Dark Oracle (7 page)

She found the last fragments of ice in the ice bucket in the bedroom, popped an ice chip in her mouth. The chill spread from her tongue to the rest of her body. She dragged the ugly comforter off the bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and sank to the bathroom floor.

Tara fell asleep in the brilliant glare of the bathroom light, the sounds of the television from upstairs echoing against the tile.

Instead of bright light, cool tile, and the smell of Pine-Sol, Tara dreamed of darkness, of the chill of dirt at her back. She could feel her breath condensing hot against her face, the thinness of the air in her lungs, and the weight of earth creaking over her. She tasted warm, coppery blood, felt it slick on her fingers as she tried to move. Fertilizer stung the wounds lacing her body and her fingertips, where she’d torn her nails off clawing into the dark. She could smell the harsh tang of the chemicals, taste them in the back of her throat. Her face was wet with tears and mud.

Buried. The fear drained into her, paralyzed her. Her breath came fast and shallow, and she felt the dizziness from lack of oxygen setting in. She couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. All she could do was whimper in the back of her throat.

Could this truly be her fate? Suffocating to death in the ground? Her cards had never predicted this. But she felt helpless against the terrible weight pressing against her, unable to distinguish up from down.

A voice whispered in her ear, a woman’s voice. “Fight.”

She forced her breath to slow. She was hallucinating from lack of oxygen. Not a good sign.

“Fight.”

The voice emanated from her right and behind her. . . Perhaps that was the way up. She struggled to turn over, feeling dirt trickling into her mouth. She spat it out. Tara dug her fingers into the earth, feeling her fingernails peel. Splinters of wood dug beneath them, and she cried out.

“Fight.”

She pushed against that terrible weight with the palms of her hands.

“Fight.”

She had no other choice but to push against the terrible darkness.

Chapter Six

H
OW DID
you sleep?”

“All right.” Tara sipped her water from a paper cup, alternating swallows between Rolaids tablets. Li noticed dark circles shadowed her doe eyes, blue as a bottle of overturned ink. “You?”

“As well as could be expected.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye for a reaction as he drove. “I got a late-night visit from Corvus.”

She hesitated, mid-sip, and the thick fringe of her eyelashes fluttered. “What did he want?”

“He warned me to wrap things up quickly. He also insinuated you weren’t reliable.”

“I suppose Corvus would think that,” she said mildly, but he watched the muscle in her jaw tighten.

“What is it with the two of you?” He was being bullish, direct. “Did you two have a thing going on, or something?”

She blinked, looked at him in shock. “A thing? With Corvus?” Horror washed over her pretty features. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but there was something deeply attractive about her. She swished water around in her mouth, as if trying to wipe out a bad taste. “Gah. Absolutely not.”

Harry relaxed his grip on the wheel, though he hadn’t realized he’d been tense. Now that it was blurted out in the open, it sounded absurd. He couldn’t picture cold-fish Corvus as being a love struck inamorata. Tara. . . He could picture Tara with her hair fanned over a pillow, drinking tea and reading the Sunday paper in bed with a lover. But not Corvus.

“He’s quite interested in keeping you out of the way.”

Tara wrapped her hands around the cup, and it was some time before she answered. “Look, he made a pass at me once, a long time ago. I turned him down. We were partners for a year after that, but it was more. . . competitive. At that time, Special Projects was a new division. He and I were both ambitious, and we clashed. Often. I eventually left Special Projects. He got what he wanted, and I. . .” She smiled, without warmth. “I got out.”

Uncomfortable silence settled in the car. Harry didn’t want to force her to talk about why she left. “And why did you come back now?”

Tara shrugged. “An old friend asked me to. She felt Magnusson’s disappearance was important.”

The neighborhood they drove through, Magnusson’s neighborhood, was heavy with the silence of early morning. This was an older section of the north edge of town, made up of a mélange of houses from various eras, most of them mid-twentieth century. Newspapers lay at the edges of driveways; garbage cans at the curb were yet to be picked up. A few isolated lights had come on in the kitchens and bathrooms, windows fogging with shower steam. There was no evidence of young families with children, no toys in the sparse yards or cars decorated with teenagers’ decals or ornaments in rearview mirrors. Tall fences and strategic use of shrubbery and trees to block the views suggested this was a place where people pretty much left their neighbors alone.

Harry pulled into a crushed-gravel driveway shaded with pine trees taking a broad curve away from the road. “You must have some powerful friends.”

“They surprise me with their nosiness, every so often.”

She wasn’t going to give him any more than that, and Harry let it drop. He parked the car behind a small bungalow screened from the street by overgrown pine and cherry trees. The cherry trees were just beginning to bud, bringing a suggestion of life into the colorless landscape. The small yard had been xeriscaped with gravel, boulders, and native sage plants. Brown skeletons of coneflower and columbine rattled near the porch, heavy with beams and pillars in need of painting. Mail peeked out of the black mailbox. Harry snatched the letters, leafing through them. Bills, a couple of journals, a lingerie catalog.

Tara had climbed to the porch and peeked in the window. “Looks like someone’s been here before us. It’s been tossed.”

Harry tried the door. Locked. But it was a simple knob lock, no dead bolt. He fished in his wallet for a credit card, slipped it between the tongue of the lock and the hole in the doorjamb, and jiggled it back and forth until he felt the card slide behind the tongue and pull it back. Drawing his gun, he pushed the door open. Tara mirrored him on the other side of the door. Harry hadn’t realized she’d been carrying.

He pushed the door open into the house. “Hello?”

No answer. A potted plant lay broken in pieces just inside the door, splaying its striped spidery tentacles all over the terra-cotta, as if it were trying to gather itself together. A sign of a struggle. He smelled urine. This was not going to be good.

He heard a sudden burst of motion—a thundering gallop, the rattle of chain—and he braced his stance to draw down on a shadowy assailant barreling down the hallway toward him. Like the Grim Reaper itself, it lunged in a blur of jingling darkness. Harry was knocked to the wooden board with an echoing slam, pulling his gun away and over his head. . .

. . . as a chocolate Labrador retriever bounded out of the house as if its ass were on fire, charged into the yard, and squatted on the gravel to take a leak.

“Poor thing.” Tara’s voice washed soothingly over Harry, until he realized it wasn’t him she was clucking over. He rolled over to see her scratching the ears of the dog in the yard, who seemed to be holding five gallons of streaming water in its bladder. “You really had to go, didn’t you? When was the last time you were let out?” The dog whimpered back at her, finished its business, and slobbered on her cheek.

“You okay, Harry?” she called over her shoulder at him, an afterthought.

“I’m fine,” he grumbled as he climbed to his feet, swallowing the surge of adrenaline that had nearly caused him to shoot the animal. “Who’s the guard dog?”

Tara read the brass tags on its collar. “This is Maggie.”

“Maggie evidently had to pee.”

Maggie bounded up the porch steps and jumped on Harry. In spite of himself, Li rubbed her ears, and she made awful faces of enjoyment, tongue lolling. He let the dog lead them into the house, tail low and wagging, nails clicking on the hardwood floors. She looked sheepishly at them when she walked past the broken potted plant, and tucked her tail between her legs when they passed the puddle on the floor of the kitchen. Chastised, she rolled her baleful brown eyes up at Harry and Tara.

“It’s okay,” Tara murmured at the dog. Maggie leaned against her, forcing her head under Tara’s hand. She patted the dog’s sides. This dog hadn’t missed many meals, a nice layer of fat encasing her ribs.

Advancing down the hall, Li did a quick check of the rooms. Nothing else seemed out of place. The living room held a tattered sofa, a CD collection, and an HDTV that made him salivate with envy. The coffee table was stacked with newspapers dated two days ago. The floor was strewn with dog toys, most of them pretty well destroyed. Li’s shoe brushed the remains of what might once have been a stuffed turtle, now wet with dog spit and leaking stuffing. When he stepped on it, it emitted a halfhearted squeak.

The bathroom smelled vaguely of bachelor mildew, with a lonely toothbrush perched in a chrome holder. Magnusson’s bedroom was what Li would have expected: unmade bed, physics books stacked on the unmatched side tables. He peered under the bed and spied a stack of magazines he didn’t want to touch. He would have expected a man like Magnusson would’ve been more tech-savvy with his porn. Most people got theirs from the internet; Magnusson was apparently old-school and liked paper princesses.

“It looks like no one’s been here yet.” He felt a stab of triumph at that.

Maggie trundled in, with Tara in tow. She sat down with a huff beside the bed, her tail slapping against the floor like a metronome. Was it too much to hope that the dog had scared them off? Maggie grinned up at him, drooling. Ferocious beast.

Tara’s eyes burned dark, considering. “They either have, and left things alone, or they’re watching to see who comes looking.”

She left the room, whistled for the dog. From the kitchen, he could hear running water and noisy slurps as Tara watered the dog. He heard her puttering around the kitchen, riffling through the drawers and cabinets. The crackling of a paper bag and the unmistakable rattle of kibble in a metal bowl made him smile. For all Tara’s cool reticence, she did seem to have some sympathy after all.

Magnusson’s office interested him the most. The original casement windows let in wan, late winter sunshine, striping a desk made from a door balanced on top of two file cabinets. Magnusson’s slippers lay, cast aside, beneath the desk. Papers and books teetered nearby on a battered bookshelf. His heart dropped when he saw the power and USB cables snaking across the desk, connected to nothing. A laptop computer had been used here at one time, but it was gone now. He stabbed the power button on the laser printer, but it spat out no forgotten queued printer jobs.

They had not been the first to arrive. He felt a twinge of disappointment at that. The tight net cast by Gabriel over Magnusson’s workplace may have reached even this far.

T
ARA FOUND
M
AGGIE’S EMPTY WATER BOWL AND FILLED IT
from the kitchen tap. Enraptured, the dog leaned against her thigh and attacked the water with mighty slurps that splashed liquid on the tile floor.

Only a lonely coffee mug rested in the bottom of the sink. Tara opened the fridge, studded with magnets emblazoned with pizza delivery numbers. Refrigerators were often the best places to get a sense of a person, and Magnusson’s fridge was no exception. The fridge light illuminated a few bottles of microbrew beer, energy drinks, ketchup, a loaf of bread, and a takeout container. Magnusson lived the life of a distracted intellectual, for certain. There was no sign of a woman’s touch in the fridge, either.

She shut the fridge door. The sight of food made her stomach turn. Though she didn’t feel nearly as weak and sickly as she had last night, she didn’t want to tempt fate. She felt too unsteady on her feet, and didn’t want to risk barfing on the evidence.

As she popped another Rolaids tablet, her gaze roved the counters. An expensive espresso machine perched next to the sink. Magnusson was a gadget man, a man who would indulge a luxury or two. Or else, he was a man who was extremely hard to buy for during holidays.

She pawed through his cabinets, finding several kinds of whole-grain cereal, a half-used jar of peanut butter, plenty of multivitamins, and prescription bottles half full of Xanax and Ambien. The original refill dates were pretty recent. Magnusson was perhaps dealing with more stress than usual. She turned the Xanax bottle over in her hand. If Magnusson had left town willingly, he would have brought his meds with him.

Maggie shoved her nose into Tara’s thigh, blinking up at her with all the sadness only dogs can muster. Magnusson wouldn’t have left the dog behind, either. The amount of toys in the living room and the layer of pudge encasing the dog suggested Magnusson wasn’t a neglectful dog parent.

“You hungry, girl?”

Maggie whimpered.

Tara rummaged around the lower cabinets and found a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble. She dragged it out and unrolled it. Though the cartoon hound on the bag cheerfully announced the bag contained organic diet dog food for overweight dogs, it didn’t seem to have had much effect on Maggie. She upended the bag, trickling kibble into the stainless steel bowl on the floor. Maggie shoved her nose into the stream of food, crunching noisily.

Something shifted inside the bag. Frowning, Tara turned it back up, tore it open to look inside. A piece of clear plastic poked into view like a prize in a Cracker Jack box. She reached in after it, and fished out a small laptop computer encased in a plastic zipper bag. Jackpot.

She took it back to Magnusson’s office and placed it on the desk before Harry.

“Where did you find that?” Harry’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead, and he grinned.

“In the dog food. Magnusson evidently wanted whoever would feed the dog to find it.”

“And no one doing a cursory search would have seen it.” Li opened the greasy zipper bag to retrieve the computer. He punched the power button, drumming his fingers as it booted up. The screen blinked on, demanding a password.

“Shit.”

Tara scanned the office, turning on her heel to fully absorb it. This place was where Magnusson had done his real work.

For the first time, Tara could feel the force of Magnusson’s personality. Where much of the rest of the house was strictly utilitarian, as evidenced by the mismatched dishes and lack of interest in décor, this was his nest, feathered in books, paper, and bits of debris that spoke of who he was. A worn rug muffled her steps underfoot, stained with coffee. Maggie’s dog bed was tucked in the corner, strewn with soggy rawhides. As Maggie didn’t seem the type of dog to be far from her master, it implied Magnusson spent more time here than he did in his bedroom. Magnets cut in the shapes of cartoon aliens studded the file cabinets, holding notes of mathematical formulae. A chipped coffee cup on his desk proclaimed he was
#1 Dad
and held an assortment of very expensive fountain pens and mechanical pencils. No wonder he’d eschewed the cheap, government-issue ones from work. A half-evaporated energy drink sat open on the desk beside a paperweight carved to resemble a happy Tiki god. A telescope perched before the window was aimed somewhere over the tree line. Tara wondered what Magnusson thought at night when the moon and stars crossed its glass eye. She wondered if Cassiopeia was visible this time of year.

Tara paused to examine a poster of the Earth at night tacked up onto the rough plaster wall. Taken from a satellite, it showed the bright illumination of cities and power sources, leaving the rest of the planet to its soft, sleepy darkness. Dark and light, the chiaroscuro was exquisite, the energy and black seeming to seethe together as a living thing, full and empty at the same time.

Her fingers traced over the titles of Magnusson’s books:
Black Holes: The Armpits of the Universe
,
A Unified Theory of Quantum Physics
,
Field Theory Equations
,
The Tao Te Ching.
She picked the last one up and flipped through the pages. The philosophy of dark and light, again. Cryptic notes were scribbled in the margins, some legible, some not. She paused at a dog-eared page and a trio of passages Magnusson had underlined: