“I’m FBI Special Agent Nick Stavros,” he said. “Some of you already know me.” With that, he looked straight at Teddy, who folded her arms and sank deeper into her seat. “This might be your first experience working with a member of the FBI. But this is not my first experience working with psychics. I think it might be useful to explain how I ended up at Whitfield.”
He opened his laptop and hit a key. An image appeared on the whiteboard at the front of the room. “This is Nogales, Arizona,” Nick said. “A border town two and a half hours south of Phoenix.” It was a small town in the desert, surrounded by scrubby foothills, miles of open road, and not much else.
Another click, another image. A young woman’s body, white and bloodless. Teddy looked away from the image. So did the other recruits around her.
“Our first victim was found by two teenage boys messing around in the desert on ATVs. No ID or identifying marks. Her description—approximately sixteen to twenty years old, five feet four inches, one hundred twenty pounds, Hispanic—matched no specific missing persons report.” Nick faced the room. “Normally, this would have been a local matter. But the woman was found on federal land, so I was sent down to lead the investigation.”
Another click. A close-up of the victim’s face. “The sheriff’s office released this photo to various media sites, hoping for a hit. Nothing. Then this woman came forward.”
The next image was a still shot taken from what appeared to be video of a police interrogation room: Nick stood on one side of a long table, accompanied by two seated uniformed police officers. On the other side of the table was a Korean woman wrapped in a shawl, her body bent with age.
“Hye Kim,” Nick said. “She didn’t speak English, so we brought in a translator. She claimed to be a psychic. She didn’t know the victim’s name, but she said the victim and many others had visited her dreams.” He lifted a piece of paper that appeared to be a copy of an official police report and read: “ ‘The women, and they are many, are watched over by the Virgin and guarded by dogs.’ ”
Teddy returned to the still shot of the interrogation room. The officers looked bored, but everything about Nick’s stance in the photo radiated impatience. His arms were crossed, his body tense, his jaw clenched.
“I wrote off Ms. Kim. Total waste of time,” Nick said. He dropped the report on the desk. “It’s normal to have people come into the station who are, let’s say, a few french fries short of a Happy Meal. Sometimes people will see something on TV or read something in the paper and get it into their minds that they know something about the case. We assumed that Ms. Kim was one of those people.”
“What happened?” Jillian asked.
“Nothing initially,” Nick said. “And then two more young unidentified women were found in the desert, not far from where the first victim was discovered.”
“A serial killer?” Jeremy asked.
“We didn’t know. The only thing we were certain of is that we had something bigger on our hands. I went back to Phoenix and had a beer with another agent, one who was older, more experienced, and a hell of a lot smarter than I am. You know what he told me?”
“Listen to Hye Kim,” Pyro said.
Nick turned to Pyro. “Exactly. A guy I respected told me to listen to a psychic. I couldn’t believe it. No offense to anyone here, but I thought psychics were con artists.” He shook his head. “But I had nothing else to go on, so I gave Ms. Kim’s statement another look.” He clicked to the next slide, projecting Ms. Kim’s words on the screen: The women, and they are many, are watched over by the Virgin and guarded by dogs.
“The dogs,” Jillian said, leaning forward as though straining to hear the animals herself.
“Not everyone speaks dog, Jillian,” Ben Tucker said.
The class laughed and Jillian blushed. “You could start looking for areas where there were large concentrations of dogs,” she suggested.
“Churches,” Ben said. “I’d start there.”
“Yes,” Nick said. “That’s what I thought, too. I started checking out local churches. Ran background checks on priests and preachers and church employees. Nothing.” His gaze moved to Jillian. “And then I thought about the dogs. So I went to training facilities, kennels, veterinary offices, and that’s where I got lucky.”
He hit the button again, showing an image of a modern facility with a sign out front: the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter. He switched to another shot of the shelter, a different angle from a greater distance. Teddy spotted a small church with a statue of the Virgin Mary, arms outstretched, gracing the entrance.
“Remember, in casework, we never dismiss coincidences.” Nick pointed to a dilapidated adobe structure set about a half mile off the highway, between the church and the animal shelter. “Our perpetrator was running undocumented workers, mostly women, into the country. Some didn’t survive the journey.” He faced the room. “Everything was right there if I’d just bothered to look at it. Two more people died because I refused to take Ms. Kim seriously at first. That will always be on me.”
Silence fell over the room. Nick cleared his throat and moved on. “I’d like to say that ever since that moment, every psychic I met on an investigation has been an asset. But that would be a lie. Unfortunately, the majority of psychics who present themselves to the FBI really are con artists.”
Until that moment, Teddy had been avoiding Nick’s eyes. Now she looked straight at him. “If you feel that way,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
He studied her. “When Clint Corbett told me about a program to vet psychics—to weed out the charlatans—I wanted to be part of it. Because my experience has taught me that working
