River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (9 page)

He had gone back to Loesser and told him that he was going to Colorado even if he had to pay for it himself. Money wasn’t a problem for him—what with the family wealth—but without Loesser’s approval, the whole situation could get ugly. After a testy exchange, Loesser had finally agreed that Truly could go, but only for the reason that Millicent had laid out. He should avoid taking any action, Loesser said—he should be there only as an interested observer. Local law enforcement had to take the lead on any investigation. Truly’s purpose was smoothing relations with his “psychic friends network,” nothing more.

That was fine with Truly. He didn’t want to get that involved anyway. Ingersoll was one of the few members of the network he had met face-to-face, and he hadn’t particularly liked the man. He didn’t intend to go too far out on a limb for people who would never be allowed to participate meaningfully in any real intelligence work—people he would happily abandon whenever he was transferred again. Even if he believed Millicent’s doomsday warnings, there was nothing he could do to set things right.

But it would get him out of Washington for a couple of days, give him something to think about besides missing Bethany. He had dialed her number at least twenty times, always managing to hang up before the call went through. He had thought he was keeping her at an emotional arm’s length. She was, after all, married, and she had never given any indication that she might want to change that status. Their breakup had hit him harder than he had expected, leading him to believe that he had misread his own investment in the affair. It would not have been the first time. He tried to keep tabs on his emotional state, but there had been occasions—and this seemed to be one of them—when he realized that, while he was pretty good at reading other people, when it came to his own feelings, he was functionally illiterate.

In Colorado, he had stopped at the Mineral County Sheriff’s Department, since they had jurisdiction over the fire scene. There, a deputy told him that Ingersoll’s death had already been ruled accidental. “No sign of foul play,” the man had said, running a finger across his thick white mustache. “We figure he fell asleep in a chair, knocked over a candle, and never woke up. There was candles all over the room, looked like. An accident waiting to happen.”

The deputy let Truly read the file, which confirmed what he had already said. Arson investigators had concluded that the blaze began in a sealed interior room, spreading rapidly throughout the log structure. The sheriff had signed off on the report just that morning.

With that seemingly settled, Truly drove his rented car up to the Arbor House Inn in nearby South Fork. He didn’t think there was much more he could learn on his own, but Millicent’s plea had given him an idea. She had mentioned Robb Ivey, a psychic who ran an occult bookshop in San Francisco. Truly hadn’t even bothered asking Ron for permission and he had used his own money for Robb’s expenses and fee. Robb had agreed to come out and take a look at the house, check the ley lines or whatever it was psychics did at this kind of scene. He picked Robb up at the hotel where he’d left him before visiting the sheriff’s office, and they drove to the house together, letting the car’s navigation unit guide him.

An hour later, he watched Robb pick his way carefully through the rubble, in which seemingly random objects (a stainless steel refrigerator and matching stove, a plasma-screen TV, a single section of wall with a bookcase in front of it) still stood, buried in ash but intact. The psychic was a tall man, skeletally thin and with a shaven head. He looked unhealthy, but up close, an inner glow showed itself in his deep-set blue eyes and beneath his pale skin. In Washington, Truly didn’t meet many people who seemed utterly centered and at peace, but that was the impression he got from Robb the moment he shook the psychic’s hand in the terminal of the San Luis Valley Regional Airport in Alamosa.

As Robb emerged from the wreckage, he offered a loose-limbed shrug. “I get a sense of fear, right?” he said, his breath steaming in the chill air of late afternoon. “That may be too weak a word. More like terror.” He gestured over his shoulder. “It’s especially strong back where you said the room the fire started in was, right? I’m assuming it’s a trace emotion Ingersoll left behind, and if that’s correct, then just before he died he was freaking petrified of something.”

“The knowledge that he was about to burn to death might do that to a guy,” Truly observed. “What about what Millicent said she asked him to look into in the first place? The disruption of the ley lines?”

Another shrug. “That’s been an ongoing issue since that night. It might be why I can’t pick up anything more concrete than that generalized sensation of terror here. But it seems to be easing up a bit now, right, like maybe it was an anomaly caused by some specific incident, and it’s normalizing again.”

Truly tucked his gloved hands under his arms. The temperature seemed to be dropping by the minute. “That’s something to be thankful for, I guess.”

Robb glanced over his shoulder, as if worried that something might have followed him from the house. “Depends on what caused the disruption in the first place. If it was something really bad that decided to stick around for a while, it might have only affected the ley lines when it originally passed through. Metaphorically speaking, of course. It might not have been an actual passage, but simply a change in status.”

“Sounds like you’re almost describing something physical, like an object entering our atmosphere.”

“Not physical per se, but otherwise the analogy isn’t bad.”

“Like a wave of…what? Power?” Truly genuinely wanted to understand what the man was saying. “Passing through the energy fields?”

“More or less.” Robb drew a series of roughly parallel vertical slashes in the air with both hands, then turned them and did the same horizontally. “Think of the ley lines as a grid, like longitude and latitude lines on a globe, right? Except they have no known beginning or end point, they just continue infinitely throughout space. Through our universe and however many other universes there are. Anything that moves has to move through those lines, but most things—you, me, an airplane, a cricket—don’t disturb them, because although we generate psychic waves, they’re so minute as to not matter. Something that would disturb them—especially to the extent that they seem to have been disrupted the other day—would have to carry
major
occult weight. And if something that significant passed through, it would have caused a ripple effect. To mix my metaphors, imagine that the lines are a body of water that envelops the Earth. Whatever passed through would have caused wavelets that ran all the way around, eventually slapping against each other and generating mini-wavelets that started back. Finally things would calm down again, but it would take a while. And whatever the original force was, it wouldn’t necessarily be gone now, just not moving around anymore.”

“You’re not making me feel any better here, Robb.”

“I tell all my clients that they may not like what I tell them. Same goes for you.”

“How bad could it get? If you’re wrong, and things don’t go back to normal?”

Robb shrugged. “That’s impossible to say. How bad would it get if, say, gravity stopped working? Or the oceans all dried up overnight? Depending on the severity of the disruption, we could be looking at that kind of scale. As I said, I think it’s getting better, that the disruption was temporary. But I don’t know that for sure, nor do I know how long the ripple effects might last.”

Robb rubbed his slender, ungloved hands together to warm them. Truly watched him, then looked back at the burned rubble. He couldn’t find a diplomatic way to phrase his next question, so he just asked it. “So you picked up a sensation of fear from a spot where a man burned to death. That it?”

Robb blinked and blew into his clasped hands. “One other thing, but I don’t know what it means. A vague sense of a river. Is there a river around here?”

Truly had studied a map of the area on the plane out. “The headwaters of the Rio Grande are nearby. It’s not much more than a mountain stream, this high up, but that’s the biggest. Plenty of lesser rivers and creeks in the area, too.”

“Maybe that’s what it is, then. I don’t know…it’s just this feeling. Flowing water. A river. Could mean anything, or nothing at all.”

Truly stamped his feet. The ground was hard, the coldness shooting up through his shoes.

“You know what I would do? In your place?” Robb asked.

“What?”

“Bring Millicent over here.”

“Millicent Wong?”

“Nobody’s more sensitive than her. If there’s anything to find here—and I think there is—she’ll be able to grab ahold of it. I wish I could, but it’s defeating me. And it sounds like she’s upset enough by the whole situation that she might be willing to make the trip.”

Which Truly knew he’d be paying for. In more ways than one, he had no doubt. It would entail another argument with Ronald Loesser, for starters. When he came back empty-handed from this trip, after a brief command appearance at his father’s home in Michigan, Loesser’s limited patience would have run out. He would have to be very convincing, or he’d have to lie about where he was going and why.

And if she came up blank, then what? With the official report calling Ingersoll’s death an accident, he was running out of options fast.

On the bright side, he didn’t really need to solve this thing. Maybe asking Millicent to come to Colorado would be good enough to convince her and the others that he was serious about looking after them.

That, after all, was what this had been about from the beginning. The appearance of concern, not the real thing.

His masters in Washington would be proud.

SEVEN

Truly dropped Robb Ivey off at the airport after dark. From there, Robb would catch a United Express flight to Denver, then fly home to San Francisco. He hated flying, had ever since 9/11, when it had changed from being an occasional treat to a frustrating annoyance. At least he had no luggage to deal with. It had been a long day, but Sandra was home with the twins—two boys, eight years old—and they were a handful and a half. Then there were the dogs, two Italian greyhounds, and they demanded attention as well. He had made the journey a one-day turnaround, scheduling the first flight that would get him into Alamosa and the last one that would take him away.

When he was growing up, his older sister had played Donovan albums until her record player wore out, and he had grown up hearing the warbling Welshman. Now he wished Donovan’s Trans-love Airways was an actual option, because at least they would probably serve vegan food and spiritual enlightenment, and he was pretty certain that neither were part of United Express’s customer service regimen.

Plus, Donovan promised that Trans-love would get you there on time, and that also seemed a thing of the past.

Alamosa’s tiny airport was far from crowded, but even here he saw people standing at the security checkpoint holding their liquids in zippered plastic bags. The whole idea was absurd. It was like the whole country, maybe the whole world, had gone nuts.

And Agent Truly, of course, worked for one of the nuttier organizations around. Robb had agreed to perform some tests for them, because he had wanted to test his skills in a rigidly controlled environment where, he suspected, no one would expect him to actually succeed. Besides, he loved his country, and if the CIA could use him for some productive purpose, he would happily do as he was asked.

So far, with this one exception, it had been a lot of testing and retesting but without much in the way of positive contributions. For that matter, this one hadn’t worked out the way anyone would have preferred. But at least it
resembled
useful, even if it hadn’t really proved to be.

Truly was an odd duck, too. His wide blue eyes seemed to take up a full third of his face, like he was some cartoon icon designed for maximum cuteness. Hard to take seriously as a CIA agent with that face. He projected an absolute lack of guile, which might come in handy as long as it was only an illusion.

He had seemed distracted, too. His body was in Colorado but his mind was elsewhere. Robb had sensed that a woman was involved. Maybe he had broken up with someone recently, or maybe the trip had brought back strong memories of someone he had been to Colorado with in the past. Robb had tried not to pry, but some things just forced themselves on him when the emotions were strong enough. In Truly’s case, they had been raw and powerful.

With thirty-five minutes before his flight, he decided to go into the restroom. He’d been holding his bladder since halfway down the mountain from Ingersoll’s place, and he felt ready to burst. A few minutes in there, and then he’d go through security and wait at the gate.

“Fly Trans-love Airways” repeated over and over in his head.

Thanks, sis.

* * *

Captain Vance Brewer had been debating whether to kill both men since they had arrived at the psychic’s house up in the San Juans. He had reached the scene before them, and had hunkered down in the trees about six hundred yards away. By the time the two men showed up, he had assembled a parabolic microphone, set it up on a tripod, and pointed it toward the ruins. When they got there—as the old man’s drawings had predicted they would—he could hear every word, as easily as if he’d been standing right next to them.