“You’re the one who sent me to help him in the first place!” Reece snapped.
“No.”
“Yes, you—”
“I told you not to touch the witness. I told you to run.”
Reece threw up his free hand. “Then why did you say Jamey needed—”
“I said she was investigating a homicide and had no leads, because I knew you’d go straight to her.”
Goose bumps broke out on Reece’s skin. “Youliedto me.”
“Nothing I said was untrue.”
“Dead men tell no tales? Just bald-faced lies?”
“It wasn’t a lie.” A car door opened in Grayson’s background. “Your sister was my best bet. I assumed you’d tell her my name and she’d immediately come up with a workable plan to get you out of town. And she tried, but you didn’t listen.”
“It was a misunderstanding.”Lie. Reece winced.
“That right?” Grayson’s voice was so unsettlingly emotionless. “Mr. Davies, there’s a dead senator in your town. I’ve got a job to do, and I can’t have an empath running around, trying to help people and getting into trouble or worse. If you’re not gonna stay where your sister wants you to, then I can take you somewhere you can’tmisunderstandyour way out.”
Reece’s fingers tightened on the guardrail. “You’re not as scary as you think you are,” he said, the sour notes of the lie loud in the thin morning air.
“This isn’t me trying to scare you, sugar. When that happens, you’ll know.” The car door slammed shut. “I believe Detective St. James is waiting for you at police headquarters. If I were you, I wouldn’t go.”
“You can’t possibly think I’m going to listen toyou.”
“You already showed me you won’t,” said Grayson. “So I already know I’ll be sayingI told you so.”
The line went dead. Reece glared at the phone, only to see it shaking in his trembling hand. He set his jaw and looked at the ocean again, tempted to prove Grayson wrong and pitch the phone into the waves like a baseball.
But the jogger’s frightened eyes instantly sprang back to mind, so he shoved it in his pocket with a curse instead.
Unreadable, other empaths said, when rumors were whispered about the Dead Man.Immovable.
Merciless.
Well, he hadn’t said he was coming because of Reece and more importantly, he wasn’t here yet. Reece spun on his heel and crossed back to his still-running car, calculating a driving route that would take exactly the thirty minutes he needed to finish safely charging his battery and end up at police headquarters.
“Agent Nolan?” The rapping came again on the window of the Explorer. “Sir?”
Special Agent Damian Nolan darkened the screen of his tablet before lowering the window to reveal an officer with a panicked expression. “What?”
“Did you see the truck that just arrived on scene?”
“I’m not traffic control, I’mbusy,” said Nolan. “Get rid of them.”
“Sir, it’s the driver. We were told—”
He cut her off. “Don’t tell me about the problem, tell me when it’s solved.”
The officer pressed her lips flat, then nodded once and disappeared.
Nolan looked back to the FBI’s empath database and the file on Reece Davies, then tossed the tablet to the passenger seat. His concentration had been broken, but it didn’t matter: the file was as useless as the empath himself. Just a sob story of an absent father, a dead mother, and a broke twentysomething who’d never finished college and slept on his sister’s couch. Didn’t even use his empathy enough to make the file interesting, only sporadic consulting for the SPD on nonviolent crime.
Definitely no record of making catatonic men scream.
