Voices & Visions: Isaac Taylor Mystery Series, #1

By Lashell Collins

A psychic so powerful his abilities come at a cost. A woman so special she alone has the power to touch him.

Detective Isaac Taylor is a broken man. Isolated by his strange abilities and what others perceive as weird behavior, he keeps his head down and excels at his job. But he hears the whispers of his colleagues and family members, and he feels like a freak among them. Then one wrong number phone call changes everything.

 

Sidney Fairchild is no stranger to danger. She's a woman on the run, in hiding and existing below the radar. Despite her efforts to stay invisible, she witnesses a crime she knows could get her killed. Then she answers a wrong number phone call that changes her life. 

 

Bound by their undeniable connection, Isaac and Sidney forge a bond stronger than anything either has ever known. But will his psychic abilities save her or lead to their mutual destruction? 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lashell Collins
• Release date: Mar 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781386965008

Book preview

1

The further she drove the worse it got.

Rough-looking run-down houses, many of them boarded up and abandoned. A few war-wary souls wearing expressions of despair walked the mean streets.

It was the kind of area that could get a person killed.

Hopelessly lost, Sidney knew she was in the wrong part of town with one glance out the windows at her surroundings. She drove on, dread hardening her stomach like quick-drying concrete.

She had to find a place to turn around and get back on the right road, and fast. The last remnants of daylight were fading and she didn’t want to be caught in this strange, scary neighborhood after dark.

She took the next right, her gaze darting all around.

Pop, pop, pop… pop!

The sound shot through the air.

Sidney jumped and slammed on the breaks. Her body lurched forward and crashed into the seatbelt. Through her windshield, she watched the kneeling man fall over dead in the street. The two guys with guns — perfectly illuminated by her headlights — looked up and stared at her.

Her heart stopped.

Everything around her seemed to freeze.

A perfect moment suspended in time.

One of the men raised his gun in her direction. Her heart exploded into a crazy fast uneven rhythm, hammering at her rib cage like it wanted out.

Shit! Sidney, get out of here. Get the fuck out of here, now!

She muttered the panicked words out loud, her brain suddenly remembering how to work again. Throwing the car into reverse, she stomped on the gas, not even stopping to check if there was anyone behind her.

Gunfire slapped her ears.

Instinctively, she ducked her head with the ping of ricocheting bullets.

Tires screeched.

She jerked the wheel, narrowly missing a parked car, and entered the intersection going the wrong way. She yanked on the gear shift and threw the car into drive. Then she floored it, tires squealing as she sped back down the street she had come.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!"

She sped through the streets like a formula one racer, zigging and zagging and weaving and wending.

Wrong place! Wronger time, Sid. Way to go!

She glanced up into her rearview mirror and her heart sank at the sight of a large black SUV racing after her.

No! God, please no!

She prayed out loud, begging for God to protect her.

Faster!

She had to go faster.

Fear rose up like a monster and gave chase.

She stepped on the gas with all her might and fought to keep the car on the road. The unshed tears stung her eyes, but she couldn’t afford to fall apart right now. She weaved the car in and out of traffic, not giving a thought to other drivers or the police.

Cars honked. People gestured.

She didn’t care that they were flipping her off and yelling obscenities. Staying alive was her only concern.

She took an immediate right, hoping to put more distance between her and the sinister-looking SUV. The sign for I-90 West appeared like a vision.

Yes. Thank you! Come on, Sid. You can do this.

She swerved left, narrowly missing a car in the other turn lane. Then she shot across the road, onto the entrance ramp.

When she finally found her way back onto I-90, she stepped on the gas pedal with everything she had. Checking her mirrors every few seconds to look for the evil SUV, she fled downtown Cleveland under the cloak of night and headed back to Rocky River as the sky grew ever darker.

This is what she got for venturing into the mean, unfamiliar city.

Okay, so it wasn’t LA or New York, but it was a city. And she wasn’t exactly sure what she had witnessed back there, but she knew enough to know that she shouldn’t have seen it.

Enough to know she was now in danger.

She’d witnessed a murder, and the men responsible for it had looked her dead in the face. That put her in very deep shit and she knew it. But she had to hold it together for a little while longer. She had to get away, and she had to get away clean.

Terror gripped her heart like a pit bull’s jaws clamping tight around torn flesh. She zoomed over the freeway with a lump in her throat.

Rocky River was about a twenty-minute drive from the city. More once you factored in traffic, but Sidney wasn’t exactly following the speed limits. The further she drove, the terrain slowly began to grow more familiar to her, but she knew she wasn’t home free yet. She took the State Route 20 exit in an effort to shake or confuse whoever might still be following.

She hadn’t seen the SUV in several minutes, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still back there. Growing up in a neighborhood ten times worse than the one she was currently fleeing had taught her a few things. She wasn’t stupid. She knew she had to make sure she truly lost the SUV before she went back home. She didn’t relish the idea of leading the killers directly to her front door.

For nearly a solid hour, she drove around aimlessly, taking back road after back road through Westlake to North Olmsted, and back up through Bay Village. At one point, she even pulled into a brightly-lit, busy fast food parking lot and sat there for several minutes just watching her surroundings. Watching for any SUVs that might be lurking.

That’s when she realized the wetness of her seat.

Jesus, Sidney, she whispered.

She might have laughed at the situation if she wasn’t so petrified.

When she was fairly certain no one was following her anymore she circled back, finally picking up State Route 6, and slipped into Rocky River to her own neighborhood. Turning off of Center Ridge Road, she made her way home, still scanning her surroundings. She pulled her car into the garage — something she didn’t normally do.

The automatic garage door came down behind her and she sat clutching the steering wheel for a long time.

Stop shaking, Sid. The voice sounded hollow and far away. Take a deep breath and stop shaking.

She couldn’t move.

The wet panties clung to her hidden places and the urine-soaked denim felt nasty against her skin, but her butt seemed surgically attached to the driver’s seat and she couldn’t make herself move.

It’s all good, Sid. You lost the SUV. No one followed you home. No one followed you. You’ve got this.

Talking to herself when she was stressed or scared was something Sidney had been doing for years. It helped with the loneliness.

Well, it had back in tenth grade anyway.

She peeled her fingers from the steering wheel. Slow methodic movements, as if not wanting to draw attention to herself. As if the gunmen were already lurking in the shadows of her unattached garage.

When her hands were free, she took another unsteady breath and opened the car door. Then she grabbed her messenger bag and her cellphone, and stepped out, hurrying over to the side door of the garage.

She peeked out the window and scanned the area outside, slinging the messenger bag over her shoulder. She would need to get across the driveway and up the porch steps to the front door, but from this angle she couldn’t see the front of the house or the street.

What if she got out there and spotted the SUV out front?

What if those men had followed her after all?

Glancing around her current position, she knew it was a chance she was going to have to take. She couldn’t stay here in the garage all night.

She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer before she slowly opened the door and took a step outside. Adrenaline tightening her gut, Sidney stood there for a moment and looked around in the dark, trying to listen for movement. Peeking around the huge rose bush on her right she examined the street out front. A nearby streetlamp offered just enough illumination for her to see a small portion of the street, searching for any sign of the big dark SUV.

When the coast looked clear, she stepped out of the shadows and began her trek to the door. Breaking into a run, she sprinted across the driveway, up the path, and up the porch steps.

Her hands shook wildly and she fumbled with her keys.

The toe of her left shoe tapped erratically against the porch floor. She was a frightened rabbit hammering out a danger warning with her foot.

Door opened, she quickly pushed her way inside, then immediately turned and locked it behind her. Finally safe inside her own home, Sidney’s breath came in shallow pants. She leaned her back against the door, dropping her bag, and slid to the floor right where she stood, wet pants and all.

The tears came freely then, like a gush of water into the lower decks of a sinking ship.

What the hell had just happened?

What had she been witness to?

Those men with the guns saw her. They had seen her face. They shot at her. And on top of everything else wrong in her life right now, this happens?

Those men saw her face, her license plate. Sidney knew exactly what that meant.

She buried her face in her hands and sobbed even harder.

2

Isaac peered around the crime scene with eyes like a hawk — sharp, precise, taking in every detail.

Longish strands of honey-blond hair fell into steel gray eyes when he lifted his gaze and glanced off to the left. A member of the K9 unit opened up the hatch of a marked SUV and loaded up a large yellow Labrador Retriever, one of the department’s drug-sniffing dogs.

At the precinct, Isaac was known to have the uncanny ability to read people and the various situations they sometimes found themselves in with startling accuracy. Something he worked hard to downplay as much as he could.

It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the edge his abilities sometimes gave him on his job. But he did not enjoy the unwanted attention it brought with it. The curious stares, or the slightly frightened frowns when somebody finally asked themselves the how-could-he-have-known-that question.

His brother called it his superpowers.

His former partner, Don Marsh, used to call it creepy.

His mother was fond of the term gift.

Isaac didn’t really call it anything, but he tended to think of it as a pain in the ass.

He reached down with a double nitrile-gloved hand and carefully checked the victim’s pockets, pulling out a worn brown leather wallet with a feather motif etched around the edges. Flipping through it, he quickly learned their victim’s name was Thomas Jenkins Sharp.

Isaac knew he should remove the gloves and touch the poor bastard. He might get lucky. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

He couldn’t deny there were things about his abilities that he kept hidden from others. Things they wouldn’t understand. Hell, he barely understood it himself, and he’d spent a lifetime either lying about it, or trying to pretend it didn’t exist. He told himself he was simply a summa cum laude graduate from Hard Knocks University. He had learned a few things the hard way, and it gave him an insight most people often ignored.

Could that be called clairvoyance?

A sixth sense?

Maybe. But he didn’t need any of that as he looked around this particular crime scene.

It didn’t take any psychic powers to figure out what had happened here, but Isaac wasn’t so arrogant and jaded to think he knew it all either. Fifteen long years on the Cleveland police force had more than assured him of that. And Lord knew if anyone had reason to be jaded, it was him. But he would follow procedure and let the crime scene talk to him instead of jumping to hasty conclusions. After all, every crime was different. Even the ones he had seen a thousand times before.

The place was crawling with uniformed cops and members of the crime scene unit. From the corner of his eye, he saw the coroner’s vehicle pulling in closer so they could prepare to load up the body. The gang was all here.

He looked up and stiffened slightly, quickly drawing his arms in closer to his torso when his new partner, Pete Vega, walked toward him.

Multiple gunshots to the head and chest from point-blank range. Victim bled out on the street like an animal. His tone held an edge of disgust and he looked back down at the victim’s body. Definitely gang related.

But the west side doesn’t have a gang problem, Ike, Vega’s voice was saturated with sarcasm.

Isaac grinned. Yeah. You and the Mayor tell that to our victim.

Yeah, well our K9 just hit on the trunk of a car parked a few feet away. Vega motioned to the vehicle in question with a nod of his head. Went right to it the minute Dale got him out. There was nothing found in that trunk though.

All that means is that our shooter took the merchandise with him, Isaac sounded very matter-of-fact as he glanced that way. So, best bet is the car belongs to our vic, and this was somehow a drug transaction gone bad.

That would be my guess, too. Vega nodded.

Isaac turned back to him. Make sure CSU does a thorough check on that vehicle. And then have the uniforms start a canvas of the area. Chances are slim, but let’s see if we can’t find someone willing to talk.

You got it, Vega said, pumping a thumb’s up gesture Isaac’s way before he walked off.

Meantime, I’m going to run our vic, he said, mostly to himself. He studied the man’s wallet again. Find out what our Mr. Thomas Jenkins Sharp was into.

He looked back down at the body, and at the Medical Examiner going over him. Anything else you can tell me, Hiroshi?

Dr. Hiroshi Sato pushed his wire-rimmed glasses further up on his nose with a gloved finger and shook his head. Until I get him on my table I would say your initial assessment of the situation is pretty much on the money. But you know the drill, Ike. I’ll be able to tell you more after I do my thing.

Isaac nodded and tried to ignore the increasing growl of his stomach. He could murder some potstickers right about now.

Still holding his arms in close to his body, he turned and pointed to one of the CSU techs passing by. You. Follow me. Hey, Wilson, Barnes! You two, over here, he called out, motioning with a nod of his head for the two uniformed officers to follow him as well.

He led them all just a few feet away from the body. Keeping one hand close to his abdomen, he pointed to the ground with the other. You see these skid marks here? Now, I’m no expert, and it’s tough to tell in the dark, but these look fairly fresh.

The female evidence tech pointed her flashlight at the road to better examine the tire marks. I think you might be right. You want me to document it and get some impressions?

Yes, I do. It might have nothing to do with our crime scene, but we can’t rule that out just yet. He turned to the two officers. It looks like the marks might stretch all the way back to the intersection. So I want you boys to light this area up and then secure this whole space so the lady can get to work.

We’re on it, Ike.

Still not bothering to remove his black nitrile gloves, he left them all to carry out his orders and walked off toward his unmarked cruiser.

Hey, Ike?

Isaac looked over to see Officer Ben Dale, the K9 handler approaching him. He stopped walking and drew his gloved hands up, clasping them together like a preacher in an awkward, yet familiar, stance. One of the many things that made him weird and freaky to his colleagues. Not that he cared. He’d long ago learned to ignore the strange looks and whispered comments of his co-workers.

You got any questions for me?

He loved being the lead investigator on his cases, but the constant pull of everyone deferring to him or looking to him for orders and instructions was sometimes draining. Especially on nights like this one, when they got a late call this close to shift’s end, and all he wanted was to address the emptiness of his stomach. Lunchtime suddenly felt like days ago.

Vega told me Zeus indicated on the vehicle, but we came up empty when we opened it up. I’m betting forensics will tell us another story though. Your dog did good. Thanks for checking with me, Dale.

All right, no problem.

The man started to walk away but stopped.

Hey, you heard from Marsh at all, Ike?

It wasn’t an odd question for Dale to ask. He had been a regular at their monthly poker game, along with M.E. Hiroshi Sato, fellow detective Gary Barker, and a couple of others. A game that had gone into indefinite suspension when Marsh decided to retire and move away. It was a monthly ritual Isaac truly missed. One that had helped keep him sane.

He knew they should simply invite some new blood and reconvene, but somehow Pete Vega didn’t seem like the poker-playing type.

No, not in a few months. Thought I’d give him some time to settle in. Before his move he kept bugging me to come out for a visit sometime. Guess I need to give him a call and set something up.

Well, when you do, tell him I asked about him, huh?

Will do. But that won’t be tonight. Once I do a little digging into our friend over there, I’ve got myself a hot date with some pepper steak and a few egg rolls.

Dale laughed and patted his own stomach. Yeah, I hear ya!

Only when he’d made it back to his unmarked cruiser did he finally pull the thick, black, double layer of nitrile from his hands. He tossed the gloves aside and got on his computer to do a cursory search for Thomas Jenkins Sharp in the system and run the vic’s license plate number. His fingers tapped the steering wheel and he glanced off in the direction of the body and waited for the information to come up.

If he had allowed himself to touch the dead man’s skin without the double layer of gloves he might have gotten a much better sense of what had happened here. But going full-on psych in front of an audience was something he avoided doing at all costs, for all the obvious reasons.

Usually, when he touched someone skin-to-skin he saw something about that person — something they felt or something they did or something they tried to hide from the world. Snippets of their life detonating in Isaac’s mind like disorienting flashbangs.

Sometimes the things he saw were useful, but the unwanted extrasensory knowledge always came at a steep price. When Isaac was a kid, the flashes and the pain they brought with them freaked him out and terrified him like a closet full of monsters. Monsters that would follow him the rest of his life. Monsters that would rob him of any hope of normalcy.

And it wasn’t like he knew how to just turn it on and off whenever he felt like it. Hell, if he