“ A psychic dick.”
“ Maybe I need you to talk to my…” She stopped herself from saying boss, angry she'd almost revealed the fact she was working for Paul Zanek. “My shrink.”
“ That's a good one, a psychic who goes to a shrink.”
“ Just like cops,” she said coyly. “Psychics have problems in their relationships too.” Her eyes were beautiful, lustrous, and they glistened even as they bore into him like two small harpoons. “I know how important this case is to you, that it's consumed your life, your every waking moment, not to mention your subconscious.”
She saw him tense before she felt the rising wall around him come back up like an ascending shield or cloaking device. She'd come a little too close in her assessment of Alex Sincebaugh, and this understandably made him uneasy. Any normal person would be a bit paranoid as a result, but a cop was doubly so. A cop was trained to reveal deceit, and who could blame him. She tried to counter what she'd said by adding, “All cops can be obsessive; it's the nature of the beast, isn't it?”
“ You're smooth; I'll give you that much, Dr. Desinor.”
“ Check with Miami-Dade. I was once a cop myself before I became a professional psychic. Check my record. Ask about the Hughes case. I knew the killer-a failed medical student- had cut off the little boy's ears after the boy was dead and that his kidnap ransom request would only yield a corpse. Ask about how I pinpointed the identity of the mad doctor who kidnapped the kid, not for ransom but for vengeance against his father, who'd been chiefly responsible for keeping the killer out of medical practice.”
“ All hits an ordinary cop like myself could have made, no doubt.”
“ No doubt…” She took in a deep breath of air. “All right, okay… agreed, but none of the other cops made the connections.”
“ So, now you take yourself seriously, and you figure there's more money in being a psychic consultant than in being a cop. I get it. Now, if you don't mind-”
“ Do you have some hang-up against making money?”
“ Only when it corrupts.”
“ Cops… you're all alike.”
“ What's that supposed to mean?”
Stubby came to the table and asked, “Alex, you going to buy somethin' for the lady or what?”
Sincebaugh asked her what she'd like.
“ Tea, if you have any.”
“ Tea… lady, this is a bar.”
“ Glass of chablis, then.”
Stubby nodded, jotted down the item on a notepad as if it were the U.S. Constitution he was putting down and finally stepped away.
As soon as he left, she leaned in over the table and said to Alex, “When a psychic succeeds, you guys are unwilling to admit that any psychic guidance is responsible, but the moment a psychic fails, you abuse her with ridicule and blame.”
“ Oh, I'm sorry if I've offended your delicate sensibilities, Doctor.” He laughed a bit mirthlessly at his own response.
She bit back her anger and let his sarcasm pass. “As for quitting Miami-Dade, well, that's a long story.”
“ I've got time and Stubby's going to take all day with that wine you ordered.”
“ All right. My leaving had to do with Florida's gung-ho, fundamentalist-Christian, hell-and-brimstone state's attorney, Don Q. Weaver-Weavil, we called him. Guy announced his own personal belief regarding psychic powers and denounced them as coming from the Evil One.”
“ Satan?”
“ Weaver almost single-handedly pushed through an order to prohibit all law enforcement in the state to refrain from doing the Devil's work, forbidding any future consultation with psychic detectives.”
He'd been trying not to laugh, holding it back as Stubby arrived with the wine. “Anything on the menu you'd like, miss?” Stubby asked.
“ No, nothing for now… thank you.”
The greasy little man ambled away with a pronounced limp, and she continued. “Anyway, Weaver started to invoke scripture, since he was a part-time Baptist minister.”
“ You're kidding. The state's attorney was a part-time minister?”
“ Baptist. And in his faxes to the department, he began quoting from Deuteronomy eighteen, verses ten and eleven. To paraphrase: God's followers are forbidden from using divination, or an observer of times-that's me-or an enchanter, or a witch, a charmer, a consulter with familiar spirits or a wizard or necromancer.”
“ Maybe the Reverend Weaver was right. You do have an enchanting way about you. Doctor.”
“ Are you kidding? He went on to tell us we shouldn't be dabblin' or experimentin' or doin' nothin' on the fringe of occult powers. 'Ultimately nothin' good ever came of it,' he said.”
Alex laughed, and his smile was infectious.
She smiled in return, sipping at her wine. “Weaver finished his fax with, 'I feel the success of my office in the courtrooms across this fair state of ours is the direct result of the Holy Spirit working His word through me, and I don't want any other spirits to undo that good work.' “
“ You quit being a cop on account of that double-talking bozo?”
“ Not exactly, and I'm glad you don't object to me on religious or moral grounds. You see, Weaver had heard about me. Some of the other cops called me the psychic cop; you know, good record, strangely successful, all that, not unlike you, Alex. Anyway, Weaver made it a vendetta to get rid of me.”
“ Jesus, sounds like a hard-ass.”
“ More to the point, he was a real prick,” she corrected him. “Anyway, he went so far as to contact the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.”
“ Yeah, I've heard of them. Somewhere in Ohio?”
She hesitated. It wasn't everyone who knew of the infamous committee. “Buffalo, New York, but they have centers all over, and they don't take any claims of the paranormal lightly. They're a dogmatic Scientism group that some call the New Inquisition. They made life hell for me. Still do from time to time. Imagine, a fundamentalist in the Bible Belt calls on a Yankee science group to sic them on a lone psychic-me.”
“ I guess it comes with the territory if you're going to make supernatural gestures like hanging out a shingle that tells people you can speak to the dead, Doctor.”
“ Supernatural is a theological term; refers to all those miraculous intrusions into the material world: deities, spirits, ail that. Paranormal is processes and laws observable in nature, but which have not yet been scientifically explained.”
“ There's a significant difference?” He did find her fascinating and beautiful to look at.
“ Damn straight there's a difference. The paranormal is no more scientifically unexplainable than a certain disease or area of the brain we lack knowledge of. The fact we can't explain something doesn't mean that it's invalid.”
“ So far I'm with you, Doctor, but remember you are dealing with a cop, so let's take it slow.”
“ Psychic functioning is merely an unexplained biological sense, rather than necessarily a communication with a spirit world, you see.”
“ Aha, I think. Does it go something like this? A psychic doesn't perform miracles, she just does the miraculous?”
She frowned but went on. “Critics and people like Weaver, and perhaps you, have intentionally blurred the distinction between what is truly supernatural and what is purely paranormal.”
“ I see,” he said without conviction, sipping at a light beer.
“ Anyway, I returned to school, got my degree in psychology, parapsychology, and psychic research-some call it psi.” She pronounced the word like sigh, and his thoughts lingered over her lovely intonations.
“ And I'm presently a member of the Parapsychological Association of Amer-”
“ So you've since legitimized your telepathy, your clairvoyance and your precognition through the accumulation of doctorates… I see.”
She let the remark go by, sipping again at her wine while he finished his beer.
“ Actually, I'm primarily into retro-cognition, dredging up images out of the past, although I get flashes of the
