The Departed

wrong.
    Colby sensed people. Living people.
    If there was somebody else in there besides their killer and Colby didn’t feel her, then chances were, the child was dead, and by letting Dez go in alone , with nobody but a ghost for a guide, they would likely be giving the bastard a potential hostage.
    Taylor, naturally, had agreed. So she wouldn’t go alone. She could live with that—after all, she wasn’t stupid.
    Nor was she helpless. She held her gun in a loose, ready grip.
    Hostage, my ass .
    She might not be the typical agent and she might not be the badass some of them were, but she’d made it through the same training they had, and she still kept herself in pretty decent shape. The day she couldn’t handle herself against a child-molesting, motherfucking pervert was the day she’d put down her gun and take up knitting—just let the ghosts drive her crazy, because she wouldn’t be much use to anybody anyway.
    “She’s in the closet.” Richelle’s ghostly voice, audible only to her, drifted back to her. “ Gave her something to make her sleep.”
    Dez hoped it was just drugs, but logically, she knew Colby was likely to sense a child, even one knocked out by drugs.
    Not many things would keep him from sensing the presence of a human.
    Dez wanted to ask Richelle if she knew what the guy had used but she knew it was a waste of time. Richelle was only ten—wicked smart and surprisingly clear minded, especially for one of the departed. But still, the child was only ten.
    And now, she’d never get to see eleven, or twelve…never go to the prom, never get her first kiss.
    Richelle stopped by the closet and Dez halted a few feet away. She looked by Richelle to the front room and then glanced over her shoulder to Taylor. He eased around her, the bulky bulletproof vest he wore breaking the smooth, perfect line of his suit.
    He stopped just a breath away from Richelle and his eyes, flat and hard, stared down the hallway, watching, waiting.
    With him watching her back, Dez laid a hand on the doorknob.
    Slowly, oh, so slowly, she turned it.
    * * *
     
    OUT front, the rest of the team waited.
    With Taylor in the house with Dez, Special Agent Joss Crawford was in charge and, unlike Jones, he didn’t believe in keeping a polished veneer that never showed any sign of emotion.
    So when the message came up on his phone, he didn’t bother suppressing the urge to swear. No, it ripped out of him in a long, ugly torrent and then he looked over and pinned Colby with a stare. “You were wrong, Mathis. Lincoln found a child and she’s alive.”
    * * *
     
    TAYLOR suspected some manner of psychic ability was more common than people thought.
    He didn’t have any classifiable skill—wasn’t telekinetic the way some of his people were and he couldn’t talk to the departed, as Dez liked to call them. Nor could he home in on the trail of a kidnapped child the way one of his sometimes contract employees, Taige Morgan, did.
    He recognized the gifted, though. It was how he’d lured so many of them to his unit. He recognized them—that was his gift, so to speak, that and knowing how to bring them inside, get them to work for him.
    While he wasn’t getting any of those vibes from this house, he wasn’t the least bit surprised when the bastard they’d been sitting on came roaring around the corner, like he’d been somehow alerted to their presence.
    Instinct. It wasn’t that far removed from some level of psychic skill, and this pervert’s sick needs were about to land him in the worst sort of hell.
    His name was Edward Mitchell; he liked to pick up pretty little girls just shy of puberty, rape them, and dump their bodies in the James River; and he wasn’t going to go down easy.
    They’d almost made it to the back door and Taylor even had a believable story concocted to explain why they were in the house to begin with—they did have a warrant, but they hadn’t bothered to explain that when he’d picked the lock on the back door. They’d had reason to believe there was a child in danger in this house and Dez was carrying that child in her arms now.
    But as Taylor went to open the door for her, Edward came rushing down the hall, huffing and puffing, his pale, pasty skin gleaming with sweat and his eyes half wild.
    “No!” he screeched.
    And he raised a gun.
    Taylor raised his own and fired, but the bastard managed to get a shot off. And as the sick fuck fell, lifeless, to the floor, Taylor turned. And the