“That’s good.” He put on a cup of coffee. “I can’t imagine what it would be like if you were.”

  “Oh, don’t start,” she warned.

  He burst out laughing. “Maybe I won’t, but, wow, you can certainly push things.”

  “I’m not pushing anything,” she muttered. “Just trying to stay alive … and to help people.”

  “That’s what it’s all really about though, isn’t it?”

  She looked over at him, lifting her head from her list, and nodded. “That’s what it’s always been about.”

  “But is that what this kidnapping and all this mess is about? The hospital seems to put paychecks over patient care, whereas you’re all about patient care. The kidnapping stops you from being able to help people and may even scuff up your reputation, especially if they can make it sound like you’re not stable—”

  “They could do that,” she admitted, “and, of course, I wouldn’t be very happy if anybody listened, but it’s possible.”

  He nodded. “And, if that were the case, you couldn’t help anybody. How many patients have you had where there were confrontations, lots of anger, blame, or guilt, for example, where the patients couldn’t be helped, and somebody thought that you should have been able to?”

  She sank back on the couch and stared at him.

  He nodded and asked, “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  “I … I don’t know.” She continued staring at him. “I hadn’t considered patients. That list is doctors, nurses, orderlies, kitchen staff, and anybody I had to write up because they weren’t doing their job. I actually caught two staff members having sex in a patient’s room one time.” He stared, and her lips twitched. “Yeah, that was fun. What was I supposed to do? Just ignore it? Obviously not, so I had to write them up for it. The rules of conduct at the center are pretty strict.”

  “Would you have done any differently if you were running the place yourself?”

  She pondered that, then shook her head. “No, not really. It was completely inappropriate. They were both on the clock at the time and in a room that a patient was waiting for, and, instead of looking after the patient, they were looking after themselves,” she explained.

  “Did your action cause much in the way of bad feelings?”

  “Sure,” she murmured, “but they didn’t have a leg to stand on. Honestly I’m still not convinced that this has anything to do with anybody on staff there.”

  “If it isn’t staff,” he pointed out bluntly, “it’s got to be patient oriented.” She shook her head at that. He held up a hand. “What is the absolute worst scenario you’ve had to deal with in terms of patient care, where it didn’t work out?”

  “You mean, where I couldn’t help somebody?”

  “Sure,” he agreed, “if you want to look at it that way, yes.”

  She snorted. “That’s easy. That would be the one that blew up in my face last year.”

  He sat down beside her, his gaze intense. “How do you figure that?”

  She frowned at him. “You saw part of what happened, I guess, if not all of it.”

  “No, not all of it,” he corrected. “I saw a lot, but I certainly didn’t see exactly what happened. Was there any kind of follow-up? We haven’t discussed that, and you didn’t tell me anything about it.”

  “I didn’t tell you because you didn’t ask,” she stated in frustration. “Yes, there was some pretty ugly follow-up.”

  “Like what?”

  “The family was pretty clear in expressing how they felt about my efforts to help their beloved son,” she replied bitterly. “There was absolutely no quarter given. They seemed to have no understanding of what he had done or what he was going through or what needed to be done for his care.”

  “Okay, I’m a little confused right now,” Gray said. “In that attack on you six months ago, didn’t he die? Either during the attack or shortly afterward?”

  “No, he didn’t die, but it burnt out his abilities, so he was essentially …” She winced. “The last I knew he was completely nonverbal, in a coma of sorts, and not likely to change anytime soon.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No, I haven’t,” she replied. “Not something I wanted to do.”

  “Is he still there?”

  She looked at him and then shrugged. “He shouldn’t be. We’re not that kind of facility.”

  “Would anybody have kept that information from you? Moved him there on the sly?”

  “It’s possible. I mean, people are doing all kinds of shit right now that I didn’t see coming, so … maybe. Did I know that they were? No. Would I have gone to see him if I did know he was there? No, I would have stayed away from him. And, if he’s there, they ought to move him elsewhere again. He’s taking a bed for someone we could help. He was there for analysis and testing before.”

  “Is he dangerous still?”

  She pondered that for a moment. “Stefan would say everybody is dangerous, even when we think they aren’t. My answer to that right now would be that I don’t think he is a danger to anybody since he burnt out during our encounter.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “No, of course I’m not sure,” she replied crossly. “Every time we see more and more things that we shouldn’t be seeing, craziness that shouldn’t be happening, people with abilities who are well beyond what we ever thought possible. Every day in every way we’re being challenged. I don’t know whether it’s just that more people with gifts are out there or if some sort of extra valve, I don’t know, has been opened, so more gifted people are showing up than we ever noticed before. Whatever the mechanism, I’ve definitely noticed a lot more people with abilities showing up. Stefan would probably say it’s because we opened the doors, and, having opened them, a lot more people are coming toward us, looking for help.”

  “Can you help them?”

  “Most of the time I can help them,” she stated. “And then you get somebody like Rodney, and there’s just nothing to be done. At least nothing I could do.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he’s a sociopath, with a hell of a lot of energy abilities, and his entire bent was to hurt as many people as possible.”

  “Yet you didn’t know that when you started treating him?”

  She stared at him. “No, I certainly did not know that. Nobody could have known. That’s just insane.”

  “Yeah, but it seems that what you deal with here are new levels of insanity.” He grabbed her hands, then said, “You need to tell me exactly what happened afterward.”

  She stared at him. “Do I have to?” she asked, her voice soft. “It was incredibly painful.”

  “I know it was,” he whispered. “I saw part of it while I was there because I was on duty, but I don’t know what the aftermath was. Did the family threaten you?”

  She gave him a half smile. “Only because the parents were in so much pain.”

  “That’s fine,” he muttered. “But what else did they do? How much of this is related to that?”

  She shook her head. “None of it should be,” she said, bewildered, “Why would it be?”

  “Because now you’re finally back working with patients,” he noted. “This is the first time that you’ve been back, after everything that went wrong. So, if Rodney’s family believed you’re a danger to other patients and that you may have had something to do with what happened to their son, then it makes a twisted kind of sense.”

  “What? Stopping me from helping anybody else?”

  “Help from your perspective, but that’s probably not the language Rodney’s family is using.”

  She felt everything inside her sinking, as she was forced to acknowledge that Gray could be onto something. “But even if that is the way they’re thinking, this reaction is pretty extreme,” she explained. “I mean, that’s setting themselves up for a lifetime of trouble and a criminal record for themselves.”

  “Maybe they don’t care. I mean, what was the fallout from their son’s illness?”

  She swallowed and shrugged. “I didn’t stay in touch,” she murmured. “I couldn’t do that after—”

  “I get that, and I don’t have a problem with the fact that you didn’t stay in touch,” he replied. “There’s only so much anybody can expect out of you.”

  She shook her head at that. “But you’re making it seem as if I didn’t do nearly enough.”

  “That’s not my intent at all,” he corrected. “That’s absolutely not what I want you to get out of this. However, those parents may feel that you didn’t do enough. Regardless, the fact of the matter is, we do need to follow up to confirm that they aren’t involved in this.”

  “Follow up then,” she said, hopping to her feet and walking over to the window. “I just hope there’s nothing to find.”

  “I hope so too,” he told her gently, “because that’s the last thing we want. However, if there is anything to find, we must stop it.”

  She winced. “Okay. I’m sure you have Rodney’s files. There was quite the case at the time.”

  “No charges were ever filed, right?”

  “No, there weren’t,” she stated. “I didn’t file against him. And I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, I tried to help a patient who attacked me and held me prisoner,” she murmured. “He thought it was great fun. The fact that he could even do it terrified me, but the fact that he could do it as easily as he did … terrified everybody else.”

  “Of course,” Gray agreed. “What about other siblings?”

  She stared at him and shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I only ever spoke with the mother.”

  “What did she do for a living?”

  “She was the CEO of some corporation or something like that,” she shared, with a wave of her hand. “I didn’t really get too many details. That’s not anything I typically deal with.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Gray said.

  She looked over at him, already on his phone, sending texts. “Do you really think this could be part of it?”

  “It’s been the biggest thing in your life. The one big issue that pretty well destroyed everything in your world.”

  She winced. “See? I worked really hard to get to a place where it hadn’t destroyed anything, and I was finally getting back to my normal life.” She sighed. “So, your phrasing isn’t exactly what I want to hear.”

  “Maybe not, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking something is okay, when maybe it really isn’t.”

  “Fine,” she muttered. “You do your investigation.”

  “Now, from you, I’ll need a list of patients we should look into. Anything that stands out.”

  “You mean, when something blew up with any of the other patients?”

  He nodded.

  “Does it happen? Sure. You get progress, and then you get patients who slide behind,” she said. “We don’t always get to know what causes the regression, whether it’s you, the therapist, or family, or it’s something else. I mean, there isn’t a direct cause and effect that’s clear-cut in cases like this. In some cases, the family is way too domineering, and the patient really needs to just be separated from them, so they can learn to grow and to have a life, However, most people, most families, aren’t ready to hear that. And, in most cases, no way we can take away the family, even on a temporary basis, to show them that the patient just needs a bit of time apart from them.”

  “Is it just time away or is it a matter of cause and effect?”

  “Sometimes there’s an awful lot of abuse, though sometimes it’s not abuse that you can see, like physical wounds. It’s psychological abuse, and that can be so very damaging that we don’t always see the effect, not until it’s too late, and that’s what happened to Rodney. His father was incredibly abusive, physically and mentally, to the mother. He was in jail at the time,” she added, turning suddenly and looking at him. “That’s right. He was in jail. He couldn’t come to deal with any of his son’s issues, and neither the mother nor the son wanted him there.”

  “Huh. That’s another thing to sort out. I’m collecting information now, but I sure wish I’d known about this earlier.”

  “I didn’t even think of it,” she admitted, “but then I’ve made a practice of not thinking about it.”

  “Of course you have. Anything that’s traumatic you try to put out of your mind.”

  “More than traumatic, since he almost succeeded, you know?”

  Gray frowned at her. “Almost succeeded at what?”

  She gave the briefest of smiles. “Almost succeeded in keeping me a prisoner in his own headspace.”

  He slowly lowered his phone and stared at her, rubbing his face. “You’re not joking, are you?”

  “Oh, no, I’m not joking at all,” she muttered. “He was incredibly strong, incredibly capable. That’s how he subdued his victims.”

  “Victims?” he repeated.

  “Yeah, he was actually committed to institutional care because he was a serial killer, but, of course, the doctors determined he wasn’t fit to stand trial.”

  “I remember something about killing someone but not that he was a serial killer.”

  “Yes, he would capture them mentally, then have them do whatever he wanted, while he toyed with them physically, and they were completely incapable of getting free of him. I understood something was going on in his psyche, but I thought, in my naïveté, that I could meet him at a middle ground—in the hallway, so to speak, between life and death. That way I could talk to him and could see if I could convince him to come back to normal, come back to reality.

  “Instead I found out that he was enjoying himself way too much. Once I went into his playground, he was the master, and I was the student because he’d spent a lifetime in there, learning to control people, learning to do what he wanted to do, instead of what other people wanted him to do. His mother was his victim as well, but I could never get her convinced to separate from him. So, of course, the more I tried to separate them, the more he fought to stay together with her because she was his lifeline in many ways. With her on his side, Rodney was pretty well invincible and got away with murder, time and time again,” she explained.

  “Jesus,” Gray muttered.

  “Yeah, Rodney was definitely somebody I didn’t want to deal with long term, but I thought I could help him. Until I went in there and realized what was going on and found a psychic so strong, so skilled, and so happy in his little hideaway that he had no intention of ever coming out. I knew that, once he passed all the psych testing, he would be free and clear again.”

  “But he had killed several people,” Gray stated, staring at her.

  “Yes, but he wasn’t convicted. Remember? He came here for testing, and I was pretty sure that he had the ability to influence several of the people on his medical team, and they were in the process of giving him a clean bill of health.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gray muttered, now sitting down. “So you’re saying he could control their minds?”

  “In a way, yes, though I’m not sure I would go so far as to say control their minds. He certainly had the ability to control people without their knowledge. I mean, he grabbed a hold of me because I was fighting his release, and he didn’t appreciate it.”

  “I wouldn’t think he would,” Gray agreed, frowning at her. “It seems strange that this is the first you’ve mentioned it.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not a subject I like to talk about.”

  “No, and I get that,” he murmured. He shook his head. “You know for sure he’s burnt out, right?”

  She stared at him. “You’re bringing up thoughts that I don’t ever want to even consider again. You know that, right? I thought he was gone.”

  “Are you sure he’s not recovered in some way?”

  “No, I’m not sure because I haven’t been in his mind to see,” she stated. “I don’t dare. He knows my signature, so, as soon as I go in, he’ll be all over me.”

  He opened his mouth, as if to ask questions, but didn’t say anything.

  She smiled. “I’m glad you’re not saying anything about that one.”

  “I need to though,” he replied. “How am I supposed to ignore something so blatantly scary and question him without more information. Obviously I need to know more about what he can do and what he can’t.”

  “What he can do is terrify even those of us who have spent a lifetime doing this,” she murmured. “I don’t even know how to explain to you how strong he is. Just know that somebody has the ability to snatch who you are as a soul, as a mind, as a consciousness, and keep you prisoner. And, for some people, quite possibly those who didn’t have the experience I have, he could make them do things. And, in this case, I think his mom took care of him, without realizing to what extent he was pulling on her. His female victims followed his orders because the alternative was something they couldn’t comprehend and didn’t realize he was already doing to them.”

  “Wasn’t there talk about cannibalism or something otherwise horrific?”

  “You know, cannibalism is often used by people as a horror factor. It’s the single most taboo thing imaginable, so, as soon as they do it, it gives them a sense of being all-powerful.”

  He nodded slowly. “I can kind of see that, though it doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “No, I’m sure it doesn’t,” she murmured. “Still, it doesn’t change the fact that, if you get hung up on that word and that action, it actually gives Rodney more power.”

  Gray shuddered at that. “Can’t say I want to even see the guy again.”

  “Did you see him at all?” she asked curiously.

  “I was a part of an FBI team, hoping you would get answers. We were in the middle of an argument about what kind of care and what kind of treatment he would get, and how many answers he actually was willing to help out with. We were missing a lot of bodies at that time. But my shift was over, so I was in the process of disconnecting and handing off my shift when everything blew up.”