Lystra went to live with a very nice, childless family by the name of Reid, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She got straight As in school while barely bothering to crack a book. She wasn’t just a smart kid; she was brilliant. A cold, emotionally distant, friendless-but-never-bullied kid.

But at age fourteen things began to change. Not her grades, those stayed top-notch. But at about that time Lystra began to talk to her long-distant father again. He would speak to her when she was walking through the corridors at school. He would speak to her as she sat in the Baptist church and listened to the sermon. Her lip would curl when she heard him. Her eyes would focus with inhuman intensity on the back of a man’s neck until by sheer force of will she could make him turn around, uncomfortable, only to become confused when the danger he sensed turned out to be just a young girl.

Her father’s voice spoke to her. And other voices as well. Angels, sometimes, though not the better sort of angel. And the voice of a girl with the odd name of Scowler.

She never told anyone about the voices; they had universally warned her not to. Yeah, don’t tell anyone we’re here, they’ll lock you up. Yeah.

Then both her adoptive parents had died in a car accident. The particulars of the accident raised eyebrows but elicited sympathy. Lystra had been sixteen at that point, just learning to drive. And despite the fact that Lystra had played various online driving games for years, she panicked while driving the real thing. She had not realized the car was in reverse. She did not notice that her parents were standing behind her, down at the bottom of the long driveway.

The police questioned her for a long time. The detectives could not quite square her story of intending to pull the car forward slowly into the open garage with the fact that the car had been in reverse and had shot at surprisingly high speed the sixty-seven feet between the rear bumper and the two Reids.

“When I realized it was in reverse, it was too late, yeah. I saw what was about to happen, and I knew what to do, but instead of hitting the brake I accidentally hit the gas pedal.”

“And then?”

“I felt the impact, and my only thought was that I should pull the car forward. Yeah. Undo my mistake.”

“Right. And in the process you ran over both of your parents again. That’s your story. You’re sticking to that?”

“How can I do otherwise? It’s the truth.”

No, they had not believed her. No one believed her. People who knew Lystra Ellen Alice Reid scoffed at the notion that she had panicked. Panic? Lystra, panic?

But in the end the cops couldn’t prove a thing.

There wasn’t a lot in the way of a social services department in Tulsa, but a shrink was tasked with testing her.

“She’s a very difficult subject,” he had reported. “Hard to test. Her IQ is very high—very smart, very quick—so she knows how to answer, how to avoid setting off alarm bells. But my instinct tells me she’s concealing something. At times I got the impression she might be hearing voices. Phantom voices. She may just be traumatized. Or she may be schizophrenic but with enough control to hide it.”

Lystra was the sole heir to a million-dollar life insurance policy that was doubled due to the fact that the death had been an accident. Double indemnity, they called it.

Two million dollars. She’d been unable to touch it until she was eighteen, and at that time other family members had petitioned the court to examine her psychologically again.

The court had found her legally sane.

The voices in her head had congratulated her on the finding.

On her eighteenth birthday, Lystra had filed papers to form the Mad Alice Holding Company. And she’d gotten her first tattoo. She’d told the tattoo artist, “I want my adoptive parents, like in this picture. But I want them to be screaming.”

The tattoo artist had been reluctant, but an extra thousand dollars had cured him of all doubt.

The placement she’d chosen was strange. Her stepmother was beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight of it. Her stepfather, also screaming, was beneath the other.

Once both tattoos were complete, they began to speak to her. They wept, sometimes. Other times they threatened. She heard their voices so very clearly. If she stripped off her shirt and her bra, she could see their mouths moving as they cried out in pain and despair.

But they could be useful, too, the talking tattoos. It was the dead Mr. Reid who suggested using her inheritance to buy a small, failing medical testing company outside of Washington, D.C.

So the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a successor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a midsize competitor in the medical testing field had suffered a catastrophic hacking that had spilled the records all over the Internet.

Lystra Reid bought the stricken company and brought in the best security people around to ensure that a similar fate would never befall her. The result was a medical testing company, Directive Medical, which had never suffered a successful break-in, while—not so strangely—security problems plagued her competitors.

At the age of twenty-four, Reid controlled a third of the independent medical labs in North America, as well as significant portions of other markets around the world.

It was amazing what you could learn from data mining the health records of more than two hundred million people worldwide. You could, for example, learn that the wife of a brilliant medical researcher named Grey McLure had a rare cancer. And you could learn that this McLure fellow was suddenly in a desperate search for living cell samples. And with just a bit more work you could discover that he was also looking for a wide range of animal tissue samples for a very secret project of some sort.