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“For Christ’s sake, Frost, it’s nearly midnight.” Dean paused, then sighed. “Yeah, I’m not busy. What do you need?”
“I’m looking into someone,” Laura said, trying to keep it sounding as casual as possible. Maybe she would be able to slide the bombshell of the person in question’s identity under the radar. “I wanted to know if there’s any dirt on him.”
“Dirt?” Dean sighed. “Okay. What scumbag are we dealing with this time?”
“His name’s John Fallow,” she said, inwardly bracing. “I’m a little concerned about his behavior behind closed doors.”
“John Fal—wait. Governor John Fallow?” Dean repeated, almost blasting her ear off. “You must be kidding. Frost, this is so far above my pay grade!”
“Please?” Laura asked. “Look, the safety of a little girl might be at stake, okay? And, you know—I have my sources, but I need something that will stand up in a court of law.”
“I know, I know,” Dean replied, sighing heavily down the line again. “You should tell your sources to bring you real, legal evidence instead of having to come to me for it all the time.”
“I do tell them,” Laura lied. “It’s just not always possible.” It was a convenient cover story. Dean believed she had some kind of underground network of informants. He never talked to Nate, and she never told Nate who her contact in the tech department was either, and everything worked smoothly. She was able to follow up on her visions from time to time without alerting anyone that she knew things she shouldn’t. This one, she knew, was a big risk. There was no source that would have been able to tell her what she’d seen; the family was alone in her vision. But she had to take the risk. Amy needed her.
“All right, leave it with me,” Dean agreed. Even though he always sounded grudging, like he was doing her a huge favor—which he was, considering he was putting himself on the line for her—he always came through in the end. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something.”
“Thank you,” Laura said. “I owe
you a coffee at lunch tomorrow.”
“You owe me a coffee and a muffin,” Dean corrected, before ending the call.
Laura closed her eyes for a moment, leaning her head back on the sofa cushions. She’d set the wheels in motion for Amy. She’d tried, and failed, to contact Marcus, and she knew what she had to do now. Still, she wasn’t calm enough for sleep. She felt everything still buzzing around in her head, all the fears and worries and the desperate impulse that told her she needed to do something. Maybe going back to her usual search would help to quiet her brain for a while.
The search was something that Laura had been undertaking for a long time now. It had come hand in hand with AA; realizing that she needed to fix herself, needed to get herself back on the straight and narrow. In order to do that, she first had to understand what was going on in her head. What the reasons were behind her slip-ups. Or so they said, at the meetings.
Lauren knew what was behind her slipping up. Every single relapse could be traced back to a particular vision, or to the repercussions of one of her previous slip-ups that was caused by a vision. She knew what it was that she had to deal with.
What she didn’t know, what she had never known, was where the visions came from. Why they happened to her and not to anyone else. How she could trigger them, how she could make them more effective. She had learned a few tricks over time—like isolating herself from others, or making sure she was well rested and fed, and putting herself into physical contact with people who could be at the center of them. She had also learned, mostly through trial and error, that the visions only told her about futures that she was personally involved in. She knew, too, that she could affect their outcome—that she could stop the futures she saw from happening.
The only way that she could think of to get to the bottom of all of this was to find someone else who had also been through the same thing. A support group. A mentor. Someone who could give her the answers she so badly needed.
That was why she spent most of her spare time searching online and looking into other people who claimed to be psychic. People who worked as clairvoyants, or claimed to have a big lead that could help a police investigation. Almost all of the time, what she found was someone who was desperate for fame and money, not someone with a real gift like she had. Or curse, as she preferred to think of it.
Every now and then, there was someone who didn’t quite fit the pattern. They would be content with working a small-town job, doing psychic readings for a few customers a week. Making hardly any money from it. But even in those cases, Laura had invariably found that the reason behind their perceived reticence was that they just wanted to help a few people. Or they just wanted a little pocket money. Whatever it was, it was never the real thing. It was just cold reading, a whole bunch of fakes deceiving people over and over again.
Laura stared hopelessly at the forum she had found, featuring a thread where people discussed what they thought might have been psychic dreams. It wasn’t even a real lead, as far as leads went. Even if she thought any of these people really were psychic like her, she would have to spend hours, if not days, tracking down IP addresses and trying to figure out who they really were. There were ways to figure it all out, but she wasn’t in the tech department of the FBI. This kind of thing took her a long time.
And for what? She wasn’t going to get anywhere with this. She sighed with frustration, slamming the lid of her laptop closed. A glass of wine looked really good right about now.
And yet. With a growl of frustration, Laura wrenched the lid open again, looking at the results that still had not cleared away from her screen. She had to do this. Even if she knew it was hopeless, she had to keep digging. Keep looking. For the sake of her daughter, particularly tonight but also for the long run, she had to keep searching.
The only other option was to lose herself completely at the bottom of the glass, and Laura didn’t want to let that happen again anytime soon. She searched Governor Fallow’s name instead, looking for the address for the governor’s mansion. As soon as she got the chance, even if Dean didn’t find anything, she would go to the governor’s house and ring the bell, try to check up on Amy in person. Tomorrow, if she could sneak out of the office early.
She wasn’t going to let Amy fall by the wayside. She wasn’t going to let her down, the way she had with Lacey.
Laura was going to stop this—and no one was getting in her way, not even the governor of the state.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carrie put her key to the door and slipped, fumbling it. She muttered a quick curse under her breath as she fought her tired fingers to grasp the key again and make it into the lock, almost falling through the door as it opened.
She sighed, pulling off her coat and dumping it on the peg by the entrance as she kicked off her shoes. She had the vague feeling she should put them away, but then again, it could wait until the morning. She just wanted to eat something and get into bed. Anything else could wait, and she didn’t particularly care what it was. After the shift she’d had, she couldn’t imagine anything less than fire or flood that could convince her to put her shoes back on or care about a little mess.
Carrie charged through to the kitchenette and grabbed something down from one of the cupboards. As she did so, she hit her elbow on the side of the fridge, like she had done a million times before.
“Goddamn Albany rent!” she cursed, because that was the cause of the bruised elbow. If she had been able to afford a nicer place, at a lower rent, she wouldn’t have been stuck in this tiny little place with its too-close cupboards and its utter lack of space.
