Rachel Lee - Protector of One

Catching himself, Adrian almost shook his head to bring his attention back to what she was saying.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said, looking at Gage. “I was just sitting there waiting for my breakfast to finish cooking…” She trailed off and looked down at her knotted hands.

“Start wherever you want,” Gage said gently. “You don’t have to get right to the vision.”

That seemed to reassure her. Her head lifted, and Adrian now saw the woman who taught for a living, the woman who could handle rooms full of teenagers.

“All right,” she said, her voice taking on a somewhat stronger timbre. “When I was in my senior year in college, we were driving back to school after the holidays when the car skidded on ice and went over a cliff. My two friends died. Probably the only reason I’m still here is that I was in the backseat, and an EMT saw us go off the road.”

Gage nodded, didn’t ask her how this was related. Just let her tell her story her own way, which was often the best way.

“Anyway,” Kerry continued, “I died twice.”

In spite of himself, Adrian sat up a little straighter. Gage leaned forward and repeated, “Twice?”

Kerry nodded. “That’s what they tell me. I was clinically dead twice before they managed to stabilize me. I’m lucky not to have suffered major brain damage.”

“I would say so!” Gage agreed heartily.

A faint smile flickered over Kerry’s face. “I’ll spare you the tale about going into the light. My near-death experience was pretty much the same as everyone’s you hear about. I know it was real. I don’t need to convince anyone else.”

Gage nodded. Adrian sat frozen. He would have liked to demand the details for himself, but held on to his desire. Another time. A better time.

“Anyway,” Kerry said, “I recovered, I finished school, I came back here to teach. You all know the rest. I’ve been teaching here for eight years now,” she added to Adrian, as if he might not know. “But I changed after the accident.”

“Most people do,” Emma said comfortingly. She would know. A senseless, brutal crime had once torn her life apart.

Kerry looked at her and nodded gratefully. “Anyway,” she continued, returning her attention to Gage, “everything checked out, not even any brain damage that they could find. I was lucky. I was blessed.”

Gage murmured agreement. Adrian could tell that Kerry didn’t really feel blessed and suspected some survivor guilt. She’d be less than human if she didn’t feel it.

Kerry drew a deep breath, clearly ready to plunge in to the hard part. “I sometimes get these feelings. I call them my quirks. But sometimes I know things that are going to happen. Or I know things that happen elsewhere that I only hear about later. I usually shake them off. Coincidence. Probably the result of some minor brain damage.”

Gage nodded. “Possibly.”

“But this morning…” Kerry hesitated. Finally she closed her eyes, as if to pretend she were alone, and said, “I heard the news announcement and then everything just shifted. In an instant I was somewhere else and the things I saw were all jumbled.”

Gage leaned forward now, picking up a pen and holding it over a legal pad. “Can you organize it in any way?”

Kerry compressed her lips before speaking. “It was like a rush of things, disjointed, some not clear, others almost too clear. Sounds. I heard men laughing. I heard them opening cans, and could smell the beer. I smelled cordite. I saw…I saw…I saw two menlying on the ground. They were facing each other, and each had an arm over the other’s body. And blood. There was blood everywhere…They were shot. Twice each. Once in the chest, once in the head. But they weren’t lying like that when they were shot. They were dragged there. Positioned.”

Her eyes snapped open. “It’s supposed to look like a message, but it’s not.”

That was the moment Adrian felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Kerry waited, but she hardly saw Gage and Adrian now. She had returned to this morning, that bright beautiful morning that had been suddenly and inexplicably blighted by evil. At some level she smelled the bacon burning on the stove, but her mind had attached itself far away from the kitchen.

“Kerry?” Gage’s voice recalled her.

“Yes?”

“Can you wring any more details out of what you sensed?”

She met his gaze and saw something there, something that suggested she hadn’t just flipped a brain circuit. “You mean what I saw was real?”

Emma squeezed her arm again. Gage hesitated. “I’m not supposed to discuss the investigation. So can we just say that you hit on something that no one outside the department should know?”

“Oh, God.” Kerry lowered her head, her stomach sinking at the same time. “I don’t need this. I don’t want this…this whatever it is.”

“I don’t blame you,” Emma said quietly. “But for whatever reason, it happened.”

Kerry nodded, fighting for equilibrium and battering down the fright. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just say that somehow, some way, I saw something that was real. At least in part. You want me to try to wring more information out of what I saw?”

“If you can.”

“It was all so jumbled, and I’ve been trying not to think about it all day.” Her fingers twisted together. “Let me think. Focus on it. But at this point I’m not sure I wouldn’t just confabulate stuff.”

“Wouldn’t it feel different?” Adrian asked, speaking for the first time.

Kerry looked at him, her jaw dropping a little. “Yes,” she said finally. “It would. There was something about what happened this morning that was so…real. Almost hyper-real.”

He nodded. “Then don’t worry about making things up. Just focus on what feels like that.”

“Good idea,” Gage remarked.

Kerry decided that would make a good guideline. Somewhere through her distress a flicker of humor emerged. “I’m not a pro at this. No practice to guide me.”

At that even the stern-faced Adrian smiled. “I’ve never consulted a psychic before so I don’t have any hints for you.”

“I’m not a psychic. I just—” She broke off suddenly. “Sorry. It doesn’t matter what I am or am not. Whatever this was, it happened. So I just need to make sure I tell you everything.”

Gage nodded encouragingly. “That’s the stuff. Then maybe you can go home and forget it.”

“That would be a relief. All right.” She closed her eyes again, this time not trying to skip quickly through the images that had imprinted themselves earlier that day, but instead to look hard at them.

“The victims were friends. One of them—there’s a woman starting to worry about him. A young woman. She wants to report him missing.”

“That’ll help,” Adrian said.

Kerry ignored him, reaching out into whatever it was that had happened this morning, unsure but driven to find something, anything that would get this off her back and help the police if she could.

“They’d been on a long hike,” she said. “Getting near the end. Several days, maybe a week. I see a camera. A camera was important to one of them. And a funnylooking hammer. They both had these hammers on their belts before they were killed. The murderer took them, and some other things.”

Where was all this coming from? But the words kept tumbling from her lips, sometimes fast, sometimes hesitant. “There’s more than one murderer,” she announced suddenly. “I get the feeling of competition. This won’t be the last killing.”

Then it was as if a bubble burst. Everything drained from her mind, leaving her relaxed. Whatever she had needed to do was done now. Finished.

She opened her eyes again, looking at the two men. “That’s it. It’s gone.”