Blood Memories vm-1 Page 8

  A uniformed policewoman came in with a paper cup. Redington held it to Wade's mouth.

  "Drink this."

  Cold water splashed between Wade's teeth. "Why did you do that to me?"

  "We had to know. To be honest, I don't think I believed what Van Tassel said about you."

  He leaned down to help Wade get up.

  "Don't touch me!"

  Redington pulled back slightly, withdrawing his hand. "I know you're thinking that none of this is fair. Not to you. Not to Mark. But our psychologist did an extensive evaluation and found him fit and ready for duty. Mark's been running around with a badge and a gun for two weeks now. Is that fair? Is that right?"

  Wade's head was beginning to clear. "No," he whispered. "He shouldn't have a gun. He's dangerous… and racist. But he doesn't care about very many people, not even his wife. He cared about Christopher."

  "That doesn't give him the right to kill someone."

  "Did you know he'd killed Merinchez?"

  "I had a pretty good idea. We just needed a body. And you may just have given us that."

  Less than an hour later, two officers found Juan Merinchez's body in the trunk of a 67 Fairlane exactly where Wade had seen it in Mark Taylor's mind. Wade left the precinct as quickly as possible, flew home, and never checked back to find out what happened to Taylor. He didn't want to know.

  Long ago, Wade had learned to slowly examine his feelings. Letting them all in at once caused poor or quick judgments. The experience in Mark Taylor's mind never left him. Those thoughts had been the ugliest string of images he'd ever seen. They would be with him always. But then anger set in… and guilt. That psychologist must have been blind. What if Inspector Redington had flown Wade out to California a few days earlier, before Mark Taylor had killed Merinchez? Could the situation have been averted? Perhaps Merinchez would still be alive, and Mark wouldn't be facing murder charges. Or back even further, what if Wade had actually been working under cover with Mark and Christopher? Could he have picked up that Merinchez had grown wise and then helped avoid Christopher's death at all? What if?

  The questions never left him for long. After receiving a master's degree in developmental psychology, he went on to a PhD in criminal psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Shortly before graduation, he applied to twenty-seven police departments around the country for a position as staff psychologist. He was offered three, and finally accepted a place in Portland, Oregon, because the department seemed friendly but overworked and in need of someone like Wade.

  Wade wished to be needed.

  "We'll miss you," Dr. Van Tassel said, smiling, "but I think you've made the right choice. You thought I wanted you to be a professor or a scientist, didn't you?"

  "Sometimes, yes."

  "It's your gift, Wade. We can study it and write about it. But you've been searching for something else your whole life. Perhaps you've found it. Come home for Christmas."

  With the first phase of his life over, Wade moved smoothly into the next. He found a loft-style apartment that would have cost him twice as much in Denver. The weather wasn't to his taste. It rained a lot. But the trees were green, the city was old but not too old, vogue but not too vogue. He thought he could be happy here.

  The job was difficult at first. He was responsible for the files on forty-four men and women. In spite of his own innate ability, there was a mountain of red tape to be danced around every time someone gave him cause for concern, especially when Captain McNickel wanted the officer in question back on the street.

  A rookie named Joe Tashet got stabbed in the side while running down a fleeing mugger. After healing up and receiving a clean bill of health from a medical doctor, he was handed over to the police psychologist.

  "No way," Wade stated flatly to Captain McNickel in private. "He's terrified. It's all too new. Give him a little more time."

  "We don't have any more time. Unless you tell me he's going to piss on the street and then shoot a couple of old ladies, I need him back out tomorrow."

  "What about his partner? Is it fair to send someone else out with a panicked rookie cop?"

  "He needs to get back on the horse, Sheffield."

  McNickel was the only person who refused to call him Dr. Sheffield.

  But Wade found that understandable. After all, he was barely twenty-seven and looked even younger. It would be hard for a crotchety old geezer like McNickel to refer to him by a title like "doctor."

  What Wade didn't like or understand was McNickel's constant refusal to accept sound diagnoses. But the Joe Tashet case ended some of those problems.

  Less than a month after Joe's psych evaluation, his partner was shot and killed by a drunken husband as the two officers were investigating a domestic battle. At the first sign of a gun, Joe bolted, leaving his partner with no backup.

  McNickel listened to Wade more often after that.

  Some of Wade's fantasies and expectations never came to pass. He didn't work under cover. He was occasionally asked to evaluate suspects and appear in court, but McNickel ordered him to "play down the psychic bit and just do your job."

  Wade was often tempted to look inside McNickel's head and find out what made the old man so bad-tempered. Maybe his sex life was lousy… though Wade's own hadn't exactly been fireworks either. His job kept him hopping. Most of his duties consisted of helping exhausted, bored, and/or disillusioned cops whose work lives were drastically invading their home lives. Time passed quickly.

  On November 7, 2005, at 5:32 P.M., Wade met Detective Dominick Vasundara, a transfer from New York. Wade was finishing up some paperwork in his office late that afternoon when a deep voice sounded from the open doorway.

  "Captain told me to see you."

  Looking up, Wade saw a man of medium height and stocky build, with stubble covering his wide jaw, and short black hair. He was dressed in faded jeans and a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. The man wasn't large, but somehow he seemed to block the entire doorway.

  "Can I help you?" Wade asked.

  "Yeah, I'm Dominick. I don't know what you can do. The captain told me to see you on my way out. Something about starting a file."

  Wade was tired. He'd had a long day, and the last thing he wanted to do was start a new file. He should already have this guy's records anyway.

  "Are you a transfer?"

  "Yeah, New York."

  "Really? Did you request to come here?"

  "All that stuff's on my application."

  At that, Wade instantly entered Dominick's mind. He was too beat to play verbal volleyball.

  Expecting the new arrival to simply sit there for a few seconds dripping in attitude, Wade read a few normal, sexually motivated images before he saw surprise flicker across Dominick's face.

  "What the…?" He blocked Wade. "Stay out of my head."

  "Did you feel that?" Wade sat up, startled. "Could you feel me focusing in on your thoughts?"

  "What do you think I am, stupid?"

  "No, but you shouldn't have been able to-"

  "Look, I'm not getting paid to be here yet. If you need anything, ask in a hurry and let me go."

  This guy was some piece of work. First, he acted as if setting up his psych file was an annoying chore, and then he acted as if someone pushing around inside his head was an everyday event.

  "Do you want to get a beer?" Wade asked suddenly, surprising himself as much as Dominick.

  "What?"

  "I've been here since six this morning. There's a little sports bar down the street… good nachos. Why don't we finish up down there?"

  The unshaven New Yorker stared at him for a few seconds and then shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Why not? I'm not trying to be a pain. People have just been jacking me around since noon. I thought I'd be out of here a couple hours ago."

  Three beers later, they were sitting in Spankey T's Sports Bar watching the Seattle Seahawks get killed by the Chicago Bears on a large-screen TV. Wade sat there struggling for a way to broach the subj
ect of how Dominick had known about blocking a psychic entry. The problem solved itself when his companion turned to him during a time-out and asked, "Hey, where'd you learn telepathy?"

  For a moment the question threw him. "I didn't learn it anywhere…"

  Wade had never considered himself bigoted or socially biased. But hearing a word like «telepathy» come out of Dominick's mouth surprised him. He usually imagined overmuscled guys with Bronx accents who wore torn-up sweatshirts would speak in one- or two-syllable words.

  "I learned to focus it," he went on, "at the Psychic Research Institute in Colorado."

  "Really? Did your folks sell you?"

  "What? No… I wanted to go. My folks were ready to burn me at the stake. How'd you know to block me?"

  Dominick put his beer down. "Spent a couple years with kids like you in high school. Some old guys, doctors, paid my folks a lot of money to borrow me for a while."

  The tiny hairs on Wade's arms began to prickle. "Why?"

  "I can touch things-almost anything-and tell you where they've been and who else has touched them."

  "Psychometry?"

  "Yeah."

  "Were you involved with a research center?"

  "A what? No, it wasn't like that. These guys worked for NYU, in this little building off campus. They had about six of us. They made us do a lot of stupid things. Pretty useless. One guy a little younger than me had what you have-telepathy. He and I used to practice on each other."

  Wade sat there, fascinated. Even at the institute, psychometry was an unusual ability. Dominick spoke of it in the same tone he might use to say he was good at calculus.

  "So what made you join the police force?" Wade asked.

  His companion's forehead wrinkled slightly, as though he wasn't sure how to answer. "I couldn't always, you know, do it… when they gave me things to examine. Sometimes I could see dozens of pictures about an object, who it belonged to, where it'd been. But sometimes I didn't see anything."

  Wade didn't follow him. "So that made you want to be a cop?"

  "No. One day Dr. Morris-he worked with me the most-shows up with this guy in a suit. I was about fifteen then. Anyway, they take me into a back room and hand me a ripped-up white sweater with dried blood all over it."

  Wade went cold. "What happened?"

  "I threw up." Dominick's voice dropped, and he seemed to slide uncomfortably back into the past.

  "I'm sorry," Wade whispered. The description was too close to home.

  "It wouldn't have been so bad," Dominick went on, "but they didn't believe everything I told them."

  "What did you see?"

  "A dark-haired guy with green eyes, wearing a black tux. He tore this girl's throat open with his teeth and started drinking her blood. Since she was wearing the sweater, I saw it all through her eyes. I gave a full description of the guy. Three witnesses, including an informant bartender, claimed to see someone who exactly matched the description leave the Garden Lounge with her less than an hour before she died."

  "Did they ever arrest anyone?"

  "No, I don't think so. I was just a kid."

  "So you joined up to help?"

  "Yeah, something like that."

  Wade looked into his glass at the foaming beer. This man sitting next to him certainly wasn't someone he'd actively seek out as a friend. But he felt a strange companionship, an understanding.

  "I forgot you're the staff shrink," Dominick said. "You think I'm cracked, don't you?"

  "No, I was just thinking about how you got involved with the force. We have a lot in common. Maybe I'll tell you sometime."

  Dominick looked away. "I gotta go. It's getting late, and I just flew in this morning."

  "Where're you staying?"

  "I'm going to find a hotel. Someone told me apartments are pretty cheap. I'll start looking tomorrow."

  "Compared to New York? Hell, yes. Hey, my couch folds out into a bed. You could crash there tonight. We can pick up a newspaper on the way home. You could go through the classifieds and call on apartments from my place tomorrow. I'll be at work all day."

  "You married?"

  "Me? No, if I was, she'd divorce me for criminal negligence. Job keeps me hopping." He jumped off the barstool. "Come on."

  Dominick looked too tired to argue. They picked up a pizza and a newspaper on the way home. That was the beginning.

  Dominick found a one-bedroom apartment only a mile from Wade's place. It often struck Wade as odd that the two of them had little in common and never discussed personal matters, but they spent four or five evenings a week together, just watching movies or going out for beer. Some nights, Wade would sit at his desk in the living room and work while Dominick just hung around entertaining himself. They seemed comfortable without having to talk.

  Instead of sticking out like a sore thumb, Dominick fit in well at the Portland precinct. He was fair, hard, tough, never late for work, and wrote up reports with remarkable clarity and accuracy. He displayed a few eccentricities. For one, he carried a.357 revolver instead of a more standard-issue automatic pistol. He said he'd learned to shoot with this gun and refused to replace it. And two, he seemed to possess no sense of humor-none. But these things were minor in the grand scheme.

  "I wish we could clone him," Captain McNickel said.

  The one problem Wade had with his friend was an unfamiliar feeling of blindness. He hadn't realized how heavily he relied upon telepathy in his job. With Dominick, he had to actually judge facial expressions and reactions. Making a correct analysis seemed impossible.

  "Why don't you let me in?" he asked one day while riding to lunch in Dominick's police car. "I'm trained at this, you know. I could make a decent evaluation if you'd just stop blocking me."

  "No. How'd you like it if I picked up a pair of your underwear and told you who you screwed last week?"

  Wade winced. "It wouldn't be like that. Most people think about sex forty times a day. I'm used to that."

  "Just drop it."

  Wade became so concerned that he suggested to Captain McNickel they assign Dominick's evaluations to another psychologist.

  "I can't do it," Wade said. "I'm used to knowing exactly what they're thinking. A normal psychologist would be accustomed to relying on instinct, on judgment calls. I'm not."

  "I hear you two have been hanging out together a lot."

  "Yes, we have… we have some things in common."

  "You two? Like what?"

  "I don't know. We both like football."

  "Yeah, right."

  "Just think about what I said, Cap, okay?"

  McNickel took the advice under consideration, but Dominick always played the role of the perfect cop, so nothing came of it.

  Years passed and little changed. On the morning of March 2, 2008, Wade and Dominick were riding around at the end of a night shift with a rookie trainee. The shift had been boring and uneventful. They were almost ready to call it a night and get some breakfast when a female voice on the radio asked them to check out a noise disturbance. The rookie acknowledged the call, and Dominick rolled his eyes.

  "Great, I'm starving, and we get to call a halt to a beer blast. Now, in New York, nobody would even notice. They got noise twenty-four hours a day."

  Wade smiled.

  They pulled up in front of an old Tudor-style home to the sound of classical music screaming out the windows.

  "Jesus Christ, what is that?" Dominick growled.

  "Tchaikovsky," Wade answered with mock snobbery. "Francesca da Rimini."

  "Oh, thank you so much. Now I can die happy. No wonder the neighbors are complaining."

  All three got out of the car, but it was the rookie's job to handle the situation. As they walked up the lawn, a half-dressed man burst out the front door and onto the porch.

  Before anyone could react or even blink, Dom had his gun out and aimed. That's another thing Dominick was always good for. As the man on the porch half turned before leaping off, Wade thought he saw dried blood in
his hair and on his back. The whole world seemed frozen in a single moment. Wade's feet wouldn't move.

  The man on the porch leapt off, crying out something none of them ever understood. On instinct, Wade reached out into his mind, looking for anything that might help. Then the impossible happened.

  Fire from right in front of him lit up the morning sky. Flames burst from every pore of the man's skin, as if someone had dumped gasoline all over him and pitched a lit cigarette.

  But Wade didn't smell any gas.

  Then the pain hit him. His knees buckled.

  "Dominick!"

  Every muscle, every sinew of his body was being ripped open and left to bleed on the grass. All the separate little cords of his brain were exploding in an ugly mass. Pictures of a thousand deaths, a thousand lives lost, poured through him, and he was powerless to stop the visions.

  He felt hands on his shoulders, holding him up off the grass.

  "Call for help!" somebody yelled.

  Then he felt her. The mind was feminine. He knew that from the first second of contact.

  Pain.

  Loss.

  Terror.

  Help me, he projected.

  Then she was gone.

  Incredibly strong hands lifted him and carried him through a doorway.

  "Dom?"

  Wade was four inches taller but twenty pounds lighter than his friend. Dominick laid him down on a couch as if he were a puppy.

  "Wade, wake up."

  Wade sobbed once and grabbed his own head.

  "Stop it!" Dominick's voice cut through the echoing pain. "I don't know what to do."

  "She's in here."

  "Who's in here?"

  "There's a woman in here, somewhere. Listen to me."

  For an answer, Dominick grabbed his shirt collar. "It was him. That guy who ripped the white sweater. It's him. I saw his face. He's everywhere. I can't even think in here. You've gotta wake up!"

  The agony in Wade's head began to clear at the panic in Dominick's voice. As he opened his eyes, the first things he noticed were coarse black hairs on the back of a hand grasping his shirt. Then he took in a pair of china-blue eyes on the brink of hysteria.

  "Get out, Dom," he whispered. "You should get out of here."