“Jim, what the hell?” Archer half turned toward Hollis, the closest to him, long enough for her to reach out silently to take the rifles and shotgun from him and place them on the table.
“You have to take them. You have to keep them.” Jim Lonnagan’s voice was low, hurried. “Keep them away from me. Away. I nearly killed her, Jack. I nearly killed Kim. I had my hands around her throat, and—and the voice said to kill her, said I had to, and I was listening, Jack, I wanted to do it! Just like I wanted to buy these damned— Take the guns, please, lock me in a cell before I hurt her, before I hurt anybody—”
His face was ghostly pale and beaded with sweat, fear and desperation coming off him in waves.
DeMarco, who had risen as the others had when his partner did, saw Hollis lift one hand and rub her left temple hard, her gaze fixed on the deputy and her expression holding both pain and anxiety. He could feel it through her, the emotions so powerful they were like a punch in the gut. And even so, she was trying to probe, to understand what was fighting so hard to influence this deputy.
Archer accepted Lonnagan’s gun belt, almost tossing it onto the table, then snapped out to the deputies standing stock-still a few feet away in the bullpen, “Go check on Kim, now.”
Both started, jolted out of their frozen bewilderment, and hurried toward the front door.
Lonnagan was still babbling, virtually unintelligible now, his voice a desperate tumble of words chased by terror. He grasped fistfuls of Archer’s slightly open jacket, the plea for help obvious even if coherency was beyond him.
“Jim—Jim, calm down. It’s all right. Jim—”
Both Victoria and Logan had jumped up when Hollis rose, and both had instinctively given way to the distraught deputy, backing away from him and the table. Almost directly behind him, Victoria stared at the deputy for just a moment, then met Hollis’s gaze.
Hollis nodded once.
Immediately, Victoria stepped close enough to Lonnagan so she could reach up and touch either side of his head with both hands.
“Sleep,” she said quietly.
The babble was cut off as though a switch had been thrown, and Lonnagan dropped, caught expertly by Victoria. Logan stepped forward to help automatically, and Galen moved around the table toward them.
It all happened within the space of a few seconds.
“There’s a couch in the sheriff’s office across the hall,” Hollis told them, the pain and anxiety no longer gripping her features. “Take him in there for now.”
Archer stared down at his deputy, his face still holding shock, and watched as Galen and Logan carried the unconscious man out of the conference room. He looked blankly at Victoria. “What did you do?” he asked.
“It’s all right, Sheriff, he’s just sleeping,” Victoria replied, calm. “I think he needed to, don’t you?”
Archer stared at her a moment longer, then looked at Hollis. He obviously wanted to ask a dozen questions, but only one emerged. “What the hell?”
“Sit down, Jack,” she said.
The sheriff found himself sitting down at the table just where his deputy had stood, hardly noticing that Victoria silently pulled out the chair for him. He looked at the pile of guns before him and repeated, “What the hell?” rather helplessly.
The others were reclaiming their seats, joined in less than a minute by Galen and Logan. Hollis waited until everybody was there again before she spoke to the sheriff, and even though the words were somewhat flip, her tone was anything but.
“Good news, bad news,” she said to Archer. “The good news is, your deputy didn’t murder his wife or anyone else.”
“And the bad news?”
“He almost did.”
Archer was staring at her. “Jim Lonnagan is a good man.”
“I don’t doubt it. Did you listen to what he was saying, Jack? A voice told him to buy the guns. A voice told him to kill his wife. A voice he very badly wanted to obey. I seriously doubt he’s in the middle of a psychotic break none of you saw coming. Any mental illness would have presented with symptoms long before now. So this is new. This was sudden. This was something no one, not you and not Deputy Lonnagan, could have seen coming. What I know, what I feel, is that he’s the one I’ve felt struggling so desperately not to give in. If he’d lost that struggle, he would have killed his wife. And maybe himself. Maybe others.”
Archer wearily rubbed his face with both hands in what was becoming a familiar gesture. “And if he’d killed Kim, but not himself? Would we have found him on his front porch smiling and blank like Elliot Weston? Or asleep like Leslie Gardner?”
“Probably one of those,” Hollis said in that steady voice. “Though more likely another successful suicide. He fought so hard, I doubt he could have lived with it if he’d been forced to kill his wife. But he fought it, Jack. And he won. That’s important. It’s the first real evidence we’ve had that whatever’s doing this can be fought, and not by resorting to suicide the way Sam Bowers did. It can be fought. And it can be defeated.”
“Energy?” There was no longer even disbelief in his voice.
“Some kind of energy. But energy alone can’t speak, not words. It can’t urge, command. Not without a guiding mind behind it, focusing and controlling it.”
“What does that mean? Somebody’s doing this? Somebody’s driving people to murder others?”
Hollis barely hesitated, knowing that the sheriff would be able to accept a somebody as an enemy far more easily than he would a something. Especially when the something pretty much defied description, far less definition.
Besides, she wasn’t absolutely positive a person or people weren’t behind it all. Somehow.
“That’s what it means. We’ll find out who’s behind it, Jack, I promise you. It’s what we do.”
He stared at her for a moment, then half nodded, something in his expression telling everyone in the room that he had reached his limit, at least for the day, that he literally couldn’t absorb any more of the weird and crazy.
“What about Jim? Will he wake up?”
Victoria replied, “In a couple of hours, probably. Unless—” She looked at Hollis, abruptly worried.
But Hollis was shaking her head. “I don’t think he’ll stay asleep longer than the nap you gave him. He resisted. He didn’t kill his wife or anyone else.” She looked at Archer. “It might be a good idea to have a doctor standing by for when he wakes. If he’s in the same state he was, sedation or an antianxiety med might be the best thing for him.”
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“Definitely, assuming he’s up to it. Not tonight, though. He needs to be a lot calmer when we talk to him, and I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next few hours. Hell, it may not happen at all. But I’d put him in a cell, Jack. If possible, not close to Elliot Weston. Both need to be watched.”
“Yeah, okay.” He glanced toward the empty bullpen.
Galen got to his feet. “Logan and I will carry him back to the cells, Sheriff. If you’ll lead the way.”
In the same numb voice, Archer repeated, “Yeah, okay.” Then he got up and led the other two men out.
Hollis noted that Logan had looked a bit pale, and she said to her partner, “I think he’s just realized.”
“Yeah, he has,” DeMarco responded quietly.
Victoria frowned at them. “What?”
“Logan never really had much luck building a shield,” Hollis said.
“Yeah, I know that. He’s never been able to keep out spirits. So?”
“The energy in this valley is affecting nonpsychics, obviously, if all our theories are right. It’s driven people to suicide or murder even if we don’t exactly understand how. Lonnagan fought it and didn’t kill, but we don’t know what damage may have been done to his mind during that struggle. The energy is also affecting us. Reese has a double shield, and he can still feel it. I can feel it. You and Logan have been aware of it.”