Protector of One

Gage leaned forward now, picking up a pen and holding it over a legal pad. “Can you organize it in any way?”

Kerry compressed her lips before speaking. “It was like a rush of things, disjointed, some not clear, others almost too clear. Sounds. I heard men laughing. I heard them opening cans, and could smell the beer. I smelled cordite. I saw…I saw…I saw two menlying on the ground. They were facing each other, and each had an arm over the other’s body. And blood. There was blood everywhere…They were shot. Twice each. Once in the chest, once in the head. But they weren’t lying like that when they were shot. They were dragged there. Positioned.”

Her eyes snapped open. “It’s supposed to look like a message, but it’s not.”

That was the moment Adrian felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Kerry waited, but she hardly saw Gage and Adrian now. She had returned to this morning, that bright beautiful morning that had been suddenly and inexplicably blighted by evil. At some level she smelled the bacon burning on the stove, but her mind had attached itself far away from the kitchen.

“Kerry?” Gage’s voice recalled her.

“Yes?”

“Can you wring any more details out of what you sensed?”

She met his gaze and saw something there, something that suggested she hadn’t just flipped a brain circuit. “You mean what I saw was real?”

Emma squeezed her arm again. Gage hesitated. “I’m not supposed to discuss the investigation. So can we just say that you hit on something that no one outside the department should know?”

“Oh, God.” Kerry lowered her head, her stomach sinking at the same time. “I don’t need this. I don’t want this…this whatever it is.”

“I don’t blame you,” Emma said quietly. “But for whatever reason, it happened.”

Kerry nodded, fighting for equilibrium and battering down the fright. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just say that somehow, some way, I saw something that was real. At least in part. You want me to try to wring more information out of what I saw?”

“If you can.”

“It was all so jumbled, and I’ve been trying not to think about it all day.” Her fingers twisted together. “Let me think. Focus on it. But at this point I’m not sure I wouldn’t just confabulate stuff.”

“Wouldn’t it feel different?” Adrian asked, speaking for the first time.

Kerry looked at him, her jaw dropping a little. “Yes,” she said finally. “It would. There was something about what happened this morning that was so…real. Almost hyper-real.”

He nodded. “Then don’t worry about making things up. Just focus on what feels like that.”

“Good idea,” Gage remarked.

Kerry decided that would make a good guideline. Somewhere through her distress a flicker of humor emerged. “I’m not a pro at this. No practice to guide me.”

At that even the stern-faced Adrian smiled. “I’ve never consulted a psychic before so I don’t have any hints for you.”

“I’m not a psychic. I just—” She broke off suddenly. “Sorry. It doesn’t matter what I am or am not. Whatever this was, it happened. So I just need to make sure I tell you everything.”

Gage nodded encouragingly. “That’s the stuff. Then maybe you can go home and forget it.”

“That would be a relief. All right.” She closed her eyes again, this time not trying to skip quickly through the images that had imprinted themselves earlier that day, but instead to look hard at them.

“The victims were friends. One of them—there’s a woman starting to worry about him. A young woman. She wants to report him missing.”

“That’ll help,” Adrian said.

Kerry ignored him, reaching out into whatever it was that had happened this morning, unsure but driven to find something, anything that would get this off her back and help the police if she could.

“They’d been on a long hike,” she said. “Getting near the end. Several days, maybe a week. I see a camera. A camera was important to one of them. And a funnylooking hammer. They both had these hammers on their belts before they were killed. The murderer took them, and some other things.”

Where was all this coming from? But the words kept tumbling from her lips, sometimes fast, sometimes hesitant. “There’s more than one murderer,” she announced suddenly. “I get the feeling of competition. This won’t be the last killing.”

Then it was as if a bubble burst. Everything drained from her mind, leaving her relaxed. Whatever she had needed to do was done now. Finished.

She opened her eyes again, looking at the two men. “That’s it. It’s gone.”

“Gone?” Gage asked.

“Gone. The vividness is gone. It’s just like any memory now.”

Emma spoke. “That’s good. Now you’re free of it.”

Kerry poked around inside her own head as if she were using her tongue to find a sore tooth. “Yes,” she said presently. “It’s gone.” And with it all the pressure that had been working on her all day. Gone, too, was the sense of a presence. All of it, gone, and for the first time since the news had come on that morning, she felt like her old self.

“Thank God,” she said. A long sigh escaped her and she started to smile. “All right, that’s it. I told you. I hope it helps, but I’m done with it now.”

Gage rose and reached to shake her hand. “Thanks, Kerry. I appreciate it. You did help.”

Chapter Two (#u48216270-17f0-5877-9232-d8d8d556db35)

Fifteen minutes later, Kerry closed the front door of her house behind her and locked it. Home surrounded her with welcoming familiarity. The smell of burned bacon still clouded the air, however, and she immediately headed for the kitchen to clean up the mess she’d left behind. The congealed grits still sat beside the stove, now in a condition to be used for glue. The blackened strip of bacon looked like a desiccated finger. All of it went into the garbage disposal, and the dishes to soak in hot soapy water.

She used a can of air freshener throughout the house, spraying it freely, because the smell of burned bacon kept trying to carry her back to that morning. She had to get rid of it. Soon a lemony scent had erased the reminder.

From the freezer she chose a prepackaged dinner because she didn’t feel like cooking today. Ordinarily she made herself do it because it was healthier, but cooking for one was rarely fun, and tonight she just couldn’t face it.

Something in her had changed today, she realized as she carried her microwaved dinner into the living room and reached for the TV remote. Ordinarily she didn’t notice the silence of her house, but she was feeling it now, oppressively. Usually she picked up a book, not the TV remote, and only if she didn’t have papers to grade.

She had a stack of essays waiting for her, plenty of books nearby, but she needed the companionship of sound, even the manufactured sounds of television. She chose a nature program about birds—the sound of their songs felt cheerful—and tried to focus on the narrator’s voice only to discover a gloomy description of the decreasing number of birds in the U.S.

Maybe she’d assign an essay on conservation or the environment next week. Or maybe not. Reaching for the remote, she began flipping through channels seeking anything that would shake the cloud of murk that seemed to have descended.

In the end, though, she quit trying to distract herself. The vision may have loosened its grip, but the fact that it had occurred remained a problem. Instead of looking at this morning’s experience directly, though, she chose instead to move back in time, to the moment when she had, as they said, “touched the light.”

She’d read all the explanations of the experience, from both the scientific and religious sides. But none of it could erase or in any way diminish her experience. As much as she had loved in her life, she had never known a love like that. Just remembering it still had the power to leave her feeling homesick, the only word she could think of that even approached the yearning she felt for that moment out of time.

Nor could anyone or anything convince her that that love wasn’t waiting for her when she died the final time.

She had managed to fit that life-altering experience into herself and her being, and used it as a touchstone, a constant reminder of what she owed her fellow humans, the world as a whole.

But now this. What the hell had happened this morning? Now that she was free of its stranglehold, she needed to explain it somehow. Deal with it. Find a way to slip it into the defined realm of possibilities in her life. Most people weren’t comfortable with loose ends and she certainly wasn’t.

Apparently, from the reaction she had received—unless Gage and Adrian had been indulging her—she had said something that got their attention. But what did it mean?