Mirror Image (8 page)

“Yes. We have the transcript, but we're in the process of accessing the 9-1-1 call. The scream may be audible on the call, and hopefully we'll hear his reaction.”

“And then he rushed back to the guesthouse?”

“I guess so, yes. The housekeeper also heard the scream and she described it as blood-curdling; she said it sounded raw and terrified.”

Margaret looked around. “So Frazer races down the path. He would certainly have seen someone coming out of the guesthouse, but he claims he saw no one.”

José smiled grimly. “And here's where it gets sketchy. The guesthouse is locked from the inside. When he looks in through that window there, he sees the girl lying on the floor, blood everywhere. He had no doubt from the quantity that she was dead.”

“How did she die?”

“Her throat was sliced open by the same butcher's knife that Frazer had been brandishing the night of the break-in. Her left cheek had been cut open down to the bone.”

“So the implication is that the big man who threatened them returned, gained entry somehow and killed the girl?”

“Yes,” he said.

Haaren shook her head firmly. “It just doesn't make sense: we have one murder weapon, one victim and no forced entry. Diane Williams worked with Anthony Farren as his assistant, maybe they were close to one another, maybe they'd been having a secret affair? He hasn't been dead more than a week, maybe she was depressed over his death?”

Detective Pérez nodded. “Suicide?”

“That's how I would read it.” She stopped. “You've got that look on your face…”

“Anthony Farren was quite active in the gay community.”

“OK, so scratch that theory.”

“But we do have a murder weapon with Mr. Frazer's prints on it.”

“We do.”

A puzzled look crossed her face. “So the door was locked on the inside. When our guys arrived, they had to break their way in with a sledgehammer.”

“OK, then,” Pérez stated. “Let's keep it simple. One accident we could believe, but two deaths on the same property and in the same place? That's stretching it.”

“Motive?” she asked.

“Putting pressure on Frazer for money.”

“How valuable are these antiques?” Haaren looked around the cluttered room, finally stopping before the tall, ugly mirror. “And this is the mirror the scarred man talked about?”

“Said he wanted to buy it.”

“What do we know about it?”

“Frazer bought it very recently at auction in London. The big guy said it should never have been sold.”

“Ugly looking thing,” she murmured, staring at the grimy surface.

“That's the sort of thing they put on the ceilings of those cheap love motels in Vegas,” José Pérez remarked, “for when the couples are having wild sex
.”

“When did you last have wild sex in Vegas?”

“I was eighteen and it wasn't that wild,” he admitted.

“Well you certainly wouldn't get it on the ceiling of my apartment … doubt if you'd even get it in the door.”

“What do you want to do now?”

“Let's take a closer look at Mr. Frazer and his interior design business. Pull his phone records and let's see if we can get a look at his financials.” She strode towards the door. “And God help him if anyone else turns up dead!”

 

14

T
RACING THE
mirror had been easy enough. There was a stink to it that anyone with half a talent could sense. Recovering it would be a lot more difficult.

The mirror had been purchased by a man named Jonathan Frazer of Frazer Interiors. He didn't know the man, didn't know the name, but he obviously needed to be looked at, and he would have to do some research into Frazer's background. There might be no connection, it might simply have been a coincidence, but Edmund Talbott didn't believe in coincidences. Frazer had been lured to the mirror, drawn to it, like a bee to pollen. And he was prepared to gamble that somewhere in the man's past—in previous generations even, for the mirror did not know the concept of time—the mirror's path had crossed with one of Frazer's ancestors.

The big scarred man moved restlessly around the tiny rented studio apartment. The rundown building was situated in a rough neighborhood just off Sunset Boulevard. The room was shabby and it suited Edmund Talbott perfectly. There were fourteen units in the building, each one as anonymous as the next, and most of the tenants appeared to be out of work. They spent their empty days getting stoned or drinking around the dried up swimming pool. No one took any notice of him and, when he left, no one would even remember he was here.

Before settling in, he had taken some basic precautions. He'd removed the spotted mirror from the bathroom, and covered the windows with newspapers for privacy. He was doomed never to look upon his own reflection, never to allow himself to be aware of his own image in a mirror.

Because sometimes when he looked into a mirror, something
else
looked out.

He had been in danger from the mirror before, mortal danger. It had come close to claiming him, but he had always managed to defeat it … but now? This was the first time in generations that the mirror had been uncovered for any length of time, and already it was gathering its strength.

It had taken one life, the man's, almost immediately.

Talbott had been asleep when he had felt the cry of a soul in torment. He had been drawn to it, pulled from a deep dreamless sleep into the shadowy Astral Otherworld in pursuit of the cry of the lost soul. But before he could get close to it, the soul had vanished, leaving behind no echo, no resonance, as if it had never existed. Although he had searched through the Otherworld until he endangered his own body's energy reserves, he found nothing. He knew then that the mirror had swallowed it, trapping it within its ancient core.

It had fed off the dog next, but that had been his doing.

He had traced the mirror to Frazer's house by fixing on the last location of the death cry in the Otherworld. Using crystals, scrying, and dowsing over a large scale map of Los Angeles, he had gradually closed in on the precise position of the glass. Once he was close to it, he could actually feel the insidious chill of the glass, though now he noticed that the residual trickle of power he always associated with the mirror was sharper, slightly stronger.

It was growing more powerful.

Time was running out.

He hadn't thought the guesthouse would be alarmed, and that had been his first mistake. And he rarely made mistakes; he was usually the most meticulous and careful of men. His predecessor's mistakes had cost him his life and his soul. Sometimes, in his darkest nightmares, Talbott would hear his predecessor's cries of unending agony.

Edmund Talbott hadn't made a mistake of this nature for a long, long time. Unless, of course, his reason had been clouded, his judgment awry. And if so, then he had every reason to be afraid, to be terribly afraid, because it spoke of the mirror's increasing powers.

He had been close to the glass when he had become aware of Frazer's approach. Instinct had driven him deep into the furthest corner of the guesthouse. When Frazer had thrown the light switch the bulbs had overloaded, sputtering and exploding with sharp pops along the length of the room.

And that had been none of his doing either.

He should have known then that the power was gathering in the guesthouse, that the mirror was drawing in its defenses.

Then the cops had arrived with the dog.

The dog had been alarmed, frightened, aware with that residual sixth sense that was once part of human kind, that something was wrong here. It sensed a presence, and it had been torn between orientating on the mirror or on him. Eventually, it had latched onto him as being a tangible, human target.

Talbott knew that the animals were not trained to kill, but as the beast had loomed up out of the darkness, teeth bared, saliva running in ropes down its jowls, eyes wide with terror, he knew it would tear his throat out.

There were implements to hand, hammers, crowbars, screwdrivers, electric drills. His questing fingers wrapped around the rubberized handle of a nail gun just as the crazed animal leapt. He pirouetted, moving surprisingly swiftly for such a large man. As the dog blundered past, he had triggered the gun, launching a trio of brad nails, embedding them into the creature's head. The beast screamed once, a terrifying sound, human-like in its intensity. Even then it had turned on Talbott, snapping furiously, disoriented, bloody saliva spraying everywhere. What was even more frightening now was that it was snapping at him in silence, its front paws scrapping along the concrete floor. And he knew then that something else was controlling the dying animal. With one swift movement Talbott pulled the dog's head back forcefully, snapping its neck before slicing its throat open with a box cutter.

The stench of blood—tart and metallic—suffused the air.

He hated having to kill so close to the mirror but he had no choice … or had he? Was this further evidence that his judgment was clouded?

He had made another mistake when he had gone back and asked about purchasing the mirror. Neither Frazer nor the girl—especially the girl—had seemed intimidated by his presence. Indeed, that little ruse had gone badly wrong. The girl was killed shortly afterwards, and naturally, suspicion had fallen on him.

He was unsure what his next move was. He couldn't go back to the Frazer house, not with the police still investigating. But he didn't think Frazer would be offering the mirror for sale in the immediate future. The man's interest in the antique had been aroused. Frazer was frightened, but intrigued.

But if he couldn't buy it, and stealing it was out of the question, then what was left? Could he try to break it? Edmund Talbott immediately dismissed the idea. The mirror itself had its own battery of protections and defenses; it had survived a very long time. It would not allow itself to be harmed.

His only choice now was to wait. But time would only allow the mirror's strength to increase and grow. It would have time to feed. That was its nature.

Talbott stripped naked and washed himself as thoroughly as was possible with the small cold-water sink. His mind was elsewhere, and he didn't feel the chill water raise goose bumps on his arms and shoulders, the cold flesh tightening around the extraordinary network of scars that began on his face, patterned his shoulders and ran down onto his chest and back. Many of the nerves beneath the skin had been damaged during the accident and both heat and pain were dull, vaguely perceptible feelings on his flesh.

Edmund Talbott would be fifty soon, but looked far older. He had reached that age when he should be instructing his own son, Edward, in the legend of the mirror. But his son was gone now, and he would never have another. The Talbott line would die with him. Edward had been dead ten years, destroyed in the same accident that had shredded his own body. He'd been strong, he'd survived, but the child hadn't, nor had his wife, dearest Elizabeth, five months pregnant at the time. There had been an accident, terrible and tragic, it made front page headlines for exactly one day, and merited a brief mention on the television news headlines. The subsequent court case ran for three years and paid a record amount of compensation that warranted five lines on the back pages of some of the newspapers.

It had taken him the best part of a year and a half to recover from his terrible wounds, and when he had finally been released from the London hospital, he had returned to Oxford. His first stop had been in the tiny graveyard close to the house where the bodies were buried. Squatting on the damp ground beside the simple graves, he had wept, the first tears since the accident. Kneeling between the graves, a hand on each, he had finally acknowledged, admitted, that it had been no accident. But what could he prove? And what could he do about it? Who would believe him?

Talbott rubbed his face vigorously, squeezing his eyes shut as the cold face cloth rubbed across them. If he wanted to, he could convince himself that the moisture on his face came from the cloth.

*   *   *

T
EN YEARS AGO
.

The first week of June. Glorious, warm and sunny.

The details were etched into his memory. The three of them had spent a wonderful weekend in London; he had renewed some old acquaintances, while the heavily pregnant Elizabeth had shopped on Oxford Street. Later, they had taken Edmund to see his first musical,
Billy Elliot
. His young son—his glorious little boy—had spent the entire performance transfixed, his eyes wide and bright with excitement. And when the performance was over, he announced he was going to become a dancer.

Edmund, Elizabeth, and Edward had been happy.

Later, much, much later, Edmund realized that his defenses must have dropped.

The elevator was bullet-shaped, a tube that crawled up the exterior of the building, the view over the city absolutely breathtaking. Little Edward had watched it move up and down the building with all the focus a ten-year-old could muster, and had begun to pester his parents with that same concentration and determination. He wanted to ride in the elevator, right to the very top. To see over the city.

Eventually, Edmund had agreed.

Initially, Elizabeth wanted to stay on the ground. Pressing her hands to her swollen belly, she said that the twins were kicking even with the thought of the elevator. But Edward had insisted. He wanted all of them to see the city together.

The journey up was uneventful.

Edmund had been sure his son was going to be terrified, but the boy had been fascinated with the view through the heavy tempered glass walls, ceiling, and floor. Elizabeth had felt slightly nauseous and even Edmund had to admit that he felt slightly off-balance. The view from the top was spectacular and London had never looked lovelier. Edward announced that he might become an artist or a photographer—as well as an actor—so that he could photograph the city every day.