The Last Echo

Violet widened her eyes at him, letting him know she was fine. She turned away, forcing herself to focus on Sara’s words.

Krystal interrupted then, disruptive and unrepentant as usual. She dropped onto the couch, squeezing into the narrow space between Violet and Rafe without even trying to be quiet, oblivious that she was disturbing anyone. Sara didn’t acknowledge the disturbance; she just kept talking like nothing had happened.

“Wow. What a sicko, right?” Krystal tried to whisper. She toyed with one of the clear healing crystals that dangled from a chain around her neck, as if she were rubbing for answers.

Violet kept her voice considerably lower than Krystal’s. “Totally.”

Sara shot a pointed look at Krystal, and Krystal rubbed her stone even harder. It was on the tip of Violet’s tongue to ask if Krystal was her real name, or just a nickname because of her belief in the powers of the stones she wore.

She opened her mouth to ask, but Sara drew her interest.

“We have some of Antonia’s things—some of her personal effects—if any of you would be willing to stay behind for a bit and check them out for me. Tell me if you sense anything?”

Violet sat up a little straighter, eager for the chance to watch the rest of them in action. Everyone on the team—at least everyone but her—was in some way psychic. They all had certain “sensitivities” to things that weren’t exactly tangible.

She supposed she did too; her gift just didn’t work the same way theirs did. Hers wasn’t useful at a moment like this. But that didn’t stop her from being fascinated by the others.

“Any chance we can go to her place? Check it out in person?” Rafe asked.

Sara cocked her head, her brows raised. “You think that wasn’t my first question?” she asked, addressing Rafe directly. “Sorry. Her home is off-limits. Once the police give us the go-ahead, I’ll see if we can schedule a little field trip. But until then, we’ll have to make do with what we have.”

Violet’s part of the investigation had pretty much finished the moment she’d discovered the girl’s body in the warehouse. Or at least it was finished until they had a suspect in mind. That was when she could try to match the echoes from the dead girls they’d already discovered to the imprints on whoever might be responsible for killing them. For now, all she could do was stand back and watch while the others did their thing.

She hovered near the edge of the large conference table where Sara placed a cardboard box and opened the flaps. Already several of her teammates were reaching inside, pulling out the girl’s belongings. Violet felt like she was eavesdropping on something that they probably didn’t share with many outsiders.

This was how it worked for some of them—maybe all of them to some degree, Violet thought as she stood back, watching as items were passed from one set of hands to the next.

Psychometry. It was what she’d seen Sam doing when she’d first met him. Violet had learned the term soon after she’d joined the team, and she’d Googled everything she could about it. From what she’d gathered, it was the ability to “read” the history of an item—or the person who owned the item—simply by touching it. Of course there was nothing “simple” about it. And like her gift, there didn’t seem to be a lot of hard and fast rules to it. Each of them seemed to have their own way of doing things. It certainly wasn’t a science.

But it had a name, and Violet felt a flash of envy that they, at least, knew what to call their ability. Hers continued to remain nameless. For all she knew, she was unique in her ability to seek out those who’d been murdered.

She eased closer, trying to get a better look at what was happening in front of her, until she unwittingly became part of the circle, handling objects that were passed around. She paid less attention to the personal effects and more attention to those who held them. Beside her, Krystal closed her eyes whenever she was given something, seeming to concentrate on the feel of each item in her hands, while Gemma scrutinized the pieces like a detective, as if she were searching for physical clues that might have been left behind on the objects themselves. Rafe, on the other hand, barely paid attention to any of them—the objects or the others. He was passed an item, glanced haphazardly at it, and then passed it along, almost as if he were playing a bizarre game of hot potato.

From outside the circle, Sara supervised, taking in all their reactions.

Sam caught Violet watching him and he winked at her, catching her off-guard with the gesture. And then he glanced away again, his face almost childlike, right down to the spray of freckles across his nose, as he ran his fingers over an ordinary hairbrush.

Violet watched him as he closed his eyes, concentrating once more. She wondered what he sensed that she didn’t.

She reached inside the box for a small photo album with a brushed black velvet cover. She drew it out, untying the satin ribbon that held it closed as she flipped to the first page. Inside, she got her first real glimpse into the girl’s life—before it had been stolen away from her.

Antonia Cornett looked barely older than Violet. She was just twenty-one, an art history major at the university. The last time any of her friends had seen her alive was just two weeks earlier, when she was leaving the off-campus rental house she shared with her best friend to go to class.

Violet studied Antonia’s big brown eyes and her thick curtain of dark hair, and wondered if she looked like the other girls who’d been discovered before her. The ones they suspected had been murdered by the same person.