4
Tennyson
Two hours later, Tennyson was still unable to use most of his gift. He gauged it was spotty at best, which wasn’t the best case scenario, but it was far from the worst.
This situation reminded him of Justin Wilson, a young spirit he’d met who’d been murdered by a serial killer.
Justin hadn’t yet mastered the art of dead speak and his only means of communication with Tennyson had been through the use of images.
He’d shown Ten a picture of Justin Timberlake followed by one of Wilson, the volleyball from the movie Cast Away and that was how his name was revealed.
He’d helped Ten find and identify his remains, and gave clues critical to finding the vicious killer who’d set his sights on Boston’s population of gay, homeless men.
Over his time in Salem, Ten had come across two or three other spirits who’d communicated in the same fashion, but, in all the years he’d had his gift, had never come up against a living person who did the same thing.
“I’ll take the ex-wife,” Ronan said.
“That leaves me with the exonerated inmate.” Jude sat across from Ten with his computer. “I’ll also look into known threats against former wardens in general and Jones in particular.”
“Good plan.” Ronan turned to Ten. “Are you staying here with us or going home?”
“I’ll stay,” Ten said. “Cope is taking the kids to McDonalds after the library. We’ll do Lobster Charlie’s tomorrow.” Or whenever this case ends, Ten thought. “I want to do some work on people who can control what information they transmit to psychics and some other stuff.”
Ronan looked curious about what the “other stuff” was, but didn’t ask.
Ten’s first step was to visit his favorite psychic forum to do a keyword search for communication through images.
It was slow going at first, with a jumble of results, mostly dealing with showing images to spirits to see if they could answer questions.
It wasn’t until Ten nearly reached the end of the list when he found what he was looking for; an article about image communication.
As he skimmed the pages, Ten noted the psychic who’d authored the opinion was convinced that his client had come prepared to transmit the images in a precise order rather than the images being sent randomly.
Ten would agree the same was true with Dan Rogers.
There was nothing random about what he’d been shown.
What the article didn’t answer was why? Why would this sort of communication be used during an appointment the client booked and paid for?
Ten thought maybe it had to do with the client testing the psychic’s abilities to prove if they were genuine or fake, which was what Rogers seemed to be doing.
He’d been seemingly thrilled that Ten couldn’t read him, as if that were the object of his game.
Ten had spent the last twenty plus years of his life reading people. His husband and Fitzgibbon were open books. They leaked information constantly. Ten tuned out of their frequencies, so to speak, so he wasn’t subjected to Ronan’s mental porn library or Fitzgibbon’s off-key shower sing-alongs.
While Ten was an expert at reading clients and strangers on the street alike, he couldn’t read Dan Rogers.
Trying to reach him was similar to trying to read Jude.
When Ten focused on Ronan’s partner, all he got in return was blessed, peaceful silence.
There was absolutely nothing he could glean from Jude, not even something as simple as what the man had for breakfast.
Dan Rogers was similar in that Ten couldn’t pick up anything from his mind, with the exception that there wasn’t silence when Ten tried, but rather a cacophony of sound.
It had sounded like a revving motorcycle engine, microphone feedback, and the red alert siren from Star Trek combined together in a nightmare composition that jangled his nerves.
Ten had immediately stopped trying to read Rogers, which he was coming to realize was the client’s intent all along.
Which brought Ten back to what the point had been in the first place. Was Rogers trying to prove Ten was a fraud? Or was it something even more sinister? “Jude, tell me again about the curse Running Eagle put on you when you were a baby.”
Jude wore a stymied look for a second. “He was protecting me against psychic harm. The elders knew I would have the ability to become a Navajo medicine man and they wanted my gifts protected. I also think Eagle did that for me, so my thoughts remained my own. As a mixed race kid, he knew there would be times that my thoughts would betray me. He was right. I took teen angst to an entirely new level. Why are you asking all of a sudden? Is Eagle okay?”
“As far as I know.” Shit, Ten hadn’t meant to stir up a hornet’s nest with Jude’s grandfather.
His gift was still on the fritz and didn’t know if Eagle was okay.
“I was asking because of that client this morning. When I tried to read him, I got nothing at all, not even simple, unimportant things, which is what happens with you. What doesn’t happen with you is sound interference. ”
“What do you mean?” Jude asked.
“When I read you, I get a blank wall and silence. When I tried to read Rogers, I got this insane opera of the worst sounds imaginable, microphone feedback, a revving engine, things like that. I stopped trying to read him the second I heard that, which I think was his objective. I’ve been sitting here wondering what he was trying to keep from me, or if he was testing the waters to see if I could be stumped. ”
“But you’re also wondering if someone put some kind of spell on him to keep you from being able to read him, right?” Jude wore a thoughtful look as he tapped his pen against his legal pad.
“Yeah. Rogers took advantage of the chaos Warden Jones created to escape unseen. I assume because he’d run his experiment and it worked.”
“You told me that Rogers was taunting you. Where does that fit in with what you think was going on?”
“This guy mentioned your name, Ronan. He knew we were married and he specifically said you were the reason he was unable to connect with the person he wanted to speak to. It felt personal to me. Obviously Dan Rogers was a fake name. When I got his client intake sheet there was nothing else on it but his name and that he’d requested an emergency appointment.
That form disappeared along with Rogers.
There’s one last thing though.” Until this moment, Ten had forgotten all about what had been scrawled on the folder in angry, red ink.
“I get the feeling I’m not going to like this.” Ronan fisted his hands on the table.
“He’d written I’ll be back in red ink.”
“So, he’s The Terminator?” Jude asked, smirking.
“I don’t think so, Jude. I think it’s a warning.”
“Or a threat,” Ronan chimed in looking upset.
“If he’s someone from my past and has a plan for me, it makes perfect sense that he would do everything he could to keep his identity hidden long enough for his sick plot to play out.
Carson sent me several screen shots of the man taken from the video surveillance system and I don’t recognize him at all.
I sent them to Fitz and Jude to see if they do.
“I don’t recognize him either.” Jude looked disappointed.
“In other news, I was able to find Gianni Franco. He’s in Ottawa.
Apparently he emigrated to Canada after he was set free from prison.
According to Customs and Border Patrol, his passport hasn’t been used to enter the U.S.
for the last two years. The warden said the letter was mailed from Salem, so that pushes Franco down our list of suspects.
Did you have any luck with the ex-wife and her husband? ”
Ronan nodded. “Everything Jones told us checks out. Names, addresses, phone numbers. Neither of them have a criminal record. The husband has a couple of speeding tickets, but other than that, he’s law abiding.”
“It doesn’t take much to turn a good citizen bad, especially where affairs of the heart are concerned.” Ten had worked in law enforcement for long enough that he knew anything was possible.
“What are our next steps?” Jude asked.
“We need to pay the ex-wife and new husband a visit and speak to them separately, if possible. I need to get truthful information from the wife and she won’t give that to us if her husband is sitting beside her.” Ronan turned to Ten. “Where are you with your gift?”
“It’s coming back. I’m not one hundred percent, but I’m not flying blind either.” Ten hated admitting this to Ronan. He’d always been his husband’s secret weapon in these kinds of cases, and he felt like he was letting Ronan down.
“Do you think you’d be able to tell if the ex-wife or her new husband is lying?”
Ten nodded. “Yeah. I’ll be able to do that, but we both know your instincts about people are usually dead on. Same with Jude and his ability to read body language. The only body language Ten could read was that Ronan’s erect dick was in need of sucking. Beyond that, he was a lost cause.
“Okay, let’s hop to it,” Ronan got out of his seat. “We promised the kids could go in the pool this afternoon. I’d like to join them if we can prove the letter Warden Jones got was a hoax.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ten agreed.
So far, this day wasn’t going the way Ten anticipated it would, making him feel off-balance. He was hoping Ronan was right on the money about the letter being a practical joke of some sort.