Winona had disappeared at some previous point, but no one remembered when she had left the party. There had been too many kids, most of them drunk or stoned.
Caleb walked into the pine forest to the north. A trail of beaten-down vegetation led away from the sand, and he followed it.
It curved around and joined the main path between the beach and the road. The kids might have been followed by the kidnapper, who broke off into the woods and observed them from there until he—or she—found a chance to grab Winona. Could the mystery woman have been the kidnapper? It was certainly possible.
And Winona, fascinated as she was, might have gone looking for the woman again. And the woman might have led her to the road while the others were busy drinking and smoking and pairing off in the moonlight.
Winona would have gone willingly, fascinated by everything the woman had told her.
He took a seat on the sand about two feet beyond where the waves washed up and closed his eyes.
There was a reason why he had gone to work for Adam Harrison, and this was the time and place to put his mind to work. He still had a tendency to balk at the idea, but he’d learned that whatever it was—logic operating in the far recesses of his mind, an ability everyone possessed but didn’t know how to tap into—it helped stopped murderers. And if he could prevent the death of another human being, then it would be cowardly, perhaps even criminal, not to do everything he could. His mental re-creations, as he thought of them, weren’t available on call or at all times, but sometimes, when he concentrated, he could see the little thing that everyone else had missed and gain insight into the truth, find a clue to follow.
The sea breeze drifted by him, and he remembered the day when he had discovered that he could use intense concentration to somehow intuit what had happened at a crime scene. He still refused to believe that he was actually seeing the past, that something psychic was at work. The way he saw it, he just put the pieces together and, like a filmmaker, created a visual image.
But that first time…
He’d been on a beach then, as well.
His cousin Elisia, just seven years old, had somehow strayed from a family gathering at a busy beachside picnic area. People had been everywhere, eating and laughing. A man dressed as a clown had been making balloon animals for a donation of a dollar apiece to delight the children. It had been easy to lose track of one little girl.
She hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes when Aunt Julia had begun to grow frantic. Everyone had assumed she was still with the other children, who were all playing hide-and-seek, until his aunt had realized Elisia wasn’t with them anymore.
Caleb had been twelve at the time, and the last time he had seen Elisia, she had smiled and winked at him before hurrying away to hide.
The police had been called immediately, and while everybody rushed around shouting and searching, Caleb had stood to one side, retreating somewhere deep into his mind. As he lost himself in thought, his cousin’s pretty and precocious face had risen before his eyes. He’d seen her smile and wink again. He saw her looking for a good place to hide, and he saw the balloon man bring a finger to his lips and smile, showing her that she could hide inside the restroom.
Someone had already looked inside the restrooms, but he’d shouted and gone running toward them anyway. You couldn’t see her at first. Her killer had folded her tiny body and left it on a toilet, then jammed the door shut.
If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the look on his aunt’s face when her child was found. He would never forget the sound of her hysterical sobs. He would never forget anything about that day, the heat of the sun, the feel of the breeze, the smell of saltwater.
But they’d caught the clown. And a cop had told Caleb that the man might have gotten away in the time it would have taken them to put the pieces together, if it hadn’t been for Caleb. It had been small comfort for the loss of Elisia.
He’d been enamored of Jacques Cousteau up until that point, convinced that he was going to become an expert diver and deep sea explorer. He’d planned to find lost colonies and sunken treasure.
After that day, he’d known without question that he wanted to be a cop. To do something, anything, to stop predators like the one who had killed his cousin.
He never forgot the past, but he didn’t dwell on it. For years he hadn’t known how to use his “talent,” not through his days in the military, college or the academy. He hadn’t understood his ability until he met Adam Harrison, who had sought him out, and then funded him through his master’s degree, asking only that he consider coming to work for Harrison Investigations to use his talent in return.
But to this day, Caleb hated clowns.
And today…