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From Murder In ScorpioPrologue
My name is Elizabeth Chase. I saw my first ghost when I was an undergraduate studying premed at Stanford. With her smart blond bob and swaying hips, I assumed she was another student walking a few feet ahead of me along the cement path near Hoover Tower. Suddenly she turned and stared at me, her eyes as wide and black as a cat's in the dark. Then she simply faded, like the dying glow you sometimes see when you turn off an old television. I was twenty then, old enough to worry seriously about my sanity. In an attempt to understand and resolve my sighting, I shifted all my attention to the field of psychology. I joined up with the Stanford Research Institute and spent the next ten years experimenting on paranormal subjects: precognition, near-death experiences, apparitions, telepathy. Along the way I earned two doctorates and discovered two things: 1) that paranormal phenomena are maddeningly hard to quantify, qualify, and explain; and 2) that my own psychic sight continued to sharpen, however much it refused to conform to laboratory schedules. After research funds dried up in the mid-eighties I moved to Escondido, an inland suburb north of San Diego, and opened a psychotherapy practice. For a time I enjoyed assisting others in uncovering the mystery of their own psyches. But soon I began to feel bored and uneasy, as if my therapist's chair had somehow become a raft and each day in it sent me floating farther and farther from my true purpose in life. That all changed one morning over coffee and a newspaper. I spotted a picture of a freckled eight-year-old and the corresponding headline, "Search Continues for Missing Boy." Instantly an image appeared before me, a holograph superimposed above the paper: 929 IDLEWILD STREET. Ten years of research had taught me that such flashes, unprompted by the conscious mind, usually correspond in some inexplicable way to reality. I contacted the Escondido Police Department and reported my experience to the detective in charge of the case. He sounded less than enthusiastic, so I sat down at my computer to write a follow-up letter. To my amazement two police officers appeared on my doorstep within the hour. With expressionless faces they informed me that a boy named Kevin Woods had been found, shot in the abdomen but alive, in an abandoned house at 929 Idlewild. They wanted an explanation. Thus began yet another career. I now devote myself entirely to the use of my gift in solving crimes. |
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