are clues your forensic team can piece together as well. But I tell you, the clarity of her memory is improving. I believe we’ve reached the point where I can put her under and guide her memories toward a particular fact.”
“You can do that? You can pick a specific memory out of her head?” Grove asked.
“It’s a new technique I’ve been working on for several months with some success.” Jameson blew out a long sigh, as though defending his expertise was a tedious subject. “I believe questioning Liza while she’s in a suggestive state could tap into those memories she’s either blocked or forgotten.”
“You want to hypnotize her here.” Detective Grove still wasn’t up to speed on the idea of hypnotherapy. Or else, that doubt in his tone meant he understood just fine what Dr. Jameson was proposing—he just didn’t think it was a worthwhile idea.
Liza squirmed in her chair. Surrendering her thoughts and memories to a professional therapist was risky enough. To do it in front of an audience felt a whole lot like standing up on a firing range and letting the entire world take a potshot at her.
But she had to try. This was about more than clearing her head of the nightmares that plagued what little sleep she did get and left her exhausted. She owed something to John Kincaid, the dead man she’d found in the warehouse. Six years ago, witnesses had come forward to help convict the thieves who’d murdered her family in a home invasion. Liza had been away at college, working on her undergraduate degree, the night her parents and pet were murdered. She hadn’t been there to fight to protect her family. Or to see anything useful she could testify to at their killers’ trial.
But she could testify for John Kincaid. If she could remember.
Helping another victim find justice was the only way she could help her late parents.
Twisting her gloves in her hands, Liza distracted herself from the uneasy task that lay ahead of her by counting the dog hairs clinging to the sleeves of her blue fleece jacket.
“The setting isn’t ideal.” Dr. Jameson gestured around the busy precinct office with an artistic swirl of his fingers. “But I’m skilled enough to perform my work anywhere I’m needed. A little privacy would be nice, though.”
Detective Grove pushed his chair back and stood. “A little privacy sounds good. We can use one of the interview rooms.”
Divided up into a maze of desks and cubicle walls, the detectives’ division of the Fourth Precinct building was buzzing with indecipherable conversations among uniformed and plain-clothes investigators and the technicians and support staff who worked with them. Liza felt a bit like a rat in a maze herself as she got up and followed Dr. Jameson’s fatherly figure and Grove—the bulldog-faced detective who’d interviewed her before in conjunction with the Kincaid murder case.
Liza tucked her gloves into her pockets as they zigzagged between desks. While Dr. Jameson discussed their late morning session with the detective, she couldn’t help but compare the two men. Both were eager to tap into the secrets locked inside her brain. But while Detective Grove wasn’t concerned with how her memories got tangled up, her therapist seemed to think he could use the painful experience of her parents’ deaths to tap into her hazy memory of John Kincaid’s murder, and draw out the information that he believed was hiding in a well-protected corner of her mind.
It felt odd to be discussed as though she were a walking, talking clinical experiment instead of a human being with ears and feelings.
About as odd as it felt to be watched by the tall, tawny-haired hotshot standing beside a black-haired man with glasses at the farthest desk.
Liza’s first instinct was to politely look away. The two men were obviously sharing a conversation, and the parade through the desks had probably just caught his attention for a moment. But the moment passed and she could feel him still watching her. Liza turned his way again, then nearly tripped over her own feet as she stuttered to a halt. “Impossible,” she gasped.
Remember. An imaginary hand from her nightmare grabbed hers and she flinched.
She was being watched by a ghost.
Closing her eyes and shaking the imagined sensation from her fingers, she purged the foolish notion from her head. Her brain was tired and playing tricks on her. Ghosts, shmosts. They weren’t real. Taking a deep breath, her streak of self-preservation that had seen her through the most difficult times of her life kicked in, giving her the impetus to mask her shock before opening her eyes and moving on.
Man. Ghost.
Reality. Memory.
She snuck another peek as the man lowered his head to resume his conversation. See? You twit. Get a grip.
The similarities were there, yes. But that honeybrown hair wasn’t streaked with gray.
The square jaw was whole. Not bruised and broken.
The eyes were blue as cobalt. Piercing. Very much alive.
Liza circled behind a carpeted cubicle wall. No way could Captain Hotshot be the same man she’d found murdered on that warehouse floor. She was going nuts, plain and simple. Agreeing to interrogation under hypnosis was a very bad idea. She should go home. Go back to work. Go for a run with her dogs. Anything normal. Anything physical. Anything that would stop the fear and confusion, and get her life back to its fast-paced, sleep-deprived, business-as-usual state.
But when she cleared the wall, Liza was forced to pause again as a pair of uniformed officers escorted a young man wearing baggy pants to a desk and handcuffed him to a chair. Determined to convince her brain that she’d only imagined Kincaid’s ghost across the room, Liza used those few camouflaged seconds to study the man who’d spooked her.
The badge hanging from a chain around his neck marked him as a police officer. Yet, unlike the detectives wearing suits and ties or the patrol officers wearing their standard blue uniforms, this man was dressed in black from neck to toe. Black turtleneck. Black gun and holster at his hip. Black pants tucked into what looked like black army boots. And a black flak vest that bore two rows of white letters—KCPD and S.W.A.T.
Mask the spiky crop of hair with a knit cap and add stripes of eye black beneath his eyes, and she’d think he was ready to launch some kind of covert attack.
Against her, judging by the way his gaze darted back to her the instant her path cleared and she took a step.
That nosy son of a… Red-haired temper flamed through her veins, and Liza tilted her chin and hurried after Jameson and Grove.
So Captain Hotshot was a tough guy. One of those S.W.A.T. cops who defused bombs and calmed riots and shot rifles at bad guys from a mile away. He probably hunted for fun—had trophies of innocent deer and hapless pheasants mounted on his walls at home.
Tough guys didn’t scare her.
The detective with glasses standing beside him kept talking, but the man in black continued to watch her. Suspecting her own scrutiny might have intensified his, Liza resolutely focused her gaze on the back of Jameson’s silvery head and wished the path from Grove’s desk to the interview room was straighter and shorter.
She felt the tough guy turn his conversation back to the man beside him, but the instant she snuck a glance over to make sure his fascination with her had waned, he blinked. And when those clear
