Eileen trailed off. One of Rosen’s eyebrows was raised exactly like Mr. Spock’s on Star Trek, and Joe couldn’t help it. He started laughing like a fool.
“Hey, this guy has got something,” he said, raising his hands as Eileen looked at him with a thunderous expression. “It’s just, you know, Monterey, and meditations, and communicating with the aliens . . .”
“He gets this way sometimes,” Eileen said coldly to Rosen. This only made Joe laugh harder, so he flapped his hands at Eileen and Rosen and headed to the kitchen. It was far too late for coffee or a soda pop, so he snitched one of Rosen’s distilled water bottles from the refrigerator. The cold, tasteless water soothed his throat and dried up his laughter.
When he came back in, Eileen and Rosen were still at the window, watching the snow. There were already a couple of inches on the streets. It was going to be a big one, a fall storm that would break tree limbs and paralyze city services for a day or so. Then the sun would come out and everyone would whoop and laugh and throw snowballs at one another. A few men would drop dead of heart attacks shoveling the heavy snow, like modern sacrificial offerings to the storm, then a few days later, the snow would be gone and people would wear shorts to the parks. That was the Front Range for you.
“Okay, I’m better,” he announced. “Want some of Rosen’s water? He’ll be pissed when we’re stuck here for three days and he runs out because I drank it all.”
“I have more in the car,” Rosen said evenly. Joe grinned at him, feeling a bit friendlier towards him. Rosen had a sense of humor after all.
“So who cares if this guy got his information from the aliens,” Joe said. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? It puts everything together.”
“You’re right,” Eileen said, smoothing the paper with her fingers. “It is bizarre, but there’s the Taos Hum, and the Northridge earthquakes, and a plausible reason for setting off a Tesla earthquake.”
“Not only plausible, but heroic, really,” Joe said. “If you can keep a fault like the San Andreas from hitting an 8.0 level, you can save thousands of lives.”
“Heroic,” Alan said from behind them, startling them all. He was blinking and rubbing at his eyes. “Maybe they started out that way, but then they killed Krista. Why, because she found the place where they set them off? They killed her because she stumbled on to something she shouldn’t have? What kind of heroics is that?”
“Not heroic at all,” Joe said evenly. “They killed Jim Leetsdale, too, you know.”
“We know who heads the project,” Eileen said in a musing, thoughtful voice. Joe looked at her sharply. She was looking at Rosen, who gave a very small shrug to his shoulders.
“Jacob Mitchell,” she said to Joe. “We met him the day we investigated Leetsdale’s murder. This man practically had ‘bad guy’ tattooed on his forehead.”
“We saw his worst side,” Rosen said. “There must be other sides to him. He’s got a lot of power.”
“Do we have enough of a linkage to get a DNA sample from him? For Krista?” Eileen asked. Rosen was already shaking his head.
“Not enough,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Why not?” Alan asked, clearly exasperated.
“Because privacy laws make DNA sampling a very tricky issue, Mr. Baxter,” Eileen said coldly. “Private citizens have a right to keep their DNA to themselves, and that’s the way I like it. We can’t take a sample from Jacob Mitchell without his permission, or unless we have some very good circumstantial evidence that he’s committed the crime we suspect him of. We don’t have those things.”
“Damn it,” Alan said.
“Can’t have it both ways,” Joe said, and grinned at Alan to take the sting from his words. “We can’t complain about government assassins and then allow Detective Eileen to go taking blood samples from innocent citizens.”
Alan flung his hands out, then laughed ruefully. “You’re right,” he said. “I admit it. So how do we get evidence? Find our killer over the next dead body?”
“No,” Eileen said. “Particularly not since the next dead person is likely to be one of us.”
“Lucy?” Rosen asked.
“She’s working on her side. I’d call her right now with what we’ve found but she’s definitely sleeping. Remember the time zones make it even later there.”
“Let’s send e-mail,” Joe suggested.
“Encrypted,” Rosen said abruptly. “If someone is searching for keywords in e-mail, they could find Joe.”
“Who’s Lucy?” Alan asked.
“A friend of ours,” Joe said after a moment. “She works in Washington, D.C.”
“Let’s do it, then get some sleep,” Eileen said. “We all need it.”
“Do we need to set watches?” Alan suggested. “I was just thinking perhaps we shouldn’t all sleep at once.”
“Good idea,” Joe said. “I’ll take first watch. I’m still wide awake. I’ll send Lucy e-mail. Do you have a regular password with her, Eileen?”
“Yeah, it’s ‘peckish,’” Eileen said. “Lucy picked it. I hope she has something else for us.”
“Me too,” Joe said, and briskly rubbed his hands together. “Ready for bed? Alan, why don’t you take the couch? Rosen, I have a camping mattress in my second bedroom. And Eileen, you take my bed for now.” Joe tried very hard for nonchalance and avoided looking at Alan.
“Sounds good,” Eileen said. She leaned into Joe and kissed him, then disappeared toward the bedroom without another word. In a very few minutes, Joe was alone in his study with the door closed. He could hear the wind-driven snow beating against the side of the house. Little hoots and howls screamed around the corners of the eaves, making sounds like a hundred masked killers sneaking towards the house. Joe wasn’t afraid. He knew what it was like to be out in weather like this; buffeted and blinded, freezing cold and unable to breathe through the wind that snatched your breath away or stuffed your mouth full of flying snow. It was not a night for anyone, much less human killers.
“Hey, Lucy,” he typed. “It’s Joe. I’ve got some interesting stuff for you. First of all, let me fill you in on what’s happened here the last few days . . .”
Crestone, San Luis Valley, Colorado
“I love Albuquerque lows,” Daniel said.
Marcia grinned at Lady Jane and took a sip of her spiced tea. It was spiced with more than herbs; Jane had tipped a generous slug of brandy into each glass. Marcia had no idea if the brandy was expensive or not. Probably not, considering Daniel’s salary as a teacher. But Marcia had never had any money to develop a taste for fine brandy. The herbal tea, the roaring fire, the company, and the enormous white blizzard made the brandy taste as fine as anything she’d ever had.
The wind roared around the little cabin. The big sheets of glass at the front of the great room were white and blind with snow. The panes rattled occasionally and sent icy little drafts to make the flames dance in the fireplace. The wood stove in the center of the house was delivering the real heat, but Daniel had lit the big stone fireplace with a roaring fire.
“For effect,” he’d said with a grin.
“Feeling better?” Jane asked. “Or should I make the next one mostly brandy?”
“Feeling lots better,” Marcia said with a sigh. “The MUFON team was very nice, actually.”
“Liar,” Jane said comfortably. “They would have spread your guts out on the table and tried to read the future in them if they could.”
“Jane,” Daniel said. “That’s horrible.”
“I know,” Jane said. “But I’m right. They want an alien murder and they’ve only got a standard one, and it’s bugging them.”
“I think you’re right, but you can’t blame them. I mean, us,” Marcia said. “I’m one of them, you know. MUFON is a very meticulous group. They’ll come out tomorrow with an official announcement, and hopefully that will be it.”
“Too late now,” Daniel said. “The Rabble is here in force and the media always pay attention to them. The
MUFON announcement will be ignored because that would lend too much credibility to the UFO-investigation movement.”
“I’ll say the Rabble is here,” Jane said. “When I went into town to pick up Sara today I could hardly believe it. There wasn’t a parking place to be had. I saw a guy walking down the street in a cowboy hat with ping pong balls glued all over it. He’d covered them with aluminum foil. Green aluminum foil.”
Daniel and Marcia sighed in unison. Marcia drained her cup and tilted the empty cup toward Jane with an inquiring look. Jane gave her an evil little grin and disappeared toward the kitchen teapot.
“Just bring the bottle, Hon,” Daniel called after her. “I think I’m going to need it too.”
“Nothing from the cops?” Marcia asked. Daniel shook his head.
“Nothing from Gonzalez. Except I think there might have been another cattle mutilation somewhere in the valley. Something in the way he was avoiding my eyes. Maybe on his sister’s place, maybe somewhere on the Baca Ranch. Wherever it was, they didn’t call me, so that narrows it a bit.”
“People call you?” Marcia asked.
“I photograph, I document, I take them seriously, and I never talk to insurance companies. This allows ranchers to have someone to express their fear and anger to, and also a way to collect on their losses. So far, only a few ranchers have been really hostile towards me.”
“Gonzalez’s sister?”
“Beth Williams,” Jane said flatly, returning with teapot and a brandy bottle from the kitchen.
“She and Jane have never seen eye to eye, you might say,” Daniel said.
“I think she’s a big-arsed snooty bitch,” Jane said.
“Oh, Jane,” Daniel said with a smothered grin. He tilted his teacup to Marcia and addressed her. “She came into the valley with her beautiful baby girl and her gorgeous everything else and I think Beth was a little jealous, that’s all.”
“Huh,” Jane snorted. “Calling me a barefoot slut of a hippie chick doesn’t sound like jealousy.”
“Trust me,” Daniel laughed. “It was.”
“Enough about her,” Jane commanded.
“Okay, so what now?” Marcia asked. She took the cup from Jane, and the buttery smell of brandy wafted up to her nose. The tea was nearly all liquor, this time. She needed it. The MUFON meeting had gone as well as could be expected, but it was exhausting. Marcia had reacted as a normal person and not a field agent, and her lack had been pointed out to her multiple times. This, even though everyone had finally come to the conclusion that there was nothing in the murder of Krista Lewis to suggest anything but a natural, human predator.
“Luckily, I don’t think we have to worry about another murder tonight,” Daniel said. He pointed toward the windows with his teacup. The windows roared with snow. The whiteout was total, blind, and beautiful to watch.
“Not a night for murder,” Marcia sighed, and felt her shoulders relax even more. The brandy was setting up a nice glow in her midsection, tingling her fingers and toes and making her lips go slightly numb. It had been a long time since she’d drunk anything more than an occasional glass of wine with dinner.
“Not tonight,” Daniel agreed. “I was thinking, though . . .” he trailed off. Jane frowned at him immediately, obviously sensing something bad.
“What?” Marcia asked.
“I was thinking that after this storm finishes, there’s going to be a lot of snow over the dunes. For a few days, anything that moves out there is going to leave a trail. A big one.”
“You’re going to go hunting for this guy?” Jane asked, and snorted angrily. “Are you crazy? Who do you think you are, Jackie Chan?”
“No,” Daniel said patiently, “Although I’m not sure I like what you’re suggesting, love. What, I’m a wimpy, geeky math teacher and anybody could knock me over with a feather?”
“No,” Jane backpedaled immediately. “I don’t mean that at all. But this is a murderer, Daniel. You should leave this to—oh.” She stopped, and gave Daniel a small and rueful grin. “Sorry. You were going to suggest that Gonzalez go out there, weren’t you?”
“I was,” Daniel said. “I really don’t care to shoot someone, or whack them about with karate chops, or whatever. If this girl were you or Sara, I would feel differently.”
“I should think you would,” Marcia said through her increasingly numb lips.
“It’s something to think about,” Daniel said. “A nice carpet of white. Maybe he stalks the dunes a lot, maybe he only comes once in a while. If he’s still out there, though, we could get lucky and the storm could get him.”
“I hope it does, the bastard,” Jane said viciously, and raised her glass in a toast to the rattling windows. “To the storm. May it kill the killer, tonight.”
“Tonight,” Marcia said, and raised her teacup at the windows.
“Tonight,” Daniel said, but his eyes weren’t hopeful.
Great Falls, Virginia
“Nikola Tesla? Who the hell is he?” Lucy asked Hank. It was two o’clock in the morning. Hank was starting another tooth, which made Lucy weep with frustration. What was God thinking, making teeth come so quickly in a little baby? Couldn’t he have taken a break from designing octopuses or leopards or something and made teething better?
At least she had something interesting on her e-mail. Hank was nursing sleepily at her breast. The pain medication was starting to kick in and he’d finally stopped wailing. Lucy hated late-night television, even though the armchair in the family room was her favorite place to nurse. Nothing seemed to be on but infomercials and horror movies. So she had carried Hank to her basement office and her second best armchair and logged on to the Internet.
“Wow,” she said, reading Joe’s e-mail. No wonder Eileen was strained. Joe wrote logically and well. His e-mail letters were like computer programs: first this, then that; if this is true, then that must be true.
Lucy grasped immediately the concept of a government program to set off bleeder earthquakes. She could understand the logic of such a concept, and how it could go terribly wrong. There were lots of examples of good ideas gone bad in government programs. The swine flu vaccine. The welfare system. Helium reserves. Mind control experiments. The list was long and full of sometimes fatal blunders. These earthquake games sounded reasonable. Wrong-headed, but reasonable. What was really interesting was Nikola Tesla.
“Let me see what I can find out,” she said. Hank gave a snort and a sigh and let go of her nipple. She looked down and saw that he was fast asleep. “Tomorrow,” she sighed to her computer. “Tonight, I’m going to get some more sleep.”
Briargate Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Joe blinked owlishly over some sketchy drawings of what Nikola Tesla’s earthquake machine might look like. It was very late, nearly three o’clock in the morning. He should have woken Alan Baxter over an hour ago. But like a program that was almost but not quite running perfectly, the pieces of the Tesla puzzle refused to come together.
He thought he had the general story right. A secret government project created small earthquakes to bleed off pressure from major fault lines. They did this using a Tesla device, nothing supernatural or alien about it. Rumors of Nikola Tesla’s plans for an earthquake machine have been floating around the conspiracy-minded population for years.
Joe’s smudged book on Tesla’s earthquake machine seemed simple enough. Evidently Tesla made a device that would create sonic vibrations. His machine would tune these ultra-low frequency sound waves until the waves matched the natural frequency of whatever was interesting to him. The waves would build naturally within the building or the bridge or the fault line until it destroyed itself. The drawings of the Tesla machine were poor. Joe couldn’t even tell how big it was supposed to be.
He looked at the second book in his lap. The book was open to pictures of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a perfect example of a natural Tesla effect. Joe had seen the film of the bridge, along with everyone who took high-school physics. Th
e destruction of the bridge was incredible and, best of all, caught on film. The wind currents down the Narrows in Puget Sound, Washington State, made the brand new suspension bridge vibrate. The vibration became an uncontrollable, spectacular sine wave. The bridge was totally destroyed within a matter of days.
So that was the essence of the Tesla machine. It made a thing vibrate at just the proper frequency, and the thing would shake itself apart all on its own. Earth, buildings, bridges, people even, could be destroyed by this thing. Theoretically, anyway.
Someone, Jacob Mitchell perhaps, headed up the government project to use the machine to help ease pressures on fault lines. A scientist lost his wife and unborn child in one of the bleeder earthquakes and decided to go public with the project. Someone panicked and killed him. A woman stumbled on the location of the project and she, too, was killed. Probably by the same someone, who was now willing to commit murder and perhaps had a taste for it. Detective Eileen Reed, too close to tracking down the killer, was marked for assassination. The killer had to keep killing to cover up each death.
All of this made sense and fit perfectly. There were only two problems, and these two puzzle pieces had Joe Tanner blinking over a dusty book and trying fruitlessly to find a place for them.
First, why the New Madrid earthquake? It was due to go off in two days. It was an 8.0 earthquake, a massive human killer and certainly not a “bleeder.” None of the other simulated earthquakes in Jim Leetsdale’s files had the magnitude of the New Madrid. The only explanation Joe could come up with was that the New Madrid was a simulation only, an earthquake that was not going to be set off by the earthquake people.
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