Sizzle and Burn

into a fight ?”
    “It’s a long story. I’ll explain later.”
    She glowered. “You told me you tried to avoid bar fights.”
    “This fight wasn’t in a bar. Tell me about the cup fragment you found in your coat. Are you sure it’s a piece of the one you used in Shelbyville?”
    For a moment he thought she was going to insist on pursuing the bar fight lecture but she reluctantly focused on the cup instead.
    “I can’t be certain it’s the same cup that was on the tea tray,” she admitted. “But there was one just like it in my room. It was still there when I checked out.”
    “I remember it.”
    “He must have entered the room, found the cup, smashed it and left a piece here tonight.”
    He looked at the locks. “How did he get into your condo?”
    “I don’t know.” She hugged herself tightly. “There was no sign of forced entry. I didn’t pick up any bad vibes off the doorknob.”
    “You wouldn’t,” he said absently, “not unless he was in a killing frenzy when he broke in. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wore gloves when he let himself in here. Psychic energy transmits most readily with direct skin-to-object contact. Gloves are fairly effective barriers.”
    She shuddered and looked at the black-lacquered shelf positioned beneath a wall sconce. “He must have been in a rage when he smashed the teacup. That piece of china reeks of panic and fury.”
    He followed her gaze and saw a fragment of broken china on the shelf. Steeling himself, he reached out and picked it up.
    Dark energy crackled across his senses. A scene appeared and then disappeared in his mind like a film clip from a nightmare. It lasted only a couple of heartbeats. In that brief span of time he felt the cup in his hand, experienced the rush of rage and panic, abandoned himself to the sheer release of hurling the delicate china against a hard surface.
    He set the china fragment back down on the shelf, trying to dampen the fresh surge of biochemicals shooting through his bloodstream. He’d already OD’d on that particular drug mix tonight.
    “The freak was here, all right,” he said. “Or maybe I should say a freak was here. I never went into the basement of your aunt’s house in Shelbyville, so I don’t have a basis for comparison.”
    “Trust me, it’s the same person.” She stared unhappily at the broken bit of china. “This is the first time one of them has followed me home.”
    “Unnerving,” he agreed.
    “Try scared out of my wits.”
    He caught her by the shoulders and pulled her gently against him, wrapping her close. “Scared out of your wits is good. Scared people tend to be more careful.”
    “No offense,” she said, pressing her face into the front of his shirt, “but that wasn’t quite the positive, upbeat approach to this situation that I was looking for.”
    “Sorry. Probably a J&J thing. Fallon Jones holds with the everything-that-can-go-wrong-probably-will-go-wrong theory of psychic detecting. He becomes annoyed whenever his agents get too positive and upbeat.”
    “Sounds like a real fun guy.”
    “Look up the definition of fun in the dictionary and you’ll see Fallon’s picture right next to it.”
    She made a strange, half-muffled little sound that could have been a choked laugh. Some of the tension went out of her. She raised her head.
    “Tell me what you saw,” she said.
    “I got a visual of what you heard. The bastard smashed the cup in a fit of red-hot rage and panic. He’s running scared. Blames you for ruining his plans.”
    “He must have been watching me in Shelbyville, waiting for me to leave. But he took a risk going into my room. I wonder if anyone noticed him.”
    “Good question. But there’s another possibility.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Maybe he wasn’t afraid of being seen. Maybe he had a right to be in the B and B.” He thought about it a little more. “Could have been one of the employees or a guest. The inn was crammed with news crews. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone to blend in with a crowd of strangers in town.”
    “True.”
    “The big question here is what made him focus on you? As far as everyone back in Shelbyville is concerned, you and that real estate agent stumbled onto the victim by accident.”
    She pulled back a little and looked at him with a shadowed expression.
    “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but in my experience, the real freaks don’t make allowances for coincidence. Everything is a sign to