She’s not like all her kind
. He needed to keep reminding himself of that. Because after reading through her files, he knew this story was more than a big-news feature to Alexa Nolan. It had become personal—he could read that in every line of her articles, in her hand- written notes and in each question she’d asked. Especially her jotted speculations about the unanswered ones.
The files had changed his perception of her. Before, he’d seen a tenacious, incredibly attractive young woman. Now he saw that same woman—with a heart. It was a stunning combination. He’d spent a long time this afternoon thinking about it, about all the different sides to her. Though a stranger to him two days before, she had succeeded in doing something even his oldest friends had been unable to do: get him involved again. That alone made her pretty unique. When combined with all the rest, she became fascinating.
“I mean, you know, the psychic stuff?” she prodded. “Do you have to look at someone’s picture, or be in their house or touching their pillow or something in order to get any impressions about them?”
How to explain that to someone who’d never experienced it? Most people’s exposure to the more unusual possibilities in this world came from shows like
Ghost Whisperer
and the one about those demon- hunting brothers with the cool black muscle car. Few ever realized they had a glimmer of the same ability he had, they simply mistook it for something like intuition, déjà vu, or lucky guessing.
She continued to wait, so he gave her his most basic answer to that very common question. “I am sometimes able to mentally connect with other people.”
“So you’re Mr. Spock. Vulcan mind- meld stuff.”
He sighed. The woman’s mouth was always three steps ahead of the conversation as she tried to fill in the answers to her own questions.
“I can’t put my hand on someone’s temple and know just what they’re thinking. In fact, I don’t have to be in the same state as the person I’m connecting with. But I am sometimes able to catch images, scents, or the physical sensation of things that have been filling their minds lately.”
“And that would be different from mind reading . . . how, exactly?” she asked, a little accusingly.
“Look, I can’t see their real-time thoughts, can’t experience
precisely
what they’re seeing or hearing or feeling at any particular moment.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. This was damned hard to explain. “Sometimes I catch snippets of people’s memories, even after they’re dead. They’re left behind, like a mental fingerprint on the world.”
“That’s gruesome.”
“It can be.”
“But I guess it comes in handy for solving crimes.”
“On occasion,” he admitted. “The problem is, it’s not a sure bet. I get flashes of things that might represent what’s been on someone’s mind, not necessarily a real picture of what they’re seeing or experiencing. Think of it as recording your favorite show on your DVR, only the power went out and you only caught part of it. It’s cut off, plus it’s a rerun, not real-time. Not the whole thing, never the entire story.”
She nodded slowly, getting it. “Frustrating.”
“Yeah. For instance, if I were to mentally connect with you, I imagine I’d see . . .”
“Don’t even go there—I was not thinking that about you!”
“. . . a random scattering of girls’ faces. Or I might catch the scent of ink and paper.” He couldn’t help raising a curious brow. “What, exactly, were you
not
thinking about me?”
“Nothing right now.” Her eyes shifted down at her hands, which were twisted on her lap. “But if you went back in the DVR of my mind to yesterday when you slammed the door in my face, you might see me thinking about a whole overflowing bucket of assholery.”
Unable to prevent it, he laughed, wondering how this blunt woman had so quickly worked her way around the stern, protective walls behind which he usually barricaded himself. “No wonder you’re a writer, Ms. Nolan. You certainly have a way with words.”
“And no wonder you’re a psychic. You certainly have a way with that whole mystical thing. By the way, if you can’t bring yourself to call me Lexie, how about Alexa? The Ms. business is a little too 1970s women’s lib for me.”
He considered it. Alexa was too formal, too junior league for her. Just as Lexie was too young and carefree.
“Or you can call me what my boss, Walter, does. Lex.”
He nodded, repeating, “Lex. As in the cape-wearing superhero’s nemesis. I think I can work with that.”
“Does that make you the cape-wearing superhero, Mr. McConnell?”
Sneering, he replied, “Hardly. And call me Aidan.”
“Yeah, I can’t see that, either, Aidan. Maybe the dark, brooding guy surrounded by bats, but definitely not the squeaky-clean one.”
Not knowing whether that had been a compliment—
probably not
—he said, “I’m not your nemesis. Not anymore, anyway.”
“No, you’re not.” A small smile told him how glad she was of that.
He noted the prettiness of that smile, the way it brought a sparkle to her green eyes.
“Speaking of Walter,” she said, “he asked me to thank you.” She quickly explained what was going on with the man, her tender tone revealing how close they were. “He would be a lot more active with this investigation himself, but with his wife, he just can’t.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Now, can we go back to the question I asked before I neglected to say hello? Can you tell me how this all started?”
“You read the whole file?”
“I did.” He reached into the backseat to grab his briefcase. As he retrieved the folder, his forearm brushed against her shoulder. It was just the lightest brush of clothing, no meeting of skin, and yet he reacted strongly, yanking his arm back.
Touching was something he tried to avoid as much as possible. Even with his mental walls in place, as they were now, sometimes people could slip in between the cracks. With a personality as strong as hers, he suspected Lex could come barreling through.
She either didn’t notice, or pretended not to. Hunkering down a little in the seat, she cleared her throat and pointed at the ticket booth set up near the field. “Wait! That’s Chief Dunston.”
He stared out the windshield at the uniformed police chief. Younger than he’d imagined, maybe in his early forties, the man wasn’t the tubby blowhard he’d been picturing. “Who’s that walking up to him?”
She moved a little closer to get a better look, leaning over into his side of the car to see around a truck blocking her line of sight. He shifted closer to the door, pulling away as instinctively as he drew breath. She noticed, looking up at him in confusion. He could only imagine what she was thinking. His innate desire to avoid touching anyone had to come across as either extreme paranoia or snobbery.
Actually, it was neither. He just didn’t want to open any lines of communication he wasn’t prepared to deal with.
She shook her head, as if chasing away some dark thought. With that shake came a hint of the light scent of her perfume, or her shampoo, flowery, clean and fresh. It suited her.
Why he’d even taken note of that, he honestly didn’t know. He was working with the woman, not contemplating sleeping with her.
Lie
.
Okay. The thought had crossed his mind once or twice. He’d been alone for a long time, and from the minute he’d answered her demanding knock yesterday, he’d been very much aware of that fact. As aware as he’d been of her silky hair, her husky voice, her curvy form, the sparkle of her smile.
He liked sex. A lot. But physical attraction usually led to mental vulnerability, so Aidan seldom allowed himself to give in to it. When he did, even more self-protection was required. Because actual physical connection demanded strength and stamina to prevent someone else’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions from overwhelming him.
So it said a lot that he’d been wondering how smooth her skin would feel beneath his fingertips, how her mouth would taste and how well her soft body would fit against his.
She might just be worth the risk.
“Would you move?” she snapped.
He jerked, wondering whether he’d inadvertently done something to reveal his incredibly personal thoughts. Then he realized she’d been addressing a group outside, who had stepped between her and the chief. Once they had left, she pointed out the window again.
“The one on the right is Mr. Lawton, who manages one of the downtown banks. On the left is”—she sniffed in disdain—“Ed Underwood, who is my boss’s partner in the paper. He stays out of it when things are going the way he wants them to. When he’s unhappy, he becomes extremely bossy.”
She didn’t have to elaborate; he got it. The man had become very bossy about Lex’s articles. He’d probably been the one who’d demanded that public
mea culpa
of a retraction, in which the woman sitting beside him might as well have asked to be smeared with tar and rolled in a field of feathers.
“The game’s starting soon,” she said, returning fully to her seat. “We should wait a few more minutes, try to slip in after it starts and get lost in the crowd.”
“Sounds good. Meanwhile, fill me in. I read the file; now I want to hear it through your perspective.” Black-and-white text was all well and good, but the nuances and subtle impressions she might have formed could prove very important.
“As you read, fourteen teenage girls from the Boro area have gone missing in the past thirty-six months,” she explained, her deep frown signaling how she felt about the subject. “All aged sixteen to nineteen, starting with Jessie Leonard.”
He nodded. “The one that stood out from the rest. She disappeared three Halloweens ago. Six months before the others.”
“Right. Like you, I wasn’t entirely certain she was connected at first because there was that big gap.”
“I can see why you decided it was.”
“You listened to the interview?”
“Yes.” It hadn’t been easy, but he’d listened to each and every recorded discussion.
“Six months after Jessie, it was boom-boom-boom,” she said. “They started happening pretty steadily, one every other month or so. All under circumstances very similar to that first one. Add Vonnie Jackson this week and you have fifteen.”
He opened the folder, recalling some of her notes. Thumbing to one particular photocopied sheet, he tapped it and glanced at her. “Only fifteen?”
She met his even stare. “You noticed that, did you?” Yes, he’d noticed. One page, copied out of what looked like her own journal, had a hand-written list of the fourteen names mentioned in her newspaper article. It also, however, contained three additional female names, all with question marks beside them.
“I can’t say for sure,” she admitted, “but these three missing teenagers from other parts of Georgia have aroused my suspicions. The cases were from before this time period, and they are a little different, but they do have a few things in common. Same type of girls—pretty, from poor backgrounds. Same circumstances surrounding their sudden disappearances. Their families are completely clueless as to what happened to them.”
“You didn’t mention them in print.”
“Nor did I even talk about them to anyone else, not even my boss. My own intuition led me to note those cases, nothing else.”
“Trust that intuition,” he told her, pleased that she’d included the journal entry in the file she’d left him. Again, every detail mattered. “Always.”
She nodded, silently assuring him she would. Then she continued to explain, quickly and concisely. First how she’d begun hearing whispers about a lot of runaways from the Boro, then details of her own interviews with family members, friends, teachers, and the uninterested members of the police force. She told him that the missing never took anything with them—leaving clothes, personal items, even cash behind. That not one of them had mentioned any thought of running away, even to their closest friends. The plans made and events skipped. Everything that had led her to write the original piece, headlined “Mysterious Disappearances of Local Teens Concern Residents.” It was followed by two more, during which it was clear that the town’s mood had grown from concerned to frightened.
Which brought them to the next document in her folder: the press release from Chief Jack Dunston. He pulled it out, reading it over, intensely disliking the man just for the arrogance of his tone that came through loud and clear, even in print.
“Dunston tracked down two of the missing girls,” Aidan said, already knowing it.
She nodded. “Yes. Rosa Chavez and Carrie Marks. Rosa was an illegal who went back to Mexico to be with her father and Carrie was picked up on a prostitution charge in Atlanta a few months after she skipped town.”
“And based on proof that those two had left of their own volition . . .”
“He was able to convince everyone
all
the rest were simply runaways, criminals, or transients, as well,” she said with a disgusted sigh.
“People believe what they want to believe.”
“You got it. Dunston didn’t have to offer any proof or even conjecture about any of the others. Providing a definitive explanation for what had happened to these two was enough to satisfy most people I had let my imagination run away with me. Or I’d made the whole thing up to get attention. It was easier than believing the alternative, I guess.”
Noting her frustration, he nodded in sympathy. “As if a dozen disappearing teenagers is just the norm in a town this size.”
Obviously hearing his skepticism, she said, “Exactly! And if you narrow down the geographical area to just the Boro, which only makes up about a third of Granville’s population, the odds against this are even worse. But nobody gives a damn.”
“The girls’ families?”
She frowned. “The ones I interviewed for the article don’t want to talk now. That could be because they’re holding out hope that I’m wrong and their daughters are fine.”
“Or because Dunston got to them?”
“Yeah. These aren’t exactly pillars of society. Rosa wasn’t the only illegal, and Vonnie wasn’t the only one who’d spent time in foster care because she had the misfortune to be born to crappy parents.”