After Dark (11 page)

S
HORTLY AFTER FIVE
that afternoon, Emmett eased the Slider into a loading zone on the street a short distance from the entrance to Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors. He got out, leaned against the fender, and folded his arms. Waiting for Lydia.

After the small funeral that morning he had dropped her off at Shrimpton's and told her that he would pick her up after work. He had spent the rest of the day plotting a new strategy for finding Quinn. At least that's what he had told himself he was doing.

He had been reasonably successful in focusing his attention on the mess he had come to Cadence to resolve. The problem was that Lydia was part of that mess, and every time he thought about her things got a lot messier.

Her words from last night reverberated dissonantly in his brain, disrupting the rest of his orderly thoughts.
Every type of psi talent produces certain eccentrici
ties…. Don't worry. I'm sure you'll be back to normal in the morning
.

Damn. Did she really think the passion that had resonated between them was the result of a peculiar para-rez eccentricity that affected only ghost-hunters?

He forced his mind away from that line of thought and studied the outrageous, over-the-top imitation Dead City facade of the structure that housed Shrimpton's. In his opinion, the building itself, with its garish domes, phony spires, and fake arches, qualified as a horror, architecturally speaking. It was supposed to be a replica of a ruin, but the only thing vaguely authentic about it was the green paint on the walls. It lacked the characteristic grace and Harmonic proportions of the aboveground Dead City structures.

As he watched, Lydia walked out through the front gate, spotted the Slider, and hurried toward him.

How the hell had she ended up working in a place like this? he wondered. Then he reflected on what he knew of her personal history. He thought about how and why she had formed a bond with a character like Chester Brady and knew he had already answered his own question. She was alone in the world. When disaster had struck six months ago, she'd had no family and very few resources to cushion the fall.

Ryan Kelso had certainly not rushed to her aid. Emmett found that interesting. He knew from the hastily assembled background report his people had prepared that Lydia and Kelso had worked on the same team together for nearly a year. They had coauthored several papers on Harmonic excavations. Apparently after the Lost Weekend, Kelso had concluded that she would be of no further professional use to him. What was it Martinez had said?
Priorities.

Sonofabitch
.

“Something wrong, Emmett?” Lydia came to a halt in front of him, frowning in concern. “Did you get a ticket for parking in a loading zone?”

“No.” He shook off the ambient hostility that he felt toward Kelso, straightened, and opened the door for her. “My record as an upstanding pillar of the community is still clean.”

He closed the door behind her and went around to the other side of the Slider. She looked better than she had that morning, he decided. The worrisome shadows had retreated from her eyes. He had the feeling that they were still there, somewhere, but the familiar look of determination had returned. Definitely a fighter.

“How did things go at work?” he asked as he pulled away from the curb.

“Quiet.” She made a face. “Shrimp is whining because the little flurry of business we had following Chester's murder has faded. I almost slugged him. Probably would have if Melanie hadn't stopped me.”

“Good way to lose a job.”

“I know.” She fell silent for a while. “I've been thinking about Chester all day.”

“What about him?”

“I want his killer found, Emmett.”

“Martinez is doing her best.”

“Martinez as much as admitted that she's got nothing. I've been thinking about hiring a private detective. How much do you think it would cost?”

“A lot more than you can afford,” he said gently.

“We've got other problems at the moment, Lydia. Stay focused.”

“Yeah. Focused. Maybe it's all connected, Emmett. Maybe when we find your nephew and your cabinet we'll find Chester's killer.”

“Maybe,” he said cautiously.

“I'd like that.” She flexed her hand. “I'd really like that.”

He did not want her to start obsessing on that aspect of the case, he thought. According to the reports he had read, she was inclined to take risks in pursuit of a goal.

“With luck I'll get some information out of Wyatt tonight that may give us a lead,” he said.

Her head came around very quickly. “Are you nervous about the dinner with Mercer Wyatt?”

“No. But I'm not exactly looking forward to it.”

“I don't blame you. I can think of a thousand other things I'd rather do, including go to the dentist.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Mercer Wyatt is very powerful in this town. That means he's dangerous.”

“All of the heads of the Guilds wield a lot of economic and political influence in their cities.”

“Wyatt runs the Cadence Guild as if it were a private fiefdom. Everyone knows it. He's grown enormously wealthy off Guild income. Politicians jump through hoops when he suggests that they do so.”

“So he's a man with a lot of clout. Every community has its movers and shakers.” He was in no mood for this. “No offense, Lydia, but your anti-hunter paranoia is showing.”

Her mouth tightened in an annoyed line. For a couple of seconds he thought she was going to tell him that he was free to fire her after all.

Instead, she said, “I've changed my mind. I'm going with you.”

He was so surprised that he nearly missed the turn into the Dead City View Apartments parking lot.

“Not necessary,” he said brusquely.

“No, it's okay. You're my client, after all. And this is a sort of business dinner, isn't it?”

He thought about just how complicated this dinner was going to be. “Sort of.”

He slid his vehicle into a slot beside an aging Float, de-rezzed the engine and opened the door. Lydia got out on her side. Together they walked toward the security door.

Lydia stopped and stared in astonishment. “It's fixed.”

“Zane and I took care of it today while you were at work,” Emmett explained. “Unfortunately, I don't know much about elevator repair.” He de-rezzed the lock.

“Hey, Lydia. Mr. London.” Zane waved to them from the third-floor landing.

“Hi, Zane. Nice job on the security gate.”

“Mr. London helped,” Zane said proudly. “Guess what?”

“What?” she asked.

“A letter came for you. A guy from Resonance Relay Messenger Service brought it. He wanted someone to sign for it, so I did.”

“Wow.” She gave him a wry grin. “Probably my invitation to the Restoration Ball. I've been wondering what happened to it. Dang, I just hope it isn't too late for me to get a decent ball gown. The good ones are probably all gone by now.”

Zane guffawed. “No, no, this is for real. I'll get it.” He whirled and ran off down the hall.

Emmett looked at Lydia as they started up the stairwell. “Restoration Ball?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Big society shindig at the end of the year. Seventy-five years ago it started out as part of the annual festivities staged to celebrate the end of the Era of Discord, but somewhere along the way it became
the
social event here in Cadence. Everyone who matters in local politics and business will be there.”

He nodded. “Got it. Do you usually attend?”

She gave him an amused look. “Don't be ridiculous. I was just joking. Of course I don't go to the Restoration Ball. What do I look like? Ameberella? Fairy godmothers don't hang out in this neighborhood after dark.”

Zane popped into the stairwell waving a brown envelope, saving Emmett from having to respond to what he was pretty sure was one of those awkward rhetorical questions.

“Who's it from?” Lydia asked.

“Don't know.” Zane handed it to her. “The return address is one of those box numbers they use at those private mail service operations.”

Lydia eyed him as she took the envelope. “Already checked, did you?”

“Sure. We don't get a lot of deliveries from outfits like Resonance Relay. I think the guy was a little nervous about being in this neighborhood. That's why he made me sign for it. He didn't want to have to make a return trip.”

“Wimp.” Lydia tore open the envelope. A key fell out. It clattered on the step.

“I'll get it.” Emmett scooped up the amber-and-steel key.

“Thanks.” She opened the single-page letter that she had withdrawn from the envelope. The amusement evaporated from her eyes. “My God, it's from Chester.”

“Brady?” Emmett closed his fingers around the key. “When was it written?”

She scanned the note. “His writing is terrible. I don't see a date. Oh, yes, here it is. Last Monday.”

Emmett calculated quickly. “The day before he was killed. Wonder why you didn't get it until today?”

Lydia scanned the note quickly. “He says he left instructions for it to be delivered after his funeral.”

Emmett propped one shoulder against the stairwell wall. “Let's hear what he has to say.”

Lydia took a breath and started to read the note aloud.

Lydia stopped reading suddenly. There was a short pause during which Emmett watched her dig out the handkerchief he had given her at the funeral. Zane looked alarmed when she brushed away the fresh tears. He opened his mouth to say something but subsided when Emmett caught his attention and shook his head.

After a while Lydia stuffed the handkerchief back into her purse and took the key from Emmett.

“Well,” she said, “this should be interesting. I wonder what kind of assets Chester would keep in a retirement plan?”

He glanced at his watch. “Too late to find out tonight. The banks are closed.”

“Not the Bank of Rose,” she assured him. “It never closes.”

T
HE SURREAL LOUNGE
was everything one would have expected in a place that had served as Chester Brady's home away from home, Emmett decided an hour and a half later. The atmosphere reeked of second-rate liquor, synch-smoke, and rancid cooking grease. The place was drenched in the perpetual gloom that was the quintessential hallmark of cheap nightclubs.

It was nearly seven o'clock. The regulars had already begun to settle in for the evening. The shabby booths were populated with men whose hair gleamed from too much pomade and women whose dresses fit too snugly. There was a small stage. A sign announced that a musical group calling itself the Earth Tones was scheduled to play at nine. In the meantime, some surprisingly good rez-jazz emanated from a pair of speakers.

Emmett thought about the photo of Lydia sharing a drink with Chester Brady in one of the red vinyl booths.

“Come here a lot?” he asked dryly.

“Couple of times a month for the past two years,” she said quite seriously. “The music's good.”

“Two years?”

“I told you, that was how long I knew Chester.”

“Ah.”

He adroitly eased both of them out of the path of a waitress. The woman carried a tray laden with bottles of White Noise beer and a bowl filled with bite-size chunks of something that had been deep-fried beyond recognition.

“Which one is Rose?” Emmett asked Lydia.

“Behind the bar.” She led the way through the crowded room with the ease of someone who knew her way around.

Emmett watched her as she moved ahead of him. She made an incongruous picture here in this sordid setting. Her red hair glowed like a cheerful bonfire in the sickly yellow gleam of the table lamps. She had dressed for the dinner with Mercer Wyatt as though she were going to meet with her lawyer or banker. All business in her trim, dark-brown business suit and demure pumps, she looked wildly out of place. But the waitress gave her a friendly nod. Lydia returned the gesture.

“Hi, Becky.”

She came to a halt at the far end of the bar. Emmett stopped beside her.

“That's Rose,” she said, indicating the huge man with the shaved head pouring whiskey at the other end.

Emmett contemplated the thick neck, mountainous shoulders, and tattoos on biceps that bulged beneath the sleeves of a lime-green T-shirt.

“By any other name,” he muttered.

“Rose is really very sweet,” Lydia confided.

“I'll bet.”

“He's a musical-harmonic para-rez,” she said. “Trained as a classical musician. But he prefers rez-jazz.”

That explained the excellent sound track playing in the background, Emmett thought. Rose knew music.

“Hey, there, Lydia.” The big man's face lit up when he spotted her at the end of the bar. “Glad you could drop by. Thought maybe we wouldn't see much of you what with Chester gone and all.”

Emmett watched Rose glide toward them. The bar tender moved in a soft, easy, coordinated way that belied his size.

“Hi, Rose.” Lydia stood on tiptoe and leaned across the bar to brush her lips lightly against Rose's cheek. “Hard to believe Chester's gone, isn't it?”

“To tell you the truth, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did.” Rose folded his big arms on the bar. “In the course of his long and varied career, Brady managed to piss off just about everyone who knew him.” Rose looked at Emmett. “Who's your friend?”

Emmett put out his hand. “Emmett London. I'm a client of Lydia's.”

“Client, huh?”

Rose shook hands firmly but politely, making no attempt to demonstrate his strength with a crushing grip. Emmett concluded that Rose was a man who was comfortable with himself and his size. He thought he understood why Lydia liked him.

“We're on our way to a business dinner,” Lydia said.

“No kidding.” Rose surveyed her from head to toe. “No offense, Lyd, but brown is not your color.”

“I'll remember that next time I go shopping. Rose, we don't have a lot of time. I've got the key to Chester's locker. Mind if I pick up his things?”

“Nope. He once told me you'd be by for them if anything ever happened to him.” Rose glanced at the waitress. “Keep an eye on things, Becky. I'll be right back.”

Becky raised a hand to indicate she'd heard him.

“This way to the Bank of Rose,” Rose said to Lydia.

He unlocked a door behind the bar and led the way into a dark hall. Lydia followed. Emmett trailed after her.

The door was surprisingly heavy. It closed behind the trio with a solid thud. Mag-steel, Emmett thought. It would take a blowtorch or a small bomb to get through it. The walls of the hallway were lined with the same material.

Rose rezzed a switch. The cold light of a fluo-rez tube in the ceiling illuminated the hallway, revealing two rows of mag-steel lockers. All of them were secured with heavy mag-rez locks.

“Looks like a bank vault,” Emmett said.

“With twenty-four-hour security.” The fluo-rez light gleamed on Rose's bald head as he walked down the aisle between the lockers. “To get in here, you got to get past me or my partner. The Surreal Lounge is open day and night, so there's never a time when there's no one behind the bar. Proud to say the Bank of Rose has never been robbed.”

“Or audited or insured or taxed or licensed, either, I'll bet,” Emmett concluded.

Rose came to a halt in front of a locker. “Nope. We here at the Bank of Rose don't have much to do with the various regulatory authorities.”

“Rose caters to a rather select clientele,” Lydia murmured as she reached into her shoulder bag.

“We rent out lockers to folks who prefer not to patronize what you'd call a more traditional bank,” Rose explained.

“Probably because most of 'em would get arrested on sight if they went through the front door of a real bank.” Lydia held out the key that had come in the brown envelope. “Any idea what Chester kept here?”

“No.” Rose took the key from her. “Bank of Rose policy is not to ask any awkward or embarrassing questions. So long as you pay your rent on time, you're a valued customer.”

The lock clicked as the key briefly disrupted the pattern of its internal resonance. Rose opened the door. Lydia stepped forward to peer into the small locker.

“Looks like an old duffel bag,” she said. She started to reach for it.

“I'll get it,” Emmett said.

She got out of his way so that he could haul the small, battered canvas bag out of the locker. It was not very heavy.

Lydia looked at the old bag. “I wonder why he wanted me to get this.”

“Not like he had anyone else to leave his stuff to.” Rose closed the locker door. “You were the closest thing to a friend that old Chester had. He always told me that the two of you had a lot in common.”

 

Lydia set the duffel bag in front of her on the floor of the Slider. She unzipped it while Emmett got in behind the wheel and rezzed the engine. In the reflected glow of the dashboard she could see a bulging envelope and a small paper sack.

“Maybe you're about to become the lucky owner of a winning lottery ticket,” Emmett said.

“I won't hold my breath.” Lydia removed the envelope. “Chester was not what anyone would call lucky.”

She broke the seal on the envelope and took out the handful of yellowed papers inside. She glanced at the first one. The tide of gloom that had ebbed and flowed around her all day rose once more, swamped her again for a moment.

“What are they?” Emmett asked.

“Chester's applications for membership in the Society of Para-archaeologists. And the rejections the Society sent back to him.” She shook her head, amazed. “He always talked about how much he disdained the Society. But according to these, he applied for membership every year for twenty years.”

“And got rejected every year?”

“Uh-huh. Poor Chester. Deep down, he must have desperately wanted to become legitimate.”

“I doubt if those papers constitute his retirement plan.”

“Probably not.”

She put the papers back into the envelope and reached into the duffel for the paper sack. She froze the instant she touched it. A thrill of awareness sang through her nerves. Psi energy.

“Oh, my,” she whispered.

Emmett glanced at her sharply. “What is it?”

“Something old.” Very gently she put the paper sack on her lap. “Something very, very old.”

“Harmonic artifact?”

“Yes.” There was no mistaking the resonance. She was a para-archaeologist, after all. One of the best. “But there's something different. I could swear I'm picking up a trace of trap energy. But that's impossible. No traps have ever been found outside the Dead Cities. No way to anchor them.”

“Never say never when it comes to the ancient Harmonics. There's still one hell of a lot that we don't know about them. Be careful, Lydia.”

“Hey, I'm the expert here, remember?”

“I remember,” he said. “Be careful anyway.”

“I'll bet you were a real pain to work with when you ghost-hunted professionally.”

“It was mentioned from time to time,” he agreed. “On the plus side, I never lost a single para-archaeologist.”

She ignored him, turning the paper sack cautiously in her hands. Then she opened it very carefully and looked inside. In the dim light she could just barely make out a dark, rounded object about the size of her two hands clasped together.

“There's something strange about the resonance,” she said. “It's definitely genuine. Very, very old. But the vibrations are different from anything else I've ever sensed from artifacts this old.”

“Still catching traces of trap energy?”

“I'm not sure. There's too much else going on here. It feels almost like—” She broke off abruptly. It was never good policy to make a fool of oneself in front of the client.

“Like what?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.” Lydia held the paper sack cradled in both hands and tried to get a grip on her runaway imagination. Impossible, she thought. It couldn't be.

But what if?

Her euphoria evaporated as another
what if
occurred to her. What if she really had lost her para-rez pitch, just as Ryan and the others assumed? What if the disaster six months ago was only now producing a delayed reaction? What if she was wrong?

“Lydia? You okay?”

“Yes.”

“What's inside the sack?”

Emmett's calm voice brought her out of the downward spiral. She stared through the window of the Slider and saw that they had left the busy city streets behind. They were climbing one of the hills above town, a neighborhood of exclusive estates. Massive gates guarded the long drives that led to the mansions.

“Lydia? Are you going to tell me what's inside the sack?”

“Yes.” There was only one way to find out if she held something truly incredible in her hands or if she should check into a nice, quiet para-psych ward first thing tomorrow morning.

Deep breaths.

She took one, steeled herself, and reached into the sack. Another, much stronger shock of tingling excitement went through her when she actually touched the warm, smooth surface.

“It feels like a bottle,” she whispered.

Emmett did not take his eyes off the winding road. “What about the trap energy you said you felt?”

“Stop worrying. I know what I'm doing.”

He said nothing, but he pulled the Slider over to the side of the road and de-rezzed the engine. He turned in the seat to watch intently as she slowly removed the artifact from the paper sack.

She saw at once that she had been right about the bottle shape.

“What the hell is it?” Emmett asked softly.

“An unguent jar, I think.” She studied it more closely, trying to focus on the shimmering surface. “But not like any that I've ever seen.”

She stared at the thing she held. In the dim backwash of illumination provided by the dashboard the sealed jar seemed to glow with an inner light of its own. Colors shifted, stirred, and swirled on the surface. She saw shades of reds and golds that had no name. They flowed into strange greens and blues before she could describe them.

She swallowed hard. “Emmett? Please tell me I'm not seeing things. I really don't want to have to go back into therapy.”

He gazed fixedly at the jar. “Hell, that's not—It can't be. We need better light.”

He reached into the console between the seats and removed a small flashlight. He rezzed it and aimed the beam at the ancient jar.

For a long moment they both just sat and stared at the artifact. In the bright light of the flash, the colors on the surface of the bottle leaped into full, pulsing life. A rest less sea of light and darkness surged around the widest portion of the elegantly shaped jar. Each hue seemed to be animated by its own inner energy source. Vast depths of dazzling light and color appeared and disappeared.

“Dreamstone,” Emmett said in a voice that held no inflection at all.

“Impossible,” Lydia said again.

“You know as well as I do that there's nothing else it could be.” He took the jar from her and turned it slightly so that the flashlight beam played across its surface. “Pure worked dreamstone. Damn. Talk about a retirement plan.”

Lydia shook her head slowly, unable to believe her eyes or her para-rez senses.

Dreamstone was well named. Small deposits of it were occasionally found, usually embedded in clear quartz in the vicinity of dead volcanoes. Not only was it extremely rare but it had thus far defied any attempt to extract it from the protective quartz. It shattered at the slightest touch, simultaneously appearing to melt and fracture into microscopic shards.

No technology yet devised by the human population on Harmony had been able to handle it without destroying it. For prospectors and mining companies, it was indeed the stuff of dreams. Beautiful to look at when it was found, it evaporated the instant you reached out to touch it.