"No," Connor said desperately. "I don't know where she is. She went to the millionaire art collector's house today. Mueller is Novak. I would bet my life on it. And I never got the chance to tag her stuff."
"Huh. Well, I've got some info for you, too. Remember when you told me to check out your girlfriend's apartment?"
"She's not my girlfriend," Connor said harshly.
There was a delicate pause. "Uh…that sucks. But anyhow, I just left the place, and I found something really weirdo—"
"I don't have time for this, Seth!"
"Bear with me. It's relevant." Seth's tone was hard. "There was a vidcam mounted behind the wall paneling. Rigged with a short-range remote transmitter. Probably the receiver and recorder are in the same building. The setup is crude. Looks homemade."
Connor swallowed, hard. "Holy shit. That is weird."
"Oh, I haven't even gotten to the weird part yet," Seth said. "About that vidcam, uh… you don't know anything about it, do you, Con?"
"What the hell are you talking about? Why would I? What is it about the goddamn vidcam? Spit it out, Seth!"
"It's yours," Seth said bluntly. "I sold it to Davy, and he passed it on to you. It's the one that got stolen in that burglary at your house a few months ago. I know it's yours. Because I marked it."
Connor tried to find space in his mind for that piece of info. His brain refused to accommodate it. "Huh?"
"Is there something you're not telling me, Con?"
Seth's voice had a cold, suspicious edge to it that Connor had never heard, at least not directed toward him. Panic jolted through him, at the thought that even Seth might abandon him.
"Fuck, no!" he burst out. "I didn't plant that thing. Not me!"
"Good." Seth's relief was palpable. "That's sort of what I figured. A hidden vidcam in a girl's bedroom isn't your style. It's more like something I would do. You're too much of a tight-ass Dudley Do-Right for a dirty trick like that."
"Thanks for your touching faith in me," Connor said.
"Anytime, man, anytime. The first thing you need to do is to turn on your phone so I can scramble you. It makes me nervous to talk—"
"I don't have the phone," Connor said. "I gave it to Erin."
"You gave the phone to Erin?" Seth repeated slowly.
"Yes! I did!" he yelled. "Will you guys please stop giving me shit about the rucking phone?"
"And she has it on her now?" Seth persisted.
"How the hell should I know? She put it in her purse last night. I assume she has it. Why shouldn't she?"
Seth started to laugh.
"What is so goddamn funny?"
"You just solved all our problems in one blow," Seth said. "We'll use the phone to find her."
Connor's hand tightened on the phone. "Come again?"
"There's a beacon in your phone. It feeds off the battery, so if it's been charged recently, it should be transmitting."
"You planted a beacon on me? Why?" he demanded.
"You never know when you might need to find your friends in a hurry." Seth's voice was defensive. "I put 'em in Davy's and Sean's phones, too, so don't take it personally. Besides, you get your ass in a sling on a regular basis. I felt more than justified."
Connor started to grin. "I'm gonna pound you when this is all over for planting shit on me," he warned.
"Yeah, but right now, when I'm useful, you love me and I'm golden. I've heard that tune before. I'll head home and key the code into my computer. Get over here, and we'll mobilize."
"Call Sean and Davy for me," Connor said.
"Watch yourself," Seth said.
Connor bounded down the remaining two flights like his feet were on springs. It was beautiful, it was amazing, it was awesome, that his pathologically sneaky gearhead friend had actually had the brilliant good sense to plant a bug in his phone. He dodged and spun around gurneys and wheelchairs, leaving shouts of furious protest behind him. He sped toward the parking garage and dug out his keys.
The door of the gray SUV with tinted windows parked next to his car swung opened, and discharged a tall, black-clad bald man.
Connor reeled back with a gasp. The guy was a hideous apparition: pallid and hairless, blue eyes burning out of dark pits, a scarred, grotesque face. A gap-toothed leer.
Georg Luksch.
Georg's arm flashed up, took aim. Connor heard a popping sound, felt a stab of pain, an explosion of helpless fury. A dart was poking out of his chest. He fought it, but he was already sagging onto the asphalt.
Shadows overtook him. The world melted into formless darkness.
"Punctual, as always," Tamara murmured, when she met them at the door. "And who is this?"
"This is my friend Tonia Vasquez," Erin said. "Tonia, this is Tamara Julian. I told you about her."
"How do you do? What a fabulous outfit," Tonia gushed.
Tamara gave her a lofty smile. "How kind of you to say so."
Tamara was dressed in black, a severe high-necked jacket paired with a billowing black taffeta skirt. The heels of her shiny, pointy-toed boots clicked over the dizzying swirls of antique tile on the mosaic floor. She glanced back over her shoulder. "I'm relieved that you made it. Mr. Mueller was distressed when you ran away last night. He was afraid he'd offended you. We weren't sure you'd be back."
Tonia slanted her an odd glance. "Ran away? What's this?"
"It's a long story," Erin said stiffly. "It had nothing to do with Mr. Mueller, though. He needn't have worried."
"I see." Tamara's face looked pale and drawn beneath her flawless makeup. Her emerald eyes looked haunted and shadowy.
Or maybe it was just Erin's own bleak perceptions, reading ominous portents into every innocuous thing. The dread in her belly got heavier. Flutters of the panic that had mastered her the day before stirred inside her, and she clamped down on them ruthlessly. She would get through this job, close this chapter gracefully, and that was all she would ask of herself. Professional suicide or not, once she delivered that report, she would be politely unavailable to Claude Mueller forevermore. She would refer him to other experts who would all fall over their feet in their eagerness to consult for him. In the meantime, she would be taking typing tests, filling out W-4 forms for temp secretary and paralegal jobs. And she would be cheerful about it if it killed her. Yippee. What a joy. You shape your own reality, she reminded herself.
Unless you allow other people to shape it for you. The thought flitted through her mind like a bat's shadow, almost too quick to catch.
God, how she hated this house. It seemed to give her a constant, low-level electrical charge, just enough to feel nauseous and dizzy, and determination alone wasn't enough to manage it. She'd bolted out of the place in a full-blown panic attack last night, like Cinderella fleeing the ball as the clock tolled midnight. But here she was again, putting one foot in front of the other, cold sweat trickling down between her shoulder blades. Trying to act like a grown-up.
Tamara stopped in front of the door to the salon. The heavy, ornate door was like the mouth of some monstrous creature, gaping wide to swallow her whole. Erin stomped down on the childish, queasy surge of panic, and tightened her belly into tempered steel.
Mueller was staring out the window, as he'd been the day before, the deep-in-thought-aristocrat pose. He turned, and smiled as he came forward to greet her. "Ah, excellent. I wasn't sure I would see you again," he said. "I am sorry if I upset you yesterday. You look pale."
"I'm fine, thanks." See? Polite, pleasant, nothing wrong with this picture. Novak is dead, on the other side of the planet. Everything here is perfectly normal. I will not let someone else's fear control me. It raced through her mind in the blink of an eye. "I'm so sorry about that. I don't know what came over me."
His teeth looked so sharp when he smiled. "And who is your lovely companion?"
"Tonia Vasquez. Glad to meet you," Tonia said, when Erin took too long to reply. "I'm Erin's shadow today. I hope I'm not in the way."
"Not at al
l. Any friend of Ms. Riggs is welcome. One can never have too many beautiful women in one place."
"That depends," Tonia purred, "on the circumstances."
So Tonia was going to flirt with him. Fine. It made her flesh creep, but if it diverted his attention from her own unhappy self, she could weep for gratitude. Soon this would be over, and she could retreat to her dingy mouse hole at the Kinsdale and lick her wounds in the dark.
And maybe she was being unfair, but it was going to be a very long time before she called Tonia again. If ever.
"Can I get started?" Her voice came out so sharp that Tonia and Mueller stopped their bantering and stared at her, startled.
"Of course." Mueller indicated a table at the far end of the room.
The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can get out of this hellish place. Her mind repeated the thought like a mantra.
Three items lay on the gleaming dark wood table. The folders of provenance papers lay beside them. She dug out her recorder, and grimly disposed her mind to concentrate. Grown-up. Professional.
The first item was a bronze dagger and sheath. The provenance papers placed it as La Tene, 200 B.C.E., dredged out of a river in Wales in the 1890s, but the blade seemed much older to her. The guard, grip, and pommel had been made of some organic material that had rotted away, but the wasp-waisted, leaf-shaped sweep of the blade was still beautiful. It had the reinforcing ridges, grooves, and finger notching that she had seen on many bronze Celtic swords from 1000 B.C.E.
The next piece was a stone statuette, eighteen inches high, of a hideous beast holding out its arms. Huge, thick claws sank into the forehead of two severed heads. An arm dangled out of its fanged, gaping jaws. La Tarasque, very like the Gallo-Roman limestone statue she had studied in Avignon on her junior year abroad in France and Scotland.
She flinched away from it. It was a rare and beautiful piece, but she felt too wretched to cope with bloodthirsty man-eating monsters, unprofessional or not. Later for that one.
The third item was a bronze flagon, decorated in the vegetal swirls and spirals of late La Tene style. It was embossed with several mythical creatures, but the ones that caught her eye first were the two dragons.
Fiery red garnet eyes glared at each other. They were symmetrical, a perfectly balanced pose of eternal mortal challenge. Like the torque. Serpentine tails coiled beneath them, blending into the intricate, flowering tendril design that decorated the whole piece.
The realization crept up on her so slowly, the way a headache gathered force until it had to be acknowledged by the conscious mind. A puzzle she hadn't known she was trying to solve slipped into place. The provenance papers cited the flagon as discovered near Salzburg in 1867 by a gentleman explorer and tomb raider from the nineteenth century, and subsequently sold in the 1950s to a rich Austrian industrialist.
But this flagon was not from Salzburg. It was from the Wrothburn cemetery. As was the dragon torque. And the Silver Fork torques, too.
She felt it in her skin. Her instincts were never wrong. Every hair on her body was on end. The wrongness deepened, widened.
She forced the words out. "Mr. Mueller. I'm sorry to tell you this, but I believe that the provenance papers for this flagon are falsified."
The murmur of conversation from the other side of the room stopped. "I beg your pardon?" Mueller's voice was gentle, puzzled.
"The distinctive designs show it to be almost certainly from the grave mounds in Wrothburn, which were only discovered three years ago. I suspect that the dragon torques, and at least two of the torques I saw in Silver Fork, are from Wrothburn, too. These pieces were looted. They belong to the people of Scotland."
She didn't have the courage to face him. Dread held her body in a paralyzing grip. She heard a dry, whispery chuckle, like a snake sliding through dead leaves. She knew. She turned, slowly.
Mueller's eyes were no longer electric blue. They were a luminous white-green, a cold, dead color. He lifted his hand and waggled his index and middle fingers. The blue discs of his colored contacts clung to the ends of them. "Congratulations, Erin."
"It's you," she whispered. "You're Novak. Connor was right."
His smile widened. "Yes. He was. Poor, mad Connor."
She wondered how anything so alien could have masked itself as human for so long. Then she thought of Tonia, with a shock of guilt and horror. She had dragged poor, unsuspecting Tonia into a world of hurt.
Her anguished eyes met Tonia's—and her heart skipped a beat.
Tonia was smiling. She reached into her white Prada bag, and leveled a small silver revolver at Erin with casual skill. "I'm sorry about this, Erin. I genuinely did like you. You seemed like such a priss when I met you at the clinic, but you're actually smarter than I thought." She shook her head. "But not quite smart enough."
Outrage held the creeping horror temporarily at bay. "You vicious, lying, heinous bitch!" Erin hissed.
"I am impressed with you, my dear," Novak said. "You exceeded my wildest hopes. Not only did you come to the right conclusion in record time, but your first impulse was to uphold the rules. You win the grand prize, Erin. Tamara, show her what she's won."
There was no taunting glitter in Tamara's eyes this time, no smile on her pale lips. She opened the library door. A tall, pale, hairless man stepped inside, grinning. Erin cried out before she could stop herself.
Georg. She knew him, even shaven bald, with the missing teeth. His eye was distorted by the drooping lid. One side of his mouth was thickened and twisted. Crimson weals marred his pallid cheeks.
He leered, his eyes dragging hungrily over her body. "Hello, Erin," he said. "I am happy to see you. You look very pretty."
She backed away. The table bumped painfully hard into her hip. "It really was you in that SUV last Sunday, wasn't it?"
His grin widened, became triumphant. "Yes."
"Georg's usefulness to me was much reduced by your lover's beating," Novak said. "He was once so beautiful, remember? And prison was very hard for Georg. He is very angry. Are you angry, Georg?"
"Yes." Georg's good eye was bright with venomous hatred. "Very."
"He suffered permanent nerve damage to his face, you know," Novak said. "In thanks for all of his pain and sacrifice, Georg shall be the one to execute my plans for you. He lives for this promise."
"No," Erin said. She sidled along the table. "No."
Tonia clucked her tongue in warning. "Don't move, please."
"It is a beautiful plan," Novak said. "Prison gives one time for a great deal of reflection, you see. I'm sure your father finds it to be so."
"So this is all just to get back at Dad?" She hardly cared what he answered. Her words were just a desperate bid for time.
He laughed. "No, Erin. I'm getting back at everyone. Tonia, did you do as you were told this morning?"
"Yes, Mr. Mueller." Her smile was smug. "Barbara Riggs is in a tizzy. Phones are buzzing about McCloud's family history of mental illness, his delusions, his persecution complex. His obsessive pursuit and seduction, and let me add rape, of Erin Riggs—"
"That's ridiculous! No one will ever believe that! My mother saw me with him! She saw how he—"
"When the video footage of last night's tryst is found in his house, she may well take a different view," Novak said. "McCloud couldn't have behaved more perfectly for my purposes if I had given him orders. I loved it when he tore your dress and bent you over the table."
She covered her shaking mouth with her hand. "Video footage?"
"Indeed. You both surprised me last night, my dear. I had no idea that McCloud could be so… raw."
"I had a conversation with your neighbor Mrs. Hathaway today." Tonia was enjoying herself. "She can't wait to tell what she saw last night in the stairwell. It's common knowledge that McCloud killed Billy Vega. A massive manhunt is already underway."
"And they will find him," Novak said. "They will find you, too, but alas, it will be too late. Let me explain the sad sequence of events for
you, my dear. After McCloud killed Billy Vega, his mental imbalance escalated, faster than anyone could have anticipated. Brought on by mad jealousy, no doubt. Ah, love is a dangerous thing."
"But that's ridiculous! No one would believe that Connor would kill Billy Vega. He had no reason to—"
"Georg left no trace of himself at Billy's house," Novak said smugly. "But the forensics team have found the hairs from McCloud's comb. The bloody cane is in McCloud's basement. A clear sign that he wanted to be stopped. A subconscious cry for help, if you will. We mounted McCloud's camera in your wall, we used tapes that were covered with his fingerprints. The camera was reported stolen months ago, so it will be obvious that he has been stalking you for some time. I'm sure the police will enjoy the spicy episodes from your affair. Maybe they will even turn up on the Internet. Like father, like daughter."
"Oh, God," she whispered.
"It was about time something happened in that wretched apartment of yours," he said. "The people who monitored you almost expired from boredom. Georg, turn on the video monitor, if you please."
She hadn't even noticed the wide-screen flat monitor mounted on the wall. The image that appeared on it made her knees turn to water.
Connor was tied spread-eagled on the bed, blindfolded.
"He will wake up shortly." Novak's tone was gleeful. "Then the real entertainment begins. He will watch while Georg performs the dreadful acts for which he will bear the blame. Then he will apparently come to his senses, realize what he has done, and commit suicide with his own gun, in an agony of guilt and horror."
She stared into the monitor. Connor looked so still and vulnerable. "It will never work," she said desperately. "Forensics—"
"No, I promise, I have thought of everything. Is he awake, Tamara?"
She peered into the monitor. "Could be. Hard to say."
"Tamara will see to it that the bodily fluids upon your ravaged body are the genetically correct ones. Tamara could extract bodily fluids from a stone statue, couldn't you, my seductive beauty?"
Tamara gave him a wide, empty smile. "Oh, yes, boss."
Novak clapped his hands together. For the first time, she noticed the prosthetic fingers. He followed her gaze and held them up, waggling them playfully. "You never checked, Erin. You were so convinced that the world behaves like you do. Now we shall watch Tamara and McCloud on the video monitor. Would you enjoy that?" He gave her an encouraging smile, as if offering a special treat to a child.
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