Untouchable

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “It . . . interests me. No, that’s not quite right. It’s more accurate to say that the kind of people who use fire to commit murder interest me.”

  “Because of some personal experience?”

  “My mother was murdered by a man who likes fire.”

  Shocked, she just stared at him for a long moment.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said finally. “That’s . . . horrible.”

  “It happened a little over twenty-two years ago.”

  “I think I’m beginning to understand why you’re interested in crimes involving arson,” she said.

  “Some people are of the opinion that my interest in crimes involving fire amounts to an obsession,” he said. “Does that scare you?”

  “I don’t know. Should it?”

  “Probably,” he said. “There are times when it scares the hell out of me.”

  There was, he realized, such a thing as too much truth. Now she would be convinced that he wasn’t exactly normal.

  Nice work, Lancaster. For a guy with a couple of academic degrees after your name, you can be amazingly stupid.

  “Good night,” he said, quietly.

  He turned and started walking toward the dark cottage at the other end of the path. If he hung around any longer he would have to tell her about his past, and he wasn’t ready to do that. If she thought that his focus on arson crimes was not normal, she sure as hell would have a problem dealing with his history as a member of a cult.

  Keeping secrets had long ago become a habit for him, just as it had for his foster brothers.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Winter closed the door and stood quietly for a time thinking about Jack’s unnerving words. He had told her that his fascination with fire scared him but it wasn’t fear that she had seen in his eyes—it was the expression of a man who has accepted the ghosts that whisper in the shadows around him.

  She would have preferred the problem of fear. There were meditation strategies that could be employed to help a strong-minded person such as Jack cope with fear. She was not certain what to do with a man who kept company with ghosts.

  A shiver of anxiety gave her pause. Jack was all right, she told herself. He had been calm when he left. Then again, he was always calm. Maybe too calm. She got the feeling that somewhere along the line he had learned to hold everything close inside.

  There was no need to worry about him. Jack was all right.

  But she could not shake the chill of dread. She realized now that it had been slowly coalescing throughout the evening, although there was no obvious reason for the uneasiness.

  She went to a window and tweaked the faded flower-patterned curtain aside. She could just make out the narrow beam of Jack’s flashlight. It moved steadily along the bluff path until it reached a point midway between the two cottages. There it stopped.

  The ominous sensation intensified. Maybe it was just the energy of the oncoming storm that was rattling her. But there had been too many times in the past when she had survived because she had heeded her intuition. She could not ignore the feeling that something was very wrong.

  She dropped the curtain, grabbed her jacket and a flashlight, and went quickly to the door. She was not sure exactly what she was going to do, but she could not let Jack stand alone out there on the cliff path, not at such a late hour. Ghosts were always most powerful at night.

  She got the door open and rushed out onto the porch, adrenaline flooding her veins. She went down the front steps and stopped, aware that the freshening storm wind was tossing her hair and tugging at the bottom edge of her jacket.

  She knew that Jack had seen her because his flashlight was once again in motion. He was walking back along the path, heading toward her cottage.

  She stopped on the porch at the top of the steps and waited until he moved into the circle of light cast by the fixture over the door. He halted at the bottom of the three steps. Behind the lenses of his glasses his eyes were more unreadable than ever but it seemed to her that there was a lot of heat in his gaze.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  There was no mistaking the icy edge on his voice.

  “Nothing,” she said a little too quickly.

  “Did you think I was going to jump?”

  “No, of course not.” She was horrified by the question. “I’m sorry. I was just a little concerned, that’s all.”

  “I’m not going to jump.”

  “I never thought you would. I just got one of those weird little feelings. You know how it is.”

  There was a beat of acute silence.

  “You’re worried about me,” Jack said.

  She folded her arms. “You just concluded a difficult case. You need time to recover.”

  “What I said a moment ago—that sometimes my focus on cases involving fire scares the hell out of me—that’s what made you nervous, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes. Maybe. A little. But now I think I understand.”

  “Yeah? In that case, why don’t you explain it to me? Because I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I realize now that, in your own fumbling way, you were probably trying to warn me that you might not be good relationship material.”

  “Fumbling?” he repeated, as if he was not familiar with the word.

  “Awkward? Not very subtle?”

  “Can I assume you got the message?” he asked.

  “Message received.”

  He stood quietly for a moment as if he didn’t know where to go with that information. He looked grim and resigned, as if she had now become just one more ghost.

  “Is that it, then?” he said finally. “Just ‘message received’?”

  “I didn’t say that I was going to pay attention to the warning.”

  “Are you going to pay attention to it?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Nope.”

  She might as well have connected a couple of electrical wires. A fierce energy heated his eyes. And then he moved.

  He dropped the flashlight into a pocket, vaulted up the three porch steps, gripped her shoulders and pulled her into his arms. She barely had a chance to catch her breath before his mouth came down on hers.

  She thought she was prepared for his kiss but she was very, very wrong. Electricity arced across her senses, igniting a response that stunned her.

  For a heartbeat or two she was overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience. Then an adrenaline-fueled excitement kicked in. She was suddenly shivering, but not because of the chilled night wind off the ocean.

  She did not realize that she had dropped her flashlight until she heard it clatter on the wooden boards of the porch. Ignoring it, she gripped Jack’s shoulders, anchoring herself against the onslaught of his embrace.

  He dropped one hand to her waist and pulled her close, crushing her more tightly against his heavily aroused body. Everything about him was hard and intense. The rush of her response was as exhilarating as the energy of the oncoming storm. She tightened her grip on his shoulders.

  Jack groaned and deepened the kiss.

  A snort of amusement followed by a hearty chuckle broke the spell.

  “Hey, you two, take it inside. Bit chilly out here for that sort of thing, don’t you think?”

  Winter yelped and tore her mouth away from Jack’s. He loosened his grip on her but he did not release her. They both turned.

  A woman dressed in faded camouflage and boots strode forward into the crescent of porch light. She was festooned with night-vision goggles, a military-grade flashlight and a camera. Her helmet of gray curls was tucked under a cap that matched the camo.

  Arizona Snow was somewhere in her eighties but she projected the tough, wiry vibe of vigor and vitality. Probably all the exercise, Winter thought. Arizona took her self-imposed responsibility for keeping an eye on the town of Eclipse Bay seriousl
y. She seemed to be always on the go. As far as Winter could discern, she did not sleep much.

  “Evening, Ms. Snow,” Jack said.

  “Now, then, how many times have I told you to call me AZ?” Arizona said. “The only people who are supposed to call me Ms. Snow are tourists.”

  Winter smiled at her landlady. “Jack and I assumed we were still classified as outsiders. Neither of us has been here very long.”

  “Some folks belong here in Eclipse Bay, even if they don’t know it yet,” Arizona said. She winked. “Sorry to disturb you. Didn’t mean to interrupt things just as they were getting interesting.”

  “It’s all right,” Jack said. He looked at Winter. “It’s time I went home.”

  “It is getting late,” she said. She knew she was turning red. “I’m sure you’re exhausted.”

  “Strangely enough, I’m feeling a lot more energetic than I did this afternoon when I got back to town,” he said.

  There was still plenty of heat in his eyes. Another little frisson of awareness sparked through her. But she knew that it was probably best for Jack to leave now. She could tell he understood that, too. The kiss had been a turning point in their relationship but what was happening between them was too important and too fraught to be rushed. Relationships were complicated, especially in her case. She did not want to screw up.

  Arizona glanced at the face of her thick black steel wristwatch. “Time I got back on patrol.”

  The faint edge of urgency in the words caught Winter’s attention.

  “Everything okay, AZ?” she asked.

  “Things look okay.” Arizona raised one black-gloved hand and rubbed the back of her neck. “But I’ve still got that weird vibe I told you about yesterday when you and I had tea and you had me talk to the rock.”

  “It was a piece of amber, not a rock,” Winter said. “And I didn’t tell you to talk to it, I just suggested that you hold it while you talked to me.”

  “Whatever.” Arizona snorted and lowered her hand. “Felt like there was something going on between me and that rock. Reminded me of my old days when I was with the agency. Never mind. I’ve had that same vibe for a while now. It’s like there’s a real bad storm closing in on this town but damned if I can figure out what’s wrong. The storm that’s gonna hit later tonight looks pretty tame.”

  “Are you planning to patrol the town all night again?” Jack asked.

  “Not like I’ve got anything better to do,” Arizona said. “Never could sleep much at night.”

  “I’ll walk with you as far as my place,” Jack said. He turned to Winter. “I’ll say good night. Again.”

  She smiled. “Good night.”

  She went into the cottage, closed and locked the door, and moved to the window. She twitched aside the curtains and watched Jack and Arizona walk off into the night. They looked surprisingly comfortable together, despite the decades that separated them. Comrades in arms was the term that popped into her head.

  Maybe that was an accurate description, she thought. The battle they fought was the struggle to lead normal lives in a world that did not consider either of them normal.

  Arizona and Jack each possessed an unusually profound ability to focus on small, seemingly unconnected details and then connect those tiny data points with the assistance of a vivid imagination.

  Their ability was both a blessing and a curse. AZ and Jack were always at risk of being dismissed as conspiracy theorists, and they knew it. That, in turn, had a profound effect on the way they dealt with other people.

  She let the curtain fall back into place and went through her customary routine, checking the locks on the doors and the windows. She switched off the gas fireplace and then turned off the lights, with the exception of the outside fixtures over the front door and the kitchen door. Last but not least she switched on the night-light that illuminated the tiny living-kitchen area and a portion of the hallway.

  For a moment she stood in the hallway and studied the front room. It was a small space, but her beautiful red sofa was small. It had been designed for an apartment or a condo. It would definitely fit in the living room of the cottage.

  Now all she had to do was figure out how to get it out of the self-storage locker in Cassidy Springs and haul it up to Eclipse Bay.

  She undressed, pulled on a pair of cozy pajamas and then sat quietly on the side of the bed. Instead of meditating as she often did before sleep, she considered what she knew of Jack Lancaster.

  She concluded it wasn’t that he feared he had some sort of unhealthy obsession with fire. She was pretty sure that what really scared the hell out of him was that someday he would go into a lucid dream once too often—and get lost in a nightmare.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “What’s the problem, AZ?” Jack asked.

  “Like I told Winter, I can’t put my finger on it,” Arizona said.

  She spoke matter-of-factly, as if he were a colleague. She considered him a kindred spirit, Jack thought, someone who could relate to her unique view of reality. That probably did not bode well for his own future mental stability, but it was what it was.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You know how it is when you can almost see something in the shadows but you can’t quite make it out?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know.”

  Now that he was no longer holding Winter in his arms he was more aware of the chill of the night wind coming off the ocean. The storm was going to be a big one. Winter would probably find it exciting.

  “Most people think I’m a little crazy,” Arizona confided.

  “Is that so?”

  Arizona chuckled. “It’s okay. Folks around town have known me forever. They’re not afraid of me. I’m kind of like a cat that everyone in Eclipse Bay has decided to adopt. Know what I mean?”

  “I think so. I’m sort of adopted, myself.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I’ve got a foster dad and a couple of foster brothers.”

  “Well, there you go,” Arizona said. “You could say that Eclipse Bay is my foster family. Every year someone decides to give me a birthday party and the whole damn town shows up. It’s real sweet.”

  “I’m surprised you told anyone the date of your birthday. I had the impression that you try to live off the grid as much as possible. I would have thought you’d be reluctant to give out personal information like a birth date.”

  Arizona snorted. “’Course, I didn’t tell anyone my real birthday. Had a lot of different sets of ID’s over the years. The outfit I used to work for handed ’em out to the agents like candy. When the head librarian here in town asked me for the date of my birthday, I had a hunch what was going down so I picked one of the old ID’s and used the DOB on it.”

  There was no way to know if Arizona actually had worked with a clandestine government agency. Most of Eclipse Bay doubted the rumor. But in a sense it didn’t matter, Jack thought, because AZ had woven the information into a coherent personal history and a worldview that worked for her. Oddly enough it worked for him, too. The longer he knew his landlady, the more he was inclined to believe the story about the agency.

  He wondered if he should be worried about the ease with which he could step into AZ’s version of reality.

  “Weren’t you afraid that the librarian would do a search on your date of birth and come up with a few questions about your past?” he asked.

  “That particular ID is rock solid,” Arizona assured him. “One of my favorites. It’s just close enough to the truth to sound good. People never question it.”

  “The best lies always contain just enough truth to sound real.”

  “Yep.”

  “So, what did you see that set off the alarm bells and made you decide to double down on the night patrols?”

  “You know what it’s like,” Arizona said. “You can’t always be s
ure what it is that rings that damn bell in your head. But you can’t ignore the vibe.”

  He exhaled slowly. “Yes, I know. Frustrating.”

  “Damn frustrating.”

  “It either keeps you awake or it gets into your dreams.”

  “Yep.”

  It was comforting to know that someone else experienced the same sleep issues he encountered when he got the sort of disturbing ping that Arizona had described. He couldn’t rest until he found the butterfly that had flapped its wings.

  “’Course, it’s easy to see how things fit together when you look back,” Arizona said.

  “Providing you have enough information.”

  “Right. But at the start you usually don’t have all the data you need,” Arizona continued. “Sometimes you can’t make out the damn pattern until it’s too late to do anything about the situation.”

  “That’s why I stick to the old cold cases,” Jack said. “The damage was done years ago. I’m not working against a ticking clock, trying to save the next victim. All I have to do is look back with the advantage of having a couple of decades’ worth of information. Most of the time it’s easy to see the connections.”

  “Back in the day I could usually identify whatever it was that set off my internal alarm bells immediately. That gave me something to work with, know what I mean?”

  “It’s like identifying true north on a compass. Once you nail it you can figure out where everything else fits and then you can navigate the connections.”

  “Exactly.” Arizona sounded satisfied.

  “Maybe it’s the storm that’s giving you the uneasy vibe,” he suggested.

  “I’ve been through a lot of storms. This feeling is different. You know, it’s good to talk to you, Jack. Been decades since they shut down the agency. Lost track of most of the agents I worked with. The smart ones all tried to disappear, of course. That’s what I did. Some died, though. A few by their own hand if you believe the death certificates.”

  Talking with AZ was a lot like working a multidimensional puzzle, Jack reflected. He had understood from the start of their association that the most comfortable way of communicating with her was to go with the flow and embrace her reality.