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Talia’s eyes became stark and unreadable. “A little over seven months ago something happened. Now I’m very,verygood at finding stuff. Especially dead bodies.”
He watched her for a moment. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She exhaled slowly. “On the plus side, my new talent has allowed me to make some money doing crime scene work for aprivate forensics firm here in Seattle. You’d be surprised how many people are interested in finding bodies.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not at all surprised. But I get the impression that you don’t like the work.”
“No, I don’t. Among other things, Roger Gossard, the forensics psychologist who hires me to consult, looks at me like I’m Wednesday Addams, or maybe her mother, Morticia. He always makes sure I conveniently disappear before the police show up.”
“Annoying.”
“Not as annoying as the fact that I don’t sleep well for a few days after I find a body.”
“Nightmares?”
“And sometimes anxiety attacks.” Talia’s dark brows rose. “How did you know?”
“Because I’ve been having a few nightmares myself for the past three months.” He drank some coffee, trying to decide how much to tell her. “Something happened to me a while back, too. Three months ago, to be precise.”
A great stillness came over Talia. She watched him with unblinking eyes. “By any chance did you suffer a bout of amnesia?”
“I did.”
This was dangerous territory, but theirs was a transactional relationship. To get information from her he had to give a little in return.
“How much time did you lose?” she demanded, suddenly very urgent.
“About a day and a half. When I woke up I was hallucinating.” He thought about his trek through the blood pool and the gardens of hell. No need to go into details. “I saw things. Impossible things. I don’t know how much was real.”
“Where were you when your head cleared?”
Time to finesse his story. “On a street in downtown Seattle.”
That was reasonably close to the full truth.
She shut her eyes briefly. When she opened them again there was grim understanding in her gaze. “Join the club. I know four other people, including myself, who went through similar experiences. Amelia and Pallas and I woke up in Lucent Springs, California. Ambrose Drake came to on a beach in San Diego. We’ve concluded we were all involuntary participants in someone’s bizarre experiments.”
“Someone who is working off that list we’re after.”
“Yes.”
He stuffed the last of a biscuit into his mouth. “Do the four of you remember where you were just before the blank spots in your memories?”
“Ambrose recalls getting into a car at the airport. It was supposed to take him to a writers’ conference. Amelia, Pallas, and I went to an abandoned hotel outside of Lucent Springs. We thought we were being hired to assist in a renovation project. We walked into the lobby, and that’s the last thing we remember clearly until early the next morning, when we were awakened by an earthquake and a fire. We barely made it out alive.”
“Was there anyone else around?”
“No. We woke up on hospital gurneys in what looked like an old lab. We didn’t have time to take notes. We barely escaped the fire.”
“That sounds a little too familiar.”
Talia frowned. “The earthquake and fire?”
“No, the lab scene.”Enough, he thought. He had already said too much. “At least I think there was a lab. I told you, I was hallucinating. I don’t have any sharp memories until I came fully awake on that street in Seattle.”
“What was your last memory before the amnesia hit?”
“I was doing some research for a paper I planned to write for a small history journal. I had an appointment with a source who claimed to have some interesting documents that related to my subject. I knocked on the door of a hotel room in Portland. It opened. And that’s the last thing I remember.”
