She turned and walked back to Lassiter. Shawn watched her go, then turned to head back to the car.
Gus finished wedging himself into the backseat as Shawn walked around the car and got into the front. “So what is it you needed to tell me about?” he asked Gus.
Gus leaned up and whispered into Shawn’s ear, “It’s about Tara.”
Tara started the engine and slammed the gearshift into drive, seemingly oblivious to their conversation.
“What about her?”
Gus checked to make sure she wasn’t listening, then whispered again. “She thinks you’re beaming your thoughts into her head.”
Gus waited for Shawn to react. To draw back in horror, maybe, or to snatch the keys out of the ignition, or even to leap out of the moving car like Mannix. For some reason, he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he gave Gus a reassuring smile.
“Don’t worry about that,” Shawn said. “I know all about it.”
“You do?”
“Of course,” Shawn said. “I’m the one beaming my thoughts into her.”
Chapter Seven
Gus pressed himself against the wall, then peered out through a crack in the curtains. The red Mercedes sat at the curb, exhaust fumes puffing out of its idling engine.
“She’s still there.”
Shawn looked up from the computer monitor. “Which is a good thing.”
Gus peered out at the car, then ducked back behind the curtain at a sign of movement inside the car. “We need to be out there investigating the impound guy’s murder, but instead we’re trapped in this office by a psychotic psychic groupie. How is that a good thing?”
“It proves that I’m not really sending her psychic orders, because if she had to do whatever I wanted, she’d be gone by now,” Shawn said. “Did you know people actually write blogs about impound lots? Apparently, among connoisseurs the Santa Barbara lot is ranked one of the best, since it’s also one of the region’s largest wrecking yards.”
“I wasn’t really worried that she was under your super mind control, because you’re not really psychic,” Gus said. “I don’t suppose the blogger says anything useful, like confessing to murdering the attendant?”
“This guy spends his life writing about impound lots he dreams of wandering through. I wouldn’t count on him being useful in any way,” Shawn said. “And even if I’m not psychic, maybe Tara is. Did you ever think about that?”
“I don’t plan to ever think about this crazy woman again.” Gus peeked out the window. The car was still there. “If we can ever find a way to get rid of her, that is.”
Shawn hadn’t thought it would be difficult. He first realized what she was thinking while they were waiting in the hospital for news of Gus’ condition. She was so attentive to all Shawn’s needs, so considerate of his concern for his best friend, he assumed she was simply a kind woman who felt understandably worried about a man she’d seen leap off a cliff. But as the night wore on, Shawn began to realize she was actually too quick to respond to his desires, or what she believed were his desires. He gave her a simple test by making his stomach growl loudly-a skill he’d perfected in fifth grade. She jumped up and offered to get them food.
When she returned with BurgerZone burgers, Shawn asked her a few leading questions. She immediately admitted she was following his psychic orders.
Shawn knew he should try to get rid of her. The last thing he needed in his life was a mental patient obsessed with him. But she did seem genuinely concerned about Gus. It didn’t seem right to cast her out before the doctors declared him out of danger. And, while Shawn would never admit this to Gus, it was good to have someone around to talk to in the hospital. A way to keep him from getting too frantic over his best friend.
Not that he let his guard down around her. Well intentioned or not, she was still nuts. But Shawn spent the next hours studying her, and couldn’t find a hint of malice, cruelty, or danger in her.
He assumed that once Gus was awake, he’d simply command her to leave them alone. And while the need for a ride from the hospital postponed that plan a little, he still intended to send her away once they got back to the office.
Once they were back in her car leaving the crime scene, however, Shawn realized that the longer he let this drag out, the harder it would be to stop. He couldn’t let it wait even the short time it would take to get back to the office. He had to let her down gently. “I am not sending you orders with my brain,” Shawn said.
“I know,” Tara said cheerfully as she accelerated through a crosswalk, cutting off two women pushing strollers. “I’m waiting for my next command.”
Shawn turned back to look over the seat at Gus, who was listening helplessly. Gus shrugged, and Shawn turned back to Tara. “When exactly did I start sending you orders?” he said.
“It’s hard to say.”
“Really? If someone were pushing into my brain and telling me what to do, I think I’d have a pretty good idea who it was.”
“That’s because you’re a great psychic,” she said. “I’m just a follower. So when I started hearing your voice in my mind, I didn’t know where it was coming from. Can you imagine it? For a few weeks, I thought I was going crazy.”
“That is hard to imagine,” Shawn said.
“I can’t tell you how many false leads I tracked down. And then one day I turned on my radio to listen to Artie Pine and heard your voice coming out of it. And I knew.”
“I knew it!” Gus said. “I knew you should never have gone on Artie Pine’s show.”
“So why didn’t you ever mention it, if you’re so smart about everything?”
In fact, Gus had done more than simply tell Shawn not to go on with Artie Pine, whose late-night radio show was nationally syndicated to an enormous audience of shut-ins, paranoids, alien abductees, friends of Bigfoot, and fanatics who’d discovered that their friends and family had started to cross the street rather than hear the newest revelation that the ether had beamed into their brains. Gus had nagged. He had preached. He had urged. He did research on Pine’s topics cross-referenced by frequency, starting with flying saucers and extending all the way to the inevitable conquest of the United States by citizens of Atlantis. Finally, with no other option, he even violated the airspace in the Echo by turning on the show while he was driving Shawn back from a midnight pizza crisis.
And after all that, Shawn couldn’t understand why Gus didn’t want him to do the show. So there were a bunch of fruitcakes who listened in every night? How could that hurt them? Especially since any one of those fruitcakes might have a case that needed solving, and a couple of extra bucks to spend unraveling some deep, dark mystery.
“Anyway, once I heard your voice on the radio, the one I heard in my head just kept getting louder and louder, telling me to come to Santa Barbara and follow your every order,” Tara said, tipping the wheel slightly to the left to avoid clipping a bicyclist who’d been riding under the mistaken assumption that the thick white line separating his dedicated lane from the rest of traffic gave him some kind of permission to slow her down.
“And how did the orderlies feel about that?” Shawn said.
Tara laughed, and Shawn grabbed the wheel to keep her from steering into an oncoming UPS truck. “I always forget how funny you are in person,” she said. “When I hear you in my head, you’re much more stern.”
“Well, it takes a lot of effort to project one’s thoughts into the mind of another person,” Shawn said.
Gus reached up and slapped the back of his head. “Maybe you should stop using so much energy and use your words to tell her what to do,” Gus said. “As long as we’re all together in the car like this.”
“I suppose I could try,” Shawn said. “Tara, are you ready to receive my order?”
“I’m always ready for your orders.” She turned to him, her wide eyes boring directly into his. “Please, direct me. I am now under your complete control.”
