And yet Grayson continued to claim Davies was harmless.
Nichols’ lip curled. Cedrick had been cagey and paranoid, unwilling to ever show all of his cards, but he’d at least understood the need to leash the Dead Man.
Nichols switched to his texts and the messages he’d sent that morning.
Nichols: Agent Grayson continues to insist on his own agenda that prioritizes the safety of empaths, even in a situation such as the Davies case. The Dead Man has become more dangerous. Cedrick never trusted him and perhaps he had the right of it.
He eyed the response.
I will always agree that Agent Grayson is complicated. But he’s on our side.
Nichols stretched out his legs in the Maybach’s spacious backseat.
He wasn’t so sure about that.
Grayson sat at the desk in the hotel room, laptop open in front of him. The desk hadn’t been designed for someone of his height, and he kept banging his knees on the underside while he hunched over to see the screen. But Director Traynor had sent over another research paper on the emergence of empaths that morning—the authors had so far declined to be credited; that was interesting—and Grayson was reading it through a second time.
I’ll give you the short version of this new theory, Traynor’s email had said.Humanity’s scourge on the planet has finally led nature to evolve a predator for our species, ones that are perfectly hidden until their transformation into corrupted empaths.
Predator theory. The level of bonkers was almost impressive; people had started cults on less.
But if Traynor thought this theory would make the Dead Manthink twice about his job, as the parting remarks in Washington, DC, had implied, then Traynor was gonna be disappointed. Far as Grayson was concerned, this changed nothing. This theory obviously wasn’t true, and even if it had been, all anyone would’ve had to do would be leave empaths the hell alone so they didn’t turn.
Protecting non-empaths was always gonna mean protecting empaths from the people who wanted to hurt or corrupt them. That was the entire reason he was here in Burlington, visiting clubs and trying to track down a killer.
Not that he was having any luck. Four of the establishments he’d visited the night before used UV stamps for their patrons, but none marked hands with the looping lowercase “L” he’d seen on the empath’s hand. An easy solution here in Burlington might’ve helped solve the case. Now he’d have to expand the search to everywhere within a few hours’ driving distance.
Maybe farther. UV stamps could last a couple days; Marie Pelletier could have gotten it in Montreal before coming down, or six hours south in New York City. The internet hadn’t been any help at all when he’d tried looking for places that marked hands with an “L.” His search could take ages.
Just like it was taking ages to get the bloodwork he’d asked for.
He switched over to that email, which had come in twenty minutes ago. The empath’s blood tests were delayed. The fingerprint records were delayed. French Canadian privacy laws, all the emails had complained.
That excuse was sounding real damn convenient. Especially considering someone had gone and tagged Reece’s car again when Grayson had explicitly said Reece should be left alone.
He pulled up the empath-tracking website. The map of North America filled his laptop screen, small blinking dots scattered across it, all glittery blue except for a tiny concentration of four red dots on an island along BC’s North Coast. Grayson zoomed in on Seattle and there was Reece’s, right on his high-rise downtown.
Reece, who by rights should have been in purple, teetering too close to corruption and who didn’t need the stress of discovering he was being watched.
Grayson picked up his phone and called Dr. Easterby.
“You have bad news, don’t you?” she said glumly, as she answered.
“How’d you guess?”
“Because I haven’t found shit.” Computer keys were clicking in the background. “I went back into the Ottawa office, but there’s nothing about Marie Pelletier heading to Vermont and no records at all about the other Canadian empath that’s gone missing from Port Angeles. I’m sending you what I have, but there is nothing helpful here on either empath who apparently crossed the border into the US from our northern neighbor.”
Grayson glanced out the window at the snowy parking lot a story below. “We don’t actually have anything about Ms. Pelletier except her name and the body. No blood tests, no fingerprints, no proof she crossed the border. And what’s the latest in Port Angeles?”
“Someone Jamey knows from the force asked her to go down and poke around, on account of no one in the Seattle or Port Angeles police departments knowing much about empaths. Officer Stensby sent her a bunch of info this morning; Jamey said it’s going to take forever to check everywhere and got a hotel in Port A with her boyfriend for tonight. But I don’t know where the SPD is getting its intel when I can’t find anything.”
A family was coming out of the lobby, a girl of maybe seven dancing around while one of her moms pushed a toddler in a stroller. “There’s something else that’s not adding up.” Grayson stood up from the desk. “The witnesses at the police station described a man stumbling out of the park, didn’t respond to their calls, blood on his face.”
“Could be an empath thrall?” Easterby said. “Was Marie Pelletier already corrupted, and her own thrall turned on her? That seems highly unlikely to me, though; thralls are completely devoted to the empaths who made them. So—a different corrupted empath, then?”
“Maybe,” said Grayson. “But in all the time we’ve been doing this, have you ever seen an empath’s thrall attack another empath?”
Easterby hesitated. “I don’t think I have.”
