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Baxter tapped a finger against his temple. “Didn’t need to, did he? Just needed to think it.”

I laughed. When Baxter didn’t laugh along with me, I examined his words more carefully. I was still examining them when Baxter carried on speaking. “And I asked him if his wife would appreciate a visit from a stranger. If she’d like to be taken to his friend’s address with the newly converted dungeon. I asked him how much longer he thought his marriage would last once she knew what he was doing instead of working late.”

This was getting more confusing by the second. “I didn’t think you knew him.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then…?”

Baxter shot me an exasperated look. “I just told you how I knew.”

“You read his mind?”

“Yes.”

“You can read minds?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not possible.”

Baxter reached into his pocket and pulled out an ID, pushing it across the table toward me. It had his photo on—a very good photo where he looked far more put-together and clear-eyed than tonight’s version. It also bore the familiar logo of the Paranormal Problems Bureau. I’d seen their adverts; you couldn’t really avoid them. “That’s not a real place.” I corrected myself. “Well, it is a real place. I’m not disputing the building’s existence. I’ve even passed it a few times. But the whole people being able to do extraordinary things, that’s nothing but a scam, right?”

Baxter crossed his arms over his chest. “Who’s Carl?”

The question made me blink. “What?”

“Carl. You were thinking about him earlier. Someone called Carl and someone called Glenn. And Verity. But she’s your sister. I got that loud and clear.”

I looked around for the punchline to the joke, expecting Verity to pop out from behind a pillar and admit that Baxter had been some sort of pretty boy test. One I’d failed miserably. When she didn’t appear, I turned my focus back to Baxter. He stared back at me resolutely.

“What am I thinking now?” I asked. I cleared my mind of anything but the most obscure historical fact I could come up with. There was no way on earth, no matter how good Baxter might be at parlor tricks, that he’d guess the information.

Baxter’s brow furrowed in concentration. “Alcohol makes it more difficult.”

And here came the excuses. A triumphant smile spread across my face.

“1977.”

My smile withered and died. “What of it?”

“The guillotine in France.” Baxter leaned forward a few inches, his gaze locked on me. “That was the year they last executed someone. A man named—”

“Hamida Djandoubi,” I provided. “He was a Tunisian murderer convicted of the kidnapping, torture and murder of Élisabeth Bousquet, a 21-year-old woman he’d forced into prostitution. Most people think that public guillotine executions ended way before that. Like at least a century before.”

I kept talking. If I kept talking history, I didn’t have to consider the bigger picture: the knowledge he’d picked such an obscure thought out of my head and that there was no other explanation for that other than that he really could read minds. Which was… yeah. “It was the last time any Western nation carried out an execution by beheading. Fifteen people were sentenced to death after him in France, but it wasn’t carried out before capital punishment was abolished in 1981. The last public execution by guillotine was carried out in—”

“1939,” Baxter finished for me.

My fingers curled into a fist. “Eugen―”

“Weidman,” Baxter said. He narrowed his eyes in concentration. “He was a German criminal and serial killer.”

I nodded, my heart beating faster.

Baxter’s gaze had dropped to his ID. He’d pulled it back across the table and was running his thumb over the edge, his expression tight, almost pained. “Sorry,” I said. “I get carried away sometimes with historical facts. Verity constantly has a go about it.” No response. “Do you… er… like working there? I guess it must be… interesting.”

Baxter’s gaze lifted to mine. “I got suspended today.”