Doom with a View (20 page)

“Kyle sounds like a great kid.”

“Yes,” said his father. “I don’t know what I’d do without him, Agent Harrison. You’ve got to find my son and bring him home for us.”

I had to give Harrison credit, because as Mr. Newhouse looked at him with such an open, imploring expression, Harrison held it together, while I had to avert my eyes and take a breath. “We’re doing everything we can, sir,” Harrison said. After a bit of a pause, he added, “Can I ask you if the name Leslie Coyle sounds familiar to you?”

The Newhouses looked at each other and frowned. Turning back to Harrison, they both said, “No.”

“So Kyle never mentioned a girl named Leslie to you? Maybe as a friend or an acquaintance?”

Both of Kyle’s parents shook their heads. “Kyle has a lot of friends,” his mother explained, and her eyes became teary. “Not a day goes by without one of them stopping by to see if we’ve heard anything about Kyle.”

Harrison closed his notebook and looked gravely at the worried parents. “We will of course keep you apprised of any new developments in your son’s case. Thank you very much for meeting with us and we’ll let you get on with your day.”

The couple looked surprised. “That’s it?” Mr. Newhouse asked.

“For now,” Harrison said, and he got up from the table.

Candice rose too and I took the cue and got up. We all shook hands, then left the house and went out to the car. Once we were on our way, Harrison eyed me in the rearview mirror again. “Thank you for cooperating.”

I shrugged. To be honest, my radar hadn’t gotten much and I wasn’t really sure why. “We should try and find a place to eat before we get back on the highway,” Candice said, pulling out her iPhone and poking the screen with her finger. “What sounds good, Abby?”

“Anything you guys want,” I said noncommittally.

“I know of a nice Italian restaurant not far from here,” Harrison said cordially. “Or there’s also a great authentic Mexican joint I know.”

Candice and I both stared at him slack-jawed. He caught us gawking. “What?”

“That’s the first time you’ve been nice to us,” I said.

Harrison rolled his eyes. “I’m not a total asshole, you know,” he said gruffly.

“Yeah, but who knew?” Candice said, and I started to laugh and then so did she and soon Harrison even cracked a smile.

We put the choice of restaurant to a vote and I was the tiebreaker. We headed to the Mexican place and were seated right away with chips and salsa, which we ate with relish while we each surveyed the menu. “So,” Harrison said, his eyes still focused on the menu, “did you pick up any hits?”

I took a big swig of water and sighed. “Not really,” I said. “I mean, I still think Kyle’s dead, but when I ask where his body might be, all I see is dirt.”

“He’s been buried?” Candice asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s weird. . . . I don’t know that what I’m seeing is underground.”

“What do you mean?” Harrison asked, closing his menu and focusing on me.

“I mean that the dirt I see in my mind’s eye looks like it’s piled into hills. And if I had to guess, I’d say they looked more like sand dunes than mounds of dirt.”

“You think he’s near some sand dunes?”

I shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say yes. But I don’t know that I see water around. I mean, all I keep seeing is something metallic mixed in with the sand. I see the dunes and then, like, thousands of little flecks of sparkling silver. It’s weird, huh?” And then something else popped into my mind and I cocked my head.

“What are you getting?” Candice asked, reading my body language.

“Agent Harrison?” I said slowly.

“Yes?”

“Can you just confirm one thing for me?”

“That depends on what you want me to confirm,” he said in all seriousness.

I smiled patiently and held in a sigh. He sure was a difficult SOB. “I would
appreciate
it if you would call the Newhouses and ask them if Kyle ever spent time racing around in a dune buggy.”

Harrison stared blankly at me. “Why exactly?”

I lost patience and growled, “Oh, for cripe’s sake! Can’t you please just this once lend me this one
tiny
bit of credit and make the call?”

Harrison visibly stiffened and his eyes narrowed slightly, but I was relieved when he pulled out his notebook and his cell phone and punched in some numbers he read off the page. Candice and I waited expectantly and then we heard him apologize for calling the senator back so soon before he asked him my question. “He did?” Harrison said with obvious surprise. “Where exactly did he like to go?” There was a pause; then Harrison’s eyes bulged and he shot an alarmed glance at me. “Which side of the state is that?” There was yet another pause and Harrison scribbled furiously in his notebook. “Thank you, Senator. I appreciate the added information. I’ll let you know if it’s relevant to this investigation shortly.” He then clicked off his phone and sat back in his seat, staring at me curiously. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’m starting to believe you may
actually
be psychic.”

“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said woodenly. “So what did Newhouse say?”

“He said that Kyle used to go dune buggying each summer with a couple of friends up near Silver Lake. They’d camp and ride dune buggies all day.”

Candice beamed at me. “Silver Lake,” she said. “No wonder you were seeing flecks of that in your vision!”

“Yeah, but you know what that means, don’t you?” When no one answered, I stated the obvious. “Kyle’s body is buried somewhere in those dunes.”

Harrison picked up his cell again and began to dial and he remained on the phone talking to various police and FBI agents throughout the rest of lunch. As Candice and I were setting our plates aside, Harrison said, “Thanks, Ben, and keep me posted on what you guys find.” And then he clicked off.

“They’re going to do a search?” Candice asked.

“They are.”

“Are you going to drag us up there this time?” I really wasn’t in the mood for another long ride that would end only with me sitting in a car for three hours.

“If I did, would you be able to locate the body?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I admitted because I thought I could. But then something else filled my mind and I thought, rather than head up there and sniff around, I might be able to just point the search party in the right direction. “Have your team look near some sort of shack,” I said. “I believe one side of the shack is painted aqua. There’s also the color red mixed in too.”

“His body is in the shack?”

I considered that, then said, “No. It feels like it’s buried. But it’s near the shack, not in it.”

Harrison jumped back on his phone and called that in.

After getting off the phone, he laid some money down for the bill and motioned for us to go. We headed out to his car and were soon under way again. It was quiet in the car, everyone alone with their thoughts, and I could feel my eyelids growing droopy. I really wanted a power nap and was considering taking one when Harrison said, “So tell me how this works, exactly.”

I started at the sudden noise in the quiet car. I looked at Candice’s face in the passenger-side mirror and saw a small smirk on her face. “Were you talking to me, Agent Harrison?” I asked when she said nothing.

“Yes,” he said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror.

“You want to know how my intuition works?”

He nodded.

I sat up straighter in the seat and tried to stifle a yawn. “Well,” I began, “it’s not that complicated. I focus on something and then certain images fill my mind’s eye. The pictures I see are usually metaphoric and the sequence I see them in usually links them together, so as they appear to me, I try and piece together the story they tell me.”

Harrison remained quiet for a little bit, and then he asked, “Yes, but
how
does it work? How can you pick up on things that you have no knowledge about?”

I shrugged. “I think you want me to give you the science and I’m afraid I can’t do that. It’s kind of like asking a caveman how his eyes work. He just looks at something and describes what he’s seeing. The actual physiological stuff that is going on with my body and my brain that allows me to get this information is something that I don’t have a clue about. I can only tell you that it happens and what it looks like. I can’t tell you why or how.”

“So why can you do it and other people can’t?” he said curiously.

“Why do some people have better vision or hearing than others?” I asked him in return. “Again, you want me to give you the science, and I don’t have that. I’m the subject, not the researcher.”

“So you do believe that there is something scientifically going on with you. That there are measurable changes happening.”

“Absolutely. The question still open is what to measure and how to detect those changes. I don’t know that we’ve developed the right tools yet to be able to measure or identify what exactly is going on with me physically when I’m using my radar, and that’s why there are so many skeptics. Everyone wants to be shown the ‘proof,’ and going after that is all well and good if you’ve got the right tools to measure and detect the differences between someone using their radar and someone not using it. But if you haven’t developed the tools of detection yet—in fact, if you don’t even know where to look—then there’s no proof to be had. The only thing you can quantify are the results—but that’s just not good enough for some people.”

“What about all this predicting-the-future stuff, though?” Harrison asked me. “What’s your take on how that works?”

“Good question,” I said to him. I took it as a positive sign that he was curious. “I think for that we actually can use a bit of science, and I’ll point to Mr. Albert Einstein for clarification.

“As you know, Einstein believed that time is not a linear line, that it does not begin at one point and continue out to some finite point in the far distant future. No, he believed that time is actually a loop; that it is possible to consider that time could actually curl back on itself. And if you think of the symbol of infinity, you understand his concept even better. Time as a sideways figure eight in constant motion but swirling back to points already traveled. Now, if Einstein is correct, and time is a loop, then I believe that there are certain things within that loop that are set, or determined. Think of it like time as a stream, and within that stream there might be large boulders which represent specific events where the water—time—bumps into them, and ripples in the water get sent forward and backward.

“What I believe people like me do is look for those boulders, and the reason we can see them is because of the ripples flowing back from them, like an echo effect. Very much like how a bat or a dolphin uses their sonar. They can see in the dark because they’re sending out sound waves to find the big objects in their path. I’m using thought waves to find the boulders and the ripples. Now, I can’t see everything, of course, but those ripples stand out, and the closer I get to the boulder, the more pronounced the ripple and the clearer the imagery.”

Harrison was silent for a while. “So you believe that we have no choice. That our futures are completely predetermined?”

“No, not at all,” I said, and I could see the surprise in his eyes as he glanced back at me. “I think the boulders—these specific events—might be set, like they are in a stream, but we’re floating along in the water and we’re free to choose the course that best suits us.

“So, to give you an example, let’s say a certain type of cancer runs in your family. And let’s say that one of the boulders in your stream is this cancer. Now, if you don’t go in for screening, you might hit that boulder head-on and maybe, because you chose not to get prescreened and it was too late when you found out, maybe you died from the impact. But say you
did
go in for regular screening, and say, because of that screening, your life was saved and you were able to carry on farther down the stream. We can choose which way we’ll go when we come to those boulders. We can smack into them, or curl to the right or left and move along down the river to the next set of boulders. It’s our choice.”

“Huh,” said Harrison. And that was the last he said for a long while.

Chapter Nine

As the sun started to set on the horizon and we entered the peak of rush hour traffic, Harrison’s phone rang. He answered it in his usual clipped tone and when I heard, “Good work, Ben. I’ll alert the family,” I knew they had found Kyle. “See what you can do about getting a DNA sample. We might want to consider dental records, though, to get a positive ID. It might be quicker,” Harrison added.

After he’d hung up, Candice said, “They found the boy.”

Harrison sighed. “They found a body. It was pretty much where Ms. Cooper said it’d be. Near a light blue outhouse at the edge of the camping grounds. The cadaver dogs found him without a lot of trouble.”

“Those poor parents,” Candice said, and I knew that her own grief over the loss of her grandmother was still close to the surface.

“Yeah,” Harrison agreed as he turned off the highway onto the main road leading to the FBI offices.“Informing the parents is the part of the job I could do without.”

I stared out the window keeping my thoughts to myself. I felt very sad for Kyle’s parents and what they were about to learn. I couldn’t imagine having that last vestige of hope taken away from me if my child went missing. Still, at least they would finally know. It had to be better than imagining all the possible tortures that could be happening to someone they loved.

Harrison dropped us at Candice’s car. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.

“You’re welcome,” I replied.

“I’ll call you when we decide on the next course of action.”

“Okay. Good night.”

Candice didn’t say anything. I figured she was still a little put off by Harrison’s stiff attitude. When we got into her car, she said, “And, by the way, Abby,
great
job!”