And if the boy was deranged enough to kill his own friend, what else was he capable of?

“We need to talk to her . . . without her husband,” I said.

Lon nodded. We marched around the crowd. Lon’s healthy six-foot frame gave him a better view. After a few seconds of shuffling, he spotted them striding across the street. We trailed them, hoofing it to catch up. “You distract him,” I told Lon, then shouted the woman’s name. They both turned around. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

Her face lifted, as if she was more than happy to talk, then her husband said something I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it annoyed her. Lon stepped up immediately, asking the man for directions to the civic center. As soon as the husband began spouting off streets and pointing, I pulled Brenda aside.

“I know this sounds weird, but I think I’ve seen a kid who has a knack strong enough to lift that car,” I said conspiratorially. “He was buddies with Noel. Dark hair—”

“Telly,” she confirmed, nodding her head quickly. “I don’t know his real name, but that’s what Noel called him.” Telly was a common nickname for Earthbounds with telekinetic knacks. I heard it around the bar all the time. “That boy’s been hanging around here a lot over the past few months, showing off, lifting things in the driveway where anyone could see him. Humans live on this block, too,” she complained. Yep, biggest gripe that older Earthbounds had against the younger generation, just like Andrew, the owner of Diablo Market. Don’t show off your knack around humans: it only leads to trouble.

“Did you see him lift the car?” I asked.

“No. It all happened so fast. I saw it in the air, then the crash shook the floor in my house. But I thought I saw someone running. I wouldn’t put it past Telly do something like this. That kid is bad news.” She leaned closer and spoke in a lower voice. “A couple of months ago, someone broke into Noel’s school and stole computers, money from the cafeteria registers. Wrecked the principal’s office and the teacher’s lounge. Did over a hundred thousand dollars in damage.”

Jesus. I remembered hearing about that in the news. “They never arrested anyone, but someone hacked into the school’s security system. Deleted school files.”

“That had to be Telly. Noel’s bragged about Telly’s computer hacking skills. Noel’s mother grounded him a few weeks ago for stealing credit card numbers and using them to buy things online. Noel said it was Telly’s idea. At least, that’s the rumor around the neighborhood.”

“Any idea how his knack is able to do something like that?” I said, nodding to the gruesome scene across the street. “I’ve never known a telekenetic to be able to lift that much weight.”

She shook her head. “No telling with that kid.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“He doesn’t live in town,” she said. “He’s from the suburbs, or somewhere on the coast. La Sirena, maybe.”

Damn. Finding a telekenetic teenage Earthbound in La Sirena . . . well, needle in haystack, and all that. But maybe Brenda saw the disappointment in my face, because she quickly added, “Wherever he lives, he spends a lot of time hanging out under the railroad bridge at the end of Monterrey Street with some other delinquents. I called the cops on them once to chase them out, but they all came back after a few days.”

“Brenda!” Her husband was Mr. Frowny Face again. If Lon shushed me like that all the time, I’d have to tell him where to stick it. Thank God for Lon’s quiet, laid-back ways and his ability to keep the husband occupied long enough for me to get what I needed.

Turning back to Brenda, I mouthed a thank-you right before her testy husband escorted her away. Monterrey Street. Didn’t know where that was, but GPS could find it. I started to tell Lon all about my discovery and suggest we try our luck hunting Telly when a car pulled up, brakes squealing. A blonde Earthbound jumped out. Police tried to stop her from running onto the crime scene.

“This is my house!” she yelled. And when she pushed the officer out of the way and saw the Road Runner, she made a horrible keening wail.

Lon grabbed my arm and tugged me from the chaos. “I can’t be here,” he said sharply as he marched me back to his parked car. It took me a few moments to realize from the pained look on his face that he was trying to disengage his knack. Sometimes when he’s steamrolled with a lot of strong emotions coming from too many people at once, he gets overwhelmed and has trouble tuning it all out. I could only imagine what he could hear right now—the confusion and anxiety of the crowd, the amped up intensity of the police, the mother’s grief. . . .

When we got back inside the SUV, he seemed to have put enough distance between his knack and the scene. “You okay?” I asked.

He shook his head and didn’t say anything more about it. Just started the engine and drove away.

Monterrey Street was a few blocks away, where the rich neighborhood petered off into middle-class, then suddenly connected to one of those sketchy, vaguely ominous pockets of the city that had been neglected for years. Lon slowed the SUV as I peered out my window, eyes following the old, disused railroad tracks that crept along the bridge in the distance. Couldn’t see much from here. It spanned what was once Monterrey Creek, according to GPS, but now looked like nothing more than a weed-infested ditch.

Lon stopped the car a half-block away. “I’m parking here,” he explained. “If this kid can lift cars, I don’t think I want to give him any weapons.”