Meriden opened the file and saw a stack of neatly typed pages, along with the photo of a young blond girl about nine years old. The kid was smiling, but her dark blue eyes looked frightened. “I suppose now you’ll give me some sort of impossible deadline to do this.”

“Not at all,” the old man said. “I understand these sorts of investigations do take some time. I will give you three weeks to locate my daughter and bring her home.”

“Why three?” Meriden asked. “Why not one, or five, or twelve?”

“Because I only have three weeks to live, Mr. Meriden,” King said calmly. “And, unless you find Alana, so do you.”

Chapter 4

The town of Halagan, California, didn’t appear on most maps, and was barely large enough to rate a Welcome sign. The only paved road was Main Street, which curled through Halagan’s official business district, a cluster of old wood-sided buildings, one or two that dated back to the Gold Rush days, when miners came down out of the hills to buy flour, salt pork, and, if they’d panned enough that month, an hour with one of the tired whores at one of the town’s five taverns.

A few weeks ago Andrew Riordan had stopped here for gas, caught a glimpse of a for-rent sign in the window of a boardinghouse, and decided it was as good a place as any to hole up in.

His landlady, an older woman who bred horses on a ranch a few miles outside of town, had not asked for his phony references or much in the way of a deposit.

“Rent’s due on the first of the month, utilities included,” she told him briskly. “You pay for your phone calls per week. No kids or pets, no loud music, no cooking, and if you have a girlfriend by, she needs to leave before breakfast.”

“Fair enough.” He handed over his cash deposit. “Who else lives in the house?”

“Besides my good-for-nothing nephew?” Her mouth twisted. “A geologist doing some survey mapping up in the hills, one of the elementary school teachers in the middle of a nasty divorce, and Mr. Cantwell, who is collecting government disability while he tries to finish his first novel.”

Drew winced. “What’s his disability?”

“I believe he has a terminal case of lazy-ass, don’t-want-to-work syndrome.” She tucked his money into a bank deposit envelope and met his gaze. “My brother-in-law is a county sheriff, and he’s going to run your name, your driver’s license number, and your tags. If he shouldn’t, tell me now, and I’ll return your deposit and you can keep going.”

“I’m clean.”

“Good.” She handed him a business card. “Any problems, you can reach me at either number anytime. Just be warned, you call after midnight, the place had better be burning down around you.”

Drew chuckled and shook her hand.

The room he’d rented had several bonuses: It was clean, comfortably furnished without being crowded or fussy, and the windows gave him an excellent view of both sides of Main Street. The tiny bathroom offered only a shower, but the water was hot, plentiful, and had the crystal-clear, faintly mineral taste of the mountain reservoir from where it originated.

Drew didn’t unpack for the first week as he looked around and made himself known to the townspeople. A few eyed the new beard he’d grown, and one of the waitresses at the local diner claimed he looked just like that red-haired actor during his NYPD Blue days, but other than that he passed inspection.

His cover story was as new as his beard; he was David White, a native of Los Angeles and graduate student who was spending his winter holidays on the road to see a little of the state while he figured out his thesis. It was just specific enough to explain his joblessness and the temporary nature of his residence, and vague enough to keep anyone from running more than a cursory background check. Even if someone did, Drew’s hacking abilities combined with a little help from his friends had insured that every detail would hold up. David White was registered as a graduate student at his college, had last resided in a small apartment off campus, and had inherited a small but tidy sum of money from a deceased uncle that was financing his mini-sabbatical. His taxes were paid, his student loans were up-to-date, and even his car was registered to the nonexistent David White.

He had bought his phone in L.A. from a store that specialized in the latest preservation of privacy gear, and while it looked like an ordinary cordless, it encrypted its own signal and could detect a trace within five seconds of activation. His computer, salvaged from the house in Savannah that had served as a base of operations for him and his friends, also boasted enough safeguards to rival those of the Pentagon.

Drew liked living in Halagan well enough, although he’d have to move on by the time the new year arrived. After several years of working undercover at GenHance, Inc., he had been exposed as a spy and had barely escaped being captured, killed, and dissected. Although outwardly he appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary, somewhat geeky computer nerd, Drew’s DNA was something more than human, and had made him part of a secret new order of superhumans that had named themselves the Takyn.

Like his other friends, Drew had been genetically altered as an orphaned child by scientists working outside the law. No one knew exactly what they had intended, but their experiments had resulted in children with powerful, unique, and sometimes frightening psychic abilities. After an accident destroyed the main experimental facility and killed most of the geneticists working on the project, the surviving children’s memories had been suppressed or erased before they were placed for adoption and scattered throughout the country. Neither the children nor their new families had any idea of what had been done to alter them.

Their Takyn abilities remained dormant for the most part throughout their childhood, although some of the children showed minor, precursory abilities. As a boy Drew had always been able to sense the presence of copper, usually in the form of pennies on the ground. He was so good at finding the coins, some of his friends in the old neighborhood had used him like a metal detector. Then when he was nine, Drew had gone swimming in a nearby lake with some friends, swallowed some water after being dunked, and had contracted an amoebic infection that had caused his temperature to spike at one hundred and six degrees.

Later his mother had told him that the doctors had prepared her and his dad for the worst. “They said you had lesions on your brain, and if you did come out of it you might never be able to talk or understand or take care of yourself again.”

Drew had stunned his parents and doctors by not only surviving, but coming out of the lethal sickness completely well. Aside from a nagging headache, he’d apparently suffered no ill effects at all from the infection. Until his father woke him up one night to his mother’s shrieking and water flooding across the floor of his room.

“The bathroom pipes burst,” his dad had told him, shouting to be heard over his mother. “Come and help your mom.”

Drew got out of bed and followed his dad, but something tugged at him and he changed direction. The pipes in his house were old, and as he went down the hall of his one-story home he ran his hand along the wall, tracing the path of the pipe he couldn’t see but could somehow feel.

“Andrew.”

“Hang on, Mom,” he called back in an absent tone. He moved his hand over the wall as he sought out the weak spot in the pipes, and then found it. He could feel through the wall the ragged edges of the split in the metal and how they curled out like a tattered flower. His dad was going to have to get the plumber to knock a hole in the wall to get at the pipe.

Unless . . .

The headache he’d had since returning from the hospital disappeared, and in its place came another feeling, a sizzling warmth that gathered behind his eyes. It traveled down into his shoulder and through his arm, moving like warm water, and seemed to pour through his hand into the wall. The water rushing across his feet began to slow, and then stopped.

“Thank God, your father finally got the water turned off. Oh, look at you,” his mother said behind him. “You’re soaked to the skin.”

His dad came up the stairs from the basement. “The shutoff valve is too rusted to turn, Bridget. I’d better call . . .” He stopped and looked at the floor. “What happened?”

Drew turned and smiled at his father. “I fixed it, Dad.”

Ron Riordan stared at his son before he burst out laughing. “And how did you do that, boy? With a prayer to the patron saint of piping?”

“No, with my headache.” Drew grimaced as he glanced down at his pajamas, which were sodden to the knees. “Can I change into my Transformers, Mom?”

Bridget looked at the wall and then sighed. “Sure, darling. But you bring those wet things into the laundry room.”

As Drew trotted back to his bedroom, he heard his mother say, “Broken pipes don’t go and mend themselves, Ronnie.”

“Something got stuck in it, I imagine. I’m calling Crowley. He’ll have something he can use to loosen up that geedee shutoff valve.”

The next day Mr. Crowley, the neighborhood plumber, came early to inspect the damage. Drew had to go to school, and didn’t give any more thought to the broken pipe until he found his father waiting for him outside the school gate.

“Dad.” Drew couldn’t remember his father ever coming to school to pick him up. Ron drove a bus, and didn’t get home until after six every night. “What are you doing here?”

“I took the day off, son. Boys.” Ron nodded to the two friends Drew usually walked home with. “Come on. Your mother’s waiting in the car for us.”

Drew wondered if he was in trouble, especially when he saw his mother’s face. She looked as if she’d been crying. “Did I do something wrong, Daddy?”

“No, son.” Ron rested a hand on his shoulder. “Your mother and me and you, we just need to have a little talk.”

His father drove them to the park where Drew sometimes played ball with his friends. The bleachers were deserted today, however, and as they went to sit by the dugout he began to see that his parents weren’t just upset; they were frightened.