Free Mind Games by TJ Moore Page A

answers.
    In the kinetic energy of running, Amy was able to focus. She wasn’t running from the evil. Instead, she was confronting it by not letting it sink its claws back into her body. When she ran, jumping over curbs, winding streetlights, shifting for every turn, Amy stayed ahead. The many diversions in her physical path matched her efforts of tricking the evidence to confess its filth.
    Of course, not all cases unfolded on her nightly runs. Amy’s time at the precinct during the day was also a vital part of her methods. There, in the safety of the office, the darkness in the evidence was subject to light.
    Posted on the evidence board, the photos, documents, and suspects had to squint in the fluorescent judgment of the precinct lights, subjecting the evidence to a sort of interrogation.
    The daylight hours revealed logical details, and as the hours passed each day, Amy both feared and reveled the chance to battle the case in the dark. As long as she kept running through the glaring streetlights of San Francisco, she still had a chance to come out on top.
    But she wasn’t just running from evil.
    Ultimately, Amy was chasing truth.
     
     
     
    The pictures from Stefani’s shrin e didn’t quite make sense. His bombs surely weren’t meant for random civilians. Amy thought the victims were probably targeted out of revenge.
    What else was there? The fish tank. Bleach. Bobbing, dead fish.
    Amy noted even those weird things, but weird didn’t mean important. Sometimes weird just meant weird.
    Then she thought of the web of terrorist articles. Amy closed her eyes and rewinded through her thoughts, scanning the front pages of past newspapers in San Francisco regarding possible threats. Her photographic memory made exercises like this a breeze compared to the hours other detectives spent scrolling through microfilm or online sources.
    She recalled the front-page reports of the recent bombings. Back then, no one knew who the real bomber was. Amy now had the luxury of knowing the bomber’s identity, but she didn’t want to focus on the past bombings.
    Now that she had strong evidence Stefani was the San Fran bomber, Amy still had a nauseous feeling that his work wasn’t finished. If Stefani acted on revenge, Amy suspected he wouldn’t even let his own death prevent him from finishing off the targets on his web of photos.
    Amy rewinded through her mental videotape, recalling the various houses and locations of the bomb-fire victims. But again, there didn’t seem to be an obvious connection between victims.
    She leaned toward the pictures on the evidence board, further studying Stefani’s shrine. Nothing jumped out at her, so she looked to the photo of the glass room underground where Stefani kept the touchscreen computer.
    Unfortunately, without the hard drives, there was no way to gather a list of Stefani’s black market clients. Amy feared Stefani’s accomplice, the white-haired man at the keyboard in the glass room, had the power to continue Stefani’s revenge mission. Even though the man vanished from the glass room, Amy was certain the hard drives from that computer still existed and therefore still posed a threat.
    She tried the open-shut method with her eyes.
    Eventually, one photograph stood out to her: a sign to Highway 17. She saw it mid-blink, and the image burned itself behind her eyelids.
    Amy was determined not to let this clue fall into oblivion.
     
     
     
    Cameron rushed into the precinc t and dropped his leather jacket on his chair. Out of breath, he walked up to the evidence board next to Amy, asking something in a mumble, but she shushed him.
    “First, Cam, you’re late. Second, be quiet. I’m working here.”
    He gave her some space and leaned down to tie his shoes. He’d almost tripped running out of the house. It was usually best to just leave Amy alone when she was in her trancelike state; so Cameron went to the break room for some coffee.
    Amy stood back from the evidence board and quieted