Behind Blue Eyes Read online

  As soon as they left, I dead-bolted the door and ran to my computer.

  No hits whatsoever for the Colorado Academy for Superior Intellect, which rang serious alarm bells, but there was a single listing for CASI—acronym only—as a subpage to something called the Meece Foundation. When I pulled it up, the hair on my arms stood on end. It was the same dark, gothic building, of that there was no doubt. It was billed as a school for extraordinary minds. Invitation only to attend, children ten through eighteen.

  Like when I’d been there, but now they were apparently aboveboard. Sorta. Freakin’ great. I really, really despise trips down memory lane, yet given the events to date, it made sense that my subconscious demanded I take a stroll. Which I wouldn’t, couldn’t do. Not right now. I needed to think rationally, not let the past cloud my judgment.

  What I needed was some fresh air. I should be fairly safe on a busy street in the middle of the day. This bastard had only killed in the late afternoon—if you counted Hiram—or at night...so far.

  If nothing else, I could hope like hell that the next time my cell rang, it would be Roney telling me it was all a stupid prank by teens. Even if that hope was ridiculously futile, I still clung to it.

  I clipped on Xena’s leash and headed to the park. The summer broiler-pan heat we’d been treated to had eased back into normal spring weather. The sun caressed my shoulders and head. It was a day you were simply glad to be alive. Unless you were vic number four or Amy Singleton, that is.

  I sat on a bench in front of The Gypsy Tea Room, Xena curled at my feet, and idly people-watched as my mind whirled.

  How had someone from CASI found me after all these years? I’d buried myself deep. Fingerprints were the only thing that could link me to my old life, and I’d been very careful to avoid being printed as part of my job with DPD. It had taken luck and more than a bit of avoidance, but I’d slid in under the Patriot Act and associated 9/11 laws, and everyone seemed to have forgotten about it. I wouldn’t be so lucky if I tried to hire on with another police department or anyplace that did a criminal background check, which made taking pictures of kids at Walmart look pretty attractive.

  What could the perp possibly hope to gain from involving me? Never mind that he was obviously a psychopath. I’d get to that later.

  I’d spent two tortuous years at CASI. Twenty-four long months that had their own special place in Hell for me. Over seven hundred days that had made me the person I am today, for better or worse. Thinking about it was enough to send a jolt through me.

  Could it be one of my old “classmates”? If it was, the question of why reared its ugly head again. I would have remembered if someone with an aura that strong, that nauseating, had been there. Granted, an aura could change over time, and I could think of no better place than CASI to bring about such a transformation.

  Who in my past could be responsible for this? I thought of Dave, the boy with the disturbing sulfur aura, who’d taken such delight in tormenting me. Of Dr. Green, the ringleader, the man responsible for two years of torture. Of the girls who had shunned me, made a horrible situation even worse. And last I thought of Wes, my best friend. Who’d been dead and buried for a decade. None of it made any sense.

  I’d been Sara Covington for so long I now thought of myself with that name, that persona. Christie Jenkins—the girl I’d been—was dead, for all intents and purposes. And until today I’d vowed to keep her buried. But now she’d have to come out and play, or it might end in another innocent’s death.

  Before CASI, I was always an adult child. The Sight undoubtedly had something to do with that, but I think I was born an old soul. When I was sent to CASI, I lamented being alone, because until then, even with the Sight, I’d wanted, needed, human contact, no matter how much I thought otherwise. They’d broken something elemental in me there, and after I escaped, I never wanted to share my space with another soul as long as I lived. That’s why I’d bought the loft, above it all. No next-door neighbors for me—it reminded me of the needles, the shock therapy...and after, of my move to the “dormitory”. My stomach roiled as memories assailed me.

  Beneath my smart-ass façade, I’d been reliving those two years each and every night in my dreams, though until today’s phone call, I’d chosen to ignore it, beat it back deep into my subconscious. And now it was looming up to bite me in the ass.

  Past and present had merged, and I was back to living the nightmare. A different one, yes, but a nightmare nonetheless. There was worse coming. I didn’t have to tap into the fourth dimension to see that.

  The ring of my cell brought me back to the present. I looked at caller ID and saw it was DPD. Probably Roney or Davis.

  I flipped the phone open. It was Roney, and he was disturbed, to put it mildly.

  “It’s for real, Sara. Amy’s been missing since yesterday. She was supposed to be at a friend’s place. Her parents didn’t even know until we contacted them.”

  “What about the friend?” I made myself ask calmly.

  “She’s a piece of work. Didn’t tell her folks she’d invited Amy over. When she didn’t show or answer her cell phone, this girl assumes she’s grounded, like she’d be if her parents found out they were planning on cruising the mall without parental supervision. The phone number you gave Monica was a dead end...untraceable, pre-paid cell. Thousands of them out there.”

  Yeah, that’s how I’d figured it would play out.

  “What’s next?” I already knew, but had to ask.

  “Are you at home?”

  “No, down on the street trying to get my head together. Why?”

  “I’m going to send a couple of techs over to set up some monitoring equipment on your cell.” He paused. “If this guy calls you again, I need you to try and get him on the phone, see if you recognize him.”

  “He’s too smart for that, otherwise he would have already addressed me directly, or used something to modify his voice.”

  “I know that,” he growled; his anger wasn’t directed at me, but at the killer. “We’ve got to try. Do what you can, okay?”

  “Sure. Poke at the killer with something pointy. Just my gig.”

  He laughed, but it was a distanced sort of laugh, as if he was thinking of something else. “Listen, I need to talk to you in person. Can I come by when I go off shift?”

  I snorted. Like my permission, or lack thereof, had stopped him before.

  “If this is about the other night...” I stopped, wondering how to say I didn’t want him in my personal life without sounding like a tease. I had kissed him back, after all, and pretty darn thoroughly.

  My pause was apparently the opening he’d been looking for. “Yeah, it’s about that, but everything else, too. Please, Sara?”

  The “please” did me in, because it was the last thing I expected from a hard-case like Roney. Deep down, I wanted to see him again, even if it was a stupid-ass thing to do. Because I could quite easily see myself giving over entirely too much of myself to him, and damn the consequences.

  “All right. But talking, nothing else.”

  “Whatever you say,” he replied seriously, and despite the gravity of the situation, I could hear the laughter lurking beneath.

  Great. Just freakin’ great.

  The techs finished hooking up some state-of-the-art contraption I’d never even heard about to my cell. I hadn’t thought you could trace cell calls, or tape them, for that matter, but evidently I hadn’t been watching enough Forensic Files.

  They left a conglomeration of equipment on the side table next to my computer. Apparently Davis trusted me enough for that, at least.

  I shooed them out the door and about thirty seconds later the cell rang. I picked it up, knowing without even looking who it was.

  “Covington.”

  “Sara? It’s Amy.” Her voice was slurred and slow, obviously drugged. The sound of it brought back too many painful memories I didn’t need beating at me right now. Amy needed a calm, collected ally, not a basket case weighed
down by a past that would give most adults nightmares.

  “He says you need to look at the board to understand the game. He won’t hurt me if you try.”

  “Are you all right, Amy?” I modulated my tone, pushing the rage and fear away. She didn’t need it.

  “I’m okay. He says he knows the cops are listening, and that’s fine because they’ll never catch him. Only you know how, and if you figure it out, you won’t want to.” She paused, almost as if winded by giving so much information. “He says I have to go now. Don’t forget about me, okay?”

  “I won’t. And tell him he’s a coward for not speaking to me himself.” Yeah, it was a calculated risk, but one Roney had asked me to take. We needed the bastard’s voice on tape as a lead, no matter how small it might be.

  I waited until she disconnected, giving the whiz-bang equipment a chance to do its job. As I stood there with the cell in my hand I knew what I had to do. The terror in Amy’s voice, even through the drugs, told me how dangerous this was...as if I didn’t already know.

  If I didn’t take care of business, she’d be dead, number five on a list we still couldn’t attach a motive to. The time for covering my own ass was over.

  Xena pressed against my leg, knowing something was wrong as only a beloved pet can. I reached down to scratch her neck, sat on the couch, lit a cigarette and waited for Roney.

  As I waited, I pondered what I could possibly say. I had two options: continue dissembling and jeopardize Amy and whoever else the killer had in his sights, or tell the whole truth. The thought of either option was enough to make me break out in hives, but I had to make a decision, and soon.

  How could I possibly give up the persona I’d spent a decade cultivating? The woman I’d become after the methodical destruction of Christie’s psyche? I liked that woman, even as I recognized that I ran from getting close to anyone, that I had been my whole life. Given what I’d experienced, was that such a shocker? I had a lot to lose: my freedom, my identity and quite possibly my life.

  Was I selfish enough to put that on the scales next to Amy’s life? I’m afraid part of me was. I’d fought too hard to get where I was now to lose it.

  Even as those thoughts formed, I was ashamed. I prided myself in being a good person, as someone who made moral choices, albeit under the radar. How could I possibly look at myself in the mirror every day if I didn’t do what was right, honorable? The simple answer was, I couldn’t. Because of that, my decision was all too easy.

  To save Amy’s life, and quite possibly someone else’s, I would have to come clean.

  Chapter Seven

  Before

  “I know all about your visions, Christie.” Dr. Green’s voice was low, concerned, like it had been when he’d spoken to my mother, what seemed like years ago. “Tell me about them, and we can get you out of isolation and into the regular population again. The drugs and shock therapy will stop, and you can go back to your room. That’s all I ask, for you to tell me everything.”

  And because his voice was a touchstone I could grasp in the fog of drugs and pain I’d endured for what seemed like years, God help me, I did.

  But Green, like everyone else in my life, lied. He didn’t move me back to my old room, but into a crowded dormitory with nine other girls. All hitting the cusp of their womanhood, all seething with colors and emotions.

  He threw me into the dorm without any downtime, left me to the not-so-tender mercies of my “roommates”. Green and his goons had nothing on the psychological terror adolescents can wreak on one another with words alone, especially girls. I didn’t see us doing each others’ hair and nails anytime soon.

  After that, every night was torture, every day a living hell. With my tenure in isolation, I’d become the example of what not to do, and everyone except me, and maybe Wes, seemed to need Green’s approval.

  Even worse, Dave, the little weasel, and Carl, the orderly, made my skin crawl, and seemed to make time to torture me. Dave with overt antagonism that stopped just short of physical violence, and Carl with his long looks and a gleam in his eye that bordered on indecency.

  It wasn’t very difficult to find out that Dave had been Green’s favorite before I came along, and that his aggression was obvious retaliation for my being the latest apple of the teacher’s eye. Like I wanted anything to do with any of it.

  Despite it all, I told Green and his cohorts what they wanted to know, took their tests, and retreated to my “space”—the loft above the library—without a word to anyone else. Well, almost anyone else. Like on the first day, Wes was there for me. He was the only bright spot in my day, the only person I gave a damn about.

  It took me a long time to figure out exactly what they were after, and when I did, everything I’d ever known was turned upside down.

  Now—Sunday, 5:00 p.m.

  Roney settled into what was becoming “his” place on the sofa without a word. I felt him watching me and couldn’t bear the scrutiny, although it’d be worse long before it got better.

  “He called again, but you already know that, right?”

  He nodded. Even with the equipment up here, there had to be techs sitting somewhere nearby in a van, sweltering their ever-loving butts off in the springtime heat. “It’s one of the reasons I’m here. He’s targeting you. We’re concerned about your safety.”

  I squirmed. Having someone worry about me was a novel concept, even if I knew it was the cop in him talking. “Don’t lose sleep over me. I’ve got my ferocious attack dog to protect me.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, she’s a real threat to your shoelaces, for sure.”

  I waited a beat, to see if he would get the ball rolling, but he sat there, expressionless as a rock. I took a deep breath and dove.

  “Have you ever been so afraid of something, the mere thought of it freezes you?” I asked, and reached down to pick up Xena. She settled in at my side and started gnawing on a finger.

  Brian waited for a long moment, obviously pondering how to answer my question. I knew it went against everything in him as a strong man to admit to any kind of weakness, especially to a woman, but I hoped he would. I needed his support now, more than I’d ever needed anyone’s.

  When he finally came to a decision he smiled, but it was strained. “I’ve always been shy of heights. You have no idea how much it pains me to admit that. To anyone, but especially to you. What I’m about to tell you wasn’t exactly my shining moment. Anyway, I wasn’t scared of heights, per se, but being up high wasn’t my favorite place to be. Guess it’s kind of ironic I chose pararescue as a career, since we got to jump out of planes and choppers. I was assigned to a combined unit of pararescue and special forces types right after 9/11. We went into Tora Bora after a squad that had gone missing. That happened a lot.”

  He paused, and I could almost see the memories flickering through his brain. Images I’d seen on television, but that were infinitely more terrifying, more exhilarating, in real life.

  “Everything went tits-up almost immediately after we jumped off the trucks. The Taliban lit into us in what was obviously an ambush. I got separated from the rest of the group. Up there, it’s all cliffs and ledges, and while I knew in my subconscious that if I could hang on ’til daylight and make it back to the unit, I’d be fine. But when dawn came, I was about six inches from the edge of cliff face that felt like fucking Everest.”

  His breath came out on a tremor, and I had to restrain myself from reaching out to touch, to reassure. This wasn’t the Brian Roney I’d come to know over the past few days. The hard-nosed detective who was, against all rational reason, willing to bring me in on his case...into his life. No, this was a man who had lived through things I couldn’t even imagine, and was now willing to speak of them. To me.

  “Don’t ask me how I got there, because it was almost as if I’d been transported. No handholds or footholds to speak of, only a skinny little ledge. I couldn’t holler, in case the Taliban were still around, and couldn’t find a way to get back. I sat there for a
day and half, until a chopper found me. Dangling from a rescue sling over a five-thousand-foot drop-off wasn’t exactly a thrill ride. My eyes were closed until they actually pulled me into the helo, and I’d lost my voice from screaming. Lost some other stuff, too, but nothing that matters right now. The shrinks relegated me to a desk job after the end of my tour, so I bailed when my commitment was over. I couldn’t stay in if I wasn’t doing the thing I loved, and being in a chopper scared the hell out of me. So yeah, I’d say I’ve been there.”

  His admission warmed me in ways that no words of comfort could have, even as I wondered what he was leaving out. There was another story there, and probably one that would intrigue me almost as much as Brian himself had begun to. When had he stopped being Roney, and switched to my thinking of him as Brian?

  It was my turn now, and because of his words, I had the strength to proceed. “For me it’s the concept of imprisonment. I have a story to tell you. Let me finish it before you ask any questions, because I don’t know that I’ll be able to start again.”

  He nodded, his face somber.

  I took a deep breath, already anticipating the expressions that would cross his face...disbelief, anger, betrayal. I didn’t want to see those looks, but knew they would be there. Dread curled in my stomach, ugly and unsympathetic.

  “Once upon a time there was a fourteen-year-old named Christie Jenkins. Her mother was an alcoholic who dragged Christie around from town to town, and through a string of men.” As much as it tore me up to relive my life with the words, it was easier to do it in the third person. I ran a hand down Xena’s back.

  “Christie had always been different. She could see things about people, read their feelings. Her mother knew it and hated it. One day she’d had enough, and sent Christie to the Colorado Academy for Superior Intellect, a private institution for the ‘gifted’. At first, Christie thought it was an asylum, and it was, to a certain extent. When they began to question her about her gifts, they began a different kind of treatment...isolation and drug and shock therapy.” I paused and clutched Xena tighter. She swiped a warm, comforting tongue over my fingers.