A Deadly Web (20 page)

Jesus, who would believe me anyway?

“Try again.” The voice was cold, implacable, remorseless. It might have been a machine, repeating the command again and again with no sign of frustration or impatience.

Before Katie on the stainless steel table lay a dagger, turned so that it was aimed, roughly, at a man-shaped stuffed target across the room. It was, perhaps, ten feet away from her.

It might as well have been ten miles.

Katie had passed exhaustion a long time ago. They had broken her down first with the pain, using some technique she couldn’t begin to understand; it had felt like they were tearing her body apart, ripping it to shreds, and yet she hadn’t, afterward, been able to find a single mark anywhere on her.

They had allowed her to sleep, or maybe they had drugged her, because however long she slept, she had awakened still exhausted, aching all over. Then they had put her in this room, and one by one a succession of objects had been placed before her, and she had been ordered to move them with her mind.

Easy things at first. A feather. A pencil. A little book.

Then harder things. Heavier things. Larger things.

She had tried for countless minutes to move a cinder block placed on the table. It hadn’t budged until something in Katie had snapped, and she had cried out in frustration.

The heavy piece of masonry not only lifted, it literally flew across the room and crashed into the glass protecting her tormentor, safe in her little watcher’s booth.

The glass—or whatever it was—had not shown even a scratch. The cinder block was in pieces on the floor. And the face behind the window had never changed expression.

“Again,” she had ordered.

They weren’t stupid. Between every “test” Katie was ordered to blindfold herself, ordered to place her hands flat on the table, and ordered to remain motionless while someone entered and placed the next object on the table.
Then she was to remove her blindfold—the chains fastened at either end to the table and the heavy metal bands around her wrists just long enough to allow that movement—place her hands flat on the table again, and use her telekinetic ability on whatever they had given her to move.

She had simply refused at first, only to find that the cuffs were yet another instrument of torture, jolting her with intensely painful shocks that increased in intensity every time she refused.

So she stopped refusing.

But she was so
tired
.

“Try again,” the emotionless woman behind the glass ordered, her voice perfectly clear even though Katie couldn’t see a sign of a speaker anywhere in her stainless steel box of a room.

A faint warning tingle around her wrists made Katie focus on the target across the room. On the red circle drawn just where a human heart would be located. She stared at the target, then at the dagger on the table. It twitched, perhaps an inch or two.

“Try again.”

“I couldn’t kill a person,” she whispered.

“It’s a stuffed target. Try again.”

“I need to rest. I’ll do better after I’ve rested.”

“Try again.”

“Something to eat—”

A stronger shock.

Katie whimpered and tried to focus on the dagger. This was not close to the heaviest thing she had moved,
or the largest. But this time she had been ordered to aim, to be precise. To hit a target.

Something she had never done before, with the single exception of mentally pulling something toward herself and reaching out to catch it in her hand. A pen. A book she’d been reading. The TV remote.

This was so, so different.

Frightened and wary of the shock, she tried to bargain. “If I do it, if I hit the target, then you’ll let me rest.”

“Of course,” her tormentor said with suspicious promptness.

Desperate to rest, to be out of this horrible room if only for an hour or two, Katie concentrated, and with all the strength and focus she could muster, she made the dagger lift—and then shoot across the room and hit the stuffed target.

“You missed the heart. Do it again.”

—

Grace Seymore lived in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood where, apparently, most of her neighbors had been certain she had simply gone to visit family and would return.

Which she had. And according to the cop who was Bishop’s source, she had returned with as little fanfare as when she had left.

“I really don’t know why you worried about me,” Grace said to Bishop and his wife as she poured tea for them. In little flowered cups. “I was just visiting family.”

“So you said.” It was easy for Bishop to keep his voice
even and casual because he’d had a lot of practice, but even he had a difficult time keeping his gaze off what was without question a quite substantial baby bump. “Did you go home to share the good news?” he added.

“About the baby? Oh, no, not really. It was only an aunt and cousin, all I have left of family, so really just a visit. We’d been out of touch.”

“But they were happy for you,” Miranda probed carefully.

“I suppose.” Grace appeared thoughtful, both hands caressing her rounded belly. “I didn’t really care. Don’t care. The baby and I will be just fine.” She smiled.

Bishop tossed tact out the window. “What about the father?” he asked bluntly.

“Oh, he won’t be involved. We met on a cruise, you see. He didn’t want a baby. But I want her. And I can raise her just fine on my own.” Her smile widened. “We’ll be fine.”

“Your ex-husband—”

“He’s not part of this. He didn’t want me, we both know that. He didn’t understand me, didn’t understand the things I can do. But my baby will understand, because she’ll be able to do those things too.”

Miranda exchanged a glance with her husband, then said, “Grace, you know that Noah looks out for people like you. For psychics. When you disappeared, we did some checking. You didn’t go on a cruise.”

“Of course I did. Months ago.” She was still smiling. “Listen, I really appreciate the concern, but I’m fine, as you can see. We’re both fine. So there’s nothing to worry
about.” Her oddly blank gaze shifted to Bishop. “And no reason to look out for me. I am grateful, Bishop, you know that, but I really don’t need anyone looking out for me. I can take care of myself. And the baby, of course.”

Miranda tried again. “Grace—”

“Really, Miranda, we’ll both be fine. I’ll let you know when the baby’s born, and you can come visit. See for yourselves that we’re just fine.”

Once again, Miranda exchanged a glance with her husband, both of them certain that as soon as they stepped out the front door, Grace would forget all about them. The only thing in her mind was the child she would deliver, probably within only a few weeks.

They finally said their good-byes and left, a last image of a smiling Grace waving good-bye from her front door a haunting one for them both.

Miranda said, “She doesn’t have any family, does she? Not even an aunt or cousin.”

“No, and Murphy was right.” Bishop’s tone was grim. “The woman in that house is not Grace Seymore, not anymore.”

“They did that, didn’t they? They got her pregnant, and before that they made her somebody else.” Miranda shivered visibly. “You know what I kept thinking?”

Even with their easy telepathic link closed down, Bishop knew. “The same things I was thinking. Stepford wives, and pod people.”

“I think it’s time we talked to Brodie and Murphy. They need to know.”

“You won’t get an argument,” Bishop replied, and put the car in gear.

—

Tucker Mackenzie frowned down at his laptop. “Okay, this is unexpected but not all that unusual.”

“What is?” his wife asked.

“Tasha Solomon was adopted. As an infant.”

“Do you think she knows?”

Tucker’s frown deepened. “I sort of doubt it. I had to dig for information, and dig deeply. If she was aware of the adoption, I doubt there would have been so many layers.”

Sarah came and joined him at the dining table in their hotel suite, coffee in hand and wearing a frown of her own. It was early morning, and both had been up most of the night. “Well . . . as you say, not so unusual. So why did Murphy want her parentage checked out? To find out if she was a born psychic? We already know that.”

“Maybe . . . to find out if her real parents were born psychics.”

After a moment, Sarah said, “Can you find out?”

“Maybe. Adoption records are sealed, but I long ago found a crowbar to unseal official documents.”

“You’re very bad,” Sarah said, but absently, adding almost immediately, “If Tasha’s real parents were psychics, do we assume they’re connected to the other side?”

Typing briskly on his keyboard, Tucker said, “Not sure. Duran likes tools, so they could have been that, just tools, a means to an end.”

“Psychic babies?”

“We’ve talked about it being possible. Maybe this is the first evidence we’ll find to prove it’s more than possible. First, we have to find out if she was in the official adoption system or this was a private adoption. We need to know if her mother was an unwed mother. If she was compensated for giving birth and, if so, how well and by whom. If there’s even any record of who the father was. And, if possible, we need to find out where Tasha’s birth mother is now.”

Sarah frowned. “Because if she was connected or being used by the other side . . .”

“Then unless she died in childbirth, it’s doubtful she only had one child. Not if they were using her in this breeding program we’ve been theorizing. The one I really hope we’re wrong about.”

Sarah leaned back slowly, her frown gone but replaced by a bleak expression. “Tasha’s close to thirty. If we’re right about this . . . program . . . she could be among the first generations of psychics deliberately produced by breeding two born psychics.”

“Could be why Duran wants her so badly,” Tucker noted, still typing.

“But wouldn’t he have her? I mean, if she was part of this eugenics program, wouldn’t their side have kept track, and closely? If they have a particular use in mind for their—their offspring—then why allow her to grow up in a normal life with normal, nonpsychic parents?”

“Maybe she—and the others—needed to grow up that way. To live normal childhoods, normal lives.”

“As psychics? Granted, I came to it late, but from what all the born psychics have said, growing up psychic runs the gamut from incredibly difficult to being locked away in a mental ward.
Especially
if you’re born to or raised by nonpsychics who can never understand what you are and generally consider you to have some sort of mental illness.”

Tucker sat back in his own chair, the humming laptop evidence that he had a program running, and gazed steadily at his wife. “Maybe that had to be part of it. Survival of the fittest. You’d have to learn control, good control. You’d have to be mentally and emotionally tough to grow up with abilities that had to remain secret, shielded. The born psychics we’ve met have all been that way, to varying degrees. It’s the created psychics who struggle that tend to be a lot more fragile, at least at first. And sometimes they remain fragile, if they survive at all.”

Slowly, Sarah said, “That might also explain the six-month window for psychics who were created like I was, abilities triggered by trauma. Maybe it takes that long for the other side to be certain that we have . . . whatever it is they need. That we can cope. That we can learn control. That we aren’t as fragile as we might seem to be in the beginning.”

“Maybe, but we still don’t know what it is they’re looking for in psychics. It can’t just be strength or the ability to cope. They’ve taken strong psychics and walked away from others. Taken well-adjusted psychics—but also taken some pretty fragile ones.”

With a sigh, Sarah said, “You know, it’s very frustrating that just when it seems we have a glimmer of
understanding into their motives, it turns into just more smoke and mirrors.”

“Which could also be another of their defense mechanisms,” Tucker pointed out. “This side’s always been hamstrung by having too little reliable information, too few answers to too many questions. It’s impossible to fight anything but defensively when you don’t know what the other side is really after.”

“Other than psychics.”

He nodded. “Other than psychics.” A soft tone drew his attention back to his laptop, which had clearly finished running its program, and Tucker frowned at the screen, scrolling through what was obviously a lot of information before finally speaking.

“So . . . Tasha’s birth mother spent the last few months of her pregnancy, and her delivery, at a home for unwed mothers not all that far from Charleston, interestingly enough. From the looks of these records, the Solomons had made all the arrangements to adopt the child at least three months before she was born.”

“Money change hands?”

“Not enough. According to these records, the home itself paid all the bills, from food and clothing to medical services. The adoptive parents paid a very reasonable fee that didn’t come close to even covering expenses.”

“That isn’t normal, is it?”