Was the dream a depiction of the past or the future? If the past, it would have to be fairly recent. They’d just spoken to the man a couple of days ago. She and Nate had been at the station house until after midnight. No call had come in.
She looked at the alarm clock on her bedside table. Would Nate have contacted her if there had been another report? She’d like to think he would. Liked to think that their relationship had eased into something resembling mutual respect, at least, in the last day or so.
Her mind scuttled away from the memory of his enthusiastic celebratory hug. She wasn’t ready to interpret that.
The scene might be a psychic interface with the future. A snippet of what was to come. There was no doubt in her mind regarding the identity of the victim. There had been no identifying the voice behind those garbled muffled screams. No visual, certainly, of the face being eaten by flames.
But there had been an up close look at one of the items the watcher had tossed. The police identification had been easily read. Illogical, because of the darkness. But logic had no place in the dreams. Their very existence defied it.
The ID had shown a familiar face. Borne a familiar name.
Either Mark Randolph had fallen prey to the man the media had dubbed Cop Killer. Or he was going to.
She looked at the cell phone on the table consideringly. Randolph’s contact information would be in her copy of the case file. She could call him now, pretend an urgent need for information . . . on Juicy, maybe.
But she’d have to explain that call to Nate, if the detective mentioned it to him later. Not difficult to do under other circumstances. She was used to having to manufacture cover stories for her “instincts” about events she shouldn’t know about. But it’d be easier to cover a phone call made to the detective on the way to work than one in the middle of the night.
And the depressing truth was, if the vision was from the recent past, Mark Randolph was already dead.
A familiar wave of frustration surged through her. Rarely did the dreams provide her with enough detail to prevent something from happening. Their only positive benefit was when they gave her information that helped track down an offender and prevent him from hurting anyone else.
It was the only thing that made them bearable. And for the past several months, she’d been questioning their effectiveness in even that area.
To distract herself from the self-doubt that circled, she looked for her sketchpad. Found it missing from the table. Her lips tightened. No doubt Hannah had moved it, or removed it from the room completely. Years ago she’d often whisked away Risa’s supplies when she found drawings of the hideous events from her visions. She’d never made a secret of the fact that she found the images disturbing.
Risa had always wondered if she found her daughter equally so.
Sliding open the drawer, she stuck her hand inside to see if perhaps her mother had placed it there, out of the way. Instead of the drawing pad, her searching fingers found the familiar shape of her weapon.
She snatched her hand back as if it had been burned. It had taken her over an hour last night to screw up the courage to touch the weapon. And only the worry of Hannah getting up the next day and finding it on the counter could have convinced her to pick it up. Take it to her room.
The safest place for it, of course, had been the trunk of the rental. But there was no way she could have forced herself to carry it that far. She’d practically sprinted to her bedroom to deposit it into the drawer. It’d taken far longer to screw up her courage to hold it long enough to unload it.
Which was a ridiculous waste of courage, any way you looked at it.
Snapping on the lamp, she pulled the drawer out farther. Stared at the gun that had once felt so natural she felt naked without its weight.
It was an inanimate object. Surely not deserving of the weight of blame she cast on it. She had failed Ryder Kremer. She’d made a serious error in judgment. Relied too heavily on details of the visions that had seemed so very clear.
Releasing a long shuddering breath, she reached her hand out. Forced herself to rest it on the