Laura cleared her throat quietly, starting to look through the files. The one on top was a single birth. The next were twins, but male. She started to sort them into piles. “I just feel it,” she said. “And I know you know that… that I’m going to be right.”
This was dangerous territory. Never before had she even acknowledged to Nate that he was right about her knowing things. She’d always tried to play it off before. Telling him that it was coincidence. Intuition. Good detective work.
Now she was as good as admitting it openly. And still refusing to tell him the details. Yes, she’d known there was a chance it would piss him off even more. But he already wasn’t talking to her, and he already knew really. What was the harm, when she could end up saving a life?
When it was her duty to do everything she could to save a life?
“You can’t be serious,” Nate said. She felt his gaze burning a hole in the side of her head.
“I just think the quicker we get on this, the better,” Laura said, trying not to let his words get to her. She needed to get this right. She needed to save them. Why couldn’t he just go along with that, and argue with her after the case was done? “Last time, we weren’t quite quick enough. We let Kenneth Wurz down. This time, we need to be there—and ready to stop him from going after anyone else after this, too.”
“So, how are we supposed to know who he’s going after next?” Nate asked. There was barely controlled fury in his voice. He was keeping it down, but he wanted to scream at her. She could hear that. She glanced around at the nearest cops, who were all busy with their own tasks. No one seemed to be paying attention—yet. “Has he called you up and told you while I wasn’t listening?”
“Nate, please,” Laura said, trying to keep her voice steady. Two more files went to either side of the first: one for male twins, one for female. The single births and other multiples went back in the box. It was a system. “We need to focus on solving the case before anything else.”
“Or how about you tell me how you know first, and then we can get on with the case,” Nate said, his voice a low snarl.
“I really think…” Laura began, but he cut her off.
“If you want to solve the case so bad, this is how you get to do it fast,” Nate said. He moved closer, leaned his hands on the desk, put his face right up at her. “Tell. Me. How. You. Know.”
Laura swallowed. “Just trust me, Nate,” she said. “You’ve known me for long enough. You know that I… that I get these things. I have a sense for them. We have to find them. There’s two, and we need to cover both. If we don’t, we could lose them again. We have to find them, warn them. Bring them in so they won’t get hurt.”
“I’m not going with your hunches anymore,” Nate growled. His voice was still low, but even so, a couple of nearby detectives flicked glances in their direction. Laura wasn’t surprised. The anger was practically rolling off him lik
e a wall of heat. “I’m not putting my career, or people’s lives, on the line for your hunches. Do you understand me?”
Laura looked at him. She was almost taken aback. She knew he was angry with her, but to refuse to solve a case just because she couldn’t answer his questions, even though she was giving him the information? “Are you willing to put someone’s life on the line because you don’t trust my hunches?” she asked, point-blank.
Nate’s face contorted with anger then, and she realized she’d said the wrong thing. Taken the wrong tactic. He was a good man, a man with integrity. She knew that better than almost anyone. Calling that into question was going too far.
“How do I know that your hunches, as you like to call them, don’t put someone in danger already?” he asked. “You can’t even be straight with me about them. That makes me think one thing only: you think I wouldn’t approve. More than that. It has to be more than that. You think I’ll be so angry it will be even worse than this. Or that I’ll report you. End your career. It has to be something that bad, or you would have told me by now.”
Laura flinched a little at the sound of his words. He was right, of course. Just maybe not for the reasons that he thought he was. She wasn’t harming anyone, but she couldn’t start telling him what she wasn’t doing unless she was going to tell him what she was doing. That way would only lead to him eliminating things one by one. She could imagine it as clear as day in her head: him asking her in exasperation whether she was psychic or something, her not being able to deny it because they’d already started down a path of honesty. And then she would have as good as told him.
“It’s not… it’s not like what you’re thinking,” Laura said desperately. She couldn’t tell him he wasn’t right in some ways. He was. But not in the kind of ways he must have imagined. She didn’t have mob contacts, or some serial killer insider who was giving her information Hannibal Lecter–style. She didn’t go around hurting people or bribing them to get information on the sly. She just had an ability—a gift or a curse, whichever way you looked at it—and that was all.
“Then tell me what it’s like, or I’m going to go on thinking that way,” Nate warned her.
Laura closed her eyes for a moment, putting her hands down on either side of the pile of documents she hadn’t yet gone through. Her fingers brushed the sides of the files, and there was another sharp stab of pain in her head. Not again, she thought, not right now while I’m trying to concentrate. Not when they’ve been so useless anyway and so vague, and Nate wants—
Laura was sitting at the café again, drinking her coffee. She put the cup to her lips.
She was here again? Why? Why was she being shown the same vision twice?
This didn’t make any sense.
Through the window, she could see her: the waitress. She was serving another table. Bending slightly to talk to them and then nodding, her hair moving up and down over her back. Laura tried to turn, to look around, to break out of the one specific view of the killer that she seemed to be locked into.
She didn’t understand this. Didn’t get why it was that she would see things from the perspective of a person in some visions, and yet from above while she was floating in others. Why she would see the same things twice. Why some of her visions were useful and others told her nothing at all.
How could she explain all of this to Nate, if she didn’t even understand how it worked herself?
She wanted to scream, but here in the vision she had no mouth. She wanted to fight her way out, but here she was only a passenger, an observer. She had no arms, no legs, no gun. She was trapped here, watching as the waitress went through the same motions, as the killer looked down and sipped his coffee, as—
As the other twin walked up the street toward the café, making him duck his head quickly in surprise?
This wasn’t…