The Vanishing

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “Be careful with the syringe,” Catalina said. “Whatever is inside is poisonous.”

  An officer wearing thick gloves retrieved the syringe and gently placed it into a special container. Someone else took charge of the gun.

  Slater and Olivia emerged from the other room.

  “Are you all right?” Olivia asked.

  “I still say this was a really stupid idea,” Slater said. He wrapped an arm around Catalina. “I swear, if you ever do anything this crazy again I’ll . . . Never mind. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, but this vest is really hot and uncomfortable,” she said. She opened the front of her jacket to reveal the Kevlar vest. “Can I take it off now?”

  “I’ll help you,” Olivia said.

  Danson did not take his eyes off Catalina. Rage spiked in his aura.

  “How did you figure it out?” he said.

  Victor strolled into the room. He was accompanied by Lucas.

  “Ms. LeClair overheard Nyla Trevelyan make a rather sarcastic comment about the difficulties of trying to work with family,” Victor said. “With that information we sought help from an Oracle.”

  Danson stared at him. “Oracle? What are you talking about?”

  Catalina smiled. There was no need to let Trey Danson or the police know that Harmony, using the Fogg Lake ancestry records, had helped them track down Nyla’s half brother.

  Lucas looked at Danson. “Once we had a name, we brought in an expert forensic psychologist.”

  Roger Gossard walked through the doorway. “That would be me.”

  “The problem was that we had zero evidence linking you to the kidnapping of Ms. LeClair or to the murders of Ingram and Royston,” Victor said.

  “Because there wasn’t any,” Danson said.

  “Until now,” Slater said. “Catalina is wearing a wire.”

  “Mr. Gossard was very helpful,” the detective said. “He advised us that if you were smart you would keep your head down and probably leave town. But he said your sense of self-preservation would probably be overridden by your desire for revenge.”

  “After talking to Olivia and me and compiling all the evidence, Roger was able to come up with a psychological profile that accurately predicted your behavior,” Catalina said. “Evidently you’ve got some impulse control issues. All we had to do was dangle the bait.”

  “Oh, my,” Beatrice said from the hall doorway. “This has been such an exciting afternoon. I haven’t had this much fun since my acting days.”

  Danson stared at her. “What the fuck?”

  Beatrice gave him an icy smile. “I knew you thought I was just a doddering old lady but I put up with it because you actually gave excellent investment advice. My sister and I made a lot of money thanks to your talent.”

  “We didn’t have any hard evidence of your involvement in a serious crime so we took a look at your list of clients,” Victor said. “Imagine our surprise when we discovered that one of them was Beatrice Ross, a former actress who retired here.”

  “Born and raised in Fogg Lake,” Beatrice added.

  “When I contacted Ms. Ross and told her our suspicions about you, she agreed to assist us,” Victor said. “Evidently she really did have a few questions about her sister’s death.”

  “This is bullshit,” Danson muttered.

  Beatrice smiled but her eyes were as sharp as gemstones. “You murdered my sister, didn’t you? You knew that I inherited her estate. As soon as you convinced me to take my nephew out of my will and appoint you as the trustee, you would have murdered me, too.”

  Danson was stone-faced now. “I’m not saying another word until I talk to my lawyer.”

  “You’ve already said enough,” the detective said. “And thanks to Ms. Lark we’ve got a recording of every word.” He looked at the team in the flashy SWAT gear. “Get him out of here.”

  Roger looked at Catalina. “Thanks.”

  “You called it right,” Catalina said. “You said Danson would not be able to resist the opportunity to take revenge.”

  “He committed several murders and risked everything to find whatever it was he was looking for,” Roger said. “But it was all for nothing, thanks to two women who operated a small investigation agency. He couldn’t let it go. It was just a matter of time before he went after you.”

  “Thanks,” Catalina said. “I think this case will be very good for your brand.”

  Roger gave her a considering look. “Lark and LeClair could have taken all the credit for this case. Why would you want to help me build my brand?”

  “Let’s just say I recently discovered that revenge isn’t sweet,” Catalina said.

  Olivia smiled. “Besides, the last thing our brand needs is another media frenzy focused on a crazy fake psychic who solves murders.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Gwendolyn Swan went to the door and turned the Open sign to Closed. She crossed the salesroom floor to her desk, picked up the receiver of the old landline phone and placed the call to her sister.

  Eloisa Swan answered on the first ring. “Well?”

  “Bad news, I’m afraid.” Gwendolyn leaned against the counter. “The project is a failure. The Fogg Lake lab has been located, but the Foundation is now in control of it.”

  There was a long silence on the other end.

  “What went wrong?” Eloisa asked finally.

  “I could list any number of things, but in hindsight it’s clear that the biggest mistake was made back at the beginning when the triplets botched the kidnapping. They grabbed Olivia Le Clair without incident, but they missed Catalina Lark that same night.”

  “You said she wasn’t at her apartment when they went to get her.”

  “She had gone to see a client,” Gwendolyn said. “There was an incident at the client’s house. A fork was involved. Lark wound up spending half the night with the police. One thing led to another. Reporters showed up at the front door of Lark’s apartment building early the next morning. The triplets got nervous and called off the operation. They tried to pick her up on the street a couple of hours later but by then the Foundation had a man in Seattle. Things went downhill from there.”

  “Any way to know how the Foundation got out ahead of us on this?”

  “Victor Arganbright was suspicious of Ingram’s and Royston’s deaths from the start. He got nowhere investigating the Ingram case, but after Royston died in a similar fashion, he sent his nephew, Slater Arganbright, to Seattle to take a look at the crime scene. Victor suggested that Slater contact Lark and LeClair for assistance. But by then LeClair had vanished. Next thing I know, Arganbright and Catalina are in my shop asking about Royston’s collection.”

  “If both women had simply vanished simultaneously there wouldn’t have been any trail for Arganbright to follow,” Eloisa mused.

  “Maybe or maybe not. We’ll never know. Regardless, what’s done is done.”

  “Any loose ends?”

  “No. Nyla Trevelyan is deceased. The triplets don’t know anything about you or me. Trey Danson is under arrest for murder and attempted murder. He’ll talk, of course, but if he tries to explain that he was hoping to join a secret organization named Vortex that is dedicated to paranormal research, all he’ll succeed in doing is convincing a judge and jury that he’s a member of the tinfoil hat club.”

  “He knows about you,” Eloisa said.

  “All he knows is what every collector in Seattle knows. I sell antiques and collectibles and trade gossip. He asked me to let him know if anyone came around to my shop inquiring about Royston’s collection. I obliged by informing him Slater Arganbright was in town. That’s not a crime. I doubt if Danson will even mention it to the police, because it will only serve to tie him more closely to Royston’s murder.”

  “Think it will dawn on Danson that he was played?”

  “We didn’t
play him. Vortex made him and his sister a legitimate offer. In exchange for membership in the organization they were required to come up with an entrance fee. They failed. Offer rescinded.”

  “So, no loose ends,” Eloisa said. “One hell of a disappointment, though. Damn it, we were so close to gaining control of one of the lost labs.”

  “It wasn’t the Vortex lab,” Gwendolyn pointed out. “That’s the one we’re after. There will be other opportunities.”

  “The Foundation will be looking for it, too, now that they have some reason to believe that Vortex is more than a legend. We need an edge, Gwen.”

  “We have one,” Gwendolyn said. “The best possible edge. We’ve got Aurora Winston’s diary.”

  “Which is only useful if we figure out how to break her private code,” Eloisa said.

  “We’re making progress. We’ve decoded some of her experimental drug formulas.”

  “Just the simple ones from the first part of the diary,” Eloisa said. “We need to decipher the more heavily encrypted passages toward the end. That was when she started doing her most important experiments in the Vortex lab.”

  “I’ll go back to work on the diary tonight,” Gwendolyn said. A muffled thud from the basement interrupted her. “Oh, damn. I’ve got to go, Eloisa. I’ll call you if I get anywhere with the diary.”

  She put down the phone and went around the end of the counter and into the back room. She opened the door at the top of the basement stairs and hit the light switches. She shut and locked the door and descended the stairs.

  Sure enough, there was another rat in the trap that guarded the underground tunnel. You’d think the idiots would learn that it was not wise to try to steal from Swan Antiques.

  The trap always caught burglars by surprise, probably because it did not look like a security device. It was a clockwork doll about four feet tall dressed in a vintage nursing costume—a crisp white uniform and a perky white cap. In the shadows the syringe in her hand was almost invisible.

  When a would-be thief stepped onto the wooden platform at the entrance of the tunnel, the old-fashioned mechanism swung into action. The nurse’s arm moved in a stabbing motion that delivered a stiff dose of the drug to whatever or whoever happened to be in the way.

  The formula for the drug had come from one of the early pages of Aurora Winston’s diary, a section that was only lightly encrypted.

  Gwendolyn assessed the raider and decided he was too heavy for her to move. She went back upstairs, picked up the phone and called the pest control service.

  “Another one?” The gravelly voice on the other end of the line sounded amused. “That makes two in the past week.”

  “It’s been a busy week.”

  * * *

  —

  Gwendolyn took the diary out of the basement vault and carried it upstairs to her condo, located above her shop. She sat down at her desk, opened her notebook and picked up a pen.

  The experiments conducted inside the lab code-named Vortex had produced an array of results ranging from lethal to extraordinary. But by far the most interesting were the offspring of the man who had been placed in charge of the lab, Dr. Alexander Winston. He had conducted some of the experiments on himself and his wife, Aurora. They had produced a daughter.

  Unfortunately for him, Alexander Winston had not been shy about scattering his sperm far and wide. Most of the women he had impregnated had been unwitting victims of his experiments. Winston had kept careful records of his offspring right up until his wife had discovered his outside activities.

  Aurora had been more than a little irritated. As head of the Vortex lab, Alexander had already taken credit for the results of much of her own brilliant work in the field of paranormal research. Discovering that Alexander was cheating on her had been too much.

  Officially Alexander Winston had died in the course of a disastrous lab accident involving radiation and an unknown crystal. But Aurora had made detailed notes of her husband’s final hours in her journal. Gwendolyn had been able to decipher that section. There was no doubt in her mind about the cause of death. Aurora Winston had exacted her revenge.

  . . . Alex’s delirium grows worse by the hour. He now suffers from extreme anxiety and wild hallucinations. I never leave his bedside. The clinic staff think I am the most devoted of wives. But Alex knows the truth. I see it in his eyes. He has tried to tell the doctors I am responsible for what is happening to him, but they attribute his ravings to the effects of the radiation. Everyone here is convinced that what happened in the lab was a dreadful accident. There is no way I can be blamed. After all, I was in another wing of the lab when the disaster occurred . . .

  After Alexander Winston’s death, management of the Vortex lab had been handed to Aurora, in part because no one else was qualified for the position, but mostly because it was rapidly becoming apparent that engaging in paranormal research was not a smart career path for ambitious scientists. Times had changed, and so had mainstream attitudes. Those who claimed to be psychic or to possess extrasensory perception were often dismissed as charlatans and frauds.

  Nevertheless, Aurora believed in the potential of paranormal research and dedicated herself to it—right up until, with no warning, the entire Bluestone Project was closed down. The order was given to destroy all of the labs, including Vortex.

  Afterward Aurora had become reclusive and increasingly paranoid. Eventually she had died under mysterious circumstances. Her daughter, Pandora, was profoundly embarrassed by her mother’s mental illness. She did her best to ensure a normal upbringing for her own two daughters, both of whom had become successful in their chosen fields.

  Eloisa was a research scientist who currently worked for a pharmaceutical company. After obtaining a degree in archaeology, Gwendolyn had opened Swan’s Antiques in Seattle’s Pioneer Square.

  Pandora had died in a car accident a year ago. Gwendolyn and Eloisa had discovered the diary and, with it, their secret heritage while cleaning out their mother’s house.

  Nothing would ever be the same for either of them.

  CHAPTER 41

  Victor and I have a business proposition to put to the two of you,” Lucas said. “The discovery of the Fogg Lake lab is going to require a lot of professional assistance. We are hoping that the firm of Lark and LeClair will agree to serve as a liaison between the Las Vegas headquarters of the Foundation and the community of Fogg Lake.”

  They were gathered in Catalina’s apartment. Victor and Lucas occupied the sofa. Olivia was in the reading chair. Slater stood near the window. Catalina had put a plate of cheese and crackers on the coffee table and had just finished pouring the wine.

  Lucas’s proposal stopped her cold.

  “Would you define liaison?” she said carefully.

  Olivia’s gaze sharpened with interest. “Yes, please define.”

  “We are well aware that the Fogg Lake community is not thrilled to have the Foundation move into town,” Lucas said. “Unfortunately the Rancourts left an unfavorable impression.”

  Catalina took a sip of her wine. “You can say that again.”

  “We need the cooperation of the locals,” Lucas continued. “We’re afraid that some of the experts on the Foundation staff will not be sensitive to the nuances of the community’s expectations and behavioral norms.”

  “What Uncle Lucas is trying to say,” Slater said, “is that he and Victor are afraid that some of the Foundation people will see Fogg Lake as an interesting biological experiment.”

  “You mean they’ll view the residents as research subjects,” Olivia said.

  “That will definitely piss off the locals,” Catalina warned.

  “We’re aware of that,” Victor said. “Our cunning plan is to establish a satellite office here in Seattle.”

  Olivia’s eyes tightened at the corners. “You want to take over our business?”

 
“No, no, no,” Lucas said quickly. “The Foundation would be a client of Lark and LeClair. The teams from Vegas will be flying through Seattle. We will provide guides to meet them and escort them to Fogg Lake but we want them to stop here first to get some background on the history of the community.”

  “Lark and LeClair is not a travel agency,” Catalina said.

  Victor fixed his piercing gaze on Catalina. “Here’s the rest of the deal, Ms. Lark. While the Foundation will provide security at the excavation site, it’s a given that there will be problems. There always are in situations like this.”

  “Because the artifacts in that old lab are worth a fortune?” Catalina said.

  “Yes. No matter how tight our security is, word of the discovery will leak out and attract the attention of raiders and freelancers. But our primary concern is Vortex.”

  “Assuming it really did exist and that someone is trying to find it,” Catalina said.

  Slater looked at her. “After recent incidents we can no longer assume it’s just a legend. Someone or some group of people is apparently trying to find that particular lab, and they are willing to kill to do it. There’s a high probability that there are some very dangerous secrets inside. It would be best if those secrets did not—”

  “Fall into the wrong hands,” Catalina said. “I get it. You know, what you really should be doing is searching for whoever is trying to find that old lab.”

  “Trust me,” Victor said. “The Foundation is working on that angle. But in the meantime we need to protect the Fogg Lake lab and we would like your professional assistance.”

  Catalina thought about that for a beat. “Huh.”

  Olivia looked at her. “A client is a client, and one thing we know about the Foundation is that it pays its bills.”

  “There is that,” Catalina conceded.

  “We could use the money to move into more upscale offices,” Olivia continued, enthusiasm sparking in her tone. “We would have the resources to go after that niche market of singles-with-a-paranormal-vibe-seeking-singles-with-a-paranormal-vibe that we’ve been trying to figure out how to target.”