice.