Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [16]
Rafe was silent, frowning slightly.
“She also told you . . . there would come a point in your life when you would have to be very, very careful.” Isabel was frowning herself now, head slightly tilted, clearly concentrating. “That there was something important you were meant to do as part of the destiny she saw for you, but it would be dangerous. Deadly dangerous. Something about . . . a storm . . . a woman with green eyes . . . a black-gloved hand reaching . . . and glass shattering.”
He drew a breath. “Vague enough.”
Isabel blinked, and her green eyes cleared. “According to what our seers have told me, visions often come that way, as a series of images. Sometimes they prove to be literal, other times it's all symbolic. The green-eyed woman could be a jealous woman or someone who resents you or someone else. The black-gloved hand a threat. The storm, violence. Like that.”
“Still vague,” he insisted. “Any of that is something a cop deals with regularly.”
“Well, we'll see. Because I have more than a hunch that what your grandmother saw was this point in your life—otherwise I probably wouldn't have picked up her prediction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Patterns are everywhere, Rafe. Events touch other events like a honeycomb, connecting to one another. And seeming coincidences usually aren't. I may pick up some trivial information unrelated to what's going on at present, and not all the stuff I get could even be called hits, but I'm focused on this investigation, this killer—and when that's the case it almost always turns out that most of what I get is relevant to what's going on around me at the time.”
“Want to use a few more qualifiers?”
She smiled at his exasperation, though it was more rueful than amused. “Sorry, but you've got to understand we're in frontier territory here. There aren't a whole lot of absolute certainties. Conventional science pretty much sneers at psychic ability, and those who were brave enough to test and experiment found themselves dealing with an unfortunate commonality among psychics.”
“Which is?”
“Very few of us perform well under laboratory conditions. Nobody really knows why, that's just the way it is.” Isabel shrugged. “Plus, the tests tended to be poorly designed because, to begin with, they didn't know what they were dealing with. How can you effectively measure and analyze something without even knowing how it works? And how do you figure out how it works when you can't make it work within a controlled situation?”
“Somebody must have known, or you wouldn't be here. Would you?”
“The SCU wouldn't exist if Bishop hadn't been highly motivated and exceptionally driven to figure out how to use his own abilities to track and capture a serial killer years ago. Once he was able to do that, he believed other psychics could be trained, that we could learn to use our abilities as investigative tools. And that those tools would give us an edge. We're proving it works. Slowly, carefully—and with setbacks now and then. We're also learning as we go.
“What we've found through sheer trial and error in the field is that our abilities function best when we're focused on something compelling—such as a murder investigation. But that doesn't mean we can flip a switch and get exactly the piece of information we need. As with everything else in life, we have to work for it. It's still trial and error.”
“So, bottom line, your best guess is that because you picked up what my grandmother told me over twenty years ago it means what she saw has something to do with what's happening in my life today. This investigation.”
“It's a good bet, based on how my abilities have worked so far. Plus, logically this'll probably be the toughest case of your career, assuming you don't move to a big city and deal often with violent killers. And though I can't speak to the specifics of your grandmother's vision—yet—I can tell you it's going to be dangerous as hell tracking and catching this killer.”
Listening to her tone as well as the words, Rafe said, “You