The man clamped his lips together.
“He said there was something strange about us,” Rachel murmured.
I guess he’s going to find out what it is,Jake answered.
Let me see what I can do,Rachel suggested. She felt Jake mentally step back, allowing her to direct the process as she probed the man’s mind.
The guy’s face contorted as he felt her mental fingers walking through his brain.
“You’re doing it again,” he shouted.
Ignoring him, Rachel dug for information.
“You’re not Eric Smithson. Your real name is Carter Frederick,” she said after several seconds.
His eyes widened. “What did you just do?”
“What Dr. Solomon made it possible for us to do,” she answered, watching his face.
He reacted to the name.
Getting Frederick’s name hadn’t been all that difficult, but extracting more information wasn’t so simple. The guy who called himself the Badger had taken the code name to stay anonymous. From their business conversations, all Carter Frederick knew was that the man who’d hired him had been some high-muck-a-muck in Washington. He’d moved somewhere out west, but Frederick didn’t know where.
Rachel rummaged around in the man’s head, not sure exactly what she was doing. But one clear memory stood out.
“You killed Evelyn Morgan,” she breathed.
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
He gave her a defiant look. “You can’t prove anything.”
Could they?
Maybe if Frederick had been in better shape, he might have resisted. But the recent information in his brain was theirs for the taking. She saw the scene in Evelyn Morgan’s hotel room. The woman had opened the door, and Frederick had burst in.
He’d tied her up, started asking questions and gotten rough when he didn’t get what he’d wanted.
She’d lashed out at him with her legs, then made a dash for the door. But Frederick had caught up with her, and she’d hit her head on the radiator while trying to get away.
Rachel felt sick as she leaned against Jake.
She glanced at Carter Frederick who was lying on the bed with his eyes closed, his breath shallow. “I want to get away from this disgusting piece of work.”
“Let’s go outside.”
After Jake checked to make sure there was no chance of Frederick’s escaping, they stepped onto the covered porch and walked across the gravel parking area, to where a picnic table sat under some shade trees.
“What are we going to do with him?” Rachel whispered when they had both sat down.
Jake shook his head. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”But there’s something else that’s important. Carter Frederick was afraid of the Badger. Which means he’s dangerous, if he scared a hard case like Frederick.
Rachel felt a spurt of dismay.The Badger guy must know we were children from the project. If he can’t find us through this guy, he’ll use someone else.
And then what? Kill us to get rid of the evidence of the doctor’s experiments?
Or maybe he thinks he can use us.
