in size, and she’s entering a phase of accelerating intensity.”
A murmur of sharp disappointment went through the bar, but that was all. The music resumed. No one made for the door. Charbou and Bull went back to their conversation with Johnson and the bartender.
She nodded pensively, watching them.
Dupree called her out of her musings. “You dream of the dead, Assistant Inspector Salazar?”
She looked at him, bewildered, thinking her ears had deceived her. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Let me try again. Are you haunted by visions of the dead at the foot of your bed, Salazar?”
She moved her lips as if to answer him, but nothing came out. What was this? Some kind of joke?
As if reading her thoughts, he responded, “It’s no joke. I do; I dream of the dead. They follow me and try to tell me things I can’t quite catch. The nightmares don’t go away until I finally manage to understand what they’re trying to say.”
Amaia’s eyes opened wide. “Uh, okay, well, I . . .”
“Oh, I understand. It’s not the sort of thing a person wants to go around talking about, and certainly not to a person in my position. You don’t need to tell me; I know you see them. I read a summary of your report about the kidnapper you tracked down in Spain. I was impressed by your stubborn dedication to the victims. And that explanation you gave. You called it—”
“A hunch,” she completed his sentence.
Dupree nodded slowly. “I’ve known lots of law enforcement agents over the years. I can tell when someone has the gift. And you do.”
Amaia pressed her lips shut. This kind of talk made her uncomfortable.
“You know, lots of people will think you’re odd. They’ll call your hunches some sort of sixth sense. But you can’t fool me. I know where a sixth sense comes from. It develops in those who’ve lived through the kinds of things that would destroy other people. But some of them, rare birds like Sherrington, learn from the experience. He was capable of seeing beyond, intuiting the evil lurking out there in the world, alive and real, disguised by a thin mask of human skin. A disguise like that hides its malevolence from most of us, but not from you.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true . . .”
Dupree was suddenly annoyed. “This is no time for false modesty. It doesn’t matter whether you’re conscious of it or not. The vital thing is to recognize where that hunch comes from. The process doesn’t seem logical in most cases, certainly not to the minds of ordinary people, those who haven’t explored the dark well of evil. But you’ve been there. You mentioned latent variables when Emerson asked how you evaluated the probabilities. Anyone can put together the obvious bits of evidence to suggest a coherent hypothesis. I’ve lectured on that a thousand times. But there’s a special talent endowed to only a few, and they all have one thing in common.” He looked deep into her eyes. “They’ve all lived through hell.”
She glanced down for a moment, even though she knew she shouldn’t, because it was an admission his insight was accurate. She lifted her gaze and detected in Dupree’s always-controlled facial expression the satisfaction of being proved right. She couldn’t help wondering why this was so important to him.
“That’s why you have the ability to see things hidden away in some blind corner, invisible to others. It’s the gift of second sight, which is required to monitor a demon. You have to know the demon intimately to maintain your safe distance, all the while keeping your eye on the fiend.”
Dupree crossed his arms on the table and leaned in close. “You can do that. You paid a high price for that ability. I want to know where it comes from. When you found the old woman’s body under the roof out on the farm, you said the situation reminded you of a place. Tell me about that.”
Her boss searched her face, silently testing her defenses and probing for weakness.
Amaia overrode her urge to look down submissively again. She chose to present a more confident front. She met and mastered his challenge. “I have no idea where that came from. I’m not tied to that place, I have no roots there, and I’d never thought about those old stories. I suppose somebody told me those legends when I was little. It was a simple logical deduction. Some synapse clicked and hauled that reference out of my subconscious.”
He