Gus looked at the gaggle of police officers standing outside the shack. The open ambulance waiting for a body. He remembered how he had felt when he saw his first corpse. There was no need to put this poor woman through that.

“You’ve done enough,” Gus said. “In fact, you might as well go home. We can get a ride with one of the detectives.”

“I can’t do that,” she said, taking his arm.

Despite the apparent fact that his neck had lost the ability to swivel, Gus scanned the road in both directions, making sure there was no car within a quarter of a mile before he headed toward the impound lot.

“Sure, you can. I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here.”

Tara looked puzzled. “You didn’t drag me here. Shawn did.”

He felt like the Tin Woodsman-his muscles seemed to be rusted solid, but once he started moving they eased up considerably. “It was really both of us who-”

“No.” There was an edge of steel in her voice that Gus hadn’t heard before. He didn’t understand where it was coming from. “Shawn dragged me here. That’s why I was here to see you fall. I was answering his call.”

“How could he call you? His phone was in my car, and my car was impounded,” Gus said.

Her ice blue eyes bored into his. “Shawn doesn’t need a phone to call me. He’s a psychic. He beams his thoughts directly into my mind.”

Gus stopped dead in the middle of the street. He would have, anyway, if his body hadn’t been experiencing a sense memory of his last journey over this particular stretch of road and propelling his legs forward without any input from his brain. “He does?”

“No matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

Gus realized he had made it to the other end of the street. So why did it feel like he had just stepped into quicksand? “Does Shawn know about this?”

“He’s the one beaming me his thoughts,” she said in a tone that suggested Gus had just come out of a short yellow bus, not a red Mercedes.