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“Or?”
“Or whoever killed him at the asylum came here to search for whatever it was Geddings planned to sell to me.”
“If you’re right it would mean that the murderer didn’t find the information on Geddings’s body,” Pallas pointed out.
Ambrose guided her out of the kitchen and along a shadowed hall. “The beauty of a commodity like information, as opposed to, say, drugs, is that one can make multiple copies and, therefore, multiple deals.”
“So maybe the killer came to see if there were any more copies?”
“Right.”
They stopped in the doorway of the laundry room. Pallas saw a washer and dryer that were decades out of date. The doors of the appliances had been left open. Ambrose pulled up the flashlight app on his phone.
“What do you sense when you look at the energy I leave behind?” he asked, splashing the light around the interiors of the appliances.
The question caught her by surprise. “If I were to draw your energy I think I would come up with a landscape of fire and ice.”
He straightened from a search of the dryer. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I would interpret it as a mix of power and control and determination. You are using all of those elements to fight off exhaustion.”
“Think that might translate as mental instability?” he suggested, his voice far too neutral.
“What?” Startled, she turned to stare at him. “No. What makes you ask that?”
“Maybe that for most of my life I’ve believed I can see human energy fields and eight months ago I experienced a bout of amnesia, after which I concluded that I’m even better at detecting auras. I’ve got a lot of possibly faulty memories of what happened to me in a sleep clinic a while back and, oh, yeah, my family felt the need to stage an intervention to force me to get treatment for nightmares and sleepwalking.”
She raised her brows. “Don’t forget your growing paranoia.”
“You’re not taking this seriously, are you?”
“Wrong.” She stopped smiling. “I’m taking you and your new talent very seriously. I take my friends and their talents seriously, too. Actually, I take everything seriously these days—way too seriously. Probably why I haven’t had a serious relationship in a very long time. And thanks to my extremely serious approach to life, I now understand why the few serious relationships I have had in the past were doomed from the start.”
“Because?”
“Because I’m weird.” She widened her hands. “So are you. Want to know what my intuition tells me about you? It tells me that I would not want to get between you and something you wanted very badly. But it also tells me that if I got left behind on a battlefield you’re the one who would come back to get me. That’s it. That’s what my talent tells me about you, and at the moment that is more than enough to make you a trusted partner.”
He studied her as if he was trying to figure out where to file her.
“Huh,” he said.
“What does that mean?” she asked, wary now.
“The first time I got a good look at your aura I came to the same conclusions about you. You’re weird but in a really interesting way. I wouldn’t want to get between you and whatever you wanted very badly, and you wouldn’t leave a friend or a partner behind.”
“Glad that’s settled,” she said.
They went back out into the hall.
“So,partner, picking up any other useful information?” he asked.
She thought about reminding him yet again that she was not a search dog, but he had a point. In this situation she was the search dog.
She concentrated on the energy infused into the floor. “I sense a lot of aggression, but not the same kind of panic and rage that I picked up out at the asylum. I suppose the killer might have calmed down before coming out here, but I think that a different person or persons went through this place.”
“Did you have to learn how to shut a window or close a door?” he asked.
“Are you talking about my other vision?”
