“Fair point. But he might make a Herculean effort for you.”
She was trying to decide what to do next when Travis leaped up and came around behind her chair. Reaching for the ends of her hair he lifted them up then moved his hands so that the hair looked like it was dancing.
“Stop,” Olivia ordered.
He did as she asked, then came up in back of Bowman, which would have been impossible if he’d had any physical substance. He lowered his fingers to the detective’s scalp and began to move them like bugs creeping across the man’s scalp, only harder.
Bowman sucked in a sharp breath.
“You can feel that?” Olivia asked.
“Yes, like my scalp’s crawling,” he said, his voice not quite steady. Lifting his head, he said, “Stop.”
When Travis lifted his hands and resumed his place on the sofa, their guest asked, “Tell me what you want from me.”
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
Harold Goddard, alias Mr. Smith, had sent men to watch Carson’s house and the entrance to the marina where he kept his boat. The watcher at the residence had noted that the same car had driven past a couple of times. The guy had been able to snap a photograph of the driver. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but it wasn’t possible to pick up much detail from a photo of a moving car. When he froze and enlarged the image, he only got a picture of a guy with a ball cap pulled low. And the camera hadn’t captured the license plate.
The man watching the dock hadn’t noticed any unusual activity, but Harold had also been able to set up a camera on a telephone pole at the edge of the parking area. Now he scrolled through the tapes, looking for the same car—and found either it or its twin, a Chevy Blazer. This time the driver was a guy wearing casual clothing and carrying a tackle box and a fishing rod. He looked like he was on his way to a fishing trip. But that could just be a disguise designed to throw off anyone watching.
Interestingly, he caught up with a casually dressed young woman who was also heading for the dock. Stopping her before she entered the marina, he steered her back toward the parking lot, where they disappeared behind a white van.
They were there for several minutes, after which they both pulled away—the van first.
What was going on here? On the face of it, they looked like they had planned to meet up at the dock. And then? She’d shown up at the wrong marina, and he’d told her where they were really supposed to be. Or what? Had the guy who had driven past the house earlier come to the dock dressed in fishing gear so anyone watching would assume he was there for recreational purposes? Then he’d seen the woman and told her what?
Was he surprised to find her there? If so, how did he know her? Was she a friend of Carson? In Harold’s research on the man, he hadn’t come upon anything more than casual liaisons with women.
He didn’t like it. Too bad he didn’t have the license plate of the van, either. But was there some other way to figure out who she was? At the very least, he’d have to instruct his men watching the house and the marina to look out for both suspicious vehicles—and suspicious individuals.
* * *
Gabe kepthis gaze on Olivia Langston.
“What do we want from you? The same thing Travis’s aunt wants, only we’re a couple of steps ahead of her. A guy who called himself Mr. Smith captured Travis, tortured him for information, and then killed him.”
Still coping with the concept of the ghost, Gabe asked, “Travis told you that?”
“Of course—Travis. Who else would know?”
“Motive?”
“He was either working with Dr. Solomon or knew about his experiments. He’s obsessed with the children from the clinic. He’s tried to capture them before, but because they were bonded, they got away. So he changed his tactics and went after a lone individual—Travis.”
“Why does he care about the children?”
She shrugged. “I believe he thinks we’d be useful. Or dangerous.”
Gabe considered that. If you had to make sense of this weird situation, that might be it.
Olivia began to speak again. “We were trying to figure out how to find Mr. Smith and make sure he doesn’t do this to anyone else.”
“Like you?” he said pointedly.
She winced. “Me and anyone else he might go after. You were already trying to figure out what happened to Travis. We can help each other.”
As she spoke, Gabe thought he heard the echo of a male voice under Olivia’s. What? Was he getting sensitized to the ghost?
