Page 35 of Diagnosis Attraction

“When I called out to you to drop to the ground, I was about ten feet away.”

“But now we’ve got a stronger link.”

“Right,” he said, and they both knew he was thinking about their lovemaking. “Let’s see how far away we can do it.”

“I think we have to be touching todo it,”She teased.

“You know what I meant.”

She nodded, and they first stood on opposite sides of the car.

Do you know the names of the trees?he asked.

She looked around.I see maples, oaks, and white pine.

Good that you know them. Let’s try it a little farther apart.

They each walked a few feet from the car and tried the communication again. It seemed to work until they were about twenty yards away, the limit of their mind-to-mind communication skills.

At least for now,he said.

What do you mean?

As you pointed out, our abilities got stronger after we made love. I think that we can make everything we do stronger—if we practice.

Practice making love?she teased again, and he knew she was making an effort to lighten the situation.

That, too.

They joined up again and walked down a trail through the woods.

“It’s so peaceful here. I hate the idea of destroying anything.”

They came to a footbridge across a stream, where large rocks poked up through the water.

“Let’s just see if we can do something to a rock,” he suggested.

“How?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

She leaned on the rail, looking downstream, then pointed to a large boulder sticking up above the water line. “We can aim for that one. And we don’t want to work against each other. I think it might be best if one of us focuses on the rock and the other one tries to—uh— add power to the focus.”

“That sounds right.”

Over a thousand miles away in New Orleans, a man named Harold Goddard hunched over his computer. He was retired now, but once he’d worked for the Howell Institute, a DC think tank that had funded some very interesting projects over the years—like undetectable chemical weapons and torture methods which left no marks on those being interrogated.

Bill Wellington had been the director of the institute, and Harold had worked closely with him. Wellington had died in an explosion at a secret research lab in Houma, Louisiana, and that had raised Harold’s interest.

The lab had been owned by Dr. Douglas Solomon, who’d run one of Wellington’s pet projectsthirty-some years ago. Only it hadn’t quite panned out the way they’d hoped. Never one to double down on a bet, Wellington had pulled the doctor’s funding, and Solomon had gone underground with a bunch of different experiments. Had the two men kept in contact over the years? Or did Wellington find out something about the doctor’s most recent activities? Harold might never find the answer to that question because Solomon and Wellington had both been killed when the doctor’s hidden research facility blew up. The authorities had concluded that the cause was a gas leak. Harold had his doubts—especially considering subsequent events.

The incident had gotten him interested in Solomon again.

He’d gone poking into old records from the clinic and come up with a list of very interesting people—all whose mothers had had the doctor’s special treatments.

Over the past few months, Harold had brought several of them together. Several men and women had ended up dead in bed together—apparently from cerebral vascular accidents. Then two of them, Craig Branson and Stephanie Swift, had vanished into thin air—after some very alarming incidents. Incidents that had made Harold cautious about approaching other people on the list.

Now here was one of the names—Matthew Delano, currently AWOL from his job as a house physician at Memorial Hospital in Baltimore and wanted for questioning in a murder investigation.

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