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 BE fore 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. Everything 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
