A small utility sled was parked just inside the jagged opening.
'If we're lucky, Griggs left the amber-rez locator set to his last destination,' Cooper said.
He slipped sideways through the opening, walked to the vehicle, and leaned into the driver's compartment. Elly watched him fiddle with the instruments.
'Well?' she asked.
'Got it.' He straightened, looking coolly satisfied. 'Care to take a spin?'
'You bet.'
She squeezed through the opening with Rose on her shoulder and hopped up onto the passenger seat of the sled.
Plant psi shivered across her senses. Turning in the seat, she surveyed the cargo bed of the sled.
'Sense something?' Cooper asked, getting in beside her.
'Yes. Psi-bright or some form of it. Very faint, but I recognize the buzz.'
'I think we're on a roll here,' Cooper said.
He hit Retrace Route on the locator and rezzed the small motor.
The trip was a short one. The sled hummed through a couple of turns and stopped in front of a vaulted chamber.
Cooper got out and walked to the door of the room. 'Nothing in here.'
She went to join him. The chamber was empty, as he had said, but the tingle of psi-bright was stronger.
'The herbs were here,' she said. 'And probably quite recently.'
'There's another room off of this one.'
Cooper started across the space. He paused halfway and abruptly changed direction.
Elly saw something glitter in the corner. She watched Cooper pick it up.
'Looks like broken glass,' she said.
'It is. I think it's the bottom half of a beaker, the kind you use to run chemical experiments. There's still some white residue in the bottom.'
'Let me see.' She hurried to join him.
There was no need to touch the shattered glass. Her psi senses flared wildly.
'Enchantment dust,' she said.
Chapter 28
'THE SON OF A BITCH HAD A LAB GOING IN THAT chamber.' Cooper eased open the rear door of Griggs's shop and stepped out into the alley. 'The question is, what in green hell happened to it?'
He listened with all of his senses. Fog still swirled in the alley, limiting visibility. A glance at Rose, perched on Elly's shoulder, assured him that there was no immediate threat.
'I can't get over the notion of Stuart Griggs as a big-time drug dealer,' Elly whispered. 'It boggles the mind. He must have made a fortune. Wonder what he did with the cash.'
Cooper thought about the two journals he was carrying and the herbal that Elly clutched as though it were a box of amber diamonds.
'Looks like he may have used some of it to buy these books,' he said. 'But a few rare volumes wouldn't have put much of a dent in the kind of profits Griggs must have been pulling in with the chant. Looks like I'm going to have to do some follow-the-money research on him tomorrow.'
'Maybe that's what the intruder was looking for tonight, Griggs's drug money.'
'Or a stash of chant.'
'Well, we know where a lot of that wound up,' she reminded him. 'In the basement of The Road to the Ruins.'
'Yes.'
'I'll bet he dismantled the lab and moved the drugs after he realized that Bertha had escaped his vortex.'
'That theory assumes that Griggs was the blue freak I'm chasing,' he said.
'You've got doubts about that?'
'It occurs to me that the odds of Griggs just happening to collapse and die from a heart attack shortly after Bertha Newell discovered his underground lab seem a little long.'
She turned her head quickly to look at him in the shadows. 'Are you saying that you think there's someone else involved in this?'
'It crossed my mind. Death by a strong blast of intense blue ghost energy can look a lot like death by heart attack. But if someone murdered Griggs that way, he would have had to do it underground. I told you, blue energy is very weak outside the tunnels, too weak to kill.'
'I suppose the killer could have murdered Griggs down in the catacombs and then dragged his body up the stairs into the back room of the shop,' she said slowly. 'It would probably require an autopsy to determine the truth. I doubt if one will be ordered in this case. Neither the medics nor the cop had any reason to think they were dealing with a crime scene today.'
'I'll call Mercer Wyatt first thing in the morning,' Cooper said. 'This is his town. He shouldn't have any problem pulling whatever strings it takes to get an autopsy performed.'
She cleared her throat. 'Generally speaking, the mainstream media here in Cadence takes a dim view of the quaint practice of referring to the city as a particular Guild boss's
'Damn. Done in by semantics again.'
They were almost back to the mouth of the alley. The green-tinged mist roiled in the empty street. On the other side of the pavement he could just barely make out the haloed lamps over the back doors of the next row of shops.
Rose rumbled softly. A warning this time.
He felt the spectral fingers of awareness on the nape of his neck and reacted instinctively. He pushed Elly into the dense, dark shadow cast by a large metal trash container.
Rose, nearly invisible except for her four glowing eyes, started to tumble toward the ground.
'No, Rose,' Elly whispered. 'You mustn't.' She caught the dust bunny in one hand and tucked her safely into the crook of her arm.
Two figures moved into the alley opening, silhouetted against the acid-hued fog light. The features of both men were covered by stocking masks. Flickers of green ghost-energy snapped and crackled in the mist around them.
At least one of them was a hunter, Cooper thought. When the adrenaline started flowing, a lot of them unconsciously summoned bits of whatever stray ghost light happened to be in the vicinity.
Unlike a lot of dissonance-energy para-rezzes who generally chose to stick with UDEM energy as the weapon of choice when they went into this kind of work, these two were armed. One carried a gun. Light glinted on the edge of the wicked-looking blade in the other man's hand.
The man on the right rezzed a pocket flash. He was the one with the gun. His stocking cap had a tassel on top.
'Don't move,' Tassel Top ordered. 'Either one of you even breathes hard, and you're both dead. You,' he said to Cooper. 'You're dressed like a hunter. You the real thing or just a wannabe?'
'It's a fashion statement,' Cooper said.
The other man snickered. 'Hey, Joe, the guy thinks he's a stand-up comic.'
'Skip the jokes,' Joe snarled. 'Unless you want to feel what it's like to take a bullet.'
'Anyone who knows me well knows I never joke,' Cooper said quietly. 'What do you want?'
'Whatever you found back there in Griggs's shop,' Joe said.
'You went in ahead of us, didn't you?' Cooper asked. 'That means you know there wasn't anything of value
