Falling Awake (26 page)

But even as he told himself that this was the way he wanted it, he knew he was lying. It was too late to pretend that he could drive off into the sunset when this was all over.

“Thank God the attendant was not a huge man,” Leila said, shuddering at the thought. “You might not have been able to haul him out of the unit.”

Tamsyn shook her head. “I’ve heard it’s absolutely amazing what you can do when the adrenaline kicks in.”

Farrell looked grim. “Nevertheless, there are limits. That guy can thank his lucky stars that Isabel is in good shape.”

It occurred to Ellis that none of the three had berated Isabel for taking the risk of going back into the burning locker to rescue the attendant. He studied their faces one by one and realized why. Each of them understood what Isabel had done because under similar circumstances, they would have attempted to do the same thing.

These were good people, he thought. They might not hold a high opinion of him, but he gave all of them a thumbs-up.

Tamsyn’s attractive face tightened into an anxious frown. “What about the bastard who started the fire and tried to lock you and the attendant inside?”

“Thanks to Ellis, he’s in jail,” Isabel said. “The detective in charge of the investigation said he hasn’t talked yet, but they’re sure that he will eventually.”

Farrell gave Ellis a considering look. Then he quietly detached himself from the group and walked to the counter.

“I want to have a word with you outside,” he said in a low voice.

Ellis nodded and got to his feet. He had a hunch he knew what was coming.

They went out onto the front porch and stood at the railing for a while. Ellis put on his sunglasses.

“I want to know what the hell is going on here,” Farrell said evenly. “My wife had a background check run on you this morning. Everything she found indicates that you’re a legitimate businessman. But I’m not buying it.”

“Yeah, I sort of got that impression.”

Farrell turned to face him. “Isabel has never led what most people would call a normal life but she’s never had the kind of problems she’s had lately. I find myself looking for some reasonable explanation. But all I come up with is you.”

“I know.”

“Who are you, Ellis Cutler, and why are you hanging around Isabel?”

Ellis hesitated, but only for a few seconds. He had already made up his mind about how to deal with Farrell.

“Got a pen?” he asked mildly.

Farrell’s hand automatically went to the gold pen in his pocket. “Why?”

“I’m going to give you a phone number. It’s the private line of a woman named Beth Mapstone. She operates a large private investigation business that has affiliates in several states, including here in California. You can verify her identity and credentials. She’ll answer your questions about me.”

Farrell’s brow furrowed. “Are you some kind of investigator?”

“Yes.” He leaned against a post and folded his arms. “Used to do it full-time but now I’m freelance. Mostly I’m a venture capitalist these days.”

Farrell slowly took his pen out of his pocket. “You’re working on a case here in Roxanna Beach?”

“Yes.”

“What’s all this have to do with Isabel?”

“She’s assisting me.”

“Bullshit. Isabel doesn’t know anything about investigative work.”

“Got news for you. Isabel has been consulting for me and other Mapstone Investigation agents for the past year, although this is her first field job.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” Farrell rubbed his temples. “Not the dream analysis thing?”

“Afraid so.”

Farrell did not bother to conceal his incredulity. “Are you telling me that there are serious criminal investigators out there using this Level Five lucid dreaming crap to solve crimes?”

“I know it’s a little hard to believe—”

“I can believe some of it, all right,” Farrell interrupted roughly. “But not all of it. I’m not a complete idiot, Cutler. I’ve got a background in the corporate world. I know enough to follow the money, and I can see that there’s a lot of it tied up in this thing, starting with the center itself. I wondered how Martin Belvedere kept that place afloat. I never understood why he hired Isabel and paid her such a good salary when she’s got zero credentials in the field of sleep research. Now you’re telling me that you work for a criminal investigation firm that employs agents who use psychic dreaming as an investigative technique.”

Ellis nodded. “Yeah.”

Farrell glanced at the Maserati and then raked Ellis from head to toe, taking in the expensive dark green shirt, charcoal pants and leather shoes. “This firm pays its consultants enough money to enable them to drive high-end cars and wear hand-tailored shirts. Not the usual gumshoe attire, Cutler.”

Ellis smiled. He was starting to like Farrell a lot.

“And this Mapstone Investigations operation uses Isabel to analyze its agents’ dreams.”

“You got it.”

“Only one source I know of that would be likely to cough up enough money to finance a phony sleep research facility and pay
people big bucks to solve crimes in their dreams,” Farrell concluded dryly.

“What can I say?” Ellis unfolded his arms and widened his hands. “Your tax dollars at work.”

Before Farrell could respond, Leila’s voice rose from inside the house.

“No insurance?” she wailed. “What do you mean you don’t have any insurance? There must have been thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture stored in that locker.”

“I had to make some cutbacks after I lost my job at the center,” Isabel mumbled. “The gym membership, my insurance policy—”

“How could you do something so idiotic?” Leila demanded.

Ellis straightened away from the post, yanked open the front door and walked back into the house.

In the living room, Isabel was clutching Sphinx very tightly as she confronted Tamsyn and Leila. The cat had his ears flattened against his skull, annoyed with the fresh wave of commotion.

“I don’t believe this,” Tamsyn declared to anyone who would listen. “How could you be so foolish as to store a fortune in fine furniture in a self-storage locker and then drop your insurance?”

“I told you, I couldn’t afford it.”

Leila jumped to her feet. “Why on earth did you buy it in the first place?”

“Yes,” Tamsyn demanded. “Why buy a lot of expensive furniture when you don’t have a house for it?”

Isabel said nothing. She just sat there, looking stubborn.

Ellis had had enough. He moved, violating the zone of intimacy. He sat down beside Isabel and gathered her securely against his side.

“It was for her dream house,” he said quietly. “Isn’t that right, Isabel?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

And then, for the first time since the events in the storage locker, she started to cry.

Ellis wrapped his hand around her head and pressed her face against his chest.

While Isabel wept, he watched Leila, Tamsyn and Farrell, challenging them silently to push him out of the zone. None of them moved.

a
n hour later, she had recovered her composure. She curled on the sofa, Sphinx’s solid, warm body cuddled against her leg, and drank the wine Ellis had poured.

“Thanks for getting rid of the others,” she said wearily.

“You’re welcome.” Ellis spoke from the kitchen, where he was putting dinner together. “I was ready for a little privacy, myself.”

“They mean well, but I’ve had about all the lectures on making poor financial decisions that I can take for one day.”

Ellis dropped four slices of bread into the heated, buttered skillet. “Be fair. You gave them a hell of a scare today. They needed to blow off their shock and concern. The furniture and the lack of insurance were easy targets.”

She was impressed. “That’s very insightful of you.”

“Not really.” He slathered mustard on one side of each slice. “I’m probably just projecting. You scared the living daylights out of me today, too. I was ready to smash walls and yell, myself.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Only because there are too many other things to worry about. Maybe I’ll get around to it later, when this case is closed.”

She turned the wineglass in her fingers, watching the play of light on the ruby red contents. “I guess I was a little obsessive about the furniture.”

“Hey, you’re talking to a guy who has been told that he has a tendency to obsess, himself. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with being obsessive. Not when it comes to something that’s really important.”

Isabel met his eyes across the room. “My furniture was very important to me. I bought it a few months ago. Walked into a furniture showroom one afternoon, saw the pieces and I just had to have them. I cleaned out my bank account to make the down payment and went into hock up to my eyebrows on my credit cards.”

He dropped cheddar cheese onto the sizzling bread slices. “That accounts for your current cash-flow problems.”

She frowned. “You were aware of my financial situation?”

“I’m in that line, remember?”

“Wait a second, are you telling me that you investigated my personal finances?”

“It was just part of a routine check,” he assured her a little too smoothly.

“Hah. I don’t believe that for a moment. More likely you and Lawson were worried that after I lost my job I might try to sell whatever I had learned about you and Lawson’s little dream operation to the highest bidder.”

“I didn’t mention it to Lawson,” he admitted. “I knew it might make him a trifle nervous.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I wasn’t worried at all.” He glanced at her, smiling slightly. “But then, I know you a whole lot better than Lawson does.”

She gave him a measuring look. “Are you telling me that it never crossed your mind that I might try to peddle some of your secrets in order to cover my debts?”

He shook his head, concentrating on the toasted cheese sandwiches. “Call me a naive, easily manipulated dupe, but I just couldn’t see a woman who had advised me to read romance novels and stop eating red meat selling me out.”

“Good thinking.” She took a sip of wine and lowered the glass slowly. “How did you know?”

“About your dream house?” He reached for the spatula. “Not that hard to connect the dots.”

“It doesn’t exist outside my dreams,” she said quietly. “But in my dreams I’ve designed and decorated every room. The furniture would have been perfect.”

He slid the cheese sandwiches onto plates. “You’ll get that house someday. And you’ll find the right furniture for it.”

“Think so?”

“Yes.”

He picked up the plates with the toasted sandwiches on them and carried them into the living room.

She uncoiled her legs and sat forward. “That smells good.”

“Glad to see your appetite is returning.”

She picked up one of the sandwiches and took a large bite. “The mustard was a stroke of genius. Where did you learn how to make these?”

Shadows moved in his eyes. “My mother used to make them when I was a kid. I helped her sometimes. It’s as close to serious cooking as I ever get.”

She tore off a bite to feed to Sphinx. “You can make them for me and Sphinx anytime.”

Ellis watched her eat the sandwich. The darkness receded from his expression.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

t
he phone rang just as they finished the last of the sandwiches. Ellis took the call. Isabel listened closely and understood that he was not happy with the news he was getting.

He finished speaking and ended the connection.

“That was Detective Conrad of the Roxanna Beach PD, the person assigned to investigate the fire.”

“I gathered that much.” She brushed crumbs from her fingers.

“The name of the guy they arrested at the scene is Albert Gibbs. His lawyer got him out on bail about fifteen minutes after
they booked him. An hour ago he was found dead in his trailer. Overdose.”

Her mouth went dry. “Oh, my God.”

“He lived in a park about fifty miles from here.” Ellis rested his forearms on his thighs. “Apparently he was so happy about getting out of jail that he went straight home and shot himself full of some extra strong junk.”

She watched his face. “You’re thinking that is rather a convenient conclusion, aren’t you?”

“I’m thinking it sounds like Vincent Scargill from start to finish. He finds real losers, manipulates them into doing his dirty work and then he gets rid of them.”

“What’s Detective Conrad’s theory?”

“He’s looking for the neatest solution, naturally. Turns out Gibbs had a history of arson-for-hire. Did time for it about three years ago. The detective thinks he was hired to set the fire today but that your locker probably wasn’t the intended target.”

“So who does he think hired Gibbs?”

Ellis shrugged. “Presumably one of the other renters who probably wanted to get rid of some incriminating evidence stashed in one of the units. But between you and Tom, the plan fell apart. Tom noticed the missing lock and called you. One thing led to another. Gibbs panicked, knocked Tom unconscious and shoved him into your locker. Before he could get out of the yard, you were there, demanding to know what was going on. So he tried to get rid of you, too.”

“Why does the detective think Gibbs just happened to pick my locker?”

“He’s not sure but at the moment he’s assuming that your locker just happened to be located near the one that Gibbs was hired to destroy. Gibbs probably figured that if the fire started in your space, it would look more like an accident and less like it had been set to damage evidence.”

“Got it.” She propped her ankles on the coffee table and went back to what had become her favorite hobby lately, petting Sphinx. “So much for Conrad’s theories. Let’s return to our own paranoid, sadly deluded view of this case. Why would Scargill tell Gibbs to target my furniture?”

“Damned if I know.” Ellis frowned and got to his feet. He went to stand looking out the window. “But I think it’s clear that it was your furniture, not you. The only reason you were there at all was because Tom called you. Maybe it was a message to me.”

“Scargill’s way of letting you know that he might go after me if you don’t back off?”