Untouchable

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “You have doubts about the causes of the deaths of some of your old colleagues?” he asked, choosing his words carefully.

  “You bet I do.” There was a rare anger in Arizona’s voice now. “We were all potential problems for them, so they tried to hunt us down and terminate us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we knew too much about the agency and what was going on in that secret lab of theirs. And don’t even get me started on the drugs and radiation they used on us. Hell, if any of us had ever gone public, we could have ruined a few careers, and that’s a fact.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Arizona grunted. “If you’re a politician running for high office, you sure as hell don’t want the media to find out that once upon a time you were responsible for funding an off-the-books government operation that conducted paranormal research. And you damn sure wouldn’t want it getting out that the agents you recruited were used in black ops work.”

  Jack felt as if he had just taken a body blow. For a couple of seconds he could not say a word. Memories of his own very private, very secretive research into the realm of psychic phenomena momentarily overwhelmed him. It was his most closely guarded secret, because that kind of academic interest was a surefire career killer, to say nothing of what it did to professional and personal relationships.

  He had not mentioned his investigation into the paranormal to anyone, not even Anson and his foster brothers, Max and Cabot. His family already considered him a little weird. They were okay with the weirdness but he had known instinctively that it would not be a good idea to burden them with that bit of information.

  The fact that he, an academically trained professional, had taken the psychic thing seriously enough to delve deep into the literature and chase down rumors in the darkest corners of the Internet might make Anson, Max and Cabot conclude that he was more than just a little out there. It might convince them that he had lost it altogether.

  Arizona seemed unaware of his stunned reaction.

  “That’s one of the reasons why I like talking to you, Jack,” she continued. “Over the years I’ve only met a few other people who see things the way I do.”

  The possibility that he saw things the way Arizona Snow did was more than a little unnerving, but he figured that as long as he could question his own sanity he was probably still on the right side of the blurry line between normal and not normal.

  They arrived at the front steps of his cottage. He stopped and looked at Arizona.

  “If you figure out what gave you the bad ping, will you tell me what it was?” he said. “I’d really like to know.”

  “Yep. Not like anyone else will listen to me. Well, except for Winter, of course. She’d pay attention but I doubt that she’d know how to deal with whatever’s coming down. Got a feeling we’re looking at a real serious situation developing here.”

  Great. Now he was getting the unpleasant vibe.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “The problem is, Winter is a civilian,” Arizona said. “She doesn’t have the skill set to deal with real trouble. All that positive thinking and meditation crap works great right up until it doesn’t.”

  “True,” Jack said.

  Arizona nodded once, decisive. “That means it’s up to you and me to keep an eye on things around here, Jack.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Evidently Arizona had decided he was not one of the “civilians.” It was disconcerting, but he was surprised to discover that he was warmed by his new status.

  Arizona raised a gloved hand in farewell. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Right,” Jack said.

  He started to go up the steps but stopped halfway, thinking about the conversation with Arizona.

  Her logic could be difficult if not downright impossible to follow, but as far as he had been able to tell she did not invent facts from scratch. There was always some solid basis for her observations and conclusions.

  “AZ, wait,” he said.

  Arizona paused and looked back over her shoulder. “What’s the problem?”

  “You said that Winter would pay attention if you talked to her about the bad vibe.”

  “Right. She’s smart.”

  “I agree. You also said that she wouldn’t have the skill set to deal with a serious situation.”

  “Figure she’d be in way over her head,” Arizona explained.

  He chose his next words with exquisite care.

  “Why would Winter be the one who would have to deal with a crisis here in Eclipse Bay?” he asked.

  “Because I’m pretty sure that the nasty vibe I got a couple of days ago is linked to her.”

  Arizona turned on one booted heel and started to march off into the darkness.

  “Shit,” Jack said. He went quickly down the steps. “AZ, wait. We need to talk.”

  “Sorry,” Arizona said over her shoulder. “That’s all I’ve got for now. But I’ll work on it while I’m on patrol tonight. I always think more clearly at night, know what I mean?”

  He halted at the bottom of the steps.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

  Night meant dreams for him—dreams that were infused with riddles, clues, shadows and ghosts. Night was when he did his best work. Evidently it was the same for Arizona.

  “If I come up with anything solid, I’ll swing by your place and tell you,” Arizona promised.

  “I’d appreciate it,” Jack said. “Anytime, night or day.”

  “Understood,” Arizona said.

  She disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack stood watching Arizona until all he could see was the faint beam of her flashlight. When that vanished behind a vacant summer cabin, he went back up the steps, crossed the porch and unlocked the front door of his cottage.

  Not that there was much point in locking doors in Eclipse Bay, he thought. The small town was as safe as a small town could be. But he had no intention of abandoning the habit. Call me paranoid.

  It occurred to him that Winter would not approve of the negative self-talk.

  In that case, call me cautious, not paranoid.

  Cautious sounded a bit more positive.

  He moved across the threshold and flipped a wall switch to turn on a lamp. For a time he stood there, contemplating the interior of the rustic one-bedroom cottage. Something was wrong with the space but damned if he could figure out what it was that bothered him.

  The cottage was nearly identical to Winter’s rental, right down to the ancient floral drapes and the well-worn furniture. But tonight her place had felt different; it had felt cozy and comfortable, almost like a real home.

  His cottage, on the other hand, looked like exactly what it was—one more rental in a long string that, with one notable exception, stretched all the way back to his early childhood.

  The exception had occurred during his teenage years. He and his foster brothers had spent that volatile period of their lives growing up under the guidance of their foster father. Anson Salinas’ house had been small but it had been home, at least for a while.

  He peeled off his jacket, hung it on a wall hook and crossed the room to a window. He pulled the curtain aside. Winter’s front porch light glowed at the far end of the bluffs but as he watched, most of the other lights in the house winked out. She was on her way to bed.

  He wondered if she understood what a priceless gift she had given him. The new skills she had taught him had helped him find the calm center in the chaos.

  At the start of a case he always got an adrenaline rush, but when it was over he invariably sank deep into the darkness for a time. It had been that way from the beginning but lately the blowback had been getting worse. The downtimes had been lasting longer and longer.

  Until Winter. She was his butterfly.
Because of her the currents of the storm inside him had been changed.

  She probably assumed that he went into the dark because none of his cases had happy endings. That was true as far as it went but it was not the whole truth. It was not the reason why he found himself standing on the edge of a cliff, gazing into the abyss, after every successful investigation.

  The truth was that each closed cold case ultimately reminded him of his one blazing failure. Quinton Zane continued to elude him.

  It was too soon to tell Winter why he was drawn into the dark place in the wake of a case. Or maybe he was too much of a coward to tell her.

  He thought about the incendiary kiss on her front porch a short time ago and wondered if she would conclude that he had developed a crush on her because he was grateful to her. She had, after all, quite literally changed his life.

  She probably got gratitude from a lot of her clients. He did not like the possibility that even now she might be adding him to a list of previous clients who were attracted to her positive energy; clients who were grateful to her.

  He wondered what she would say if he told her that he had chosen her name as his escape word. Winter.

  It was her name that made it so much easier to surface from one of his dark lucid dreams.

  He tightened his grip on the windowsill. He was going to drive himself nuts if he didn’t focus on something else. He glanced at the cupboard that held the whiskey bottle and decided against a nightcap. He’d had enough to drink tonight. But he wasn’t going to be able to sleep right away, thanks to Arizona’s cryptic warning, so he might as well occupy himself with some useful task, like organizing his notes from the latest case.

  He sat down at the table, opened his laptop and went to work. The investigation had been surprisingly straightforward once he had identified the key element that had set events in motion. But, then, as Arizona had pointed out, they all looked simple once you had the key.

  An hour later he finished the notes and filed them under Closed. Time to call it quits and try to get some sleep, but there was one more thing he had to do before he shut down the laptop. He opened the folder labeled Recent Suspicious Fires.

  He had not attempted to log the details of all the fire-related deaths that had occurred since Anson and Cabot had closed the Night Watch case a few months earlier. It would have been an overwhelming task. According to the latest government statistics, there were, on average, as many as three thousand deaths linked to fire each year in the United States alone.

  The Recent Suspicious Fires folder was a carefully curated file. It contained only cases that had occurred since the Night Watch case and that appeared to have Quinton Zane’s signature.

  Officially, Zane had died over twenty-two years ago, shortly after torching the compound of the cult that he had founded. The inferno had killed several of his followers. Jack’s mother had died that night. So had the mothers of Cabot and Max.

  Zane himself had supposedly perished in a fire at sea while attempting to escape the country on a stolen yacht. The body had never been recovered.

  Jack had never believed that Zane was dead. Anson, Cabot and Max had never bought the story, either.

  Every arsonist had a style, Jack thought. For years he had been collecting and analyzing reports of fire-related deaths that whispered of Zane’s signature. The investigations had become increasingly refined as the online search engines grew more efficient and sophisticated. As a result, he was now able to exclude the vast number of cases that otherwise would have landed in the Recent Suspicious Fires file. But there remained a handful that, for one reason or another, he could not dismiss.

  If Zane was alive, then he was still a pyro, still obsessed with fire. Guys like that did not change. But the fact that he had escaped detection this long meant that he had some control over his obsession.

  If he was still alive—if the ghostly footprints online and in Ice Town did belong to him—then little had altered in Quinton Zane’s pattern over the years. His process remained the same: set up a clever financial scheme, con and manipulate people into doing exactly what he wanted them to do, make a lot of money, ruin a lot of lives and then burn down the whole project and murder the witnesses.

  Jack paused over a brief report that had pinged when it had been swept up by a search engine a few weeks earlier. He had looked into it at the time and concluded that it should probably be moved to the Inactive file. Nevertheless, for some reason he hesitated.

  Las Vegas: A fatal car crash on a rural desert road took the life of the driver late last night. The vehicle caught fire and the body was badly burned but the authorities have tentatively identified the victim as Jessica Pitt of Burning Cove, California. It is believed that Pitt was smoking and may have fallen asleep at the wheel.

  Pitt was married and divorced three times and was single again at the time of her death. She had no children . . .

  Fires happened in vehicle accidents but not nearly as often as television and the movies made it appear. Still, a vehicle fire was hardly a rarity.

  “What were you doing out there alone on an empty desert road, Jessica Pitt?” Jack asked softly. “And why won’t you let me move you to the Inactive file?”

  There were no answers.

  He needed sleep.

  He shut down the computer, got up and headed for the lonely bed at the end of the hall.

  * * *

  • • •

  He was still awake when the storm made landfall shortly before midnight. He got out of bed and went to the window. He could no longer see the light over Winter’s front door. That worried him for a few seconds. Then he pulled the chain on the lamp beside his bed. The light did not come on. The heavy winds had knocked out the power.

  He wondered if the storm was making Winter nervous. Probably not. She had told him that she liked the energy. The window-rattling wind might keep her awake, though. If she was awake, was she thinking about that red-hot kiss?

  After a while he stopped thinking about Winter. He wondered if the tempest had caused Arizona Snow to abandon her patrol. He hoped so. He did not like to think of her outside, battling the elements as she walked her lonely patrol for the citizens of Eclipse Bay.

  The more he thought about Arizona outside on her own, the more concerned he became. She was tough and accustomed to the wild weather on the Oregon coast, but she was in her eighties, after all.

  He turned away from the window and got dressed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Winter awakened from the chase dream gasping for breath. Her pulse skittered wildly.

  The unnerving nightmare took various forms but each version had two things in common—she was always on the run and she always knew that, sooner or later, the monster would find her. On some nights she ran through a dense forest, seeking a cave in which she could hide. In other variations she struggled to swim to safety through a gelatinous sea.

  Tonight, however, the dream took a new and disturbingly different dreamscape. She had found herself racing through a fiery maze, desperately searching for the way out but knowing all the while that she was only going deeper.

  Crap. She had adopted a dreamscape that had been constructed by a client. It was the first time that had ever happened. She had her own nightmares. She did not need to borrow Jack’s old, well-used dreamworld.

  Meditation guide, center yourself.

  Lightning crackled outside, strobe-lighting the night for a few seconds. The wind sang a song that sounded as if it came from another dimension.

  The storm had made landfall. That was probably what had awakened her.

  But for some reason that didn’t feel like the right explanation.

  She pushed the quilt aside and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The room was cold. The comforting glow of the porch lights and the plug-in night-light had disappeared. That meant that the power had been knocked out.

&n
bsp; There was a battery-operated camp lantern in the kitchen cupboard. Arizona had given her instructions on how to use it. There was also a powerful flashlight in the kitchen drawer.

  But first she had to navigate the darkness of the bedroom and hallway. She fumbled for her cell phone. It was right where she had left it—on the end table. She gripped it and tapped the flashlight app. The narrow beam of bright light illuminated the path into the front part of the cottage.

  She slid her bare feet into her slippers and stood. She was surprised and more than a little annoyed to discover that she was still struggling to calm her breathing and her pulse. It’s just a storm. You enjoy storms. The energy is exciting.

  She focused on her breathing and told herself that there was no good reason to still be on the edge of panic.

  If your body is fighting your mind, there will be a reason. There is always a reason. It may not be a good reason but it will, nevertheless, be a reason. Listen to your senses.

  She stopped focusing on her breathing technique and went through her senses one by one. She could not have seen anything because she had been asleep. Perhaps she had heard some small, unusual sound. She listened intently but the storm was still in full roar. The rain slammed against the windows. The wind shrieked and wailed. Underlying it all was the endless boom and crash of the surf at the foot of the bluffs.

  She went down the hall.

  She was crossing the living room area, heading for the small kitchen, when she heard the muffled groan and snap of metal and wood being wrenched apart. Shock flashed through her.

  She turned toward the front door just as it slammed open.

  Cold, wet wind howled into the cottage. A man loomed in the doorway, silhouetted against the glare of a lightning strike. The beam of a flashlight speared the darkness, sweeping the small space. She could just make out a long object in his other hand.