LITMIR.BIZ

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was his turn to laugh.

      “I don’t get visions, I don’t see dead people, I don’t even hear little voices in my head,” she continued. “But sometimes, I just get this big, nagging sense that I have to say something or do something. It doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, but it’s like an itch I can’t scratch.” She stopped squeezing. “I saw you in the coffee shop, and I just had to talk to you.”

      He shook his head, opening his mouth to reply and finding that he had nothing to say to that.

      “Ummmm…” She swallowed. “I mean, I felt like I had to tell you something. And when I finally got up the nerve to approach you, that thing about the kids and the water just came flying out.” She fluttered one hand in front of her like a butterfly to illustrate, then pulled it back, curling both hands around her gloves so the leather squeaked slightly. “I had no idea if I was right about what I told you until I saw the news tonight.”

      “Great.” It sounded so far-fetched, but something in him almost believed her. She seemed so sincere, so…normal. But there was nothing normal about a ritualistic murder in a state park. And there was nothing normal about warning someone not to take children near the place where a dead body waited. “You know the police think you might have something to do with that murder, right? And your defense is you’re a psychic who sucks?” He leaned back in his seat, stretching his arm across the ridge between the door and the window. “Sweetheart, I don’t have to have my own 1-900 line to know that that isn’t going to get you very far.”

      “Then why haven’t you called the police yet?”

      Just then, a wailing siren sounded in the distance, growing louder with every passing second. Oh, yeah, if she was what she said she was, she sure had the “who sucks” part down if she hadn’t seen that one coming.

      “You did call them. Before you even got in the car.” She dropped her gloves and whirled around, clutching at the door handle and looking very much like a trapped rabbit—soft, scared and completely clueless as to what to do next. “I’m such an idiot.”

      A police car careened into the parking lot, lights flashing, only to be followed by another. And another.

      Several more skidded to a halt around the parking-lot exit, forming a haphazard line that would prevent any cars from going in or out. Their respective sirens blended together into one shrieking, cacophonous alarm, somewhat muffled inside the closed doors of the car.

      “I didn’t think I warranted this much effort,” she shouted at him.

      “Get out of the car, and put your hands in the air!” a tinny voice outside blared through a bullhorn.

      She yanked the keys out of her car ignition and shoved them in her pocket. “You slept with a woman named Penny last month,” she said suddenly to the windshield.

      “Wha—” How could she know that? Penny lived in another state and had claimed to have no friends in Washington when she’d visited on business.

      “She has a blog, and she’s very, very peeved at you.” Sophie sighed, and her shoulders dropped in defeat. She switched off the car’s headlights. “See? I’m awful. I wish I could throw some secret or something that only you and your dead aunt Polly know at you, but I can’t. All I know is that when it’s really, really important, sometimes words come to me that are meaningful to someone else. I’m not a murderer.” She opened the car door and raised her hands as she got ready to exit the vehicle.

      “And I don’t know why, but I’ll see you again,” she shouted over the noise that had grown significantly louder since she’d opened the door. “This murder is connected to you in more ways than you know. And I think I have to help you with something.” She rolled her eyes, her body half in, half out of the car. “Although why I would help a guy who thinks I’m a satanic cult killer is beyond me.”

      With that, she got out, heading for the cops waiting for her with her head held high, and leaving him to wonder at the strength of her seemingly unshakable conviction in her innocence.

      And how, with a seemingly random comment, she could have hit on the fact that he had a dead aunt Polly.

      Chapter Four

      Alex’s stomach rumbled as he pulled his pickup into his driveway, an insistent reminder that it was well past dinnertime. Good thing he’d stopped on the way to get a sandwich, or he might have wasted away to nothing trying to conjure up a meal out of a half-eaten bag of Fritos and a case of beer. If memory served, he’d been putting off grocery shopping for too long.

      The police had questioned him only briefly about his conversation with Sophie Brennan, but somehow, time had gotten away from him as he’d filled in his coworkers, who’d all wanted to know the latest on why one woman warranted a major sting operation.

      All signs pointed to the fact that said woman was somehow connected to the grisliest homicide Port Renegade had seen in decades. But murder? Ritual killings? He wasn’t a go-with-your-gut kind of guy, preferring to deal with hard evidence, like footprints and broken plants. But from the little he’d observed of Sophie, he didn’t think she had it in her.

      Trouble was, he believed her story about being psychic about as much as he believed that little green men were going to visit him tonight and take him into space for sinister experiments.

      Grabbing the slender plastic bag containing his sandwich and chips off the passenger seat, he exited the truck and retrieved his mail from the squeaky outdoor box next to his driveway, shoving the few thin envelopes and solicitation postcards into the oversize right pocket of his parka before heading for his front steps.

      A few years back, through some hard-core savings and wise investments, Alex had managed to parlay his park-employee salary into a down payment on a house in the mountains. The house itself was a butt-ugly three-story block of brown siding that looked like a Jawa sandcrawler from the original Star Wars film. But inside, it was a little piece of heaven, with cherry hardwood floors that seemed to glow from within and a huge stone fireplace to match an equally huge kitchen. The entire outer wall of the master bedroom was a series of windows that looked out on the snow-capped peaks of the Olympics. But what had really sold him was the sweet deck overlooking an enormous tree-lined backyard.

      Trouble was he hadn’t yet had time to get much in the way of furniture, for the deck or the house, but one of these days, he’d fix that.

      Once inside, he threw his jacket on the nearest milk crate and tossed his baseball cap and jacket after it. Shaking the sandwich out of its skinny bag, he sank gratefully into the one piece of quality furniture he did own—a dark brown recliner—which faced the love of his life—a fifty-two-inch wide-screen HDTV hooked up to stereo surround sound. A man had to have his priorities.

      He kicked back his weight; the recliner’s footrest popped up, and Alex had everything he needed in life—a dinner he hadn’t made, a comfy chair and the sports update on channel seven. Actually, if he had telekinetic powers and could float a beer from the refrigerator to his tragically empty hand, life would be complete. Maybe he should ask Sophie Brennan if her Jedi powers extended to levitating objects….

      Stop it. Thinking about Sophie Brennan was only going to get him into trouble. Big, fat, crazy-girlfriend trouble. Why he was a magnet for that type, he’d never know, but the sooner he forgot her, the better. No thinking about Sophie Brennan. No hitting on Sophie Brennan. No nothing on, near or around Sophie Brennan.

      Although he had to wonder what was happening to her down at the station. Maybe he could just call—

      With a hiss of disgust, Alex cut off that train of thought, concentrating instead on a search-and-rescue mission for his TV remote, which had apparently become lodged inside the chair somewhere. He’d managed to extract it and turn on SportsCenter when the doorbell rang.

      And all he could hear in his head as he went to answer the door was the last thing Sophie Brennan had said to him: I’ll see you again. This murder is connected to you in more ways than you know.

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