senses the stag.
Kiel cast a swathe of naivet about her to protect her from her
awareness of him. Momentarily disoriented, her brow puckered in a
frown. Kiel cleared his throat. She had last spoken of Keller, so he
began there. "According to Stuart, Keller knew what was up. Did he
keep a journal?"
"Yes." Robyn gave a quick shake of her head. "But he doodled so much
you could hardly make sense of what he wrote down. That didn't bother
him, of course. He had a nearly photographic memory. But it drove his
secretary and law clerks to distraction--when they weren't howling over
his cartoon figures."
Kiel's consciousness quickened. "That's how he doodled? In
cartoons?"
"Yes. Just quick sketches, but they were inspired, Kiel. He was
really quite good. He paid his way through law school with freelance
political cartoons. When I met him, he would sit in court and draw the
little cartoon figures of the defense attorneys or the judge--even
himself. What I remember best are the little beads of perspiration
popping off the defense attorneys' heads when they couldn't get what
they wanted out of a witness. Keller told me they were called
plewds."
"The sweat drops you mean?"
"Yes." She spelled plewds for him. "He knew all the cartooning
conventions, all the little squiggles and crosshatches and spirals--and
what they were called. Like the little dust clouds Charles Schultz
used. to put all around Pigpen." She hesitated a moment. "Do you
have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about? Being an angel, I
mean."
"Sure. Charlie Brown. Beetle Bailey. Garfield." He tossed off names
of famous cartoon characters, but the truth was, between one instant
and the next, Kiel knew he could pick up a pen and re-create on the
spot any drawing Keller had ever made, any doodle, any cartoon
figures.
He could have told her those dust clouds were called briffits in a
cartoonist's lingo. And the reason he could tell her was that
everything Keller Trueblood had ever known about sketching and cartoons
had just exploded into Kiel's consciousness.
But he could never actually tell her. The list of things Kiel had to
keep from her got longer. Good thing old Gepetto wasn't his Creator.
"Remember," Robyn was saying, "that I told Stuart I hadn't seen the
actual bronze statue that was used to kill Spyder? That Keller
sketched it on a napkin for me?"
Kiel nodded, resigning himself to knowing about these things before she
told him. He changed the subject. "So Keller had a near perfect
memory?" He'd need to know because he would need one even more
dependable--just to keep from screwing up somewhere along the way,
betraying his possession of Keller Trueblood's conscious-hesS. "Give
me an example."
"Other than his law books? He remembered every case he ever read down
to the footnotes." She didn't have to think hard to come up with many
more. "Newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes. Keller could recite
restaurant menus verbatim. It actually took a lot of effort to keep
the minutiae of day-to-day living out of his head." She smiled at the
fond memories that had to "I
never ever saw him look at a menu. Information overload, he called it.
He would just order a steak, medium rare, and fries. And a pitcher of
iced tea to himself."
"Would he have kept a record of what he was thinking when he knew
Stuart Willetts was getting into bed with the enemy?" The answers to
these questions might become available to him as pieces of Keller's
memories returned. Talking with Robyn might jog them. "Any notes
about what he planned to do about it or who he might have spoken to?"
"Yes." Robyn gnawed gently at her lower lip. "He wanted everything
down on paper, for the record, whether he ever had to refer to his
notes again or not. I have his briefcase in the trunk of the car. He
kept a Day-Timer, and he usually recorded his witness interviews on
audiotape. His clerk typed them into transcripts that he rarely used
again because his recall was so. infallible." "How soon did you know
that about him?" "Everyone around him knew, so it was just out there,
like everyone knows the sun's coming up in the morning. I can't say
exactly when I knew it for myself."
She settled deeper into the sofa cushions, hugging the comforter close.
"When I worked with him on the case that I wrote about in Where Angels
Fear to Tread, I started out comparing what he told me with those
records and transcripts as a matter of course--to double-check and
confirm everything as I would in any other case." She gave a delicate
shrug. The crocheted blanket touched her chin. "I never caught him in
a mistake, or even an inconsistency."
Kiel grinned. "You tried?"
"All the time--at first because it was so obnoxious that he was never
wrong." She gave a faraway smile. "Later... after we got to know each
other a little better,
it turned into a harmless game we played. A way to flirt and do
business at the same time."
Kiel flashed on a string of memories, Keller's memo-ties, of "harmless"
kisses and then less harmless ones, and then hotter, far less innocent,
kisses he exacted over time as penalty from Robyn whenever his recall
proved accurate.
He knew in those memories that there came a night in the spring when
Keller had turned up the charm and the pressure and the heat, and Robyn
had responded, challenging him on the accuracy of his recall not
because she knew he was wrong, but for the opposite reason.
She knew he knew, and she knew perfectly well what would happen.
Keller's penalties were Robyn's candy.
Kiel "remembered" how she had defied her attraction to Keller Trueblood
at first. How she held up her professionalism like one of his force
fields to fend off men, how she insisted she didn't want to be involved
with anyone at the time.
She was fierce at first and for days on end, then her resistance caved
in to her own affinity to an intelligent, quick-witted, daring, all-out
man who made her laugh.
Keller's gradual seduction of her never felt carved in stone to her,
like some routine he laid on anyone with breasts and a brain. He
responded to her, not acting on whatever preconceived tactics he knew
of in the battle of the sexes. He battered down her resistance by
being willing to know her. To poking and prodding until he got at the
truth about her. Truths that she would have had to spoon-feed to any
other man she became interested in.
Finally knocking out her own defenses, she accepted his kisses, then
liked them, craved them, invited them, returned them, deepened them,
and came around for them again and again, until one night Keller took
her on the desk in his office and they made love. Neither one of them
was thinking at all or they would have thought to lower the shades and
lock the doors.
No one had ever walked in on them, but Keller figured that was pure
luck and poor planning. And
they figured out soon that they needed a
place of their own: A bed of their own... This breech in Keller's far
more intimate memories knocked Kiel for a loop. He dammed them up, but
unlike the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in a hole in the dike,
Kiel wasn't hopeful that stopping up the leak was going to be enough.
He made light of it all for Robyn, who could have no idea that her
fairly tame revelation had triggered a stampede. in him. "That kind
of recall must he a pretty annoying habit in a husband."
"It was." She laughed softly. Her uncomplicated pleasure did a
little, though not nearly enough, to ease his tension. She stared a
moment into the flames. "Anyway, we could look at his Day-Timer and
his clerk's records." '
"Did he also have copies of the trial transcripts?"
"I would think so, yes. They are probably all in a vault in the county
courthouse. His Day-Timer, though, is in his briefcase."
Kiel nodded. The book might well trigger further memories. He got up
to put another pine log on the fire, then dropped back into the leather
chair. The dry wood crackled and popped in the flames. The scent of
burning pine got stronger. "Robyn, do you believe Stuart Willetts?"
Staring at the burst of fiery crackle rushing up the chimney, she
looped a strand of her raven hair around her finger and twisted. "He
desperately wanted us to believe him. A part of me is so incredibly
offended by what he became--and that he would compare what Keller and I
had with whatever kind of relationship he has with Trudi... but-" She
broke off. "I did. I believed him." She met Kiel's gaze. "Do you
think he was manipulating me?"
Kiel held her look. "I think he knows you're vulnerable to that kind
of emotional appeal--he's not above using it. But I had the sense he
was sincere. That he believes what he said. There's no question,
either, as to how good Trudi Candelaria was at manipulating him."
"None," Robyn agreed. "Although, somehow she just comes off a lot less
trustworthy than he is. Maybe if I'd lived for ten years with a
womanizer like Spyder Nielsen, I'd be as brittle as she is, too. My
problem with believing either one of them is that Keller wouldn't have
been prosecuting her if he didn't believe she killed Spyder. I trusted
Keller's judgment."
"Do you know if he ever prosecuted a person who turned out to be
innocent?"
Robyn nodded. "Once--that he knew of. A capital case. Murder in the
first. A few years later, another man made a deathbed confession. The
reason I trust his judgment so much is that he went to the mat with the
system to free the man he'd convicted of the murder. Keller's career
came to a screeching halt for a while, but he did what he had to do."
Kiel's thoughts turned inward. He didn't know or remember the
specifics of the case she was talking about, but Keller's emotional
memory pulsed. The guilt connected with having sent up an innocent
man, the internal battle between wanting to keep his own record of
righteous prosecutions untainted and knowing better. Knowing his
integrity was on the line.
"The tragedy of it all was that Willie Sandoval died three days before
Keller thought he was going to get the appellate courts to release
him."
A long, shuddering sigh escaped Kiel. He suddenly understood. "Willie
Sandoval is the reason--" He stopped mid-sentence. He couldn't say to
Robyn that the injustice Keller had caused Sandoval was the mason that
he had been assigned to the Avenging Angels as Ezekiel. Those were the
injustices that needed redeeming, so in the Hereafter, Keller was given
that kind of responsibility.
"Willie Sandoval is the mason for what?" Robyn asked.
"For Avenging Angels," he answered, truthful if not totally
forthcoming. "People like Sandoval, ! mean, and the injustices that
happen to them."
"Sort of like a karmic payback? If you cause injustice, you're
condemned forever to fight it?"
"Like that yes." Kiel couldn't restore Willie Sandoval's life, but he
could make sure other injustices like that didn't go unavenged. He
wondered what had become of Sandoval in the Hereafter.
Then there was the matter of Robyn's trust. She believed he'd said
what he was going to say, but he hadn't. Sandoval was the mason Keller
had become Kiel, but he'd generalized because if he hadn't, he'd have
to tell her that he was in fact Keller. He had to wonder again how he
was going to keep from blurting out the truth to Robyn. Every turn in
their conversation seemed littered with the time bombs of Keller's
awareness just waiting to explode into his consciousness.
"Do you know," she asked, her face solemn and interested, the firelight
arranging a spectrum of light colors around her that his gifted,
special sight saw as an aura, "what it was that you did, what injustice
you caused?"
Chapter Six
Like the needle of a magnet pulling faithfully to true north, Robyn had
honed in. He couldn't lie to her. This was a direct question, and
very much against the rules to evade or lie about. "Yes."
She waited for him to elaborate.
His altogether human Adam's apple pitched like a shooting star through
the night sky. "Maybe another time, Robyn."
Her lips pursed. He felt her disappointment like a tidal wave. Her
life was an open book to him; his was dammed shut and locked tight
against her. He watched her snatching a deep breath, repressing the
emotion she felt. She shoved aside the comforter and arose quickly
from the sofa. "I should try to sleep now."
She moved, wraithlike, jerkily, toward the bedroom door in the
flickering orange-yellow light of the waning fire. Kiel didn't want
her to go, especially like this, feeling so slighted, but he couldn't
think of anything to say to stop her, "Sleep well, Robyn."
She turned back to look at him. A long, keen, somehow vaguely familiar
moment stretched unbearably. A pocket of dry sap in the burning pine
bough exploded.
The physical awareness between them that he had been so careful to tamp
down flared. She stared at him. Her pulse quickened. He knew it.
She turned and fled. Kiel's angel heart staggered. As an angel he had
no need for tear ducts, but now he discovered how they worked.
THE HEART OF MODERN-DAY Aspen could be seen inside five blocks, between
Main Street and Durant Avenue. The most renowned photo shots were of
the iron-front Aspen Block in the foreground of Aspen Mountain, but the
most famous landmark, the Hotel Jerome, where celebrities partied, and
the county courthouse, sat on Main Street, the Park Avenue of the
Rockies.
The courthouse hummed with activity. Even this, Robyn thought, was
quintessentially Aspen. The building was a hundred-and-five years old,
but cops also drove thirty-thousand-dollar Saabs.
Detective Crandall was snit in, but the police here were friendly and
helpful to a fare-thee-well. The police officer who took down Robyn's
name to leave a message glanced up when she heard the name Trueblood.
"That's an unusual name. Are you any relation to Keller Trueblood?"
"Yes." She felt pleased for Keller's sake, that he was remembered here
even now, more than a year later. "He was my husband."
Giving Robyn the once-over, the female officer nodded a bit forlornly.
"We all knew he was married, of course, but... well. Don't get me
wrong. I'm happily married, too--" She stopped herself from carrying
on. "Let me see if I can track down Detective Crandall."
"If it's no trouble," Robyn said. "I just wanted to make a courtesy
call. Otherwise, I can catch him later."
She gestured to Kiel. "This is my associate, Ken... um--"
"Kiel," he said, covering her near miss with his name, as smooth as
butter. "Kiel Alighied." Offering his hand, he turned on the
thousand-candle smile.
The policewoman couldn't seem to take her eyes off him, or let go of
his hand.
Subtly stepping on Kiel's toe, Robyn cleared her throat. His smile
faded to maybe a hundred candles. A hundred bright ones.
"I'm ... we're staying at The Chandler House. We'll be in town
researching Colorado v. Candelaria for a few days, and we'd like to
speak to Mr. Crandall. Do you know where we could find him?"
The woman checked a watch schedule. "Actually, he's off duty today.
I'm afraid you'll have to wait and come back tomorrow."
Robyn didn't intend to wait. She'd find the policeman at his home if
that's what it took. She thanked the woman and turned to go. On their
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