Copper Beach

17

“DID HE GIVE YOU ANY DETAILS ABOUT THE AUCTION?” SAM asked.

He was at the wheel of his SUV, driving into the foothills of the Cascades along a narrow, winding road. The terrain was turning steeper and more heavily wooded. Abby was strapped into the passenger seat, her attention focused on the view through the windshield. Newton was in the backseat.

Abby had been unusually quiet since she had locked up her condo and stowed her suitcase and her dog in his vehicle. He had sensed how hard it was for her to accept that her home was no longer safe. He wanted to tell her that she could trust him to take care of her, but he knew that would not make up for the temporary loss of the one place that was hers, the small, cozy space where she was in complete control. He understood about control issues. Hell, he had them, too. Who didn’t?

“No, but obviously rumors are circulating that the lab book will soon be up for auction,” Abby said. “That’s good news and bad news.”

“What’s the good news?”

“I know how to track that kind of chatter. I don’t usually do business with the dealers who work the deep end, but thanks to Thaddeus and Nick, I know who they are and I know how to contact them. I’ll try for a preemptive bid for the lab book. Failing that, I can guarantee that my client will top any other offer.” She gave him a quick, searching look. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I want that lab book.” He tightened his hands around the wheel. “Price is no object. What about the bad news?”

“Once the announcement of the auction is made, one or more of the high rollers who want the book will be able to drive the price sky-high.”

“Not a problem.”

“That’s nice to know. What has me worried is that we are now officially in the deep end of the market. Like I told Dawson, some of the collectors are dangerous. If one of them decides he won’t be able to buy the book, he may go after it some other way.”

“He’ll try to steal it?”

“To do that, he would have two likely options. The book is most vulnerable during a transaction. So he can try to identify the current owner or the dealer who is brokering the sale. That won’t be easy. If that doesn’t work, he’ll get a second shot at acquiring the volume if he can ID the new owner.”

“Me.”

“Your problem is that you are not exactly a low-profile collector in my world. Dawson, for instance, now knows that you are trying to acquire the book. If he tells his investor…”

“I see where you’re going with this. But once I have the book, I’ll make sure it’s secure. The word will go out that it is permanently off the market. Even if some people know that my family has it, there won’t be many collectors who will take the risk of trying to steal it from Copper­smith Inc. We’ve got some serious security and an even more serious interest in making sure that notebook stays locked up. We’ll take good care of it.”

“Okay,” she said. But she did not look satisfied.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. I’ve got a bad feeling about Thaddeus’s last email.”

“We’ll be at his place soon.”

“Take the next left.”

“There’s no road sign.”

“Thaddeus likes it that way.”

He slowed and turned left onto an even narrower strip of badly cracked pavement. The trees loomed close on either side. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Depends on the question.”

“I’m pretty sure I know what happened when you accidentally started the fire in the bathtub. You tried to unlock a book, and the energy got out of control.”

“I had no idea what I was doing, let alone that it might start a fire.”

“Paranormal fire is unpredictable. Get it burning hot enough and it will affect the energy in neighboring bands on the spectrum, all the way to the normal.” Sam whistled softly. “Must have been a lot of energy released when you broke that code.”

“Uh–huh.”

“What about the time you disappeared for a couple of days and nearly got arrested for trying to burn down a bookshop?”

“That was a little more complicated,” Abby said slowly. “I thought the owner of the bookshop was just a nice old man who recognized my talent and wanted to help me learn how to handle it. I realized later that he wanted to use me to unlock an old volume that he had in his collection.”

“Did you?”

“No. And to this day, I’m not sure why. When I picked up the book, I got the overwhelming sensation that whatever was inside was dangerous, or at least it would be in his hands. I just knew that I did not want him to be able to read that book.”

“What was it about?”

“Hypnotic poisons. So I lied and told the bookshop owner that I couldn’t break the code. He went a little crazy. He locked me inside his rare-book vault and told me that he wouldn’t let me out until I agreed to break the encryption.”

“The son of a bitch imprisoned you?”

“I was terrified. I held out for as long as I could. I had some fantasy that someone, my dad or the police, would realize what had happened and rescue me. But eventually it dawned on me that no one knew where I was and that I was on my own.”

“You told the bastard that you would break the psi-code.”

“Yes. When he opened the door I told him I had done what he wanted. I handed the book to him. When he touched it, I channeled some of the energy into his aura. I was acting entirely on intuition. I had no idea what would happen. He screamed and collapsed. The next thing I knew, the book was on fire.”

“A shop full of old volumes and manuscripts. Talk about a firetrap.”

“I had no idea how to put out the flames. I pulled the fire alarm and managed to drag the owner out of the vault. That’s where the firefighters and the cops found me. When the dealer recovered, he claimed that I had attempted to burn down his shop.”

“And you ended up in the Summerlight Academy for troubled youth. What happened to the dealer who forced you to decode the book?”

“He died of a heart attack a few months later.” Abby held up one hand. “I had nothing to do with it. I was locked up at the Summerlight Academy.”

He flexed one hand on the wheel, aware of the cold tension simmering in him. “Wish I could have taken care of him for you.”

Abby looked disconcerted. “That’s very…sweet of you.”

He smiled. “Sweet?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that no one has ever offered to do anything like that for me before. I’m touched, truly I am. So, uh, have you done anything like that before?”

“Most of the time I prefer to use less permanent methods.”

“In other words, you have done that sort of thing before.”

“Maybe.”

“When you work for that private contractor you mentioned? The one who does some business with the post office?”

“To be clear, the post office is not the client,” he said. “It’s a different agency.”

“When was the last time you worked for the contractor?”

“About three months ago.” He paused. “But I was on an assignment the night Cassidy was murdered.”

“Ah,” she said softly. “No wonder you had a hard time establishing an alibi.”

He did not respond to that. It was enough that she believed him, he thought.

“Take that gravel road to the right,” she said.

He slowed the SUV and turned into a rutted lane that wound through the trees and dead-ended in a small clearing. A high steel security fence protected a run-down house and a yard filled with large stone pots. As far as he could tell, the only things growing in the planters were weeds.

He brought the vehicle to a halt and studied the scene. “You’re sure this is the right place?”

“I told you, Thaddeus is a bit eccentric.” Abby unfastened her seat belt and opened the door.

“Doesn’t look like he’s much of a gardener.”

“The pots and the weeds are all that remain of an experimental garden he planted years ago. He was trying to grow some exotic herbs that he found for sale online. Supposedly, the herbs had psychical properties. But they didn’t do well in this climate.”

Sam got out of the car. “How do we announce ourselves?”

“There’s an intercom at the gate.” Abby started forward. “I’ll let Thaddeus know we’re here. He’ll disarm the security system and let us in.” She opened the rear door of the SUV. “Come on, Newton. We’re going to visit Thaddeus.”

Newton bounded down, but he did not look like his usual enthusiastic self. Instead, he flattened his ears and moved close to Abby.

“Maybe he’s not a country dog at heart, after all,” Sam said.

“I don’t understand it,” Abby said. “Usually he loves to come up here.”

Small shards of ice touched the back of Sam’s neck. He jacked his senses a little and looked around, trying to decide what it was about the scene that was bothering him.

“Wait,” he said, making it an order.

Abby stopped and looked back at him. “What is it?”

“Looks like the gate is unlocked.”

“That’s impossible. Thaddeus always keeps the gate locked.” She took a closer look. “Good grief, you’re right. It’s not like Thaddeus to get sloppy with his security system. He’s totally paranoid, and he’s got reason to be. He deals with some very dangerous collectors.”

Sam went back to the SUV, opened the cargo-bay door and unzipped his duffel bag. He took out the small pistol, shut the door and went back to the gate.

“That’s a gun,” Abby said. She sounded oddly shocked.

“Good observation.”

“But I thought you used that crystal gadget for self-defense.”

“Sometimes a gun works better. It gets people’s attention faster.”

He gave the gate a cautious shove. It swung open easily enough. He walked into the yard. Abby followed quickly. Newton trailed behind. He whined softly.

“Something is wrong,” Abby said.

“Yes,” Sam said. “But I think the trouble has already come and gone.”

“You can tell things like that?”

“I’ve got pretty good intuition when it comes to this kind of stuff.” He glanced at Newton. “So does your dog.”

“Maybe Thaddeus fell ill or took a fall,” Abby said anxiously. “If he managed to call an ambulance or a neighbor, that would explain why he unlocked the security system.”

“Maybe.” But he knew before he went up the three concrete steps that whatever he found inside the little house was going to be bad.

The front door was ajar. He pushed it wider.

Abby eyed the open door. “This isn’t good.”

“No,” Sam said. “It isn’t.”

Sam took another look at Newton. The dog’s ears were flat, and his tail was down. He stayed close to Abby, but he did not have the go–­for-the-throat vibe he’d had earlier, when Abby had confronted Dawson.

Sam moved across the threshold. An all-too-familiar miasma iced his senses. He knew that Abby felt it, too. But, then, most people, psychic or otherwise, could sense death when it was close by.

“Dear heaven,” she whispered. “Not Thaddeus, please.”

Sam went along the small front hall. The house felt empty and filled with the silence of the dead. There was no other sensation like it. He heard Abby and Newton behind him.

The place looked like the home of a hoarder, but as far as he could tell, the only things Thaddeus Webber had ever hoarded were books. There were thousands of them on the floor–to–ceiling shelves. Hundreds more were stacked on the floor.

“It’s hot in here,” he observed. “­Psi-hot.”

“Most of the books in this house have a paranormal provenance,” Abby said. “Get enough hot books together, and you can feel it. If you think it’s warm up here, you should see the vault.”

“Where is it?”

“Downstairs in the basement. That’s where Thaddeus keeps his most valuable books.”

Sam turned the corner at the end of a row of shelving and stopped at the sight of the crumpled form sprawled on the floor.

“Thaddeus,” Abby said.

She said the name with grim resignation. She had known this was coming, Sam thought.

She slipped past him and hurried to the end of the aisle to crouch beside the body. Newton hung back, whining a little.

Abby touched the dead man’s throat. Sam knew there would be no pulse. He was sure that Abby knew that, too.

She drew her fingertips away and looked up at him. There was a forlorn sadness in her eyes that he knew he would not soon forget. He walked to the body and hunkered down beside it.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“There’s no blood,” Abby said. “I don’t see any wounds. Perhaps he died of a heart attack or a stroke. He was eighty-six, after all.”

“The authorities will conclude that the death was due to natural causes, but you know as well as I do that is probably not what happened here.”

“He was just an old man who loved his books,” she said.

An old man who loved his books so much that he was willing to do business with some very dangerous people, Sam thought. But he did not say it.

He turned Webber faceup. The body was surprisingly heavy. They always are, he reflected. There was a reason the term dead weight had been coined a long time ago.

Scraggly gray hair and a wildly overgrown, unkempt beard framed sunken cheeks and a bulbous nose. Webber was dressed in a tattered robe and ancient pajamas.

“He heard an intruder during the night,” Sam said. “Came out of the bedroom to see what was going on.”

“Someone got past his security system.” Abby rose and looked around. “It would have taken a lot of digging to find this place. He did all of his business anonymously over the Internet.”

“As you pointed out, if you want to find someone badly enough, it’s usually possible. Even the most sophisticated computer security systems are vulnerable.”

“I know,” Abby said. “Thaddeus shelled out for a high-end system, but it’s not like he was a large corporation or the military.”

“Which, as we all know, get hacked, too. The thing that narrows our list of suspects in this situation is the cause of death.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen this kind of thing before, Abby. This was death by paranormal means. Not many people could kill this way. It almost always involves physical contact.”

“Are you certain?”

He got to his feet. “This is the kind of crime I investigate for that private contractor I told you about. No, I can’t be absolutely certain yet, but death by paranormal means is my working theory until proven otherwise. A heart attack would be way too much of a coincidence.”

Abby took a deep, shuddering breath. “Maybe someone used one of his encrypted books to do this, someone with my kind of talent.”

“It’s a possibility, but I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, there just are not a lot of folks who can do what you do. For another, being able to short-circuit someone’s aura long enough to knock him unconscious is one thing. The ability to actually stop a man’s heart with psychic energy is something else. It would take a whole different level of talent.”

“Maybe not.” Abby rubbed her arms as if she was cold. “If the victim was old and frail and was having heart problems, a severe shock to the senses might be all it would take.”

“There is that. Let’s take a look at that vault you mentioned.”

“All right.”

She led the way to the small kitchen, Newton hanging at her heels, and opened what looked like a closet door. Sam saw a flight of stone steps that went down into darkness. Abby flipped a light switch, revealing a concrete chamber piled high with cartons, crates and shelves of books.

“I don’t see a vault or a safe,” Sam said.

“That’s because Thaddeus took care to make it as invisible as possible. The door to the vault is in the floor.”

She went down the steps ahead of him, wove a path through the crowded space and stopped at what looked like a nondescript section of the concrete floor. She shoved aside a heavy book cart and revealed a small computerized lock set into the floor. She crouched, entered a code and stepped back.

“Webber gave you the code?”

“I think I’m the only one he ever trusted,” Abby said.

A large square section of the floor rose on invisible hinges. A heavy wave of psi poured out of the lower basement, jangling Sam’s senses. At the top of the basement steps, Newton whined again.

“I see what you mean about the heat in the vault,” Sam said. “It would take at least some degree of talent just to push through that high-energy atmosphere.”

“Thaddeus kept all of his most valuable items down there.” Abby descended a few steps and flipped another switch. She looked around. “I don’t think the killer got this far. Nothing appears to be disturbed.”

“Whoever killed Webber was not interested in anything except the lab book.”

“Which Thaddeus did not have.” Abby turned off the lights and climbed back up the steps. “The bastard killed him for no reason.”

“Not necessarily. The killer may have been after information.”

Abby entered another code into the vault lock. She watched the section of floor glide back into place with an expression of pain mingled with anger. “Such as?”

Sam took a few seconds to put himself into the mind of the killer. “If it were me, I would have come here to get the identities of the most likely auction dealers.”

Abby gave him an odd look.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s just that for a moment there you sounded like you actually knew what the killer was thinking.”

He said nothing.

Abby blinked and collected herself quickly. “Right. That’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Thaddeus knows all the players. If there is an auction about to go down, he would have known the dealers most likely to handle it.”

“The question, then, is whether or not Webber gave up the information before he died.”

“He would have had no reason to risk his neck to save his competitors. In the deep end, it’s every man for himself. Yes, if he felt threatened, he would have given the killer a few names and contacts. I’m sure the monster got what he wanted, and then he went ahead and murdered poor Thaddeus anyway.”

“Let’s go.”

She turned quickly and went up the steps to the main floor of the house. Sam followed her. Newton was waiting for them. He seemed relieved to have them aboveground again. Sam closed the basement door.

Abby surveyed the crowded shelves. “It won’t be long before everyone in the rare-book community knows that a cache of extremely valuable books has been left unguarded. But only a very small number of people know the location of this house.”

“The killer found Webber,” Sam pointed out. “That means others can find this place, too.”

“What are we going to do about Thaddeus? We can’t just leave him there.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “We can, and we will. As soon as we get to an anony­mous phone, we’ll call nine-one-one and tell the authorities that we’re concerned neighbors who are worried about Webber because no one has seen him outside his house for a time.”

She frowned. “Why does the call have to be anonymous?”

“At this stage, I don’t want anyone to know that we found the body. We need to leave. Now.” He started toward the front door and stopped.

“What is it?” Abby asked.

He looked back toward the body. “What was Webber doing in that aisle when he died?”

“He was probably trying to flee the killer. He staggered that far and collapsed.”

“Yes, but that row of shelving dead-ends at the wall,” Sam said. “This was his home. He knew every inch of it. He must have realized that if he fled in this direction, he would be trapped.”

“He was dying. He would have been terrified. At the very least, terribly disoriented. I doubt that he was thinking clearly.”

“I’m not so sure of that.” Sam slipped the pistol beneath his jacket and went slowly back down the aisle. He stopped a short distance from the body and studied the spines of the dusty, leather-bound volumes on the shelves. “I assume he had a logical way of organizing his books?”

“Of course.” Abby came to stand at the far end of the aisle. “Thaddeus devised a very elaborate system years ago. It was based on alchemical symbols and numbers. Each section is labeled. See that little placard on the end of each shelf     ?”

He glanced at the nearest bit of yellowed cardboard. There was a handwritten notation on it. The combination of old symbols and numbers looked like some ancient, incomprehensible alchemical formula.

“Can you tell what kind of books he kept in this section?” he asked.

Abby came down the aisle and examined the faded handwriting on the cardboard for a few seconds. “This is a history section. Reference books that were written about alchemy by late-nineteenth-century scholars. These would all be secondary sources, as far as serious collectors are concerned. Some are interesting, but none are unusually rare or inherently valuable.”

“None of them are hot?”

“No. Most of them are available from other antiquarian book dealers or large academic libraries.”

Sam studied a small gap on one of the shelves. “One of the books is gone.”

“He probably sold it recently.”

“No, look at the way the dust on the shelf is smeared. That was done by a hand groping for the book and pulling it away from the others. Whoever grabbed that volume was in a big hurry.”

He went down beside the body again and took another look at the scene from the lower vantage point. A slim leather-bound volume lay just out of sight in the shadows beneath the last row of shelving. He retrieved the book, opened it and read the title aloud.

“A Brief History of the Ancient Art of Alchemy, by L. Paynter.” He looked up at Abby.

“Paynter was a Victorian-era scholar,” she said. “One of the first historians of science.”

“I know.”

“By that time, alchemy had long since fallen into disrepute. It was the province of crackpots and eccentrics. Anyone who considered himself a serious scientist or researcher was into chemistry and physics by then. But Paynter was of the opinion that if Isaac Newton had been intrigued by alchemy, there had to be something to it.”

“Paynter was right.” Sam handed the book to her. She paged through it quickly, pausing midway through the little tome.

“There’s a page missing,” she said. “It was ripped out, not cut out. The damage was done recently. You can tell because the crinkles and jagged edges haven’t been pressed into place the way they would be if this book had been sitting unopened on the shelf for a few years.”

“I knew I was missing something,” Sam said.

The sense that an ominous darkness was closing in on them was getting stronger. Spending time with a dead body will do that, he reminded himself. This is important. Take your time and think. You need to find whatever it is that you aren’t seeing clearly. He patted down Webber’s pajamas and bathrobe. It was unpleasant work, but this was not the first time he had performed such a chore. When his palm passed over the pocket of the robe, he felt a small bulge. Probably a tissue or a handkerchief. There was a faint crackling sound. He reached into the pocket and drew out the crumpled page.

“That’s it.” Excitement quickened in Abby’s voice. “That’s the missing page. He tore it out of Paynter’s history in the last moments of his life and stuffed it into his pocket.”

“He knew we were on our way, that we would probably be the ones who found him. He did his best to leave us a message.”

Carefully, he smoothed the old page and studied the illustration. The cold sleet of psi that had been stirring his senses all morning transmuted into an ice storm.

“What?” Abby asked.

“This message isn’t for you. It’s for me. He knew that I would be with you when you got here.” He shoved the page into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Let’s move.”

“I don’t understand. What does that drawing mean to you?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re in the car.”

Mercifully, Abby did not question the decision. She followed him quickly out the front door. Newton dashed ahead, more than enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving the grim scene.

He got Abby and Newton into the SUV, climbed behind the wheel and drove swiftly back toward the main road. The icy-cold feeling on the nape of his neck was getting more intense.

“What’s the rush?” Abby asked, fastening her seat belt.

“Damned if I know.” He took one hand off the wheel long enough to rub the back of his neck. “Just a feeling.”

“What is it about the page that Thaddeus tore out of the book that has you so worried?”

Sam reached inside his jacket. He pulled out the torn page and handed it to her. “Take a look.”

She took the page and examined it closely. “It’s an artist’s rendering of an alchemist’s laboratory. Competently done, but it certainly isn’t Dürer’s Melencolia. So?”

“Look at the setting.”

“It’s different from most pictures of an alchemist at work, because the setting is clearly Victorian,” Abby mused. “Scenes of this type are usually set against medieval or Renaissance landscapes. This has got more of a Frankenstein vibe. The mad-scientist thing. But there is the usual mishmash of allegorical images from Egyptian and Greek mythology.” She looked up from the picture. “What makes this illustration different?”

“That picture is not an artist’s generic vision of an alchemist’s lab. Take a closer look at the fire on the hearth.”

Abby glanced down. She stiffened. “The flames are formed by the stylized wings of a phoenix. Oh, geez, Sam. The bird looks an awful lot like that tattoo on your shoulder.”

“Where do you think I got the idea for the tat?”

“You’ve seen a copy of this book?”

“Not that particular text but some related writings. I told you that when Dad and his partners found the crystals, they did a lot of research into the scientific literature. They were trying to track down references to previous discoveries of similar crystals. They didn’t find much that was useful, just some old alchemy texts. But they did come across a few notes made by the guy in the picture. Dad gave them to me.”

Abby read the title under the drawing. “Scene from Dr. Marcus Dalton’s laboratory.”

“Dalton conducted some experiments on crystals that he called the Phoenix stones. Very little of his work survived, unfortunately. He sensed the latent power in the stones, but he never figured out how to access it. He theorized, however, that in the hands of someone who could tap the energy of the crystals, the stones could be used, among other things, as weapons.”

“Like that crystal bug zapper you used on poor Nick?”

He let the poor Nick comment pass. “Yes, but on a much larger scale. The most I can do with my little zapper is temporarily paralyze certain currents in an individual’s aura. It’s probably similar to what you do when you channel the energy in an encrypted book into someone’s aura. And I need physical contact to achieve the results. Dalton believed the crystals had the potential to create much greater destruction, and from a distance. But he also theorized that the crystals could be engineered to create a source of power.”

“Which, presumably, is why your father doesn’t want to destroy all the records of the experiments and why he doesn’t want to obliterate all traces of the Phoenix Mine.”

Sam smiled. “Good guess. The world is going to need new sources of power in the future. Engineered correctly, those crystals might be an answer.”

“What happened to Dalton?”

“He was killed in an explosion that occurred when one of his experiments went out of control. All of the crystals he was working on at the time disappeared, and most of his notes were lost.”

“Just like the explosion in the Phoenix,” Abby said.

“Yes. I told you, those crystals are dangerous and highly volatile.”

Abby thought for a moment. “So Thaddeus was trying to warn you that someone is after the lab book. But we already knew that.”

“I don’t think that’s what Webber intended as the takeaway from his last message.”

“What, then?”

“I think he was trying to tell me that someone has one of the Phoenix stones and has figured out how to turn it into a weapon. That’s what the killer used to murder him.”

“Oh, my God,” Abby whispered. “Lander Knox.”

“Maybe. I knew that Thaddeus Webber was murdered by paranormal means. Now I know the nature of the weapon. We need to find that lab book, Abby.”

She took out her phone. “I’ll see if any of the deep-end dealers have responded to my offer of a preemptive bid.”

He drove very fast along the graveled lane and pulled out onto the main road, accelerating hard. He saw a car parked sideways, blocking both lanes, when he came out of the first turn. A man was slumped over the steering wheel.

The psi-chill that had been riding him hard for the last hour flashed into full-blown awareness of impending disaster.

“Hang on,” he said.

Abby looked up from her phone and saw the car. “There’s been an accident.”

“I don’t think so.”

He hit the brakes, slamming to a stop. He heard dog claws scrabbling wildly on the rear seat.

He snapped the SUV into reverse and shot back around the turn.

The maneuver got them out of sight of the blocking car, but he knew that they had only a couple of minutes, at most. There was bound to be a second vehicle coming up from behind. A classic pincer move.

He braked again. “Out. Into the woods. Go.”

Abby did not ask questions. She freed herself from the seat belt, opened the door and leaped to the ground, still clutching her phone. Sam followed. By the time he got out, Abby had freed Newton from the backseat.

“Head for the rocks,” Sam ordered.

They ran up the hillside into the cover of the trees, aiming for the jumble of boulders that formed a natural fortress.

“What is going on?” Abby asked, panting alongside him.

“Not sure, but I think that whoever murdered Webber left some thugs to watch the house.”

“But why?”

“Someone wants you, Abby. Someone wants you very, very badly.”