Second Sight Read Free Page B

the sheriff. The woman was already dead when the tires rolled over her.
    He ruled her death an accident.
    Eagle Junction’s weekly newspaper announced that the thirty-eight-year-old woman, Victoria Spencer, was the daughter of Carl and June Spencer of Sheep Springs, New Mexico. Although she lived across the Colorado border in Ouray, police in the Four Corners area of the state knew Victoria—who sported tattoos of barbed wire around her throat and wrists—well. Victoria was the property of the Mongols, a California-based motorcycle gang that sold drugs at truck stops in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.
    New Mexico’s various state and county law enforcement officers would all have agreed that Victoria was destined for a life of crime. Everyone in the Spencer family had been in prison at one time or another. From drugs to assault to fencing stolen property, sheriff’s deputies and state police officers had been visiting the Spencer scrap-metal yard near Sheep Springs for as long as they had been in business.
    Except that when the sheriff of Sheep Springs went to the the Spencers’ to notify them of their daughter’s death this time, there was no answer at the trailer door. In fact, the only sign of life on the two acres of junk cars and rusting appliances was an emaciated Rottweiler that the sheriff had removed to an animal shelter.
    Meanwhile, in the days that followed, two emergency medical technicians who had transported the child’s body to Albuquerque were admitted to Presbyterian Hospital with severe abdominal pains. Then the elderly physician who performed the autopsy on Victoria Spencer in Shiprock came down with violent flulike symptoms.
    Three days later the pathologist who performed the child’s autopsy in Albuquerque began to bleed internally, and four days later both medical examiners were dead.
    Albuquerque’s director of environmental health was notified about the incidents and blood was sent to the CDC in Atlanta for testing.
    No one needed to mention the obvious. Not around Albuquerque. New Mexico had just had a serious outbreak of the hemorrhagic virus called hantavirus in 1993, right there in the same Four Corners area. Now it was critical to find out what the Spencer woman and the child in the Dumpster had in common. If they actually had become infected with hantavirus, state officials needed to know where they had been when they inhaled the spores of the deadly disease.
    The director of health and human services for New Mexico ordered DNA tests for both victims. Then he issued bulletins to every hospital and physician in the state, cautioning them to be vigilant for new cases of hantavirus. No one was going to contract the virus merely by treating flu cases, but extra precautions were required in handling clothing, hair, and bodily fluids.
    A colleague of the New Mexico health director in nearby Oklahoma who had been reading about the two new cases in New Mexico called with a most unusual suggestion. He knew of a blind woman in Philadelphia who was able to envisage the final few seconds of memory in corpses. In other words, he told the director, someone like her might be able to tell you where his victims were before they died.
    The director of environmental health was still chuckling over his colleague’s odd suggestion when the Albuquerque hospital’s administrator called to tell him that the Sheep Springs sheriff who went to the Spencer ranch to locate the parents was now in her critical care unit hemorrhaging from the bowels.
    The health director stopped smiling and had his assistant place a call to the Oklahoma Department of Health to obtain Sherry Moore’s phone number. Meanwhile, his staff arranged to locate and quarantine anyone who had come in contact with the two original victims’ bodies or clothing.
    What harm could there be, he thought, in bringing a psychic here and letting her do whatever she did?
     
    Sherry Moore was having dinner at the Deep Blue Bar and Grill in