Sixth Sense (A Psychic Crystal Mystery) (8 page)

The toilet flushed. Lucas Taylor sauntered out of the bathroom, half-dressed, blond hair mussed and pale skin gleaming with sweat, singing, “Kylee, time to wake up again.” He froze when he saw the officers.

A second later Lucas sprinted into action and ran for cover in the bathroom, but Commander Jones was quicker. He stuck his booted foot in the door and pushed against the force on the other side before Lucas could lock it and barricade himself in.

“It’s over, Taylor. Come out or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”

“Do you know who I am? My father—”

“I know just who and what you are, and I don’t care who your bloody father is, you’re going down. No more hiding behind Daddy.”

Together the commander and his team broke the serial killer’s hold on the door and pulled the bug out of his hidey hole.

Jack carried Kylee over to the couch and placed her head in Kate’s waiting lap. Kate covered the girl with a blanket she’d found tossed carelessly over a throw pillow and wrapped a protective arm around her shoulder.

“You’re safe now, Kylee. You’re going home.”

Kylee wept a stream of silent tears. When she looked over at her captor, she started trembling uncontrollably and she couldn’t stop.

The commander read the Lord Mayor’s son his rights, jerked his hands behind his back, and cuffed him roughly.

“How do you like it now? You like it rough? I can do rough.”

“Commander, we’ll take him out the back,” Jones’ second-in-command said.

“No, we’ll be making a little detour through the house, to give Daddy and his party guests a good look at his freak of a son.”

“You can’t do this,” shouted Lucas. “I have my rights.”

“Let’s talk about your rights down at the station. I want this whole damn place swept for evidence. Make sure he doesn’t have anyone else down here.”

The commander walked over to where Katherine was sitting. “Great job, Kate.” He pressed her shoulder emphatically. “You should feel good about what you did here today. You saved this girl’s life.”

“You’re going to be okay now,” Commander Jones assured the girl gently. “We’ve got him. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

Katherine held Kylee closer, both of them shaking. Nothing about this place made her feel good. She couldn’t wait to get home, away from this house of horrors. She’d never been so scared in her life. Scared for Kylee. Scared for herself. Her parents had been right about predicting the future. She had no business tampering with other people’s lives, messing with the unknown.

Chapter Seven

Aboard a Koala Blue jet en route to Atlanta

Katherine pretended to sleep while she squinted at Jack, who was half-hidden behind a newspaper, trying to get comfortable in his cramped airline seat. Turned out Jack wasn’t as big a jerk as she’d originally thought. In fact, he had been very protective of her in Sydney, and he’d been there when she needed him. He hadn’t apologized, but he wasn’t cracking any more “woo-woo” jokes or mocking her “magical powers.” So that was a step in the right direction. The fact that Flight Attendant Barbie wasn’t on the return flight was another plus.

“Kate,” he nudged her shoulder. “Are you awake?”

Kate smiled. The man wasn’t exactly subtle. She’d hardly had enough time to admire him surreptitiously or finish her in-flight fantasy about being tangled up in the satin sheets on the king-sized bed at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney, wishing Jack had not agreed so readily to sleep on the couch. She was vulnerable and thoroughly shaken up by the whole experience. She needed to be comforted. Hell, she wanted to do more than talk to Jack, as macho and insufferable as he had been. Maybe it was just the adrenalin, but she’d been having naughty thoughts about Jack throughout the flight.

“I guess,” she said. “What’s up?”

“You’re famous.”

“What do you mean?” Kate straightened in her seat.

“You’re all over the
Sydney Morning Herald
and
The Daily Telegraph
.”

Kate grabbed the newspapers from Jack’s hand. “Why did they have to mention me?” Katherine said, lips pursed when she saw her picture splashed all over the front page of the newspaper. Her parents had repeatedly warned her not to make headlines. She read a few paragraphs about her role in the Sydney Strangler case and the recounted story of how she had predicted the death of the son of Vince Rivers.

“What are you so steamed about? You’re the new ‘It’ girl. Apparently you single-handedly caught the Sydney Strangler.”

“I didn’t catch him. You and the commander did.”

“Information you provided led to his arrest.”

“Just a technicality.”

Jack took her chin in his hands and tipped her face up to him. “Kate, look at me. We couldn’t have done this without you. That’s a fact. So face it.”

“I don’t want to ever have to go back there,” she said.

“Hopefully, you won’t have to. But if we have to go to Sydney to testify at the trial, that’s a small price to pay to get that sick psycho off the streets. He won’t ever see the light of day, and if justice is finally done, we’ll execute him.”

“I thought the commander said Australia had abolished the death penalty.”

“We’re trying to get him extradited to Georgia, where we do have it. My team is busy trying to tie him to the Atlanta killings, refute his alibis. We have our people checking the Lord Mayor’s travel records. If we can match Junior’s DNA to the evidence we found on the dead girls at Atlanta College, and if the Lord Mayor was in Atlanta during the time of the killings and his son was traveling with him, then we’ve got him dead to rights.”

Katherine was still looking at the newspapers with a frown on her face.

“So what’s bothering you?”

“I just hope the Atlanta papers don’t run anything. I don’t want my name associated with another case.”

“Why not?”

“My parents don’t want me doing this kind of thing.”

“Saving lives? Isn’t your mother an attorney and your dad a federal judge?”

“Yes, but she and my father shun publicity. They’ll be furious if this gets out. They haven’t recovered from the swirl of publicity surrounding the Vince Rivers crash. They think this sort of stuff is somehow less than respectable.”

“Well, normally I’d have to say I agree with them. But in this case, I can’t discount what I saw or what you did. How do
you
feel about it?”

“Conflicted, I guess. I’ve had these dreams, feelings, welling up inside of me ever since I can remember, and I can’t go to my parents. My mother used to call my visions headaches. ‘KC, dear, are you having one of your headaches again?’ she used to say before she dismissed them. The Vince Rivers case was the first time I acted on my instincts. It felt…good, right.”

“Better than selling paintings to socialites?” Jack said, barely hiding his amusement. “Do you plan to work at an art gallery selling somebody else’s work the rest of your life?”

Katherine looked up at Jack in disbelief. He was the most exasperating man. One minute he was signaling his approval and the next, dismissing her abilities. She was good at her job. Intuitively, she knew which paintings should go home with which patrons. But that knowledge was useless now, because no one except the super rich was buying paintings anymore, not in this economy, and they preferred dealing with Sotheby’s or Christie’s rather than a local gallery.

“Apparently not, since I just lost my job at the Freyer Gallery. I haven’t even told my parents yet.”

“You got fired?”

“Laid off. Nobody has any money to buy fine art anymore. I was the top salesperson,
when
people were in the market for my product. To answer your question, no, that’s not what I pictured myself doing for the rest of my life, but right now, that’s all I’ve got going. What about you? Planning to be a cop forever?”

“I’ve got a degree in criminal justice and I’ve almost graduated law school.”

“My mother says there are already too many lawyers,” Katherine said, snorting.

“But how many lawyers have police backgrounds? I know the justice system from the ground up. One day, I want to have my own detective agency. I’m covering all the bases.”

“Sounds like you know just what you want. I envy you.”

“I guess with your parents’ connections and money, you really don’t even need to work. Must be nice to have a safety net. Parents who believe in you.”

Jack fixed her with his searching blue eyes, and she flinched under his frank appraisal.

Jack didn’t know how wrong he was. Her parents were both realists who believed only in proven facts. They were both methodical and reserved, so it was frowned upon to show emotions in the Crystal Palace, otherwise known as her family home in Buckhead, the toniest section of Atlanta.

Wasn’t Jack listening? Hadn’t he heard her mention that neither of her parents knew what to make of her psychic abilities? They usually chose to ignore her random visions of inconsequential future events, such as consistently predicting winning lottery numbers. They chalked it up to coincidence when she knew someone was at the door before the doorbell rang or a lucky guess that she knew the phone was going to ring before it did. Or when she had a dream that usually came true. But they found her serious visions of disastrous events, over which she had no control, more worrisome. Katherine considered her special abilities natural, but to her parents they were unnatural, supernatural, an embarrassment, and the less said about them the better.

Worse, she sometimes felt like she didn’t even belong in her family. Both her parents were successful overachievers. She was a failure, by any standard. No job now, no means of support, and she didn’t want to continue to freeload off her parents. She wasn’t exactly living in their basement. She had her own suite in the Crystal Palace. But she was still wandering on an unknown future path, trying to find her way.

If she were truly successful, would she still be living at home? And would the gallery have terminated her because they no longer needed her services? She had been embarrassed when she had to admit to Jack that she was unemployed. But she wasn’t about to back down.

“And what if I did want to sell paintings for the rest of my life?” she challenged. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I appreciate beauty.”

Jack stared at her intently, then looked away, leaving her to scan the papers and wonder what she did to put the latest scowl on his face.

****

If he didn’t know better, and she wasn’t always so damn angry all the time, he’d think
Crystal Ball Kate
had cast a spell on him, a love spell. He’d been watching her sleep, taking cover behind a newspaper to hide the fact that he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was having a hell of a dream if that smug smile on her face was any indication. Probably about some guy—some lucky guy.

All he could think about since they left Sydney was kissing her. He’d come so close in the hotel room as they were packing up and preparing to fly back to Atlanta. They were both ginned up after catching the Sydney Strangler. For all his bluster, and the control he wielded over innocent, helpless young girls, Lucas Taylor was just a sniveling little creep who had broken down like a crybaby when Commander Jones perp-walked him by his father in front of all the Lord Mayor’s distinguished party guests. The commander had caught hell from Chief Commissioner Williams for doing it so publicly, but he still admitted it had been worth it.

They’d finished up all the paperwork and said their goodbyes to Commander Jones at the station, and then Jack had taken her out for a big dinner to celebrate the fact that his long-term losing streak was finally over.

Back at their hotel suite, he could still see Kate perched in the window seat, sunlight streaming in, highlighting the golden streaks in her hair, sprinkling sunshine like fairy dust. She was marveling over the view, and he was thinking the view from inside the hotel room was pretty great, too. He’d walked up behind her and placed his hands squarely on her shoulders. She’d startled and turned around, and at that moment, as he gazed into her bottomless violet eyes in that stunning face, he’d wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms and find out what it would be like to kiss a psychic, to be part of her future.

He’d resisted the urge and the moment was lost. But his desire for Kate was still alive and kicking. The look she’d given him then made him think she really could read his mind. It was uncanny.

He hoped she didn’t know what he was thinking right now, sitting so close to her, winging their way back to Atlanta. She hadn’t given him a clue as to what was going on in that complicated, messy mind of hers. Or whether she’d want to see him again when they got back to Atlanta.

“So, what do you plan to do when you get back to Atlanta?” Jack asked, testing the waters. “With all this publicity, you have an open ticket to travel around the world solving mysteries and problems.”

“You wouldn’t believe the endless parade of reporters knocking on my parents’ door looking for a scoop since the Vince Rivers prediction,” Katherine said. “Inquiring minds want to know: Who is
Crystal Ball Kate
? Where did she come from? What’s going to happen next?

“It’s all about the road not taken, and everyone thinks I can point them in the right direction. How can I point anyone in the right direction when I don’t know where I’m going myself?”

“Well, I’m not a psychic, but I can pretty much predict where we’re going now,” Jack said. “Back to Atlanta.”

“Very funny.” Katherine shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable.

“But seriously, are you going to continue doing police work?” He was crowding Kate in her seat. His arm was touching hers as they fought for purchase on the armrest between them. He was winning. He enjoyed the electric shock sensation whenever they came in contact. Kate, not so much. She was grabbing her left shoulder and twisting her body in an effort to angle away from him. He couldn’t help his bulk or his muscles. He was a big guy. He turned his head to face her.

“Not if my parents have anything to do with it. As of now, the ‘Crystal Ball Kate,’ franchise is closed for business.”

He didn’t know how he felt about that. He didn’t want her on his turf on a regular basis, but she had been a big help on the strangler case in Sydney.