Moving Target (20 page)

If that happened Paul would get up and dance a jig, because Cleary would inherit a buttload of money, but he knew she didn’t want to hear about that. “He won’t. Not today.”

Which was probably, unfortunately, true.

“He can’t die.” Her voice was tense, desperate.

Not for the first time, Paul wondered how in hell an otherwise smart woman nearing her fiftieth birthday could be so dumb about an elemental fact of life: People died. All the time. For every reason. For no reason at all. Every day. All day. Night, too.

But the one time he had pointed that out, Cleary had exploded and called him a cold monster. It had taken him a week to coax her back into speaking to him, and it was another two weeks before she went down on him.

Paul learned from his mistakes.

He kissed Cleary’s forehead and stroked her back and hips. “That tough old man will live to blow out a hundred birthday candles.”

She sighed and snuggled closer. “I know. I just worry about him. I don’t want him to die before . . .” Her voice faded. Before he realizes what a good daughter I am.

“Before what?” Paul asked.

Her shoulders jerked. She didn’t like admitting her needs to herself. She did her best to hide them from everyone else, even the man she loved as much as she could love any man after her father.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was petulant, like a little girl.

But the tongue licking his neck was all woman. So were the hands reaching for his fly.

Paul smiled and shifted to make it easier for her. The nice thing about giving people what they wanted was that the smart ones gave it back to you.

Cleary was smart.

“Promise you’ll get those pages?” she said. “We’ve got to keep a lid on this or we’ll lose out on the merger with smaller Internet houses. Then we’ll get swallowed up by Christie’s or Sotheby’s or even—Christ forbid—Auction Coalition.”

He felt her mouth burrow into the opening of his fly and groaned.

“Promise me,” she said, licking him.

His hips jerked. “I promise.”

She smiled and felt better. She couldn’t control her father, but she could certainly hold his right-hand man’s attention.

It was as easy as sucking on candy.

T
he call came after midnight. Only one person heard the cell phone ring.

He had been waiting.

“I’m listening,” he said in a low voice.

“She went into her own house the same way she left North’s—empty-handed.”

Shit! Had she left the stuff in a safe-deposit box in Palm Springs?

“Stay with her.”

“You want me to toss the house?”

He had already considered and rejected the idea. If Serena hadn’t carried anything into the house, then the pages weren’t there. “No. This is legal all the way.”

A lie, but a useful one.

If it came to another murder, he didn’t want anyone to know but Serena, because she wouldn’t tell anyone. Ever.

That was the really nice thing about dead people. Their mouths were sewed shut.

O
kay, Shel. Let me see if I have this right,” Erik said into the phone. He scrolled through the list of pages Rarities was researching for him. For the sake of simplicity he had numbered them one through eleven. “So far, most of the provenance trails go back only as far as the seventies, no matter how many owners.”

“Right.” At the other end of the conversation, Shel didn’t bother to conceal a jaw-cracking yawn. He was used to working long shifts, but this one had gone beyond caffeine’s ability to speed him up. His only consolation was that Factoid was at this moment cursing up and down the hallway at the slow—
for God’s sake it’s fucking Stone Age microfilm
—pace of searching through some of the mustier archives of the U.S. government. “We’re contacting the last-listed private individuals or dealers on the East Coast right now. Midwest next. Mountain time next. Should know more by noon. Evening, latest.”

“What about the auction houses? Sooner or later, I’ll bet that quite a few of the leaves go back to them.”

“Dana’s working on that now. Christie’s was slow until she pointed out that it was to their benefit to demonstrate how thorough their research was. Sotheby’s took some of our expert opinion on various stuff as quid pro quo for checking their databases.”

Erik grunted, unimpressed. “What about Warrick?”

“They’ve had their people on it since the request went in yesterday. Or was it the day before? Or—“ He yawned so hard he nearly broke his jaw. “Damn, I’ve got to get some sleep.”

Erik knew how he felt. His own sleep had been restless and unsatisfying, filled with images of himself wrapped around Serena like hot around fire. Except it wasn’t quite him. His hands were more scarred, marked by sword and crossbow and his peregrine’s talons, which sometimes pierced even his leather gauntlet. Nor was the sorceress quite Serena. The eyes and hair were the same, but the mouth was different, thinner, and she smelled of cloves, tasted of dark wine, wore a medieval dress whose fabric caressed him as though alive.

“You still there?” Shel asked.

Impatiently Erik forced his mind back to tracing provenance rather than the feel of a woman’s body beneath unearthly, loving cloth. “I’m here. If you reach a wall on the provenance on any single piece, let me know where. Immediately.”

“Yeah.” Yawn. “Sure. I’ve got Takeo and Suelynn on it. They’re fresh. They’ll wake me if they stall out.”

“Thanks, Shel.”

“I should thank you. Dana promised me three weeks off after this is wrapped up.”

“Don’t take your Rarities communications unit with you,” Erik warned.

“Oh, I’ll take it, just like my employment contract says. But it don’t say nothin’ about batteries.”

Driven by the impatience that rode him with razor talons, Erik disconnected, printed out the list of what he had so far, cursed savagely, and headed for the shower. Enough was enough. He was going to have a look at Serena’s inheritance, and to hell with her lack of trust.

He didn’t know why time was closing in like an enemy. He just knew that it was.

P
romptly at nine o’clock, Serena’s front doorbell chimed. Then it squawked long and loud. Something had happened a few months ago to its melodious electronics. Something expensive. So she had been forced to choose between buying yarn for weaving and new tires for the van or fixing the doorbell. No choice, really. She couldn’t weave with musical notes, no matter how pretty they were. Nor could she deliver her smaller textiles to southern California outlets without tires on her van. So as soon as the next check came in, her van would get new shoes.

And the doorbell would just get worse.

“What the hell was that?” Erik asked the instant the front door opened.

Serena didn’t say anything. She felt like slamming the door in his clean-shaved, handsome face. Wearing jeans, hiking boots, hunter-green shirt, and a soft leather jacket the color of night, he looked like he had just stepped out of an advertisement for the outdoor life.

She looked like the before photo in a You Can Do It spa ad. She was showing every one of the long hours she hadn’t slept because she was too stubborn—and too uneasy—to stay in the guest room Erik had offered her, complete with a telephone and an inside dead bolt to ensure her privacy. Instead of being sensible and staying behind the bolted guest room door, she had driven all the way home.

It hadn’t been her smartest moment. She had arrived after midnight, spent more than an hour trying to fall asleep, and then awakened to a nightmare of cold sweat and fiery death.

She told herself that her ragged emotions were understandable. The last few days had been exhausting: the lawyer, her grandmother’s estate, the Warricks, the pages that might or might not be real, the note warning of danger, and most of all the unnerving sense of déj `a vu that had increased the longer she stayed with Erik North. So she had driven back to her own familiar home as though pursued by a demon.

And here the demon was, standing at her front door.

“The doorbell electronics are skippy,” she said.

“They’re more than skippy. They’re twisted.”

His voice was almost curt. He had been in a bad mood since Serena had gotten in her old beater and driven off into the night, leaving him behind. His mood had gone from bad to dangerous a few minutes ago; that was when he spotted the guy parked down Serena’s street wearing a tiny high-tech headphone and driving a drab Japanese car.

Without seeming to, Erik watched Serena closely. If she was aware of the watcher down the street, she didn’t show it. She never once so much as glanced in that direction. Even so, she looked plenty nervous. He wondered if she had changed her mind during the night, if she would back out of showing him the pages in the clean light of day.

“I’m glad you made it home safely,” he said, giving the van in her driveway a narrow look. “Your tires have about the same amount of tread on them as the average egg.”

“They’re not that bad.”

“Have you checked them lately?”

“Yes.”

“Then get your eyes examined and look again. You need new tires.”

“They’re at the top of my list, right after cat food.”

“If I go out and get some, will you let me in?”

“Cat food?”

“Or tires. Take your pick.”

Startled, she looked directly at his eyes for the first time. They were as clear as sunlight and almost as golden. They were also serious. He meant just what he said: cat food or tires, whichever she wanted, he would supply.

She stepped out of the doorway and motioned him in. “I don’t require guests to bring hostess gifts.”

The fact that he had invited himself—in fact, he had nearly shouted at her that he would see her tomorrow, early—was something she decided not to bring up. Despite his crisp appearance, he was looking determined around the eyes and mouth. She knew that he really hadn’t wanted her to leave last night.

And she really hadn’t wanted to stay. It had been too unnerving.

Every time she looked at him, it was as though there was another Erik there, too, shimmering just beyond reach, a presence that was both darkness and light, the air smelling of cloves and wine. When she looked down, she saw herself shimmering, too, wearing a dress of an unspeakably clever weave, a dress just like her scarf; and an ancient ruby ring she had never seen before was on her right hand.

She had panicked.

I’m not crazy
, Serena told herself for the thousandth time.
Crazy people don’t worry about being crazy. They just are.

A black cat the size of a dog slid up and looked at Erik with unblinking fire-colored eyes.

“What about the cat?” Erik asked. “He looks like he demands tribute.”

Briskly Serena cleared her mind of weird dreams and even more startling waking moments. “Mr. Picky? Nah. He’s love with four feet and black fur.”

“Don’t forget the claws and teeth.”

“I take it you don’t like cats.”

Erik gave her an amused look. Then he sat on his heels and began talking to Mr. Picky. The rumbling, purring noises and the soft yeowings Erik made sounded remarkably like they came from a cat’s throat—a very large cat.

Mr. Picky thought so, too. He leaped up into what there was of Erik’s lap and burrowed in as though he had been born there. Smiling, Erik sat cross-legged on the floor and settled in for some serious cat petting. He missed having cats around, but he was gone often enough that he didn’t want anything less wild than a chaparral cock depending on him.

As Serena watched her cat quite literally drool over the strange man, she was divided between jealousy and fascination. Picky didn’t dislike other people, but he usually ignored them, especially if they paid attention to him.

Not this time. The cat’s glazed eyes were half closed. He was ecstatic.

Erik made feline sounds.

“What are you saying to him?” she demanded.

“Damned if I know. He seems to like it, though.”

Picky butted his big head against Erik’s chin and purred like a tiger.
Pay attention to me, not her.

Holding the cat, Erik came to his feet in a lithe movement. Picky shifted, clung less than delicately with sharp claws, and generally made it known that he wasn’t giving up his long-lost, very new friend.

“You’d think I never petted the ungrateful rat,” Serena said.

“Cat.”

“
Rat.
See if I share any more fresh shrimp with him.”

Picky turned up the volume on his purring as though to drown out her complaints.

“You want a cat?” she asked.

“You offering this one?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

The big cat shifted, sprang, and flowed into Serena’s arms. The purring never stopped. She sighed and rubbed her chin against his soft, sleek fur.

“I’ll keep him,” she said.

“I never doubted it.”

“Neither did he, the rat.”

Picky ignored the insults, butted her chin gently, and leaped down. A few moments later the flap on the cat door in the kitchen slapped softly.

“Was it something I said?” Erik asked, deadpan.

She snickered. “All that purring worked up an appetite. He’s gone hunting.”

“The coyotes better take cover.”

“That’s what I like about Picky. He’s big enough to give a coyote second thoughts about feline sushi.”

“That’s one of the reasons I don’t have a cat,” Erik said. “I haven’t found one that can outrun, outwit, or outfight a coyote. Palm Springs is full of them.”

“So far, so good here. Want some coffee or food before you look at the sheets?”

Sheets. Bed. Serena in it with me.

Then reality hit Erik. She was talking about the leaves from the Book of the Learned. The fact that he hadn’t thought of that immediately told him just how deeply she had gotten to him.

“Coffee would be good,” he said.

An ice cube shower would be more to the point, but he wasn’t going to say it aloud.

“Cream? Sugar?” she asked, turning and heading for the kitchen.