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“Maybe,” Nate said, nodding. “Yeah, probably. We can see which store it was bought from. The manufacturer will have records of which identifiers went to which customers. Then we can talk to the store—maybe they have detailed enough sales records that we can see who bought them.”
“Unless he paid in cash,” Laura said. “But still. This is great, right?”
“It’s a start,” Nate said, jumping to action. “I’ll call it in, see if the Chief can get a warrant for us, just in case. Then I’ll jump on the line with the manufacturer.”
“It could take a few hours,” Laura said, and then shrugged. “But it’s all we’ve got to go on right now.”
Nate nodded, putting the phone to his ear as he waited for it to connect.
Laura tuned out his conversation, rubbing her face as she looked over at their investigation board. The faces of the two women who had died stared back at her. Laura and Caroline. No one had moved fast enough to save them. If they didn’t get this information before the end of the night, there could be another face going up on the board.
Laura reached for her purse while Nate was distracted, and quickly pulled out a blister pack of painkillers. She took one straight down, without water. When you were on the move a lot and suffered with near-constant headaches, you got used to being able to take whatever pain relief you needed without waiting for convenient facilities.
She sat back in her chair then, waiting for the painkiller to take hold. Having the throbbing in her temple out of the way would certainly make investigating a bit easier. But right now, she wasn’t sure there was anywhere else they could go. The phones were a good lead. If they were really lucky, this would clear the whole thing up. They’d be able to get a
name, go arrest the guy, and it would be over.
But it was getting late, and Laura couldn’t help but feel they were racing against time. The vision she had seen—the pain had been bad, which meant it was probably happening in the next few hours at most. If they didn’t get the information before then—or if they got it when the killer had already left home to go after his next victim…
Laura didn’t want to think about the girl she had seen, or half-seen, in her vision. That girl was on the cusp of death. She probably didn’t even know it yet, but her life was in grave danger. And what was Laura doing? Kicking her heels at the local precinct, resting in a chair and waiting for her painkillers to kick in.
She picked up her cell phone, needing to do something to distract herself. Something to keep her mind away from the urgency. Sitting on her hands had never been her favorite thing to do, and right now, it amounted to torture. Besides, she needed to check whether she had any messages or updates from home. An invitation to go visit Lacey would be nice, though she didn’t hold out hope for that anymore.
She just braced herself in case one day she would receive word from Lacey’s father that there was an emergency.
Laura checked her emails online, skimming through a load of junk mails from Nigerian princes and supposed purveyors of magic pills. Down below them, though, there was at least one message she actually wanted to read: a reply from a forum she was signed up to about psychics.
She’d joined as a bit of a last-ditch effort to find someone who was like her. After years of just reading the forums and remaining a passive bystander, Laura had come to realize that she wasn’t getting anywhere at all. And she figured it was possible that anyone who was like her, might be just like her. Meaning that they, too, would hang silently around on the outside, watching and waiting.
And if they all did that, well, they would never find one another at all.
So, she’d taken the plunge. Signed up with a fake email address and a fake name, initially from a library computer so that it wouldn’t even register the account to her IP address. She was fairly certain there was no way the account would be connected back to her or the FBI. She wasn’t as good with the tech stuff as Nate was, but she’d learned a thing or two from him over their time working together. VPNs, for example.
She’d created a post a while back on a few of the various sites that existed for discussion of the psychic gift, and she’d had a few replies over time, too. She’d asked for people who genuinely had psychic gifts, and who saw snatches of the future, to contact her. She’d only found charlatans so far. The same story as any other method she tried to figure out if she was not alone in this.
This post intrigued her. It was from a user who had only just created a brand new account, presumably just to be able to reply to her thread. And it was free of the usual bragging or links to websites where she could “test” their skills for a price.
It read: “Hi AnnaSmith8932. I think we may share the same gift. I don’t talk about it a lot, but I see things happening around me all the time. To my friends and family. And after I see it, I get the chance to try to fix it or stop it from happening.
I would love to know if we are experiencing the same thing. I’m living in Virginia, so I don’t think we’re too far apart. We should meet up and compare notes.”
Laura bit her lip, reading it through again. Did they seem genuine? It was altogether possible this was one of the frighteningly lonely people who seemed to stalk these kinds of sites and try to get dates out of them. But then again, the message hadn’t seemed flirtatious. In fact, the tone of it was serious enough that it gave Laura real pause.
She shot a glance behind her. Nate was still on the phone, on hold. Laura guessed he was waiting to be patched in on a call, or else to be transferred to another department. She couldn’t hear the hold music, but she could see him bobbing his head just slightly from side to side, almost unconsciously. She smiled in spite of herself and turned back before he could feel her watching him and look up.
She took a single deep breath before typing out her reply.
Hi, VirginiaMan383. Nice username! I would like to meet up. I’m not in DC right now, but I’ll contact you when I get back.
And that was that. Laura figured she didn’t need to really meet him. If she looked into him a little more and changed her mind when she was home, she just didn’t need to contact him again. But if he was the real thing, if there was even a chance of him being the real thing, she needed to know.
Laura tried not to let it happen, but it did, every time. She felt a flare of hope in her chest, the same place where it had blossomed with regards to the case a few minutes before. What if this was real? What if she’d finally found someone just like her?
She had so many questions. For the person who had made her like this. For the universe, if it wasn’t a person. Maybe someone who was just like her would be as clueless as she was. But maybe he would have some pieces of the puzzle, and she had her own, and together they could figure it out more. Find a way to make it stop. To give her peace.
Peace was a little thin on the ground right now, and Laura would have given a lot to get some.
She got up from her chair, lifting her coffee cup and gesturing at Nate. He nodded silently in response and passed his own over. Laura walked out into the hallway, down a couple of turns to the coffee machine, which was one of the only things she could navigate to effortlessly in the building. A few hours into the job, and she knew where the coffee machine was. You had to get your priorities in order.
