Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

that right?”
    “The police do what they do, but they are not trained to—what’s the phrase?— think outside the box. What I offer is something more unconventional.”
    “I’m waiting.”
    She looked him in the eye. “I see things, Mr. Garfield.”
    His mouth opened, but he was briefly at a loss for words. Finally he said, “You see things.”
    “That’s right, I see things. Let me make this as simple and as straightforward as I can, Mr. Garfield. I have visions.”
    A small laugh erupted from him. “Visions?”
    Keisha was very careful to maintain her cool. “Yes,” she said simply. Draw him out. Make him ask the questions.
    “What, uh, what kind of visions?”
    “I’ve had this gift—if you can call it that, I’m not really sure—since I was a child, Mr. Garfield. I have visions of people in distress.”
    “Distress,” he said quietly. “Really.”
    “Yes,” she said again.
    “And you’ve had a
vision
of my wife? In distress?”
    She nodded solemnly. “Yes, I have.”
    “I see.” A bemused smile crossed his lips. “And you’ve decided to share this vision with
me
, and not the police.”
    “As I’m sure you can understand, Mr. Garfield, the police are often not receptive to people with my talents. It’s not just that they’re skeptical. When I’m able to make progress where they have not, they feel it reflects badly on them. So I approach the principals involved directly.”
    “Of course you do,” he said. “And how is it you get these visions? Do you have, like, a TV antenna built into your head or something?”
    She smiled. “I wish I could answer your questions in a way that everyone would understand. Because if I knew how these visions come to me, I might be able to turn them off.”
    “So it’s a curse as well as a blessing,” he said.
    Keisha ignored the sarcasm. “Yes, a bit like that. Let me tell you a story. One night, this would have been about three years ago, I was driving to the mall, just minding my own business, when this . . . image came into my head. All of a sudden I could barely see the road in front of me. It was as though my windshield had turned into a movie screen. And I saw this girl, she couldn’t have been more than five or six, and she was in a bedroom, but it was not a little girl’s bedroom. There were no dolls or playhouses or anything like that. The room was decorated with sports memorabila. Trophies, posters of football players on the wall, a catcher’s mitt on the desk, a baseball bat leaning against the wall in the corner. And this little girl, she was crying, saying she wanted to go home, pleading to someone to let her leave. And then there was a man’s voice, and he was saying not yet, you can’t go home yet, not until we get to know each other a little better.”
    She took a breath. Garfield was trying to look uninterested, but Keisha could tell she had him hooked.
    “Well, I nearly ran off the road. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the shoulder. But by then, this vision, these images, had vanished, like smoke that had been blown away. But I knew what I’d seen. I’d seen a little girl in trouble, a little girl who was being held against her will.
    “So, in this particular situation, because I did not know who the actual people involved were, I made a decision to go to the police. I called them and said, ‘Are you working on a missing girl case? Perhaps something you haven’t yet made a statement about?’ Well, they were quite taken aback. They said they really couldn’t give out that kind of information. And I said, ‘Is the girl about six years old? And was she last seen wearing a shirt with a Sesame Street character on it?’ Well, now I had their attention. They sent out a detective to talk to me, and he didn’t believe in visions any more than I would imagine you do. Maybe they were thinking I might have actually had something to do with this girl’s disappearance, because how else could I know those kinds of details? But I said to him, talk to the family, find out who they know who’s really into sports, who’s won lots of trophies, particularly football trophies, maybe even baseball, and the detective said, yeah, sure, we’ll get right on that, like he was humoring me. But then he left, and he made some calls, and within the hour, the police had gone to the home of a neighbor who fit that description, and they rescued that little girl. They got to her just in time.” Keisha paused. “Her name was