Page 29 of Possessed

Lauren looked horrified. “There are dead bodies up here?”

“Yep. Humans, animals and probably a bunch of bugs, too.”

She shuddered. “No wonder I never went to class.”

“Stay close,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that. I’m not going anywhere.” She wrapped her arm through his.

Raef moved forward with Lauren practically stuck to his side, trying not to think about how good she felt and how badly he wanted to keep her safe.

The classrooms were clearly labeled and in numerical order, with odd numbers to the left and even on their right. Room 303 was only a few yards from the stairwell exit.

“Ready?” he asked her.

She unwrapped her arm from around his and lifted her chin. “Ready.”

Speaking quietly, he said, “This isn’t going to take long. Remember, let him see you, but then I’ll move between the two of you. Stay behind me.”

“And close to the door,” she whispered back. “I remember. Let’s just get this over with.”

He nodded tightly, and pulled the door open by the cold, metallic handle. Only half of the fluorescent bulbs in the classroom were on and very little light managed its way through the high, rectangular windows. Black lab tables were clustered in pods. The smell was bad, but the tables and the aluminum lab chairs—which looked ironically like bar stools—were spotless. The wall closest to them was decorated with large feline physiology posters that were almost as gruesome as the stuff that was floating in huge jars on the shelves that lined two of the other walls. The place was so dim and creepy that at first Raef didn’t think anyone was in the room. Then, from the head of the classroom, a man cleared his throat and said, “May I be of some assistance to you?”

“Dr. Braggs?” Raef asked in his best nice-guy voice.

The professor pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the back of his hand, which was covered in a latex glove.

“Yes, I am Dr. Braggs. How may I help you?”

“Well, if ya have a sec I’d like to ask you ’bout a tree,” Raef said, adding a healthy dose of Okie and country-ing up his words.

Braggs blew out a little sigh. “I’m a bit busy setting up tomorrow’s lab. But I can talk while I work.”

“Hey, great! That’d be great,” Raef said, and started moving toward the front of the room, staying ahead of Lauren.

“All right, then. Ask away.” Braggs put his glasses back on and bent over the large metal tray that was mounded with something Raef couldn’t quite make out. He studied Braggs as he approached him.

Had Raef not been so accustomed to the many faces of evil, he would have automatically discounted Braggs. The guy was absolutely average. His height was average—his balding was average—even the slight paunch he was working on was completely average. He appeared as harmless as Raef’s dorky tenth-grade math teacher.

But Raef had spent ten years with the OSI in the air force, and he’d been involved in the apprehension of men who looked like Mr. Rogers, even after they’d strapped explosives to women and babies and intimidated them into going into restaurants to blow themselves up, along with innocent civilians, just to make a pseudo-religious point. It’d been tough to learn to separate the seen from the unseen, but he’d damn well figured it out—lives had depended on him. He’d been good at his OSI job then, and that military experience had helped him become one of the best psychic murder investigators in the U.S. of A.

So, Raef looked past what his eyes could see, reached out and tested the invisible energy around him. Nothing. He felt nothing. Not even the slight hum of irritation Braggs should have been feeling at being interrupted.

“I’m Buddy Chapman,” Raef began when they were within handshaking distance of Braggs, “and this is my wife—”

But Raef didn’t get a chance to finish his introduction. Lauren, who had been following just a little behind him, had stopped like she’d run into a glass wall. Her eyes were wide, staring at the tray Braggs was working on, and her voice was unusually loud. “You’re cutting up a cat!”

Braggs looked up, pulled off his glasses again, his average brown eyes blinking like he was having trouble focusing on Lauren. “Young woman, I am dissecting the internal organs of a feline specimen for tomorrow’s nursing students to identify in their anatomy and physiology midterm,” he said patronizingly. “I realize this might appear unsavory to an outsider, but I hope you will try to realize that this creature died for the greater good of science.” He hesitated and blinked again. Then, as if his vision had finally cleared, his eyes widened. He smiled at Lauren. “You look familiar. Are you a graduate of TU?”

It was when Braggs smiled that the bedlam of emotions hit Raef. Braggs’s expression never changed—never wavered from the benign dismissiveness and slight curiosity he was showing Lauren—but inside therealBraggs was a seething cesspool of hatred and rage, lust and fear, all mixed with the most disturbing wash of greed and violence Raef had ever felt.

“Graduate of TU? My wife?” Even though Raef was being battered by emotions, Raef forced himself to keep his tone normal, his voice jovial and as mildly patronizing as Braggs’s charade. “No, sir. My little woman here married me right outta high school. She went straight to the college of havin’ babies, if you know what I mean.” As Raef spoke he kept his eyes on Braggs, moving one more step forward, and positioning himself directly in front of the professor, who was on the opposite side of the dissection table, and between him and Lauren. “Hey, I gotta apologize. We shouldn’t have barged in here on ya. I just got a question about the big elm in my front yard. It’s lookin’ sickly and I hear you’re a damn good tree doctor.”

“Well, thank you,” Braggs said, sounding calm and cordial, even though Raef could feel that he roiled with hatred and a deep, desperate need for violence. “I truly do not mind that you and your lovely wife have sought me out.”

“Yeah, but you got your work to do, and the wife, she’s a little squeamish.” Raef tried to chuckle, but only managed to clear his throat. “How ’bout you give me your card and I call and set up an appointment proper?”

“Whatever you wish, Mr. Chapman. I have cards here in my desk, and I do see that your wife is looking rather faint.”