The Vanishing

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  She led the way, setting a brisk pace while silently counting off booths.

  Four to go.

  Three.

  Two.

  In a few more seconds she would be past Roger’s booth. She would pretend not to see him. She was very sure he would return the favor. At the most they might exchange the barest of small nods. Civilized adults.

  “You’re leaving me in the dust back here,” Slater said.

  She suppressed a sigh and forced herself to slow down to a normal pace.

  He caught up with her.

  One booth left.

  She kept her gaze fixed on the front door but out of the corner of her eye she saw Roger glance up. For a second he was looking straight at her. There was no way they could ignore each other now.

  “Catalina,” he said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  There was no help for it. The civilized, adult response demanded a brief pause.

  “Slater and I just finished lunch,” she said. “Got a busy afternoon ahead.”

  “This is Alicia,” Roger said. “Alicia, this is Catalina.”

  Catalina gave Alicia her new-client smile, polite and professional.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  Alicia blinked, as if she wasn’t sure of what she was supposed to say next.

  “Hi,” she said. Then she switched her attention to Slater and immediately found her footing. “Hello. I’m Alicia.”

  Slater nodded politely but he did not offer his name.

  “Got to run,” Catalina said. “See you later.”

  “Right,” Roger said, clearly relieved that she was not going to linger.

  The brand thing.

  Catalina started toward the door again, Slater beside her.

  Without warning there occurred that brief lull in conversation that happens periodically in a crowded space. It was only a small wave of silence destined to disappear in a matter of seconds. But one lone voice continued talking.

  “Is that her?” Alicia asked. “The psycho you told me about? The one you said was crazy?”

  Catalina froze. Slater halted beside her.

  “We’re all civilized adults here,” he said very quietly.

  “Maybe not,” Catalina said.

  She turned on her heel and walked the three steps back to the booth where Roger and Alicia sat. The restaurant had gone still. Forks paused in midair. The waiters were locked in a time warp. It was as if a spell had been cast across the room.

  Catalina stopped at the table. Alicia’s eyes widened. She looked as if she was on the verge of panic. Roger’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. Catalina knew that he was frantically trying to come up with a way to handle whatever came next.

  She smiled.

  “Boo,” she said.

  She might as well have dropped a live grenade on the table.

  Alicia squeaked and scooted to the far corner of the booth.

  Roger flinched. In the next instant he recovered. Anger leaped in his eyes.

  “Damn it, Cat,” he said, “that was not funny.”

  She swung around again and nearly collided with Slater for the third time that day.

  “Are we done here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She flashed him her most dazzling smile. “We’re done.”

  Behind them the spell was shattered by a lot of frenetic motion and sound. Cups clattered in saucers. People resumed conversations. Waiters swung into action.

  Outside on the street, Catalina walked in silence for a moment or two.

  “I behaved like a civilized adult back there, didn’t I?” she said after a while.

  “Depends on your definition of the term,” Slater said. “But revenge is still revenge, and you know what they say about embarking on that journey.”

  She sighed. “That business about first digging two graves? I don’t think it will come to that, but I can tell you one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Payback doesn’t feel nearly as good as it should.”

  “Karma bites.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Gwendolyn Swan picked up the receiver of the landline phone and called a familiar number.

  Trey Danson took the call on the first ring.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  His voice went well with the image that he took pains to project—that of a brilliant attorney and financial advisor; a man who could be trusted to be discreet; a man who would keep your secrets and make your legal problems go away quietly. His main business was handling estates and trusts for wealthy individuals. That meant he kept a lot of secrets.

  “Guess who just walked into my shop looking reasonably sane and wanting to know if I’d heard any rumors about artifacts from the collection of a certain dead collector,” Gwendolyn said.

  “Shit. The fucking Foundation is already on this?”

  “Afraid so. And Victor didn’t send one of the regular cleaners, either. Slater Arganbright is in town and asking questions about Royston. What’s more, Arganbright was not alone. Catalina Lark was with him.”

  “Slow down. Are you saying that the Foundation sent Slater Arganbright?”

  “It’s not like I’m going to make a mistake about the identity of an Arganbright, now, is it?”

  “The rumors said that if he survived he would be spending the rest of his days in a locked room at Halcyon.”

  “Well, he survived and he’s in Seattle.”

  “What about his talent?”

  “It’s not exactly the sort of question you can ask a person.” Gwendolyn touched the crystal locket at her throat. “It was obvious that he’s still sensitive to the vibe of paranormal objects, but there’s something different about him.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. All I can tell you is that when it comes to artifacts, he’s as strong as ever. Lark is strong, too. When I took the two of them downstairs, they both reacted to the atmosphere.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Trey said. “Most people with even minimal talent can sense that kind of energy if they find themselves in a confined space where there are a lot of hot artifacts.”

  “Yes, but Lark was able to activate the dancers in the miniature ballroom. She got the master out from behind the curtains, too.”

  “All right, so she’s strong. That’s not exactly a surprise. I already knew she does some crime scene work. The one we have to worry about here is Arganbright.”

  “You mean he’s the one you have to worry about. I sell information and artifacts. That’s all. You paid me to let you know if anyone came around asking about Royston’s collection. I’ve done that. Now I’m out of this. You’re on your own.”

  She ended the call before he could say anything else and put down the phone. The problem with Danson was that he had enough talent to make him both clever and dangerous. He paid well for rumors and information, but no amount of money was worth the risk of getting dragged any deeper into his current project. She did not want to tangle with the Foundation.

  She picked up the phone again and made another call. The voice that answered on the first ring was male and gravel-rough.

  “Pest control.”

  “I found another rat in the trap today,” she said. “I’d like it removed as soon as possible.”

  “It will be taken care of tonight.”

  “Thank you.”

  Gwendolyn ended the call and picked up a duster. The artifacts business was a dirty business. It sometimes seemed as if she spent half of each day cleaning up.

  CHAPTER 18

  Catalina shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her trench coat and watched Slater press a small electronic device against the high-tech lock on the back door of the big house. She heard a faint humming sound and then a muffled click.

&nbs
p; Slater dropped the gadget into one of the many pockets of his cargo trousers and opened the door. He aimed the beam of a flashlight down a shadowed hallway.

  Catalina got a flicker of curiosity.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry, we’re not in danger of getting arrested for burglary. Royston left his collection to the Foundation. I’m here as a representative of the Foundation’s museum.”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  “According to the report, Royston’s gallery and vault are downstairs in the basement.”

  “Like Swan’s salesroom? Oh, joy. Another basement full of heavy energy.”

  “Collectors like basements because they offer an extra level of security. The surrounding ground absorbs a lot of the paranormal radiation, which means freelancers and raiders are less likely to detect a cache of hot objects.”

  “Is that why the lost labs were set up in places like the Fogg Lake caves?”

  “Probably.” Slater led the way down a wide corridor. “The caves there would have been a naturally secure location. The Foundation experts think that in other cases vast underground tunnel complexes had to be constructed to house the labs.”

  Catalina followed him along the hallway, aware of whispers of energy lifting the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

  Slater stopped in front of a metal door and used the lock-picking device to open it. Stairs stretched down into the darkness. Currents of energy wafted upward.

  Slater found a bank of switches on the wall. The lights came up, revealing a large belowground display room. Many of the shelves and glass cabinets were empty. There was a lot of residual heat radiating from the walls, floor and ceiling, but not much from the handful of artifacts scattered around the chamber.

  Catalina followed Slater downstairs. When she reached the bottom of the steps, she paused to look around.

  “You were right, this gallery has been cleaned out,” she said. “There’s some serious energy from whatever used to be in here, though.”

  “Royston was eccentric, and so was his collection,” Slater said. “But as I told Gwendolyn Swan, the good stuff, most of which would have been stored in the vault, is long gone. The raider crews always seem to be the first to hear about the death of a major collector. It’s uncanny. But in this case I think someone else was here even before the raiders.”

  “The killer?”

  “Or killers,” Slater said. He gestured toward a heavy steel door at the far end of the room. “There’s the vault. The body was found inside. No signs of foul play. It looked like a straight-up heart attack.”

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “No.”

  Catalina moved a little deeper into the room and cautiously opened her senses. Sure enough, the whispers of fresh death shivered in the atmosphere.

  “I hate crime scene work,” she said.

  She did not realize she had spoken aloud until Slater responded.

  “Uncle Victor told me that in the past you’ve done it only when asked and only because you felt you had a responsibility to do it,” he said.

  “It’s hard to say no, not when you know there’s a murderer on the loose and you might be able to pick up some information that will help law enforcement catch him.”

  Slater watched her as she paused near a glass-and-steel case. “You know, there are some talents who actually get a thrill out of the work.”

  “Well, hey, good news for Victor, right? In the future he can dig up someone who gets a kick out of murder scenes to read crime heat for him.”

  “The problem with consultants who derive a thrill from this sort of work is not only that they are creepy but that you can’t be sure they’re not embellishing their results.”

  She had been about to move on to another row of shelving but she turned her head to look at him over her shoulder.

  “What do you mean by ‘embellish’?” she asked.

  “They lie.”

  “Ah. Frauds.”

  “Not always,” Slater said. “They might have a little talent, maybe even enough to pick up a hint of violence or death, but that’s all they can detect, so they use their imaginations to enhance their reports. They inevitably end up giving law enforcement a lot of false leads or leads that are so vague they are meaningless. ‘The body is buried near water.’ ‘The killer is obsessed with mirrors.’”

  “So when the body is found or the killer is apprehended it’s impossible to say that the psychic was wrong, because there usually is some water in the vicinity and almost every house or building has a couple of mirrors.”

  “Right. The really good crime scene people are like you—they hate the work but they do it because they feel they have a responsibility to help law enforcement. And when they can’t offer anything helpful, they’re up-front about it.”

  “I saw the way you responded to some of the artifacts in Swan’s gallery. What’s that like for you?”

  “Depends on the provenance of the object,” Slater said. “Some whisper to my senses. Others shout. I tend to resonate most strongly with the dark stuff.”

  “Same with me.”

  “You see visions. I hear voices. In another time and place people would have either revered us as seers and prophets or hunted us down with pitchforks and knives.”

  “These days they just label us as delusional and try to medicate us or confine us to a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital.” Catalina sighed. “Which is why my parents drilled into me the importance of acting normal.”

  “I got the same lectures,” Slater said. “Something in common, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Catalina stopped at the open door of the vault and looked inside. The space was not large, about the size of a walk-in closet. It was lined with glass. Most of the shelves, which were constructed of glass and steel, were empty. There were only a few artifacts left, including a vintage black telephone with an old-fashioned rotary dial, a plastic case full of small index cards, a desk lamp and some odds and ends that looked like they had been taken from an old lab.

  “I wonder what the index cards were for?” she said.

  Slater moved past her into the vault and raised the clear plastic lid of the case. He flicked through some of the cards.

  “It’s a file of addresses and phone numbers,” he said. “In the era of the Bluestone Project all data was stored on paper. Uncle Lucas is going to love this.”

  “Why would he want it? If that file is from the Bluestone Project, most of the people involved are either very old or dead by now.”

  “Lucas is in charge of building a database of the descendants of anyone who might have been connected to Bluestone.”

  Catalina made a face. “Does it strike you that your uncles might be a tad obsessive?”

  “It’s often my first thought in the morning and usually my last at night. At the moment they are obsessed with the possibility that the Vortex lab was real and so were the weapons it created.”

  “Do you really believe psychic energy can be weaponized?” Catalina asked.

  “Over the years the Foundation has come across a few devices that appear to have been designed as weapons, but no one has been able to operate them, let alone actually fire them.”

  “Why?”

  “The theory is that in order to be activated, a paranormal gun would probably have to be tuned to the user’s personal vibe. That’s a technical hurdle that hasn’t ever been solved, at least as far as we know. Still, the rumors of a lab that succeeded in creating some prototype weapons have never stopped circulating.”

  Catalina sniffed. “Neither have the rumors about the dead extraterrestrials in the freezers at Area Fifty-One. Everyone knows those sorts of stories are strictly conspiracy theory junk.”

  Slater picked up the vintage telephone. “
Sort of like the stories about the residents of a certain small mountain community having extrasensory perception because a few generations back their ancestors were subjected to some unknown gases released in a mysterious explosion?”

  Catalina sighed. “That doesn’t qualify as a conspiracy theory.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  She watched him lift the telephone receiver and put it to his ear. Experimentally he used a finger to turn the rotary dial in a full circle.

  “Is it hot?” she asked.

  “No more so than other office equipment that has been housed in a paranormal environment,” he said. “But I love these old phones. As handheld communications devices they absorbed some really interesting energy. I’ve never come across one quite like this, though.”

  “Why? What’s different about it?”

  Slater examined the base of the instrument. “No label, brand or serial number. Also, it feels a little too heavy for a vintage phone. It’s probably from the Fogg Lake caves, because artifacts from that facility were the main focus of Royston’s collection. That makes me curious.”

  “I wonder why the raiders didn’t take it.”

  “It doesn’t have the kind of heat that appeals to raiders—or to the Foundation curators, for that matter,” Slater said. He hesitated. “But evidently Royston considered it important enough to store in his vault.”

  Catalina stepped through the doorway of the big vault. “Wow. There is a lot of hot energy in here, isn’t there? Oh, shit.”

  She jumped back, jolted by the currents of violent heat that she had just stepped into. Her pulse kicked up. Frissons of ice and fire arced across the back of her neck. A ghostly vision began to coalesce.

  She retreated a few more steps, putting a little space between herself and the pool of energy.

  “What did you pick up?” Slater asked.

  She took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. “You were right. Someone died in here, and he was not alone. The killer was here, too.”