Obsidian Prey (27 page)

“Past tense, I’m afraid.” She sighed. “Cruz made a scene. I was humiliated. I burst into tears and managed to create a spectacle of myself in front of a very large group of the most important amber collectors in Frequency. I think it’s safe to say that I won’t be getting any more high-end clients like Revere for a while.”

“Revere is our biggest competitor,” Jake roared. “He’s a complete and total son of a bitch. You can’t trust him any farther than you can walk without amber in the tunnels.”

“Really?” She gave him a quizzical look. “I never had any problem with him.”

Evidently sensing that he wasn’t going to get far with her, Jake rounded on Cruz.

“Did you know she was working for Revere?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Cruz said patiently. “That’s why I went along. But as Lyra said, the situation became somewhat untenable, so we left. The bottom line is that we were able to determine that the relic was in Fairstead’s vault. That’s why I set up surveillance on the gallery.”

Jeff leaned back in his chair. “We think the killer came and went via the catacombs, and that’s where we are now.”

Jake grunted, clearly unsatisfied. But he picked up his coffee. “You’re going to take a look?”

“I’ve got the plane standing by,” Cruz said. “Jeff and I will leave right after breakfast.”

Lyra lowered her cup. “What about me?”

Cruz looked at her across the table. “You’re staying here.”

She pretended she had not heard the command.

“What, exactly, are you going to be looking at?” she asked instead.

It was Jeff who answered. “The Frequency PD won’t let us into the crime scene. They’re still working it, and they can be kind of territorial. But no one can stop us from going into the catacombs beneath the gallery. The boss and I are going down to see if we can pick up any traces of the killer.”

“Right,” Lyra said. She crumpled her napkin and got to her feet. “You’ll be needing me, then.”

Cruz gave her a hard look. “And why is that?”

“Even if you do manage to track the killer through the catacombs, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to find the relic. But if it is anywhere in the vicinity, I’ll be able to sense it.”

“Huh,” Jake said and looked at Cruz. “She’s a Dore. She knows what she’s doing when it comes to amber.”

CRUZ JACKED UP HIS SENSES AND STUDIED THE JAGGED tear in the glowing green quartz wall. At once the whispers of violence—hot, ravenous, haunting and, yes, darkly thrilling—lifted the hair on the nape of his neck and sent a shot of adrenaline through him. The dirty little secret of every man in the family was that it felt good, really, really good. Until he had met Lyra, the sensations of the hunt had always ranked as the most enthralling rush he had ever experienced. Now it was the second most enthralling rush.

Vincent, perched on his shoulder, made a low, rumbling sound. He was still fully fluffed, but he seemed to understand that they were engaged in some kind of hunting game. He was having a good time, too. What’s more, he obviously did not feel the need to try to appear politically correct about it.

“The killer came this way, all right,” Cruz said. “And he used the same route out.”

He moved through the ripped quartz into the dense darkness of the underground cavern. Jeff followed. They both used their flashlights.

“Hot when he arrived,” Jeff said. “He was planning the kill. Hotter when he left.”

Jeff was doing his best to hide the effect the spoor of violence was having on him. His voice was so unnaturally level and uninflected he sounded as if he were making an observation on the weather.

They were both fully rezzed, fighting the same battle to maintain a facade of cool control, not only because control of one’s talent was considered priority number one in the Sweetwater family, but also because of Lyra. She was strong and she was gutsy, but even strong, gutsy women had been known to run screaming in the opposite direction when they found themselves in the presence of men whose talents predisposed them to be stirred and deeply aroused by violence. Couldn’t blame the ladies, Cruz thought dourly. Just the old survival instinct kicking in.

There was only one way a woman could come to trust such a man with absolute certainty, and that was if she experienced and accepted a psychic connection with him. That was the only way she could comprehend at the very core of her being that he would never be a threat to her, that he would die to protect her.

“The first question that comes to mind,” Jeff said, “is how did the killer know about this entrance to Fairstead’s gallery?”

“He wouldn’t have discovered it by accident,” Cruz said. “Fairstead must have shown it to him.”

Lyra stepped through the torn quartz and rezzed her flashlight. “Maybe the killer had a long-standing business relationship with Fairstead, and this is how he came and went from the gallery on a regular basis.”

Cruz and Jeff looked at her. She did not appear to notice. Her attention was on the cavern.

Jeff cleared his throat. “If he was a regular business associate of Fairstead’s, why would he come and go underground?”

“He probably supplied Fairstead with artifacts that had what you might call somewhat murky provenances,” she continued. “Fairstead had an image to uphold in the high-end antiquities trade. He would not have wanted his clients or his competition to see him buying antiquities or valuable specimens from a tunnel rat or a low-level independent like, say, me.”

Jeff’s cool demeanor slipped a little for the first time. He was torn between astonishment and laughter.

“No offense, but you seem to know a lot about the underground amber market, Miss Dore,” he said.

“I do,” she agreed. “Just ask the boss.”

Jeff looked at Cruz.

Time to take charge,
Cruz thought.

“We are not going there,” he said. “And that’s an executive decision. Back to our problem here. The killer may or may not have been a regular supplier of illegal amber to Fairstead, but it’s a good bet either way that Fairstead knew him.”

“The police have that much, already,” Jeff said. “They’re going with a falling-out among thieves scenario.”

Cruz glanced at him. “Is that from your buddy in the Frequency PD?”

“Uh-huh.”

Cruz nodded, impressed. “Nice work. Always good to have contacts like that inside regular law enforcement.”

Evidently encouraged, Jeff kept going. “They’re talking to low-end dealers throughout the Quarter, trying to find out who might have been selling to Fairstead. What they can’t figure out is why nothing was taken from the vault.”

“In other words, they still don’t know about the relic,” Cruz said.

Jeff shook his head. “No.”

“That’s something, at least. Let’s see if we can pick up anything else here.”

The cavern was a natural cave, but at some point in the past two hundred years, someone had constructed a steep flight of stone steps that led upward into the darkness, presumably ending in the basement of the Fairstead Gallery.

Cruz walked to the staircase and touched the handrail. The miasma of recent violence washed through him again. This time he rezzed a little energy through his newly tuned ring, trying to see if he could get any more details.

He was expecting the escalation of the intensity of the psychic traces. What caught him off guard was the way the violent energy came into sharp, clear focus.

“What the hell?” he asked. Automatically he looked down at his ring.

Jeff grinned. “Told you. It’s that special precision tuning thing that Lyra does. Makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

Cruz glanced at Lyra. “Yes, it does.”

She smiled. “I usually charge extra for that.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that you could do that with amber?” Cruz asked.

“You never asked.”

“Got any more tuning secrets?”

“Certainly. But a tuner never tells all her secrets. What are you finding there on the stairs?”

“One man,” he said, going back to the business at hand. He glanced at Jeff. “Do you agree?”

Jeff seemed briefly taken aback at having been asked for an opinion. But he recovered quickly.

“Yes,” he said. “Just one going up the stairs and one coming back down. The same guy, I think.”

Cruz touched another section of the railing. He rezzed a little more energy and was once again amazed by the clarity of what he sensed. “He was excited, but he was also a little rattled.”

“He knew he was taking a big risk killing Fairstead,” Jeff offered. “That was bound to produce a high-profile murder investigation.”

“Something I’m not getting here,” Lyra said. “We’re talking as if the same guy who sold the relic to Fairstead came back later to murder him and retrieve the artifact. But why would he do that? He and Fairstead had done the deal.”

Cruz looked up toward the top of the steps. “Given the timing of Fairstead’s death, I think the killer may have heard about your dramatic little scene in Fairstead’s gallery yesterday afternoon. He panicked after he found out that I was there in the same room as the relic. He doesn’t believe in coincidences.”

“Makes sense,” Jeff said. “If he knew that you were not only at the gallery but also in the vault chamber where the amethyst was hidden, he might have freaked. Figured you were getting too close.”

“So he goes in last night and kills the one person who could identify him,” Lyra said. “Valentine Fairstead.”

“And while he’s at it, he retrieves the artifact,” Cruz concluded, satisfied with the logic. “Let’s go; we’ve seen enough.”

“Where are we going?” Lyra asked.

“Now that we have his psi spoor, we might be able to follow the killer’s path through the catacombs. Normally the heavy psi inside the tunnels makes it very difficult to track someone underground, but with this new tune-up job on my amber, things may be different.”

Jeff grinned. “I think you may be right.”

“Are you serious?” Lyra asked. “You can actually track a person by following their psychic spoor?”

“Only if he’s still riding the waves of energy that accompany acts of violence,” Jeff explained. “Once he’s calmed down, the traces become indistinguishable from other kinds of psi.”

“Tuners aren’t the only ones with a few secrets,” Cruz said. “Sweetwaters have some also.”

“I’ve got to tell you that does not come as a huge surprise,” Lyra said.

Cruz focused through his amber. The currents of violent psi leaped into clear definition immediately.

“Got him,” he said quietly to Jeff.

“Same here,” Jeff said.

Vincent rumbled excitedly and leaned forward so far, Cruz wondered if the dust bunny would fall off his shoulder. But Vincent did not seem the least bit worried about that possibility. He stared straight ahead with all four eyes, riveted.

“It’s like he knows we’re hunting,” Jeff said. “Like he’s hunting with us.”

“He’s a good dust bunny to have at your back in a fight,” Cruz said. “Trust me. I saw him in action last night.”

“Oh, great,” Lyra said. “I sense male bonding and a pack mentality developing here.”

An uneasy jolt sliced through Cruz. Maybe she was making a joke. Maybe not. Either way, he did not want her to start classifying him as some kind of predatory beast. Her opinion of his character was shaky enough as it was.

“Think of the three of us as a team,” he said, “not a pack.”

“Whatever,” Lyra said.

The killer’s spoor led through three disorienting intersections, each with multiple connecting hallways, past countless vaulted chambers and anterooms. It dead-ended in front of a solid wall of quartz.

When they all stopped, Vincent chittered impatiently and bounded down to the floor. He scampered eagerly to the wall. A dust bunny-size hole in the quartz opened. Vincent went through it and promptly vanished. The hole closed.

“Well, that answers that question,” Lyra said. She studied the wall. “The killer escaped into the jungle. He’s long gone.”

“Damn,” Jeff muttered. “We’ll never be able to track him down in the rain forest, not even with our new, improved, highly tuned amber. You can’t track anyone in the jungle unless you’ve got their locator frequency. The psi in there is just too heavy and way too freakish.”

Cruz studied the blank quartz wall. “He’s gone, and you’re right, we can’t track him. But I’d really like to have a look around on the other side of that wall.”

“Why?” Lyra asked.

“Last night after the murder he was in a real hurry. Maybe he got careless and dropped something.”

Vincent reappeared. He made encouraging sounds and promptly disappeared again.

Jeff contemplated the wall. “We need to get someone down here who can open a people-size jungle gate.”

“That would be me,” Lyra said.