Color Blind (3 page)

J
enna entered the inner room. Isaac Keaton’s head was down, eyes hooded. Fearful? Defensiveness intentional? Only one way to know.

“Isaac. I’m Dr. Jenna Ramey. I understand you wanted to speak with me?”

He glanced over her, a slow perusal from head to toe, reading. This guy had just shot more than a dozen people at a theme park for children, and here she was introducing herself as though they were business associates. The job was never boring.

“So you’re the famous Jenna Ramey,” he said, his voice weary.

Colors flashed in. She pulled up a rolling chair across the table from Keaton. “Why did you want to speak with me specifically, Isaac?”

He leaned forward, squinted. Worry lines creased his forehead. “You were the only person I could think of who’d understand. You know. How someone can be a whole person, even if they do a very bad thing.”

Jenna pursed her lips. She knew exactly what he was referring to, but she wasn’t ready to give him that much yet. Granted, many people knew about her mother, but the fact that he referred to her so specifically spoke volumes. The years had taught her not to assume. “That I do. Are you saying you’ve done a very bad thing?”

He nodded emphatically, rocked again. “Uh-huh. I did. I killed those people.”

Different colors struck her, but Jenna didn’t try to reel them in. Her deeper brain would settle on one when it was ready.

She tossed the facts, quick and furious. He’d picked a vantage point that boxed him in, no escape, but then hadn’t tried to shoot his way out. Hadn’t committed suicide, either. Yet now he appeared tortured, remorseful. Wanted to be caught, not killed. Definitely wanted to get caught.

To end it or to play?

“Why did you put down your gun?” she asked evenly.

“I didn’t . . . I expected it to stop the pain. Then they were dead. Blood everywhere, people hurt. My fault. I knew I should talk to you.”

Interesting,
but I didn’t ask why you shot them
. The vacillating colors coalesced, and a shade flashed in her mind. It lasted only seconds, but it was enough for Jenna to file it away, to use the ever-growing database of her color associations to define what the color said about Isaac.

“Would you like a drink of water, Isaac? I think you should have one. Keep your strength up. It’s been a long, hard day,” Jenna said, standing.

She stepped out of the box, where Detective Richards waited.

“Keep your strength up?” Richards repeated.

Jenna stared at Keaton, who was still rocking himself. He knew he was being watched.

She turned back to Richards to answer his earlier question.

“I see him as red.”

“Huh?”

This part was never easy to explain. “Red. He could be either of the team, the mastermind or the submissive. He either picked a spot where he was sure to get caught, or someone chose it for him. He wasn’t
afraid
of being caught. Backed into a corner, but didn’t take everyone down with him. Could mean he wanted to stop, but not necessarily. He also knew to ask for me. Again, could’ve been told to by his superior. But when I asked about the gun, his speech pattern was strange. I asked him a question, and he answered something totally different. He’s pushing his own agenda. He comes in as red.”

Most people associated red with anger. To Jenna, it was less definitive. Her color associations proved more random and yet not random all at the same time. She never knew them until she felt them, saw them. The color would flash in, but after the flash, even when the color wasn’t readily present, if Jenna closed her eyes and thought about a person or an event, she could draw up the color she tended to associate with them or it. A color association for Jenna was just like any other detail she would note about a person that might affect her perception of them, no different than the way she might read into someone’s body language or note a person’s tone of voice. The initial flash was fast, but it left its brand on something forever. In the bizarre color dictionary in her brain, red could mean wrath or love or a host of other things. Red often showed up for people she saw as strong, type A. Isaac Keaton headed the Gemini. He was the general.

“In this case, red tells me he’s a power player. He’s the dominant of the two, and for some reason, he wanted to get caught.”

“I thought you said the color thing had nothing to do with emotions,” Richards said.

“It doesn’t.”

Richards put his hands up. “Whatever. Where do we go from here?”

Jenna walked to the water cooler, filled two cones from the dispenser. “That’s what I’m trying to decide. If he wants us to believe his act and we call him out, he might button up. If that’s the case, better we play along.”

“Seems like knowing the truth without him realizing is an upper hand,” Richards ventured.

“The problem is, we
might
get more out of him if he respects a worthy opponent,” Jenna said. She took a sip of water. If she hadn’t met enough of these monsters, pretending to be clueless would seem the obvious way to go.

Red flashed in again. As it was, obvious wasn’t accurate here. “He’s testing us.”

J
enna reentered the box and handed Isaac Keaton, who was wiping his palms on his pants, the little cone of water.

She watched as Isaac lifted the cup, sipped. His hand didn’t shake. The cone tilted smoothly, the water slid down easy.

Done.

Things were about to get either good or bad. “Good show, Isaac.”

His chin tilted upward, and his hazel eyes met her own. In an instant those eyes transitioned from wild and scared to focused, calculating. Intense.

The side of his mouth turned up first, then he chuckled. “Whaddaya know? You’re
not
a complete fraud.”

Jenna’s stomach knotted. Just because she’d suspected this outcome didn’t make her less uneasy about it.

“I’d hate to think all that training was for nothing,” she countered.

Isaac laughed again, hard and loud. “Oh, come on, Dr. Ramey! We both know your gift didn’t come from one of those ‘I have a high school diploma and can carry a gun’ training courses!”

Gift. Kind of like the “gift” of foresight.
“Tell me about your partner.”

Isaac’s thin brows lifted. “Partner is an interesting word choice. Implies equality.”

“And he’s not your equal,” Jenna supplied. It wasn’t a question. “Most people aren’t, are they?”

Isaac threw his head back. “Oh, Dr. Ramey! You’re shrinking me, aren’t you? That’s cute. Can I try? You like saving people. You saved your dad and brother, but you can’t come to terms with the fact that you couldn’t save your mom. You rescue other people to make up for the guilt.”

Bile rose in Jenna’s throat. “I’m not shrinking you, Isaac. Not any more than you want me to. I’m trying to wrap my head around why you did what you did. That I’ll admit.”

“Of course you are! That’s your job.”

Certain brands of sociopaths were like that: oppositional kindergartners wanting to be both first
and
not first for show-and-tell. When they showed the propensity, refocusing on something else tended to do the trick. “Tell me about the other half of the team.”

“Third.”

“Okay,” she conceded. “The other one-third.”

“Did you always see your mother as black?”

Flashes of the steak knife jutted in.
Bloody palm prints dotting the kitchen countertops, a sick trail to the door. Freedom.
“We’re not here to talk about me, Isaac.”

“Hmph,” he smirked. “
I
am.”

Jenna’s heart clenched. Panic built in her chest. Something ugly pressurized it, readying it for explosion.

Chill out.

This psycho shot a bunch of people and hung around to be caught. Couldn’t be
only
because he wanted to talk to the “famous” Dr. Jenna Ramey, no matter how bored he got. No. He was stalling. Waiting for something.

His smirk made purple flash in. Grapheme-color synesthesia worked for Jenna like inverted colorblindness. Where for most people, traits blended in, the colors that flashed in her mind at certain statements or mannerisms could make a quality stand out like a brunette in a sea of bald heads. In this case, the purple that crossed her mind brought up thoughts of narcissism. Flattery would get her everywhere.

“I don’t believe for a second that you
let
yourself get caught so you could shoot the breeze with me, Isaac.”

“You tell me, Dr. Ramey. Why would I
let
myself get caught?”

Notoriety
. You’re playing a game, proving you’re smarter than we are.
“You didn’t enjoy your knitting class?”

“I wouldn’t
want
to be caught, would I?”

Normal people didn’t want to be caught. Isaac did. “You already told me the other guy is only one-third of what you are, and
he’s
out there. By your own reasoning, either you’re underestimating him, or you’re lying to me. Which is it?”

“Did you know
she
was lying, Jenna? Your mother? How could you tell? The news stories said you had a hunch about her based on the color you associated. They said you couldn’t explain it. They said your colors had nothing to do with your emotional feelings for someone, Jenna, but they did, didn’t they? You didn’t want them to, but they did.”

She swallowed the surge of angst that crept in. Isaac was quite a fan.

But Jenna would rather donate a kidney to this guy than talk to him about her past. Best to keep him on task. “Speaking of your partner, if this guy is only one-third of what you are, why team up with him? Seems like a liability.”

Isaac puffed out his cheeks, then let the air out by pushing on his cheeks with a handcuffed hand on either side of his face. “You know the answer to that, don’t you?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms. “You asked me if I thought most people were my equals, and you knew that answer.”

Good memory, too. “Why don’t you humor me?”

He tipped his chair farther back so it stood on its two back legs. “’Cause if I did that, Dr. Ramey, you might not need to ask more questions, and I do hope you’ll stay and chat awhile.”

S
ebastian Waters blinked into the fluorescents overhead. Damn, he was groggy. He couldn’t feel his left side.
What the—

Then he remembered. Pops. Bullets. People falling. He’d yelled that someone was shooting from above them, from the castle.

He jumped when he saw the nurse in the corner of his eye. “Who’s there?”

The young brunette nurse with the sleek ponytail smiled. “I didn’t mean to scare you, Mr. Waters. I’m your shift nurse. You’re at the hospital. Do you remember what happened?”

Boy, did he.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice solemn. So much blood.

“A bullet got you in the shoulder. It passed straight through, thank goodness. No major damage, didn’t hit any arteries. You do have a good gash on your stomach where you fell. The doctor put in five stitches. You were one of the lucky ones.”