Running Hot

parenting or no parenting at all. A lot of them had been abused as children. Many had some kind of mental illness. Nearly half the suspects I caught couldn’t even read a newspaper, let alone hold down a decent job.”
    “You felt sorry for them?”
    He smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t go that far but the truth is, the majority of the people I helped send away didn’t stand a chance against me. I could and did violate their right to due process without anyone else, including the suspect, knowing it.”
    “You didn’t violate their rights in the legal sense.”
    “No, but I sure as hell did in a very real sense.”
    “You accomplished a lot of good, Luther. Putting bad people away. Getting justice for the victims. Those are important to a civilized society.”
    “That’s what I told myself for several years. But I found out the hard way that the vigilante thing carries a load of bad karma.”
    “Your two broken marriages?”
    “Among other things. I also managed to freak out so many partners that eventually no one wanted to work with me. I got a reputation for being a lone wolf. That’s not good when you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be part of a team. I tended to make the people around me very uneasy.”
    She frowned. “Did the other detectives you worked with ever realize what you were doing?”
    “They knew that I almost always got results but they didn’t know how I got them. Hell, they didn’t want to know. A few concluded that I was somehow hypnotizing the suspects. Turns out no one wants to work too closely with a guy who may be able to hypnotize you without you knowing it.”
    “I can see where that might be an issue,” she said.
    “I went through partners the way the Dark Rainbow goes through dishwashers. Some of the other guys had enough natural sensitivity of their own to wonder if there might be a paranormal explanation for my string of confessions. They didn’t like that idea any better than the hypnosis theory.”
    “Because it made them question their own mental health?” she asked.
    “Most successful cops have a fair amount of intuition when it comes to dealing with the kind of folks who lie, cheat and kill. They’re usually happy to admit that they have good instincts.”
    “Aren’t good instincts viewed as an asset in the police world?”
    “Sure. But no cop wants to get slapped with the psychic tag. The woo-woo factor can kill a career real fast.”
    She studied him intently. “You just walked away from the job?”
    “There was what I guess you could call a final straw. An incident. People died. I walked away after that.”
    “What happened?”
    He watched the sunlight flash on the waters of the cove.
    “There was a man,” he said. “His name was George Olmstead. He walked into the office one day and said he’d just killed his business partner. Turned over the gun. It had his prints on it. He claimed he and the partner had quarreled over whether to sell the business. He said he was desperate for the money but the partner refused to go through with the deal.”
    “You didn’t believe him?”
    “He seemed calm enough but there was something spiking in his aura. I talked to him for a while. Pushed a little. It came out that he wasn’t the one who had shot the partner. Olmstead was covering up for his daughter.”
    “She was involved with the partner?”
    “They’d had an affair,” he said. “She was twenty-five years old. She had been seeing a shrink since she was in high school and she was on medication. The partner belatedly started to realize that she was very unstable. He tried to end things. She went crazy and shot him.”
    “And then went running to her father?”
    “Who told her that he would handle things. He wanted to protect her. He saw that as his job. He’d been doing it all her life. She was his only child. The mother had died years earlier.”
    She nodded. “Did he know about the relationship between his daughter and his partner?”
    “Yes. He’d encouraged it because he thought marriage would give his daughter some emotional stability. After the murder, he was convinced that the whole thing was his fault so he was eager to take the blame.”
    “But his story fell apart.”
    “Because of me. When we arrested his daughter, he felt he had failed in his duty as a father. The daughter committed suicide in jail. Olmstead went home, stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
    “Thereby proving that he was just as unstable as his