The Shadow Hunter by Michael Prescott Page A

sunset, watching massed armies of saguaro cacti raise their spiked arms against the glare, and she asked why the boys in school didn’t like her. She was twelve years old.
    It’s not that they don’t like you her father said. They’re put off a bit. Intimidated, I think.
    This was baffling. What’s intimidating about me?
    Well, I don’t know. What do you suppose might be intimidating about a girl who can climb a tree better than they can, or shoe a horse, or mm and shoot a rifle like a pro?
    She pointed out that most of them had never seen her do any of those things.
    But they see you, Abigail. He always called her that, never Abby, and never Constance, her middle name. They see how you carry yourself.
    Anyhow, you don’t give them much encouragement, do you? You keep to yourself.
    You want solitude and privacy.
    She allowed that this was so.
    We’re a lot alike, Henry Sinclair said. We get to feeling crowded more easily than most. She asked him if this was a good thing. It is, he said, if you can make it work in your favor. When she asked how, he answered. You’ll figure it out.
    Had she? Sixteen years had passed since that conversation.
    Her father was gone, and her mother too.
    She was more alone than she had ever been as a child, and still she got to feeling crowded more easily than most.
    n the evening, after a light supper, Abby went downstairs to the small gym adjacent to the lobby. She used the Stairmaster for a half hour, then left the building and walked into Westwood Village, where she browsed in a bookstore and bought a book on criminal psychopathology and a collection of old Calvin and Hobbes comics. She had never quite forgiven Bill Watterson for discontinuing that strip.
    Burnout, he’d claimed. She wondered how long he would last at her job.
    Mostly her visit to the Village was an excuse to do some people-watching. This was not only her job, it was her hobby. In college she had majored in Psychology because the field suited her temperament. She wanted to observe people and make assessments without being required or even permitted to get close.
    Had she continued with her training, she would have been a licensed psychologist by now. But in the summer after her second year of postgraduate studies everything had changed. She had met Travis.
    He was giving a lecture in Phoenix at the Arizona Biltmore. His topic: warning signs of violent psychopathology.
    He was not a psychologist, but as the head of a leading security firm he had the kind of hands-on experience that trumped book learning.
    She had read a profile of Travis in the Arizona Republic, which was still delivered to her father’s ranch, though her father was no longer there to read it. He had died that June, a week after she earned her master’s degree, and had been buried beside her mother in a family plot. Abby had returned to sell the ranch, a job that took longer than expected. Grief and the relentless summer sun had worn her down, and she looked for any excuse to get away. Travis’s lecture, open to the public, was the lifeline she seized.
    Even without a license, she was enough of a psychologist to know what Dr. Freud would have said about the developments that followed. She had lost her father.
    She was looking for another. Travis was older, an authority figure, and he came along at the right time.
    Whatever her motive, she went to the lecture. Travis was charming. It was not a quality he exhibited with great frequency, but that night he roused himself to eloquence. He told intriguing stories culled from the cases he had handled, mixing humor and suspense, while never allowing his audience to forget that the stakes in his work were life and death.
    Afterward she lingered with a group of attendees chatting with Travis.
    As the ballroom was clearing out, she asked her only question. You evaluate your subjects on the basis of their letters or phone calls, she said. couldn’t do therapy that way. A therapeutic diagnosis requires one-on one