Moving Target

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Moving Target Page 21

by Elizabeth Lowell


  There had been no blind phone calls to the sheriff’s office hinting at a possible motive or suspect. No drunken bragging at any of the bars. No pissed-off girlfriend turning in an abusive boyfriend who just happened to like burning grannies. No informant pointing the way for an investigator to follow. No guilt-wracked amphetamine freak walking in to confess. Dead end.

  After several weeks, fresher crimes claimed the attention of the overworked sheriff’s department. Ellis Weaver’s file remained open, but the conclusion wasn’t likely to change: Death by homemade napalm bombs of one old lady at the hands of person or persons unknown. There hadn’t been a crime like it before in the county. There hadn’t been one like it since.

  Erik looked out the window where the little pickup gleamed beneath a trail of moonlight and wondered if the man carried a box of soap flakes and a spare can of gas in the trunk.

  Chapter 37

  LOS ANGELES

  FRIDAY EVENING

  Niall pushed back from his desk and stretched hard enough to make his tendons pop. A quick scan of all the screens showed that Rarities Unlimited was buttoned up for the night, except for the International Division. The people there went twenty-four hours a day. But that was his second in command’s problem; Ruben Valenzuela was in charge of overnight security.

  After another glance at the screens, Niall lifted his worn leather jacket off the back of his chair. If he hurried, he might get to Dana’s kitchen before she added too much pepper oil to the stir-fry. She was always trying to get even for the nuclear curries he prepared.

  The phone rang. It was his private line. Not his most private one, but not a line that many people had a number for.

  “Yeah?” Niall said.

  “Tannahill here. Sheridan isn’t answering her unit.”

  “You want me to cry now or later?”

  “I want you to tell me where she is.”

  “Flea-marketing.”

  There was a faint click from Shane’s end of the line. Experience told Niall that the other man was walking his pen over his hand, and the click came from solid gold pen meeting solid gold Celtic ring. Niall wished he could watch the process. No matter how many times Niall tried the pen-walking trick, the damned thing kept leaping to the floor.

  “Upscale fleas, I trust,” Shane said.

  “Museums.”

  Shane grunted. “Any news on a nice nearly solid gold illuminated manuscript page for my casino?”

  “What kind of news are you looking for?”

  “Price.”

  The laconic answer made Niall grin. He had only played poker with Shane once. It had been a learning experience. One of the things he had learned was how Shane had survived after he told his overbearing daddy to take his billions and shove them where the sun don’t shine.

  “The only one I know about isn’t for sale,” Niall said.

  “Sooner or later, everything is for sale.”

  “Not this. Not today.”

  “When it is, call me.”

  “Norman Warrick gets the first call. If he doesn’t want the pages or can’t afford them, we’ll let you know.”

  “What does the old buzzard want with that page among all the others? Besides, he likes fifteenth-century French stuff.”

  Silently Niall noted that Shane obviously had heard in fair detail about the manuscript pages that Serena Charters had. “I didn’t ask. He didn’t offer.”

  “You’re acting as his go-between?”

  “Not me. Erik North.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “I’m hungry and Dana is cooking without my supervision.”

  There was silence at the other end, then the click that said Shane had quit playing with the pen and had flipped it onto his palm.

  “You’re not the only one who knows about the pages,” Shane said.

  Niall’s eyes narrowed. “Besides you, is there anyone in particular you want to talk about?”

  “Not yet. But if Serena Charters was hoping to keep her pages quiet, she shouldn’t have sent them through the House of Warrick’s mail room.”

  “What else do you hear?”

  “The pages are forgeries. The pages are Nazi loot. The pages are a local history of local political alliances. The pages are from a twelfth-century alchemy text and contain the secret to eternal life.”

  “Oh, Christ Jesus. We’ll be ass-deep in geriatric millionaires.”

  “Young billionaires, too.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe that crap.”

  “I believe that initial page is a fantastic example of Insular Celtic gold illumination. I believe that all the pages came from something that Erik North refers to as the Book of the Learned. I believe that Ellis Weaver’s murder had something to do with—”

  “You got into our files,” Niall cut in angrily.

  “—those pages,” Shane continued without a pause. “I know I want that illuminated carpet page with the intertwined initials for the Golden Fleece’s collection.”

  “How did you get in our files.” It was a demand, not a question.

  “McCoy is very good, but he isn’t God.”

  “And you are?”

  “No, but my daddy dearest wrote the software. He knows where all the trapdoors are hidden and how to open them. He made sure I learned even when I wanted to be out playing hockey in his very own private stadium.”

  “I’m switching software.”

  “To what?”

  Niall snarled some words under his breath. There was nothing even half as good on the software market and both men knew it.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Shane said. “I’ll tell McCoy how I got in your computer system if you’ll guarantee that I’m first in line for those pages.”

  “I’d love to. I won’t. It’s called integrity, a concept you have at least a nodding acquaintance with. My name is on the contract with the House of Warrick and Rarities Unlimited.”

  “You think old man Warrick’s a pillar of honesty?”

  “I think he’s a pillar of shit. What does that have to do with it?”

  “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Warrick would sell you out in a nanosecond.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You’re a good man, S. K. Niall. Too damn good for this world.”

  Niall snickered. “Right, mate. I’m a regular fairy godmother blowing sparkling stuff out my arse.”

  Shane laughed once, roughly, then said, “There’s something ugly oozing around those pages. Watch your back.”

  Before Niall could ask what he meant, Shane hung up. Niall looked at the phone, thought about dialing up Shane again, and decided against it. If the gambler had anything concrete, he would share it.

  All the same, Niall didn’t dismiss what Shane had said. Both men came from a long line of people who respected hunches, luck, and things that go bump in the night. Niall also respected Shane Tannahill for other reasons, one of which was that Shane had what every successful gambler had: a way of understanding people, cards, and circumstances that went beyond the rational surface of probability and odds.

  Hunches, luck, and things that go bump in the night.

  There’s something ugly oozing around those pages.

  As Niall stared out at the sea of lights and the overarching darkness that was Los Angeles, he decided to tackle Dana again on the subject of security cameras in her home. This time he would be a gentleman and a scholar about it. He would give her a choice.

  She could live with cameras or she could live with him.

  Chapter 38

  PALM SPRINGS

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  Serena didn’t know what time it was when she realized that a phone was ringing at her bedside. She was so tired from throwing the shuttle, switching heddles and bobbins, and beating down the weft that she ached from her feet to the top of her head. She had only meant to lie down for a minute and stretch out the kinks. She had fa
llen asleep lying across the bed, with her scarf covering her eyes.

  And now her stomach was growling.

  So was the phone.

  Sighing, stretching, shaking out the fatigue, she got up, settled the scarf around her neck, and reached for the phone. The instant her fingers plucked the unit from the charging cradle, she realized she wasn’t at home.

  “Er, North residence,” she said.

  “Where’s Erik?” asked a brusque male voice.

  “Who’s calling, please?” Serena said in her most pleasant receptionist-dragon voice. Not for nothing had she paid her way through the early years of weaving as an office temp.

  “S. K. Niall.”

  “Oh. His boss.”

  “One of them. Are you Serena Charters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s Erik?” Niall asked again.

  “I don’t know. I was weaving and when I weave, the world goes away. I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.”

  “Try his tower.”

  “Tower?”

  At the other end of the line, Niall sighed. Obviously Erik had been correct: Serena needed a keeper. “His studio. On the top floor. Where are you now?”

  “His bedroom.” When Serena heard her own words, she winced and added hastily, “The guest room looks out on the street and the guy out there was looking in so Erik gave me his room.”

  Niall digested that. “Right. Go to the hall, turn right, go through the living room, take the hallway off the kitchen that looks like it leads to a pantry, open the door, climb the stairs, and bang on Erik’s head until he puts down the damned quill or bitty little paintbrush and pays attention to you.”

  “What about if I just yell from here for him to pick up the phone?”

  “He’ll ignore you the same way he did the phone. When he’s working, he’s impossible.”

  “I resemble that remark.”

  “I wasn’t going to point it out, but since you did, it’s only polite that I agree.”

  Serena snickered and decided she might like Erik’s boss. “Okay, I’m walking out the door and turning right . . .”

  She got lost once, but only because Niall hadn’t counted the coat closet as a door on the way to the kitchen. Soon she was climbing a lovely old spiral staircase up to the broad turret room that had looked so odd from the street. The door at the top of the stairs was open. Just inside the threshold, Mr. Picky was asleep on Erik’s discarded jacket. The room itself was radiant with full-spectrum lights.

  Erik didn’t even notice her. He was working over a steeply slanted table, having found that sleep just wasn’t possible for him. His mind was too crammed with speculations, images, memories that he couldn’t possibly have, fears that were all too rational, and a hunger for Serena that was like nothing he had ever known in his life.

  His eyes blazed with reflected light like yellow gems. In his right hand was a small penknife. In his left was a long, creamy feather.

  He didn’t so much as glance at her.

  “S. K. Niall wants you,” she said.

  Erik grunted, dipped quill into ink, and went back to writing.

  “He’s ignoring me,” she said into the phone.

  “Bugger. Try again.”

  “Erik, S. K. Niall is on the phone for you.”

  “Callhimback,” Erik muttered.

  “I think he mumbled something about calling you back,” Serena said.

  “Is he writing or illuminating?”

  “He has a feather in his left hand, does that help?”

  “Not if he’s at the top of the page. How far down is he?”

  Serena took a few steps and glanced over Erik’s shoulder. “From what I can see, he’s close to the bottom.”

  “Is he wearing a shirt?”

  She blinked. “Er, yes. Why?”

  “Put the phone in his pocket.”

  She hesitated, shrugged, and put the hand unit in the pocket on the left side of Erik’s chest. She told herself that her fingers didn’t tingle where they had slid over his shirt and come into contact with the vital heat of his body. Then she rubbed her hand over her scarf and told herself to think about something else.

  He kept working as though she didn’t exist.

  “Erik?” Niall’s voice rose from the unit held in Erik’s pocket. “Yo, Erik. This is half of your paycheck calling you. Erik? Can you hear me? ERIK!”

  Serena stared at the work that so held Erik’s attention. After a few moments she drew in her breath and made a muted sound of appreciation. With every practiced motion of the quill, he replicated a way of writing that was ancient, difficult, and quite beautiful. Most of the letters looked familiar. Only a few of the words were. The rest were in a language that had died out long, long before Erik North had been born.

  The sheet itself was nearly full of writing but for two rectangles in the midst of text. Each rectangle had a penciled design that was as intricate as it was ancient, based on a view of man and the universe that existed only in old Celtic manuscripts. Once the designs were filled in with paint and gold, they would be breathtaking.

  Then she realized that Erik wasn’t creating text, he was copying it from what looked like a very modern photograph pinned to the right-hand side of the drafting table. Except for the clarity of the copy—the original apparently had faded to almost invisibility—she couldn’t see any difference between the two pieces of calligraphy.

  Erik reached the end of the page about the time his caller reached the end of his patience. He laid the quill aside, dusted the vellum with sand, and grabbed the phone.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Erik said to Niall. “You know if I stop in the middle of the page it always shows, especially with the calligrapher whose work I’m copying right now.”

  “Is Serena still there?” Niall asked.

  Erik looked up as though surprised to find her nearby. She was staring at his replicas as though she had never seen anything like them before. Probably she hadn’t. Replicas as exact as his—down to the technique of tanning the vellum, mixing the ink, making his own colors from recipes a thousand years old—such works were as rare as the originals. More rare, actually. There were only a few people working in the world today who had the patience to do illumination and calligraphy exactly as it had been done in the Middle Ages. He was one of them.

  The best one.

  “Yeah, she’s still here. Why?” Erik said.

  “Serena doesn’t know anything about what I’m going to tell you. If you want to keep it that way, pull your head out of your inkwell.”

  “It’s out.”

  Niall’s grunt said he wasn’t sure. “Tannahill knows about her pages.”

  “Am I supposed to be surprised?” Erik asked, yawning. “He knows anything he puts his mind to knowing. Once I saw that gold carpet page, I figured he’d be sniffing around real soon. It’s better than the one hanging in his gold gallery, and he never liked second place.”

  Serena listened with only part of her attention. She was staring at various works in progress that Erik had pinned to several drafting boards around the room. The writing was complete on each one. The illuminations were in varying states of completion. Unlike a weaving, where all colors were added as needed, illumination was accomplished in stages, one color at a time.

  “Shane is doing more than sniffing around,” Niall said. “He has his ear to the ground.”

  “Sounds uncomfortable.”

  “Listen, boyo. Shane is hearing things about those pages. Ugly things. Watch your back. Get that gun out of hiding.”

  “I—”

  “Hate guns,” Niall cut in impatiently. “I know, Fuzzy boy. I’ve heard it all before. And if you start wearing that nine-millimeter, you’ll live to whine about it again. You still have someone parked out front?”

  “Yeah. We’re back to Bad Billy. The baby pickup took off a few hours ago.”

  “Probably didn’t go farther than the nearest cheap motel.”

  “That’s what I thought
.” Erik smiled thinly. “The good news is that in Palm Springs, even the cheap motels aren’t cheap. He’ll have to go all the way to Cat City for cheap. If a flare goes up, the cops might beat him back here.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “I’m not counting on anything, most of all on a chunk of metal that can screw up fatally.”

  “Every gun jams sooner or later.”

  “If you don’t use ’em, they don’t jam.”

  “Sod it,” Niall snarled. “You aren’t stupid so don’t act it. The smartest mouth in the world doesn’t have the stopping force of the dumbest gun in the world. Wear that pistol or I’ll tear up your contract right now.”

  “Shane really put the wind up your ass.”

  From the corner of his eye, Erik saw Serena walk closer to one of the drafting boards. The page on that one was almost finished. Only the gold foil itself remained to be added. A small “book” of extremely fine gold foil strips lay open in the narrow tray at the bottom of the table. The least stirring in the air lifted the corner of a foil strip, setting it to shimmering with light and hidden life.

  Erik raked his fingers through hair that was two months away from its last cut and spiky from similar careless combing. “All right. Fine. I’ll sleep with the damned thing.”

  “You do that. If I see you without it before I say all clear, the next thing you’ll hear is the sound of your contract being turned into fucking confetti. Got that, Fuzzy boy?”

  “Yeahyeahyeah.” Then Erik cursed and said, “I got it.”

  He was talking to himself. Niall had already punched out.

  Serena didn’t notice. She had discovered a series of before and after photographs. The before ones were ratty, chewed, dirty, with their ink all but illegible and their colors faded to whispers. Only the elemental gleam of gold was untouched by time. The after pages were as luminous as gems, radiant with the color and beauty created by Erik North’s patience and skill.

 

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