Rod’s eyebrows shoot up. “A psychic called here, too. Wonder if it’s the same woman.”

“Did you get her name?” I ask.

“Barresi did. She said she wanted access to Marc Klaas’s apartment in Sausalito, something about sensing Polly’s vibrations.” Rod’s look dismisses her credibility and closes a door simultaneously. Even if I do plan to interview Tally Hollander, now’s not the time to bring it up.

“You know how it is, Rod,” I offer finally, working to shift us back to sounder footing. “We don’t want to get confused here, thinking everything is connected, but we don’t want to miss anything, either. Whatever’s between those two things, that’s the line we’re trying to walk.”

He nods, hands on his hips, saying nothing. He knows the territory all too well. He’s one of the good ones—the best. But that doesn’t mean he can solve his mystery, or ours.

(twenty-seven)

As I’d told Will, women like Tally Hollander aren’t unknown to me. Searchlight has used them occasionally, with some success. And then there was Eden.

She was “sensitive”—her word—able to see the future in dreams and visions that arrived when she could sense someone was in trouble, doubled over the bathtub after a bad fall, or under a truck at the side of the highway, trying to remove a flat. These were real people, as I understood it, but almost always strangers. She was simply at the receiving end of an image, a flash of telegraphed panic, as if her unconscious was a kind of cosmic phone line. Occasionally she intervened or tried to, when the events in question were to happen nearby, to people she could identify, not too far in the future or the past to be useful. Never, ever, was she in her own visions, which she found a relief.

“I don’t want to know what’s going to happen to me,” she explained once. “I don’t know anyone who does.”

“What if you could stop the future, though? Do something different?”

She shrugged almost imperceptibly, her head bent over the bowl where she was kneading dark studs of raisins and pecans into pale bread dough. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“No one can change anything? Like fate, then?”

“No, I don’t mean fate, Anna. I mean character. We do what we do because we are who we are.”

Her words dropped through me like polished stones. “Do you dream about me?”

Eden’s eyes glanced up. I caught the edge of a troubled thought before she cleared it away, like drawing a broom across a corner of the room. “Sometimes.”

I was afraid to ask my next question. It hung there, weighted, while I looked at her.

“What do you want to know, Anna?” Her voice was tender and patient.