“Not like he’s a great loss to the world,” Judson said.
“You’re not taking this seriously, are you?”
“I’m taking you very, very seriously, Gwendolyn Frazier.”
He tightened his grip on her face and pulled her mouth down to his. He kissed her until she wrapped herself around him once more.
* * *
A LONG TIME LATER, he awoke to the feel of someone shaking him gently.
“Judson,” Gwen said.
“What?” He did not open his eyes.
“Judson, wake up.”
The urgency in her voice brought him fully awake. He sat up swiftly and used his other vision to quarter the room, searching for the threat. Nothing of a dangerous nature presented itself.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Gwen was on her knees amid the tumbled bedding. Excitement blazed in her eyes. “That’s just it, nothing’s wrong.”
He sank back against the pillows. “I think I’m missing the point here. If nothing’s wrong, why the hell are you acting like there is something wrong?”
“We both fell asleep.”
“Yeah. Felt good. I haven’t been sleeping too well lately and I needed the rest. Nothing like great sex to do the trick. Better than meds, that’s for damn sure.”
“Yes, you are missing the point. Judson, we both fell asleep. Side by side. I was dreaming and you didn’t even twitch.”
“I try not to twitch too often,” he said. “It makes people nervous.”
“This is no joke. You are the first person I have slept next to in my entire adult life who hasn’t had a really bad reaction to my dream aura.”
“Oh, that.” He stretched his arms overhead. “Between you and me, I wasn’t expecting to run screaming into the night.”
She ignored that. “I was planning to send you back to your own room before I drifted off, but I fell asleep instead. So did you.”
“Probably all that exercise,” he explained.
“You were sleeping quite soundly.”
“Yes, I was, wasn’t I? Can I go back to sleep now?”
“I have a theory,” she said. “It’s just a theory, mind you, but there is a certain logic to it.”
“I’m going to have to listen to this theory before I get to go back to sleep, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are.” She was clearly having trouble containing her excitement. “I think that because you are a strong talent, yourself, you have a kind of immunity to me.”
He raised a finger to silence her. “Now there is where you are wrong, Dream Eyes.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I am anything but immune to you. Just the opposite.”
He pulled her back into his arms and kissed her until she stopped talking.
Twenty
Sometime later, he opened his eyes again when he felt Gwen slide out of bed. He knew she was trying to be discreet about it. Probably headed for the bathroom, he thought. But when he saw her put on the robe and lean down to pick up the map that had fallen to the floor, he realized something else was going on.
He levered himself up on his elbows. “Everything okay?”
“What?” Surprised, she glanced back at him. “Yes, sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you. A few minutes ago, I woke up and decided to try the road trip dream again. I went back to the start, back here to Wilby, and I saw a pattern.” She moved to the table and spread the map out across the surface. “But it was all wrong.”
Her urgency got through to him. He shoved aside the covers, sat up and reached for his pants. Zipping his fly, he crossed the room to the desk.
“Tell me about the pattern and what’s wrong with it,” he said.
“I assumed going into the dream that this was a map of towns and places that Evelyn intended to visit for research purposes. But there are too many towns marked.”
“There are only a half-dozen circled.”
“Yes, but that’s about four, maybe five too many. You see, Wesley operates with a tight budget. He doesn’t like to pay for airfare and lodging for a scouting crew to check out the location unless it promises to be good. It’s highly unlikely she would have selected six towns for the next episode of Dead of Night. And if she was working on a big project involving multiple locations, I think she would have talked it over with me and probably Wesley as well.”
He flattened his hands on the table and examined the six towns. “You’re thinking that there’s a connection between these locations? Some paranormal significance?”
“No, well, not exactly, at least not in terms of legends about haunted houses or paranormal vortexes. In my dream, Evelyn told me to go back to the beginning. That was my intuition reminding me that this is the same kind of pattern that she and I uncovered after Zander Taylor went over the falls.”
Judson’s senses stirred. “The two of you were able to identify some of the locations of his previous kills. You concluded that he had targeted people who claimed to be psychic.” He flipped the map over and looked at the six names that had been written there. “I need fifteen minutes on my computer.”
* * *
TEN MINUTES LATER he shut down the obituary page of the newspaper he had been studying and checked off the last name on the list that Ballinger had made on the back of the map.
“That’s it,” he said. “Six towns, six deaths, all by natural causes, all within the past eighteen months or so. The names of the deceased match the names on the map. But if someone has started killing again with the camera, there’s one big difference this time.”
“What?” Gwen asked.
“None of the victims was a practicing psychic, real or fake. According to the obituaries, none of them was making his or her living by claiming paranormal talents.”
“I don’t know why the pattern is different, but someone is killing again, the same way Zander Taylor did—by paranormal means.” Gwen drummed her fingers on the table. “Evelyn somehow stumbled onto the truth.”
“The murderer realized she was tracking him so he killed her?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Judson thought about it. “He took her computer and cell phone, hoping to get rid of any traces of her research that might lead the cops to him.”
“He couldn’t have known about the map and where it was hidden,” Gwen said. “Either that or he was unable to get into the mirror engine to retrieve it. I told you, not everyone can handle the psi in that machine. But this doesn’t make sense. Why the change in pattern?”