Dream Eyes

thumbtacked to her bulletin board. The fact that it had been ripped off the board and dropped on the floor bothered me for some reason.”
    “Ballinger is not in the picture.”
    “She was the one who took the photo. Three of the people in that picture are dead. Mary Henderson, the blonde on the left, Ben Schwartz, the man standing next to her, and Zander Taylor. Taylor is the good-looking dark-haired man in the first row.”
    “You’re standing next to a serial killer.”
    She shuddered. “Don’t remind me. His goal was to take us down in the order in which we were posed in the picture. It was all a game to him. He was annoyed because he had to make me his third target. He said I had interfered with the proper sequence of play.”
    Judson’s eyes heated. So did his ring. “He told you that?”
    “Shortly before he went over the falls. Yes.”
    “All right, we’ll finish this conversation later. Let’s take a look at the scene.”
    Gwen kept her talent tamped down so that she would not see the ghost in the mirror. She reached around the corner of the door frame, found the wall switch and flipped it.
    Shock lanced through her when she registered the chaos inside the office. Desk drawers and cupboard doors stood open. Books had been swept off the shelves. Files had been pulled out of the metal cabinet and dumped on the floor.
    “Good grief,” she whispered, stunned.
    “I take it things didn’t look like this when you got here this morning?” Judson said.
    “No,” she said. “Someone searched this room sometime after I left today.”
    She was already tense and on edge. Her startled response to the scene in the office kicked up her talent. It was an intuitive reaction. Before she could suppress it, she was looking into the mirror.
    The ghost appeared in the glass.
    “Well, you knew that this was going to get a lot more complicated, didn’t you, dear?” the ghost said. “That’s why you brought along your very own psychic investigator. I must say, he looks interesting. Definitely a high-end talent. I do hope he’s competent.”
    “You and me, both,” Gwen said under her breath.
    “What did you say?” Judson asked.
    “Nothing.” She dragged her attention away from the mirror, lowered her senses and looked at him. “Talking to myself. I do that sometimes. Bad habit.” She swept a hand out to indicate the overturned office. “What happened here?”
    “I’ll go out on a limb here and say that it sure looks like someone was searching for something he expected to find in Evelyn’s office.”
    “No kidding.” She paused, frowning. “Maybe the killer didn’t find whatever he was after on her computer so he came back to take another look.”
    “I don’t think so.” Judson prowled deliberately through the office, stopping briefly to brush his fingertips across the top of the desk. “I think we’re dealing with someone else. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection between the second person and the killer, though.”
    “What makes you think that there was a second person here?”
    “There’s a lot of desperation and growing rage in this space. Whoever conducted the search started out with a high level of urgency and left in a frustrated fury.”
    Gwen was fascinated. “You can sense all that?”
    “Sure,” Judson said, “providing the emotions were laid down with a lot of intense energy as they were in this case. It’s what I do, Gwen.”
    “All right, let’s think about this. If there was a second intruder, maybe he was searching for whatever was on the computer or the cell phone, in which case he didn’t find it because the killer got to the information first.”
    “That’s a reasonable assumption.” Judson crouched on the floor and shuffled through the folders that had been dumped on the carpet. “Some of these files go back thirty years.”
    “I told you, Evelyn devoted her life to the study of the paranormal. But in the end, she was never able to prove anything to mainstream science.”
    Judson opened several folders and examined the contents. “Looks like most of her research was focused on dreams.”
    “Much of it was, yes. That’s why she and I became so close. I met Evelyn when I was in high school at the Summerlight Academy. She was a counselor there, the only one who really understood my psychic side. My aura vision is linked to my lucid-dreaming ability.”
    “Yeah?”
    She flushed, remembering how bad things had gone that night in Seattle when she had