Gabe briefly considered shooting it out with the bad guys. But no telling how many of them were in those two vehicles, since the windows were tinted. And no telling who else might get hurt.
Looking left and right, Gabe saw there was maybe enough leeway between the creek and the house whose property abutted it for his vehicle to squeeze through.
With no other option, he turned left, forcing the car into the narrow strip of lawn that was barely wide enough for a donkey cart. He took out some kind of bush next to the house. And the wheels on the right side almost went over the bank, but he somehow made it to the next street, where there was a development of townhouses and small tract homes.
One of the boxy little units had an open, empty garage, and he drove inside. Leaping out of the car, he ran to the garage door and slammed it shut.
“What if the homeowner comes in here with a gun?” Olivia gasped.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t.”
He moved to the row of windows, waiting as an SUV sped past. It turned around and came back, slowly inspecting the street. Gabe prayed the driver wouldn’t get out and start opening garage doors. When the car finally disappeared from sight, he let out a sigh of relief.
“What’s happening?” Olivia asked from the car.
“They’re gone, but we’d better wait for a while before leaving.”
After half an hour, he decided it was safe to split. All the way back to Olivia’s house, he cursed himself for trying this plan. But he’d been desperate. He wasn’t going to find Smith without information, and his ploy probably would have panned out, given enough time to work Pete over.
Too bad he hadn’t figured on an alternate surveillance system. Still, there was one important piece of information he’d ascertained. The rescue team had arrived quickly, which meant that Smith’s base of operation couldn’t be too far away.
So, what next? Use a compass to draw a circle on a map and check every house within the radius?
Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. They weren’t looking for any of the new little houses around here, or anything in town, for that matter. Pete had said that Smith lived on a big estate on a river. There were a lot of them, but not an overwhelming amount.
“What are you thinking?” Olivia asked.
“About how to find Smith—and how to keep you safe.”
“He doesn’t know who I am.”
“Let’s hope not.” He gave her a quick glance. He hadn’t known her long, but he knew some important things about her. She was courageous and reckless, and he’d quickly come to care about her. He cleared his throat, “But just in case, maybe you should move out of the house until we resolve this.”
“No. Where would I go?”
“Where you’d be out of danger.”
“No,” she repeated. “Travis wants to help you find Smith, and he can’t stick around without me.”
Gabe had the feeling there was no way to make her understand just how dangerous a game this was. Smith had no compunctions about murdering anybody who could compromise him.
He sighed. “Okay, then you’re going to have me as a house guest, because I’m not going to leave you unguarded.”
She nodded. “That will give us more of a chance to brainstorm.”
Harold Goddard, alias Mr. Smith, looked at the sorry individual slumped in the chair on the other side of his desk.
Pete Roka sat with an ice-filled compress pressed to his nose.
“Tell me again, how did the detective get the drop on you?”
Pete shifted in his seat. “I don’t know exactly. The car started to, you know, rock.”
“No, I don’t know,” Harold said, punching out the words.
The man he was interrogating dragged in a breath and let it out. “It was weird, man. The car started rocking, like…” He shrugged. “Like somebody had thrown themselves against it.”
Harold felt his eyebrows rise. “Like somebody. But you saw no one.”
“No. Just the detective standing a few yards away, watching.”
He tried to bring the scene into focus. It sounded like the guy had known what was going to happen, and he was waiting.
“Then the door opened,” Roka said.
“You hadn’t locked the doors?”
“I did. I’m sure.” The words came out like a whine.
“So how did they open?”
Roka’s look was pleading. “I dunno. And then it was like somebody pulled me out.”
Harold kept his expression neutral as he ran over possibilities in his mind.
The detective had been professional and methodical. Harold’s men had gone over the interior of the house. The only fingerprints were Carson’s. And the car that looked like a junker had been quite fast. It had led his men on a merry chase.
But it hadn’t been fast enough to get so far ahead that Timbers would have lost it. Bowman must have found a place to hide and waited until the coast was clear before making his getaway.
The whole incident was a puzzle. It felt like a combination of careful planning and magic.
Harold made a snorting sound. He didn’t believe in magic, although he did believe that the children from the Solomon Clinic had powers.
But he knew the detective wasn’t one of them. Harold had checked the rolls. He wasn’t listed. Or what if he was one of the ones who had somehow slipped away? No, that wasn’t possible. Some of the mothers had failed to take the children back for testing, and their names had fallen off the list. But the Howell Institute had maintained meticulous records of all the mothers and children, even the ones who broke their contracts. And Harold had been working from their list, not the one from the Solomon clinic.
So either the detective was using some kind of magic tricks that Harold couldn’t imagine. Or…
What if the woman was one of the children? What if she’d met Carson before his death?
Harold’s fists clenched. He had surveilled the man for months. He hadn’t gotten together with any women.
Dismissing that possibility, Harold went back to another option. What if Carson had been lying about being able to do stuff on his own? What if it was possible, and he’d somehow been able to hide it?
Harold didn’t think so. Not after what he’d done to the man. Everybody broke under torture, and if Carson had known something, he would have given it up to make the pain stop.
But now perhaps the woman was the key.
On the chair in front of him, Roka shifted.
Harold’s gaze flicked back to him. He’d like to kill the idiot, but this might be the wrong time for bodies to keep piling up. He couldn’t just terminate someone when they were no longer of use to him. He kept a room on the basement level where operatives might sleep if they were on duty here.
“Go down to the dorm,” he said. “Get some rest. We can continue this later.”
Harold bit back a smirk as relief flooded Roka’s face. The man practically sprang from the chair as he headed toward the door, wincing as he juggled the ice pack against his nose.
When he was gone, Harold turned back to his computer. At first, the woman had stayed out of sight behind a large bush. But when Bowman had taken Roka into the house, she’d come out of hiding and joined him. Which was good because he’d gotten some good shots of her face.
He’d fed it into a powerful facial recognition program, and he had high hopes that it would reveal her identity. If he knew who the woman was, he could scoop her up and get back to some intensive interrogation.
Olivia felt a sense of relief when she got back to the house, stepped inside, and locked the door.
The solace evaporated as she watched Gabe walking around, checking locks on doors and windows, even the ones upstairs.
Travis stood behind her, his arms around her waist, holding her tightly. I hate putting you in danger.
Not your fault, she answered.
She looked up as Gabe rejoined her in the den. “You don’t think they’re going to come here, do you?” she asked. “I mean, they don’t know who I am.”
“I hope not. Are you sure you’re not willing to go to a friend’s house or something?”
She wasn’t going to tell him that she didn’t have any real friends. She imagined it was the same for all of the children produced from Dr. Solomon’s experiments.
All she could do was reiterate her previous “no.”
“Do you know how to use a gun?” the detective asked.
Travis’s grip on her tightened as she answered, “My father made sure I did, because this house is in an isolated location. I have a gun in a lockbox here. But really, I’m probably better off using the powers Gabe and I have.”
“Maybe not if someone’s shooting at you,” Gabe muttered. He had brought in an arsenal, including an automatic rifle.
We need to get better at hurling thunderbolts, Travis said.
She turned to Gabe, “Travis and I are going outside to practice blowing things up.”
When his eyes widened, she clarified. “Not literally. But we’re going to amplify what we can do.”
“If you go out, I’m going too.”
When she headed for the door, he picked up the automatic rifle and followed, settling into one of the lawn chairs to stand guard.
From his comfortable lawn chair, Gabe watched Olivia and Travis at their strange weapons practice. It was like nothing he had ever witnessed in his life. There were no actual weapons. All the force of the attack seemed to come from Olivia’s body, although logically, Travis must be an equal partner.
Gabe could see when Olivia set up a can on the step stool they were using. Other times, it would look like a can was floating to the stand, only Gabe knew that Travis was carrying it. Once a can was in place, Olivia would face it. He could only see her, but from her stance, he could tell that Travis was also there, either holding her or being held by her, as he was the one launching the power bolt.
Gabe couldn’t help imagine the intimate contact, the natural way Olivia fit against Travis. They must be completely comfortable with each other. More than that, they must have a warm, satisfying relationship—whatever that would be with a ghost.
As Gabe watched Olivia’s graceful movements, he found himself contemplating what it would be like to be intimate with her. When he realized he was mentally putting himself into the role of her partner and her lover, he brought himself up short.
Don’t even think about it, he warned himself. She was bonded with Travis. She’d said she’d never been close to anyone before the ghost. There was no way another guy—one who wasn’t a result of Dr. Solomon’s experiment—was going to horn in on that relationship.
It was just a damn shame that she couldn’t have a normal sex life. Or could she? What was it that she and the ghost did together?
His gaze cut to her, knowing Travis was nearby and hoping the ghost couldn’t read the thoughts of the man who was watching them with envy.
Olivia and Travis kept up the practice as long as they could, trying different variations. Usually, they stood together. Sometimes they tried it several yards apart. And they also kept increasing their distance from the target until it was simply too far for a bolt to hit the can.
After a couple of hours, Olivia could see that their strikes were losing power.
The effort had exhausted her, and she could tell that Travis was flagging, too.
Were they going to defeat the purpose by burning out?
“Maybe we’re overdoing it,” she finally said.
From where he sat watching them, Gabe voiced his agreement. “You look like you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns,” he said. “Pack it in now, and you can see how it goes tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she agreed, silently admitting that she welcomed a reason to stop.
Surprisingly quickly, Harold’s facial recognition program hit pay dirt, partly because he was limiting his search area to Maryland and Delaware, the most likely places where Gabe’s little helper might reside.
It turned out she was Olivia Langston, and of all things, she was an artist who painted furniture—which was carried in some of the shops in St. Stephens. Maybe she’d run into Carson on one of her trips down here.
He went back to the database that listed all children from the Solomon Clinic. Jackpot. She was on the list. But after a few times, her mother had stopped bringing her back for testing. And Carson’s father had never brought him back.
Harold scrolled through her record. Her parents had been a wealthy couple who had probably thought that rules and contracts didn’t apply to them. They had died in a small plane crash on the way to their vacation house. Their main residence was in Frederick, and Olivia had inherited it after their deaths. He found an interior design magazine that featured her work, as well as pictures of her workshop that looked like a converted old carriage house. There were mentions of awards in the local paper and even in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post.
He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. Her notoriety presented a problem. Carson had been a nobody fishing-charter captain. She was a local celebrity. If he had her shot after interrogation, the police were going to do some investigating. Better to arrange an accident at sea for both her and Gabe Bowman. Yeah, maybe they’d been dating or something and had gone out cruising—and met with some nautical disaster.
But he was back to square one as far as his assessment of the Solomon Clinic spawn. Travis was dead, and there weren’t any other clinic children for her to hook up with. How the hell had she gotten tangled up in the detective’s investigation?’
Still, something out of the ordinary had happened to Roka. Did she have some powers on her own? Like he had suspected with Carson? Or was it some trick the detective had been able to pull off? It would have to be a trick, because there was no reason for him to have any paranormal powers.
Harold sat down at the computer, reviewing the videos that the cameras had taken of the car. Roka hadn’t been able to describe what had happened. As he watched, Harold couldn’t either. He just knew that something very odd had gone down.
Well, maybe he couldn’t get to the bottom of it—yet. But he wasn’t going to take any chances. When he scooped up the woman, he was going to make sure she was incapacitated before getting anywhere near her.
Olivia wavered on her feet and glanced up to see Gabe giving her a critical look. “You need to get some sleep. But we should eat something first. Um, is there anything around we can grab?”
“I’m not much of a cook, but I have takeout from some of the best restaurants and delis in town.”
“What do we have?”
“Let’s find out.” She led him to the kitchen and began taking cartons from the fridge.
Gabe selected some kung pao chicken. Needing something lighter, she went for a beet salad with grapefruit, feta cheese, and pistachio nuts.
“You actually like beets?” he asked, as he waited for the microwave to warm up his food.
“Yes. Try them. You may like them.”
“I’ll leave them for you.”
It was fully dark by the time she and Travis went upstairs to her bed, where she changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt.
“You’re wondering if you’re going to have to make a quick getaway,” Travis said.
“Unfortunately, I can’t lie to you,” she answered.
Goddard rarely went on missions with his operatives, but this time was an exception. There had been too many cock-ups lately, and he was going to make damn sure nothing else untoward happened.
He selected two good men, not including Roka. One of them, Kentwell, had been on the kidnap operation. The other, Green, had not been along, but he was an excellent choice for the evening’s work. He had a lot of technical experience, he knew how to work quickly and quietly, and he was a helicopter pilot.
He had Green prep the helo as he looked at some online maps for a suitable landing spot. Not near the Langston house, because that might alert her. Was the detective keeping her company? That would be convenient. They could deal with him at the same time.
After finding a landing place, he arranged for a vehicle to be on site when he got there.
Harold quickly gathered the equipment he needed. It also helped that Olivia Langston’s house was an old one. There’d be lots of opportunities for penetration.
Everything was in place before midnight.
He was whistling a jaunty tune as he went out to board the helicopter. Soon he’d know exactly what had happened to Roka.
