The thoughts came from her brain.
She was like him. Alone.
Her head turned toward him, her eyes wide with shock, and he knew that she was getting the same kind of impressions from him that he was getting from her.
Impressions and memories. Some of them recent. Others older.
He saw a cute little girl walking home from school by herself. At the movies trying to understand the emotions of a love story. The same girl, sitting in her beautifully decorated room weeping.
Things it would be impossible for him to know, yet he was sure he wasn’t making them up.
And under the thoughts and memories was an aura ofdanger gathering like a dark cloud around them. Was she going to attack him?
Not likely. They’d met by chance in the middle of a crowd. Or was it by chance? Had someone sent her to ambush him?
Another image leaped into her mind. A woman with dyed brown hair. In her sixties. Walking with a limp. Wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she’d come to see him.
She was the only one who knew he’d be here.
His eyes locked with the woman pressed against him, his total focus on her.
“Evelyn Morgan,” she breathed.
“What do you know about her?” he asked, hearing the shock and uncertainty in his own voice.
He’d forgotten the people around them. Now he remembered they were standing in the middle of a crowd, speaking in low voices, but they might as well have been alone for all the other people mattered.
The woman raised her chin. “She asked me to meet her tonight.”
“Are you lying?” he demanded.
“Why would I?” she challenged.
Couldshe lie? After all, he’d pulled the information from her mind.
He held onto that extraordinary thought as he kept his hand on her, drawing her back through the mass of people until they had emerged into a clear space in the middle of the street.
A man in a wrinkled shirt strode toward the hotel. It was Detective Moynihan, whom Jake knew from his work with kids at risk in the city. “Detective” he called out.
The cop stopped and looked at him.
“What happened?” Jake asked.
“You know I can’t give out any information.”
Jake’s hand was still on the woman. He was close enough to reach out with his other hand and touch Moynihan.
He wasn’t sure why he did it, but as his fingers closed on the detective’s sleeve, information leaped into his mind.
Evelyn Morgan. Lying in a pool of blood, her limp body on the floor of her hotel room.
Jake stared at him, struggling not to let the shock he felt show on his face.
“Got work to do,” Moynihan said and pulled away, making for the hotel, leaving Jake alone with the woman.
“Let me go,” she demanded.
“Not likely.”
