Being officially designated Suspect 90210 was a dubious honor at best, as was having one's case assigned to me. Harvey Bell, called "Ding Dong" by the bullies in high school, and "Taco" by the more charitable souls, had both. 5'9" with sandy hair in a spiky style, early twenties, whip-thin runner type on a diet of microwaved cup noodles and Hot Pockets. Garden-variety mind-controlling telepath. He had some skill, but was nothing really to write home about, except for the fact that he was extremely sensitive to psychic probes. Anyone trying to read his mind was quickly crippled by a wash of painful memories--their own, in addition to the many he had gathered from previous victims. This had to be dealt with delicately. That was why I had been chosen.

I was sitting at an outdoor restaurant, making sure everyone ignored me, when he came out of the Denny's across the street. Mr. Bell had a blank-faced waitress following him puppyishly. Casting subtlety aside, he'd merely suppressed her awareness of self and memory, making her little more than a puppet dancing on his strings.

I scratched an itchy place under the patch that covered my left eye--a casualty from my early days. A telekinetic had managed to get a metal fragment through my defenses. I followed Mr. Bell discreetly. To my annoyance, he took her to a motel room he'd procured earlier. To my further annoyance, he'd rented out the adjacent rooms, and this motel was quite free of any of the vermin I occasionally used as spies. I had two choices, watch the encounter through the victim's mind, or slip into an adjacent room and listen. Either choice presented a substantial risk of discovery, but the latter allowed me to keep my mental defenses up, thus reducing the risk of mental injury.

As I installed myself in the room that shared a bathroom with Mr. Bell's, I heard from the sounds coming out that he had already gotten down to business. Unaware of either pain or pleasure, she lay placidly beneath him while he thrusted into her, grunting rhythmically. The temptation was to rush in and take him down while he was distracted, but I needed him to lead me to the others. Though it sounds terrible, I hoped he enjoyed his doll enough to take her home.

No such luck. After a very sweaty time in which he ejaculated in each of the three usual orifices, he dressed her back up and sent her to her place with no memory of the interlude, and no indication that he intended to repeat it. I took a couple of minutes to remove the penile obsession he'd implanted in her and return her libido to normal. Bell settled in for a nap. I meditated.

When Bell awoke and left, I followed at a distance. Despite his talents, he was a rookie, not thinking to quest his mind around to see if he was being followed. His loss. Surely a man with curly, gray hair down to his shoulders and a patch over one eye could hardly be missed by someone who wasn't under telepathic instruction not to notice.

He began to give off waves of aggression. The cause? A police officer was arresting a petty thief on the sidewalk. Bell's file indicated a decided antipathy toward authority figures. As if to prove it, he erased the officer's mind, and puppeteered his body to unlock the thief's handcuffs, before letting it flop to the ground, not breathing. Neither Bell nor the thief stayed around long. I rushed forward to resuscitate the officer. I called for paramedics and a response team, but lost Bell's trail.

It took four days to pick up the scent again. My next confirmed sighting was at the local high school. It was lunch time. He walked straight to the cafeteria. By the time I arrived, all the male jocks and teachers were writhing on the floor in the grip of a hallucination of their worst fears come to life. Meanwhile, heedless of the goings on, the rest of the male population was getting their rocks off inside one female student or another.

Shit, where was Bell? I didn't have time to restore normalcy. I put everyone into a dreamless sleep and called for a clean-up crew while I sought out my quarry once again. I found him out in the parking lot, with three students of varying ages fawning over him.

Instead of merely suppressing who they were, as he had done with the Denny's waitress, he'd made subtle changes to their ideals, morals and ambitions so they felt honored to be chosen, out of their entire class, to come to his home and be his slaves.

So, he intended to keep them. This was just the opportunity I'd been waiting for. Staying out of sight of my distracted prey, I waited as he had one of the girls unlock her car for him. He got in the back, letting two of his lovestruck victims pleasure him while the third drove.

I manipulated the lock of an unassuming vehicle and hotwired it. Following as close as I dared, I let the little snake lead me right into his nest. I parked a block away from where he did. I could see him and the newest additions to his collection making their way upstairs to an apartment. Daring a quick probe, I snatched the apartment number out of the mind of one of the girls.