Copper Beach

43

SAM SAT IN THE CHAIR, ANKLES STACKED ON THE CORNER OF his desk, and listened for the sound of footsteps in the hall. His gun was on top of the desk. So was the green prism.

It was just a matter of time. He had seen the killer make his way to the edge of the crowd a few minutes ago. Sooner or later, he would show up in the lab.

The desk lamp was switched off, but Sam was jacked. The crystals and stones in the display cases glowed in the darkness, casting the strange shadows that could be created only by ultralight.

The footsteps he had been waiting for echoed in the hallway at last, faint at first and then louder as they neared the door. There was a short pause.

The door opened slowly. A figure appeared, silhouetted in the opening. A toxic mix of fear, panic and desperation burned in the atmosphere.

The intruder hesitated, then moved quickly into the room and closed the door. There was a sharp click. A penlight beam arced through the darkness and came to rest on the packing boxes in the corner.

“You don’t have to go through the boxes, Dr. Frye,” Sam said. “I’ve got what you’re looking for here on my desk.”

Gerald Frye froze. “Sam.”

“I had a feeling you would be the one who came here tonight, but I had to be sure.”

“I was looking for you, Sam. Your mother noticed that you had disappeared from the party. She’s worried because you’ve been so depressed lately. She asked me to see if you’d retreated here to your lab. I told her that you probably just wanted to get away from the crowd for a while, but that I’d make sure you were okay.”

“Skip the bullshit,” Sam said. “You’re here to get the prism that you used to manipulate Grady Hastings. Must have come as a shock today when I mentioned during the tour that I had packed up the contents of the lab of a small-time researcher named Hastings.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The prism is the one thing that connects you to Grady Hastings. You realized that if I ever examined it closely, I would know that it had probably come from the Black Box lab. You were right.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Frye said.

“I recognized the para-engineering immediately. Knew it could only have come from our facility. But there’s a large staff in the Black Box. It took me a while to go through the list of suspects. I had a hunch you were the one who had created the hypnotic recording and tuned it to Grady Hastings’s aura, though. You’re one of the very few people in that lab with the technical expertise and the talent to do it. But that didn’t mean that you were the killer. There was always the possibility that someone else had used your device. Trust me, I know how it feels to be set up. I didn’t want to make a mistake, so I ran this little experiment tonight.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Frye edged toward the door.

“There’s no point trying to run. It’s over. Just a couple of things I want to get clear. Whose idea was it to try to steal the crystals? Yours or Cassidy’s?”

“I’m not going to answer any of your questions. If you lay a hand on me, I’ll scream bloody murder. There are a couple hundred people outside.”

“We’re in a concrete basement. No one will hear you scream.” Sam took his feet down off the desk, sat forward and rested one hand on the glowing green prism. “But I’m not going to touch you. We’re just going to talk.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you want me to know how brilliant and how talented you are.”

There was stunned silence. A great calm descended on Frye. He moved to the nearest display case and examined the cut geode inside. The blue ultralight from the glittering crystals embedded in the rock etched his face in eerie shadows.

Frye grunted. “Everyone said you were heartbroken, but I knew you were just pissed off because you had let Cassidy get so close to your family’s secrets.”

“That was part of it.” Sam got up and walked around to the front of the desk. He leaned back against the edge and folded his arms. “So whose idea was it to try to steal the crystals?”

“Mine. I recognized Cassidy Lawrence for the opportunist she was the first time I met her. We were two of a kind. I dropped a few hints about the Phoenix stones. Imagine my surprise when I found out that she was already aware of them. That’s why she set out to seduce you at that gem-and-mineral show.”

“Guess that explains a few things.”

“Cassidy, of course, thought she was using me. She was accustomed to being able to manipulate every man she encountered. She certainly dazzled you.”

“How did she learn about the crystals?”

“The rumors of the Phoenix Mine have had forty years to turn into a legend. Cassidy came from a long line of crystal talents. She paid attention to that kind of chatter. She picked up the whispers of the Phoenix a year ago and started doing some serious research. She arranged to meet you at that gem-and-mineral show. The next thing you know, you’re giving her a tour of the lab and she’s filling out a job application.”

“You started working for us before Cassidy did. How did you learn about the Phoenix Mine and the crystals?”

“Ray Willis filled up more than one lab notebook with the records of his experiments,” Frye said. Cold triumph rang in his words.

“I’ll be damned. Willis kept more than one notebook?”

“There were two, the one he showed to your father and Knox, and a second one in which he kept his own private records. Shortly before the explosion in the mine, he sent the second one to my mother for safekeeping.”

“Why would he send it to your mother?”

“The two of them were lovers at the time that your father and the others discovered that vein of crystals,” Frye said. “He realized the true value of the stones immediately, and wanted to conceal some of the results of his experiments from his partners.”

“Did your mother have any idea of how dangerous the stones are?”

“No, of course not. The first lab book wasn’t encrypted, but it might as well have been, as far as she was concerned. The notes are all written in the form of para-physics equations and technical jargon. I found it when I went through her things after she died a few years ago. But there was nothing in the notebook concerning the exact location of the Phoenix Mine.”

“But after you found the lab book you knew who did have that information, though, didn’t you? Your father’s partners, Elias Coppersmith and Quinn Knox.”

“I managed to track down Knox,” Frye said. “He was deep into the booze and the pills by then. I tried to question him, but I couldn’t get much out of him. His brain was mush. He told some very tall tales about the Phoenix Mine, but he had long since forgotten the coordinates, or pretended that he had forgotten. All I got from him was that it was somewhere in Nevada.”

“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.”