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The family does not wish for any contact regarding the child except for the invoices—any disciplinary and medical matters are to be handled by the school.

Dae Park wasn’t in the diner when Eleri walked in to take a seat at the counter. “I was hoping to run into Dae,” she said to the proprietor, Sally, a tall woman with sharp eyes and striking bone structure under skin of glowing ebony.

“He tell his ma he was having breakfast here again?” Sally chuckled, her voice husky.

“Honey, he’s a healthy young male trapped in a house with his mother—I ain’t never seen him for breakfast. I haven’t figured out who his lady friend is, but he’s surely got one.

Good on him, I say—man finally broke out of his shell. ”

Eleri dropped the subject, but she added this lie to the one Dae had told about Jacques and found him inching higher on the scale of suspects—at least when it came to the shooting.

His humanity still placed him as an outlier on the Sandman suspect list unless she wanted to revise her opinion that it was a single killer rather than a pair.

“Thank you,” she said as Sally put her plate in front of her—it was the “Psy special,” a bland arrangement of bread spread with nutrient paste, along with a hot cup of an herbal tea with no discernible taste that Eleri could fathom.

“You mind if I ask you a question?” Sally said after returning from topping up a heavily bearded man’s coffee. “I always wondered if the memories you took as a J haunted you.”

“We have eidetic memories,” Eleri told the other woman. “But only for the memories we take from others in the course of our duties. We cannot forget.”

Sally sucked in a short, hard breath. “Why would your parents allow you to go into that kind of work? I would never let my daughter do something like that—I don’t care if she’s full grown and in charge of herself!”

Eleri thought about her own mother, a slender 7.

9 telepath she barely remembered who’d had no idea what to do with the daughter who’d been born with an ability that could bring no advantage to the family.

Maria Dias had blamed herself for not fully researching Eleri’s paternal line for “discrepancies” before their fertilization agreement and had ignored the child except for ensuring her physical needs were met.

Eleri had far preferred her life in boarding school, especially after she met Bram, then Saffron and Yúzé. A small family. Her real family, the memories they’d created between them potent enough that she remembered her emotions toward them even behind the wall of nothingness.

Once, she had been able to love them.

“Most Js before the fall of Silence were funneled into the job,” she told Sally, leaving out the political reasons for it—for the vast majority of Js, the control of the Council never came into play, but it was nonetheless the reason the Council wanted Js in the system.

So they could alter cases at will.

LIAR!

The wall had regrown, thick and all but impenetrable, and so she could speak past the brutal echo of Adam’s accusation.

“Js now have a choice.” They could learn to use their abilities in less damaging ways, could even have careers that had nothing to do with their skills at memory retrieval and broadcast.

Two people hugged outside the window of the diner, young women who were smiling at each other in welcome. It was an experience Eleri would never have. The contact could kill or disable her at her current level of Sensitivity.

A flicker in her mind, eyes that were no longer fully human looking into hers as Adam told her not to forget her gloves.

Changelings had natural shields.

People with natural shields were no threat to Sensitives.

Shaking off the thought that was apropos of nothing, because physical contact with Adam wasn’t within the realm of possibility, she ate a bite of her toast while Sally went to chat to the bearded patron. Their conversation, however, lingered with her.

What choice, she thought, would she have made had she had a true choice?

Her brain had trouble even comprehending the question.

Fact was, she’d never had any inkling of a choice, having been put into specialized training the moment she passed her Silence tests, and at this point couldn’t even imagine what she’d do if she wasn’t a J.

This was what she was good at, and what she was good at could make the world a safer place.

Putting yourself in the line of fire isn’t an act of penance that’ll wipe out the past.

Her fingers tightened on the cup of tea just as the Enforcement deputy she’d met yesterday—Jocasta Whitten—entered with a male colleague in a rumpled uniform. He was about Adam’s height, had tumbled dark curls and sculpted musculature that was obvious under his tailored uniform.

Cheeks creasing in a tired smile, he said, “Hey, Sally. Breakfast for me and Jo. Our usual.”

“I thought you’d be off shift by now, Hendricks,” Sally said as she turned to call in the order to her cook.

“Decided to wait so I could eat with Jo,” the deputy named Hendricks answered, his curious gaze cutting to Eleri.

Whitten, meanwhile, wandered over to her. “Hey, you want to join us at a booth? We can catch each other up and I can introduce you to Hendricks.”

“Sure.”

Once they were seated and introductions made, the two deputies shared what they knew about the chief. “No news from the hospital yet,” Whitten said right as Sally slid their plates onto the table.

After which, the conversation shifted to the shooting.

“I think it looks panicked,” the female deputy said. “At least three shots from a high-powered laser rifle. Overkill and messy with it.”

“I mean, I dunno,” Hendricks mumbled from around his eggs before taking a gulp of coffee from a refillable silver flask that Sally had topped up with a smile.

“The falcons are tough. Way I figure it, the shooter was making sure he got the job done. Not panic, more like not wanting to take the risk of Jacques surviving.”

Eleri could see both points of view, because Hendricks was right—the shooter had to have known that should Jacques survive and talk, their life would be forfeit. Adam and his clan would come after them like arrows unleashed.

“Is it rude to ask about the gloves?” Hendricks’s voice broke into her thoughts.

“It’s just to stop accidental contact,” Eleri said, not in the mood to offer further details.

“Huh. I heard online that it was for Psy who can sense stuff through touch.”

“I’m no psychometric.”

“Must be weird to be one,” Whitten said as Hendricks shrugged and got back to buttering a thick slice of toast. “Like imagine touching the tire tracks at the scene of the shooting and getting snapshots of the shooter. No idea if that’s how it works, but maybe Enforcement should think about recruiting psychometrics.

They can go around zapping crime scenes and just telling us what happened. ”

Eleri had met a few Ps-Psy through her work, and it didn’t quite work like that, but she let it go because the two deputies seemed fascinated by the idea.

“What would be the fun in our work if they could just give us the answers?” Hendricks made a face after swallowing his bite of toast. “No actual investigating. Nah, I say leave the psychometric people to do whatever they’re doing now.”

He tapped the side of his head. “Now, telepathy, that I could get onboard with. It’d be straight-up ice being able to talk to another cop without the criminals ever figuring it out. Imagine how you could use it to stymie them in an interrogation.”

Whitten snorted. “Calm down, John. You work in Raintree. We interrogate teenagers and drunks, hardly criminal masterminds.”

Instead of being offended, Hendricks grinned. “Just you watch. I’m going to pass my detective exams and get myself a shiny new badge in a big-city station.”

“You know I’ll be there with bells on to celebrate the day. So will your falcon gym buddies.”

Hendricks’s smile faded. “Jacques is a good guy,” he said. “I don’t know him real well, but I’ve run into him a few times when he dropped by to use a few of the machines they don’t have up in the Canyon.

“And WindHaven’s helped us out with a ton of searches,” he added, to Whitten’s solemn nod, “finding people who got lost in the desert. We don’t need to hunt down jet-choppers or search planes because the falcons have our back and act as air support.”

Eleri thought of seeing those wings in flight, of the ease with which Adam rode the air currents, and wondered what it was like to be so free. “That’s a stroke of luck in this remote region.”

“Yeah, but even they can’t help us with this.” Whitten pushed her waffles around her plate, having only taken a few bites. “No one knows anything.”

“What about other crimes in town?” Eleri was certain the Sandman hadn’t hunted on his home ground, but compulsions were strange things and could’ve driven him to other criminal acts. “Anything else disturbing?”

“Last ‘big’ crime”—Hendricks hooked his fingers in air quotes—“was when Dexter Camp’s little group of budding criminals took the high school principal’s SUV for a joyride and left it stuck in the desert.”

Whitten rolled her eyes. “The kids were never in danger of getting away with it. They’d blabbed to their other mates before they were even back in town—and we were waiting for them.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing beyond drunkenness and the odd break-in.” Whitten drank a bit of orange juice.

“Whoever’s breaking in doesn’t even take anything except for stupid stuff—like one time, it was clear they’d spent time in the kitchen cutting up and eating big chunks of leftover birthday cake; they exited by the back door just as the couple who lived there returned—couple heard the door close. ”

Hendricks grinned. “My favorite was the one where the owners came home and their puppy was sleeping surrounded by toys they’d put up in a box for later in the day.

The burglar had spent time playing with the pup, tired it out, then had a shower .

Homeowners say the bathroom was full of steam when they got back. ”

“It’s bored kids.” Whitten added more syrup to her waffles. “We’ve done fingerprints for all the break-ins, but no luck so far. Some group of kids probably has a bet going on about how long they can keep it up.”

Eleri wasn’t so sure it was anything that petty.

Her antennae had quivered to attention at the first mention of a burglary that wasn’t a burglary…

and of an intruder who timed his crimes to just miss the people whose home he’d violated.

That was an escalation that could turn deadly, because she was sure this person or pair—unlikely a group as the deputies believed—had begun with entries that hadn’t been detected, before moving on to more risky actions.

Stage three would be an intrusion while the people inside were present but asleep. Then would come the intrusions while the residents were awake. And worst-case scenario would be a full home invasion, with the residents terrorized and murdered.

“Since we have no new data on Jacques,” Eleri said, “and I haven’t picked up anything in Raintree on my case, I can have a look at the files to do with the break-ins, see if I notice anything.”

“We’ll have to ask Beaufort,” Whitten said. “Only he or the chief can authorize that.”

Eleri nodded, leaving it at that. It didn’t really matter; she had ways to get the files without authorization. Because it turned out that a woman who hunted serial killers with great success had a hell of a lot of contacts who owed her favors.

She glanced at the gloved hand she had on the table.

Not long left for her to collect on the favors. Might as well cash in one now.

Don’t forget your gloves.

She polished the memory of their morning interaction, made sure it was in high definition before she stored it carefully away. Because while her memories were only eidetic when it came to the traces she took, she’d never forgotten a single detail of her interactions with him.

Never wanted to forget.

···

It was three hours later when she returned to the inn.

She’d spent the time working her imaginary cold case while making contact with the Psy residents of the town.

Still no red flags, but the Sandman had been flying under the radar because he was good at hiding his true face.

She planned to dig into each and every person to whom she’d spoken.

Having already used her mobile comm to check her security system, she pushed open the door…

and felt her boot press down on something that crackled softly.

Lifting her foot at once, she looked down to see what looked to be printouts of online articles.

She crouched down so she was close enough to read the headlines without having to touch the paper.

The Sandman Strikes Again!

Missing woman identified as Kriti Kumar, an engineering student from ASU.

Breaking News: Body discovered!

Vivian Chang’s Parents on Why They Still Have Hope

Rumors of a Serial Killer in Arizona!

They were all like that, every single printout that she could see. Someone had gone to great lengths to find articles on the Sandman going back all the way to the beginning. That interview with Vivian’s parents, for one, had been right back at the start, when she’d been a missing person.

But that wasn’t what held her attention: it was the printout in the center of the haphazard mass—of an article that included a black-and-white image of the location where Eleri had discovered Sarah Wells’s body.

She was standing next to Tim, the two of them in conversation.

The person who’d slipped the printouts under her door had drawn a smiley face next to Eleri’s image.