Naval combat pilot Lt. Cassandra Morse was blown out of the sky by a mysterious space weapon. When she awoke from a coma, she had the ability to accurately dream future events. Unfortunately, like her mythological namesake, no one believed her.

After she successfully predicted a double homicide, she moved from crank to a media sensation.

Her life was turned on its head when she met an odd little man who claimed to know why she was having her dreams.

While looking for answers, she had her most terrifying dream yet.

Chapter 1

Anyone who had only known Cassandra Morse at the Naval Academy, or when she still had her flight wings, probably wouldn’t recognize her today. For the first time since she had reached puberty, she had let her hair grow out. While not long by civilian standards, her blonde hair, that now reached her shoulders, spent most of its time pulled into a ponytail and sticking out the back of a Dodger’s baseball cap. Lean and hard while in the military, in the past six months she had softened and added a few pounds to her five-foot seven-inch frame. And, much to her surprise, she had developed some curves. Her bust had gone from an athletic “A” cup to a tasteful “B”. Dressed in a flowing linen summer dress, in her postage stamp backyard, she was tending a flower bed in the rear of her home which was on a canal in Venice Beach. She had, much to the annoyance of her four cousins, inherited the house from her grandfather, Admiral Henry Morse. She figured, since she was the only one of her entire generation to stay in the family business and serve in the Navy, her grandfather decided it was a part of her retirement package.

The view from her rear porch was amazing, and the narrow three floor house was far enough from any of the footbridges over the canals that it didn’t get many tourists. The admiral had received the house as a wedding gift from Cassandra’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side, Malcolm Comstock, and it had been in the family ever since. The house wasn’t much, but the land it was sitting on was worth a small fortune. Having been built between the first and second world wars, the plumbing was shot and the electric box still had screw-in fuses instead of circuit breakers. With its age and condition, it was a perfect “knock down” candidate to be replaced before someone nominated it for the National Registry of Historic Homes. Hardly a week went by without a realtor knocking on her door asking if she would consider selling.

That was never going to happen.

Cassandra loved the place because it was only a five-minute walk to the beach and the business district. What she liked the most were all of the quirky and weird people in her neighborhood and on the boardwalk. After a life of rigid military structure, first as a Navy Brat, then Annapolis, then as a combat pilot, it was a pleasant change.

When Cassandra saw the odd little man approaching on the sidewalk between her yard and the canal, alarm bells went off. He wasn’t a tourist; his eyes were locked on her and he was purposely striding in her direction. After her performance the night before, he was most likely a reporter and she had no interest in talking to him. As she turned to go inside, she heard a voice behind her.

“Lt. Morse?”

That stopped her in her tracks. For the past six months she had done everything possible to leave the Navy behind. No one had called her “Lieutenant” since she had moved into her new life.

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” asked Cassandra guardedly. The man didn’t appear to be much of a threat. He was two inches shorter than her and at least twenty pounds heavier. He looked like the effort of vaulting her rickety three-foot-high white picket fence and sprinting the twenty feet to where she was standing was more likely to induce a coronary on his part than any damage on hers.

“We’ve never formally met, but I was in town and saw the article about you in the newspaper this morning. That must have been some meltdown at the police station last night,” the stranger said as he held up a copy of today’s Los Angeles Guardian.

Not owning a television, never reading a newspaper and avoiding the cesspool that was the internet, this was the first she was hearing of the story.

“Crap,” she muttered as she approached the man and snatched the newspaper out of his hands. Above the fold on the top of the front page was a banner headline:

“Dream Lady” Does it Again

Predicts Arson That Kills 2

Below the headline was a picture of Cassandra screaming while being restrained by several uniformed policemen.

Not her best look.

Cassandra felt her anger building again. As usual, she had been right. As usual, the police didn’t listen. Now, two people were dead.

“It happened exactly the way you predicted it.”

“Are you a cop?” She asked.

“No.”

“Are you a reporter?”

“God no,” the odd little man answered.

“Then who the hell are you and why are you bothering me?” Cassandra snapped.

“I’m just a guy who knows why you’re having your dreams.”

“What?”

Cassandra’s heart skipped a beat. Could it be possible? Could someone actually explain the nightmare she had been living for the last six months? Then her skepticism began to creep in. Was this some kind of con man doing a cold read on her? He had read about her in the paper and now was telling her what she wanted to hear.

Her eyes narrowed. “Prove it.”

“If you would like to find out the truth about what happened to you,” he said as he started to walk away, “call the doctor who treated you at the USC Medical Center, Dr. Newman. Ask him if you looked like you had been adrift at sea for twenty-two days,” the stranger said.

“How do you know about that?” asked Cassandra. “That’s classified information.”

“That’s not important,” the stranger continued. “Next, ask him to closely examine this part of your skull in an X-Ray.” He touched the left side of head directly above the ear.

“After you’ve done that, we’ll talk again.”

“Wait!” Casandra shouted as she ran to her fence. “How will I find you?”

“Put a flower on your mailbox and I’ll find you.”

Chapter 2

As the man walked away, a series of high-resolution color stills flashed on a computer screen over three hundred miles north.

The man behind the oversized desk, with three 32-inch monitors in front of him, continued to work the joystick that controlled the camera mounted on the telephone pole near Cassandra Morse’s backyard. As he feared, there was too much ambient noise and wind to pick up much on the microphone and he was only getting an odd word or two here and there.

Phil Levy was an overweight, pimple-faced computer nerd. While he worked out of a basement, at least it wasn’t his mother’s. He had been hired by a mysterious person on the dark web to keep a remote eye on a house in Los Angeles, and the money was enough for him to be able to afford his own place.

For six months, he had watched easily the most boring woman in history. Other than the occasional visits to her backyard, she almost never went outside during daylight hours. He had watched her many nights on the rear camera, as she got hammered on the porch overlooking the canal. On the front camera, he watched her leaving the house in the early evening and returning hours later obviously drunk and more often than not with a man. So far, none of the men had stayed for breakfast, and none had ever made an encore appearance.

He had specific instructions, if anything in her routine changed, he was to call immediately and report it.

He had a knot in his stomach. This was the sweetest gig he had ever had. After he had installed the motion detector software on both of the feeds, it took maybe twenty minutes a month out of his time. With what they were paying him, in cash, he figured, for the time he actually did anything, he had to be earning close to Jeff Bezos’s hourly rate.

Levy compiled a file of the best pictures and sent them along to what he figured would be a world tour of computer servers before arriving at their destination. He was a pretty fair hacker but when he tried to follow the trail, he had gotten lost in a Chinese server farm and had given up. Next, he reached for the disposable mobile phone his mysterious employer had sent him, but he had never used. Levy dialed the only number available in its contact list, which he assumed was another disposable phone. His call was answered on the first ring.

“Yes?” said a female voice.

“This is Mr. Black. I need to speak to Mr. White.”

“Hold.”

There was about a two-minute delay then this time the voice was male. “Yes?”

“She had an unexpected visitor.”

“How do you know he was unexpected?”

“She retreated when he approached and was agitated when he left.”

“This is unusual, how?”

“She has never had a daytime visitor before. Every other man she has ever spoken to was on her arm after last call.”

“I see. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Levy answered as he cleared his throat.

“I had always thought this woman was a cold fish who never showed any emotion. This time was different.”

“Do you have a video of the meeting?”

“Of course.” Levy cleared his throat again. “The audio is really spotty, but I also took multiple still HD photos of the visitor.”

“Excellent. Email the entire package to me.”

“It should already be in your inbox.”

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