Hostage by Kay Hooper Page A

promise of it, to persuade them to transfer him. He either took the chance or was reasonably sure he could exercise some kind of control over the two agents. Maybe they were all he could handle.”
    “Makes sense,” Callie agreed.
    “He had to have practiced in prison. We may know little about psychic mind control, but common sense says nobody learns how to successfully control the minds of two other people the first time they try, and he was in there for weeks waiting for his trial, and months after his conviction. He must have taken every chance to practice when he was relatively alone with someone else. His cellmate. Maybe a guard or two. Even his legal counsel. Especially his legal counsel.”
    “Privileged communication and so not monitored even within a highly monitored prison,” she agreed. “That would have been a good chance. Except that he had no visits from his attorney.”
    “None at all?”
    “No. A couple of phone calls, but there wasn’t much chance of an appeal. The prosecution had him cold. They caught him with about a hundred grand on him, all of it from the robbery. Security footage from the bank when it was actually robbed wasn’t much use because of a glitch, but they had footage of him pretty obviously casing the place the day before. They had his fingerprints. Even his DNA.”
    “Should I ask how they had that at the scene of a bank robbery?” Luther asked warily.
    Callie smiled. “The place was busy when he got there, and he killed a little time while he was covertly studying the layout pretending to fill out a deposit envelope. Which he licked.”
    “Not very bright.”
    “Well, in fairness to him, the camera footage shows him shoving it into a pocket. His bad luck that it fell out before he left and was missed by the cleaning crew that evening. Fingerprints on the envelope matched those later discovered in the vault.”
    “He didn’t wear gloves?”
    “Latex ones. One of which he left behind in the vault; the techs got his prints from the inside of the glove.”
    Luther shook his head and frowned as he thought. “So he’s caught, tried, convicted, sent to prison. Talks to his legal counsel only over the phone. What about visitors?”
    “No visitors.”
    “What, none at all?”
    “No.” Callie was certain. “Or mail. And no Internet connection. At all. In fact, no computer access; prisoners only get that after proven good behavior. Once he was inside, and except for a couple of brief calls from his attorney, he only had contact with the people inside.”
    “No family?”
    “A half sister, considerably older. Not so much estranged as complete strangers; her mother got total custody after a young, brief marriage, and Jacoby’s father apparently never saw her again. He remarried, then started a second family when his son was born. Far as we were able to determine, Cole Jacoby never met his half sister and likely doesn’t know she even exists.”
    Luther frowned. “Okay. So no visitors maybe makes it even more likely that Jacoby had to spend a lot of time practicing, figuring out what he could do. And maybe easier on strangers. He still could have been trying to control other minds a long time before he escaped.”
    “Trying, yeah. But even being semi-alone with his cellmate, or a guard or two now and then, it wouldn’t have been easy even for an experienced psychic to control any abilities, especially such a specific ability, with so many violent minds all around. So much negative energy. Prison bars can hold prisoners, but their violent energy permeates the place. It . . . soaks into the walls and floors. The older the prison, especially a high-security prison, the more negative the energy. Where they kept Jacoby the energy was very dark and very bleak.”
    After studying her for a moment, Luther said, “You appear to speak from experience.”
    She nodded. “Prisons were one of the places I visited when we were trying to analyze my abilities. Square foot by square