“Okay, maybe I need to qualify my statement. I respect you. Not sure about the other psychic counselors. Lot of phonies out there.”
“Sadly, that is all too true.” She took a cautious sip of the tea. “Which is why I’m thinking of changing careers.”
“What?”
“I like this detecting business.”
“I can tell,” he growled.
“All modesty aside, I feel I have a certain flair for it.”
“You do,” he agreed. “But where, exactly, are you going with this?”
“I’ve been solving historical murder cases in a fictional sense for the past two years for Dead of Night. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about researching cold cases from Evelyn. I’ve learned a lot from you, too. In fact, I’ve picked up several very helpful pointers in the course of our partnership.”
“Gwen, if this is going where I think it’s going—”
“And then there’s my dream therapy work.” Gwen’s enthusiasm was growing stronger by the second. Her eyes sparkled. “When you think about it, that has a lot in common with what you do—searching for clues, understanding motives. It’s like I’ve been serving an apprenticeship all these years. Now I’m ready to come out of the shadows.”
He was getting a bad feeling, a real deer-in-the-headlights kind of feeling.
“What are you planning to do when this case is over?” he asked.
“I’m going to open a psychic detective agency,” Gwen announced.
She was damn near incandescent now, he thought.
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” He set his cup down in the holder. “Gwen, listen to me, this business isn’t what you think it is.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t plan to compete with Coppersmith Consulting,” she said quickly. “I’m not interested in industrial espionage or secret agent work.”
“Okay, that’s a good thing because—”
“I’m thinking more along the lines of small, quiet murder cases and missing persons work.”
“There are no quiet cases of murder, and when people go missing it’s usually for a reason—often a dangerous reason.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful.”
“That’s supposed to reassure me? Gwen, you read auras for a living. You fix bad dreams, remember?”
“I just explained that background will be very helpful in my investigations.” Excitement and energy heated her eyes. “This feels right, Judson. It’s like I’ve been floundering around all my life trying to find myself and figure out what I ought to be doing.”
“You sound like my sister, Emma.”
“I’ve found my passion, Judson, just as you have. I’m sure your sister will find hers, too, eventually.”
For a nightmarish instant, he was back in the flooded caves, sucking up the last of the air in the tank. It took him a couple of seconds to breathe again.
He wanted her to feel passion for him, he realized, not for the investigation business. But she had a point. He did have a passion for the work that he did. How could he argue that she shouldn’t feel something similar? Because it could be dangerous. That was the reason. The thought of Gwen going off on her own to investigate small, quiet murder cases scared the living daylights out of him. But he also had to admit that he understood.
They sat quietly for a time, the rain drizzling steadily on the windshield. The surging energy of the falls was a palpable force that penetrated the SUV. Something deep inside Judson responded to the wild currents. The steady, unrelenting roar was muffled by the closed windows, but it was always there in the background. He wondered absently how many eons the water had been cascading over the cliff. You didn’t have to be psychic to know that there was such a thing as the paranormal. You only had to look at the forces of nature to realize that energy existed across a vast—perhaps an endless—spectrum that extended far beyond what people, with their limited senses and puny machines, could measure.
“Sometimes the hunt doesn’t end well,” he said after a while. “Sometimes I get the answer too late to do anyone any good. Sometimes people won’t accept the answers I come up with. Sometimes I don’t find any answers.”
“Sometimes I can’t fix a dreamscape,” Gwen said. “Sometimes my clients won’t accept the answers I come up with. Sometimes I can’t find the answers, either. But at least as a private investigator I’ll be able to find some of them.”
“The major drawback to investigation work is that you have to deal with the clients,” he said.
“They can’t be any more frustrating or difficult than my dream therapy clients.”
“Maybe not, but they can be more dangerous. My last client tried to kill me.”
“Good grief.” She swallowed hard. “Well, I promise I’ll be careful.”
“You keep saying that.”
“No offense, but given your career path, you aren’t in a position to lecture anyone else about the importance of not taking chances. Neither of us can ignore our talent, Judson.”
“This conversation isn’t going well, is it?” he said. “Maybe we should get back to the investigation that we’re trying to work on here.”
“Okay.”
He settled into the corner and rested one arm along the back of the seat. “It occurs to me that Zander Taylor may have given you more hard facts than you realize.”
Gwen’s brows elevated slightly. “What makes you say that?”
“A skilled liar is usually smart enough to mix in as much of the truth as possible. It makes for a more convincing story.”
“One thing I do know about Zander is that he was an excellent liar,” Gwen said.
“In which case, it’s possible that at least some of the information he gave Evelyn when he applied to the study was true,” Judson said.
“Even if you’re right, how do we sort the wheat from the chaff?”
Judson closed his eyes and summoned up a little energy, putting himself into the zone—into the head of the dead psychopath.
“Got a hunch that when we go looking, we’ll find out that Taylor really was adopted and that his adoptive parents were murdered—maybe by Taylor himself, given what I know of his para-psych profile—but that’s not our problem now.”
“Sometimes I wonder how many people he did kill, but I suppose we’ll never know,” Gwen said somberly. “Maybe I don’t want to know.”