“Yes,” he said, “I just know that—because of the styles of clothing, the shades of gray—this happened a long time ago.”
“Know?”
He stared at her.
Yet he seemed more confused than mad. “And?”
Her fist clenched on her lap, she stared at the half-moons that her fingernails had embedded into the palm of her hand in order to stop the scream from reaching up her throat. She wanted nothing more than to grab this guy by the throat and to shake the truth from him.
“The trouble is, it goes from that image to another image within a little room,” he said, “with toys and a toddler’s bed, but no child is there, just a blanket. But it’s got some plastic wrapping around it that’s a different color, not so dark. Unfortunately then it goes to an absolutely beautiful little girl in a fancy little bed.” His tone was heavy. “The little girl in the bed is crying her eyes out. She’s in a basement. It looks like a basement or maybe a cellar. I don’t know,” he said. “She’s got just a blanket, and blood’s on the bed. She is crying, as if her heart is breaking.” And then he fell silent.
She sat back and looked at him. “And it’s the same nightmare over and over again?”
“The same one for a week now,” he said bitterly. “Until last night.”
“What about last night?” she asked, but inside she knew. Dear God, inside she knew.
“Last night, another child was added to the sequence,” he said. “A little boy, a little bit older, like six, maybe seven. I don’t know children’s ages. Skinny, curled up in the bed, but he wasn’t even breathing. In the nightmare I zoomed down, and he was just lying there, and I couldn’t see him moving or breathing. There was like a weird outline to him.”
“Did you see anything that can identify these children? Or where they are located?” she asked lightly. But she was gripping the pen in her hand so hard that it was in danger of breaking.
“I would have said no,” he said. “I would have said it could be any child, anywhere in the world. That’s one of the reasons I never came in to the cops before. Although I’ve had these particular nightmares for the last few weeks, I’ve had them off and on in various forms for years. I’ve always just ignored them, but now I can’t ignore them anymore.”
“Why is that?”
“Because this newest little boy has a name on the bed above his head. It read ‘Jason.’ No last name, just the first name.”
“And you can’t give me any physical description of him?”
“Emaciated to the point of being starved,” he said bluntly. His tone still easily portrayed the horror of what he had experienced in his nightmares. “He’s drawn, skinny, like you could see inside him. His skin was almost translucent.”
“And, if the child were dead, how long has he been dead?”
He shook his head. “I got the impression it was recent. But I don’t think he was—” And then he stopped, shook his head, and looked away. “I don’t put any credence into this,” he said. “So you probably shouldn’t either.”
“Well, I don’t have anything to put credence into yet,” she said drily. “So why don’t we just go down this mythical pathway and see if anything is there?”
“Have you had anything to do with psychics before?”
“Hell no,” she said forcibly. “I only believe in what I can see and hear and feel.”
He stared at her. “Of course I would be talking to you.”
“Do you consider yourself a psychic?”
“Hell no,” he said. “But I can’t help but wonder if these nightmares don’t have some kind of fact-based realism.”
“Fact-based realism?” She had never heard that phrase before. “If you had given me anything to identify any of these children with,” she said, “I could look them up in the files.”
“It’s the first time I saw a name on the bed,” he said, “but I definitely got the impression the child had been there for a while.”
“Starved to death?”
“I’m afraid that was probably the least of his problems,” he said softly.
She studied his face, seeing the pain, the tired lines in the corner of his eyes, the faint anger masked around his lips, as he clenched them tight. “It makes you angry, doesn’t it?”
He glared at her, not liking the sound of that. “I didn’t do anything to these children,” he said, “but whoever did hasn’t stopped.”