by Jayne Castle
Before he could decide how to proceed, rapid footsteps sounded in the hall.
Celinda appeared. Her hair was a tangled cloud around her face. She wore a dark blue robe secured with a sash and a pair of matching slippers. Araminta was perched on her shoulder.
Davis looked at her and realized that he was getting aroused all over again. He liked Trig a lot, trusted him completely, but right now he wished his friend was anywhere else but here in Celinda’s living room. He didn’t like the idea of Trig or any other man seeing her like this, all warm and soft and flushed from sleep. The surge of possessiveness caught him by surprise.
“Araminta’s back,” Celinda announced excitedly.
“Yeah, they both rolled in a couple minutes ago,” Trig said, angling his head toward Max.
Celinda turned to Davis. She seemed oddly startled at the sight of him sitting there on her sofa. It dawned on him that, what with his crumpled black dress shirt and trousers and the morning beard, he probably looked as if he, too, had spent the night out on the tiles.
Celinda’s hopeful expression dimmed. “No one looks very cheerful. Can I assume that means they didn’t bring back the relic?”
“It’s still missing.” Davis got to his feet. “Mind if I use your shower?”
The request seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened. “Uh.” She recovered quickly, blushing a bright pink. “No, no, of course not. Go ahead. I’ll, uh, start breakfast. Or something. I think I’ve got some eggs.” She turned quickly to Trig. “Will you stay?”
“Appreciate the offer, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way,” Trig said. “I need to start working our contacts on the street and inside the Guild, see if we can find the guy who generated those twin ghosts last night.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Celinda paused, looking first at Trig and then at Davis. “What about the second man?”
“The getaway driver?” Davis nodded. “We’ll look for him, too. But we haven’t got much to go on there.”
“Well,” Celinda said, “if it helps, I can tell you that he’s got a rather twisted parapsych profile. I would advise extreme caution if either of you happen to run into him again.”
They both looked at her.
“Are you saying that because he’s involved in a criminal enterprise and, by definition, most outlaws probably have twisted profiles?” Davis asked evenly.
“No.” She seemed to hesitate, then come to a decision. She reached up to pat Araminta. “I’m saying that because I can read psi profiles if I get close enough to a person. Last night, for a few seconds, I was very close to the getaway driver.”
Davis looked at Trig and then turned back to her.
“Are you telling us that you can sense other people’s psi energy patterns?” he asked.
“At close range, yes.” She shrugged. “It’s one of the reasons why I’m so good at my job. I can match people psychically as well as in the usual ways.”
Trig whistled softly. “Whoa. Talk about a nonstandard talent. Ever been tested?”
“Yes. My parents suspected I was a little different. They took me to a private lab. The ability to read psi patterns is extremely rare, so I don’t advertise my talent for obvious reasons. But Davis is a strong and evidently rare para-rez himself, so I assume neither of you gets nervous around nonstandard talents.”
“How strong are you?” Davis asked.
She hesitated again. “Very.”
He raised his brows. “Are we talking off the charts?”
“Well, yes,” she admitted, “but I’m sure that’s only because the talent is so rare in the population the testing labs don’t have a good basis for comparison.”
Davis rubbed his jaw again. Something in common, he thought. “How much can you tell about a person based on what you pick up from his or her psi energy patterns?”
She gave him a very somber look. “Often a lot more than I really want to know. There are some very strange people out there.”
“I’ve always heard that psi patterns are unique to individuals,” Trig said.
Celinda nodded. “In my experience that’s true. No two people produce precisely identical psi wave patterns, not even twins.”
“Could you recognize the driver of that car if you got close to him again?” Davis asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “But I would have to be fairly close. No more than a few feet away at most.”
“Oh, man,” Trig said. He looked eagerly at Davis. “That kind of talent would sure be useful in our business, boss.”
“Sort of like having one of those dogs they use to detect drugs in suitcases,” Celinda said dryly.
Trig turned red. “No way, ma’am. I never meant to imply that you’re a dog.” He went almost purple, clearly mortified. “Or anything like that,” he finished weakly.
Celinda gave him a wry smile. “It’s okay, I understand.”
“Your talent,” Davis said, diplomatically emphasizing the word talent, “for picking up another individual’s psi patterns would certainly be useful when it comes to identifying the driver, but it won’t help us locate him. Unfortunately, that’s going to take old-fashioned detective work.”
Trig grimaced. “Which means I’d better get moving.” He looked at Celinda. “Would you mind if I borrowed a book?”
She looked taken aback by the request. “What book?”
“That one.” Trig indicated a volume on the table beside a chair. “I started it after I finished Espindoza’s History last night. Found it on your bookshelf. Hope you don’t mind.”
She looked at the book on the table. So did Davis. From where he sat he could just make out the title. Ten Steps to a Covenant Marriage: Secrets of a Professional Matchmaker.
“Oh, that one.” Celinda suddenly rezzed a dazzling smile for Trig. “Certainly. Help yourself.”
“Thanks,” Trig said. “I only got through chapter one.” He walked back to the table, picked up the volume, tucked it under his arm, and returned to the door. “Nice to meet you, Miss Ingram. Have a good time at the wedding.”
“Thanks,” Celinda said. Her smile faded.
Trig let himself out into the hall and went downstairs, making very little noise for such a solidly built man. Davis listened closely, but he did not hear Betty Furnell’s door open.
He got to his feet. “That book that Trig took with him.”
Celinda raised her brows. “What about it?”
“I assume you’ve read it?”
“I wrote it.”
HE WAITED UNTIL HE HEARD THE SHOWER RUNNING BEfore he went into her bedroom. He stood there for a couple of seconds, inhaling the scent of her space and thinking of how she had made a great fuss about checking to be sure the bridesmaid’s dress was safe. But she had not even glanced into the closet. She had looked under the bed.
He crouched beside the bed. There were no telltale lines indicating a hidden floor safe beneath the wall-to-wall carpet. He ran his fingertips along the baseboard. A section felt loose. He tugged gently.
A ten-inch length of the baseboard popped free. Behind it was a dark opening in the wall.
He reached inside and pulled out a gray sack. The object it contained felt heavy in his hand. It also felt familiar.
He untied the sack. The missing relic was not inside. Something else was, though.
He retied the sack, tucked it into the wall, and replaced the baseboard.
He went back down the hall wondering why a professional matchmaker would have an illegal mag-rez gun hidden under her bed.
A woman who lived alone and worried about intruders would probably keep the gun in a place where she could get at it in a hurry, the drawer in the bedside table for instance. But Celinda kept hers stashed in a very inaccessible location.
The mag-rez had been concealed for some serious purpose. Evidence of a crime committed in the past? Or evidence of one that had not yet been committed?
Chapter 11
HE WAS STILL FEELING UNNERVED THE NEXT MORNING when he walked into his office. E
verything had gone wrong again last night. First, they had been unable to find the relic in the woman’s apartment, and then Brinker had nearly been caught when he tried to search Oakes’s car. It had been a very close call.
Ella Allonby, seated behind the reception desk, looked up from some papers.
“Good morning, Dr. Kennington,” she said in her crisp, well-modulated, businesslike way.
Everything about her was crisp, well-modulated, and businesslike. She was forty-three years old and astonishingly good at her job. But he hadn’t hired her for her office management skills. He had chosen her because she was secretly enamored of him. That made her extremely easy to manipulate.
He paused in front of her desk and gave her a warm smile. “How does my schedule look today, Miss Allonby?”
The impact of the smile brought color to her cheeks just as he had known it would. As always, the wielding of power over another human being, even in such a small way, gave him a pleasant little rush.
“Busy, as usual, sir,” she said. “You have three patients this morning and two this afternoon.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Miss Allonby.”
He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him, and set his briefcase on the desk. He hung the hand-tailored gray silk jacket on the coat rack and then sat down behind the desk.
He looked around the office and felt the old anger rise inside. How had it come to this? He should have been president of the Society of Para-Psychiatrists by now, with a lucrative private practice on the side. He should be publishing papers in the most esteemed journals. He should be giving lectures at the university.
Instead, he had been reduced to changing his identity and starting over as a so-called dream therapist. It was humiliating for a man of his power and brilliance. He might as well hang out a shingle advertising himself as a meditation guru or offering to read astrological charts and tea leaves.
A year ago his life and career had been on track. He had been headed straight to the very top of his profession. But the narrow-minded fools at the institute had failed to comprehend his genius. Instead, they had fired him. Fired him. His hand clenched in a fist. Not only that, but the administrator had made it clear that he would never get a decent reference. For all intents and purposes, the bastard had destroyed his career.
Admittedly, there had been some unsatisfactory outcomes among the subjects, but that was the nature of the experimental process. It was no reason to fire him. The truth was that it was professional jealousy that had led to his dismissal.
No matter. One day soon they would all pay.
But first he had to find the other relic. Luckily at this point the Guild had no inkling that there were two of the ruby amber devices. The psi-burned hunter who had found them down in the catacombs had turned over only one of the artifacts to the Guild. Sensing that the relics had great value, he had concealed the other one.
Fortunately, the para-trauma the hunter had experienced had brought him to the hospital where Kennington had been working. He had discovered the man’s secret in the course of an experiment. It had been no trick at all to pull the location of the concealed relic out of the patient. The man had, of course, died soon thereafter. It had been suicide, according to the records. It was true the hunter had been severely depressed. Kennington had made sure of it with a carefully measured dose of psi meds.
It had taken months to find a thief capable of stealing the second artifact from the Guild vault.
The other bit of good news was that it was obvious that the Guild had no clue as to the nature of the kind of power the artifacts could generate when they were operated by an individual who possessed the right type of psychic talent, his type. Those with his brand of psi abilities were statistically quite rare. The odds were excellent that no one else would realize that the relic was anything other than an alien curiosity. Nevertheless, he wanted it in his possession as quickly as possible.
One thing was clear now: Davis Oakes was a problem. Any ghost hunter capable of destroying a doppelganger without generating green fire had to be taken seriously. More crucially, Oakes appeared to have Celinda Ingram in his control. That meant that she was the key to the missing relic.
He rezzed the computer and searched for everything he could find on Celinda Ingram, professional marriage consultant. Everyone had a weakness.
He discovered Celinda’s in less than five minutes.
Chapter 12
MRS. FURNELL WAS WAITING AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS. Celinda, preparing to lock her door, looked down and got a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Luck had been with her earlier when Trig had left. Mrs. Furnell had evidently not heard him descend the stairs. But she was lying in wait for Davis. It was too much to hope that she would not know that he had spent the night.
Davis was halfway down the stairs, a suitcase in either hand, Max perched on his shoulder. He nodded pleasantly at Betty when he reached the front hall.
“Good morning, Mrs. Furnell,” he said.
“I thought I heard someone coming down the stairs.” She chuckled. “I meant to tell you both that I had the oddest dream—” She broke off, wincing in pain. She touched her temples with her fingertips. “Oh, dear, I seem to have a headache coming on. Probably that new pillow.”
It wasn’t like Betty to complain about aches and pains, Celinda thought. Worried, she started down the stairs, the plastic-covered pink dress draped over one arm.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Furnell?” she asked.
“What?” Betty blinked. Her face cleared miraculously. “Yes, dear, I’m fine. Just a bit of a headache. But it’s easing up already. I’ll take something for it in a minute. I just wanted to wish you a safe trip to Frequency City.”
“Thank you,” Celinda said.
Araminta stuck her head out of Celinda’s oversized tote and chortled happily at Betty.
Betty laughed lightly, reached into the pocket of her purple track suit pants, and took out a small, paper-wrapped candy. “There you go, Araminta.”
Araminta accepted the gift with polite greed and downed it with two or three efficient crunches of her sharp little teeth.
Betty beamed at Celinda. “Give my regards to your sister.”
“I’ll do that,” Celinda promised. She tried to edge surreptitiously toward the front door. Unfortunately, Davis was standing in the way, and he showed no signs of moving.
Betty smiled archly at Davis. “I see you’re going to attend the wedding with Celinda.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Davis assured her.
“You know, I don’t believe Celinda has had any overnight visitors in the four months she’s been here except for her sister, who came to visit her last month.”
Davis gave her a wicked grin. “You can’t know how happy I am to hear that, Mrs. Furnell.”
Betty laughed. “Go on, you two. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you.”
Celinda yanked open the front door and hurried outside to the Phantom. Davis followed at a more sedate pace. He opened the small trunk and put the suitcases inside. She arranged the pink dress very carefully on top of the suitcases and then stood back and watched him close the trunk.
“You do realize that it will be a miracle if my reputation survives the week,” she said.
He shrugged. “What’s the big deal about having a man spend the night?”
“A marriage consultant’s reputation is her most important asset. In fact, the vast majority of successful consultants are in Covenant Marriages. It sends a subtle signal to the clients, you see.”
“That the matchmaker knows what she’s doing?”
“Exactly. Mrs. Takahashi took a big chance when she hired me. If word gets out that I let men I barely know spend the night, she’ll probably ask me to leave.”
For some reason that observation seemed to irritate Davis. “I spent the night on the sofa, remember?”
“Yes.” Celinda started toward the passenger door. “But appearances are everything in my business.”
He went around to the driver’s side and looked at her over the Phantom’s low roof. “Don’t worry, if your reputation gets damaged because of this case, the Guild will take care of it.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or grit her teeth. “Got news for you; there are some things even the Guild can’t fix.”
Chapter 13
THE DRIVE TO FREQUENCY CITY USUALLY TOOK A LITTLE over three hours, but Celinda had a feeling that with Davis at the wheel they would make it in considerably less time. It wasn’t just that the Phantom was a fast car, it was the way Davis drove it, efficiently and with exquisite control.
Araminta, who had been perched on the back of the seat with Max since the start of the trip, hopped onto Celinda’s shoulder and made little encouraging noises. Celinda gave her another cookie from the bag of snacks she had brought along.
Cookie in her paw, Araminta returned to the back of the seat and huddled close to Max. She broke off a bit of her treat and offered it to him. He took it as though it were a rare and valuable offering.
“Araminta and Max seem to be getting awfully cozy together,” Celinda observed, more to break the silence than anything else. Davis had said very little thus far. After the quick stop by his apartment to pick up an overnight bag and his tux, he had seemed content to concentrate on his driving.
His mouth curved a little at the corner. “Dust bunny love, you think?”
“Whatever it is, I doubt that it can be dignified by the term love,” she replied. She winced a little, aware of the primness in her voice. “They only met yesterday, and they spent the night together last night. We in the matchmaking profession refer to that as a one-night stand.”
“I’m getting the feeling that’s probably against one of the rules in that book you wrote.”
“It certainly is,” she said.
“They’re still together this morning. Doesn’t that bode well for true love?”
She watched Araminta and Max move a little closer to each other on the back of the seat.
