Running Hot

many tools she employed to keep some distance between herself and others.
    “Are you packed yet?”
    She had never met the man in person. Fallon Jones ran J&J from a one-man office tucked away in a little town on the northern California coast. Some said he was an obsessively paranoid recluse. Others claimed that the reason he lived and worked alone was because no one could stand being around him for more than five minutes. It was true that he had the personality of an annoyed rhinoceros. He was also a brilliant talent.
    She had done some off-the-books genealogical research shortly after her boss, Harley Beakman, had begun referring Jones’s queries to her. Evidently she was the only one in the department who had the patience to put up with the ceaseless demands of the notoriously difficult head of J&J.
    It hadn’t taken much sleuthing to discover that Fallon was a direct descendant of Caleb Jones, the founder of Jones & Jones. That much was not a secret. There was also no question but that Fallon ranked very high on the Jones Scale, probably off the charts. She knew from her work that the members of the Jones family—many of them legends in the Society—were not above fudging their talent rankings with a view to making themselves appear less psychically powerful than they actually were. She did not hold that against them. She had discreetly cranked her own ranking back to a more respectable and far less intimidating level seven.
    The exact nature of Fallon’s talent, however, had proved elusive, probably because no one had yet come up with a polite, scientifically neutral term for what most people referred to as a full-blown conspiracy theorist.
    The thing that set Fallon apart from the general run of committed conspiracy nuts was the fact that the mysterious patterns he identified and which he wove into his elaborate theories were not a product of his feverish fantasies. They were real. Most of the time.
    “Almost finished,” she assured him. “I’ll be on my way to Portland in an hour or so. Before I leave I have to drop by the post office to ask Mrs. Waggoner to hold my mail, and then I have to notify my landlady that I’ll be out of town for two or three days. That’s it.”
    “You have to make an announcement about this trip to the whole damn town?” Fallon growled.
    “Trust me, if I don’t inform my landlady about the trip and leave word at the post office, there will be rumors within twenty-four hours. The next thing I know, the police chief will be knocking on my door wanting to see if I’m alive. This is a very small town.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know how it is with small towns. Same story here in Scargill Cove. Do what you have to do and then get moving.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You’re booked into an airport hotel in Portland tonight. The ID you and Malone will be using will be delivered to you there by a Society courier. Your flight to Honolulu leaves tomorrow morning. Malone will meet you at the gate in the Interisland Terminal at Honolulu International. That’s where the two of you will catch the connecting flight to Maui.”
    “How will I recognize Mr. Malone?”
    “Well, let’s see. He’s a level-eight aura talent. With your sensitivity you’ll be able to pick him out in a crowd. Can’t be that many level eights running around Honolulu International.”
    Luther Malone was the one factor in the venture that bothered her. She had not had an opportunity to research his family tree but she was not worried about his level-eight ranking. It certainly indicated above-average strength but nothing out of the ordinary, at least not within the Society. What concerned her was the fact that Malone had once been a cop, specifically a homicide detective. What’s more, his record for closing cases was extraordinarily good. Cops could be tricky. But she had dealt with a number of them over the years. She could handle one more.
    “All right, I’ll watch for an eight aura,” she said. “Anything else?”
    “His picture is on the driver’s license the courier will give you this evening,” Fallon said. “But let’s see, I think he said he’d be wearing khakis and a dark brown shirt. No flowers. I told him you’ll have on a pair of gloves. Don’t sweat it. I doubt that the two of you will miss each other at the airport.”
    She looked down at the gloves in the suitcase and sighed. Like everyone else she met these days, Luther Malone would think she was weird. She was getting very tired of