A Deadly Web (11 page)

“You think so?” Duran seemed mildly curious.

“I know so. He was before he met Solomon. And now, if he can tap her abilities in any way . . . if he’s connected to her . . . Well, we both know that’s an edge you just don’t have.”

“Perhaps,” Duran said. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

—

Tasha felt deeply disturbed, and on a skin-crawling level she had never felt before. “They . . . sold you? They planned to just hand you over to . . . to breed more psychics?”

“They didn’t understand.” Elizabeth Lyon’s voice was
quiet. “And they didn’t understand the worst of what they had done. They had also pledged themselves to aiding the ruthless, secretive organization Eliot belonged to, even though they knew their help would result in the death or destruction of other psychics.”

“That’s . . . horrible.”

“Yes. I couldn’t hate them for choosing to save my life whatever the cost, but I could no longer love them for it. I chose to begin a new life, alone, that very night. I had a little money left to me by my grandmother, enough to get by, if I was careful. And I had learned a few things by watching my father get what he wanted; I knew how to find resources. It was a simple matter to get forged identification in a new name.

“I became Elizabeth Storm. It seemed apt.”

“And you disappeared?”

“As far as my family and Eliot knew, yes. I gained admission to a small college in the midwest, and there my new life settled into a kind of peace. I had a part-time job and made new friends. I was never quite able to stop looking over my shoulder, and I had to guard myself every minute in order not to reveal my abilities, but I knew that I was as safe as I could possibly be. At least . . . I thought so.”

“But you weren’t.” It wasn’t a guess.

“No. I began to feel . . . watched. But before I could really focus on that and try to determine if it was really true, at the beginning of my senior year in college, I met John Brodie.”

Tasha blinked. “Oh. Brodie is the
him
you mentioned. One of the reasons why I need to know all this.”

“Yes.”

“It feels . . . He should tell me himself. Shouldn’t he?”

“He won’t. Not, at least, for a long time. And you need to know this now. But you mustn’t tell him you know, at least not yet.”

“When?”

“You’ll know when the time is right.”

Tasha was still reluctant, but nodded slowly.

Elizabeth went on with her story.

“John was . . . amazing. He was a law student. Brilliant, handsome, and stronger than any man I had ever known. He won my heart so quickly it was almost terrifying. And it was the same way with him, I knew that. We had a connection, a bond, from the very first time we touched, and it only grew stronger as the days passed.”

“A psychic bond?” For some reason, Tasha really wanted to know that.

“No. We never connected in that way. But I had to be honest with him, at least as honest as I could be given the facts, so I told him two of the secrets of my life. That I was a psychic, and that I had broken with my family and changed my name. He loved me and asked no questions beyond what I was willing to talk about. I loved him, but . . . I had lived with the secrets for so long that it was difficult to confide in, even trust, just because I loved.”

“That must have been tough,” Tasha said.

“Yes. But we both thought we had plenty of time. Plenty of time for confidences, for secrets. John wanted me to tell him only what I was ready to tell him.”

“You didn’t tell him about Eliot?”

“No. Not about Eliot, and not about his organization. Not about what they had planned for me. It all sounded so . . . unbelievable. And even though I knew John loved me, I didn’t think he would believe me. That’s what I told myself, at least, though I know now that at least part of my reluctance was a bone-deep certainty that the knowledge would put him in danger.”

“It probably would have.” Tasha tried to console, even knowing she couldn’t. Knowing it was too late for that.

“Maybe. Anyway, I was able to put it out of my mind. There was so much else to think about. We married just after I graduated college. I got a job teaching while John finished law school. It was a good life. A happy life.” She drew a breath. “I can pinpoint the day things began to change. The day I made another choice I was to bitterly regret.”

Tasha didn’t ask, just waited silently.

“It seemed a simple thing at first. Another psychic recognized me as a kindred spirit, something psychics can often do. She asked me for help. Pleaded, really. She was young, frightened. She hardly understood her abilities, or knew what to do with them, and was having trouble hiding them. I had to help her.”

“Of course you did.”

“That was how it began. They came to me quietly, one or two at a time, asking for my help. A surprising number of them, as the months went by. That seemed odd, but I didn’t question it at the time. They needed help, and I had learned a lot in my life about my abilities.

“There was no place else for them to go, no one else they could turn to who understood what they were going
through. As a cover, I formed a ‘study group,’ and we met two or three times a week after regular classes. John patiently accepted my absences and secretiveness; I don’t think he understood, not completely, but he loved me and respected my need to be independent.”

“That’s what he thought was going on?”

“From things he said now and then, I think so.”

“And he was busy too.”

“Oh, very. We didn’t have a lot of time together, but we made it count. Those are some of my best memories.”

“But then something else happened?” Tasha guessed.

“Yes. I had made many good and lasting friends through my ‘study’ group. One in particular, a girl in her first year of college, became an especially good friend. And she was an unusually powerful psychic, with great potential. It was out of concern for her that I told her what had happened to me, the fate that had been planned for me, something I had never told anyone else, not even John.”

“How did she react?”

“She was shocked. Frightened. And, I felt sure, just a bit disbelieving. Because it all sounded so incredible. I couldn’t blame her for that. Someone was . . . breeding psychics? What kind of sense did that make? What kind of reasoning could be behind it? But I had told her, and there was no taking that information back. So I swore her to secrecy, and life went on.

“I suppose it was inevitable that, as our secretive circle grew wider and wider, it would come to include someone connected to the vast organization to which Eliot belonged.
But when the betrayal came, it was so sudden and unexpected that it caught me completely off guard.”

Tasha was almost afraid to ask. “What happened?”

“Two people dropped suddenly out of our group and vanished. One of them was someone I’d been feeling uneasy about for reasons I couldn’t even explain to myself. The other was the girl in whom I’d confided my story. A few days passed, and I became more and more concerned. And then . . .

“I was supposed to meet John for lunch that day. He was late, which wasn’t unusual, so I waited. It was at a sidewalk café in Boston, one of our favorite spots. I was enjoying the fall day, the cool breeze. Fretting about my missing friends, but kids drop out of college all the time, so I couldn’t assume they hadn’t done just that. And then . . .

“And then Eliot suddenly sat down across the table.”

—

Bishop leaned back in his chair, staring grimly at the laptop open on the desk before him. “Goddammit,” he said quietly.

Miranda had seen her husband’s computer skills many times, but both the speed and complexity of his work over the last couple of hours had impressed her—and momentarily pushed aside the question of what had disturbed him. “Tell me you didn’t just hack into the DOD,” she said.

He turned his head and looked at her, a faint smile lightening his expression. “The Department of Defense has some of the best and strongest firewalls in the entire
cyberworld. Sensible, given the sort of information they routinely handle.”

“Noah.”

“No, I didn’t just hack into the DOD.” He paused, adding, “I have clearance, actually. But that wasn’t where I was.”

“It looked like it.”

“Supposed to. A number of the psychics I’ve kept in touch with over the years wanted a safe and secure way to contact me if they had to. If they were in trouble, or otherwise needed my help. It would have been easy enough to create a private e-mail account a lot more secure than the average person feels the need for, but . . .”

“You wanted real security.”

Bishop nodded. “So . . . I piggybacked onto the DOD, in a sense. Created a safe and very, very secure area inside those firewalls, undetectable by the DOD’s system, where each of them could leave me messages. None of them could communicate with each other, just me. Individual passwords, codes, all they needed to get through the firewalls and make contact with me without alerting anyone else. And I set it up so that if one of them
did
leave me a message, the program would send an innocent e-mail alert to my FBI account.”

“What sort of alert?”

“A note supposedly from a friend in law enforcement here in the South. Very innocent, nothing to send up flags.”

“Except to you.”

“Yeah. I can’t always be close to the laptop all the time,
of course, but I check that account several times every day, and have the laptop set up to alert me with a tone if that note lands in my inbox even when I’m not online or if it’s the middle of the night.”

Miranda shook her head. “I thought you just plugged in your laptop in the bedroom every night to recharge it. Even with our connection . . . I had no idea what was really going on. It’s an automatic thing now, isn’t it? Something you don’t think about.”

“I suppose. It’s something I set up a couple of years before I found you again, when I was actively searching for psychics for the unit. And for you.”

“I have to say . . . it’s not entirely a bad thing to find out we still have our secrets even with the connection. Is it?”

He eyed her. “Trying to tell me something?”

Miranda smiled. “A little mystery is good for a relationship. That’s all.”

“Uh-huh.” He gazed at her a moment longer, then yanked his mind back to far more deadly mysteries. “Anyway, there’ve been no notes from Katie Swan—or Henry McCord.”

“So his client was right in believing Henry has disappeared too?”

“Looks that way. And if the client has his days straight, Henry must have been taken about a week ago.”

“They do move fast,” Miranda said, sobered. “Henry last week, Katie this week. And there were two other psychics you were concerned about around the end of last year. Two more disappearances.”

“Grace Seymore and Jeffrey Bell, clairvoyant and seer respectively. With Jeffrey, all the evidence pointed to him just up and moving, running away. He’d done it before, and the same thing was happening to him again. He tried to disappear into the woodwork, do his job and live quietly, but somebody got curious, looked into his background—and the whole circus started for him again. He couldn’t escape the desperate people begging him for whatever it was they needed to know.”

“So it looked like he packed up and left.”

“Yeah. Grace Seymore, on the other hand, was a more troubling case, at least at the time. She’s a born psychic, not triggered like Jeffrey by some kind of trauma. Her abilities had been getting stronger, and her control was erratic, but she was handling it. Mostly. Her second husband, apparently, couldn’t. The divorce was barely final when she disappeared. A concerned coworker came to check on her and found everything as it should have been at her house. Nothing disturbed, nothing missing—except Grace. Her car was in the garage, keys in the house, cell phone showing no suspicious calls, house phone the same.” He frowned again.

“What?” Miranda asked.

“The only odd thing, at least to me, was that her disappearance
looked
planned. But not obviously, if that makes any sense. She’d just gotten a nice inheritance from her grandmother’s estate and used some of that to pay off her house. All of her utility bills were autopays, and there was plenty in the bank account to cover those debits, even for a year or more. Her cleaning service showed up every week
to take care of the house; they’d been paid in advance for six months of weekly cleanings.”

“The police didn’t find
that
suspicious?”

“It wasn’t unusual for her, according to the service. She’d been paying them ahead for the last couple of years. Her bank statements confirmed it. Friends said she didn’t like dealing with bills and finances, so had streamlined as much as possible. It made sense, given what her friends and neighbors and coworkers said about her. There was absolutely nothing to make the police suspicious.”

“Except that she was gone.”

Bishop nodded. “I never even found the hint of a trail to follow. Her ex had moved out of the country more than two weeks before she disappeared, had a cast-iron alibi for those weeks. No family to speak of, and a couple of distant cousins we finally located hadn’t heard from her in years. She was just gone. Then we got busy on the first of several difficult cases, and before I knew it my list of missing psychics was getting much too long to ignore.”