"You can see in this night?" she whispered.
"I come from a long line of hunter-talents. Good night vision runs in the family. Whatever happens, keep silent. I'll handle this."
They reached the last step. Fallon drew her through the cold sea of energy and brought her to a halt. The absolute night was disorienting, but when she put out her hand, she realized that they were standing under the staircase.
They listened to the footsteps overhead. The long, sure strides were definitely those of a man, Isabella thought. He was moving like someone who could see in the dark.
The intruder was coming down the hall toward the basement entrance. A moment later she sensed the presence in the open doorway at the top of the staircase. She knew from Fallon's great stillness that he, too, was aware of the stalker.
The intruder started down into the basement.
"Welcome to my little game," the man said. Unwholesome good cheer reverberated through the words. "I've never used local players. Too risky. But when I heard that the silly new real estate agent in town had hired an investigator to clear out the ghosts in the old Zander place, I knew I would have to change the rules for this round."
The hunter paused midway down the steps.
"Then, again, you aren't exactly local, are you? The office of Jones & Jones is over in Scargill Cove. So, I guess I'm not bending the rules all that much after all. Let's see now, you're hiding either under the stairs or behind the armoire. There is no other option in this room. Keeps the scoring simple. I'll try the armoire first."
Isabella sensed the hunter's sudden movement on the staircase. At first she thought that he was rushing down toward the armoire. But in the next instant she heard the jarring thump of running shoes on the floor directly in front of her. The hunter had vaulted over the railing.
"Fooled you," the stalker said happily. "I chose the stairs. Bonus points for me. My name is Nightman, by the way. Think of me as an avatar."
A pair of eyes hot with madness and psi burned in the mist from a distance of less than two yards. The preternatural speed, balance and agility with which the intruder had moved, as well as the intense energy in the atmosphere, told Isabella that the intruder was a true hunter-talent.
"Well, well, well," Nightman said, "I can sense a little energy in the atmosphere. Maybe you two aren't complete frauds, after all, huh?"
"No," Fallon said. "We're the real deal."
"Once in a while I pick up a player who has a little talent," Nightman said. "Adds spice to the game. Tell you what, I'll do you first, Mr. Private Eye. Save the lady for some fun later. After you and I are finished, I'll take her upstairs and let her run. It's so much fun to watch them try to find a door or a window in the darkness."
"Where did you get the clock?" Fallon asked as if it were a matter of idle curiosity.
"Interesting gadget, isn't it?" Nightman chuckled. "I found it in an old tunnel under the floor in this room a few months ago. I was checking out the place to see if it would be a good platform for my games. The innards of the clock were in pretty good shape considering that it had been sitting in a damp cave for quite a while. It was stored in a weird glass box. I cleaned it up and got it working. Imagine my surprise when I discovered what it could do."
"It generates night," Fallon said.
"Sure does." Nightman laughed. "I have to tell you, it makes my little live-action video game very interesting for all concerned."
"What turns off the clock?" Fallon asked, still speaking in tones of academic interest.
"It runs down after about three hours," Nightman said. "Then it has to be rewound. It's motion-sensitive, though. When I'm in the mood for a game, I pick up some junkie whore on the streets of Oakland or San Francisco and bring her here. I set the clock, explain the rules and turn the player loose in the house. We play until I get bored."
"The bodies go under the floorboards here in the basement, right?" Fallon asked.
"There's a tunnel down below. Probably an old smuggling route. This stretch of coastline is riddled with caves."
Isabella could not stand to remain quiet any longer.
"You must have really freaked when you found out that Norma Spaulding had hired Jones & Jones to investigate this place," she said.
The hunter's vicious eyes switched to her. "I'm afraid I'll have to do something about Norma. Can't let her actually sell this place, not after I've put so much creative effort into my game."
"How do you plan to explain the fact that we're both missing?" she asked.
"Nothing to explain." There was a shrug in Nightman's voice. "There won't be any bodies to find. I'll drive your cars to one of the roadside lookouts and leave them there. No one's going to look too hard for a couple of missing psychic detectives from Scargill Cove. Everyone knows the town is populated by crazies and losers."
"What kind of weirdo loser picks a name like Nightman for his avatar?" Isabella demanded. She was pretty sure she heard Fallon heave a small sigh but she ignored him. "Or didn't you know Nightman was what they used to call the guy who cleaned out the cesspools and emptied the privies in eighteenth-century England?"
"That's a lie." Nightman's voice rose in shrill rage. "You're laughing now, but wait until I start using my knife on you."
"New rules tonight," Fallon said.
Isabella felt energy flare fiercely in the unnatural night. She heard a choking gasp and knew that it came from Nightman.
The killer uttered a strangled scream. His eyes got hotter, this time with the energy of terror and comprehension of his impending death.
"No," he wheezed. "I'm the winner. I'm always the winner. You can't do this to me. It's my game."
There was a dull thud as his body hit the floorboards. The hot psi dimmed in his eyes and vanished altogether.
The clock continued to tick into the sharp silence that descended on the basement.
"Fallon?" Isabella whispered.
"Game over," he said. His eyes were still hot.
She felt him move away from under the staircase and realized that he was crouching beside the fallen man.
"Dead?" she asked.
"I couldn't let him live." Fallon's voice was flat on the surface but underneath there was a soul-deep weariness. "He was too strong. A hunter-talent of some kind. If the cops had tried to arrest him, it would have taken him about five minutes to escape and disappear."
"Don't get me wrong, I wasn't complaining. But what do we do now? There's no way we can explain that clock to the police."
"We're not going to explain it to the cops. We'll take it with us. They won't need it to find the bodies and figure out what was going on here."
She heard a rustling sound and realized that he was going through the killer's clothes.
"We'll have to find a way to stop that clock before you drive it back to Scargill Cove," she said. "It's generating too much energy, enough to fill this entire house. You might be able to see where you're going, but the driver of any car that you pass will be temporarily blinded."
"It's just a damn clock," Fallon said. "Got to be a way to stop it. Mrs. Bridewell's curiosities all incorporated traditional mechanical escapements."
She shuddered. "I can't wait to hear more about this Mrs. Bridewell."
"I'll tell you later. The point is that, paranormal aspects aside, the clock's mechanism is very similar to the one in my office."
She sensed his movement when he got to his feet. He crossed through the strange night, a dark shadow silhouetted against the eerie mist. There was a squeak of small hinges and a cranking sound. The ticking stopped abruptly.
The flashlights reignited, spearing beams of light across the basement. At the top of the stairs, the entrance was once again filled with normal shadows.
"That worked," Isabella said.
"Which means this really is one of her infernal devices, not some new variation," Fallon said. "That's the good news."
"Why is it good news?"
"I wasn't looking forward to huntin
g down a modern-day inventor who had decided to create a high-tech version of some of Bridewell's gadgets. The originals are bad enough. The question now is, how did the clock get into this house? But we'll deal with that later."
He aimed his flashlight at the body on the floor. Isabella looked at the crumpled figure of Nightman. The killer's face was set in a death mask of stark horror. He looked to be in his midthirties, sandy-haired and lithe in build. He was dressed in dark green work pants and a matching shirt. The logo on the pocket of the shirt spelled out the name of a construction firm based in Willow Creek.
She looked away. "He told us he found the clock in a cave beneath this basement."
Fallon swept the light across the floorboards. "Before we call the cops, I want to make sure the evidence is there."
She speared her flashlight at the section of the flooring that was in the heart of the whirlpool of energy. "Try that section."
He walked to the circle of light created by her flashlight, crouched and began probing with his gloved fingers.
"Here we go," he said. "A trapdoor."
She went toward him, watching as he opened a wide, square section of the flooring. They aimed their flashlights into the darkness below. A metal ladder disappeared into the depths. Isabella leaned forward slightly, trying to get a better view of the object near the foot of the ladder.
"What's that?" she asked.
"Looks like a body bag," Fallon said.
Isabella straightened quickly. "Norma Spaulding is never going to sell this house now."
"Real estate has always been a tough market in this part of California." Fallon reached for his phone.
Isabella cleared her throat. "One thing before you call the cops."
"Don't worry, you won't be here when they arrive. You're leaving now."
"Right, thanks." She exhaled slowly. "But there's a complication. Norma knows that I was the one who promised to check out the house for ghosts."
"As far as everyone involved is concerned, including Norma Spaulding, I got an intuitive flash of impending disaster and decided that I would handle the Zander house case personally. I sent you back to the office before I found the bodies. Now go. Get out of here."
"Right," she repeated. She turned and hurried up the stairs. When she reached the doorway, she paused and looked back at him.
"An intuitive flash of impending disaster?" she said.
"I'm supposed to be psychic, remember?"
"Of course."
"Where did you pick up that factoid about the meaning of the word nightman?"
"I had what you might call an eclectic education."
"Homeschooled?"
"Yes. Plus, I read a lot."
"When this is over, maybe it's time you told me who or what you're hiding from," Fallon said quietly.
"I should have known better than to take a job as an assistant to a psychic detective."
4
We still don't have any leads, Mr. Lucan," Julian Garrett said. "Turned over every stone we could find in Phoenix. It's like she never existed except during the short time she worked at that department store."
"It's been damn near a month," Max Lucan said.
"I'm aware of that, sir."
Max got up from his desk and went to stand at the window of his office. Absently he touched the black granite pedestal that stood nearby. The pedestal held the bronze statue of a seated cat. The creature had a gold ring in one ear.
The statue was Egyptian. Like the other antiquities displayed in the room, it was authentic. It had been created sometime around 600 B.C. But it was not the age of the bronze that intrigued Max. It was the power that the artist had somehow infused into the metal. After all these centuries, the energy in the figure still whispered to him.
"How could a little finder-talent drop off the radar so easily?" he asked.
"Beats the hell out of me," Julian said.
"Rawlins and Burley still haven't recovered their memories?"
"No, sir, and I think we should assume they never will. Evidently the finder-talent put them into some sort of fugue state. They remember locating her in that mall store, but the next thing either of them remembers is waking up in front of a restaurant three miles away."
Max felt the hair on the back of his neck stir. He knew it was because he was missing some important pieces of the puzzle. "Interesting that Rawlins and Burley didn't get run down by a car, walking blind like that through Phoenix traffic at night."
"They can't account for that, either," Julian said. "They had to cross a lot of streets in the process of getting as far as the restaurant. Damn lucky, I guess."
"I think it's more likely there are a few things we don't know about the finder-talent," Max said. He could hardly blame her. He kept his own unique ability secret, too. As far as most people were concerned, he was just very, very good at tracing stolen antiquities and providing security for museum collections. "I wonder what else she kept from us while she was here."
"We need to find her, sir."
"I'm aware of that," Max said.
He watched the sunlight flash on the yachts in the harbor. Lucan Protection Services occupied two floors of a gleaming new office building in one of the most exclusive enclaves on California's Gold Coast. Not that his clients were ever impressed with the view or the refined sophistication of the decor of his company's headquarters. The majority of the collectors who commissioned the services of his firm were wealthy and well traveled. They frequently owned handfuls of residences in locales ranging from the Caribbean to New York to Paris. It took more than a view and expensive interior design to impress them. Nevertheless, Max thought, you could not run a business like Lucan out of a storefront in a strip mall. Appearances mattered in the world in which he operated.
I'm missing something here.
"Tell me again what went wrong in Phoenix?" he said.
Julian ran through the details again but there was nothing new.
"Obviously she made my men when they found her in that department store," he concluded. "From what they could piece together later, she escaped through the emergency stairwell. Her car was gone from the mall garage. It turned up later in a parking lot outside a hospital emergency room. All indications are that she never did return to the motel where she was staying."
"In other words, she went to work that night ready to run if necessary."
"Yes, sir."
"Just like she ran from Lucan when we found the files on her computer."
"Yes, sir."
"She's damn good at getting lost." Max pondered that for a moment. "Any news on Caitlin Phillips?"
"No, sir. She's still missing, too," Julian said. "We need to assume that she's dead."
Max tightened his grip on the edge of the granite pedestal. "Someone has been dealing para-weapons out of Department A for nearly a year, and now two women have vanished. The broker handling the arms deals was shot to death, a dangerous artifact has gone missing and I've got a black-ops agency breathing down my neck. This is not good for Lucan's corporate image, Garrett."
"I understand, sir. Believe me, I'm working the case night and day."
Max turned around to face him. "No one gets away with using the resources of my company to deal black market weapons."
"Yes, sir."
"Find the women and find that damn artifact."
5
There was a take-out container sitting on top of the garbage can in the alley behind the Sunshine. Walker picked it up and was pleased to note that the fried chicken, mashed potatoes and peas inside were still warm. It was his lucky night.
Just like last night, he thought. He had a vague recollection of having gotten lucky the night before that, as well, but his memory was somewhat unreliable when it came to the unimportant stuff. Sometimes it took everything he had to stay focused on his mission.
He hunkered down, bracing his back against the wooden wall of the cafe, and methodically consumed the chicken dinner. Really, it was a shame the way people
threw away good food. All the starving kids in the world and yet folks in the Cove tossed out perfectly edible stuff like chicken and mashed potatoes and peas every night. Same deal with muffins and coffee in the mornings. Damn shame.
He finished the meal and got to his feet. He went back to the garbage can, lifted the lid and deposited the empty take-out container inside.
Adjusting the hood of the long, heavy coat to shield his face from the rain, he resumed his patrol. The pressure in his head had been building again lately. That was not good. It meant something bad was going to happen.
He had discovered the warm, waterproof coat and the boots sitting on top of another trash container in the Cove. He was pretty sure that particular can was located in the alley behind the PI's office.
The PI was important to Scargill Cove, but Walker wasn't sure why, not yet, at any rate. He knew what he knew and that was enough. He had gotten the same whispery sense of certainty again when Isabella Valdez arrived in town. He had watched her walk into the Cove that night and known that she belonged there. Just like Jones.
Walker walked behind the row of darkened shops and turned right at the corner. The familiar route took him past the Scar. It was early, not quite seven o'clock. The tavern was still busy. He could hear the voices of the regulars inside. Elvis music drifted out into the night. He paid no attention. Everything was normal in this sector. His job was to keep an eye out for things that were wrong or out of place.
There had already been a couple of very disturbing developments today. Several hours ago Isabella had driven out of town. Jones had followed not long after. Walker had been very relieved when Isabella had returned, but it alarmed him that Jones had not yet come back to town.
He looked in the windows of the bookshop. It had closed recently following the death of the proprietor, a guy named Fitch. The book-seller had keeled over one day down in the basement. Heart attack, the authorities said. But Walker had known from the start that Fitch was bad news, an outsider who did not belong in the Cove. No loss.
He walked some more and checked out the windows of Isabella's apartment above Toomey's Treasures. The shades were closed but the lights were on. She was safe inside for the night. That was good. That was the way it should be.