circuit someone’s aura long enough to knock him unconscious is one thing. The ability to actually stop a man’s heart with psychic energy is something else. It would take a whole different level of talent.”
“Maybe not.” Abby rubbed her arms as if she was cold. “If the victim was old and frail and was having heart problems, a severe shock to the senses might be all it would take.”
“There is that. Let’s take a look at that vault you mentioned.”
“All right.”
She led the way to the small kitchen, Newton hanging at her heels, and opened what looked like a closet door. Sam saw a flight of stone steps that went down into darkness. Abby flipped a light switch, revealing a concrete chamber piled high with cartons, crates and shelves of books.
“I don’t see a vault or a safe,” Sam said.
“That’s because Thaddeus took care to make it as invisible as possible. The door to the vault is in the floor.”
She went down the steps ahead of him, wove a path through the crowded space and stopped at what looked like a nondescript section of the concrete floor. She shoved aside a heavy book cart and revealed a small computerized lock set into the floor. She crouched, entered a code and stepped back.
“Webber gave you the code?”
“I think I’m the only one he ever trusted,” Abby said.
A large square section of the floor rose on invisible hinges. A heavy wave of psi poured out of the lower basement, jangling Sam’s senses. At the top of the basement steps, Newton whined again.
“I see what you mean about the heat in the vault,” Sam said. “It would take at least some degree of talent just to push through that high-energy atmosphere.”
“Thaddeus kept all of his most valuable items down there.” Abby descended a few steps and flipped another switch. She looked around. “I don’t think the killer got this far. Nothing appears to be disturbed.”
“Whoever killed Webber was not interested in anything except the lab book.”
“Which Thaddeus did not have.” Abby turned off the lights and climbed back up the steps. “The bastard killed him for no reason.”
“Not necessarily. The killer may have been after information.”
Abby entered another code into the vault lock. She watched the section of floor glide back into place with an expression of pain mingled with anger. “Such as?”
Sam took a few seconds to put himself into the mind of the killer. “If it were me, I would have come here to get the identities of the most likely auction dealers.”
Abby gave him an odd look.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s just that for a moment there you sounded like you actually knew what the killer was thinking.”
He said nothing.
Abby blinked and collected herself quickly. “Right. That’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Thaddeus knows all the players. If there is an auction about to go down, he would have known the dealers most likely to handle it.”
“The question, then, is whether or not Webber gave up the information before he died.”
“He would have had no reason to risk his neck to save his competitors. In the deep end, it’s every man for himself. Yes, if he felt threatened, he would have given the killer a few names and contacts. I’m sure the monster got what he wanted, and then he went ahead and murdered poor Thaddeus anyway.”
“Let’s go.”
She turned quickly and went up the steps to the main floor of the house. Sam followed her. Newton was waiting for them. He seemed relieved to have them aboveground again. Sam closed the basement door.
Abby surveyed the crowded shelves. “It won’t be long before everyone in the rare-book community knows that a cache of extremely valuable books has been left unguarded. But only a very small number of people know the location of this house.”
“The killer found Webber,” Sam pointed out. “That means others can find this place, too.”
“What are we going to do about Thaddeus? We can’t just leave him there.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “We can, and we will. As soon as we get to an anonymous phone, we’ll call nine-one-one and tell the authorities that we’re concerned neighbors who are worried about Webber because no one has seen him outside his house for a time.”
She frowned. “Why does the call have to be anonymous?”
“At this stage, I don’t want anyone to know that we found the body. We need to leave. Now.” He started toward the front door and stopped.
“What is it?” Abby asked.
He looked back toward the body. “What was Webber doing in that aisle when he died?”
“He was probably trying to flee the killer. He staggered that far and collapsed.”
“Yes, but that row of shelving dead-ends at the wall,” Sam said. “This was his home. He knew every inch of it. He must have realized that if he fled in this direction, he would be trapped.”
“He was dying. He would have been terrified. At the very least, terribly disoriented. I doubt that he was thinking clearly.”
“I’m not so sure of that.” Sam slipped the pistol beneath his jacket and went slowly back down the aisle. He stopped a short distance from the body and studied the spines of the dusty, leather-bound volumes on the shelves. “I assume he had a logical way of organizing his books?”
“Of course.” Abby came to stand at the far end of the aisle. “Thaddeus devised a very elaborate system years ago. It was based on alchemical symbols and numbers. Each section is labeled. See that little placard on the end of each shelf??????”
He glanced at the nearest bit of yellowed cardboard. There was a handwritten notation on it. The combination of old symbols and numbers looked like some ancient, incomprehensible alchemical formula.
“Can you tell what kind of books he kept in this section?” he asked.
Abby came down the aisle and examined the faded handwriting on the cardboard for a few seconds. “This is a history section. Reference books that were written about alchemy by late-nineteenth-century scholars. These would all be secondary sources, as far as serious collectors are concerned. Some are interesting, but none are unusually rare or inherently valuable.”
“None of them are hot?”
“No. Most of them are available from other antiquarian book dealers or large academic libraries.”
Sam studied a small gap on one of the shelves. “One of the books is gone.”
“He probably sold it recently.”
“No, look at the way the dust on the shelf is smeared. That was done by a hand groping for the book and pulling it away from the others. Whoever grabbed that volume was in a big hurry.”
He went down beside the body again and took another look at the scene from the lower vantage point. A slim leather-bound volume lay just out of sight in the shadows beneath the last row of shelving. He retrieved the book, opened it and read the title aloud.
“
“Paynter was a Victorian-era scholar,” she said. “One of the first historians of science.”
“I know.”
“By that time, alchemy had long since fallen into disrepute. It was the province of crackpots and eccentrics. Anyone who considered himself a serious scientist or researcher was into chemistry and physics by then. But Paynter was of the opinion that if Isaac Newton had been intrigued by alchemy, there had to be something to it.”
“Paynter was right.” Sam handed the book to her. She paged through it quickly, pausing midway through the little tome.
“There’s a page missing,” she said. “It was ripped out, not cut out. The damage was done recently. You can tell because the crinkles and jagged edges haven’t been pressed into place the way they would be if this book had been sitting unopened on the shelf for a few years.”
