Bishop,_Carly_-_The_Soul_Mate.txt

by The Soul Mate

  senses the stag.

  Kiel cast a swathe of naivet about her to protect her from her

  awareness of him. Momentarily disoriented, her brow puckered in a

  frown. Kiel cleared his throat. She had last spoken of Keller, so he

  began there. "According to Stuart, Keller knew what was up. Did he

  keep a journal?"

  "Yes." Robyn gave a quick shake of her head. "But he doodled so much

  you could hardly make sense of what he wrote down. That didn't bother

  him, of course. He had a nearly photographic memory. But it drove his

  secretary and law clerks to distraction--when they weren't howling over

  his cartoon figures."

  Kiel's consciousness quickened. "That's how he doodled? In

  cartoons?"

  "Yes. Just quick sketches, but they were inspired, Kiel. He was

  really quite good. He paid his way through law school with freelance

  political cartoons. When I met him, he would sit in court and draw the

  little cartoon figures of the defense attorneys or the judge--even

  himself. What I remember best are the little beads of perspiration

  popping off the defense attorneys' heads when they couldn't get what

  they wanted out of a witness. Keller told me they were called

  plewds."

  "The sweat drops you mean?"

  "Yes." She spelled plewds for him. "He knew all the cartooning

  conventions, all the little squiggles and crosshatches and spirals--and

  what they were called. Like the little dust clouds Charles Schultz

  used. to put all around Pigpen." She hesitated a moment. "Do you

  have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about? Being an angel, I

  mean."

  "Sure. Charlie Brown. Beetle Bailey. Garfield." He tossed off names

  of famous cartoon characters, but the truth was, between one instant

  and the next, Kiel knew he could pick up a pen and re-create on the

  spot any drawing Keller had ever made, any doodle, any cartoon

  figures.

  He could have told her those dust clouds were called briffits in a

  cartoonist's lingo. And the reason he could tell her was that

  everything Keller Trueblood had ever known about sketching and cartoons

  had just exploded into Kiel's consciousness.

  But he could never actually tell her. The list of things Kiel had to

  keep from her got longer. Good thing old Gepetto wasn't his Creator.

  "Remember," Robyn was saying, "that I told Stuart I hadn't seen the

  actual bronze statue that was used to kill Spyder? That Keller

  sketched it on a napkin for me?"

  Kiel nodded, resigning himself to knowing about these things before she

  told him. He changed the subject. "So Keller had a near perfect

  memory?" He'd need to know because he would need one even more

  dependable--just to keep from screwing up somewhere along the way,

  betraying his possession of Keller Trueblood's conscious-hesS. "Give

  me an example."

  "Other than his law books? He remembered every case he ever read down

  to the footnotes." She didn't have to think hard to come up with many

  more. "Newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes. Keller could recite

  restaurant menus verbatim. It actually took a lot of effort to keep

  the minutiae of day-to-day living out of his head." She smiled at the

  fond memories that had to "I

  never ever saw him look at a menu. Information overload, he called it.

  He would just order a steak, medium rare, and fries. And a pitcher of

  iced tea to himself."

  "Would he have kept a record of what he was thinking when he knew

  Stuart Willetts was getting into bed with the enemy?" The answers to

  these questions might become available to him as pieces of Keller's

  memories returned. Talking with Robyn might jog them. "Any notes

  about what he planned to do about it or who he might have spoken to?"

  "Yes." Robyn gnawed gently at her lower lip. "He wanted everything

  down on paper, for the record, whether he ever had to refer to his

  notes again or not. I have his briefcase in the trunk of the car. He

  kept a Day-Timer, and he usually recorded his witness interviews on

  audiotape. His clerk typed them into transcripts that he rarely used

  again because his recall was so. infallible." "How soon did you know

  that about him?" "Everyone around him knew, so it was just out there,

  like everyone knows the sun's coming up in the morning. I can't say

  exactly when I knew it for myself."

  She settled deeper into the sofa cushions, hugging the comforter close.

  "When I worked with him on the case that I wrote about in Where Angels

  Fear to Tread, I started out comparing what he told me with those

  records and transcripts as a matter of course--to double-check and

  confirm everything as I would in any other case." She gave a delicate

  shrug. The crocheted blanket touched her chin. "I never caught him in

  a mistake, or even an inconsistency."

  Kiel grinned. "You tried?"

  "All the time--at first because it was so obnoxious that he was never

  wrong." She gave a faraway smile. "Later... after we got to know each

  other a little better,

  it turned into a harmless game we played. A way to flirt and do

  business at the same time."

  Kiel flashed on a string of memories, Keller's memo-ties, of "harmless"

  kisses and then less harmless ones, and then hotter, far less innocent,

  kisses he exacted over time as penalty from Robyn whenever his recall

  proved accurate.

  He knew in those memories that there came a night in the spring when

  Keller had turned up the charm and the pressure and the heat, and Robyn

  had responded, challenging him on the accuracy of his recall not

  because she knew he was wrong, but for the opposite reason.

  She knew he knew, and she knew perfectly well what would happen.

  Keller's penalties were Robyn's candy.

  Kiel "remembered" how she had defied her attraction to Keller Trueblood

  at first. How she held up her professionalism like one of his force

  fields to fend off men, how she insisted she didn't want to be involved

  with anyone at the time.

  She was fierce at first and for days on end, then her resistance caved

  in to her own affinity to an intelligent, quick-witted, daring, all-out

  man who made her laugh.

  Keller's gradual seduction of her never felt carved in stone to her,

  like some routine he laid on anyone with breasts and a brain. He

  responded to her, not acting on whatever preconceived tactics he knew

  of in the battle of the sexes. He battered down her resistance by

  being willing to know her. To poking and prodding until he got at the

  truth about her. Truths that she would have had to spoon-feed to any

  other man she became interested in.

  Finally knocking out her own defenses, she accepted his kisses, then

  liked them, craved them, invited them, returned them, deepened them,

  and came around for them again and again, until one night Keller took

  her on the desk in his office and they made love. Neither one of them

  was thinking at all or they would have thought to lower the shades and

  lock the doors.

  No one had ever walked in on them, but Keller figured that was pure

  luck and poor planning. And
they figured out soon that they needed a

  place of their own: A bed of their own... This breech in Keller's far

  more intimate memories knocked Kiel for a loop. He dammed them up, but

  unlike the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in a hole in the dike,

  Kiel wasn't hopeful that stopping up the leak was going to be enough.

  He made light of it all for Robyn, who could have no idea that her

  fairly tame revelation had triggered a stampede. in him. "That kind

  of recall must he a pretty annoying habit in a husband."

  "It was." She laughed softly. Her uncomplicated pleasure did a

  little, though not nearly enough, to ease his tension. She stared a

  moment into the flames. "Anyway, we could look at his Day-Timer and

  his clerk's records." '

  "Did he also have copies of the trial transcripts?"

  "I would think so, yes. They are probably all in a vault in the county

  courthouse. His Day-Timer, though, is in his briefcase."

  Kiel nodded. The book might well trigger further memories. He got up

  to put another pine log on the fire, then dropped back into the leather

  chair. The dry wood crackled and popped in the flames. The scent of

  burning pine got stronger. "Robyn, do you believe Stuart Willetts?"

  Staring at the burst of fiery crackle rushing up the chimney, she

  looped a strand of her raven hair around her finger and twisted. "He

  desperately wanted us to believe him. A part of me is so incredibly

  offended by what he became--and that he would compare what Keller and I

  had with whatever kind of relationship he has with Trudi... but-" She

  broke off. "I did. I believed him." She met Kiel's gaze. "Do you

  think he was manipulating me?"

  Kiel held her look. "I think he knows you're vulnerable to that kind

  of emotional appeal--he's not above using it. But I had the sense he

  was sincere. That he believes what he said. There's no question,

  either, as to how good Trudi Candelaria was at manipulating him."

  "None," Robyn agreed. "Although, somehow she just comes off a lot less

  trustworthy than he is. Maybe if I'd lived for ten years with a

  womanizer like Spyder Nielsen, I'd be as brittle as she is, too. My

  problem with believing either one of them is that Keller wouldn't have

  been prosecuting her if he didn't believe she killed Spyder. I trusted

  Keller's judgment."

  "Do you know if he ever prosecuted a person who turned out to be

  innocent?"

  Robyn nodded. "Once--that he knew of. A capital case. Murder in the

  first. A few years later, another man made a deathbed confession. The

  reason I trust his judgment so much is that he went to the mat with the

  system to free the man he'd convicted of the murder. Keller's career

  came to a screeching halt for a while, but he did what he had to do."

  Kiel's thoughts turned inward. He didn't know or remember the

  specifics of the case she was talking about, but Keller's emotional

  memory pulsed. The guilt connected with having sent up an innocent

  man, the internal battle between wanting to keep his own record of

  righteous prosecutions untainted and knowing better. Knowing his

  integrity was on the line.

  "The tragedy of it all was that Willie Sandoval died three days before

  Keller thought he was going to get the appellate courts to release

  him."

  A long, shuddering sigh escaped Kiel. He suddenly understood. "Willie

  Sandoval is the reason--" He stopped mid-sentence. He couldn't say to

  Robyn that the injustice Keller had caused Sandoval was the mason that

  he had been assigned to the Avenging Angels as Ezekiel. Those were the

  injustices that needed redeeming, so in the Hereafter, Keller was given

  that kind of responsibility.

  "Willie Sandoval is the mason for what?" Robyn asked.

  "For Avenging Angels," he answered, truthful if not totally

  forthcoming. "People like Sandoval, ! mean, and the injustices that

  happen to them."

  "Sort of like a karmic payback? If you cause injustice, you're

  condemned forever to fight it?"

  "Like that yes." Kiel couldn't restore Willie Sandoval's life, but he

  could make sure other injustices like that didn't go unavenged. He

  wondered what had become of Sandoval in the Hereafter.

  Then there was the matter of Robyn's trust. She believed he'd said

  what he was going to say, but he hadn't. Sandoval was the mason Keller

  had become Kiel, but he'd generalized because if he hadn't, he'd have

  to tell her that he was in fact Keller. He had to wonder again how he

  was going to keep from blurting out the truth to Robyn. Every turn in

  their conversation seemed littered with the time bombs of Keller's

  awareness just waiting to explode into his consciousness.

  "Do you know," she asked, her face solemn and interested, the firelight

  arranging a spectrum of light colors around her that his gifted,

  special sight saw as an aura, "what it was that you did, what injustice

  you caused?"

  Chapter Six

  Like the needle of a magnet pulling faithfully to true north, Robyn had

  honed in. He couldn't lie to her. This was a direct question, and

  very much against the rules to evade or lie about. "Yes."

  She waited for him to elaborate.

  His altogether human Adam's apple pitched like a shooting star through

  the night sky. "Maybe another time, Robyn."

  Her lips pursed. He felt her disappointment like a tidal wave. Her

  life was an open book to him; his was dammed shut and locked tight

  against her. He watched her snatching a deep breath, repressing the

  emotion she felt. She shoved aside the comforter and arose quickly

  from the sofa. "I should try to sleep now."

  She moved, wraithlike, jerkily, toward the bedroom door in the

  flickering orange-yellow light of the waning fire. Kiel didn't want

  her to go, especially like this, feeling so slighted, but he couldn't

  think of anything to say to stop her, "Sleep well, Robyn."

  She turned back to look at him. A long, keen, somehow vaguely familiar

  moment stretched unbearably. A pocket of dry sap in the burning pine

  bough exploded.

  The physical awareness between them that he had been so careful to tamp

  down flared. She stared at him. Her pulse quickened. He knew it.

  She turned and fled. Kiel's angel heart staggered. As an angel he had

  no need for tear ducts, but now he discovered how they worked.

  THE HEART OF MODERN-DAY Aspen could be seen inside five blocks, between

  Main Street and Durant Avenue. The most renowned photo shots were of

  the iron-front Aspen Block in the foreground of Aspen Mountain, but the

  most famous landmark, the Hotel Jerome, where celebrities partied, and

  the county courthouse, sat on Main Street, the Park Avenue of the

  Rockies.

  The courthouse hummed with activity. Even this, Robyn thought, was

  quintessentially Aspen. The building was a hundred-and-five years old,

  but cops also drove thirty-thousand-dollar Saabs.

  Detective Crandall was snit in, but the police here were friendly and

  helpful to a fare-thee-well. The police officer who took down Robyn's

  name to leave a message glanced up when she heard the name Trueblood.r />
  "That's an unusual name. Are you any relation to Keller Trueblood?"

  "Yes." She felt pleased for Keller's sake, that he was remembered here

  even now, more than a year later. "He was my husband."

  Giving Robyn the once-over, the female officer nodded a bit forlornly.

  "We all knew he was married, of course, but... well. Don't get me

  wrong. I'm happily married, too--" She stopped herself from carrying

  on. "Let me see if I can track down Detective Crandall."

  "If it's no trouble," Robyn said. "I just wanted to make a courtesy

  call. Otherwise, I can catch him later."

  She gestured to Kiel. "This is my associate, Ken... um--"

  "Kiel," he said, covering her near miss with his name, as smooth as

  butter. "Kiel Alighied." Offering his hand, he turned on the

  thousand-candle smile.

  The policewoman couldn't seem to take her eyes off him, or let go of

  his hand.

  Subtly stepping on Kiel's toe, Robyn cleared her throat. His smile

  faded to maybe a hundred candles. A hundred bright ones.

  "I'm ... we're staying at The Chandler House. We'll be in town

  researching Colorado v. Candelaria for a few days, and we'd like to

  speak to Mr. Crandall. Do you know where we could find him?"

  The woman checked a watch schedule. "Actually, he's off duty today.

  I'm afraid you'll have to wait and come back tomorrow."

  Robyn didn't intend to wait. She'd find the policeman at his home if

  that's what it took. She thanked the woman and turned to go. On their