Gwen smiled. “You and Sam wanted to know what you were getting involved in when you agreed to take a job. You wanted context.”
“Sounds familiar?”
“Yep. So, to recap, I’m getting the impression that over time your relationship with Spalding and his little agency became somewhat strained.”
“Right.” He started to prowl the room. “But we all managed to make it work for a while. The bottom line for Spalding was that he needed us. We were the strongest talents he could put on a case and he knew it. If he wanted results, he used us, and if he used us, we demanded context.”
“What about the other agents?”
“Burns and Elland turned out to be the canaries in the coal mine. I noticed the changes in them first.”
“What kind of changes?”
“I had worked with both of them long enough to have a sense of their paranormal strengths as well as their limitations. Their abilities were similar to your friend Sawyer’s—preternatural night vision and hearing, lightning-fast reflexes. They could disappear into the shadows.”
“What happened?” Gwen asked.
“I went into the office one day to get a briefing from Spalding on a new investigation. Spalding was on the phone when I arrived. Burns was there. He offered to pour a cup of coffee for me. When I took the mug from his hand, I sensed something in his energy that just seemed somehow wrong.”
“Define wrong,” Gwen said.
“Unstable. Unhealthy. Unwholesome. He looked bigger, too, like he’d been lifting weights. There was some kind of heat in his eyes that I’d never noticed before. I asked him if he felt okay. I wondered if he might be coming down with a heavy-duty virus.”
“How did he respond?
“It was as if I’d flipped a light switch. He went from calm and friendly to furious, like I’d insulted him. I thought he was going to take a swing at me. Then Elland came into the room and said something like,
“Were they sick?”
Judson paused again in front of the window.
“Damned if I know,” he said. “If it was an illness, it was a fever that affected their paranormal senses. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to spend any time around either Burns or Elland. We Coppersmiths are a healthy bunch, but that day in Spalding’s agency I started wondering if people like us—people of talent—might be vulnerable to fevers of the senses that normal people don’t have to worry about.”
“A reasonable concern. When did you run into Burns and Elland again?
“When they tried to kill me on that Caribbean island,” he said.
“Wow. Okay. Go on.”
“Shortly after that small scene at the agency, Spalding contacted me about an urgent, high-priority investigation. An intelligence analyst from another agency was missing. The working theory was that either he had gone rogue with some extremely sensitive information or else he’d been murdered. Spalding wanted me to find out what had happened. As usual, my job was to get answers. Sam and I don’t do apprehension or arrests.”
“You’re just the consultants.”
“Just the consultants,” he agreed quietly.
“This was that final job that Coppersmith Consulting took for the no-name agency?” Gwen said. “The one where you went off the radar for a while?”
He glanced at her, surprised. “You know about that?”
“I didn’t at the time. I was in Hawaii. But when I got back, Abby said that you had dropped out of sight for a while in the course of your last case and that something had gone wrong but that you had returned safely. Everyone said that you were taking some time off over on the coast to come up with a new business plan for Coppersmith Consulting.”
“All true,” he said.
“Except for the part about the recurring dreams.”
“Except for that part.”
“Tell me what happened on the island,” Gwen said.
“I followed the missing analyst there. The story was that he had gone on a cave-diving trip. The islands in that part of the Caribbean are riddled with underwater caves. They attract a certain breed of diver.”
“The thought of going into an aboveground cave is more than enough to give me the jitters. I can’t even imagine going into one that is filled with water. Panic-attack city.”
“It’s not for everyone or even every diver,” he said. “At any rate, it didn’t take me long to discover that the analyst had disappeared shortly after arriving on the island. The local police had conducted a brief investigation, discovered he’d gone cave diving and concluded that he had drowned attempting to swim through a flooded cave system the locals called the Monster. I was told that he was not the first reckless tourist who had vanished that way.”
“But you were suspicious?”
“I’d done some research on the missing analyst,” Judson said. “He was an experienced diver, but he had never been into cave diving. It seemed unlikely that he would have attempted to dive the Monster, even less likely that he would have gone in alone. There’s adrenaline junkie and there’s dumb adrenaline junkie. Based on what I had learned about him, the analyst was not dumb.”
“Did you find him?” Gwen asked.
“I found the place where he had been murdered. It was inside a cave at the entrance to the Monster. But his body was gone. I was pretty sure that whoever had killed him had taken the corpse down into the flooded part of the cave and wedged it there so that if it was ever discovered, the death would look like an accident.”
“You decided to search for the body, didn’t you?”
“That was the plan.” Judson resumed his prowling. “But I never got the chance to put together a search- and-rescue operation because Burns and Elland arrived. They had been tailing me. They intended to get rid of me the same way they did the analyst. I was going to disappear into the Monster. Just another adrenaline junkie diver who took one too many chances.”
“How did you survive?”
“The old-fashioned way. I had a gun. I used it.”
“Yes, I suppose that approach still works.” Gwen exhaled slowly. “You shot them both?”
“Yes, but here’s the thing, Gwen, I didn’t kill them.” Judson stopped. “I got the information I wanted out of them and then I called the local cops. I waited until the emergency responders had arrived on the scene and explained that Burns and Elland had murdered the man who had disappeared into the sea caves. I flashed the fancy agency ID Spalding had given me, and the locals were satisfied. I swear, the last time I saw Burns and Elland, they were still alive and on the way to the hospital. Neither of them had life-threatening injuries.”
Gwen frowned. “They didn’t make it?”
“No. I wasn’t around to witness what happened, but I found out later that both men went crazy after about a day and a half in the hospital. They both died within forty-eight hours. Suicide. Burns hung himself. Elland slashed his own wrists. Big medical mystery as far as the local authorities were concerned.”
“Hmm. You have no idea what happened?”
“The nurses said the two men kept screaming for their special meds. They said their boss had the drugs they needed. They gave the hospital staff a number to call, but no one ever answered.”
“Because by then their boss, Spalding, was dead?” Gwen said gently.
“Yes. Before they were taken away in an ambulance, Burns told me that the plan was to dump my body in the same underwater cave that they had used to conceal the analyst. They knew they had to make my death look very, very good.”
“They were obviously aware that your father and your brother would tear Spalding’s agency and the whole island apart looking for you if they had any suspicions about how you had died.”
“Don’t forget Emma and my mother,” he said dryly. “They’ve both got claws, trust me.”
“I believe you,” Gwen said.
