Dream Eyes

don’t have any helpful advice to give you,” he said. “You don’t ever forget watching someone die. Doesn’t matter if the bastard deserved it. Violent death exacts a psychic toll from anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. I see that in my work and I’ve experienced it firsthand. No one is ever the same afterward. If the events of two years ago didn’t give you a few bad nights, it would probably mean that you were missing something vitally important in the part of you that is supposed to make you a decent person. It’s only the monsters that can kill without paying a psychic price. That’s what makes them monsters.”
    She looked at him. “I’m the one who is supposed to be the psychic counselor here.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s all the counseling you’re going to get from me because I don’t have anything else to offer. I’ll warn you up front that what I just said isn’t going to be any help in the middle of a bad night. All you can do is remind yourself that it was the outcome that matters. You saved not only yourself but all of the people Taylor likely would have murdered in the future. You take that information and you move forward.”
    “I get the feeling you’ve given yourself the same lecture recently.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Is it working for you?”
    He looked at her and said nothing.
    “Right,” she said. She drank some more of her brandy. “You need closure, too.”
    He ignored that. “There’s no doubt that it was Taylor’s body they found?”
    “None. Evelyn and I both knew him and so did Nicole. All three of us identified him.”
    “Did anyone come forth to claim the body?” Judson asked.
    “No. It was Nicole who arranged to have Taylor cremated.”
    “What about the weapon?”
    “The camera?” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to it. I think about it a lot. I try to see it in my dreams. Evelyn and I went back to the lab the following day to look for it, but we couldn’t find it. We assumed that it went into the river with Zander, but I’ve never been entirely sure of that.”
    “What makes you think it didn’t get lost in the water?” Judson asked.
    “I’ve replayed that scene over and over again in my dreams, using my talent to take a closer look. I could swear that Zander did not have anything in his hands when he ran outside the lab and went toward the falls. I think he dropped the camera somewhere inside the lab. I thought I heard it hit the concrete floor, but I might be wrong. But like I said, Evelyn and I searched that whole place the next day and we didn’t find it.”
    “And now Evelyn Ballinger has died in a way that is very similar to the deaths of the two people who were killed by the camera weapon.”
    “Yes.”
    “You said you didn’t go back to the lab until the next day,” Judson continued. “That leaves an entire night during which someone could have searched the lab.”
    “But that would mean that someone else knew about the weapon and what it could do. It means that person knew where to search for it after Zander’s body turned up in the river.” Gwen caught her breath. “It means someone was aware that Taylor was murdering people with a crystal-based weapon and that he intended to murder me that day.”
    Judson’s ring flashed with dark energy, but his expression did not change. “Yes,” he said. “We’re talking about an accomplice who may have decided to continue playing the game.”
    “But no one else in the study group has died in the past two years. Evelyn and I kept track.”
    Judson’s did not take his eyes off the fire. “You said that Mary Henderson and Ben Schwartz were both victims of Taylor’s kill-the-psychic game and that Taylor liked to see his prey run. He intended for you to die running, too.”
    “Yes. The chase excited him.”
    “What I sensed today at the scene told me that Ballinger’s killer did not see her as a player in a fantasy game. He definitely got a rush out of the kill, but he was under control at the time, not excited the way I think he would have been if he had considered that murder a game.”
    “You could perceive that much?”
    “It’s the nature of my talent,” Judson said. “I can sense the emotions the killer experienced when he made the kill.”
    She shivered. “It’s as if you get a snapshot of the killer’s mind.”
    He looked at her. “Yes.”
    “Tough talent. Must make for a lot of bad dreams.”
    He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes