Sudden Insight

Was Jake Harper’s harsh judgment right? Should she have warned Evelyn Morgan about what she’d seen? Had she played a role in her death by keeping silent? Maybe Evelyn would have left New Orleans. Maybe that wouldn’t have done any good, like in that book Appointment in Samarra, where the guy is heading for death no matter what he does.

She squeezed her hands into fists, grappling with the what-ifs.

She came back to the woman herself. There had been a strong streak of determination in Evelyn Morgan. She wouldn’t have run. She would have stayed around to accomplish her mission—whatever it was—but maybe she would have moved up her timetable. What if the meeting had been last night and Evelyn had left town before her murderer arrived?

Rachel had never felt so conflicted about a reading. True, she’d seen death in the cards before. But not murder.

Well, she hadn’t known it was murder. The cards hadn’t been that specific. And as she’d told Jake, there was always the chance she’d gotten it wrong.

She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to banish the woman’s image from her mind. As she tried to focus on something else, her thoughts jumped back to Jake Harper. Another upsetting subject. For too many reasons.

All her life she’d felt a little apart from other people. No, to be brutally honest, she’d felt a lot apart. People made connections that she simply couldn’t manage herself.

Over the years she’d had lovers. The physical part had been all right, but she’d longed to find a soul mate—someone who would understand her and be there for her no matter what happened.

It had never come to pass. Somehow, she always put emotional distance between herself and other people because it felt as though something was missing in the relationship. Did she create that? Or was she missing some cues about human relations that came easily to everyone else?

When she and Jake Harper had met on the street, when they’d touched, she’d felt a zing of awareness that was totally alien to her.

She’d wanted to burrow into his arms. At the same time, she’d wanted to run from him. But she’d gone back to his restaurant, and when he’d started stroking her and kissing her, everything from the encounter on the street had only become more vivid.

She’d felt a need for him that burned in her brain and in her blood. Even though it had frightened her, she’d clung to him.

The need had been the same with him. She knew it from the way he’d kissed her with an urgency that took her breath away. And from what she’d read in his mind. He was a man, and lust should have been enough to keep him focused on what they were doing.

Instead, when he’d stumbled on the information that Rachel had anticipated Evelyn’s death, he’d pulled away.

Because he was shocked that she hadn’t warned the woman? Or because the intimacy had triggered that Vulcan mind-meld thing, and he’d been as confounded by it as she?

She wanted to ask him. At the same time she heard an inner warning to stay as far away from him as she could.

And then there was the headache. Had the intimate contact been responsible for that, too? And made it hard to think clearly?

Trying to wrest her mind away from Jake, she crossed the room and turned on the television set. The hotel death had made the evening news.

But there wasn’t much more information than they’d picked up on the street. A woman had been found dead in her hotel room when the maid had come in to turn down the bed and put a piece of chocolate on the pillow.

Rachel fired up her laptop and got a web account of the incident. When she didn’t find anything new, she picked a deck of tarot cards from the shelf beside her easy chair. She had collected them over the years. There were modern interpretations. Fantasy versions. A Gothic deck with witches and vampires. But she usually ended up going back to the Rider-Waite deck because that was what she’d learned on, and she knew the cards so well.

She had never been good at doing readings for herself. Particularly anything formal. Instead of laying out one of the classic patterns, she shuffled the cards and cut, pulling out one at random.

The Lovers. Oh, great. Apparently she couldn’t get away from the heated scene between herself and Jake Harper.

Were they getting together again?

She shuffled a second time, and got the Magician. Did that mean she wanted to find a new direction in life? The card said that everything she needed was there—if she wasn’t afraid to reach for what she wanted. She had the tools and the power. Or did she?

IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, Mickey Delaney sat in front of the television set, waiting for Tanya to come home from one of her shopping trips. She liked to buy things. A lot of the time it was things she didn’t need, like clothing or jewelry, but he didn’t complain. What was the harm? If it made her happy, let her spend money. They could always get more.

“Yeah, money’s not a problem,” he said aloud just before an item on CNN caught his attention.

He’d turned it on because he liked to keep up with stuff. Now one of the talking heads was giving an account of a murder in New Orleans.

“The woman found dead in her New Orleans hotel room yesterday has been identified as …”

“Evelyn Morgan,” Mickey said.

The name had leaped into his head before the guy said it.

He didn’t know why, but he waited to see if the announcer said the same thing.

“Evelyn Morgan.”

“Okay!”

“She has no known relatives, and her reasons for being in the city have not been established, but it appears that robbery was the motive.”

Mickey was still focused on the way he’d picked up her name. It was like knowing the phone was going to ring and knowing who would be on the other end of the line, but this seemed more important than a phone call.

A little jolt of fear sizzled through him.

Was Evelyn Morgan going to mess up what he and Tanya had? Was that why he’d known her name?

Mickey shook his head. Sometimes when he woke up, he had to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe that his new life was real. As a kid he had to endure the constant fighting of his parents. He was using drugs by the time he was fourteen. When good old Mom and Dad had kicked him out, he’d hooked up with some of the dealers on the street in Baltimore.

Big business for the bosses. Small potatoes for the working stiffs.

He’d met Tanya Peterson at a Twelve-Step meeting after he’d gotten into some kind of do-good program run by a city charity.

They’d helped him clean up. Gotten him an apartment. But he’d known he was going to slip back into the bad life—until Tanya.

The first time they’d met, they’d clicked in a way he didn’t understand. It had been like a hit of some exotic drug, and he’d wanted more. Their thoughts had started running along the same lines—just like that.

They’d robbed a tourist down by the Inner Harbor, then gotten a hotel room where they could be alone.

They’d taken the money and headed for Chicago. Followed by Atlanta. New York. Cleveland.

Now they were back in Baltimore in a furnished Federal Hill town house they were subletting by the month because Tanya had gotten a yen for Maryland seafood.

She was going more on whims lately. Which was starting to worry him, and he hoped to hell that she wasn’t going to screw things up for the two of them.

When the door opened, he looked up. She had a couple of shopping bags with her, from Nordstrom and Macy’s and a couple of those high-priced women’s specialty shops.

She dropped the bags on the floor and crossed to him, just as the guy on TV started in about the murder again.

Tanya went very still. “I don’t like that at all.”

“It’s nothing to do with us,” he answered, hoping it was really true.