In Too Deep (32 page)

S
paulding Properties was housed in a quaint, weathered commercial building on the main street of Willow Creek. The “Closed” sign showed in the window. Fallon walked past the entrance without pausing, as though he were headed to the drugstore on the corner.

When he reached the narrow strip of muddy grass that separated the premises of the real estate business from the restaurant next door, he turned quickly and went around to the back door of Spaulding Properties.

The rear door was locked, but that did not come as a surprise. Fallon reached inside his jacket and removed one of the electronic lock picks that he handed out like candy to J&J agents. It took less than three seconds to open the door. Whatever secrets Sylvia Tremont was hiding, she was not concealing them inside the office.

The back room of Spaulding Properties was remarkably uncluttered. There were no reams of paper, no stacks of printed brochures or any business machines. It had taken less than two minutes on the computer to discover that Norma Spaulding had not closed a sale in the four weeks that the office had been open.

He moved into the main room. The lack of sales had not stopped a few desperate homeowners from listing their properties with Spaulding Properties. Unappealing photos of a handful of aged cabins and the old Zander mansion adorned the wall.

He disregarded the mansion because, although it was no longer an active crime scene, it had become a grisly attraction for tourists and thrill seekers. It would not make a good place to hold Isabella and Walker.

He slipped into his other senses and studied the half-dozen featured listings with the cold-blooded logic of a killer. Swiftly he calculated distances from Walker’s house, the degree of geographical isolation offered by the various properties and the proximity to the two locations in the area that provided the kind of powerful, reliable currents required to drag two bodies out to sea and make sure that the evidence disappeared.

Tremont would not use the Point, he concluded. It was too close to Scargill Cove. There was a serious risk that someone in town would see her and her companion, even in the midst of a storm. That left the second location, the blowhole site. The surf was violent there, and the currents were extreme. In the summer it was a popular tourist attraction. There was a convenient turnout.

In the end, one cabin stood out as the obvious choice. Certainty whispered through him.

He yanked the listing sheet off the wall and headed for the door. Although he was ninety-nine-point-two percent sure of his calculations, there was a small, but very real, possibility that he was wrong. He had to cover all the bases. Isabella’s life was at stake. He opened his phone.

Henry answered halfway through the first ring.

“Six possible locations where she might be keeping Isabella and Walker,” Fallon said. “I’m taking one. I’ll read you the list of the other five properties. They’re all empty cabins along the bluffs. You and the others check them. No one goes alone, understood?”

“Guns?” Henry asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Fallon said. “Take guns. And the dogs. They know Isabella. If she’s in one of those cabins, they’ll tell you.”

“Those dogs love Isabella. They’ll rip out the throat of anyone who tries to hurt her.”

Isabella dreamed . . .

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She was waltzing with Fallon, wearing her lovely midnight-blue gown and her black crystal shoes. Fallon was resplendent in his black-and-white tux, the ultimate power suit.

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They circled the glittering ballroom to the strains of the relentless beat. She should have been deliriously happy, but everything seemed wrong.

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The ballroom was painfully bright, lit up with paranormal radiation from the most disturbing sectors of the spectrum. The senses-dazzling glare made it impossible to see the other dancers or the musicians. On top of that, the music was extremely annoying. She found herself wishing that it would stop.

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And Fallon was not being at all lover-like. He looked at her with eyes that were hot and dangerous with psi fever.

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“I’m on my way, Isabella. You do whatever you have to do to stay alive until I get to you. Do you hear me?”

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“Yes,” she said. “I hear you. But what about the music?”

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“Find the source and turn it off.”

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“How do I do that?”

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“That’s your problem. You’re a J&J agent. You’re supposed to figure these things out on your own.”

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She frowned, thinking. “But you’re not really here with me, are you?”

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“No.”

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“Then how can you be talking to me? There’s no such thing as telepathy.”

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“True,” Fallon said. “But you know me well enough to know what I’d be saying to you if I were there with you.”

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“Right.”

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She looked around, trying to bring the ballroom into focus, searching for the source of the music. She could do this. She had a talent for finding things.

She came awake to the muffled sound of pounding rain and booming surf. It took her a moment to realize that she was lying on a hardwood floor. She was cold and stiff. When she tried to move, she discovered that her hands and ankles were bound with duct tape. Mercifully, there was no tape across her mouth. Unfortunately, the obvious conclusion was that the kidnappers were not worried about her screaming. That, in turn, implied that the cabin was a long way from any source of help.

The music was still playing, but it was fainter now. She turned her head and saw the still shape of Walker lying beside her. He, too, was bound hand and foot.

She finally spotted the Victorian music box. It sat on a nearby table. The dancing figures were barely turning. The clockwork mechanism was winding down. Probably the reason she had awakened, she thought.

First things first. She rolled awkwardly across the floor until she reached the table. She levered herself onto her back, brought her knees up into a bent position, planted her feet against one leg of the table and pushed out with all of her strength.

The old table went over easily enough. The music box slid off and landed on the floor with a satisfying crack of glass and a clunk. The last notes of the waltz stopped abruptly. The dancing figures popped off and rattled across the floorboards until they fetched up against the wall.

To make certain the device was inoperable, she inchwormed her way to the broken artifact, turned her back to it and managed to grasp it in her bound hands. She slammed it against the floor a few times. Pieces of the mechanism fell out.

“That takes care of that problem,” Isabella said softly. “Walker? Are you awake?”

There was no response.

She studied the shadowed interior of the cabin again, looking for anything she might be able to use to hack through the duct tape. She considered the small kitchenette. The place had obviously been uninhabited for a very long time, but with luck someone might have left a knife in one of the drawers. She started to work her way across the small room.

“Walker?”

This time she got a groan in response

“Walker, it’s me, Isabella. Wake up.”

Walker groaned again and stirred. His eyes opened. He looked straight at her.

“It’s okay,” she said gently. “Fallon will find us.”

To her surprise there was no panic in Walker’s eyes, just a bleak acceptance.

“She got p-past me, didn’t she? I tried to s-stop her.”

“I know, Walker. But she used a secret weapon on both of us.”

“One of the alien weapons?”

“Yes, but don’t worry, it’s out of commission. I smashed it. Now we have to get free. I don’t suppose you carry a pocketknife.”

“Found a real n-nice one in the trash out behind Jones & Jones a few months ago,” Walker said. “You wouldn’t believe w-what people throw out.”

“Do you have it on you?”

“In my new c-coat. Inside pocket. Can’t imagine why anyone would throw away such a good coat.”

“That’s wonderful, Walker.” She changed course and started to work her way toward him. “Turn onto your side. Maybe I can get the knife out of your coat.”

He did as she instructed.

“Left pocket,” he said hoarsely. “Hidden zipper.”

It was tedious work trying to manipulate the interior zipper with her hands tied behind her back but she managed to get the pocket unzipped.

Footsteps sounded on the front porch just as she was probing for the knife. She froze, aware that Walker had done the same.

The door of the cabin opened. Norma Spaulding came into the room, a gun in her hand. A heavily bulked-up man who looked like he ate steroids for breakfast, lunch and dinner loomed behind her.

“Let me take a wild, flying leap here,” Isabella said. “Your name isn’t Norma Spaulding, and you’re not in real estate.”

“Good guess. I should introduce myself. Sylvia Tremont. I’m a curator at the Arcane museum in L.A.”

“Well, that certainly explains a few things,” Isabella said. She looked at the man. “Who’s this?”

“His name is Vogel. Sort of an odd-jobs specialist. He was assigned to me a couple of days ago by my new associate when I said I was going to need a little assistance cleaning up a few loose ends.”

“I s-saw you,” Walker said urgently. “I s-saw you both last night. You were t-trying to sneak into the Cove.”

Sylvia glanced at him. “I know you saw us. That’s why you’re going to take a very long swim this evening.”

“What were you doing trying to sneak into the Cove?” Isabella asked.

“My new business associate concluded that you were going to be a problem because you are an unpredictable factor at Jones & Jones. She thought it would be best to neutralize you, as it were. She gave me a vial of a new experimental drug that affects the psychic senses in such a way as to make an individual behave in a dangerous and erratic manner. Jones would have assumed that you were going crazy. You would no longer have been any use to him. But when you showed up to check on this nutcase today, I realized that plan was no longer viable. Now I have no choice but to get rid of both of you.”

“Killing us will be the biggest mistake you ever made,” Isabella warned.

“It wasn’t my first choice, believe me. I know Fallon Jones will search for you. That is not a good thing. But I’ve been very careful. I’m sure that, in the end, he will conclude that you just took off as you have been known to do in the past.”

“He’ll find you,” Isabella promised. “He won’t stop looking until he does.”

“When this is over, I will disappear so completely that not even Fallon Jones can find me.” Sylvia glanced at the pieces of the music box. “You would have to break it. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that thing was worth in certain quarters?”

“Speaking of money, you owe Jones & Jones five hundred bucks,” Isabella said.

Sylvia smiled. “And you’re here to collect?”

“That’s right.”

“Good luck with that.” Sylvia glanced at her watch. “It will be dark in a few hours. You and he will be going over the bluffs into the sea as soon as night falls. I was planning to wait until midnight to make sure no one notices, but I don’t think there’s any need to hold off, not with this storm. No one will notice one more tourist stopping at the blowhole turnout to dump a couple of bags of trash.”

“Since we’ve got all the time in the world,” Isabella said, “mind telling me how you located the Bridewell curiosities?”

“I’ve been looking for them for years,” Sylvia said. “To some extent, I was able to use the resources of the museum, but I had to be extremely discreet. I did not want to draw the attention of my colleagues or J&J. But after a certain point, I decided to fund my own search.”

“And to do that, you needed money. A lot of it.”

“More than I could afford on my salary from the museum, certainly.”

“You set up a profitable little sideline selling off the odd paranormal weapon to Julian Garrett and Caitlin Phillips, using Orville Sloan as the broker.”

“Sloan knew the world of paranormal arms dealing,” Sylvia said. “It’s a highly specialized field, as I’m sure you can imagine. He was the one who suggested that we work with Garrett and Phillips. The arrangement was quite successful for several months. Then I got a solid lead on a cache of curiosities.”

“You found one of the two men who survived the explosion in the shelter, didn’t you? Was it Kelso? That’s the name of the family that used to own the lodge.”

“His name was Jonathan Kelso. He was the last member of his family, and he was not mentally stable. By the time I tracked him down he was living in an institution. He told me a fascinating story about how he and two colleagues had discovered a number of Bridewell’s clockwork curiosities. They wanted to find out exactly how they worked, but they knew the objects were dangerous. Kelso remembered the old bomb shelter behind the lodge and decided it would be a good place to run their experiments.”

“They brought the curiosities here, tuned them up and then things went wrong.”

“According to Kelso, there was an explosion. It killed one of the three outright. The second man’s senses were severely affected by the heavy dose of radiation. He took his own life a few months later. Something about incessant nightmares. Kelso, himself, as I said, wound up in a psychiatric facility. But he was able to tell me about the commune that was going on in Scargill Cove at the time of the experiments. I started doing some research.”

“You found Rachel Stewart.”

“By the time I tracked her down she was dying of cancer and using serious pain meds. Her story was somewhat confused, but I was able to put the facts together into a coherent picture.”

“She was a Seeker,” Isabella said. “The woman everyone thought ran off with Gordon Lasher.”

“Well, that was the plan. But Lasher was only interested in Rachel because it turned out she had a strong affinity for glass psi. Not only was she immune to the effects of the curiosities but she also intuitively understood how they worked. Furthermore, she could sense them at a distance.”