Read Sixth Sense (A Psychic Crystal Mystery) Online
Authors: Marilyn Baron
Tags: #Contemporary, #Suspense
Sixth Sense (A Psychic Crystal Mystery)
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Sixth Sense
by
Marilyn Baron
A Psychic Crystal Mystery
Book One
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Sixth Sense
COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Marilyn Baron
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by
Debbie Taylor
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Crimson Rose Edition, 2013
Print ISBN 978-1-61217-933-9
Digital ISBN 978-1-61217-934-6
A Psychic Crystal Mystery, Book One
Published in the United States of America
Praise for Marilyn Baron
SIXTH SENSE
won the Georgia Romance Writers 2012 Unpublished Maggie Award for Excellence in the Paranormal/Fantasy category.
~
Marilyn is also Winner of First Place in the Suspense Romance category of the 2010 Ignite the Flame Contest sponsored by the Central Ohio Fiction Writers chapter of Romance Writers of America, as well as Finalist in the Georgia Romance Writers Unpublished Maggie Award for Excellence in 2005 in the Single Title category.
~*~
“Baron offers a bit of everything...There’s humor, infidelity, murder, mayhem, and a neatly drawn conclusion.”
~RT Book Reviews (4.5 Stars)
“Expertly handled relationship... a page-turning journey... a riveting read.”
~Anna K.
“Wonderfully witty writing...sharp characterization and...brilliant dialogue...humorous asides and...the quite fantastic twist at the end...left me with a real lump in my throat...highly recommended. Worth more than 5 stars if that were possible.”
~Andrew Kirby
“Ms. Baron’s portrayal of her heroine’s thoughts, feelings and actions was spot-on. Five stars! Highly recommended!”
~Pam Asberry
“[
UNDER THE MOON GATE
] is a surefire blockbuster…a treasure trove of mystery and intrigue. It sparkles with romance. The thrills and chills are unrelenting, and the writing is witty and engaging…I couldn’t recommend this more.”
~Andrew Kirby
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my critique partner, Anna Doll,
for her help with this manuscript,
and to Haywood Smith and Debby Giusti
for their advice and support.
Other Books by Marilyn Baron
Available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
UNDER THE MOON GATE
~
DESTINY: A BERMUDA LOVE STORY
(prequel to
Under the Moon Gate
)
Chapter One
Atlanta Police Department
Mini-Precinct in Midtown
Beauregard Lee Jackson Hale was a shit magnet. No doubt about it. And he could feel a mighty shit storm blowing his way.
“Hey, Wolf Man Jack, cover the front desk while I take a leak.”
Jack grimaced and walked by the empty waiting area toward Sarge’s desk. It was a fluke he was even in the precinct this late at night. He’d dragged in from the field to fill out some paperwork. Just his luck, after the day from hell, Sarge’s pea-sized bladder needed emptying. Sergeant Anthony Lisle’s bathroom breaks were legendary around the stationhouse.
“Don’t worry, Hale, it’s dead around here. I’ll be right back.”
Famous last words
. Sergeant Lisle rose from his chair and stretched his stubby legs as he reached for the remote to lower the volume on the flat-screen television set mounted over his desk. As an afterthought, he grabbed a magazine from his inbox.
Reading material
. A sure sign Sarge was in it for the long haul.
Jack shook his head, picked up the report he was working on, replaced the sergeant at his desk, and slapped the file down on the hardwood surface. Atlanta in the middle of the night was anything but dead. That’s usually when the crazies came out.
He looked around the empty, dimly lit squad room of the Atlanta Police Department’s newest mini-precinct and felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. Everything about this place was small. The chairs were designed for grade-schoolers. His six-foot-four-inch frame dwarfed the furniture. The whole precinct could fit into his one-bedroom-plus-den apartment. How thirty police employees squeezed into this cramped space was beyond comprehension.
He couldn’t wait for his undercover assignment to be over so he could move back to more mundane crimes like auto theft, burglary, robbery, drug arrests, and run-of-the-mill shootings and homicides. Cases that had a conclusion. Cases where perpetrators actually got caught. And tried.
And
convicted.
Ever since he’d grown a beard and gone on the trail—the stone-cold trail—of the Midtown Strangler, he’d suffered ribbing from the guys at the precinct and brought a negative publicity hailstorm of epic proportions down on the department.
If he’d had any success in catching the twisted bastard, things might be different. But the killer had brutally strangled five Atlanta College coeds, right around the corner from where Jack lived in his high-rise Midtown condo. And right under the noses of the officers in Zone Five, the same mini-precinct the mayor had opened precisely to protect the students at Atlanta College.
Protect and Serve
. He’d done a hell of a job. He hadn’t protected shit. He certainly hadn’t protected the five young girls whose dead bodies had been found naked in their dorm rooms right down the street. Now, after easy pickings on the Midtown campus, the killer had vanished, like a phantom, into thin air, left the planet without a trace, with no leads and little chance of capture. At least he’d stopped killing…in Atlanta. Maybe he’d moved on to greener pastures.
If he were alive, Jack’s father would have stopped the killer dead in his tracks. Sometimes his dad cut corners and didn’t always follow the rules. But he did what he had to do to get the job done.
Jack inspected his reflection in the stainless steel coffee tumbler mug on Sarge’s desk. In the scheme of things, whether he looked like a homeless wacko wasn’t high on his priority scale. He needed a change. He needed a shave. But he had promised himself he wouldn’t shave until he caught the strangler. And that wasn’t happening anytime soon. The investigation had hit a brick wall. An insurmountable, Berlin-style, brick wall.
Sarge had ordered him to resurface. It was a good thing, too, because he needed a bath. He needed a woman. He’d been so deep undercover even his mother wouldn’t recognize him. He needed to check in on his mother. He hoped he hadn’t forgotten her birthday or another important date. Since his father had been murdered, it had been up to Jack to make sure those special occasions didn’t go unrecognized. What he really needed was a secretary to keep him organized.
Jack picked up a pen and reached across the desk to answer the phone that wasn’t supposed to ring.
“Fifth precinct. Detective Hale. How can I help you?”
“The plane is going to crash!” a woman shouted. “You need to do something.”
Jack jolted forward, ready for action.
A plane crash!
Then
his police training kicked in.
Stay calm in a disaster
.
“Could I get your name, please?” He reached across the desk and picked up a pad of yellow sticky-notes.
“It’s Katherine Crystal. But my name isn’t important. Vince Rivers and his son are on a plane, and it’s going down.”
This call was getting stranger by the minute.
“The movie star Vince Rivers? Are they on a commercial airliner?”
“It’s his private plane. Vince Rivers is the pilot.”
“When is this crash going to happen? And where?”
“I don’t know when it’s going to crash, but soon, and somewhere in Georgia.”
“Can you be more specific about the location?”
Dead silence.
“Let me get this straight,” Jack stated. “You can’t predict when or where this crash will happen?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“How what works? Do you have inside information about this incident? Is the crash weather-related? Is it terrorism? On what facts are you basing this call?”
“I saw it in a vision.”
“I see.” Jack exhaled, rolled his shoulders, laid down his pen, and flexed his right hand.
Another lunatic. Predictable.
Atlanta was full of them, and Jack was already drowning in a reservoir of bad feelings about so-called psychics. When he was ten, a psychic had taken advantage of his widowed mother and bilked her out of most of his father’s police pension. He’d had his fill of psychics, and he definitely did not believe this deluded drama queen on the phone.
“What do you want me to do? Tell Vince Rivers he can’t fly his jet anymore?”
“Do whatever you have to do to save them.”
Whatever you have to do
. That had been Jack’s father’s motto. And his dad’s cop credo had proven to be a sure-fire formula for getting himself killed. His father had been a maverick, a cop’s cop. Everyone in the precinct made allowances for Jack’s cautious, plodding, by-the-book code because of his father. They also made the inevitable comparisons. And by any measurement, he came up short. The consensus around the precinct was: Jack could never fill his father’s shoes.
“If we grounded a plane every time a psychic made a prediction, nobody would fly,” Jack pointed out. “Law enforcement agencies can’t act on premonitions or crackpots calling in with false claims.”
“I’m not a crackpot.”
Jack scratched his beard. There was probably a family of fleas setting up house on his face. He was dog-tired, and he didn’t believe this conversation was happening. The woman’s story had as many holes as Bonnie & Clyde’s bullet-riddled getaway car. All he wanted to do was hop in the sack and spend the next day, maybe the next week, in blissful peace and quiet. No serial killers. No psychics.
“Tell me, Miss Crystal, if that’s really your name, do your premonitions always come true?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you call the Atlanta Police Department?”
“I didn’t know how to get in touch with Vince Rivers. Even if I did manage to get through, he probably wouldn’t believe me. I thought if a law enforcement agency contacted him he would take it seriously. But you were my last resort. I’ve called all the local news stations and the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, the national networks, CNN, everyone. No one will listen to me.”
Bingo
. She’d called all the networks? She was nothing but a run-of-the-mill publicity hound. She wasn’t genuinely concerned about the lives of a man and his son. She was trying to make a name for herself, like all the rest of her kind. This chick was bugging the hell out of him. Where was Sarge? Probably whacking off in the head. Sarge had endless patience. Jack’s had just run out.
“Now you listen to me, Miss Crystal. I know your type. I’ve dealt with psycho-broads like you before.”
“I’m not a psycho.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not wrong. Do you promise you’ll do something about this?”
“Yes,” Jack assured her as he released the last of his strategic politeness reserves to place the phone gently in its cradle, when what he really wanted to do was slam it in her face.
Any one of his fellow officers would have done the same thing in his place. Some hysterical woman calls out of the blue in the middle of the night with a premonition that Vince Rivers’ son was about to die in a private plane crash.
All his questions had been reasonable. All her answers had bordered on fantasy.
