“But I haven’t done anything today to make your life difficult!”Lie. Reece winced.
Liam put salt in the wound as he said, “Did you show up at the crime scene this morning?”
“Well—”
“Did you, anempath, show up at our most notoriousanti-empathy senator’s murder scene when her body was found on Cedrick Stone’s yacht?”
“Just because the boat she was found on belongs to some rich guy—”
“Oh my God. You don’t know who Cedrick Stone is. You wear his productevery day.”
Reece glanced down at himself. “He’s a...sweatshirt mogul?”
“CedrickStone,” said Liam. “FromStone Solutions.”
Oh.
Reece looked at one gloved hand and flexed his suddenly prickling fingers. “Right,” he said, with a lightness he didn’t feel. “That guy.”
Because yes, he did know who that was. He’d seen him on TV, promising that his newest product waseight percent more effective at blocking empathyor some other blathering. Reece didn’t listen, just wore whatever pair of government-mandated gloves the Empath Initiative agency gave him. The gloves were stiff and hot but they did their job and kept him from accidentally reading a stranger when buying groceries and he’d never given any thought to their creator.
“Right. That guy.”Liam’s imitation of Reece was scarily accurate and not particularly flattering. “Look, people are going to blame empaths for Senator Hathaway’s death and it could get ugly. Come meet us at the department; you can lay low until your flight to Juneau, and then hopefully I can get you off the grid.”
“Why? You want a witness-free way to drown me in the sea?”
“Funny,” Liam said flatly. “It’s for Jamey. She wants you to be safe and I want her to be happy, so get over here already.”
Reece turned the key in the ignition, ready to get in one last righteous dig, then hang up on Liam and drive off in a satisfied huff. “You know I don’t talk on the phone while driving. So if you want me to leave, why are you busting my ass about what I say to the press—”
Shit. He tried the key again, and again got nothing but a quiet clicking noise as the engine refused to turn over.
“You’re right, how inconsiderate of me,” Liam said. “I should be moreflexible.”
The line went dead. Reece decided not to think too closely on which one of them might be better at righteous digs and dramatic hang ups.
He sat back in his seat with a sigh. Well, this was what he got for driving on an old, unreliable battery in a cold snap. He could call Liam back, but Liam was frazzled and Jamey was worried, and Reece could handle it himself just fine.
He got out of the car and went to get his portable charger out of the back. He’d have a few minutes to wait while his car charged—maybe enough time to figure out who Evan Grayson was.
Chapter Five
Your jack-o’-lantern might be frowning or smiling this year—but did YOU choose which emotion to carve? Or could it have been EMPATHIC INFLUENCE? Read the story that will change how you see Halloween—forever!
—Gretel Macy, blogging forEyes on Empaths
Once Reece had the battery in the passenger footwell jumped and the Smart car idling, he opened the hatch at the back of the car again. But as he lifted the carpeting and panel over the engine, his gaze landed on something small and black affixed to the underside of the panel.
“Again?”He dislodged the Empath Initiative tracker with a hard yank and tossed it over his shoulder. “Have fun tracking that,” he muttered. For all of the clamor about empathy and privacy, empaths sure didn’t get any privacy themselves.
A couple minutes later, with the charger carefully secured back in the hatch, he sat back in the driver’s seat to let the car idle and charge the battery.
He picked up his phone. He wasn’t good at doing anything with it besides making calls. The gloves got in the way, and he never took them off in public, even on a freezing morning with only a few hardy souls trudging around the waterfront. He didn’t want to make anyone nervous, and he’d learned the hard way that nothing good came of not wearing gloves around others.
But even Reece could putEvan Grayson empathsinto a search engine.
The first few hits were all fromEyes on Empaths. Ofcoursethey were;Eyes on Empathswas, as its bold banner claimed, “The Number One Empath-Awareness Blog in the Pacific Northwest.” Reece was far more familiar with it than he wanted to be, because it was run by Gretel Macy, the daughter of Beau Macy, founder of the country’s biggest conspiracy theorist organization, American Minds Intact.Eyes on Empathsknew more than the press most of the time because it had a direct pipeline to all the lies and sensationalist trash AMI pushed, and the worst part was Gretel herselfwasn’ta liar. She was worse: a true believer with unshakable faith in her own bias.
He frowned, and then clicked the first link anyway.
