Copper Beach dl-1

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “Lot of desert in Nevada.”

  “Knox did let slip one other interesting bit of information. He told me the story of how he and your father had escaped from the mine after Willis tried to murder them. He said that they both nearly died because your father insisted on carrying out a sack of rocks.”

  “You realized that my family probably still had the crystals.”

  “I decided my best bet was to get a job with Coppersmith Inc.,” Frye said. “With my talent, it wasn’t hard to work my way into the Black Box facility.”

  “You became a trusted employee, but you couldn’t find what you wanted most, the location of the Phoenix. And there was no record of the geodes that my father had carried out of the mine the day of the explosion.”

  “Since the stones were not housed in the lab vault, I knew they were most likely either here on the island or down in Sedona,” Frye said. “Couldn’t see the Coppersmith family letting the crystals get too far out of sight. After a couple of visits here, I realized that your private lab was the most likely place.”

  “But my security is good, and you didn’t even know where the vault was located. You needed to get someone inside. And then Cassidy came on the scene, and you saw your opportunity. How did she find the vault in the wall?”

  “There aren’t that many firms that specialize in high-end vaults and safes here in the Northwest. I eventually tracked down one that had a record of an installation here on Legacy a few years ago. There weren’t many details, but a contractor had left some handwritten notes that made it clear the safe had been installed in a basement wall.”

  “Cassidy had the freedom of the whole house when she stayed here with me. But I still don’t know how she found the vault. I never showed it to her.”

  “Finding it wasn’t that hard,” Frye said. “I knew there had to be a phony wall somewhere, and that the vault would be behind it. I gave Cassidy one of the high-end metal detectors we use in the lab. It didn’t take her long to find the lever that opens the wall.”

  “After that, the two of you figured you were home free. You weren’t concerned about your ability to crack the vault. Given your lab equipment and your talent, you assumed that would be a piece of cake. You chose a night when you knew that I was going to be away from the island on a consulting trip.”

  “When you go off on one of those trips, you’re generally gone for several days,” Frye said. “We knew we’d have plenty of time.”

  “You and Cassidy came to the island in a private boat. You anchored in one of the small pocket beaches to make sure no one in town witnessed your arrival. You made your way here and managed to disarm my house security system.”

  “I’ve always had a talent for locks, and yours had come straight out of a Coppersmith lab,” Frye said. “That part was easy. Cassidy and I came down here to the basement. She showed me the mechanism that opens the fake wall.”

  “You got the wall open, but then you discovered that there was a new lock on the safe, one you couldn’t hack.”

  “That damn crystal lock is your own design, isn’t it?” Rage flashed in Frye’s voice and in his aura. “I realized immediately I wouldn’t be able to open it. The only option was to blow it. That’s what Cassidy wanted me to do. But I hadn’t come prepared for that. I knew enough about the crystals to know they were volatile. The last thing I wanted to do was use an explosive device. She was screaming at me.”

  “So you cut your losses and murdered her.”

  “I had to kill her,” Frye said. “I had no choice. She was raving mad, furious with me for failing to get into the safe. She said I was a screwup. I’m pretty sure she intended to kill me. I acted first.”

  “Plan B, stealing the crystals, had fallen apart. You went back to plan A, trying to find the Phoenix Mine. This time, you decided to go at it using a research approach. You spent a lot of time in the Coppersmith company library. You even started a relationship with the librarian, Jenny O’Connell.”

  “Jenny knows a great deal about the hot-books market,” Frye said. “Between you and me, she’s fascinated with it. She even hangs out in some of the underground chat rooms. I asked her to help me search for a forty-year-old lab notebook rumored to contain some experiments performed on some rare earths from an old mine in Nevada. She got a real kick out of the challenge.”

  “Does she know why you wanted to find that notebook?”

  “No. Of course I didn’t tell her anything about the Phoenix or my connection to it. I had to be very careful. Jenny’s a true-blue company employee. She would have gone straight to someone in the Coppersmith family if she had suspected that she was prying into your family secrets.”

  “Good to know,” Sam said.

  “Jenny suddenly caught nibbles of a forty-year-old book that was rumored to be coming up for sale in the private market. The underground chatter was that the book was a notebook containing records of some crystal experiments and that it was encrypted. I knew I had to get hold of it. But Jenny didn’t have the kind of connections required to do a deal deep in the underground market.”

  “Her lack of connections didn’t matter, anyway, because you didn’t have the kind of money you needed to go after an encrypted book. They’re expensive. You had to find another angle.”

  “Yes,” Frye said. “I needed someone in the underground market who could not only find the book for me but also break the code.”

  “So you set out to find your own freelancer. You got lucky and came up with Abby.”

  Frye rocked a little on his heels. “How did you put it together?”

  “You made one critical mistake. You used the Summerlight Academy student records to find the local talent you needed.”

  “You know about that? I admit, that does surprise me.”

  “You were obviously aware that the Summerlight Academy had more than its share of talents among the alumni, because troubled teens with certain para-psych profiles often ended up there. How did you discover that? Were you a student at the academy?”

  “No,” Frye said. “My mother was one of the counselors at Summerlight for years. She had some talent herself, enough to realize that several of the so–called troubled teens in the school were actually psychically gifted. She wanted to follow them and study them over time. She even went so far as to shape the admissions criteria to ensure that families dealing with teens who displayed certain kinds of psychological issues were encouraged to enroll their kids in the academy.”

  “In time, she created a very handy database of talents throughout the Pacific Northwest.”

  “For all the good it did her,” Frye said. “Most of the real talents at the school either dropped out of sight after they graduated or refused to cooperate in her research study.”

  “But you were able to use the records to trace Abby.”

  “The files were very complete,” Frye said. “I found family names and addresses, and the name of the college she had attended. With all that to go on, the investigator I hired had no trouble locating her. After all, she had never left Seattle.”

  “Before you contacted her, however, you wanted to be certain that she could actually deal with serious psi-encryption.”

  “I certainly didn’t want to risk another disaster like the Cassidy Lawrence fiasco,” Frye said.

  “So you set up an experiment to test Abby’s abilities.”

  “When she took the job cataloging Vaughn’s library, I saw the opportunity to conduct my test. Thanks to Jenny, I knew that Hannah Vaughn was rumored to have a small collection of encrypted books in her collection, including The Key.”

  “To run your experiment, you needed another talent, someone you could manipulate with the prism. You chose Grady Hastings out of the Summerlight files, too. How did you get the prism into his lab?”

  Frye snorted. “That was simple. I mailed it to him, explained it was a free sample from an online company that made scientific and research equipment. Miss Radwell passed the test with flying colors.”


  “But you knew that you couldn’t afford her, even if you could get someone to refer you, so you started sending blackmail notes. Abby, however, immediately contacted Webber. By then he had heard the rumors about the lab notebook. He realized that Abby might be in danger. He sent her to me.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Frye hissed. He slammed a fist on the nearest workbench. “It was as if there was a conspiracy against me.”

  “It was a classic example of the oldest law of engineering. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment.”

  “No, it was your fault, you son of a bitch,” Frye snarled. “When luck breaks, it always breaks in your favor. You should have been arrested for murder after you found Cassidy’s body. But you walked away. When the rumors of the lab book started circulating, who does Abby run to for protection? You. I set up a careful, controlled experiment, and you figure it out because you believed the wild story of a kid who has been declared certifiable.”

  “For the record, Grady hasn’t been declared crazy yet. He’s still undergoing observation. But yeah, I figured it out. What are the odds?”

  “Don’t you dare laugh at me, you bastard,” Frye said. “I have as much claim on those crystals as you or anyone else in the Coppersmith family.”

  “In that case, maybe you should have been up front about those claims instead of hiding your true identity, infiltrating Coppersmith Inc. and murdering an innocent young woman.”

  “Cassidy Lawrence was no innocent, but that aside, I had no choice. I knew that you would never give me my share of those crystals or tell me the location of the mine.”

  “Because the stones are dangerous.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Frye was amused. “You’re afraid of them, aren’t you? You and the rest of the Coppersmiths are prepared to let them sit in that vault forever, rather than discover their properties and find out what they can do.”

  “We’re not afraid of them. We’re being cautious with them. We need more advanced technology and instrumentation before we risk running experiments on them.”

  “Your family doesn’t deserve those crystals.” Frye reached into his pocket and took out an object. “So I’m going to take them. Now.”

  “A gun, Frye? That’s a little over-the-top.”

  “Not a gun. Something a lot more interesting. A weapon that only I can use, because I’m the one who constructed it. One that won’t leave any evidence. You Coppersmiths aren’t the only guys who can work crystal.”

  Dazzling energy flashed from the object in Frye’s hand. An icy shock wave lanced through Sam’s senses. He tried to move and discovered that he could not even unfold his arms. The glowing stones and crystals in the cases did not dim, but the atmosphere took on an eerie, foglike quality.

  “What made you think that I created only one prism?” Frye asked. “The one you found in Grady Hastings’s house was a simple version I designed to deliver hypnotic commands. But this one is far more sophisticated. It throws the subject into a trance that is more like a true dreamstate. You will know what you are doing, but you won’t be able to resist my orders. You will open the vault for me, and then you will take your own life using your own gun. For the record, this is what I used on Cassidy. While she was trapped in the dreamstate, I gave her an injection of a fast-acting drug that stops the heart but leaves no trace in the body.”

  The crystals and stones in the display cases were drifting in and out of the paranormal mist now. Sam fought to focus his para-senses and discovered that he no longer had any control over them. He could hear every word Frye said, but he could not respond.

  “The difference between a true dreamstate and your present condition is that under the influence of the prism, you are aware that you are locked in a dream.” Frye walked slowly through the maze of glowing specimens. “Aware that you are powerless.”

  Sam watched one of the glowing rocks in the gallery burst into flames. The fire wasn’t real. He knew that. But in his dreamstate, it seemed very real.

  “I did bring a gun,” Frye said. “But this time, we’ll use yours.”

  He went behind the desk and picked up the pistol. Sam watched, helpless to stop him.

  Frye’s words echoed in his head. You are aware that you are locked in a dream.…

  That was the definition of a lucid dream. According to Abby’s friend Gwen, strong talents were especially good at manipulating lucid dreams: they just had to focus.

  With an effort of will, he succeeded in pulling his attention away from the burning stone. The paranormal flames were abruptly extinguished. But now the darkly glittering interior of one of the geodes summoned him into an endless black hole in the universe. In the distance, he heard a labored ­thud-thud-thud. His heart. He was using a harrowing amount of energy to overcome the effects of the prism.

  A spark of fire caught his eye. He managed to look down and saw that the stone in his ring was burning. Real energy. Not part of the dream.

  “You will open the vault for me now,” Frye said.

  Slowly, painfully, Sam began to unwind his arms. Each tiny movement required enormous effort. It was like moving through quicksand.

  And then he heard the light footsteps in the outer hall. A woman.

  Abby.

  “That will very likely be Miss Radwell, come to see what’s keeping you,” Frye said. “I didn’t plan this, but it’s going to work out well. When your new girlfriend walks through that door, she will be silhouetted against the light, a very easy target. You will kill her, and then you will open the vault. Afterward, you will turn the gun on yourself. Given your recent history of depression, no one will be terribly surprised.”

  The footsteps drew closer. Now he could hear a familiar clicking sound. Dog nails. Abby had Newton with her.

  Sam tried to call Abby’s name, but he could not get the words out.

  It was the damned recurring nightmare made real.

  The footsteps and the clicking stopped. Frye moved out from behind the desk and aimed the gun at the door.

  Sam pulled hard on his senses. This dream was going to have a different ending.

  And suddenly he knew intuitively how to shatter the trance. He focused everything he had left through the Phoenix stone. It was all he had to work with, his only chance to save Abby.

  He found the resonating frequency buried deep in the heart of the stone, the latent power that he had always known was there. In that moment, it was his to command.

  The Phoenix crystal blazed with dark fire, swamping the energy that Frye was using to maintain the dreamstate. Sam came out of the paralysis on a wave of raw power.

  Paranormal lightning arced from the ring, igniting Frye’s aura. Psi-fire blazed around him, enveloping him in flames. He opened his mouth in a silent scream. His body stiffened, as if electrified. The gun and the prism fell from his hands. Violent convulsions racked his body.

  He crumpled and collapsed without making a sound. The paranormal fire winked out. So did Frye’s aura.

  The door of the room slammed open. But it was not Abby who stood silhouetted in the doorway. Newton charged into the shadows, low to the ground, silent and dangerous. He locked his jaws around Frye’s right ankle.

  “Abby,” Sam said. “Call off your dog.”

  Abby appeared. “Newton. That’s enough.”

  Newton released the ankle and trotted back to her.

  “See?” Sam said. “He goes for the ankles every time.”

  Abby ignored that. “Everything okay in here?”

  Sam glanced down at his ring. The crystal was no longer burning.

  He looked at her. “It is now.”

  44

  “WELL, OF COURSE YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT I WOULDN’T do something dumb like open the door and make a perfect target out of myself,” Abby said. She patted Newton’s head. “I watch TV like everyone else. You don’t charge into an unknown situation. But Newton is a lot shorter than me. I knew that no one would be expecting a dog to be the first one
through the door.”

  Newton licked her hand. She fed him another treat, his fourth or fifth, Sam thought. He had lost count.

  Sam raised his glass. “Here’s to Newton.”

  “To Newton,” Willow said.

  “To Newton,” Elias repeated.

  The four of them were sitting in the living room of the big house. A fire burned brightly on the wide stone hearth. The Coppersmith employees and their families had returned to their island lodgings, preparing to leave in the morning. The county sheriff and a deputy had come and gone, taking Gerald Frye’s body with them.

  Everyone seemed to think that Frye had died of a heart attack. There was, Sam thought, nothing to indicate otherwise. He looked at his ring and thought about the raw power he had pulled from the small Phoenix crystal. So much energy from just a tiny stone.

  “Not to take away anything from Newton’s act of derring–do,” Abby said, “but it’s obvious that Sam had the situation under control before Newton and I arrived.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that.” Sam swallowed some of his whiskey and set the glass down on the arm of his chair. He gazed into the flames. “In a weird way, I think it was knowing that you were coming down the hall and that you would open the door that gave me the juice I needed to break through the trance.”

  “You would have escaped from the dreamstate with or without me,” Abby said, with conviction.

  Willow smiled. “You have a lot of confidence in my son.”

  Abby raised her glass. “Another professional.”

  Elias studied her with keen interest. “How did you know?”

  “Know what?” Abby asked.

  “That Sam was in danger?”

  Abby rubbed Newton’s ears. “I just knew. And there was a huge sense of urgency about the knowing. I knew he had set a trap in the lab, so that was the logical place to go first.” She glared at Sam. “I thought you had set up cameras to photograph the killer when he went after the prism.”