Laura smirked a little at that, as if realizing the stupidity of the situation, and then looked at the mannequins with a shudder. “Creepy, aren’t they?”
Nate looked at them again. They were pretty creepy, actually. They had painted faces, though they still weren’t even close to looking like real people. Maybe if you squinted in a dark room.
Or a dark alley.
Now, that thought made him feel a little chill.
Then he thought about how Laura was going to touch them, as if they were real people and she was touching their flesh, and how they would tell her a story even without animation. That was even creepier.
He took a step back and gestured, ostensibly to give her room to work but actually because he now wanted to get out of this creepy storage room away from the creepy murder-witness mannequins.
Laura reached out quickly, grabbed the fastenings at one end of one of the evidence bags, and opened them with a jerk. She slipped her hand inside and pressed just the very side of one of her fingers against the mannequin, pausing for a moment in anticipation.
And then she frowned.
“What?” Nate asked, immediately. Had he missed it? He’d been trying to see that moment when she would space out, disappear, but he hadn’t seen anything.
“Nothing,” Laura said, sighing. She drew her hand away and refastened the evidence bag. Her sigh had a sharp edge to it, like she was frustrated. Angry, even. “I didn’t see anything.”
“What, like you couldn’t work out what you were looking at?” Nate asked.
“No, like I didn’t have a vision,” Laura said.
Nate frowned. “But, I thought you said if you touched them…”
“Usually, I would get something,” Laura said, then seemed to amend herself, her blue eyes half-disappearing into a squint as she thought. “Well, maybe not ‘usually.’ Often. But it’s not an exact science. I mean, I guess it’s not science at all. I don’t know what it is.”
Nate bit his lip for a moment, wanting to ask a hundred thousand questions. What was it, if not science? When did she usually get it triggered? What usually worked? What didn’t work? Why hadn’t it worked this time? Would she be able to try again? Was there something blocking the visions, like they were a signal or something? Could he do anything? Could she do anything?
Instead, he cleared his throat. “Well, I guess it’s not so bad,” he said. “We’re no worse off than we were.”
That was his attempt to make her feel better.
Even as he said it, he felt the words falling flat.
“Yeah,” Laura said, clearly not convinced either. “I guess we go back to the drawing board.”
Nate opened his mouth to ask something again, but shut it. No, he couldn’t ask. He’d already messed up big time by assuming it would always work no matter what, and making her feel bad about not being able to do it. All he was going to do if he spoke again was put his foot in his mouth. Besides, if she wanted him to know something about it, she’d probably tell him. What was it she’d said earlier, when he found out about her visions of the past? That she didn’t want to overwhelm him?
Given the way he’d overreacted when she first told him about all this, he figured that was totally fair. In fact, it was generous that she’d decided to carry on keeping him in the loop at all.
No, he wouldn’t push his luck. She could tell him everything in her own time. He was just going to have to be a good detective: listen, observe, pick things up on his own.
“What’s on that drawing board, exactly?” he asked, leaning against one of the racks of evidence, careful not to actually brush against any of the exhibits – even if they were all wrapped up.
“I don’t know,” Laura sighed, rubbing a hand over her eyes. She smudged her mascara slightly, leaving a trail of small black dots near the corner of her eye. “I don’t know if there’s anything on it at all. We’re out of leads, aren’t we?”
“For now,” Nate said. “I’m sure if we look closer, go back over everything, we’ll find something new to chase down. We’ve only just started.”
“Yeah,” Laura agreed, but she looked so tired even as she said it that Nate couldn’t help but take pity on her.
Did the ability leave her that drained, even when she hadn’t used it?
Or was it just that she was already tired anyway?
“It’s late now, anyway. Let’s go to our hotel, get some rest,” he suggested. “Tomorrow’s a new day. There hasn’t been another body yet. Maybe there won’t be. Maybe we have all the time in the world to solve this.”
“Except you know as well as I do the trail gets pretty cold after forty-eight hours,” Laura said reproachfully, then sighed. “I guess you’re right. We can take a short break. Get up around dawn and get right back to it.”
“At dawn,” Nate promised, privately hoping she would forget to set an alarm or fall asleep again after turning it off so she would get some proper sleep.
And knowing, at the same time, that she would be knocking on his door at dawn, ready to go.