“Oooh,” my mother said, perching on the edge of an easy chair. “Is that it? Is that the thingamajig you want Garnet to lay hands on and get her reading from?”
“Did you find that at the dump site or the kill site?” my father asked.
Singh’s only reply was to give my father an assessing look. He handed me the bag, and I became aware of the unsettled state of my stomach. This was it, my chance to impress the FBI agent, to prove I was neither a deluded idiot nor an out-an-out fraud. Trying to calm myself, I took a moment to study the snap button inside the bag. It was small, round, and made of metal with raised lettering around the circumference mostly obscured by rust.
The button Singh had brought me in March had been made of wood and found on the body of Jacob Wertheimer, a young man who’d gone missing in 2009. When I’d touched it, I’d seen a vision of the killer’s hands doing horrible things to his victim and, just like when I’d touched a rib bone of the victim, I’d sensed an abyss of fear, darkness and evil which had left me disturbed for days.
I shuddered at the memory. Sensing that I might again be about to experience something similar, my body rebelled, urging my heart into a faster beat. A deep, primitive part of my brain ordered me to drop the bag, to flee and have nothing further to do with this.
I blew out a steadying breath and pushed the soles of my feet onto the carpet, as if that could keep me rooted in place. Then I opened the bag.
– 4 –
My mother sucked in a breath, my father covered his mouth with a hand, and Singh, unblinking as a cobra, watched as I closed my fingers around the button in my sweaty palm and concentrated. And got only the faintest of sensations.
I opened my eyes, and my mother, positively thrumming with excitement, asked, “What did you see, dear? Did you hear anything? Pick up any evil vibrations?”
“Not really. I just got a vague impression of … anger. And pain, maybe?” I said uncertainly. I met Singh’s gaze and shrugged, feeling guilty. Maybe he’d come all the way to Pitchford for nothing. Maybe I’d lost the ability to read objects.
My mother slumped back in her chair in unmistakable disappointment and frowned at the pitcher of water. “Perhaps I should’ve added a pinch of peppermint.”
“I wonder,” Singh said, glancing from her to my father, “if Garnet would be able to concentrate better if we were alone?”
My mother stood up at once, regretful but still eager to help. “I’ll go upstairs to my bedroom and lay a crystal grid. It’s directly above this room, so it should potentiate the vibrations. Amethyst, celestite, and quartz should turn the trick, I think.”
Singh directed a look of such complete blankness at me that I knew exactly what he was thinking: WTF, lady? I had no answer for him.
Instead, I turned to face my father, who hadn’t moved. “Dad, don’t you have something else to do, somewhere else to be?”
He stood up. “Yes, of course. I’ll go rinse my rods.”
A flicker of bewilderment crossed Singh’s impassive features.
“He means his fishing rods,” I explained. “He was away on a fishing trip until last night.”
“If you need me, kiddo, you’ll find me in the basement,” Dad said, leaving the room with my mother, who was wondering out loud whether it would be a mistake to exclude malachite.
As soon as we were alone, Singh jerked his chin at the button still in my hand. “Can you tell whether that’s connected to the killer with the last button I brought?”
I closed my eyes again and, concentrating as hard as I could, tried to feel with the fingers of my mind for any link to the other murder, the other victim. When I opened my eyes, I tried to put into words what I’d intuited. “There’s a … a resonance. I get ‘the same but different.’ Where did you find this one?”
He hesitated, obviously reluctant to give me any information. Eventually, he said, “With a body.”
“But not on or in its mouth.” It wasn’t a question.
Neither confirming nor denying this, he pulled a different evidence bag out of his briefcase and handed it to me. “Let’s try this one.”
I placed the first button on the table and peered at the dark-green button inside the baggie. It was about an inch in diameter and made of plastic, with a raised edge around the circumference and a crosshatch pattern scored on its upper surface. Four holes punctured the center. I was about to open the bag when a slight movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention. I glanced up just in time to see my father ducking back around the entrance to the living room, where he’d obviously been eavesdropping.
“Dad!” I yelled and heard a mumbled apology and footsteps retreating down the hall.
“Your father is very curious about all this,” Singh said.
“Yes, he’s very … protective of me.” I said nothing about his killer hobby; Singh didn’t need to know the full extent of my family’s strangeness.
I tugged the ziplock of the baggie open and tipped the button into my hand, then closed my eyes and focused. My palm grew warm, and the skin on my scalp tightened. The image I saw was faint and brief but enough to tell me that this button was definitely from one of the Button Man’s victims.
I opened my eyes. “Okay, I didn’t see much. And what I did see wasn’t very clear.”
Singh raised an eyebrow, like he thought I was already preparing excuses for a failure to see anything.
“It was a hand, a male hand, pushing this button into a man’s mouth.”
Singh’s blank expression gave me no clue as to whether I was on the right track.
“Did you find the button in the skull of the skeleton, maybe in the jaw area?” I asked, remembering something my father had once told me. “Did you know that the Greeks used to place copper coins in the mouths of the dead so they would have fare for the ferryman on the River Styx? They had to pay him to take them across the river to the world of the dead.”
“Is that so?” His tone could not have sounded less interested.
“I’m just wondering what the button in the victim’s mouth could mean to the killer.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“Give me a minute.”
Holding the button between both my palms, I clasped my fingers, slowed my breathing, and tried to empty my mind of all distracting thoughts and worries. When my full attention was fixed on the curves and ridges pressing into my skin, I re-entered the vision I’d seen moments earlier.
Hands, white as death-lilies in the darkness.
Two hands, left and right.
The left hand touches the stubbled jaw of a young man. His skin is pale, his eyes closed, his lips slightly parted. A white object lies beside his head.
No fight, now. No fear left. No problem.
The thumb of the hand pushes between the young man’s lips, pulls out, pushes back inside. Thrusting in and out of the mouth. Then it pulls down the jaw, holding it open in a silent scream, while the fingers of the other hand slide a green button over the teeth and into the mouth, then push the jaw up, pinching the lips closed between thumb and forefinger. Tugging them into an obscene pout.
The vision dissolved into formless clouds of gray. Swallowing rising bile, I opened heavy eyelids to find Singh watching me carefully.