Vision Impossible: A Psychic Eye Mystery - Couverture souple

Chapter One

For the record, burying a dead body is a lot more work than it looks like on TV.

Also for the record, burying a dead body while wearing a clingy cocktail dress and heels, and in the pouring rain—darn near impossible. Of course, I had help, which could be why we eventually got our dearly departed dude six feet under. (Okay, so maybe it was more like two feet under, but who’s really measuring at that point?)

“I think that’s good,” said my oh-so-gorgeous fiancé as he patted down the mud, leaves, and scrub covering our dead guy.

“Thank God,” I said, holding my hands palms up to let the rain wash some of the mud off. And that’s when I realized my engagement ring had slipped off. “Son of a beast!” I gasped. (Yes, I’m still not swearing, which, at times, proves most inconvenient.)

“What?” asked my sweetie.

Before answering him, I dropped to all fours and began to feel around frantically in the mud. “My ring! I’ve lost my ring!”

My fiancé threw aside his shovel and came to squat down next to me. “When?”

Tears welled in my eyes and my heart raced with dread. “I’m not sure,” I admitted, still scratching at the mud with my fingernails.

“Hey,” he said gently, taking my wrists in his hands to stop my frenetic search. “If it’s in the grave, we’re not going to find it now. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“But—” I began.

“No buts. Now come on. They’ll catch on that we’ve killed the head of the guard any minute now, and they’ll come looking for us. We have to put some distance between us and them.”

I was still crying, however, and I couldn’t get over losing the most precious thing I owned. “Please, Rick?” I begged, using the name easily now. “Just give me a minute to look; I promise if I don’t find it in—”

And that’s as far as I got before the woods all around us erupted in gunfire. Rick pulled me to him protectively. I stared into his deep brown eyes as he growled, “Move!”

He got no further argument from me; we surged forward and I stuck close to him as we darted through the underbrush. We ran for probably a quarter mile, and I tripped and slipped almost the entire way in my heels. The darn things had no traction, and if Rick hadn’t been practically carrying me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have made it that far that quickly.

We stopped to catch our breath and listen for signs of a chase behind us. I did my best not to quiver in fear while he scanned the area. In the distance I could hear the occasional pop of a gun, but nothing seemed close, and for that, I was grateful. I eyed my sore, muddied, blistered feet and wished that my black pumps were ruby red and I could click them together to go back home.

“You ready to move again?” Rick asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

No, I thought.

“I can see a structure about twenty yards that way,” he told me. “I think it might be a hunting lodge or a log cabin. We can make it there and hide out till they’ve finished looking for us. It’ll also give us some shelter from this rain.”

“Yippee,” I said woodenly.

Rick smiled in sympathy and took my hand. “Come on, babe. It’s not far.”

Now, you’re probably wondering what mess I’d gotten myself into this time—right? Let me take all that suspense out right now, and admit that it was a doozy!

It all began a few weeks prior to our mad dash through the forest, at a time when I was feeling . . . well . . . patriotic.

Of course, when you have three high-ranking members of the FBI, CIA, and armed forces telling you that your country needs you, it can be a powerfully convincing argument.

You see, several weeks before, there was a breach in our national security of epic proportions. Something was stolen that was so crucial to our country’s safety that it left each and every one of us vulnerable.

What was it? you ask. Well, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.

Ha, ha, ha! Kidding! I’ll divulge all; but let me at least start again at the beginning, which, for me, was on a beautiful late-April day in downtown Austin when I was called to a meeting at the FBI field office, where I was a civilian profiling consultant. That’s really just a fancy way of saying that, as a professional psychic, I assisted the FBI by pulling warm clues out of the ether on cases that had long since gone cold.

At this particular meeting was my sweetheart— Assistant Special Agent in Charge Dutch Rivers—his boss Brice Harrison, his boss FBI regional director Bill Gaston, and a lieutenant colonel with the air force, along with some steely-looking dude from the CIA.

During the course of that meeting, it became evident that something of great importance had been stolen off a military base and was then summarily smuggled out of the country. The good news was that the item had been traced to Canada. The bad news was that everyone agreed it would not be there for long.

Now, naturally our government wanted its property back, and so they’d sent two CIA agents into Canada to retrieve it. Those agents’ true identities were discovered, however, and I understand that their demise was swift and most unpleasant . . . something I’d rather not think about, actually.

Anyway, when it became evident that the task of retrieving the article in question was more formidable than first imagined, Bill Gaston thought of me.

I debated the idea of becoming a spy for about two whole minutes, something in hindsight I’m still sort of regretting, but I’d agreed, and Dutch and I had flown to Washington, D.C., the following week.

We’d been met at the airport by a lanky young agent with red hair and lots of freckles. He reminded me of Opie. “Agent Rivers and Ms. Cooper?” he asked, spotting us immediately from the faces in the crowd surrounding the luggage carousel.

Dutch extended his hand. “Agent Spencer?”

Opie shook Dutch’s hand warmly. “Yes, sir,” he said, offering me a nice smile too. “Our car is this way.”

We trailed behind Spencer, toting our luggage to a waiting black sedan. I swear, if the FBI ever wants to blend in right, they’ll need to add a few Priuses to the fleet.

Spencer loaded my bag into the trunk and we were on our way. “Are you taking us to headquarters?” Dutch inquired.

Spencer shook his head. “No, sir,” he told us. “I’ve been told to bring you to the CIA central office.”

I gulped. I grew up at the height of the cold war, so I still think of the CIA as an agency staffed with seriously scary people willing to do anything for the cause. But I held my nerves in check—I mean, I didn’t want to appear all fidgety and nervous on my first day of spy school; how uncool would that be?

We arrived at the CIA central office and Opie handed us off to a female agent dressed in a smart black pantsuit, a crisp white shirt, and no emotion on her face whatsoever.

She took us through security before seeing us to a large conference room, where nearly a dozen men and one woman were already seated.

The woman stood when we entered, and I noticed she was at the head of the oval table. “Good morning,” she said cordially. “Agent Rivers, Ms. Cooper, please come in and join us.”

The agent who’d shown us in backed out of the room and closed the door. I felt Dutch’s hand rest on my lower back as he guided me to the only two available seats left at the table. My mouth went dry as I took my chair, but when I saw FBI director Gaston sitting across from us and smiling warmly, I breathed a teensy bit easier.

It struck me then that the table was arranged somewhat by rank. The woman at the head of the table was obviously running the show, and she was flanked by two gentlemen whom I’d guessed were in their mid-fifties but seemed full of authority. The authority vein trickled down the table from there.

I also couldn’t help noticing many steely eyes were focused my way. I could also see a little disappointment in a few of their expressions while they assessed me head to toe. Not the first time I’d experienced that reaction, and likely not the last.

“Welcome to Washington,” the woman at the head of the table said into the silence that followed our sitting down. “I’m Christine Tanner, and I’m the CIA director of intelligence here in D.C.”

I smiled and nodded to her, and Dutch did the same. And that was it for pleasantries, because Tanner promptly got down to brass tacks by clicking a button on a handheld remote, which caused the conference room to go dark except for the projection of a slide onto a screen at the other end of the room. “Ms. Cooper, as you have cleared our security background checks, we feel it wise to educate you on the nature of the security breach we encountered a few weeks ago.”

I focused on the slide, which showed an aerial view of a large air force base. “This is a military outpost in southern Nevada. On the morning of April sixth, during a routine flight test, one of our military drones went missing.” I heard a click and a new slide showed the image of an unmanned drone aircraft like I’d seen on the news used in air strikes against enemy militant fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, although this one looked much smaller and sleeker in scale and on its top were mounted a small camera and what looked like a small rifle.

“The pilot claimed that midway through the test flight, the operating system on the drone failed, causing it to stop responding to his commands, and eventually crash somewhere out in the desert.”

So far I was following. The air force lost a little drone. Got it.

“It is not unheard of for the operating systems on these aircraft to fail, especially since this model was a prototype.”

“It’s smaller than most of your regular drones, right?” I asked.

The colonel nodded. “It’s also the latest in whisper technology. It’s powered electrically from a lithium battery, and the drone is virtually silent, which allows it to get within a hundred feet or so of its target without being seen or heard. Because of its advanced technology, this model would be very expensive to replace, and this particular drone was carrying something of great importance, so an extensive search was immediately conducted to retrieve whatever remained of the drone and its cargo.”

I looked at Dutch; he was focused on Tanner in a way that suggested there might be something more to this missing-drone story. “After combing through the area where the drone was believed to have crashed, no evidence of it could be found, which is why the military began to suspect the pilot’s story.”

A little way down from me and to the right, the lieutenant colonel who’d come with Gaston to recruit me in Austin shifted in his seat uncomfortably. Into the silence that followed Tanner’s last statement, he said, “I personally requested the pilot come in for a polygraph. But when he failed to show up, we went looking for him. We found him on the floor of his shower, shot through the head at point-blank range.”

“Suicide?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“No,” he told me.

“Any leads on who pulled the trigger?” Dutch asked.

“No again,” said the military man.

“We hope to get Ms. Cooper’s intuitive input on that later,” Director Gaston said, with a meaningful look at me.

I nodded. I’d do what I could, especially if this was a case of national security.

Tanner spoke next. “Obviously, we no longer suspect there was an operational issue with the drone. We believe the pilot was coerced or bribed into delivering our drone into enemy hands.”

I furrowed my brow. Why was one missing drone causing so much concern? I mean, when I looked back at the slide, the thing looked one step above a model airplane you could buy at any hobby shop.

Gaston seemed to read my mind, because he spoke next. “It’s more than just a missing drone,” he told me. “Agent Tanner, why don’t we allow Professor Steckworth to explain?”

Gaston’s eyes had settled on a slight man at the end of the table with salt-and-pepper hair and a nose much too big for his small square face. He cleared his throat when all eyes turned to him, and nodded to Tanner, who clicked her remote, and another slide projected onto the screen. It was a photo of a man young enough to be a college student, and somewhat unremarkable in appearance except for the fact that enveloping him on all sides was the most beautiful cloud of color I’d ever seen. “Oh, my God!” I gasped, already understanding what I was looking at.

“Do you know what you’re seeing?” Professor Steckworth asked, eyeing me keenly.

I nodded. “You’ve captured the image of his aura.” In my mind’s eye when I focused only on the young man in the photo, I too saw a cloud of color, though it wasn’t nearly as vivid or complete as what I was seeing on the screen.

Professor Steckworth smiled. “Yes, very good, Ms. Cooper. Your own abilities allow you to see auras, I take it?”

“Well . . .” I hesitated, not wanting everyone to assume my eyesight was clogged with images of color, color everywhere. “It’s less that I see them and more that I sense them in my mind’s eye. If I close my own eyes and focus, I can imagine, if you will, what someone’s aura looks like. And in case you’re wondering, Professor, yours is mostly deep blue with some wisps of yellow and olive green.”

Professor Steckworth appeared surprised, and he reached for a folder and pulled out a printout of himself, surrounded by a blue bubble with traces of yellow and some olive green, which he held up for everyone to see.

I sat back in my chair and grinned at each person who’d given me a doubtful look when I’d walked in. Oh, yeah . . . I’m a badass psychic, people . . . uh-huh.

“I’m quite impressed,” he said, and I relished the few knowing glances exchanged around the table before the professor motioned to Agent Tanner, and she clicked forward again . . . and again . . . and again. In every slide was the picture of another person wearing a different set of colors, varying in degrees of intensity and vibrancy. I knew why they were showing me the photos. “You’ve documented that each one is unique to the person,” I said. “Like a fingerprint.”

Professor Steckworth spoke again. “Indeed.” He then seemed to want to talk at length and looked to Tanner, who nodded. “You see, twenty years ago I had the most astonishing encounter with a woman who claimed to be a psychic. I was working on my PhD at the time, and her abilities so impressed me that I made her the focus of my thesis.

“This woman was also an artist, and for a mere pittance she would paint your portrait and include your individual aura. Of the hundreds of portraits I viewed from her hand, no two were alike, and that began my quest to see if I could prove that auras really existed.

“What I discovered was that each and every human being emits a certain electromagnetic frequency made up of individual wave patterns that is unique to that person—no two frequency patterns are alike, not even with identical twins. I then worked with the psychic to match colors to each wavelength and was able to develop digital photography software that captured the frequencies and translated them into a signature color pattern. I called the system Intuit.”

“Awesome,” I whispered, completely fascinated by the photos and the professor’s s...