Angel's Advocate (31 page)

“Oh, my God,” Antonia said. “The whole thing sucks like a lemon.”

Bree nodded glumly. She’d gone straight to the theater after hearing what Tiffany Burkhold had to say, in the hope of finding someone sane and lovable to talk to. Who better than her sister?

“Jeez.” Antonia propped her knees against the seat in front of her and unwrapped the remaining half of Bree’s BLT. “Poor kid. Isn’t there anyone who gives a rat’s behind about what’s going to happen to her?”

Bree thought of Madison, who was sane, grounded, and focused, and Chad Martinelli, who wasn’t. “Maybe. I hope so. I’m going up to rag on Lindsey this afternoon.” She resisted the temptation to grind her teeth. “That kid! Are she and Chad mixed up in this robbery? And do the families know it? That goes a long way toward explaining why the Chandlers are keeping the lid on. Do you suppose it’s some kind of revenge against their parents?
Why
, for God’s sake?” She kicked Antonia’s theater seat in frustration. “I can’t,
won’t
, believe that the two of them committed murder.”

Antonia’s silence was sympathetic. Then she said, “So what’s going to happen now?”

“I’m going back to the office. I’m going to go through the file again. Maybe I’ll make one of those charts on whiteboard. Except I don’t have a whiteboard.” Bree closed her eyes, suddenly sick of the whole investigation. Pseudoephedrine. Meth labs, probably. God help them. “You want to go out for a pizza after tonight’s show?”

“Got a date. Sorry.”

This was nice, normal, kid sister stuff. Bree gazed at Antonia with enormous affection. “No kidding? Sherlock or Watson?”

“Ew! Watson’s got to be, like, forty-five if he’s a day!”

“Sherlock, then,” Bree said with approval. “Good looking, and a heck of an actor. He’s was at the open house a few weeks ago, wasn’t he? I’d forgotten about that. Lucky old you.”

“Lucky old me,” Antonia said with a happy sigh. Then, with obvious reluctance: “You can join us if you want. We’re going dancing at Murphy’s Law, that pub off of Franklin Square. Hunter dances, doesn’t he? Bring him, too.”

“Hunter, dance? Don’t make me laugh.”

“For Pete’s sake, Bree. The guy moves like a boxer. I’ll bet he’s a wizard on the dance floor.”

“I’m not about to find out.” Bree eased herself out of the theater seat.

“Are you off?”

“I’m off.”

“Are you going to tell Hunter about Lindsey and the keys?”

“I don’t know.” Bree stood in the theater aisle, thinking hard. She didn’t want to make the drive back up to Cliff’s Edge Academy, but she didn’t see how she could avoid it. What she wanted to know from Lindsey, Lindsey didn’t want to tell her. If she called, the kid could just hang up. And it was harder to lie when your interrogator was looking you straight in the eye. “What time is it?”

“Just quarter to one.”

“I’m going to the office. Then . . . I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“We’ll probably end up at Huey’s tonight, if you want to drop by late.”

But Bree, halfway up the aisle, didn’t have time to reply.

There wasn’t anyone at home at 66 Angelus Street. Bree let herself into a darkened office. Outside, the wind was rising, and a slow roll of storm clouds headed into Savannah from the west. She fed the three dogs, and then, in response to Belli’s imperative scratch at the back door in the kitchen, let them all out into the cemetery. Sasha relieved himself against the magnolia tree, then sniffed busily around the fence surrounding the graves. Miles and Belli went about their business in a more dignified way, then settled themselves down between the Pendergast graves. Tomb guardians, Bree thought.

She settled herself at her desk and began a methodical search through the Chandler file. A neatly lettered note from Ron was first.

Then, from Petru:

Jensen, the store manager, must have discovered the robbery when he came on duty at six in the morning and called his boss. Then Chandler marshaled the troops, Lindquist and Stubblefield first. A long list of calls followed those. Bree skimmed through the phone calls—the man must have had the phone permanently implanted in his ear, from the number of them Petru listed. She stopped at the calls that must have occurred at the Miner’s Club in the early evening. An
incoming
call from Chad Martinelli. An outgoing call to Peter Martinelli, his father. Another call from Probert to Chad, and then to Lindsey.

Bree sat back. So Chad called Probert first. Why? To make threats? She shook her head, puzzled. The kid didn’t make sense to her. Not yet.

She moved on through the file, the witness statements, the accident report, the summary of her talks with the rest of the Chandler family. She read through the autopsy report again, noting, as she did, that Probert Chandler’s blood type was OO.

That stopped her.

Bree was realistic enough to know that as a corporate tax lawyer—the area of law she’d specialized in before she’d been dragged into this loony defense work—the only real talent she had was a memory for minutiae. And something about that blood type bothered her.

She still had the lab report on Carrie-Alice’s blood type crumpled in her pocket. She smoothed it out.

Carrie-Alice was OO, too.

And Lindsey . . .

Bree thumbed through the girl’s medical history. There it was. AB-.

“Whoa,” Bree said aloud. Lindsey wasn’t Probert’s daughter. She couldn’t be. There was no way two double-O parents could have an AB-child. Bree remembered enough Mendel to know that.

Bree lifted her head and stared out the window, thinking hard, wondering why this bit of information seemed so critical. She reached for the phone. Carrie-Alice. Lindsey’s mother was the place to start for answers.

A shout of thunder shook the house. Outside, the wind picked up with a shriek. Miles and Belli sat as if carved in stone. Dead leaves and dust whirled around them. Bree got to her feet—Sasha, at least, shouldn’t be out if it was going to rain.

The swamplike mire that covered Josiah’s grave opened up, slowly, a dread eclipse of movement across the ground. Miles whirled and faced the opening. Belli backed up slightly, head lowered, lips pulled back over those fearsome teeth, eyes glowing red.

A strange, furnace glow sprang to eerie life in the depths of the open grave. And then, with the sly, stealthy movement of a creeping snake, a path of filthy green light crept over the lip of the hole and onto the ground.

Bree discovered she’d backed up against the desk. A figure jerked horribly up the path. The shape was manlike, but distorted, as if she saw it through the shield of a scum-filled pond. It seemed to be made of flesh and bone, but a pallid, dead white flesh that crawled with corpse-mold. The man, Bree saw, or what had once been a man, raised his arms in a dreadful summons.

Sasha appeared out of nowhere, tail thrashing furiously over his back, barking as if to raise the dead.

Miles and Belli leaped forward. The ground caved under their feet. They fell, soundlessly, and disappeared from sight.

Sasha jumped backwards, avoiding the pit by a hairs-breadth. Josiah—who else could it be but Josiah?—lifted his head and stared directly at Bree. His eyes were a hideous, human blue in the ruins of his face. He grinned, horribly. Then he whirled and kicked. His boot caught Sasha under the chin. The dog screamed and flew backwards and hit the magnolia tree with a shattering thump.

Bree raced to the back door and flung it open. The wind smacked into her like a train. She staggered, got to her feet, and pushed herself against the roiling air like a swimmer coming out of the depths of the sea. Sasha shook himself, rolled to his feet, and raced to Bree’s side.

She had nothing. No weapons. No way to fight him. Josiah shuffled over the dank and rotting grass. The stench of rotting flesh forced itself down her throat. Bree fought the fear that engulfed her, and sent up a wild, wordless prayer for the power that was her Company’s gift to her and her kin.

Josiah’s hands reached out to grab Bree. Sasha leaped full at him. Josiah fell back, flat onto the green miasma of the Bridge from the grave, and tumbled back, back, back to the ashy glow of the depths.

The grave closed in over itself, but not before Belli and Miles jumped out.

Bree was alone in the cemetery with her dogs. A gobbet of decayed flesh clung to her hands and the smell of the dead was in her hair.

“What I want to know,” she said furiously into the phone, “is
where was everybody?
”

Professor Cianquino let a moment of silence pass before he responded. “The rules are fairly clear,” he said, finally.

“Not to me, they aren’t.” Bree’s hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel. She made a conscious effort to relax them. She was headed up to Cliff’s Edge to confront Lindsey. Belli and Miles sat behind her in the back. Sasha sprawled in the passenger seat next to her.

“Like meets like.”

“Like meets like?” Bree wasn’t scared anymore. But as often happened when she’d been frightened out of a year’s growth, she was angry. And that interfered with the ability to think clearly. So she said, as calmly as she could, “Does this mean I’m the temporal equivalent of a corpse?”

“Very good,” Professor Cianquino said. His approval was a rare thing.

“No extras, then,” she said. “I get it. The Pendergasts don’t have any extra help, and neither do I.”

“Precisely.”

“So it’s mano a mano?” She scrabbled around for her long-forgotten Latin and said, “Or
corpus a corpus
?”

“You would
not
,” her professor said, “want it any other way. If you were able to call on the Company, they, in turn, would be able to call on . . .” He paused. “You would not like that. Not at all.”

Bree rolled her eyes.
Says you,
she thought, but aloud she said, “Thank you. I guess.”

“How is the case progressing?”

“Slowly. I don’t have any real leads. And it’s insane to try to solve this murder without any real communication from my client.”

“But he has communicated with you,” he said. “The paperweight, the keys, the blood test, and the photograph.

“The blood test has already led you to an essential key to the case, dear Bree. Listen to what else your client has to say.”

She made it to Cliff’s Edge Academy in under two hours. The big wrought-iron gates to the school were closed. The fence surrounding the property was as firmly planted in the ground as ever. Bree drove past the grounds at a leisurely pace, as if looking for an address or admiring the Spanish moss that dropped from the live oak trees that dotted the landscape like so many sentinels.