Read Online Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set by Eric Van Lustbader - Free Book Online
Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
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heart, thumping and crashing like a drum set, threatened to blow a hole in his chest. His hand trembled when he put the CD back on the small stack. He didn’t want them; he didn’t want to move them either. Her iPod was living at home, untouched. He’d palmed it from inside the wrecked car without anyone seeing, the only thing miraculously undamaged. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d promised himself he’d listen to the music on it, but so far he’d failed to work up the courage.
“So difficult,” Garner continued, “I can only hope you can do your job with a clear head, McClure.”
Jack was immune to the taunts. He’d been derided by eighteen-year-old professionals drawing on depths of sadism Garner got to only in dreams. He stood very still now, transferring his gaze from the specific, allowing it to sweep the room instead. He had what in the trade was called soft eyes. It was a phrase difficult to translate precisely but, more or less, soft eyes meant that he had the ability to see an area, a neighborhood, a house, a room as it was, not as it was expected to be. If you went into a crime scene with preconceptions—with hard eyes—chances were you’d miss what you needed to see in order to make the case. Sometimes not. Sometimes, of course, there was no case to be made, no matter how soft your eyes were. But that was a matter out of Jack’s hands, so he never gave it a thought.
Jack walked straight down the center of the room, peered out and down through the windows. They were on the third floor, it was a straight drop down to a blue-gray gravel drive, no trees around, no hedges to break a fall, no wisteria trunk to climb up or down. He turned around, stared straight ahead.
Garner pulled ruminatively on the lobe of his ear. “So far, what? See anything we missed, hotshot?”
Soft eyes be damned. While Jack’s dyslexia robbed him of his ability to see verbally, he received something valuable in return. His multisensory mode of seeing the world tapped into the deepest intuition, an area closed off to most human beings. This same strange quirk of the brain caused Einstein to fail at schoolwork yet become one of the greatest mathematical minds of his century. It was also what allowed Leonardo da Vinci to conceive of airplanes and submarines three hundred years before they were invented. These great leaps of intuition were possible because the geniuses who conceived of them were dyslexic; they weren’t tied down to the plodding logic of the verbal mind. The verbal mind thinks at a speed of approximately 150 words a minute.Jack’s mind worked at a thousand times that rate. No wonder certain things disoriented him, while he could see through the surfaces of others. Take the crime scene, for instance.
Alli had slept here last night until just after three; then something happened. Had she been surprised, driven out of sleep by a callused hand clamped over her mouth, a cord biting into her wrists? Or had she heard a strange sound, had she been awake when the door opened and the predatory shadow fell on her? Did she have any time before being overpowered, before she was gagged, bound, and spirited out across the black lawn under the black sky? Alli was a smart girl, Jack knew. Even better for her, she was clever. Maybe Emma had been secretly envious of her roommate’s ingenuity. The thought saddened him, but wasn’t everyone envious of someone, wasn’t everyone unhappy with who they were? His parents certainly were, his brother was, up until the moment the bomb took him apart on a preindustrial Iraqi highway, somewhere in the back of beyond. After the explosion and the fire, there wasn’t enough left to make a proper ID, so he remained where he died, staring endlessly into the hellish yellow sky that seemed to burn day and night.
These disparate thoughts might have confused a normal mind, but not Jack’s. He saw the room in a way that neither Garner nor any of the forensic experts could. To him
“So difficult,” Garner continued, “I can only hope you can do your job with a clear head, McClure.”
Jack was immune to the taunts. He’d been derided by eighteen-year-old professionals drawing on depths of sadism Garner got to only in dreams. He stood very still now, transferring his gaze from the specific, allowing it to sweep the room instead. He had what in the trade was called soft eyes. It was a phrase difficult to translate precisely but, more or less, soft eyes meant that he had the ability to see an area, a neighborhood, a house, a room as it was, not as it was expected to be. If you went into a crime scene with preconceptions—with hard eyes—chances were you’d miss what you needed to see in order to make the case. Sometimes not. Sometimes, of course, there was no case to be made, no matter how soft your eyes were. But that was a matter out of Jack’s hands, so he never gave it a thought.
Jack walked straight down the center of the room, peered out and down through the windows. They were on the third floor, it was a straight drop down to a blue-gray gravel drive, no trees around, no hedges to break a fall, no wisteria trunk to climb up or down. He turned around, stared straight ahead.
Garner pulled ruminatively on the lobe of his ear. “So far, what? See anything we missed, hotshot?”
Soft eyes be damned. While Jack’s dyslexia robbed him of his ability to see verbally, he received something valuable in return. His multisensory mode of seeing the world tapped into the deepest intuition, an area closed off to most human beings. This same strange quirk of the brain caused Einstein to fail at schoolwork yet become one of the greatest mathematical minds of his century. It was also what allowed Leonardo da Vinci to conceive of airplanes and submarines three hundred years before they were invented. These great leaps of intuition were possible because the geniuses who conceived of them were dyslexic; they weren’t tied down to the plodding logic of the verbal mind. The verbal mind thinks at a speed of approximately 150 words a minute.Jack’s mind worked at a thousand times that rate. No wonder certain things disoriented him, while he could see through the surfaces of others. Take the crime scene, for instance.
Alli had slept here last night until just after three; then something happened. Had she been surprised, driven out of sleep by a callused hand clamped over her mouth, a cord biting into her wrists? Or had she heard a strange sound, had she been awake when the door opened and the predatory shadow fell on her? Did she have any time before being overpowered, before she was gagged, bound, and spirited out across the black lawn under the black sky? Alli was a smart girl, Jack knew. Even better for her, she was clever. Maybe Emma had been secretly envious of her roommate’s ingenuity. The thought saddened him, but wasn’t everyone envious of someone, wasn’t everyone unhappy with who they were? His parents certainly were, his brother was, up until the moment the bomb took him apart on a preindustrial Iraqi highway, somewhere in the back of beyond. After the explosion and the fire, there wasn’t enough left to make a proper ID, so he remained where he died, staring endlessly into the hellish yellow sky that seemed to burn day and night.
These disparate thoughts might have confused a normal mind, but not Jack’s. He saw the room in a way that neither Garner nor any of the forensic experts could. To him
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