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out—or remember—why you ran away when you were seventeen. That’s all for now.”
    “Yeah,” Jessie said. “That’s all.”

THREE
    Haven
    JUNE 28
    Nathan Navarro walked into Command Central with a cup of coffee in hand, yawning. “Christ, I feel like I’ve been asleep for a week,” he told Maggie.
    “Nearly twenty-four hours. But after that last case, you were overdue. Have you eaten?”
    Navarro couldn’t help but smile inwardly. She was his employer and he respected her more than just about anyone else in his life, but it never failed to amuse him that Maggie just naturally mothered everyone around her.
    She looked at him out of serene golden eyes in a sweet face surrounded by an unruly cloud of reddish hair, nothing about her appearance offering any indication of the very sharp and oddly calculating mind capable of juggling many operatives and usually several assignments at any given time
and
of making some extraordinarily tough-minded decisions.
    “I’m not mothering,” Maggie said. “Just testing the readiness of one of my operatives for a new assignment.”
    “Stop reading me.”
    She smiled. “Your emotions are easy to pick up on, pal. I don’t even have to try. Which sort of fascinates me, because you’re very, very good at masking them visibly and maintaining an unemotional facade.”
    “One of my many strengths.” He changed the subject. “I’m ready for another assignment. Put me to work.”
    “By rights, you should have a week off, at least.”
    “I don’t want a week off. I want to work.”
    “Mmm.” She studied him for a moment, seeing a big man with obvious physical strength and an unmistakably military stance, and wondered fleetingly if Bishop was right and Navarro would eventually end up in the SCU. There was nothing to disqualify him, after all—except for his reluctance to too quickly re-up with the US government again after years with Naval Intelligence.
    Well, that plus the fact that he was still dealing with the traumatic event that had awakened his latent psychic abilities. And learning to deal with the abilities themselves, at least one of which was most certainly emotionally unsettling. And possibly emotionally damaging; Maggie wasn’t sure about that yet.
    “Put me to work,” he repeated. “What’ve we got?”
    “A bit of a mystery.” She caught him up, quickly and concisely, with Jessie’s trip home, the reasons for it, and the spirit she had encountered warning of a killer hunting in that small, isolated town.
    Navarro frowned. “I’ve never worked with Jessie. Is she a strong medium?”
    “Erratic. Same with her telepathy, though that’s tested as definitely a lesser ability.”
    “But you believe she saw a spirit?”
    “Oh, yes. Jessie has a…singular lack of imagination in many ways. It’s helpful in some cases, and a disadvantage in others. But one thing you can be sure of is that if she says she saw a spirit, then she saw a spirit.”
    “So I’ll be looking for the remains of that victim—and possibly a few more.”
    “That’s the idea.
If
there’s a killer operating there, he has a wilderness in which to dispose of his victims once he’s done with them. And there are plenty of isolated homes and other places where he could hold them. Torture them. Use them however he does to satisfy whatever his particular twisted needs are.” Her voice, always gentle, made the matter-of-fact words sound more chilling.
    “Do we know that’s what he’s doing?”
    “As soon as Jessie reported in, I knew. Because, somewhere deep down inside, unconsciously, Jessie knows too. I don’t know how or why, but she knows.”
    “Maybe picking up on the negative energy of months or even years of murders?”
    “Maybe. She’s capable of that.”
    “Have you told Bishop about this?” Navarro asked.
    “I have. Just talked to him before you walked in. For now, all we have is the word of a spirit that something’s been happening there. No evidence. Not only