The Colour of Death (23 page)

“What suicides?”

“About ten members of the Indigo Family were found dead in a stone barn in the commune.  The details of their deaths were mysterious and suicide was suspected but two other family members told the police they saw Regan lead them into the barn and then come out alone.  When the police came for him, he later bragged that the cops had to fight off half the commune to get to him.”

“What happened?”

“The two witnesses vanished and the cops released him a few days later due to lack of evidence.  The commune welcomed him back like a persecuted messiah.  It was clear he’d found his place in the world.  Soon after that they started calling him the Seer.”

“The Seer?”

“Something to do with the third eye.  He was always exaggerating what he could see, boasting about his powers.”  Connor sneered when he said ‘powers’.

Fox thought of Sorcha’s gift.  “I know many of the visual aspects of synaesthesia, such as seeing colors, can
seem
like hallucinations but did he ever claim to see anything significantly out of the ordinary which you thought might be genuine?”

Connor Delaney looked like he was about to laugh.  Then he stopped himself and turned back to the house, which was now some distance away.  “There was one time,” he said quietly.  “Come with me.  I want to show you something.”  He kicked his horse’s flanks and broke into a canter.  Fox followed.

Back in the house Connor led Fox upstairs to a large bedroom.  “Our father died in this room,” Connor said.  “He’d been ill for some weeks and died in great pain.  Only I was with him when he passed but after his body had been moved Regan insisted on sitting in here for hours on end.  When I asked why, he told me he was reliving our father’s death — even though he hadn’t been here when it happened.  He believed that if he relived the experience enough times he’d see where his spirit had gone.  See beyond the veil.  He took the headboard for a keepsake.  “Said it made him feel closer to Dad.  What freaked me out at the time, though, was he told me exactly how he’d died.  Details only I knew.  Details I’d told no one about.”

Fox said nothing but the story made him wonder if Regan Delaney shared his daughter’s death-echo synaesthesia.  If so, why hadn’t he reacted when Fox showed him into Sorcha’s original room at Tranquil Waters?

Connor continued.  “Two days later the will was read.  Our father was an old-time patriarch and left little to our female cousins.  The bulk of his inheritance went to Regan and me, half each — even though I was the oldest and had done most to build the business.  Regan immediately demanded his share in cash because he wanted to buy up a large chunk of Oregon wilderness so he could lead his cult — what he now called his
real
family — to a new promised land.”

“Do you know where in Oregon he set up his cult?”

“I’ve got geographical coordinates in the legal files but it’s in the middle of nowhere.  I told him his plans would bankrupt the family business but he didn’t care.  Eventually, to keep the business I had to sell land and horses and take out a crippling loan to pay off Regan’s share.  The pressure made my wife leave me.  My brother waked away with millions and took three of my best thoroughbreds.  He even stole the Delaney family Bible, which contains the family tree and had been handed down to the first-born male for centuries.”

“Why take horses if he wanted out of the business?”

“He thought the purity of their bloodline mirrored his own.  Ninety-five per cent of the hundreds of thousands of thoroughbreds on earth come from
one
foundation stallion in England, back in the late seventeenth century.  The other five per cent come from two other stallions in England.  Every thoroughbred in the entire world comes from the loins of three stallions.”  Connor Delaney shook his head.  “I don’t blame the Indigo Family for all this, though.  In fact I almost feel sorry for them.  Cults are often accused of brainwashing their members and hijacking their lives.  But my brother did the hijacking.  He took a commune of harmless hippies and misfits who dabbled in crystals, wore colorful tie-dyed clothes and wanted to heal the world and turned them into a hardcore cult focused on achieving his Great Work.  The last time I saw them, just before they went off to Oregon, they’d already become a pretty strict, well-organized community — a sort of Rainbow Amish.”

“What exactly do you think your brother’s Great Work is?”

Connor shrugged.  “I can’t say for sure.”  Then his eyes narrowed.  “But I can tell you one thing.  It’ll be hugely ambitious and he’ll be totally ruthless.  You must understand that my brother doesn’t just believe he and his Indigo Family are descended from fallen angels who bred with humans.  He wants to
recreate
the golden age when these ancestors of his — these most pure of thoroughbreds — once walked the earth.”  Shaking his head at the preposterousness of what he was saying, Connor led Fox out of the bedroom and back toward the stairs.  He smiled.  “It’s funny you being a psychiatrist because it’s felt like therapy getting all this shit off my chest.”

Fox wasn’t sure how he felt about his visit.  He had learned that Regan Delaney was selfish, obsessive and delusional and that the Indigo Family was as dysfunctional as any cult Fox had encountered, but he had no reason to believe Sorcha was in any immediate danger — or any proof.  Professionally, he had discovered how his erstwhile patient might have come by her rare gift.  It appeared to be a strange genetic inheritance, a freak mutation in her bloodline resulting from centuries of Delaney family inbreeding.

Approaching the stairs, they passed another room.  Fox glanced inside and saw a child’s bed and a cluster of pink toys.  “That’s my daughter’s room,” Connor said proudly.  “She’ll be five next year.  She’s out with the horses and can already ride better than me.”  He smiled.  “It’s funny.  I never had any children with my first wife but my second’s given me two.  Perhaps, by breaking up my first marriage, my brother did me a favor after all.”

Fox was no longer listening.  He was staring at the wooden letters pinned to the door, which spelled ‘Angela’.  “You buy those letters or make them?” he asked, taking a photo with his cell phone.

“I made them,” said Connor.  “Angela’s my daughter’s name.  Why?  You want to know why I colored the letters that way?”

A chill ran down Fox’s spine.  “No,” he said, more calmly than he felt, wondering how he could have missed the connection.  “You’ve already told me why.”  He checked his watch then shook Connor Delaney’s hand.  “Thank you for everything, but I’m afraid I have to leave now.”

“Why?”

“I need to get back to Portland and if I run I can catch the five p.m. flight.”

As he left the house and jumped into the waiting cab he punched a number on his BlackBerry.  He was trying to call Sorcha and warn her but the iPhone he had given her wasn’t answering. 
Shit
.  He left a voicemail, telling her to call him urgently, then phoned Jordache.  The detective was busy but his assistant promised to courier the crime scene photographs to Fox’s apartment that night.  Fox checked his watch again and willed the cab to reach the airport in time.  If the photographs confirmed his suspicions then Sorcha faced a far more dangerous threat than a delusional father.

Part Three

The Great Work

Chapter 34

At midnight, the excitement of Sorcha’s homecoming had subsided and the settlement was quiet.  His exhausted daughter was asleep in her room, but Regan Delaney was too preoccupied to retire.  He stepped out into the night to wander his domain.

As he walked among the silent wooden cabins within which his followers slumbered he looked up at the night sky.  In a few days the silver moon would be full and Esbat would be upon them.  Despite the mild air, the sense of anticipation caused goosebumps to erupt on his arm.  Passing a sign forbidding entry into the forest on the rise behind settlement, he breathed in the smell of the giant sequoia redwoods.  The forest was quiet except for the occasional cry of lovesick owls.  He smiled up at the massive trees, standing like silent sentinels guarding his settlement and his secrets.  Even the tower’s giant eye, gleaming in the moonlight, could not see into their depths.

Back inside his private quarters, he went to his concealed room and checked the closed-circuit monitors, toggling through the cameras secreted in the various sites around the settlement.  He saw two Watchers patrolling the bridge but most of the screens showed his people asleep in their beds.  Usually he searched for forbidden activity so he could publicly shame the wrongdoer and reinforce his people’s belief that he, the Seer, saw everything.  Tonight, however, he selected the room in which his daughter lay sleeping.  Because of the low light the black and white image was grainy but when he zoomed in on her face he could still make out her features.  He remembered the day she was born and how he had stared into her eyes, wondering what they had seen before coming into existence and what they would see after she died.  As he studied her face now, he smiled.  He had reclaimed her just in time, days away from taking the Great Work to the next stage.  Then his lens zoomed out and the excited glow of anticipation curdled in his belly.

Someone was standing at the foot of Sorcha’s bed, watching her sleep.  Disbelief paralyzed Delaney for some seconds.  How could an intruder be in Sorcha’s room?  What was he doing there?  How dare anyone steal into his private chambers?  As he zoomed in on the intruder, fury replaced shock and he ran to Sorcha’s room.

Exhausted, Sorcha lay on her bed, in deep sleep.  Again the nightmares visited her but tonight the circling horses, the eye staring down at her from the looming tower and the shadowy figure chasing her seemed even more real and frightening.

Suddenly, something sensed in the real world pierced her dreams and dragged her from the depths of her unconscious.  As she surfaced she became aware of a mounting, suffocating dread pressing down on her chest.  The terror of waking was so great that she would have preferred to return to her familiar nightmares.

As her eyes flickered open she heard herself cry out.  A figure was standing by her bed, bending over her, reaching out his hand but in her half-sleep state she couldn't move away.  She flinched as he touched her brow and stroked her forehead.

“Relax.  It’s only me,” the figure said.

As her eyes focused she recognized her father.  A warm wave of relief flooded over her.  She was home, back with her family.  She sighed and felt herself descent into deep sleep once more.  As she lost consciousness she didn’t register the anger and concern on her father’s face or the trace odor hanging in the still air like the smell of death.

Chapter 35

When Fox returned to his apartment that evening the photographs of the three crime scenes were waiting for him.  As he laid them on the dining table he ignored the mutilated victims and focused on the blow-ups of the killer’s message:

SERVE THE DEMON
SAVE THE ANGEL

Ignoring what the messages might mean, Fox compared the colored letters on the crime photographs with those on his cell phone.  The colors Connor Delaney had used to spell the word ‘Angela’ on his daughter’s bedroom door corresponded almost exactly with the marker pen letters that spelled the word ‘Angel’ in the crime scene photographs.  In all pictures, the A’s were red, the N’s blue, the E’s green and the L’s differing shades of yellow.  Even the G’s were similar brown tones.  Fox knew why Connor Delany had chosen the colors:  he had grapheme-color synaesthesia and saw individual letters as a particular shade.  But why had the killer assigned the same colors to identical letters?  Was it a coincidence?

Fox retrieved the notes he had made the day he’d first discovered Sorcha’s synaesthesia.  What had she said when he had shown her the letter A?  ‘
You’ve written it n black ink but everyone knows A’s are red…  E’s are olive green.
’  Grapheme-color synaesthetes often ascribed similar colors to the same letters, which indicated that not only were Sorcha and Connor Delaney synaesthetes but the killer was, too.  Did that mean the killer was, too?  Did that mean the killer knew Sorcha and was part of her past?

He needed to speak off the record with someone about this to check his thinking before he went official.  Fullelove already thought he was spending too much time on an ex-patient so he doubted she would be too receptive, and he would have to get his facts straight before he spoke to Jordache.  Whatever his facts were.  He packed up all the photos, files and notes and picked up his car keys.  Within half an hour he was at Samantha’s.  There was a squad car outside but otherwise no sign of the recent attack.  The front door had been repaired and when she opened it she showed no ill effects.  “What are you doing here, Nathan?  Not checking on me again, I hope.  I can look after myself.”

He smiled.  “You’ve proved that.  I need your help.  It concerns Sorcha.”

“Well, in that case, come in.”  She escorted Fox into the kitchen and poured him a glass of wine.

“Have you got any beer?”

She grimaced.  “You know I serve only proper drink in this house.  This is a very good Sauvignon Blanc.  All the way from New Zealand.”

He smiled and took the glass.  “Thank you.”

“So what’s this about Sorcha?  When she said goodbye to me, by the way, I got the distinct impression she didn’t want to go.”  She raised an eyebrow.  “And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so…”  she paused, searching for the word, “…engaged by someone.  I’m surprised you let her go.”

He frowned.  “She was my patient.  I did what I thought was right for her.”

“Nathan, my dear, you might understand the human mind but it appears you still have a lot to learn about the human heart.”  She sipped her wine.  “Why are you concerned about her now she’s out of harm’s way?”