Mind Games by Christine Amsden Read Free Book Online Page A

the station. I’d been on my own since Rick quit, no one particularly eager to team up with me, and now I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful for the help or wary of the intrusion. A new partner meant new quirks. Given the types of cases I typically worked, I needed to know how he would react to the strange and unexpected. Bad backup could be worse than none at all, as Rick had proved during the diner robbery.
    “What did you do in St. Louis?” I led him across the small open space where all the deputies had their desks. Mine was in the back corner, furthest from both the sheriff’s office and the reception counter. His was adjacent to mine, with only a few feet between. There weren’t even cubicle walls to give us the illusion of privacy.
    “I started in traffic, but they moved me to homicide last year. I thought it would be interesting, and it was, but there was just too much of it. And too many cases we couldn’t solve.”
    “We don’t always solve them here, either.” I thought about David McClellan, though I wondered if I was really putting my all into that case.
    I didn’t get into David’s case with Wesley right away. Better to work our way up to that. Instead, I showed him the break room, coffee maker, file room, copy machine, and the small jail. We weren’t equipped to handle long-term inmates but there were always a few people there, awaiting trial or sleeping off a hard night of overindulgence.
    I also introduced him to the other deputies. After Rick left none of them had rushed to fill the gap, but it wasn’t because they disliked me. We got along pretty well with one another, but everyone knew that if a crime involved anything out of the ordinary, I would be the one to get it.
    Around mid-morning our dispatcher, Jane, came by to introduce herself to Wesley. She flung back her long red ponytail and sat on the edge of his desk, her manner typically flirtatious. I considered her a friend, but for some reason her mannerisms bothered me more than usual.
    “So, Wesley,” Jane said. “Do you believe in magic?”
    “Magic?” He furrowed his brows in obvious confusion. “Like stage magicians or something?”
    “No, real magic,” Jane said.
    He looked my way as if hoping I would help, but his answer interested me even more than it interested Jane. I’d been working my way up to the question more slowly, but now that Jane had forced the issue, I wanted to hear the answer.
    “Do you mean like fortune tellers and ESP?” Wesley asked.
    “Oh, you know… witches… vampires… magic.”
    Wesley glanced at me. “Does this have anything to do with that Scully remark you made earlier?”
    I gave him a careless shrug. “It helps to be open-minded.”
    “I’m open-minded,” Wesley said, almost defensively. “But no, I don’t believe in magic. I’ll have to see it to believe it, and even then I’m going to want to rule out scientific explanations first.”
    “You should check out our coffee maker,” Jane said, winking at me. The coffee maker had been a gift from my father. “Makes the best coffee you ever had in less than ten seconds flat.”
    Wesley looked unimpressed. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
    I frowned, trying to place where I’d heard that before, but it escaped me.
    “Arthur C. Clarke,” Wesley said helpfully.
    “I see.” Since I didn’t normally read science fiction, I wasn’t sure why it had even sounded familiar to me. Maybe Evan had mentioned it before; it was the sort of thing he liked to read.
    “Hey, Cassie!” Joe called from the reception counter.
    I looked up, but before I even had a chance to ask what he needed, I saw the answer for myself. Cormack McClellan, David McClellan’s younger brother, drummed his fingers impatiently on the counter and stared straight at me.
    “Speaking of unsolved cases,” I murmured as I rose to my feet and went to face down Cormack.
    Cormack looked a lot like his brother around the face,