After I traveled from the forest and back to the casita, I soothed myself with the computer, doing a search for everything I could find out about serial killers, especially when it came to psychology. But there was so much to cover. Too much.
And the distraction wasn’t keeping away the willies.
I just kept hearing Amanda Lee’s frantic voice when she’d pulled me out of the vision.
“Jensen, you come back to me! Don’t leave me!”
Her pleas had worked because, with that familiar backward sucking sensation, I was yanked out of the vision, returned to the world, Amanda Lee coming into focus second by confusing second.
“Jensen?” she asked, still panicked while reaching out to me.
I dodged her hand. She didn’t like to get cold, and that’s what she would be if she made contact with me. For some demented reason, that fact was first and foremost in my mind during the fuzzy aftermath.
As if remembering my coldness, she backed off. But her voice didn’t calm down.
“You’re so gray right now,” she said. “Just like you were when I first met you.”
As I checked out my essence—definitely no color here—she’d gone on to tell me that my pallor had been going grayer and grayer while we were sharing her vision, and she’d been afraid that I was about to return to my residual haunting phase.
So what was the lesson here? That I shouldn’t be partaking in any more of Amanda Lee’s murder visions. But the ramifications of what’d happened today in Elfin Forest extended even beyond that.
Was this what would happen to me if I scared myself to death with a hallucination during a haunting? Should I be taking Amanda Lee’s psychic vision as a warning for how much terror I could tolerate?
Those were the questions dogging me during my serial killer research, so I finally broke it off and did the next best thing.
I went outside and restlessly hopped into a travel tunnel, already leaving my killer in a “to be continued” mental file. Seriously, since the ax and the old granny mask had added about five hundred notches of creep to my story, the only thing that made me feel better about it was putting it at a distance for the rest of the day.
I told myself it’d been another girl in that vision today, a different Jensen Murphy.
It hadn’t been me. Couldn’t have been.
And I kept telling myself that as I surged to my next destination on the Jensen Justice Tour, popping into the atmosphere right across the street from the shorefront building that housed Gavin Edgett’s gaming company.
I was invisible to the tourists who trooped by on the village sidewalk, some looking for the Hard Rock Café, which I guess used to be in the building I was pseudo-leaning against. They were only background noise, though, because I had to decide, here and now, if scaring myself back into a time loop was going to be worth catching killers.
But would I even know that I’d returned to that numb state? Would I even care, just as long as people like Gavin Edgett made a confession that led to punishment?
My killer’s granny mask flashed before me again. So did the glint of that ax blade.
And it was there, on the sidewalk, facing the windows of Gavin’s building as the sun threatened to dip below the ocean, that I decided that no amount of danger was going to stop me, ever.
In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh.
As I surveyed the two-story structure, I knew what I had to do now—restrict myself to only playing full-on detective with Gavin today, using my empathy to get into his head so I could be sure of his guilt and then get to the real haunting stuff.
Since the clock hadn’t struck five yet, I’d been betting that he was still inside his office, so I rose above the heads of a family dressed in tropical shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, then floated over the traffic toward the building.
It was easy enough to get inside, because I just followed a punky-looking girl with dreadlocked hair through the door, then the lobby. I took a detour up some stairs and through a quiet white hallway. When I got to a place marked ON EDGE PRODUCTIONS, I breezed inside.
Way busier in here. I navigated what seemed like a maze of modern-art-like pale walls that slanted away from the main hall, then cubicles where workers—mostly nerdy guys—were chatting away and having a grand old time while others wore headsets and played games on their computers.
All around, there were cardboard cutouts of characters that probably starred in the games On Edge Productions made, and the same characters were framed on the walls. Some of them even looked like the ones in Wendy’s room.
I flattened myself against the ceiling, flowing along at a crawl as employees strolled below me. I swung down to glance in every open office door I passed.
No Gavin anywhere.
When I got to the only closed door, near the corner of the building—a place for a boss to have an office—I took a chance and slid underneath.
And there he was. The boss.
He wasn’t working behind his computer-cluttered desk, though. He wasn’t even staring out the window at the palm-studded street below and seemingly dreaming up all those blood and blades featured in his video games.
The big guy was fast asleep on a couch, one hand hanging off it until his blunt fingers almost brushed the floor.
Was he catching up on the sleep he’d lost last night, during the haunting?
Electricity beat through me, and I tried not to think about how it would feel to whoosh by him, trailing my hand over his short brown hair. I tried not to look at him up close, noticing the thickness of his lashes against his otherwise hard features.
But I did both anyway, flying over him, then hovering.
What’s going on in your head? I wondered, face-to-face, now that I could get away with it. What was the trigger that made you kill Elizabeth, if you really did it?
I braced myself—make it subtle, Jen—then touched his cheek, thinking what a shame it was that a killer had to be this brutally handsome.
But maybe that had been his best weapon, just like Ted Bundy.
Something like anger boiled in me—anger at him, at anyone who’d take a knife or an ax to another person—and before I knew it, I was pressing harder on his cheek than I intended.
Beyond an empathetic touch and into hallucination territory.
Without warning, I got sucked into him, turning, flailing, flying, then landing in what seemed to be a blank space.
Why did I keep ending up in these situations?
God.
Then I realized that I could still feel me in this new place. This wasn’t like the hallucination I’d shared with Wendy, when the beach had come into her room, thanks to my efforts.
I was in complete control as Jensen right now. And I was still floating in complete blackness inside Gavin’s psyche.
If this wasn’t a hallucination, then what was it? Definitely not the more superficial thought-empathy.
I heard a warped knocking sound to my right. Slow motion, drawn out, unclear.
This was more like… a dream?
Gavin’s dream?
Shit. Did it make a difference if the hauntee was asleep or awake when I went into him? Drunken Sailor Randy hadn’t gotten around to that explanation, either, but it sure looked like I’d become a part of Gavin’s psyche in a different way than how hallucinations or empathy worked.
I was deeper inside his head because he was totally unguarded in sleep.
Well, since I was here, I had to go for it, right? Actually, this was pretty awesome, when it came right down to it. How many detectives had opportunities like this to investigate their subjects?
A faint outline was gradually appearing where that knocking was coming from, and the sight resembled a door with a light on behind it.