More Than an Echo (Echo Branson Series) (31 page)

I felt a catch in my breath, but I let that conversation go. I could not deal with the fact that I was so far inside the paranormal closet I might never get out. “I’ve decided to go to the mayor’s press conference tomorrow. After tomorrow, the police department will see me as Typhoid Mary. I don’t imagine that will go down well with your buddies in blue to know that you’re consorting with the enemy.”

She blew out a breath and ran her hand through her hair. “Maybe not, but I can handle them.” Taking my hand in both of hers, she squeezed harder. “I think you’re worth it.”

Staring into her eyes, I smiled softly. “Thank you, but that’s just it. I don’t want you to have to
handle
them. I don’t want them seeing me as a thorn in your side. That’s not a great way to start.”

She thought about it a long time. “You might be right.” She scooted closer. “Do what you need to do, Echo, just let me help. Even if I can only help from the sidelines, let me help.”

I nodded. Then I told her what I had so far and about the van.

“It needs to be big enough to be able to throw a guy in and go. How do we narrow down the possibilities?”

“You would need a list of all van owners in the city and, of course, since people are missing from Oakland as well—you need to know all of the van owners in a hundred-mile radius.”

“Damn. Impossible, huh?”

“Yep.”

“I’m at my wit’s end here. It feels like I have a dozen different puzzle pieces I’m trying to fit into one puzzle. It’s goddamned frustrating.”

“Welcome to investigative work. You just keep your eyes on the prize and keep turning all the evidence around in your head like a Rubik’s Cube. One day something will click and you’ll have the whole side complete just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“And in the meantime?”

“You take what you have to the top. You believe in your evidence enough to stand by it no matter what.”

“And you promise you won’t hate me?”

She brought my hand to her lips and let them linger there. “That could never happen.”

“Promise?”

Taking my chin in her hand, she kissed me softly. “I promise.”

I rolled back into Oakland still feeling Finn on my lips.

I had a feeling it was Dante who kept bringing me back to Oakland. It wasn’t that I was reading him as much as the situation seemed to be beckoning me to him. When I found Dante again, he was standing in an alleyway with about twelve onlookers enraptured by his performance. I have to say he was truly captivating with his James Earl Jones voice and his Samuel L. Jackson presence. The man could have played Othello without competition.

He was very good, and though I did not know my Dante well, I did know a grand performance when I saw one.

“
Turn your back and keep your eyes shut tight;

for should the Gorgon come and you look at her,

never again would you return to light.

“This was my guide’s command. And he turned to me about himself and would not trust my hands alone, but, with his placed on mine, held my eyes shut.”

I stole a look at members of the audience and couldn’t help but smile. Dante held them in the palm of his hand with his theatrical flair. When he spoke, he moved with the words. He stood there now, with both of his hands over his eyes.

...suddenly, there broke on the dirty swell of the dark Marsh a squall of terrible sound that sent a tremor through both shores of Hell.
”

As he spoke, his voice pitched and rose like a professional thespian. I was enthralled.

When at last it was time for an intermission, he accepted a small bottle of water from an older woman. “Virgil was afraid, wasn’t he?” she asked. Virgil was Dante’s guide through Hell in this particular epic tale.

“Indeed he was, but Virgil tried to hide it.”

She shook her head. “But Dante wasn’t fooled, was he?”

Dante smiled softly at her. “What do you think, Jenny?”

She thought for a moment, like a student in class might, before finally shaking her head. “I think Dante’s not so sure Virgil knows the way.”

Dante patted her on the back. “And you would be right. Bravo!”

I rose and walked over to him. I sure could use a Virgil now. “This is quite a performance you put on. Do you do these every night?”

“Every single night. Consistency is key to the folks out here, so I’m here first and then I go down the street a bit and do a shorter version down there. Gives them something to do.”

“And always Dante’s
Inferno
?”

“Oh heavens, no. It’s seasonal, really. I do Dante in the summer months from June to September. From September to October I do the
Legend of Sleepy Hollow
. In November and December, of course, I do the
Night Before Christmas
and other tales. And January through April I do
Paradise Lost.
”

“Wow.”

“The
Inferno
is everyone’s favorite. It’s been Smiley’s favorite since before he could walk. That kid knows the story like the back of his hand. I’ve never seen a kid love a story so much. He can recite it verse for verse. It’s pretty amazing for a kid who seldom talks.”

I grinned. “You still call him a kid.”

“He always will be to me. It was Smiley who got me to start performing in the first place. He wanted other people to feel what he felt whenever I told a story. At the beginning, only a few folks gathered around. Most thought I was crazy. Can’t say I blame them. When one of us starts orating on a corner somewhere, we usually sound quite insane.”

Something in my stomach turned. “He...
feels
the story?”

“Well...I don’t know that he really does, but that was the way he put it to me.”

I blinked several times and let the thought linger a bit.

I stayed for the next piece, but it was getting cold and I hadn’t brought a jacket. Whatever was nagging the edges of my mind wouldn’t come up, so I waved goodbye to Dante and headed home.

Nothing on my phone from the boys. Nothing from Danica. Nothing at all. By the time I got home, I had a headache the size of Texas. Whatever was poking at me was in a part of my brain I couldn’t locate. It reminded me of a song playing over and over in your head but you can’t name it. So, I did what every other red-blooded American did when that happened...I took a shower, brushed my teeth, filed my nails, fed the cat, cleaned out my refrigerator, and did everything I could to keep my mind off whatever it was playing hide-and-seek with me. When it didn’t come, I cleaned the house and surfed the Internet until I could barely keep my eyes open.

They had been closed for half a second when the phone rang. Checking the caller ID as well as the time, I grinned. Finn.

“Normal women don’t call after midnight,” I said, yawning.

“Who said
I
was normal? You’ve been given erroneous information if you think that. Sorry I woke you, but I needed to know you were okay.”

“I am fine and I wasn’t asleep. Really.” Now I was sitting up. There was something in her voice I hadn’t heard before and couldn’t place it.

“I worried about you all night. I only worry about people I truly care about. I…uh…just wanted to say it seems like you’re ready to start a new chapter in your life and I would really like to be part of it.”

“I’d like that as well, Finn. I know I am preoccupied with my story and my career, but maybe once this gets off the ground, so can we.”

“Once the story is over. Echo, I think you’re an incredible woman, and I hope you feel the same way about me.”

“Officer Finn, I think you rock. Don’t you know? Can’t you tell? If I wasn’t so interested in finding Bob, I’d be making up other reasons to call you. I’m sorry if I haven’t been sending out the right vibes. I would love to spend time getting to know you.”

She chuckled goodheartedly. “That’s good to hear. I was hoping this wasn’t a one-way thing.”

“It isn’t. I enjoy spending time with you, too.” I heard her radio in the background.

“Damn, I gotta roll. Oh, and Echo? If you ever want to feel safe at night...sleep with a cop.” With that, she hung up, leaving me smiling and feeling a little tingly.

Rolling over, I sighed contentedly, my eyelids getting heavy again. I don’t know how Finn could do that job. It must have been hell day in and out dealing with nothing but tragedy. I was just about asleep when suddenly I sat up straight and turned on the light so fast Tripod ran under the bed. “That’s it!” Jumping out of bed, I ran to my bookshelves and rifled through all of my old college textbooks, spilling them to the floor. “Where is it?”

When I finally found the one I needed, I pulled it out and held it to my chest. “This
has
to be it.”

I was holding Dante’s
Inferno;
my key to the clue kingdom.

I was sure of it.

Turning on my desk lamp, I grabbed the slip of paper with numbers on it and studied it for a moment. “I
knew
there was something there.” The moment Finn said the word chapter, all the doors started to unlock for me.

“Okay, Echo, calm. Calm down.” My heart was pounding so I took a deep breath, pulled a pen and pad out, and then opened my copy of the
Inferno
.

It had all my earlier chicken-scratch notes from when I had taken a Milton course from Dr. LaBoskey. I remembered how difficult I’d found the class in college. I may not have gotten it, but Smiley the Savant did.

Rainman was a savant who was exceptional with numbers. He couldn’t hold a conversation or drive a car or even make his own meals, but he could count cards in Vegas, memorize lists and compute almost faster than a calculator or computer.

Smiley knew the
Inferno
like the back of his hand. He had used it to send some kind of message to his people. Dante’s
Inferno
was a story about his trip to hell and the different people who occupied the layers of each region. According to Dante’s version of hell, people ended up in the appropriate situation depending on what kind of sinner they were.

I started reading from the first of Smiley’s number 3:9. Canto III. It was called the
Opportunists
, people whose souls are neither good nor evil, but self-centered. It had the most famous line in the work, and most of us had heard it at one time or another:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
That was the sign above the gates to Hell.

Why had Smiley written this down on a piece of paper? Quickly, I flipped to the next set of numbers. Seven was Canto VII, which dealt with the Hoarders and Wasters, The Wrathful and Sullen. The Hoarders and Wasters lacked all moderation and thought nothing was as important as money. Turning to line 30, I read the next ten lines out loud:

Why do you hoard? Why do you waste? So back around that ring they puff and blow, each faction to its course, until they reach opposite sides, and screaming as they go, the madmen turn and start their weights again to crash against the maniacs. And I, watching, felt my heart contract of pain.

Sighing, I leaned against the back of the sofa and scratched Tripod’s ahead. At the moment, he wasn’t stoned, so he liked me a little bit. “What was Smiley trying to say?” I was beginning to think I was way off base; that I had reached too far in an effort to find an answer.

I jammed a three-by-five card into both cantos and moved on to 24, Canto XXIV, which was about thieves. That was pretty self-explanatory, so I pressed on. There was one line from Smiley’s notes: line 93:
In that swarm, naked and without hope, people ran terrified, not even dreaming of a hole to hide in or of heliotrope.

Heliotrope? I flipped to the notes in the back of my translation and saw that a heliotrope was some sort of stone. A bloodstone believed to be capable of making the wearer of it invisible.

Okay...

With the exception of people running terrified, the idea that Smiley had used the
Inferno
as a way of communicating what he saw was a quantum leap, but I couldn’t let go. Not yet. Canto XXXIV, Smiley’s 34 dealt with Satan and others. The one line, line 62 read:
That soul that suffers most, explained my guide, is Judas Iscariot, he who kicks his legs on the fiery chin and has his head inside.”

My glimmer of hope was quickly fading. “What are you trying to say? What did you see?” Flipping back to the notes in the book, I read that Judas’s punishment was patterned after the Simoniacs. The who? I made a note and continued.

I looked at the last sets of numbers 26, 86; they were a reference to Circe. I knew that one well. Circe was a woman Ulysses stayed with for a year when he was trying to get home. The final set of numbers, 22 {B} made a reference to a bridge:
by the bridge and among a shapeless crew.
Now,
that
caught my attention. San Francisco is known for the Golden Gate Bridge. Was Smiley making a reference to that? And if that was true, then was the reference to Judas about the person who was giving over our guys to those possibly driving a van? If all of this was true, then where was Smiley? Why was he able to even
give
any clues?