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thought. But it never got any easier. Never.
    “He got her in the back,” she said, “then jerked her around by the wrist and began driving the knife into her chest. The first blow to her chest staggered her backward, the second put her on the ground. She was losing blood so fast she didn’t have the strength to fight him off. She was all but gone when he began stabbing her in the genital area. And either her skirt came up when she fell, or else he jerked it out of the way when he began stabbing her, since the material wasn’t slashed. He pulled the skirt back down when he was done. Odd, that. Protecting her modesty, or veiling his own desires and needs?”
    Rafe was frowning. “The ME says she died too fast to leave any bruises, but he told me privately he felt she’d been jerked around and held by one wrist. It wasn’t in his report.”
    Isabel looked at him, weighing him for a moment, then smiled. “I get hunches.”
    “Yeah?” He crossed powerful arms over his chest and lifted both eyebrows inquiringly.
    “Okay, they’re a little more than hunches.”
    “Is this where the
special
in Special Crimes Unit comes in?”
    “Sort of. You read the Bureau’s brief on our unit, right?”
    “I did. It was nicely murky, but the gist I got is that the unit is called in when a judgment is made that the crimes committed are unusually challenging for local law enforcement. That SCU agents use traditional as well as
intuitive
investigative methods to solve said crimes. By
intuitive
I gather they mean these
hunches
of yours?”
    “Well, they couldn’t very well announce that the SCU is made up mostly of psychics. Wouldn’t go over very well with the majority of cops, considering how . . . um . . . levelheaded you guys tend to be. We’ve discovered through bitter experience that proving what we can do is a lot more effective with you guys than just claiming our abilities are real.”
    “So why’re you telling me?”
    “I thought you could take it.” She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Was I wrong?”
    “I’ll let you know when I make up my mind.”
    “Fair enough.”
    “So I gather you don’t normally inform local law enforcement of this?”
    “Depends. It’s pretty much left up to our judgment. The assigned team, I mean. Bishop says you can’t plan some things in advance, and whether or not to spill the beans—and when—is one of them. I’ve been on assignments where the local cops didn’t have a clue, and others where they were convinced, by the time we left, that it was some kind of magic.”
    “But it isn’t.” He didn’t quite make it a question.
    “Oh, no. Perfectly human abilities that simply don’t happen to be shared by everyone. It’s like math.”
    “Math?”
    “Yeah. I don’t get math. Never have. Balancing my checkbook stresses me out like you wouldn’t believe. But I always liked science, history, English. Those I was good at. I bet you’re good at math.”
    “It doesn’t stress me out,” he admitted.
    “Different strokes. People have strengths and weaknesses, and some have abilities that can look amazing because they’re uncommon. There aren’t a lot of Mozarts or Einsteins, so people marvel at their abilities. Guy throws a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball and puts it over the plate three out of five pitches, and he’s likely to be set for life, because very few people can do what he does. Gifts. Rare, but all perfectly human.”
    “And your gift is?”
    “Clairvoyance. The faculty of perceiving things or events beyond normal sensory contact. Simply put, I know things. Things I shouldn’t be able to know—according to all the laws of conventional science. Facts and other bits of information. Conversations. Thoughts. Events. The past as well as the present.”
    “All that?”
    “All that. But more often than not it’s a random jumble of stuff, like the clutter in an attic. Or like the chatter of voices in the next room: you hear everything but really catch only a word or