He spoke briefly to whoever answered the phone, giving instructions with a relaxed authority.
“Thanks, Bill,” he concluded. “Let me know when you’ve got something.”
Sam ended the call and reached for the wine bottle. When he realized that Abby was watching him, he raised his brows. “What?”
“Must be nice to be able to pick up a phone and have a lawyer snap to attention like that for you,” she said.
“There are benefits to having access to the resources of a privately held company.” Sam poured wine into one of the glasses. “But guys like Bill don’t come cheap, and they don’t exactly snap to attention, sadly.”
He splashed some whiskey into the second glass and carried both across the room to where Abby sat.
“Thank you for trying to protect Thaddeus’s collection,” she said. She swallowed some of the wine and lowered the glass. “It meant everything to him.”
“We might be able to protect his books, at least for now, but if there is an heir and if he or she doesn’t appreciate the value of the collection, the books will probably go straight into the used-book market,” Sam said.
“Or a yard sale.”
Sam drank some whiskey and sank down onto the couch next to Newton. Absently, he scratched Newton’s ears.
Abby smiled proudly. “Newton was a real hero today, wasn’t he?”
“You’re not supposed to anthropomorphize,” Sam said. “Dogs don’t think in terms of bravery and cowardice. He recognized a threat, and he followed his instincts.”
“He was trying to protect me.”
“You’re his pack buddy. Like I said, he was just going on instinct.”
Abby took another sip of wine. “You were protecting me, too. You’re human. Am I allowed to call you brave and daring and heroic?”
“Nope.” He drank some more whiskey. “I was just doing my job.”
“Heroes always say stuff like that, you know.”
“In this case, it’s the simple truth. You hired me to find a blackmailer. Now it looks like I’m dealing with a blackmailer who is getting desperate enough to commit murder and attempted kidnapping.”
“And you hired me to find that lab book. Which reminds me.” She reached into her tote, took out her phone and checked her email. “There are a few new messages. Let me see if any of them are from those dealers I contacted earlier.”
She ran through the new mail. There was a note from her father, reminding her of the signing event, and a message from her stepmother, demanding that she get in touch immediately. Ignoring the first two emails, she opened the third. In spite of her exhaustion, she experienced another flash of adrenaline.
“Here we go,” she said, trying to keep her professional cool. “The auction is scheduled for next week. No preemptive bids are allowed, but it has been noted that my client will try to top any bid. We are guaranteed the opportunity to do so.”
Sam sat forward, eyes heating. Energy whispered in the atmosphere. Newton stirred and raised his head, ears sharpened.
Sam looked at the phone. “Which dealer is running the auction?”
“He calls himself Milton,” Abby said. “But that’s just his online alias. I don’t know anything more about him, aside from the fact that he is one of the dealers who works with the most dangerous collectors and the most dangerous books. I’ve never done business with him, but he says he knows my reputation and trusts that my client is solid.”
“I’ll call one of the people in the IT department.” Sam reached for his own phone. “See if he can trace Milton.”
“I doubt that you’ll be able to find him. Dealers like Milton don’t survive this long unless they are very careful.”
“Thaddeus Webber was careful,” Sam pointed out. “Someone found him.”
22
Imprisoned in the shadows, he watched her walk down the hall to the door of the lab. He called out her name, but in dreams there is no sound. He tried to move, desperate to stop her before she opened the door and disappeared inside the room where death awaited.
He managed to take one step and then another, but the darkness bound him as securely as a prison cell. He knew he would not get to her in time.
At the end of the hall, she stopped and looked back at him, her hand on the doorknob.
He said her name one more time, but she did not respond.
Cassidy.
She opened the door and entered the lab. The killer was waiting for her.…
SAM CAME AWAKE AS HE ALWAYS DID AFTER THE DREAM, BREATHING hard and drenched in sweat. He wrenched the covers aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. He forced himself to take a few deep breaths.
After a while he got up, yanked off his damp T–shirt, pulled on a pair of pants and opened the bedroom door. For a moment, he stood in the shadowed hall and studied the door across the way. Abby was inside that room. She had not invited him to join her. He had not pushed. His intuition warned him that she not only needed sleep, she needed time to come to terms with whatever had happened between them last night.
One night of hot, psi-infused sex did not a relationship make, he thought. Well, it had for him, but he could tell that Abby was having trouble with the concept. It was probably hard to focus on your personal life when you were worried about people with guns trying to kidnap you. A woman had to set priorities. So did a man, and keeping Abby safe was his one and only priority now.
He started down the dimly lit hall toward the stairs but paused when he heard the click of dog nails on the other side of Abby’s bedroom door. Newton was awake and alert inside the room.
“It’s okay,” Sam said, keeping his voice to a whisper. “Go back to sleep.”
He went downstairs to the kitchen, turned on a light and took the whiskey out of the cupboard. He poured a medicinal shot and drank it, leaning against the granite counter. The heat of the liquor burned away the last fragments of the dream.
When the glass was empty, he thought about going back to bed, but that would be futile. He would not sleep again tonight. He never did after the dream. He would be awake until morning, so he might as well do something productive.
He turned off the light, left the kitchen and went down to the basement. He walked along the hall, the same hall that appeared in the damn dream. The ghostly images of Cassidy walking this path to her doom were not from his memories. He had not been in the house that night. But he had imagined how it must have happened so many times that his reconstructed version of events had become as detailed and as graphic as a photograph.
He opened the door and went into the chamber. The energy in the room stirred all of his senses. The lab was drenched in darkness, but the specimens in the glass cases were all hot. They burned most strongly at night.
He jacked up his talent and walked through the dazzling rainbow of paranormal light. The hues ranged across the spectrum, from icy ultrablack to hot ultrareds and on into the silvery ultrawhite energy that the old alchemists had called the Hermetic Stream, the water that did not wet the hands.
The raw-amber pieces were especially powerful to his heightened senses. He stopped in front of a glass case and studied the copper-and-gold radiation given off by the specimen inside. The same color as Abby’s hair, he realized. He smiled a little and reached out to open the case.
Soft footsteps and the click of dog nails sounded in the hall. He turned away from the case and saw Abby and Newton silhouetted in the doorway. Abby had a flashlight in her hand. The beam speared into the lab, illuminating one of the glass cases.
Newton trotted into the room and immediately began to investigate the space, his nose to the floor.
Sam looked at Abby. She had put on her robe and slippers. Her hair was a wild storm of curls around her face. His slightly jacked senses got hotter.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.
She moved slowly into the room. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” He went to the desk and flipped the switch on the lamp.
/> “Not much in the way of lighting,” she said. She switched off the flashlight. “I think of labs as being sterile, brightly lit places, like the Coppersmith Black Box.”
“They often turn off the lights in the Box. Paranormal energy is more vivid to the senses in darkness.”
“Yes.”
She walked slowly toward him, gazing into the cases that she passed. He felt energy shimmer in the atmosphere and knew that she had heightened her talent. He would know her aura anywhere and in any light, he thought.
“What do you see when you look at these stones?” she asked.
He looked at her, not the gems and crystals that surrounded them. She dazzled his senses more than any of the rare stones in the room.
“Fireworks, rainbows and a thousand shades of lightning,” he said.
“I can sense that they’re hot. Anyone with a scrap of talent could figure that out.” She stopped a short distance away. “But I don’t see fireworks, rainbows and lightning.”
“That’s because you’re not looking at what I’m looking at.”
“What are you looking at?”
“You.”
She took a step closer, and then another, until she was only a foot away. She raised her hand and brushed her fingertips across the phoenix tattoo that covered his shoulder.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked.
“A dream woke me.”
“A bad one,” she said. It was not a question.
“A recurring one.”
“Was it about the woman you were dating? The one who was killed here in this room?”
“Cassidy Lawrence. Good guess.”
“Not a guess,” Abby said. “Intuition. What really happened that night?”
“Damned if I know.” He exhaled slowly. “I was on an assignment with that private contractor I told you about. I finished the job early and got the feeling that I needed to get back here to the Copper Beach house as soon as possible. I arrived sometime after midnight. Knew something was wrong immediately.”
“Bad energy?”
“There was definitely some of that, but the really big clue was that the alarm system had been turned off.”
“By Cassidy?”
“I don’t know. I never gave her the code. Maybe she had some good hacking skills. But my theory is that it was the killer who deactivated the system. I entered the house. Nothing appeared to be disturbed, but I could feel the psychic residue that murder always leaves. Same thing I sensed today at Webber’s house. Death leaves a calling card. I found Cassidy’s body in here. There was no obvious sign of violence. The authorities and everyone else concluded that she had taken an overdose of some exotic club drugs.”
“Suicide?”
“No. I’m sure of it. Trust me, Cassidy was not the type.”
“But you never found the killer.”
“No.”
“What do you think happened that night?” Abby asked.
“I’ve gone over and over all possible scenarios, and I keep coming back to the only one that works. It was a setup right from the beginning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cassidy must have helped engineer the whole thing. I don’t want to believe it, because it makes me look so damned stupid, but there’s no other explanation that fits. Serves me right for breaking the rules.”
“What rules?”
“Never date the employees.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“At a gem-and-mineral show in Arizona. I hit most of the big events each year, because you never know what might show up. Once in a while, there’s a hot stone. At that show, one of the dealers had a very interesting chunk of psi-infused quartz. It was obvious that he didn’t realize what he had. In fact, the only other person in the vicinity who clearly recognized the nature of the quartz was the spectacular-looking woman standing next to me.”
“Cassidy.”
“Right. One thing led to another. She was smart, gorgeous and talented. And she was as obsessed with hot rocks as I am. She wanted a job with Coppersmith. I introduced her to the director of the Black Box. Frye hired her immediately. Talent like hers is hard to come by.”
“But the two of you continued to date,” Abby said.
“I started bringing her here on weekends. But she wasn’t supposed to be on the island the night she died.”
“Why was she here? Did you ever figure it out?”
“The only logical explanation is that she came here with her partner to steal the Phoenix stones.”
“I don’t understand,” Abby said. “Why would she think they were here in your lab? You said that those stones disappeared in the explosion at the mine.”
“That’s only half true. The stones that Ray Willis had removed for analysis and experimentation vanished. But my father escaped from that mine with a small number of geodes containing hot crystals. The stone in my ring is from one of them.”
Abby studied his ring, fascinated. “That’s one of the Phoenix crystals?”
“Yes. Dad split one of the geodes and removed three of the smallest crystals. He had them made into rings and gave one to my sister, Emma; one to my brother, Judson; and one to me. But so far they’ve served mostly as reminders of our obligation to protect the stones. We can run a little psi through them, but none of us has been able to figure out how to tap the full power of the latent energy in the crystals. And we’re not sure it would be smart to do so.”
“But you can sense that energy?”
He glanced at the ring. “Yes. The three crystals are all different. Even though they came out of the same geode, they are not the same in color, and they appear to have different properties. Emma, Judson and I each responded differently to them. Each of us chose the one that compelled us the most. This was the stone that somehow resonated with me.”
“Where are the rest of the Phoenix crystals?”
“They’re in a vault here in the basement. But that’s one of the problems with the scenario that I’ve been working on. I never told Cassidy about the stones. Never showed her the vault. As far as I knew, she had no knowledge of the Phoenix Mine or the rocks that Dad hauled out of it.”
“Yet somehow she came to know your family secrets.” Abby concentrated for a moment. “You said she was a talent with an affinity for stones that was similar to your own.”
“Right.”
Abby looked around the chamber. “She spent time in this lab with you. Maybe she could sense them.”
“I doubt it. They don’t actually give off a lot of energy unless you know how to tap into the heat. No one ever notices the one in my ring. It’s the same with the crystals Emma and Judson wear. Besides, the stones in the vault are shielded behind an inch of steel. But maybe her accomplice knew something she didn’t know.”
“You’re sure she had an accomplice?” Abby asked.
“It’s the only answer. He’s the one who killed her.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That’s one of the many things I don’t know,” he said. “The only thing I am sure of is that whoever was here that night, he or she did not get the vault open. The stones are still inside.”
“Could be her accomplice wasn’t all that good with locks,” Abby said.
“Even a first-rate locksmith with some serious talent wouldn’t be able to open the vault. It’s got a one–of–a–kind crystal mechanism. Designed it myself.” He held up his hand to show her the stone in his ring. “It can only be opened with one of the rings, and whoever did it would have to be able to push a little energy through the stone.”
“What about explosives?” Abby asked.
“Sure, you could blow the safe, but it would be an extremely dangerous operation, due to the unpredictable nature of the stones inside. Whoever was here that night knew better than to try that approach.”
“So Cassidy’s partner got this far that night, realized he couldn’t get into the safe and decided to cut his losses,” Abby said. “He started with
his accomplice, Cassidy, the one person who could implicate him.”
“I think that’s how it went down. I also think it’s time you had a look at what this situation is all about.” He walked toward the far end of the room.
Abby trailed after him. “You’re going to show me the lock?”
“I’m going to open the vault and show you the stones. You’re in this as deep as I am. You have a right to see what my family has been protecting for the past forty years.”
He went to the far end of the room and pushed the concealed lever in the wall. A panel of fake stone slid open to reveal the steel door of the vault.
“That safe looks much newer than the rest of the house,” Abby said.
“It is. For years Dad used a top–of–the-line security system designed by the head of our Black Box lab, Paul Lofgren. He was an old friend of my father’s. Lofgren died a few years ago. After I moved into this house, I wanted something more secure. I designed a new one. It was made to order by a firm in Seattle. I played around with various crystal devices until I came up with the obsidian lock and the Phoenix keys.”
Abby gave that some more thought. “Did anyone outside the family know that you changed the lock?”
“No. It was another Coppersmith family secret. You’re thinking that whoever arranged the burglary that night expected to find the old lock in place, aren’t you?”
“It might explain why things ended the way they did.”
“That’s my conclusion as well.”
He held his ring to the chunk of obsidian that was set into the wall and pushed a little energy through the crystal. The black stone glowed with dark light. The thick steel door swung open slowly. Faint currents of ghostly energy wafted out into the lab. Newton growled.
“I see what you mean,” Abby said. She moved closer to get a better look. “Whatever is inside doesn’t feel particularly hot. The vibes are definitely strange, however.”
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