by Jayne Castle
“Stakeout?”
“Dinner date.”
Trig’s heavy black brows bounced up and down a few times. “You’re dating someone who is involved in the case? You never do that. Thought it was one of your rules.”
“Comes under the heading of undercover work. Any messages?”
“Cooper Boone called while you were out. He wants you to call him back when you get a chance.”
“Damn. I’ve been trying to duck him. He’s going to lean on me to attend his wedding in a couple of weeks.”
“Stop fighting it, boss. He’s an old friend. You have to go. There’s no way around it.”
Trig was right. He had been friends with Cooper Boone for over a decade. They had some stuff in common when it came to weird talents. Boone was now the head of the Aurora Springs Guild. In a couple of weeks he was going to marry Elly St. Clair, the daughter of a prominent Aurora Springs Guild family. The wedding was certain to be a huge formal Covenant Marriage affair with all the trimmings. Davis would have preferred to go to the dentist.
“I’m too old to be going to weddings,” he said. “You know how it is if you show up without a date at my age. Everyone immediately starts trying to set you up with their sister’s friend’s second cousin.”
“Tell me about it. Pressure city. Hey, I’m in the same boat, remember? I’ve got three invitations this week, so far. Face it, it’s the wedding season. What are ya gonna do?”
Davis nodded glumly. “Anything else?”
“Yep, your brother called. Says to warn you that your mother is plotting to introduce you to another candidate.”
A sense of gloom pressed down on him. “My lucky day.”
“The lady’s name is Nola Walters. According to your brother, her family’s third-generation Guild from Crystal City. Your mom met her through a friend.”
Just what he did not need, Davis thought. Another attempt at matchmaking by his mother.
“Where’s the mail?” he asked.
“There wasn’t much today. Couple of bills.” Trig handed him a crisp white envelope. “And this.”
Davis took the letter and glanced at the return address. He recognized it immediately. It was the third letter he’d had from the Glenfield Institute in the past three weeks.
“I’ll be in my office.” He held out his hand to Max. “Let’s go, partner.”
Max scurried up his arm and resumed his position on Davis’s shoulder.
Davis went through the door of his office, dropped the briefcase beside the desk, and sat down. Max bounced down onto the desk and went straight to his favorite source of amusement, the green quartz vase that held a mound of paper clips. He settled down on the rim of the vase and began rummaging through the shiny heap.
Davis leaned back in the chair and stacked his heels on the corner of the desk. He tapped the envelope against the arm of the chair a couple of times, debating whether to rip it up without reading it or read it first and then rip it up. Decisions, decisions.
Eventually he reached for the letter opener, slashed the envelope, and removed the sheet of letterhead inside. The message was the same as the previous two letters.
Dear Mr. Oakes:
It has come to my attention that you have missed all of the follow-up appointments that were scheduled for you after you left the Institute. I urge you to call my office as soon as possible….
The signature at the bottom was the same, too: Gordon R. Phillips, DPP. The initials stood for doctor of para-psychiatry.
He leaned over the arm of his chair, shoved the letter and the envelope into the shredder, and rezzed the machine. There was a high-pitched hum as the device turned the paper into confetti.
He settled back into the chair again. Trig was right. Dating someone involved in a case was against all the rules.
“Probably a mistake, Max.”
Max selected a shiny paper clip, removed it from the vase, and carried it across the desk to Davis.
“Good choice,” Davis said.
He attached the paper clip to the chain of clips that dangled from the reading lamp. Satisfied, Max hurried back to the vase and started searching for another suitable clip.
Davis thought for a while. Then he took his feet down off the desk and rezzed up the computer. There hadn’t been an opportunity to do any research on Celinda Ingram this morning. Things had been moving too fast, what with finding the body, contacting the police, and tracking down the new owner of the relic.
It was time to take a closer look at his date.
Within a couple of minutes he found himself reading the first of a number of lurid headlines in the Frequency City tabloids.
LOCAL GUILD COUNCIL MEMBER’S SECRET MISTRESS IS MATCHMAKER TO CITY’S ELITE
The next one was similar in tone.
HIGH-RANKING MEMBER OF THE FREQUENCY CITY GUILD INVOLVED IN AFFAIR WITH SOCIETY MATCHMAKER
There were several more in the same vein. They all included grainy photographs of Celinda. In several she was seen leaping out of a rumpled hotel room bed. The photos had been cropped in a bow to good taste, but it was clear that she was wearing only a filmy negligee. There was a man in the background. He had a towel wrapped around his waist. In two other shots Celinda was shown in a white spa robe running barefoot across a parking lot.
He checked the dates. The salacious news stories were all dated four months earlier. The scandal had taken about ten days to run its course. After that there was no further mention of Celinda Ingram or her business, the Ingram Connection.
He tried the online Frequency City Directory, found a number, and dialed it. Someone answered almost immediately.
“Ruin View Pizza.”
“I was given this number for the Ingram Connection,” Davis said.
“Yeah, we get that a lot. The Ingram Connection had this number before us. It went out of business a few months ago.”
“Thanks,” Davis said. He ended the call.
Max had selected another paper clip. Davis attached it to the chain and then settled back to read some of the tabloid pieces in greater depth. The sensational story about the matchmaker who had run the most elite marriage consulting agency in Frequency City had obsessed the papers. That wasn’t surprising. Illicit sex always sold well. Add a powerful man and a woman whose personal reputation was one of her most important business assets, and you had the ingredients for a perfect scandal.
…Benson Landry, a high-ranking member of the local Guild Council, is reported to be involved in a torrid affair with noted matchmaker Celinda Ingram. The two were photographed together in intimate circumstances at the exclusive Lakeside Resort & Spa last weekend. The couple was registered under false names in an obvious attempt to avoid prying eyes.
Miss Ingram, whose exclusive matchmaking agency, the Ingram Connection, handles only Covenant Marriages, is the most sought-after marriage consultant in the city. There is speculation that Benson Landry will soon be tapped to head the Frequency City Guild when current chief Harold Taylor steps down….
He did a quick search on the Ingram Connection and learned that the agency had quietly closed its doors less than a week after the photographs at the Lakeside Resort & Spa had been taken.
No wonder Celinda had been so anxious not to get involved in Guild business. She’d been badly burned by a high-ranking Guild man.
He did a quick search on Benson Landry. It was no surprise that Landry fit the profile of most of the ghost hunters at the top of the Guilds: a strong dissonance-energy para-rez talent, extremely ambitious, hints of ruthlessness, and enough gaps in the record to indicate that he had some secrets.
Davis looked at Max. “Wonder what the hell she saw in him.”
Chapter 4
HE HATED THIS GREEN HELL, BUT IT WAS THE PERFECT HIDing place for the gun. He pushed it inside the small grotto and covered it with a few leaves and palm fronds. The foliage was green, but not the natural-looking green you saw on the surface. Everything down here in the underground rain forest was a wei
rd shade of iridescent green, like the luminous quartz that had been used to construct the catacombs. Even the artificial sunlight was an eerie green.
It wasn’t just the colors in the jungle that were strange. Most of the flora and fauna bore a vague resemblance to the plants and wildlife on the surface of Harmony, but down here evolution, modified by the underground environment, alien engineering, and the constant presence of a lot of ambient psi had produced several startling twists and turns.
The experts theorized that the aliens had engineered the belowground ecosystem because the one aboveground was toxic to their kind. It was clear that the aliens had never been at home on the surface of Harmony. They had evidently lived most of their lives in the vast maze of tunnels and chambers they had built beneath the surface. When they had fashioned cityscapes aboveground, they had surrounded them with massive green quartz walls. It was believed that the psi energy given off by the quartz and by something here in the jungle had been an antidote to whatever it was that had been dangerous to them aboveground.
He surveyed his handiwork and was satisfied. The gun was well-concealed, but it would be easily available if he needed it again in the future.
He hurried quickly through a stand of tall fern trees. It made him nervous to get out of eyesight of the gate. He had an amber-rez compass with him, but they were not infallible down here where vast currents of psi energy called ghost rivers could distort the delicate devices. He had a great fear of getting lost in the jungle.
The hot, humid atmosphere was almost smothering. It would rain soon.
A large green bird took flight directly in front of him, startling him so badly he cried out. The creature flapped madly, shrieking its annoyance, and then disappeared into the heavy green canopy overhead.
The constant din of birdcalls and mysterious rustlings in the undergrowth rattled his nerves. He was terrified of snakes and insects. While thus far no species down here had been identified as lethal to humans, that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Exploration of the jungle had barely begun. The Guilds were still in the process of trying to find the special kind of psi talents who could open gates to the rain forest. To date only a handful had been discovered.
The gate he used was not one that had been opened under the auspices of the Guild. It was not listed on any official chart. The six-foot-tall hole had been created for him by one of his street clinic patients who happened to possess the unusual type of para-rez talent needed to access the rain forest. The junkie had suffered a most unfortunate overdose once he had finished the job. But what could you expect of an addict?
He hurried through the opening, breathing easier once he was outside in the green quartz corridor. It always amazed him that nothing from the rain forest followed him through the gate. There was not so much as a stray leaf or twig or insect on the glowing green floor of the tunnel. The gates all seemed to generate invisible and, to most humans, undetectable energy barriers that kept the jungle contained.
He walked quickly toward a quartz staircase, adjusting the cuffs of his immaculately tailored white shirt. Even if the police did somehow manage to connect him to the shooting and even if they figured out that he had concealed the weapon in the rain forest, they would never be able to find it. There was no way it could ever be used as evidence against him in a court of law.
Of course, that still left the Cadence Guild. Alvis Shaw had warned him that Mercer Wyatt had hired an investigator to search for the relic. It was no secret that the Guilds did not always feel it necessary to honor the legal niceties when it came to hunting down those who stole from their vaults.
But he was safe. He had been careful. And he was infinitely more intelligent than any Guild man.
Nevertheless, he now had a serious problem. Things had gone terribly wrong last night. He was a brilliant para-psychiatrist, an expert on reading people, but for some reason he simply hadn’t expected a low-end, drug-addicted thief like Alvis Shaw to double-cross him. The bastard had actually threatened to set up an auction and sell the relic to the highest bidder. He’d had no choice but to kill Shaw. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t intended to get rid of him anyway, once he took possession of the relic.
The realization that he had a disaster on his hands had hit when he searched the dying man. Shaw hadn’t had the relic on him.
Even as Shaw lay dying, his blood running across the alley bricks, the bastard had laughed.
“Hid it in the antique shop last night. Seemed like the perfect place. Didn’t think anyone would notice it, not with all that other junk piled around it. But it’s gone. You’re screwed, man. You’ll never find it now.”
He had torn the antique shop apart, hoping that Shaw had lied to him when he had claimed that the relic was gone. But in the end he had been forced to conclude that the thief had told him the truth.
He had no choice now. Against his own professional judgment he would have to use another patient from the street clinic. The man he had in mind was a former ghost hunter who had been badly psi-burned and was now heavily medicated. The patient was extremely fragile, but that condition had the advantage of making him easier to control than Shaw had been.
He climbed the staircase, aware that he was still shivering. It was a perfectly normal reaction to a highly stressful situation, he assured himself. He was a doctor. He should know.
Chapter 5
ARAMINTA WAS WAITING FOR CELINDA WHEN SHE GOT back to her apartment. The dust bunny was sitting on the railing of the small balcony that overlooked the Old Quarter. She was fully fluffed, with only her innocent blue eyes showing. There was no sign of the red artifact.
Celinda yanked open the sliding glass door, scooped her up, and looked her in the eye.
“Where have you been? Are you all right? You scared the you know what out of me. You’ve never acted like that before.”
Araminta chattered cheerfully and hopped up onto her shoulder. Celinda reached up to pet her. “Don’t ever do that again, okay? It’s very hard on the nerves.”
Araminta muttered reassuringly.
“You hid that relic somewhere, didn’t you? I hope you realize that Davis Oakes isn’t going to leave us alone until he gets his hands on that thing.”
Araminta displayed a vast amount of unconcern. She made hopeful little noises. Celinda recognized them immediately.
“You’re hungry again, aren’t you? Well, this time I’m not surprised. No telling how long you’ve been running around. Probably worked off lunch. Let’s go see what’s left in the refrigerator.”
Dusk had begun to overtake the Old Quarter. The Dead City wall was starting to glow faintly. When darkness fell, the ambient luminescence would infuse the surrounding neighborhoods with a pale emerald radiance. Celinda thought of it as a permanent nightlight.
She gave Araminta another pat. Together they went back inside the apartment and into the little kitchen. Most of the apartments in the Old Quarter were small, and this one was no exception. The buildings had all been constructed during the Colonial era. The First Generation colonists had built their original structures in the shadows of the ancient walls that surrounded each of the four Dead Cities that had been discovered: Old Cadence, Old Resonance, Old Frequency, and Old Crystal.
Over the years, as the new human cities had grown and expanded into the surrounding countrysides the Old Quarter had fallen into decay and disrepair. Many of the neighborhoods with their tight, cramped streets and dark, looming buildings had become home to derelicts, prostitutes, and the down and out.
Although gentrification had begun in certain sections, you could still get a cheap apartment in the Quarter. That fact had figured heavily into Celinda’s decision to rent in the neighborhood. She had been on a very tight budget when she moved to Cadence to start over. But it wasn’t cost alone that had brought her to the Quarter. Like most strong para-rez talents, her senses responded pleasantly to the gentle ambient psi that leaked out of the ancient city.
She opened the door of the refrigerator. Together
she and Araminta surveyed the contents. There was a large wedge of leftover lasagna, some salad greens, a carton of milk, and a half-empty bottle of wine.
Araminta displayed great interest in the lasagna.
“Well, I was going to have that for my dinner, but since it looks like I’m eating out tonight, whether I like it or not, you can have the lasagna,” Celinda said.
She spooned the lasagna into Araminta’s plate on the floor and then went into the bedroom and opened the closet. Her social life had been nonexistent since the debacle in Frequency. She hadn’t been inspired to shop for anything more interesting than extremely conservative business suits.
Her choices tonight were limited to two possibilities. The very pink dress sheathed in clear plastic did not count. She was quite certain that once she wore it for her sister’s wedding, she would never wear it again. Pink was not her color.
She contemplated instead the classic little black dress hanging at the back. It was long-sleeved and had a demure neckline. The last time it had been worn was at a funeral. She pondered it for a long moment. According to Ten Steps to a Covenant Marriage, black was always safe. Furthermore, on a first date elegant was the watchword, not provocative.
On the other hand, there was a fine line between elegant and dull, and as Davis had made clear, this wasn’t exactly the start of a Covenant Marriage courtship.
She pushed aside a couple of jackets and studied option number two, a sleek, dark violet number with a deep, off-the-shoulder cowl neckline that could only be described as provocative.
Number two was probably not a good idea. Regardless of how it had started out, this was not a real date.
But a strange recklessness seemed to have replaced her usual good sense. What the heck, the relic was his problem, not hers. This was the first time she’d been out to dinner with a man in months, and she intended to enjoy it, even if she was breaking all the rules.
She headed for the shower, stripping off her clothes.
