Read Running Hot for Free Online Page B

it had been a little over twelve months since Martin Crocker had died. Surely if anyone had been looking for her she would have sensed it by now. Her survival instincts were inextricably linked to her peculiar version of aura talent. Both had been honed razor sharp at the age of fourteen. Even more reassuring, she had made it through the J&J background checks. She was safe now; tucked away in that great dusty vault of the Arcane Society officially known as the Bureau of Genealogy. True, the contents of the vault these days were housed online and she accessed them with a computer; nevertheless, the metaphor still applied.
    She was safe. It would be okay to get a dog.
    Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the coded number and answered immediately.
    “Good morning, Mr. Jones,” she said. The formality was automatic, one of the many tools she employed to keep some distance between herself and others.
    “Are you packed yet?”
    She had never met the man in person. Fallon Jones ran J&J from a one-man office tucked away in a little town on the northern California coast. Some said he was an obsessively paranoid recluse. Others claimed that the reason he lived and worked alone was because no one could stand being around him for more than five minutes. It was true that he had the personality of an annoyed rhinoceros. He was also a brilliant talent.
    She had done some off-the-books genealogical research shortly after her boss, Harley Beakman, had begun referring Jones’s queries to her. Evidently she was the only one in the department who had the patience to put up with the ceaseless demands of the notoriously difficult head of J&J.
    It hadn’t taken much sleuthing to discover that Fallon was a direct descendant of Caleb Jones, the founder of Jones & Jones. That much was not a secret. There was also no question but that Fallon ranked very high on the Jones Scale, probably off the charts. She knew from her work that the members of the Jones family—many of them legends in the Society—were not above fudging their talent rankings with a view to making themselves appear less psychically powerful than they actually were. She did not hold that against them. She had discreetly cranked her own ranking back to a more respectable and far less intimidating level seven.
    The exact nature of Fallon’s talent, however, had proved elusive, probably because no one had yet come up with a polite, scientifically neutral term for what most people referred to as a full-blown conspiracy theorist.
    The thing that set Fallon apart from the general run of committed conspiracy nuts was the fact that the mysterious patterns he identified and which he wove into his elaborate theories were not a product of his feverish fantasies. They were real. Most of the time.
    “Almost finished,” she assured him. “I’ll be on my way to Portland in an hour or so. Before I leave I have to drop by the post office to ask Mrs. Waggoner to hold my mail, and then I have to notify my landlady that I’ll be out of town for two or three days. That’s it.”
    “You have to make an announcement about this trip to the whole damn town?” Fallon growled.
    “Trust me, if I don’t inform my landlady about the trip and leave word at the post office, there will be rumors within twenty-four hours. The next thing I know, the police chief will be knocking on my door wanting to see if I’m alive. This is a very small town.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know how it is with small towns. Same story here in Scargill Cove. Do what you have to do and then get moving.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You’re booked into an airport hotel in Portland tonight. The ID you and Malone will be using will be delivered to you there by a Society courier. Your flight to Honolulu leaves tomorrow morning. Malone will meet you at the gate in the Interisland Terminal at Honolulu International. That’s where the two of you will catch the connecting flight to Maui.”
    “How will I recognize Mr. Malone?”
    “Well,