“Pretty much the same as he was this morning. Worse than yesterday, but not catatonic. Yet, anyway.”
Archer leaned on the table, staring down at the postmortem reports. “Did Hollis say anything before they went out about . . . what might happen today?”
“No. She said the whole town’s on edge, and that’s all she was feeling. Sort of a flood of emotion, I take it. She said she’d get to a landline and call in if she feels or senses anyone struggling the way Jim did. Anyone in trouble.”
“And until then, we wait.”
“I’m afraid so, Jack.”
* * *
? ? ?
HOLLIS HAD THOUGHT about it and talked it over with Reese, and had decided that her team needed to be as protected as possible, especially after the brief but chilling attempt to get inside her own mind. But since only three of her team possessed shields she felt would be strong enough—Reese, Victoria, and Galen—it was impossible to send everybody out in pairs.
And she wasn’t at all sure about Galen, whether he would even accept—
“I’ll go with Olivia,” he told her.
Hollis fought to keep from betraying surprise. Now, how had Bishop known? She was also aware of a surge of rather panicked uncertainty from Olivia, and smiled at the seemingly most fragile psychic on her team. “I think that’s a good idea. Reno can make up the third place. Sully, you go with Victoria and Logan. And Dalton comes with Reese and me.”
Dalton, not so angry today but very closed in on himself for someone without a shield, merely nodded without comment.
He really was not what Hollis had expected. At all.
It was Victoria who said somewhat uneasily, “I can’t extend my shield to cover anyone else, Hollis.”
“Yeah, I know. We can’t cover everybody with a borrowed shield, which is why I want one strong shielded mind with each group. Part of your job is to keep an eye on the others in your group.”
“Looking for?”
“Anything that bugs you. Distraction. Any actions or words that seem out of character. Just . . . anything you don’t like. All of you know each other better than Galen, Reese, and I know you; you’re more likely to notice something strange.”
Victoria said, “Damn. You mean something like an attempt to control somebody.”
“Yeah. It’s possible, Victoria. So we have to be prepared for the possibility.”
“Okay, but what happens if any of us notice something weird?”
“As soon as he found out about the energy, and especially about how screwed up communications are in the valley, Bishop had the technicians at the house work on a warning and tracking system for us. They’re installed in each vehicle as part of the radios.”
“Ah,” Sully said. “That’s what was in the bag Bishop sent with me to give Galen.”
“Yeah. Galen installed the enhanced radios in the three vehicles we brought to Prosperity yesterday and last night.”
“So we’re all on the same channel, so to speak.”
“Right. You’ll see tracking dots on the screens for each vehicle; that’s one reason we’re going to spread out in a line and basically work our way across the valley like that. We’re far enough apart to cover the valley, but close enough to each other to be able to make contact as quickly as possible.
“You notice anything wrong, get back to your vehicle and hit the red button on the radio—basically a panic button. Alerts will sound in the other vehicles, which is why nobody gets more than a hundred yards away from them. And the tracking dot for the group sounding the alert begins to flash, so we all know who needs help and where they are in relation to the rest of us.”
“And then?” Dalton asked dryly. “When everybody rushes to help?”
“Then we help.” Hollis looked him in the eye, daring him to question.
He smiled faintly, but didn’t push it. Hollis didn’t know whether to hope he trusted her and his other team members, or to be worried by his lack of concern for them.
She looked around at her team. “Everybody clear? We’re looking for disturbed ground. Old wells, caves, even a plowed field or a gully that looks odd. Trust your instincts. And alert the rest of us if you find anything you consider especially suspicious.”
“You mean if it feels wrong?” Olivia asked.
“Yes. If it feels wrong, if your instincts are in any way telling you to stay away, then do that. And call the rest of us.
“You have your maps with your search grids marked. When we’re all in position, I want to do a radio check. We should have voice communication now. I hope. But even if we don’t, the warning and tracking system is designed to work even in the middle of a much stronger energy field than we have here.”
In less than fifteen minutes, the team moved out from their hotel and headed to their positions beginning about two miles outside town and a mile from the site of the first death.
Then they went to work.
Hollis was surprised but pleased to find that Dalton was very familiar with maps and with the rougher terrain she had assigned them along one of the outer edge of the valley, though when she thought about it she wondered if she should have been surprised. He had, after all, ended up in Kodiak, Alaska. And given his nature, he probably hiked into the wilderness regularly in order to get as far as he could from other people.
Their radios worked, and rather well, which was another pleasant surprise. “But if we don’t find the source soon,” she said to Reese and Dalton, “I doubt that’ll be the case.”
“Is the energy still intensifying?” Reese asked her.
“I think it’s stronger than it was yesterday,” she told him. “Not so sure it’s stronger than it was this morning.” She hesitated, frowning slightly.
“Something?” Reese asked.
“I don’t know. Pretty much everybody in this valley is worried and horrified, so I’m getting a lot of that. A sort of . . . uncomfortable feeling of people watching each other. But for just a minute there, I thought I got a flash of something else. Something . . . driven.”
“A consciousness trying to control another mind?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” Her frown deepened, and she added slowly, “You know, that attempt this morning, as eerie as it was, wasn’t nearly as powerful as I’d expect. Unless . . .”
“Unless,” Dalton supplied, “everything that happened yesterday took more energy than whatever this consciousness expected. From the timeline you gave us, it looks like the worst murders took place early in the day. By the time Deputy Lonnagan managed not to kill his wife, it was late in the day. What if that was less about his ability to resist and more about how much energy had been expended in that . . . mad rush to kill as many people as possible while scaring the shit out of everybody else?”
Hollis blinked, surprised. She was sitting turned in her seat so she could see both her team members, and caught a glint of amusement from Reese.
“That could be it, couldn’t it?” Dalton asked absently as he studied the map.
“Yes,” Hollis told him. “That could definitely be it.”
“Makes sense,” Reese murmured.
“None of this makes sense,” Dalton said, and then added, “I think there’s a ravine up ahead we should probably check out.”
* * *
? ? ?
“FOR ALL THE world,” Hollis told Bishop much later when she reported in that night, “as if he’d said nothing remarkable. Did no one ever tell Dalton he’s a born cop?”
“Apparently not,” Bishop said.
“I think he’s right about the energy field. And I’m beginning to understand why we got the summons when we did. I’ll bet nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary on Monday. Either the energy field didn’t exist then, or else it was . . . contained . . . much lower to the ground and in a much smaller area around the source.”
“Do you believe it hadn’t begun affecting anyone yet?”