The Psy-Changeling Series, Books 6-10 (107 page)

Sophia’s expression didn’t change. “I expected that, Mr. Reuben. Bonner isn’t used to being denied.”

Max folded his arms across his chest. “That’s an understatement.” Bonner had been born into wealth, gone to the most exclusive private schools, summered on a vineyard in Champagne, wintered at a ski resort in Switzerland. He’d had simply to ask and his parents had given it to him, their only son—a hundred-thousand-dollar car at sixteen, a trip around the world at seventeen, a private residence on their extensive property at eighteen.

“He’ll try to play you,” Bart said, tapping a pen on the old-fashioned legal pad he insisted on using. “He’s had a few days to do some underground research, maybe find out things about you—”

Sophia shook her head. “I’ve survived worse monsters.” Her eyes met Max’s. “It’s time for me to go in.”

Every single muscle in his body went rock hard in rejection of the idea, but he nodded. “I’ll be right here—one small signal and I come get you.”

 

Sophia walked into the same room she’d entered only a few days prior, but this time, she was viscerally aware of Max’s gaze on her no matter that he stood hidden behind the wall that separated the room from the observation chamber. And though a prison guard stood with his back to the wall behind Bonner, it was the knowledge of Max watching over her that kept her calm, focused.

Her cop would never let the monster touch her.

With that knowledge in her heart, she said, “Mr. Bonner,” as she reached the table.

Gerard Bonner’s smile presumed an intimacy that made her skin crawl. “Sophia. I’d rise to welcome you, but alas . . .” He gestured to the clamps that kept him immobilized, his hands jerking to a halt.

“It’s for my protection that you can’t move,” she said, taking a seat across from him. “You have very strong hands.” After torturing Carissa White in a multitude of horrific ways, he’d finally killed her with the intimacy of his hands.

“Are you attempting to shock me?” A warm chuckle from the outwardly handsome man in front of her. “I enjoyed it, you know. Poor Carissa. She begged me to do it in the end.”

So clever, she thought, always couching his words in a way that it was never quite a confession. Not that they needed it, not for Carissa White. “I was told you were ready to cooperate.”

“Did I put you to too much inconvenience with my request?” he asked, his expression filling with what many would’ve mistaken for the sincerest of apologies. “I find that I like you the best. You’re so much . . . gentler than the other Js.”

“Did you know, Mr. Bonner,” she said conversationally, “that in the early part of this century, they still incarcerated males together in the same cell? Tell me”—she held his gaze, let him see that she’d looked into the abyss, that nothing he said could touch her—“do you think you would have . . . enjoyed”—a deliberate echo of his word, his tone—“being in a cell with another inmate who might not have shared your more sophisticated tastes?”

Bonner didn’t like that, his eyes showing the sadistic bite of malignant rage before he got it under control. “I’m sure I would have survived, Sophia. Hmm, does anyone call you Sophie?”

She hated that he’d used Max’s pet name for her, hated it so much that for an instant, she wondered if she’d betrayed herself, because Bonner’s blue eyes glinted with pleasure.

“You may call me anything you wish.” A facsimile of calm, good enough that it had fooled the medics all these years. “All I care about are your memories.”

Another crack in the facade, the ugliness inside him rising to the surface for a fleeting instant. “Then take them,
Sophie
.” Vicious words laced with charm. “Take what you came to find . . . then maybe you can tell me how you got such a pretty, pretty face.”

She did nothing, felt nothing. His words didn’t matter—not when Max
saw
her, knew her, accepted her. “I’m not going on some kind of a scavenger hunt in your brain, Mr. Bonner. If you want to cooperate, then cooperate. If not, I’ll make a final recommendation that your offers to share information have been nothing but a waste of time and that all further approaches from you be ignored.”

“Bitch.” It was said in that same charming voice, his smile never slipping. “Is the rest of your skin marked? Or are you a blank canvas just waiting for the right artist?”

“One last time, Mr. Bonner—are you ready to cooperate?”

“Of course.”

She held the eye contact, sweeping out with her unique telepathic gift. Some Js needed physical contact with those they scanned, but she never had. And now, with her Sensitivity, touch would take her too deep, lock her into another’s mind. And if there was one consciousness she did not want to be trapped within, it was that of the sociopath on the other side of the table.

Moving effortlessly through the easily permeable barrier that was the weakness of a human shield, she stepped into his mind. It was as calm, as orderly . . . but the pieces had shifted. Bonner was rearranging his memories of the past, perhaps to better fit his own personal view of the world.

A woman’s screaming face, her back contorted in agony, her eyes bleeding at the corners. Sophia recoiled inside, but years of training kept her from betraying her abhorrence on her face. “We already know what you did to Carissa White,” she said. “If that’s all you’ve got—”

A small wooden glade, peaceful almost.

She felt the handle of the shovel vibrate under her hands as he/they drove it into the earth, heard the eerie quiet, felt the cool crackle of the plastic under his/their hands as he/ they rolled the body into the shallowest of graves. Bonner didn’t waste any time covering his victim up again, his/their actions as impersonal as if he/they were raising a garden. The body had ceased to have any meaning once it stopped screaming. Not long afterward, the earth covered the plastic, and then they were walking through the forest, exiting less than five minutes later onto a rugged track swathed in fog.

Firs—deep green, thick with foliage—their tips disappearing into the fine white mist, surrounded them on all sides, but there was a lot of undergrowth, a few spindly trees of other species. So not a tree farm, but something more natural. She got into the vehicle, started the engine after stripping off heavy gardening gloves. The four-wheel drive took the rickety road with ease, until half an hour later, she appeared out of the fog and found herself at a T-junction, a sealed road in front of her. Her heart was calm, her body relaxed. It was—

Sophia realized she was losing herself in Bonner, fought to bring herself back. “I need a location.” She could see nothing but the infrequent car zipping by fast—a lonely highway.

“Patience, my sweet Sophia.” Bonner was breathing hard, excited by the memory . . . by making her relive it with him.

That was when she saw it, the board on the left that marked the entrance to “Fog Valley Track.”

She took note of the kinds of flowers she’d seen, the angle of the sun, the weather, everything she could.

Then Bonner’s memories shifted sideways, a twisting kaleidoscope.

She’d expected something of the kind, pulled back before it could affect her. “That doesn’t give us much.”

“You’ll find her.” He drew a long, deep breath. “You’ll find my lovely Gwyn.”

Gwyneth Hayley had disappeared six months after Carissa White and was widely considered to be Bonner’s second victim. Sophia tried to pry further details out of the Butcher, but he just smiled that intimate, satisfied little smile and told her she’d have to do some of the work herself.

Exiting, she let the medic scan her. “You need nutrients,” was the response.

She drank the energy drinks he gave her, then let Bartholomew Reuben lead them up out of the bowels of the building and to a conference room on the upper floor. “If everyone could drop their shields,” Sophia said, “I can project the scan into your minds.” This was part of what made her a J, rather than a simple telepath—the ability to literally project entire memories. She could only do five people at a time, but other than Max, there was only Reuben, the warden, and Reuben’s assistant. “I’m sorry, Detective Shannon, I can’t project through your natural shield.”

Max shrugged. “Projecting is tough on a J, right?” He continued without waiting for an answer, “Why don’t you give us a recap instead?” His eyes were piercing. “If Bonner really is in a cooperative mood, we don’t know how soon you might have to scan him again.”

He was protecting her. The knowledge made her heart expand until it threatened to consume her. Taking a deep breath, holding that powerful emotion like the treasure it was, Sophia described what she’d seen.

“Fog Valley Track,” Max said, already on the phone to the computer techs at Enforcement. “Yeah, how many hits?” A pause. “Narrow it down to a location with a lot of firs, relatively isolated—or it would’ve been five years ago; maybe off a highway.”

Sophia raised her hand to catch his attention. “The temperature was cool, though the position of the sun suggested it was close to midday.” Her mind filtered out the distractions of the other cars, Bonner’s thoughts, and saw through to the other side of the road. “There was a billboard advertising a harvest festival as he turned out of the track.”

Max repeated her words to the computer tech, waited a few moments. “I owe you a drink. Send everything through to D2, comm station three. And encrypt it, just in case someone’s scanning the prison line.” Hanging up, he said, “We’ve got three mentions of a Fog Valley Track that might match,” he said.

“The track was very rough,” Sophia pointed out. “Could be it’s not on the maps at all.”

“Yeah.” A grim look. “But we’ll worry about that after we check out these images.”

Those images were transmitted moments later. Sophia said, “That one,” almost before she was aware of opening her mouth.

Gwyneth Hayley’s last resting place lay deep within a snow-capped mountain range.

Faith NightStar, daughter of Councilor Anthony Kyriakus and the most powerful foreseer in the world, walked out into the forest that surrounded the home she shared with her changeling mate, hoping the fresh air would melt away the fog that clouded her mind. Deep and viscous, damp and clammy, it felt almost real—the chill of it making her rub her hands up and down her arms.

“Something bad is coming,” she said out loud, trying to think past the thick gray soup that hid everything from view. “Fire and fog and screams and metal.” They were all connected. The fog touched those in the center, but so did the flames and the stabbing, cutting violence of metal.

She began to pace restlessly across the pine needles that littered the forest floor, her gut twisted up with the knowledge that someone was going to die. Tears pricked her eyes, burned in her throat. “Fire and fog and screams and metal.”

But no matter how many times she repeated that, no matter how many times she tried to part the fog, all she got was a crushing sense of impending horror.

Four hours after Sophia pinpointed the location, the entire team, complete with a forensic unit, got out of their vehicles at the forested end of Fog Valley Track. Though the ground was currently clear, the air up here carried a touch of ice, the threat of snow lingering in the air.

“You, me, and Bart,” Max said to Sophia. “We go in, see if we can eyeball anything. If that fails, we send in the dogs.” It was just nudging five, but the winter sunlight was fading fast. It would’ve been more sensible to wait until the next day, but an unspoken thought united them all—they couldn’t bear to leave Gwyn alone and cold in the dark any longer.

Nodding, Sophia took the lead. “The undergrowth has gotten considerably thicker in the years since Bonner was here.”

“At least the path’s still negotiable,” Bart said, pushing a branch out of his way as he and Max followed Sophia’s shorter form. “It’ll be a bitch to process though once we find the grave.”

Max shot out a hand to grip Sophia’s upper arm when she stumbled over a rock. “Thank you, Detective.” A calm, even voice, but Max had felt the slight tremor in her muscles, knew his Sophie was hanging on through sheer, stubborn grit.

“Anything look familiar?” Dropping her arm, Max backed off, aware of Bart staring at him.

“Not so far.”

Bart nudged Max, his voice low. “You know Psy don’t like to be touched.”

“They also probably don’t like to fall flat on their faces.”

“True.” Blowing out a breath, Bart shook his head. “I haven’t called Gwyn’s parents yet.” The name fell easily from the prosecutor’s tongue—like Max, he’d come to intimately know the short life and lost dreams of each and every girl.

“Neither have I,” Max said, remembering Gwyn’s mile-wide smile, her long runner’s legs, with an anger that hadn’t dulled in the intervening years. “No use ripping the scab off that wound unless we can give them some peace.”

Sophia went motionless up ahead, her head angled toward a twisted old tree on the edge of the path. “I saw that.” It was almost soundless.

Max kept an eye on her as she stepped off the path and began to jog forward. Not more than five minutes into it, she jerked left and clambered onto a fallen log. But she didn’t step off on the other side. Reaching her, Max jumped up on her right, as Bart did the same on her left.

There was no need to ask her what she’d seen.

“It’s like the land died here,” Sophia said, her eyes on the lifeless patch of earth in front of them, which though bordered by the living beat of the forest, tiny shoots and greenery, was itself as browned and dry as dust.