Orchid

'I'm dispatching help right now. Can you stay on the line?'

'No.' Orchid fumbled the phone back into the wall cradle.

'Sonovabitch, Jink, she got to the phone. Probably called the cops. We gotta get outa here.'

'Don't worry about it. We got what we came for. Let's go.'

'Shit. I thought you said the illusion would hold her.'

'Don't worry, she can't tell the cops a damn thing. She never saw our faces. Come on. Move it, man. I can hear a siren.'

Orchid crouched on the kitchen floor and listened to the two men run from the apartment. When she heard their footsteps outside on the dock she opened her eyes very carefully.

The kitchen was back in the right universe. The hallway was no longer filled with fire. She drew a deep breath, trying to quell the tide of adrenaline that was sending chill after chill down her spine.

She straightened slowly and picked up the phone a second tune to dial the emergency number.

'New Seattle Emergency Center.'

'This is number four, Shelter Cove Marina again. We need an ambulance, too.'

Then she called the one person she wanted to call most of all.

Rafe.

Fifteen minutes later, Rafe stood on the dock in front of Morgan Lambert's houseboat. He had one arm locked so tightly around Orchid that it was a wonder she could breathe. He was certain that he had set a record for the short trip from his hillside house to Curtain Lake.

Her phone call had come as both a relief and a terrible confirmation of the increasing unease he had been experiencing for the past hour. He had called her home phone every five minutes after the first trickle of restlessness had hit.

At first he had felt foolish. He knew as well as everyone else that there was no such thing as telepathy. But after the night he had felt the consuming need to phone Orchid and had awakened her from one of her psychic vampire nightmares, he had not been so quick to shrug off his intuition when it concerned her.

He watched the grim scene unfolding on the street above the marina. The rain had stopped a few minutes ago, leaving a damp sheen on the pavement. The medics were in the process of trundling the still unconscious Morgan into an ambulance. Two police cruisers were parked at odd angles. The uniformed officers were inside Lambert's apartment, taking notes.

'Are you sure you don't want to go to the emergency room?' Rafe asked Orchid for the third, possibly the fourth time. He had lost count.

'No, I'm all right, really. Just a little shaken. Rafe, the cops are going to want to talk to us after they finish inside the houseboat. You heard the officers. They're working on the assumption that Morgan overdosed himself on dirty-ice and got ripped off by some drug-dealing friends. What are we going to say?'

'There's not much we can tell them. As far as we know, that may have been exactly what happened.'

She turned in the circle of his arm. Her eyes were steely green. 'Morgan did not do hard drugs. He would never touch something as dangerous as dirty-ice.'

'You want to tell that to the medics who just pumped out his stomach? One of them said it's a wonder he's still alive.'

Her mouth tightened mutinously. 'Those two intruders must have forced him to swallow the stuff. Maybe the illusion-talent made the drug look like milk or wine or something.' She shivered. 'It had to be the same talent-prism team we ran into the other night at Theo's house. I'm sure of it.'

The bastards would pay for scaring her, he thought. But he had a hunch she would not want to hear about his plans for retribution just now. She was too busy worrying about her friend, Morgan.

'You said you think that the two men were after a letter Theo Willis sent to Lambert?'

'I heard enough to know that they were searching for something. It had to be the letter Morgan mentioned in the phone message he left on my answering machine.

Unfortunately, I think they found it. We won't know what was in it until Morgan wakes up.'

'In other words, we don't have any hard facts to give to the cops.'

'No. But we have to protect Morgan. Those two men wanted him dead. What if they try to get at him while he's in the hospital?'

Rafe considered the matter briefly. 'I doubt that they'll risk attempted murder in a hospital. After all, Lambert can't identify them. But just in case, I know someone who will keep an eye on him. For a price.'

'Who?'

'Whistler.'

'Your street source? Is he also a bodyguard?'

'If the price is right.'

Orchid brightened immediately. 'Good idea. But that still leaves us with the problem of what to tell the cops. I know Dr. Brizo asked us to keep the stolen relic a secret, but how can we do that after what's happened?'

Easy, Rafe thought. He'd had years of experience keeping secrets. He did business under a long-established policy of protecting his clients' privacy. Furthermore, he knew only too well that if news of the missing relic hit the press, his small handful of leads would vanish. People who might know things would panic and drop out of sight. Time would be lost dealing with questions for which he did not yet have any answers.

'We've got nothing concrete to give the cops at this point,' he said. 'If we tell them what's going on, they'll probably assume that your friend, Lambert, is involved.'

'But Morgan doesn't have anything to do with this. He's just an innocent bystander.'

'Maybe, but how do you prove that? Given the few facts we have, it would be very easy to come up with a scenario in which Lambert plays a major role.'

'What do you mean?'

'He was a relatively close acquaintance of Theo Willis's. One of the few friends Willis had, apparently. It would be reasonable to assume that Lambert helped Willis stage the theft of the relic.'

'No. Absolutely impossible.'

'I'm not so sure.' Rafe wanted to his own logic. 'Maybe they had a buyer for it. Maybe Lambert got greedy and decided he no longer needed Willis. Maybe he killed Willis and then tried to do the deal on his own. Hell, maybe he tried to raise the price and the buyer got pissed and sent that talent-prism team to get the relic.'

'That's ridiculous. If Morgan was involved in something shady regarding the relic, why would he call me to tell me he had a letter from Theo?'

'Maybe he was trying to draw you into a trap. He may have suspected that you knew too much.'

'Rafe, that's just plain crazy.'

'The bottom line is, there's no hard evidence that Willis's letter even exists.'

Orchid groaned and reached up to massage her temples. 'Good lord, I never thought of that. You're right. If I tell them what I know, the cops might leap to the conclusion that Morgan is mixed up in this.'

'He is mixed up in it.' Rafe watched a medic close the ambulance door. 'We just don't know how, yet.'

'I refuse to believe that Morgan had anything to do with—' She broke off as one of the medics walked toward them.

He was a young man with earnest eyes and a crisp, clean-cut appearance. The name stitched on the pocket of his uniform was Paulsen. He gave Orchid a reassuring smile.

'I think your friend will be all right, ma'am. Lucky you found him when you did, though. Judging by that half- empty packet of dirty-ice, he took a major overdose. Another hour or two and he'd have been gone.'

'Dead,' Orchid whispered.

'Yeah.' The medic nodded. 'As it is, he won't wake up for at least twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours and he'll be pretty groggy for a while after that but with luck, he'll make it. Hope he has the sense to get himself into syn-psych drug rehab. Next time he may not be fortunate enough to have you around to save him.'

The medic turned and walked back to the ambulance. Orchid stared at his retreating figure. Then she looked at Rafe.

'They really did mean to kill him,' she said.

'Maybe,' Rafe agreed quietly. He did not share her conviction that Morgan Lambert did not do hard drugs.

Orchid clenched her hands at her sides. 'I'll bet they're the same ones who murdered Theo.'