The First Prophet Read online

  “I know. Pictures on milk cartons.”

  He nodded soberly. “Exactly. Unsolved and, after a while, with no leads, little hope, and precious little manpower to devote to them, pretty much going cold. Most of the families try to keep the searches going, keep the public aware, but…other people move on. And those kids are just plain gone.”

  Donny Grant was big for his age, which is why the other members of his Richmond neighborhood baseball team had elected him to be center fielder. He threw too wildly to be a pitcher, but his long legs could cover a remarkable amount of ground quickly, which, as any true baseball fan could tell you, counted for a lot.

  Still, he didn’t really like to run, so maybe he didn’t move fast enough when his best bud, Gabe Matthews, hit a rocket to deadaway center field. The vacant lot wasn’t big enough to hold it.

  “Go get it, Donny,” their pitcher Joe Singer yelled disgustedly as he watched Gabe happily kick the half-full cement bag that was second base as he passed. “I ain’t got another ball, you know!”

  “I thought you had at least two,” Gabe shouted, and cackled at his own wit as he jumped on home plate with both feet.

  “Fuck you!” Joe turned and put his hands on his hips as he watched Donny pick his way gingerly through the gap in the old board fence as he went after the home-run ball. “Shake a leg, Donny!”

  Donny needed very little encouragement to move faster. He didn’t much like the adjoining vacant lot, overgrown with weeds and brambles and rumored to be the site of drug deals and the occasional gang brawl.

  So he moved quickly, bent over as he swiped at the ground with his glove in a wide arcing motion. Where the hell was the thing? It couldn’t have gone much farther, surely—

  “For Christ’s sake, Donny!” Joe yelled again.

  Donny half turned in order to yell back a choice insult he’d just thought up, and promptly tripped and fell flat on his ass.

  Jeez, this place has more roots and vines than a jungle. He put his ungloved hand down to boost himself up, and froze for an instant before instinctively jerking his hand up. That wasn’t a vine, and it sure as hell didn’t feel like a root.

  He looked down and for a moment had no idea what he was looking at. Then he got it.

  Oh. A woman’s hand.

  He knew it was a woman’s hand because the nails were painted a pretty pink color. And there was a ring on one finger, a delicate little rose; it was caked with dirt now, of course, but still pretty.

  She seemed to be almost pointing up at him, her pointer finger extended while the others were gently curled. Pointing at him, almost beckoning him to come closer. Without thinking, he bent closer.

  That was when he realized that her wrist ended at the ground because the rest of her was under it. That was when he realized she was dead.

  That was when Donny Grant wet his pants and began to scream.

  SEVEN

  Slowly, Sarah said, “Then…we are talking about a conspiracy.”

  “I hate to admit it, and I can’t even begin to imagine why it’s happening, but I think so. It would take more than one person to cover up any murder or disappearance, and by definition that makes it a conspiracy. I can’t think of another explanation.”

  “Who?”

  Tucker let his breath out in a long sigh. “I don’t know. But if this is an organized effort, we’re talking something so big and complex that it almost defies belief. It does defy belief. Think of the cost. Think of the manpower. I mean, they have to be…monitoring the media, for one thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sarah, how do you think they found out about you? Six months ago, you were mugged, but there was no mention in the papers of psychic ability. It was just later, weeks ago, that the Richmond papers picked up the story. And what happens soon after? You realize you’re being watched. And your house burns down. And somebody comes in the night to kill you.”

  “You mean they’ve got people just…reading the papers looking for mention of psychics?”

  He nodded toward his computer. “The high-tech version. Using computers and keywords, you can search through a hell of a lot of newspapers, blogs, and other social media even in a single day. Could be an automated system. But even so, you need people to monitor, to weigh and consider what they find—and do something about it. A lot of people, assuming they don’t go after one psychic at a time. It would have to represent a huge investment.”

  “So what’s the payoff?” she realized.

  “Exactly. Why are they taking some psychics—and killing others? What are they doing with the ones they take? What is the threat, or the reward, that makes these actions necessary? In other words—what the bloody hell is going on?”

  To Sarah, the possibilities were terrifying. It was one thing to believe that an anonymous someone was after her, but to suspect that her enemy was organized on a national scale, ruthless and frighteningly efficient, and had been taking and killing psychics for more than a decade, was the most chilling thing she had ever even imagined.

  She avoided his steady gaze and looked into her coffee cup instead, and said the first thing that came into her head. “Lewis was a cop. If even cops are involved in this…if even cops are expendable…then how can we begin to fight them?”

  “We begin with information,” he answered promptly. “We gather the pieces and put them together until we have a complete picture, until we understand what’s going on.”

  “While we’re on the run from them?”

  Tucker shrugged. “We may be running from them—or running toward something that might help us understand who they are and what they’re doing. We won’t know until we get there.”

  “I still think…I’m still afraid that the end of this journey for me will be death.”

  “I know,” he said. “I think that’s why you can’t see where it is we’re supposed to end up. You don’t want to see, because you’re afraid you’ll die there. But you won’t, Sarah. Margo’s fate as you saw it was changed. Your own fate as you saw it will not happen the way you saw it. We’re going to change it.”

  “You’re so sure of that.”

  “Positive.”

  But I’m not. I think this is all part of the plan. We’re like rats in a maze, pleased we’re finding our way and unaware that at the center there’s a trap instead of cheese…

  Melissa Scanlan picked up the phone before it rang, and said absently, “Hi, Sue. What’s up?”

  “Don’t do that!” Susan Devries ordered in a harassed voice. “I hate it when you do that. Let the phone ring at least once before you pick it up, dammit!”

  “Sorry,” Melissa said ruefully. “I usually remember, but…never mind. We can’t go to the dance tonight, Sue. There’s weather moving in, and we have a cow out and ready to calve. Joe wants me to help him look for her. It’ll probably take us hours to find her.”

  “You might at least wait for me to ask,” Sue said, mild now. “Bad weather?”

  “Snow. I think.”

  “You’re usually right about that. Okay, I’ll tell Tom. Be careful out there, Melissa.”

  “Always. Bye.” Melissa glanced out the kitchen window as she pulled on her gloves. It was still calm out there. Too calm. The weather service said it’d stay that way, but she knew better. It was one of the things she could predict with near-one-hundred-percent accuracy—the Wyoming weather.

  She went outside in the cold late-September air and joined her husband in the main barn, where he already had their horses saddled.

  “Still sure?” he asked, always a man of few words.

  Melissa nodded. “Should start about dark. We only have a couple of hours to find her, Joe.”

  “Then let’s move.”

  She swung herself into the saddle, reflecting with pleasure that Joe never disbelieved her. And he never made her feel like a freak. His grandmother had had the Sight, and Joe considered himself fortunate to have married a woman who also had it.

  They split up not far
from the house, with Joe heading off to the east and Melissa going west. With bad weather coming, they couldn’t spare any of the hands to help in the search; the men were already working hard to get the other stock into safer areas. Unfortunately, the particular cow that was about to calve had a habit of hiding herself away for the duration, and she was both very valuable and a favorite of Melissa’s.

  It took Melissa half an hour to work her way out to the place where the cow had hidden last time. It was a low-lying area, thick with brush, and the worst kind of place for a cow and calf to be during a snowstorm. It was also an extremely difficult area for a horse to pick its way through.

  At first, that was why Melissa thought her horse was edgy. Because this was a bad place to be stuck with a storm coming, and animals often seemed to know when trouble loomed in their simple lives. So when her gelding shied nervously when the increasing wind rustled bushes nearby, she didn’t worry too much about it. Especially since she heard a cow bleat mournfully at about the same moment.

  It took her ten more minutes to home in on the cow, and when she reached her she was relieved that no calf was present yet. She reached for her rope and dismounted, and in a soothing voice said, “You idiot cow, what’s the matter with you? You should be close to the house, not way out here with a calf and snow coming—”

  Belatedly, she realized two things. That the gelding was backing away nervously, trailing the reins that should have made him stand still as per his rigid and reliable training, and that the cow was tied.

  “What the hell?” Melissa took a hesitant step toward the cow, staring at the thick rope that bound her to a tree. She very obviously was not about to calve, and the scuffed ground all around her testified to her restless attempts to move away from the tree.

  Bait. Bait for you.

  She didn’t know where that inner voice came from, but Melissa instantly dropped her rope and turned back toward her horse, one hand reaching for her rifle and the other for the walkie-talkie hanging from the saddle horn.

  She never touched either one.

  Her horse came back to his stable just minutes before the storm hit, wild-eyed and lathered. The missing cow also returned.

  But Melissa Scanlan didn’t.

  When Tucker woke abruptly, his internal clock told him it was still well before dawn, probably three or fourA.M. He had been asleep since just after midnight and had no idea what had awakened him. He listened intently for several minutes, one hand under his pillow grasping the .45 just in case, but heard nothing to alarm him.

  He finally relaxed a bit—though not completely. He had the idea he’d never be able to relax completely again. What he had discovered so far about the seeming conspiracy to kill and kidnap psychics had shaken him far more than he had allowed Sarah to see. At least, he hoped she hadn’t seen. Or sensed. She needed him to be sure of himself, he thought. Her belief in fate was so strong that he had to be equally strong in insisting they could avert the future she had seen for herself.

  Even if he wasn’t sure.

  How in hell were they supposed to fight an enemy that was organized on a national scale? An enemy with resources they couldn’t begin to match, with more manpower and undoubtedly some kind of uber-efficient communications network. An enemy ruthless enough to murder a cop—and smart enough to get away with it. How could that enemy be fought? How?

  The fire he’d built the night before was no more than glowing embers in the rock fireplace, and he lay there on the couch watching them dim and brighten. Once awake, his mind refused to shut itself off again.

  He wondered whether Sarah was sleeping. After seeing all those news clippings, she hadn’t had much to say. And she had kept a careful distance between them. Physically, emotionally, and mentally.

  Or maybe the mental distance he felt was due to his own wariness. The more convinced he grew that Sarah was a genuine psychic, the more he could feel himself getting…still inside. And watchful. He didn’t want to withdraw from her but couldn’t seem to help himself.

  Pushing that out of his mind for the moment, Tucker thought of all the charlatans he had met over the years, so many of whom cheerfully plied their trade in carnivals and malls and psychic “fairs” around the country, and knew those people were not threatened by anything but the occasional suspicious police officer. He was certain, however, that if he had been able to meet any of the people on the growing list of dead and missing, he would have found them genuine. The fakes and phonies stood in no danger from this; people with true psychic abilities were the targets.

  Which meant, he thought, that the people behind this had some way of determining the genuine from the fake. Or…did they simply watch and wait, as they had apparently watched Sarah, until they could decide? That was possible, maybe even likely. He thought of watchers all over the country observing potential psychics, checking off items on a list until the total added up to “genuine,” and felt a spreading chill.

  Jesus Christ—the enormity of the thing.

  And it was so damned inexplicable. Why psychics? Were they a threat to someone, or did their abilities make them somehow valuable? That was the question he felt needed to be answered, and it was the most elusive—because dead or missing psychics offered no answers, and as far as he could tell, nobody else had bothered to ask.

  He could remember reading of long-ago experiments in this country and others, when it had been theorized that psychics could be used in some fashion as weapons or deterrents to weapons, but those experiments—as far as he knew—had proved worse than useless. Only a handful of genuine psychics had been able to control their abilities in any real sense, and nobody had really known what to do with them. They could not, after all, stop bullets or prevent bombs from blowing up. And their predictions had been erratic at best.

  But that had been back during the Cold War, when paranoia and suspicion had compelled more than one government to attempt unconventional means of attaining and maintaining power over others. Things were different now.

  Weren’t they?

  Tucker shifted restlessly on the couch. Whoever was killing and taking them, the list of psychics was turning into a long one. No wonder Sarah had grown so quiet. In his research so far, she was one of a much smaller list made up of psychics who had lived normal lives well into adulthood before some trauma—usually a head injury—had left them struggling to understand new and baffling abilities. That alone would have been enough of a strain for anybody without finding out she was also a target of some mysterious conspiracy.

  And on that smaller list of new and untried psychics, most had wound up dead in some “accident” within months of the birth of their new abilities.

  Tucker turned over onto his back and stared at the dark, beamed ceiling. Sarah was in deadly danger. And the only thing standing between her and the people who would kidnap or kill her was him.

  “So how’re you gonna stop them, Mackenzie?” he muttered aloud.

  He didn’t know.

  Realizing suddenly that sleep was not going to return, he sighed and sat up. Glancing toward the bedroom door automatically, he stiffened when he realized it was open. He was on his feet before he decided to be, gun in hand and senses flaring.

  If they had snatched her right out from under his goddamned nose—

  A moment later he relaxed. One step away from the couch had brought the sliding glass doors into view, and through them he saw the moonlit deck and Sarah standing at the railing gazing out over the lake.

  Tucker hesitated, then stuck the automatic into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and shrugged into the flannel shirt he’d earlier removed. His boots were nearby, and he put those on as well before heading for the glass doors.

  He paused there, his hand on the handle, and for several moments studied her through the glass. She stood much as she had the first time he’d seen her, with her arms crossed over her breasts and hands moving slowly up and down her upper arms as though to warm chilled flesh. But she hadn’t been cold t
hen, not from the weather. From something inside her. And it was the same inner chill now, he realized. Sarah wasn’t cold.

  She was alone.

  For the first time, he realized that for all her passive acceptance of his company, Sarah had never stopped being alone.

  She was as shut in herself as she had been that first day, isolated within walls of wariness, remote in a way he didn’t really understand. And inside her were thoughts and feelings and terrors she had not put into words. Perhaps had not dared put into words. But they were there. Buried deeply. Locked away from him and anyone else who wanted to be close to her. Looking at her, he had the sense of things moving slowly and with terrible deliberation underneath a frozen stillness, like an ocean under ice.

  Tucker drew a breath and opened the door, wondering how he could reach her. Wondering whether he could reach her.

  It was chilly out on the deck, but not actually cold here at the end of September. In fact, it seemed warmer here than it had been in Richmond, and Tucker didn’t bother to button his shirt as he joined Sarah at the railing.

  Before he could speak, she did, almost idly. “I knew when you woke up. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Maybe not,” he said slowly. “Maybe not for you.”

  She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, and definitely wide awake as she glanced at him. “That makes you uneasy.”

  It did, as a matter of fact, but he denied it. “Of course not.”

  Her smile, clear in the moonlight, held a twist of bitter certainty. “Oh, no? Then what about this: I’m changing, Tucker.”

  “Changing how?” He was cautious, not only because of what she was saying, but because he realized he had caught her at a raw moment when she might reveal more than she wanted to.