JUNE 5 Louis Andretti (28)-Corona, California (snakebite)
JUNE 21 Thaddeus Johnson (New York, New York (murder)
JUNE 30 Rachael Steinberg (23j-San Francisco, California (murder)
JULY S Carmen Diaz (30)-Miami, Florida (fire)
JULY 14 Amanda Cutter (30)-Houston, Texas (murder)
JULY 20 Steven Aimes (57)-Birmingham, Alabama (murder)
AUGUST 1 Laura Lenaskian (28)-Seattle, Washington (drowning)
AUGUST 8 Doogie Burkette (11}-Peoria, Illinois (drowning)
AUGUST 12 Billy Jenkins (8)-Portland, Oregon (traffic fatality)
AUGUST 20 Lisa (30) and Susan (10) Jawolski-Mojave desert (murder)
AUGUST 23 Nicholas O’Conner (6) Boston, Massachusetts (explosion)
Certain patterns were obvious. Of the fourteen people saved, six were
children. Seven others were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty
Only one was older-Steven Aimes, who was fifty-seven. Ironheart favored
the young. And there was some evidence that his activities were
increasing in frequency: one episode in May; three in June; three in
July and now five already in August with a full week of the month
remaining. Holly was particularly intrigued by the number of people on
the list who would have been murdered without Ironheart’s intervention.
Far more people died each year in accidents than at the hands of others.
traffic fatalities alone were more numerous than murders. Yet Jim
Ironheart intervened in a considerably greater number of homicides than
accidents; eight of the fourteen people on the list had been spared from
the malevolent intentions of murderers, over sixty percent.
Perhaps his premonitions more often related to murder than to other
forms of death because human violence generated stronger psychic
vibrations than accidents. . .
Holly stopped chewing and her hand froze halfway to her mouth with
another forkful of blueberry pancake, as she realized just how strange
the story was. She had been operating at a breathless pace, driven by
reportorial ambition and curiosity. Her excitement, then her
exhaustion, had prevented her from fully considering all of the
implications and ramifications of Ironheart’s activities. She put down
her fork and stared at her plate, if she could glean answers and
explanations from the crumb patterns and smears in the same way that
gypsies read tea leaves and palms.
What the hell was Jim Ironheart? A psychic?
She’d never had much interest in extrasensory perception and strange
mental powers. She knew there were people who claimed to be able to
“see” a murderer just by touching the clothes his victim wore, who
sometimes helped police find the bodies of missing persons, who were
paid well by the National Enquirer to foresee world events and
forthcoming developments in the lives of celebrities, who said they
could channel the voices of the dead to the living. But her interest in
the supernatural was so minimal that she had never really formed an
opinion of the validity of such claims.
She didn’t necessarily believe that all those people were frauds; the
whole subject had bored her too much to bother thinking about it at all.
She supposed that her dogged rationality-and cynicism–could bend far
enough to encompass the idea that now and then a psychic actually
possessed real power, but she wasn’t sure that “psychic” was an adequate
description of Jim Ironheart. This guy wasn’t just going out on a limb
in some cheap tabloid to predict that Steven Spielberg would make
another bit picture next year (surprise!), or that Swartzenegger would
still speak English with an accent, or that Tom Cruise would dump his
current girlfriend, or that Eddie Murphy would still be black for the
foreseeable future. This guy knew the precise facts of each of those
impending deaths. . . who, when, where, how-far enough in advance to
derail fate. He wasn’t bending spoons with the power of his mind,
wasn’t speaking in the gravelly voice of an ancient spirit named
Rama-Lama-Dingdong, wasn’t reading futures in entrails or wax drippings
or Tarot cards. He was saving lives for God’s sake, altering destinies,
having a profound impact not only on those he saved from death but on
the lives of the friends and families who would have been left shattered
and bereaved. And the reach of his power extended three thousand miles
from Laguna Niguel to Boston!
In fact, maybe his heroics were not confined to the borders of the
continental United States. She had not researched the international