Psych:Mind-Altering Murder Read Online Free PDF

mirror.
    What Juliet O'Hara saw was herself, flying. There was the long blond hair, the blue-and-gold cheerleader's sweater and short pleated skirt revealing the toned tan legs floating effortlessly above the tiled floor.
    She blinked hard and forced away the sensation of flight. Blinked hard and forced herself back to the now.
    It was remarkable how strongly the young woman resembled O'Hara. It wasn't just the hair and the cheerleader's uniform; her face was the same Kewpie-doll oval and her eyes that piercing blue. She was a few years younger than the detective, but it was hard to tell by how many because of the way her eyes were bulging from their sockets and her mouth was twisted into an agonized grimace.
    The cheerleader was flying, but gravity's gentle hand could not bring her down. There was a rope around her neck, tied to a pipe that ran across the ceiling, and it held her a foot above the ground.

Chapter Five
    G us glanced at his watch, then looked down at the orange chicken congealing on the plate in front of him. When the kid in the paper hat with a panda on it had dropped it on his table forty-seven minutes ago, Gus had picked up the plastic fork and made an attempt to eat a little of it. Even after two tines snapped off somewhere between the outer layer of citrus-flavored goo and the inner shell of deep-fried chicken skin, he still thought he might nibble at a couple of the smaller pieces. But before he could yank a chunk of chicken out of the rapidly hardening sauce, his stomach growled a warning and sent a tendril of bile into the back of his throat. If he tried to swallow anything from this plate, he'd have reason to regret it.
    It wasn't the quality of the food that was turning Gus' stomach. He'd eaten at several Chop Them Sticks outlets since they started popping up a few years back, and the Orange You Glad You Ordered the Chicken was always exactly the same--hardened nuggets of dubious poultry in a sauce that tasted like double-strength orange Jell-O. That was fine with Gus, who had long believed that an entree that doubled as dessert saved both time and money.
    Gus looked back at his watch just in time to see the larger hand slide over the four. In ten minutes it would be twelve thirty, and in ten more his flight would start boarding. He'd timed the walk from the strip of fast-food restaurants to the terminal and he knew it wouldn't take him more than five minutes. Security wouldn't add more than another five. The Burbank airport's main midweek function was as a commuter portal, and since even the most laid-back techie tried to get to work no later than noon, the lines were rarely long this time of day.
    Better yet, Gus was leaving from the smaller of the two terminals. He'd decided to fly into San Francisco, even though it would cost half as much to land in Oakland. It wasn't simply the convenience of being able to hop on a BART train at SFO that would take him to his ultimate destination--for the difference in ticket price Gus could have hired a limo in Oakland and still had money left over for a substantially better lunch than the one in front of him.
    It was, in fact, the ridiculously higher ticket price that convinced Gus to fly from Burbank to San Francisco. He didn't think he'd left any clues about his trip, even making his plane reservations from what might have been Santa Barbara's last pay phone. If he'd been careless, though, he didn't want to make it easy for Shawn to track him down. That meant doing the opposite of what his friend would know he'd normally do. Which was, of course, to take the easiest flight or the cheapest, those two rarely occurring together.
    If he'd cared about cost, he would have flown out of LAX, where competition between airlines served to keep prices low. If convenience had been the key, there were frequent, if ludicrously costly, flights from Santa Barbara International to the Bay Area. Driving eighty miles down the always jammed 101 to Burbank only to spend as much as