“While you do that, I’m going to go in and look around. See if I can find his head.”
She nodded, then walked away from the room to call Inspector Bellmonte. He was glad for the reprieve, as it would afford him the privacy to do what he needed to do.
He went into the room and scanned the walls for a light switch. He found only five oil lamps along the wall. Without matches, he’d have to make do with the flashlight.
Mindful of where he was stepping, Cale neared the impaled body. As if an insect on display, five wooden stakes pinned the victim to the wall, one each in his arms and legs and one through his heart.
The assailant or assailants had to have been very strong to be able to hold a vampire still enough to impale him with stakes into wallboard. That took a lot of power and finesse. Cale’s money was on another vampire, or two.
He peered at the stakes. There was nothing remarkable about them. Just the standard wooden stake, oak most likely. He imagined a person could pick them up anywhere, on eBay even, or they could be homemade. Either way, they’d be virtually untraceable—to modern-day investigative techniques. He had something else in mind.
Glancing at the doorway to make sure he was alone, Cale rubbed his fingers together on his right hand. Carefully, he reached for the stake impaling the body through the heart. He touched the end of the wood. Nothing hit him immediately, so he moved his fingers down over the slope of the stake, searching for that thin thread that would connect him.
After another few seconds of searching, he found what he was looking for. Like a shock of adrenaline, heat surged through his fingers and up his arm.
Closing his eyes, he saw ragged snippets of images coming at him at a rapid-fire pace.
A room. Small, cramped and dirty. Two men, with vague faces that he couldn’t discern, talking.
But Cale couldn’t hear the words. Another scene flashed by. A van. Again something old and dirty.
Two different men. Then Luc Dubois’s front door. It opened, and a man Cale assumed to be Luc smiled and let the men in. After that, the images flashed by too fast, too blurred by the speed. But Cale saw blood, lots and lots of blood. And the last image, which seemed to last longer than the others, was the face of a young woman, a teenager perhaps, with piercing blue eyes. Then everything went blank.
He blinked open his eyes as he dropped his hand from the stake. His fingers tingled from the energy that had flowed out of it and into him. The feeling always lasted for a few hours afterward. But he figured it was worth it, considering the information he was usually able to glean. This time it hadn’t been so easy. Violence like this usually left a bad essence. And he unfortunately could feel it through his thoughts.
“You’re a touch telepath.”
Startled, Cale turned toward the door. Olena stood in the doorway, watching him. He couldn’t read the look on her face, but it definitely wasn’t surprise he was seeing.
He clenched his hand tight, trying to push the tingling sensation away, but it was as stubborn as he was. He moved toward her.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked.
“I don’t like to advertise it.”
“Why?”
He didn’t meet her gaze. He didn’t want her to know that he wasn’t proud of his power. When he was younger it had been a nuisance. Now it was just a tool for him to use on his job.
“Why do you think?”
“Because you don’t want to be a freak. Because you were teased as a child, maybe even feared because of the things you could see.”
He met her gaze then. She was perceptive. Unnervingly so. “I wasn’t teased for long.”
She shook her head. “No, I imagine after a while you probably beat the crap out of anyone who said anything to you.”
He smiled then. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“Does Interpol know about your gift?”
“My immediate boss, maybe a few other key players.” He rubbed his hand on his pants. It still tingled. “That’s why they indulge my ‘feelings.’”
With narrowed eyes, she looked at him. “Can you read people?”
“No, just objects. People are much too complicated to get a bead on.” He turned off his flashlight and slipped it into his jacket. She was still watching him with a wariness he hadn’t seen from her before. “Are you worried that I’ve peeked into your head?”
“Not at all. With me, pretty much what you see is what you get.”