He wiped sweat from his face, and turned, and headed up the long dark weary stairs through the granite and up to the tower, pausing at each landing and turn and branch to rest and breathe and cool off. Changing back was always harder than gaining his body's proper form.
Climbing again and climbing again, he finally reached the third level of the tower and flopped down into a chair in front of the control board for the security system. He took a deep breath and scanned the board, automatic action.
He froze. Off to one side of the green lights of "all's well" and the yellow lights of sensors deliberately off line, he found a single line of red. Red from certain specific sensors, his memory told him, perimeter alarms designed to be triggered without drawing notice.
Ben had grinned like an orca when they set those up, a second system that lay outside the first. Pressure switches that sensed anything bigger than a rat, acoustic pickups that could hear a man breathing twenty feet away. They gave false triggers all the time, storm and wind and frost heaves and inquisitive raccoons. But Ben had wanted to catch patterns, not individual alarms. And every one of them had been tripped.
Someone had been scouting Morgan defenses. Not penetrating deep into the caves and tunnels, just scouting, probing and then retreating. Looking for hidden entrances.
The same thing he'd just been doing.
Time to arm the traps. Which means you have to warn Gary, warn Ben. Tell Alice to warn Caroline as well, dammit, because that smart-ass kid wanders in and out of here like it's the frigging village green.
He needed to find a pay phone in the next county. No calls out of the Morgan house with Gary away to college.
One of the TV monitors seemed to be on the fritz, lost vertical sync and the picture was rolling. He checked the circuit — that camera hung just on the far side of the tower wall from him, looking down into the family graveyard. He switched the camera to a different monitor. The image still rolled down, a wide slow black band with horizontal smear, and now the first monitor showed a clear view of the road out in front of the house. So the problem was in the camera. Have to let Gary know about that.
The view locked onto a steady picture, the graves and memorial stones. But the first monitor started rolling again, cutting the view of the road. What the hell?
Then Dan jerked, recognition pulling his eyes back to the view of the graves. Something lay across one of the markers, something long and narrow and gray in the mist. He reached for the video joystick, switched control to that camera, and zoomed in on a form wrapped in plastic.
A chill shivered his spine. He'd read the reports on that body Kate Rowley found out on the ridge. He'd studied the photos Alice took.
Reflex action, he pulled a 9mm Beretta out of the desk drawer, checked its magazine and chamber, and made sure the safety was off. He stood up. He scanned the monitors a final time, and the view of the road was still blurred. He felt adrenaline pumping through his blood, the twitching of danger. If he moved fast enough, he might catch those bastards . . .
Down through the winding tower stair, into the cold damp dim tunnels, three turns, up worn steps and through the hinged stone slab in the back wall of the crypt. Push a stone block here until it clicked and fiddle the green bronze flowers there until a metallic rasping unlocked the crypt door from the inside, all automatic actions after decades. He stopped in the shadow of the crypt door, calming his breath, using that black-painted iron plate as a shield, scanning the yard and thinning fog, scanning the graves, checking each bush and tree trunk for extra arms or legs. These monitors had shown clear, but he couldn't trust them anymore . . .
He stepped out of the shadow, checked right and left, circled the crypt, still all clear. The back of his neck itched, and the skin between his shoulder blades crawled with the sense that someone watched him from the shadowy edge of the fog. His pistol sights kept searching, and he pulled on his Tear's strange ability to help him see through illusions to the truth beneath.
The sense of watching vanished. That bothered him as much as the sense itself, as if witchcraft warred with whatever Power lived in the Dragon's Eye.
But the Tear said he was safe, safe to walk across the yellowing autumn grass, through the dank flowing mist, still turning and scanning over the sights of his pistol, safety off. Shoot first and don't even bother to ask questions later — that was the drill for this kind of scene.
And then he stood over the plastic-wrapped form lying across a memorial stone in the family graveyard. His memorial stone, Daniel L. Morgan, 1964 - 2004, Lost at Sea, the inscription always good for a shiver even without a corpse dumped on top of it.
Yes, it was a corpse. Yes, the wrapping matched that one up on Kate Rowley's ridge. He didn't touch it. He walked the length of it, crouched at a safe distance, puzzled out the features on the face under layers of polyethylene, and frowned. A local kid, teenager he'd seen now and then, he couldn't remember the name. Memory tied the boy to the drug scene.
Dan shook his head. That was another reason that Morgans had walked away from the old partnership — Pratts sold stuff locally. Started back in Prohibition with the smuggled booze. They cut the stuff, sometimes with bad alky, wood alcohol, jacked up the
