Blood Memories

CHAPTER 9


Wade

Wade Sheffield was born in North Dakota in 1977, the fourth son of a wheat farmer. He was seven years old before realizing that no one else could hear other people’s thoughts. His older brothers thought him weak because he cried while helping with daily chores like delivering baby calves or butchering chickens. His sisters sometimes cried when chickens were killed, but the men in his family couldn’t figure tears over a new calf.
“She hurts so much,” he would say, stroking the heifer in labor.
At the age of twelve, he began responding verbally to people’s thoughts. This made several of his teachers nervous—especially the ones who quietly hated teaching, and Mr. Rhinehard, who was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old student named Phyllis Dunmire.
Wade knew all this. He knew what they thought of him. Most of the boys hated him because he was different, and most of the girls wouldn’t be seen with anyone so unpopular. Lisa McKendrick had a secret crush on him for a few years, but she also worried much of the time about her private nose-picking habit.
By reading the thoughts of animals, he could always tell when a storm was coming. Animals knew a lot about weather.
One year, when he was fourteen, he stopped off for hamburgers with two of his brothers and mentioned to Mr. Masterson and Mr. Hinthorn that they should bring their cattle in early because of a thunderstorm. The weatherman on the radio had predicted no storm.
That night, every farm within a seventy-mile radius of the Sheffields’ lost half their wheat. In anger and frustration, people blamed Wade because he’d warned them.
Within a week, three farmers caught him alone on the way to school and beat him with pitchfork handles until his left leg and four ribs were broken. His oldest brother, Joshua, put him in the back of a Ford pickup and drove him to the Whitman County Hospital, where he was also diagnosed as suffering from a concussion. The next few weeks were hazy. He didn’t remember much besides a lot of bright lights, but when he woke up, a miracle happened.
Dr. Geoffrey Van Tassel leaned down over him and smiled.
“Welcome back,” the round-faced man said. “Tell me what I’m thinking.”
Wade had grown practiced at hiding the extent of his gift, but now he picked up bits and pieces of very focused thought patterns. “A garden,” he whispered. “Strawberries that your mother planted a long time ago.”
The eyes above him grew warm. “I have an interesting proposition for you, young man, when you’re feeling better.”
Wade often viewed that moment as the real beginning of his life. Six weeks later, he arrived at the Psychic Research Institute of Northern Colorado, on a set of rented crutches, and began to realize his own self-worth. Suddenly, being able to do something no one else could do had turned into a plus instead of a severe minus.
Dr. Van Tassel was often with him then. Apparently, Wade talked a good deal while in his state of delirium. He’d been speaking aloud whatever the nurses happened to be thinking. Sheila Osborne, a young nursing student from the Psychic Institute, had been working on her internship at the Whitman County Hospital during Wade’s stay.
The night before first seeing him, she’d experienced the worst blind date of her life. The guy her best friend had fixed her up with looked like he belonged on the cover of Muscle Fitness. He wouldn’t eat the popcorn she bought at the movies because it had salt and butter. He called her babe and lectured her most of the night about the best kind of workout for slimming down her thighs. And then he actually expected her to sleep with him after his cellulite comment.
Slamming bedpans into the cupboard of a hospital room, she heard soft murmuring from the bed.
“I don’t have cellulite. And I was wearing Levi’s. What would he know?”
She stopped in shock. A semiconscious young man on the bed was rolling slowly in sweat-soaked sheets and whispering her recent thoughts. Forgetting her own hurt vanity, she leaned over him and wiped his face.
“Yeah, I had Levi’s on,” she said. “What kind of shirt was I wearing?”
“No shirt—that pink sweater your mom bought you last Christmas.”
His voice was barely audible, but she heard him. Ten minutes later, she was on the phone to Dr. Van Tassel in Colorado. “I think you’d better come up here. There’s someone you need to see.”
That was the beginning. Sheila returned to the institute and remained his friend. Although he never did remember much about his stay at Whitman County, she related an embarrassing story about him exposing an affair between a prominent neurologist and his youngest male lab assistant. That hadn’t gone over well in North Dakota.
Wade found some of the experiments he participated in to be pointless. But he continued high school with other young people like himself. Well, not quite like himself. No one in the history of the institute had demonstrated anything close to Wade’s telepathic ability. He was the golden boy. Everyone wanted to be like him. But as the years passed, they kept asking him a lot of redundant questions.
“What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?”
“I see what you feel. Pictures, I guess. I don’t know.”
Scores of PhDs in fields he didn’t understand wrote papers about him.
The frightened, barely literate farm boy from North Dakota slowly fell away, and a self-assured, young-adult version of Wade took his place. In time, he began to verbalize his responses on a higher level.
“What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?”
“What do you see when I speak?” he answered. “Do you see words coming from my mouth? How does your mind know what I’m saying?”
In his senior year of high school, he stopped studying for exams. Why should he study when the answers were right there in the teacher’s head? He took Russian and began speaking the language fluently in three weeks just by concentrating on the instructor.
He lost his virginity to Sheila, but then left quickly afterward when she began thinking that he’d been okay but didn’t compare to her last boyfriend, Steve.
His teachers started making him take his exams in a private room.
But most of them understood his sometimes difficult behavior. He was different, and they did not expect his schooling to be normal.
However, when new arrivals came to the institute, he was often put in charge of helping the young children adjust to their new environment. Early on, Wade exhibited strong—almost obsessive—tendencies toward protection over the institute’s children, especially any who had been abused or neglected by their families . . . due to their abilities. He remembered all too well how it felt to be blamed and punished for his gift.
The children responded well to his assurances that everything would be different now, and he always let them talk to him, even though he could simply read their thoughts.
One thing Dr. Van Tassel did discover was that if he, or anyone else, put a conscious effort into blocking Wade, it wasn’t difficult to lock the young man out. But the doctor never stopped thinking about the possibilities for Wade’s gift.
“You could be anything you wanted, my boy. Anything.”
The problem was that Wade didn’t know what he wanted. At nineteen, his self-assured nature wavered when he was faced with choosing a university. The memories of fear and ostracism from his childhood had never quite passed away. The people in Colorado seemed to like him, and Dr. Van Tassel was the closest thing he had to a father. He hadn’t seen his own since leaving for the institute.
His first thought was to go into social services—specializing in child protection. But he wasn’t certain that his motivation was correct, and he had no idea where he wished to attend college.
The issue eradicated itself when he found out that he didn’t have to make a choice. The institute arranged a full scholarship for him at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. All he had to do was go back and work with Dr. Van Tassel during summers and breaks on new tests or research projects. Relief flooded through him. That was safe and perfect.
“What are you majoring in, son?”
“I don’t know. What should I major in?”
“That’s up to you. As long as you continue working with the doctors at the institute several times a year, you can choose anything you want.”
More choices. All his life he had hidden behind one wall or another. Now he was going back into mainstream society, where people had once beaten him with pitchfork handles.
College turned out to be quite different than he expected, though—full of pretty girls, liberal professors who questioned the government, and law students in black wool coats walking past Peace Corps soon-to-bes. It was amazing. But the pull to remain part of the institute, part of a safer world, still influenced him. He decided to major in psychology.
Dating, football games, and a part-time job in the university bookstore became part of his life and made him feel normal. Knowing how his girlfriends really felt about him wasn’t an insurmountable problem. He simply took it for granted that even people deeply in love had evil thoughts about each other once in a while. He had long since grown used to reading the casual malice behind someone’s smile. Those emotions were human.
His friends and lovers, however, didn’t take his abilities so lightly. In his junior year, he fell hard for an anthropology student named Karen. She had long, brown hair and hazel eyes. He loved even the tiny freckles on her nose.
“This isn’t working,” she told him after six months. “I can’t stand that you know what I’m thinking every minute, and you’re a blank wall to me. I never know what you’re feeling.”
“Then ask me.”
“I shouldn’t have to.”
That particular brand of pain and loss was new to him. He flunked statistics and had to retake it in his senior year.
After that, nothing of real note happened in his life until midway through graduate school. When he was twenty-three and working on his master’s in developmental psychology, an inspector from the Los Angeles Police Department flew out and made an appointment to speak to him while he was on summer break at the institute. Dr. Van Tassel instructed Wade to make an effort to stay out of the inspector’s mind.
“I’m Will Redington,” said a tall man in a business suit, extending his hand. “Dr. Van Tassel’s told me a little about you. We need you to do something for us.”
“What?” Wade asked, immediately suspicious. This situation smelled as if he would have to make a decision.
“Just listen to one of our departmental psychologists talk to an officer,” Redington said calmly. “That’s all we want you to do. You’ll be in a separate room with me, on the other side of a two-way mirror. You can see and hear everything that goes on. I just need you to tell me what the officer is thinking during the interview.”
“Is he being accused of something?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Wade looked to Dr. Van Tassel for help.
“It’s your choice, son. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d use my gift to help as many people as possible.”
That wasn’t much help. The inspector looked as if he flossed with a bicycle chain.
“Okay,” Wade said uncertainly. “When?”
“Two days.” Redington smiled. “We’ll fly to California tomorrow.”
Two days later, Wade found himself in an air-conditioned Los Angeles precinct. The interview room turned out much like Wade expected it to be—small and windowless, with an empty table and chairs. The officer in question’s name was Mark Taylor. Wade was placed in an adjoining room on the other side of the two-way mirror Redington had promised. He was told to watch and listen to what went on.
Officer Taylor had a stoic, passive expression and answered the questions being asked him with all the emotion of a brass chess piece.
“Mark,” the psychologist began, “how are you feeling about Christopher’s death right now?”
“No one forgets something like that right away,” Taylor answered. “I’m angry, but I’m dealing. It doesn’t affect my job performance.”
His answer sounded healthy and logical. Wade gently reached out into the man’s mind, and then fell forward out of his chair in shock. Hatred and rage and visions of violent death flashed before him like an NC-17 film.
“Wade.” Someone was shaking him. He looked up to see Inspector Redington’s face looming over him. “What do you see?”
“Christopher . . .” Wade choked. “He’s dead. They cut his throat open and pulled his tongue through the hole.”
Slight surprise registered on Redington’s face. “Yes, we know that. But what is Officer Taylor thinking?”
“They killed Christopher,” Wade shouted, “and you don’t even care!”
“Sssssh, keep your voice down.”
Wade started shaking. Christopher was Mark’s partner. They’d been working under cover with some small-time cocaine dealers, trying to flush out big game.
“Who killed Christopher?” Redington asked suddenly.
Wade glared at him. “You know. You all know.”
“Then tell me.”
“Juan Merinchez and the rest of those spics.”
Wade seemed to be lost inside Mark’s mind.
“And Juan deserves to die, doesn’t he?” Redington asked.
“He’s already dead, you worthless piece of shit. Somebody had to handle it.”
“If he’s dead, then where’s his body?”
“Eddy’s Junkyard, in the trunk of a ’sixty-seven Fairlane.”
Redington went to the door quickly and spoke to someone outside. Then Officer Taylor was taken away from the little room on the other side of the mirror.
“Wade,” Redington said, “are you all right?”
Ugly pictures moving like worms crawled around the inside of Wade’s skull. He couldn’t stop shaking or get up off the floor. Redington yelled out, “Somebody get me a glass of water!”
A uniformed policewoman came in with a paper cup. Redington held it to Wade’s mouth.
“Drink this.”
Cold water splashed between Wade’s teeth. “Why did you do that to me?”
“We had to know. To be honest, I don’t think I believed what Van Tassel said about you.”
He leaned down to help Wade get up.
“Don’t touch me!”
Redington pulled back slightly, withdrawing his hand. “I know you’re thinking that none of this is fair. Not to you. Not to Mark. But our psychologist did an extensive evaluation and found him fit and ready for duty. Mark’s been running around with a badge and a gun for two weeks now. Is that fair? Is that right?”
Wade’s head was beginning to clear. “No,” he whispered. “He shouldn’t have a gun. He’s dangerous . . . and racist. But he doesn’t care about very many people, not even his wife. He cared about Christopher.”
“That doesn’t give him the right to kill someone.”
“Did you know he’d killed Merinchez?”
“I had a pretty good idea. We just needed a body. And you may just have given us that.”
Less than an hour later, two officers found Juan Merinchez’s body in the trunk of a ’67 Fairlane exactly where Wade had seen it in Mark Taylor’s mind. Wade left the precinct as quickly as possible, flew home, and never checked back to find out what happened to Taylor. He didn’t want to know.
Long ago, Wade had learned to slowly examine his feelings. Letting them all in at once caused poor or quick judgments. The experience in Mark Taylor’s mind never left him. Those thoughts had been the ugliest string of images he’d ever seen. They would be with him always. But then anger set in . . . and guilt. That psychologist must have been blind. What if Inspector Redington had flown Wade out to California a few days earlier, before Mark Taylor had killed Merinchez? Could the situation have been averted? Perhaps Merinchez would still be alive, and Mark wouldn’t be facing murder charges. Or back even further, what if Wade had actually been working under cover with Mark and Christopher? Could he have picked up that Merinchez had grown wise and then helped avoid Christopher’s death at all? What if?
The questions never left him for long. After receiving a master’s degree in developmental psychology, he went on to a PhD in criminal psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Shortly before graduation, he applied to twenty-seven police departments around the country for a position as staff psychologist. He was offered three, and finally accepted a place in Portland, Oregon, because the department seemed friendly but overworked and in need of someone like Wade.
Wade wished to be needed.
“We’ll miss you,” Dr. Van Tassel said, smiling, “but I think you’ve made the right choice. You thought I wanted you to be a professor or a scientist, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“It’s your gift, Wade. We can study it and write about it. But you’ve been searching for something else your whole life. Perhaps you’ve found it. Come home for Christmas.”
With the first phase of his life over, Wade moved smoothly into the next. He found a loft-style apartment that would have cost him twice as much in Denver. The weather wasn’t to his taste. It rained a lot. But the trees were green, the city was old but not too old, vogue but not too vogue. He thought he could be happy here.
The job was difficult at first. He was responsible for the files on forty-four men and women. In spite of his own innate ability, there was a mountain of red tape to be danced around every time someone gave him cause for concern, especially when Captain McNickel wanted the officer in question back on the street.
A rookie named Joe Tashet got stabbed in the side while running down a fleeing mugger. After healing up and receiving a clean bill of health from a medical doctor, he was handed over to the police psychologist.
“No way,” Wade stated flatly to Captain McNickel in private. “He’s terrified. It’s all too new. Give him a little more time.”
“We don’t have any more time. Unless you tell me he’s going to piss on the street and then shoot a couple of old ladies, I need him back out tomorrow.”
“What about his partner? Is it fair to send someone else out with a panicked rookie cop?”
“He needs to get back on the horse, Sheffield.”
McNickel was the only person who refused to call him Dr. Sheffield.
But Wade found that understandable. After all, he was barely twenty-seven and looked even younger. It would be hard for a crotchety old geezer like McNickel to refer to him by a title like “doctor.”
What Wade didn’t like or understand was McNickel’s constant refusal to accept sound diagnoses. But the Joe Tashet case ended some of those problems.
Less than a month after Joe’s psych evaluation, his partner was shot and killed by a drunken husband as the two officers were investigating a domestic battle. At the first sign of a gun, Joe bolted, leaving his partner with no backup.
McNickel listened to Wade more often after that.
Some of Wade’s fantasies and expectations never came to pass. He didn’t work under cover. He was occasionally asked to evaluate suspects and appear in court, but McNickel ordered him to “play down the psychic bit and just do your job.”
Wade was often tempted to look inside McNickel’s head and find out what made the old man so bad-tempered. Maybe his sex life was lousy . . . though Wade’s own hadn’t exactly been fireworks either. His job kept him hopping. Most of his duties consisted of helping exhausted, bored, and/or disillusioned cops whose work lives were drastically invading their home lives. Time passed quickly.
On November 7, 2005, at 5:32 P.M., Wade met Detective Dominick Vasundara, a transfer from New York. Wade was finishing up some paperwork in his office late that afternoon when a deep voice sounded from the open doorway.
“Captain told me to see you.”
Looking up, Wade saw a man of medium height and stocky build, with stubble covering his wide jaw, and short black hair. He was dressed in faded jeans and a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. The man wasn’t large, but somehow he seemed to block the entire doorway.
“Can I help you?” Wade asked.
“Yeah, I’m Dominick. I don’t know what you can do. The captain told me to see you on my way out. Something about starting a file.”
Wade was tired. He’d had a long day, and the last thing he wanted to do was start a new file. He should already have this guy’s records anyway.
“Are you a transfer?”
“Yeah, New York.”
“Really? Did you request to come here?”
“All that stuff’s on my application.”
At that, Wade instantly entered Dominick’s mind. He was too beat to play verbal volleyball.
Expecting the new arrival to simply sit there for a few seconds dripping in attitude, Wade read a few normal, sexually motivated images before he saw surprise flicker across Dominick’s face.
“What the . . . ?” He blocked Wade. “Stay out of my head.”
“Did you feel that?” Wade sat up, startled. “Could you feel me focusing in on your thoughts?”
“What do you think I am, stupid?”
“No, but you shouldn’t have been able to—”
“Look, I’m not getting paid to be here yet. If you need anything, ask in a hurry and let me go.”
This guy was some piece of work. First, he acted as if setting up his psych file was an annoying chore, and then he acted as if someone pushing around inside his head was an everyday event.
“Do you want to get a beer?” Wade asked suddenly, surprising himself as much as Dominick.
“What?”
“I’ve been here since six this morning. There’s a little sports bar down the street . . . good nachos. Why don’t we finish up down there?”
The unshaven New Yorker stared at him for a few seconds and then shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Why not? I’m not trying to be a pain. People have just been jacking me around since noon. I thought I’d be out of here a couple hours ago.”
Three beers later, they were sitting in Spankey T’s Sports Bar watching the Seattle Seahawks get killed by the Chicago Bears on a large-screen TV. Wade sat there struggling for a way to broach the subject of how Dominick had known about blocking a psychic entry. The problem solved itself when his companion turned to him during a time-out and asked, “Hey, where’d you learn telepathy?”
For a moment the question threw him. “I didn’t learn it anywhere ...”
Wade had never considered himself bigoted or socially biased. But hearing a word like “telepathy” come out of Dominick’s mouth surprised him. He usually imagined overmuscled guys with Bronx accents who wore torn-up sweatshirts would speak in one- or two-syllable words.
“I learned to focus it,” he went on, “at the Psychic Research Institute in Colorado.”
“Really? Did your folks sell you?”
“What? No . . . I wanted to go. My folks were ready to burn me at the stake. How’d you know to block me?”
Dominick put his beer down. “Spent a couple years with kids like you in high school. Some old guys, doctors, paid my folks a lot of money to borrow me for a while.”
The tiny hairs on Wade’s arms began to prickle. “Why?”
“I can touch things—almost anything—and tell you where they’ve been and who else has touched them.”
“Psychometry?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you involved with a research center?”
“A what? No, it wasn’t like that. These guys worked for NYU, in this little building off campus. They had about six of us. They made us do a lot of stupid things. Pretty useless. One guy a little younger than me had what you have—telepathy. He and I used to practice on each other.”
Wade sat there, fascinated. Even at the institute, psychometry was an unusual ability. Dominick spoke of it in the same tone he might use to say he was good at calculus.
“So what made you join the police force?” Wade asked.
His companion’s forehead wrinkled slightly, as though he wasn’t sure how to answer. “I couldn’t always, you know, do it . . . when they gave me things to examine. Sometimes I could see dozens of pictures about an object, who it belonged to, where it’d been. But sometimes I didn’t see anything.”
Wade didn’t follow him. “So that made you want to be a cop?”
“No. One day Dr. Morris—he worked with me the most—shows up with this guy in a suit. I was about fifteen then. Anyway, they take me into a back room and hand me a ripped-up white sweater with dried blood all over it.”
Wade went cold. “What happened?”
“I threw up.” Dominick’s voice dropped, and he seemed to slide uncomfortably back into the past.
“I’m sorry,” Wade whispered. The description was too close to home.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad,” Dominick went on, “but they didn’t believe everything I told them.”
“What did you see?”
“A dark-haired guy with green eyes, wearing a black tux. He tore this girl’s throat open with his teeth and started drinking her blood. Since she was wearing the sweater, I saw it all through her eyes. I gave a full description of the guy. Three witnesses, including an informant bartender, claimed to see someone who exactly matched the description leave the Garden Lounge with her less than an hour before she died.”
“Did they ever arrest anyone?”
“No, I don’t think so. I was just a kid.”
“So you joined up to help?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Wade looked into his glass at the foaming beer. This man sitting next to him certainly wasn’t someone he’d actively seek out as a friend. But he felt a strange companionship, an understanding.
“I forgot you’re the staff shrink,” Dominick said. “You think I’m cracked, don’t you?”
“No, I was just thinking about how you got involved with the force. We have a lot in common. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.”
Dominick looked away. “I gotta go. It’s getting late, and I just flew in this morning.”
“Where’re you staying?”
“I’m going to find a hotel. Someone told me apartments are pretty cheap. I’ll start looking tomorrow.”
“Compared to New York? Hell, yes. Hey, my couch folds out into a bed. You could crash there tonight. We can pick up a newspaper on the way home. You could go through the classifieds and call on apartments from my place tomorrow. I’ll be at work all day.”
“You married?”
“Me? No, if I was, she’d divorce me for criminal negligence. Job keeps me hopping.” He jumped off the barstool. “Come on.”
Dominick looked too tired to argue. They picked up a pizza and a newspaper on the way home. That was the beginning.
Dominick found a one-bedroom apartment only a mile from Wade’s place. It often struck Wade as odd that the two of them had little in common and never discussed personal matters, but they spent four or five evenings a week together, just watching movies or going out for beer. Some nights, Wade would sit at his desk in the living room and work while Dominick just hung around entertaining himself. They seemed comfortable without having to talk.
Instead of sticking out like a sore thumb, Dominick fit in well at the Portland precinct. He was fair, hard, tough, never late for work, and wrote up reports with remarkable clarity and accuracy. He displayed a few eccentricities. For one, he carried a .357 revolver instead of a more standard-issue automatic pistol. He said he’d learned to shoot with this gun and refused to replace it. And two, he seemed to possess no sense of humor—none. But these things were minor in the grand scheme.
“I wish we could clone him,” Captain McNickel said.
The one problem Wade had with his friend was an unfamiliar feeling of blindness. He hadn’t realized how heavily he relied upon telepathy in his job. With Dominick, he had to actually judge facial expressions and reactions. Making a correct analysis seemed impossible.
“Why don’t you let me in?” he asked one day while riding to lunch in Dominick’s police car. “I’m trained at this, you know. I could make a decent evaluation if you’d just stop blocking me.”
“No. How’d you like it if I picked up a pair of your underwear and told you who you screwed last week?”
Wade winced. “It wouldn’t be like that. Most people think about sex forty times a day. I’m used to that.”
“Just drop it.”
Wade became so concerned that he suggested to Captain McNickel they assign Dominick’s evaluations to another psychologist.
“I can’t do it,” Wade said. “I’m used to knowing exactly what they’re thinking. A normal psychologist would be accustomed to relying on instinct, on judgment calls. I’m not.”
“I hear you two have been hanging out together a lot.”
“Yes, we have . . . we have some things in common.”
“You two? Like what?”
“I don’t know. We both like football.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Just think about what I said, Cap, okay?”
McNickel took the advice under consideration, but Dominick always played the role of the perfect cop, so nothing came of it.
Years passed and little changed. On the morning of March 2, 2008, Wade and Dominick were riding around at the end of a night shift with a rookie trainee. The shift had been boring and uneventful. They were almost ready to call it a night and get some breakfast when a female voice on the radio asked them to check out a noise disturbance. The rookie acknowledged the call, and Dominick rolled his eyes.
“Great, I’m starving, and we get to call a halt to a beer blast. Now, in New York, nobody would even notice. They got noise twenty-four hours a day.”
Wade smiled.
They pulled up in front of an old Tudor-style home to the sound of classical music screaming out the windows.
“Jesus Christ, what is that?” Dominick growled.
“Tchaikovsky,” Wade answered with mock snobbery. “Francesca da Rimini.”
“Oh, thank you so much. Now I can die happy. No wonder the neighbors are complaining.”
All three got out of the car, but it was the rookie’s job to handle the situation. As they walked up the lawn, a half-dressed man burst out the front door and onto the porch.
Before anyone could react or even blink, Dom had his gun out and aimed. That’s another thing Dominick was always good for. As the man on the porch half turned before leaping off, Wade thought he saw dried blood in his hair and on his back. The whole world seemed frozen in a single moment. Wade’s feet wouldn’t move.
The man on the porch leapt off, crying out something none of them ever understood. On instinct, Wade reached out into his mind, looking for anything that might help. Then the impossible happened.
Fire from right in front of him lit up the morning sky. Flames burst from every pore of the man’s skin, as if someone had dumped gasoline all over him and pitched a lit cigarette.
But Wade didn’t smell any gas.
Then the pain hit him. His knees buckled.
“Dominick!”
Every muscle, every sinew of his body was being ripped open and left to bleed on the grass. All the separate little cords of his brain were exploding in an ugly mass. Pictures of a thousand deaths, a thousand lives lost, poured through him, and he was powerless to stop the visions.
He felt hands on his shoulders, holding him up off the grass.
“Call for help!” somebody yelled.
Then he felt her. The mind was feminine. He knew that from the first second of contact.
Pain.
Loss.
Terror.
Help me, he projected.
Then she was gone.
Incredibly strong hands lifted him and carried him through a doorway.
“Dom?”
Wade was four inches taller but twenty pounds lighter than his friend. Dominick laid him down on a couch as if he were a puppy.
“Wade, wake up.”
Wade sobbed once and grabbed his own head.
“Stop it!” Dominick’s voice cut through the echoing pain. “I don’t know what to do.”
“She’s in here.”
“Who’s in here?”
“There’s a woman in here, somewhere. Listen to me.”
For an answer, Dominick grabbed his shirt collar. “It was him. That guy who ripped the white sweater. It’s him. I saw his face. He’s everywhere. I can’t even think in here. You’ve gotta wake up!”
The agony in Wade’s head began to clear at the panic in Dominick’s voice. As he opened his eyes, the first things he noticed were coarse black hairs on the back of a hand grasping his shirt. Then he took in a pair of china-blue eyes on the brink of hysteria.
“Get out, Dom,” he whispered. “You should get out of here.”
If Wade had been Dominick, he simply would have picked his friend up and carried him outside. But he wasn’t. The ache in his head still lingered. He didn’t know what to do.
“I need some water,” he whispered. “And look for a woman. She’s here. Where is that rookie?”
“I don’t know. Are you awake?”
“Yeah, don’t touch anything. Go outside and call for backup.”
“It’s him, Wade. The one they wouldn’t believe me about. But he looked the same. Exactly the same as fifteen years ago.”
“Do you see a woman?”
“No, why do you keep asking that?”
“She’s here. She felt it.”
“Felt what?”
“When that man died . . . it hurt.”
It more than hurt, but he couldn’t explain it. Dominick’s eyes hadn’t cleared yet. Something about the room had him nearly hyper-ventilating.
“Get me outside,” Wade said. “I can’t think in here.”
Dominick dragged him outside. The porch seemed aged and faded, waiting to crumble like a yellow leaf in November. They moved past it and sat on the weed-filled grass, staring at the burning spot on the lawn.
“Do you smell gasoline?” Wade asked.
“No. Did you pick anything out of his head?”
“I didn’t have time.”
“It’s him. It’s the same guy.”
Wade didn’t know how to respond and thankfully didn’t have to. Two squad cars with blaring, screaming sirens flashing red and blue lights pulled up. Uniformed men were running all around them.
“Where’s the body?” someone asked.
“Right there,” Dominick answered coldly, pointing to the burning spot on the grass.
“What happened?”
“You figure it out.”
Dominick looked back at the house. “We have to go back. Can you walk?”
“Yeah,” Wade answered, “but you aren’t going back in that house. The cavalry’s here now. Let them check into it.”
“If you won’t come with me, I’ll go by myself.”
“It can’t be the same man. Think about what kind of a coincidence that would be. The same murderer from New York living in Portland—after you’ve transferred to the local police force—and you just happen to be on duty the morning he decides to cash his own ticket? I don’t think so.”
“Then come back inside with me.”
Wade was exhausted, almost beyond caring. He needed to sleep this off. But something in Dominick’s voice made him listen. Dom could be aggressive and high-strung and difficult to know, but he wasn’t irrational.
“One condition,” Wade said.
“What?”
“You let me in your head the whole time. If I feel you losing it, we leave.”
Dominick’s face darkened. For a moment, Wade thought he was going to hear the usual “No way.”
“Okay,” Dominick answered.
“You’ll leave if I tell you?”
“Yeah, just come on.”
For months Wade had wanted permission to read his friend’s mind, explore his thoughts. Now that it was actually happening, he felt almost too drained, too numb to go through with it.
Upon reentering the house, the first thing they heard was one of the other cops choking in the kitchen.
“There.” Dominick pointed to a large photograph over the hearth. He walked right over and put his hands on it.
The girl in the picture was different from anyone Wade had ever seen. She reminded him vaguely of a stalk of wheat. Her age was difficult, impossible, to peg. She might have been thirteen or twenty-eight. Her huge hazel-brown eyes complemented her pale face and blond hair. She sat on a forest-green velvet couch, with shelves of leather-bound books behind her head.
“Who is she?” Wade whispered.
Dominick’s eyes remained closed. When he didn’t answer, Wade gently reached into his mind and was blocked instantly.
“Stop it, Dom.”
No answer.
“Hey, you guys,” a middle-aged officer blurted out, running into the living room. “Hurry up. Jake found something downstairs.”
“What?” Wade snapped.
“Loose boards and a stink you won’t believe.”
Dominick opened his eyes.
“Bodies,” he said. “Jake found bodies.”
Wade stared at him. “How do you know that?”
Dominick pulled his hands off the photo and moved quickly toward the stairwell. The first thing Wade noticed in the cellar was the smell—different, sweeter than the stench from the kitchen. Dominick dropped down to help Jake tear at the floor.
“They’re here, under the boards,” he said to Jake. “You smelled them, didn’t you?”
Wade had completely lost control of the situation. He’d lost control of Dominick, lost control of reality. Then he looked up from the sight of the two men pulling at the floorboards to a painting resting against the wall, a misty, ethereal oil painting.
“Dom, come look at this.”
His friend ignored him and kept on digging like a man possessed. Wade walked over to the painting. Her face was unmistakable: the girl in the photo upstairs. Her eyes stared out at him as though she were right here and alive.
Down at the bottom of the portrait was an unintelligible signature and a date: 1872. Was it authentic? How could this girl be the same one in the photo upstairs? Her great-great-grandmother perhaps? He looked closer. No, it was the same girl. No two people could share eyes like that.
Jake began choking. Without turning around, Wade let his mind drift into the young, retching policeman’s. He saw through Jake’s eyes and found himself staring at a half-decomposed woman with red hair. He wasn’t surprised.
“Dom, please stop digging and come look at this.”
A moment later, he felt his friend standing next to him.
“Touch it,” Wade whispered. “It’s the same girl, isn’t it?”
Dominick stared at the painting for a long time. Then he reached one hand out and placed it over her face.
“What the hell are you guys doing?” Jake managed to spit.
Wade ignored him. “Is it the same girl?”
Dominick’s china-blue eyes somehow seemed even lighter than usual. His fingers ran softly over the painting as though in a caress.
“Yeah, it’s her. I can’t tell anything else. She’s like a wall. Maybe the painting’s too old.”
“Will you two get away from that picture and call the coroner? We’ve got a mess over here.” Jake’s voice had grown stronger.
The room seemed small. Wade had turned to answer when Dominick’s hand closed over his wrist. It hurt.
“They aren’t going to believe us, Wade. They’ll say we’re crazy or put us on vacation.”
Everything in Wade wanted to argue, wanted to play this horror by the book. To do otherwise would mean making decisions. But he knew Dominick was right. Captain McNickel wouldn’t want to hear this, much less believe it.
“We’re on our own,” Dom said.
Wade didn’t look at the bodies. He stared at a mass of painted wheat-gold hair. “Don’t say anything yet. We still need the precinct computers. I saw a red Mazda parked out front.”
Dom was aggressive and high-strung and hard to know, but this time he was right. They were on their own.