Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Oh, sure,” Factoid said sarcastically. “Have it in two shakes of a stripper’s tit. Fuck. You think I’m some kind of magician?”

  “I’m not listening,” Niall said to no one in particular.

  “Yes,” Erik said.

  Factoid cracked his knuckles spectacularly, cut the speaker, and got to work.

  “What was that all about?” Niall asked Erik mildly.

  “Not yet. If it’s a false trail, I don’t want to mire anyone else’s speculations in it.”

  “And if it isn’t a false trail?”

  “Life will get very interesting.”

  “You know about the old Chinese curse, don’t you?” Niall asked.

  “Which one?”

  “May you live in interesting times.”

  Chapter 65

  LOS ANGELES

  LATE AFTERNOON

  We’re not getting anywhere,” Erik said, pushing away from the steel table. “We need new information.”

  Niall sucked up the last cold noodle from a soggy carton before he spoke. “At last count, Dana had fifteen researchers combing data.”

  “Not that kind of information.”

  “Then what?”

  Erik looked at Serena. Her eyes were dark, haunted, almost bruised. He didn’t need any particular pattern skills to guess that she was seeing fire rain down out of darkness and knowing all too clearly what her grandmother must have seen and felt and tasted in her last instants of life.

  “We’re looking in the wrong place,” he said. “We need to follow Ellis-Lisbeth’s directions.”

  “Glad to, boyo,” Niall said. “What in bleeding hell were they?”

  “To think like her. To remember Serena’s childhood.”

  “Oh, well, piece of cake.” Niall’s deep, ironic voice mocked every word he spoke. “What’s holding us back?”

  Serena’s eyes focused on Erik. “I’ve tried. But all this”—she waved her hand to take in the room with its high-tech screens, cameras, communications equipment—“distracts me. It just feels wrong.”

  “I know. How can we help?”

  “Hypnosis?” suggested Niall.

  “Won’t work,” she said. “I tried it once to see if it would explain my dreams of mist and forest and a loom I’d never seen filled with patterns that haunted me, people speaking a language that was old before Chaucer.” She shrugged. “I found out I don’t hypnotize worth a damn.”

  “Not surprising,” Erik said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Hypnosis requires suggestibility and trust,” Erik said matter-of-factly. “You’re about as suggestible as a stone wall. As for trust, well, we’ve already been around that track once or twice, haven’t we?”

  She smiled thinly. “Bet you don’t hypnotize worth a damn, either.”

  “Bet you’re right,” Niall said before Erik could. “It’s one of the things I liked best about him. He drove Dr. Cooper nuts.”

  “If you really want to help me remember,” she said to Erik, “let me go back to G’mom’s house. Even though I know nothing is there, I can’t shake the feeling it will help me remember something.”

  “Forget it,” Niall cut in. “You’re not leaving headquarters until we catch the murderer—or murderers.”

  Serena kept looking at Erik.

  “The desert sounds like a great idea,” he said. “I’ve had about as many walls and computer screens as I can take. I always keep camping gear in the SUV. How does that sound?”

  “Like a bloody stupid idea!” Niall snarled.

  She ignored him and smiled at Erik. “I haven’t slept out since I was a girl.”

  “There’s no feeling quite like it.” He smiled at her in return, the lines around eyes and mouth almost sad.

  “Do you have a lantern?” she asked suddenly. “The old-fashioned kind that runs on kerosene or white gas and is pressurized with a little hand pump and has silk mantles that burn with a clear light that is almost as good as sunlight.”

  “Is that the type of lantern your grandmother used?”

  “No,” Niall said. “Repeat, NO.”

  “Yes,” Serena said over him. “Can you find one? The sound and sight and smell of it burning against the darkness is my most vivid childhood memory.”

  “And smell triggers more memory than any of the other senses,” Erik said. “Good idea. Very good. I have one of the old lanterns at home. I’ve always loved the light. Sketches done by lantern light have a special quality.” He held out his hand.

  She took it, lacing her fingers deeply with his.

  “I’m getting Dana,” Niall said harshly. “You fucking well better be here when we get back.”

  Erik glanced at Niall. “Don’t dawdle. It’s a long drive.”

  “Anybody following us?” Serena asked.

  “Not that I’ve picked up,” Erik said, glancing automatically at all the SUV’s mirrors.

  Except Lapstrake, of course, and Erik hadn’t exactly spotted him in the surprisingly heavy evening traffic leaving L.A. He simply knew that Lapstrake was out there somewhere, leading Heller on a merry chase in Dana’s SUV, with one of the security women riding shotgun in a red wig.

  Niall hadn’t liked letting Erik and Serena leave headquarters without guards. He had argued about security with Dana until the walls vibrated; then he had stalked off to orchestrate the inevitable.

  Despite their burning impatience to be away from the carpet of lights and humanity that was L.A., it was almost two hours before Niall declared that he had done all he could. When Erik and Serena had driven away from Rarities Unlimited, they were alone.

  As far as Erik could tell they were still alone.

  “We don’t have to do this,” he said to Serena. “Niall is right about the risk. If Lapstrake didn’t decoy Heller successfully, we could end up with a lot of company out in the desert.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “If I thought I could do this without you, I would.”

  “You’re worried.”

  “Fucking A,” he said sardonically.

  “But only about me, not about yourself.”

  Erik didn’t bother to argue that. “If I get hurt, it’s my own fault. If you get hurt, it’s my fault.”

  “That’s crap.”

  “That’s the way I feel about it.”

  “I can’t be responsible for your irrational emotions.”

  “Bloody hell,” he said through clenched teeth, hearing echoes of his own arguments years ago. “Are you sure you don’t know my sisters?”

  Serena smiled and touched his cheek. The masculine texture of heat and beard stubble made her smile soften. “I’d like to. Are they as smart and stubborn as you?”

  He blew out a breath, then said starkly, “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  Again.

  “And that’s as emotional and irrational as anything I’ve said tonight,” Erik muttered.

  “But much more sensible,” she said.

  His only answer was in the hard set of his shoulders.

  She hesitated, then let out a long sigh. “Erik, I feel it, too. I didn’t want to. I’m not even comfortable thinking about it.” She touched the scarf that nestled around her throat as though protecting her vulnerable pulse. “Yet it . . . is. I knew you before I met you. You knew me. I see another man in you sometimes, like a colored shadow thrown by unearthly light.” She hesitated. “Do you see another woman in me?”

  “Yes. Sometimes. I’m not real cool with it, either. I’m too much a creature of the twenty-first century to be comfortable with anything you can’t reproduce in a lab under specified circumstances.”

  Serena made a muffled sound and then laughed out loud. “Put that way, our worries sound ridiculous. The most important things haven’t been reproduced in any lab—creativity and imagination, laughter and grief, time and memory, hate and love and yearning. Everything that makes us human.”

  He ran the back of his fingers over her cheek and down to the ancient
cloth against her neck, warm with her warmth, vital with her life. “How did I ever lose you in the first place?”

  “I’m guessing we were as stubborn and proud then as . . .” Her voice died, but they both knew what she had been about to say . . . as we are now.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That would explain it.”

  It wasn’t a comforting insight.

  They drove in silence to his home to pick up a lantern that they hoped would be rich with memories of her childhood.

  Chapter 66

  DESERT, EAST OF PALM SPRINGS

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  It would have been more symmetrical to incinerate the old man while he slept, but that would attract too much attention. At least there wasn’t any need for caution or stories about being stranded by a broken radiator hose. The old man was dead drunk. Dead easy.

  Breathing through clenched teeth, a shadow in black clothing stood over the pile of blankets that passed for a bed. The stench rising from the mound was enough to make eyes water; cleanliness hadn’t made the hermit’s short list of virtues.

  “Old man, how can you stand the smell?”

  Black-gloved hands reached out. A quick, jerking twist of bristling chin against thin shoulder, a dry snap, and the transformation was complete.

  Dead drunk to dead.

  Satisfied that no one would become curious about any strange vehicle parked in the dusty yard, the attacker went to the car, drove it around in back, and threw a drab tarp over it. Night glasses were put in place and adjusted for the surprising light of the stars. Only then did the intruder walk into the darkness.

  The deadly shadow moved quickly over the rough land. It wouldn’t do to be late. It was going to be a busy night at the cabin where Lisbeth Charters had lived in solitude and died under a hail of fire.

  Chapter 67

  The helicopter shot a spear of white light over the empty land. Caught in harsh illumination, Joshua trees seemed frozen in horrified surrender, their spiky arms stretched high. The spear of light swept on, quartering the area around the burned-out cabin, looking for fresh tire tracks or vehicles.

  Niall didn’t expect to find anything, but he was a careful man. It had saved his life more than once.

  “Looks clean,” he said finally into the microphone in his helmet. “Take us down.”

  The chopper dropped out of the night like an elevator with a death wish. At the last instant, the pilot adjusted the controls. Butterfly-tender, the chopper’s metal runners kissed the ground.

  “You’re going to misjudge someday,” Niall said into his microphone. “It better not be on company time.”

  Larry’s grin was a slash of white against the glowing amber of the console lights. Fifty feet up the road, the ruins of a dead woman’s home rose out of the little hollow. “What do you think, Ian?”

  The sound of the rotors dropped to a tolerable roar as Lapstrake unhooked the safety harness and reached for his helmet. Before he pulled it off, he said, “I think you’re almost as good a pilot as you think you are. It’s the ‘almost’ that’s giving me gray hair.”

  Larry laughed while he watched both men switch from helmets to very discreet, portable, battery-driven communications gear.

  “You read me?” Niall asked. The hair-fine microphone at the corner of his mouth picked up his words.

  “Four by four,” Lapstrake answered.

  “Let’s go. The way Erik drives, he might not be more than an hour or so behind us. We have to choose our positions and be in them by the time his headlights clear that little rise.”

  Carrying backpacks, both men dropped to the ground and shrugged their gear into place.

  Though the landing had been light, the helicopter wasn’t. The landing skids had dug into the dirt road’s rain-softened surface. Beneath that top inch or two, the baked earth of the desert lay hard and untouched.

  Lapstrake looked at the chewed-up road. “What if Erik spots the marks left by the chopper?”

  “Then he’ll know what he already suspects,” Niall said coldly. “No way in hell I was going to let him go without backup, no matter how much the two of them bleated about having to get away from the crowd in order for Serena to remember.”

  He glanced around. Even without the benefit of the night-vision glasses that he had slung around his neck, he could see that there wasn’t as much cover as he had expected. The trees—if you could call them that—were more like spiky, many-armed scarecrows than real trees. Only Factoid could have hidden behind one of them.

  “Rocks?” Lapstrake asked, pointing toward the closest of the random stacks of boulders that poked up out of the rolling desert.

  Niall grunted. It was a little obvious, but it wasn’t like Erik was going to come hunting. It was more a matter of giving him a feeling of space. Freedom. “Yeah, the rocks. Let’s get rid of the light show.”

  He looked toward Larry and made a gesture with his hand that suggested rotors winding up.

  Larry took the hint. The rotors spun more quickly as the engine revved. Dust, grit, and small pebbles made life a misery for everything within reach of the rotor wash. The chopper vibrated like an eager hound and leaped up into the night. The white shaft of the powerful landing light swept over the two men as the helicopter swung to a new heading.

  Side by side, eyes closed against the whirlwind, ears throbbing from the unleashed roar of the metal beast, the two men waited for the air to calm and their night vision to return.

  They didn’t see the shadow separate from nearby boulders. They didn’t hear anything come up behind them. Without warning something grabbed their hair and slammed their heads together with a vicious cracking sound only the attacker was conscious long enough to hear.

  A different kind of night fell on Niall and Lapstrake, the kind of night a man would be lucky to survive.

  Working quickly, the shadow dragged the slack-bodied men behind the boulders. The slow, dark welling of blood from each man’s skull announced that they were still alive. The attacker considered that fact, then shrugged. If there were questions to ask the men later, they probably would still be alive. If there weren’t any questions, they could die in a few hours just as well as now. A smart person kept as many options open as possible.

  The attacker was very smart.

  Lifting from the silence beyond the hollow came the sound of a distant vehicle. Soon it would be close to the hermit’s turnoff. Then would come the turnoff to the informal target-shooting range. Then would come the ruts that led to the destroyed cabin.

  The shadow worked with redoubled urgency. Backpacks were jerked off and flung beyond reach into the boulders. Quick fingers ripped duct tape off a roll and wrapped it around wrists and ankles with swift motions.

  Within two minutes Niall and Lapstrake had their hands bound behind their back and their ankles strapped together. A few turns of tape across each man’s mouth and around their head ensured that if they came to before they died, they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.

  With a smooth efficiency that told its own story, black-gloved hands frisked the fallen men. First Niall’s weapons, then Lapstrake’s, were stowed behind the attacker’s waistband. Pocketknives were discovered and hurled into the darkness well beyond reach of even a conscious, unbound man.

  Satisfied that the two men were fully helpless, the attacker slipped away and merged with the darkness once more, waiting for the final participants to arrive.

  Chapter 68

  Lantern and camping gear stowed in back of the SUV, Erik and Serena turned off the highway onto the asphalt county road that connected the nearly uninhabited Mojave Desert with the bright lights and crowded ambitions of urban southern California.

  No lights turned off behind them.

  He hadn’t spotted any lights following him from the freeway to his home. No little pickup truck or pale Nissan sedan had been parked in front of North Castle, waiting for him to return. Nor had anyone been nearby, watching with binoculars.

  Or if there h
ad been someone, he or she hadn’t gotten into place quick enough to pick up the SUV when it left North Castle. No one had followed them from Palm Springs to the lonely county road leading east into the Mojave Desert.

  Along with cars and concrete, they had left behind the lid of clouds that had settled over L.A. and was trying to engulf Palm Springs. Even without clouds, there wasn’t as much light as usual. There was no moon to separate the night into slices of silver and shards of black. Beyond the reach of the headlights, a bowl of stars glittered brilliantly overhead, almost bright enough to cast radiant, ghostly shadows.

  Erik kept on checking the mirrors all the way up the asphalt road to the dirt road that led to shacks inhabited by a determined, far-flung handful of desert hermits. Lisbeth had once been one of them. The most resolute one. Her cabin was the farthest away and the best hidden.

  Serena woke up when he turned off the county road onto the dirt road that twisted up and over several miles and many rumples in the desert floor, branching off to cabins or dead ends where the locals came to play with their guns. In the bright glare of headlights, the dirt showed signs that another vehicle—or vehicles—had been on the road since yesterday’s rain, but no matter how often Erik checked, he didn’t see any moving lights anywhere in the landscape ahead of or behind him. The graded dirt road stayed empty.

  Unless someone was driving without lights.

  As an experiment he killed the headlights and went with parking lights alone. Then he went with nothing at all. It was slower, but safe enough as long as you were sure you were the only one driving in stealth mode. The graded road didn’t have any potholes or rocky outcrops to snare the unwary. The ruts leading to the burned cabin were a different matter. They would require care and good light, especially after a rain.

  He turned the headlights back on. If he was going to hit one of the big-eared local deer or a roving coyote, he wanted to see it coming.

  “Well?” she asked, watching him check the mirrors.

  “So far so good. Lapstrake must have decoyed Heller back in L.A. No one picked us up leaving my place in Palm Springs. No one is in our rearview mirror. Or in our windshield, for that matter.”