Harmony 03 After Glow (2 page)

Lydia knew only too well that Emmett London was not into amber accessories because they were fashionable. He was a very powerful dissonance-energy para-resonator—a ghost-hunter. He had the psychic talent and the training required to neutralize the dangerous, flaring balls of chaotic dissonance energy, the so-called
ghosts,
that drifted at random through the endless underground corridors of the alien ruins.

Ghost-hunters were a necessary part of any excavation team. They were, in essence, professional bodyguards who were hired from their Guilds to protect archaeologists, researchers, and others who explored and excavated the ancient catacombs beneath the
Dead
City.

Until she had met Emmett last month, she had held an extremely low opinion of hunters in general. She considered most dissonance-energy para-rezes to be little better than high-end mobsters. There was a hunters’ Guild in every major city on Harmony and as far as she was concerned they were merely legalized criminal organizations run by ruthless bosses.

Emmett was the mysterious ex-boss of the Resonance City Guild. Shortly after his arrival here in Cadence last month, rumors had begun to circulate in the tabloids to the effect that he was the handpicked successor of the current boss of the Cadence City Guild, Mercer Wyatt.

Emmett denied any interest in assuming the leadership of the local Guild, but Lydia was not so sure he could avoid the job—not if Wyatt put pressure on him. There were a lot of old sayings about the hunters and the Guilds, one of which was,
once a Guild man, always a Guild man.
Granted, the conventional wisdom overlooked the fact that there were some female hunters but that was beside the point.

In the past few weeks she had tried very hard not to think about the fact that she was sleeping with the man Mercer Wyatt had chosen to take over as the boss of the Cadence Guild.

She yanked open the door and threw herself into Emmett’s arms.

“You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” she said into his shirt. “How did you find me?”

“I called your office. Melanie told me you were here.” He put an arm around her shoulders and glanced back to check the grimy hallway. Satisfied, he moved both of them into the apartment and closed the door. “What the hell are you doing in this part of town?”

“Maltby, the man who lives here, said he wanted to see me. When I arrived I found him lying on the floor of his study.” She took a deep breath. “He’s sort of dead.”

Emmett looked pained. “Not another one.”

She frowned. “This isn’t like the last time. It looks like Maltby took an overdose of Chartreuse. I called for an ambulance.” She sighed. “Not that it will do any good.”

“Where is he?”

The stoic resignation in his voice annoyed her. “You don’t have to act as if I make a habit of finding dead bodies.” She waved a hand toward the study. “He’s in the room down that hall.”

Emmett walked to the doorway of the study. She trailed after him, clutching her purse.

“This is not good,” Emmett said.

“Yes, well, it’s a lot worse for Maltby.”

“That’s not what I meant. Some complications have come up. The last thing we need right now is a dead body.”

He disappeared into the study.

Alarmed, she hurried to the doorway. Emmett was standing over Maltby’s remains, surveying the small space with a considering expression.

“What complications?” she asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to see you, but what are you doing here? When did you get home from the camping trip with Zane and his buddies?”

It was not at all surprising that Emmett looked a little rough around the edges today, she thought. Her young neighbor, Zane Hoyt, and his pals were all budding dissonance-energy para-resonators from a part of town where good male role models were decidedly scarce. The boys in the neighborhood were growing up fast with more psi power than any of them knew how to handle. It was a recipe for disaster. They desperately needed guidance and a firm hand.

The Guild-sponsored Hunter-Scout troops were a useful community resource for boys in Cadence but there had been none in the section of the city where
Lydia and Zane lived. Emmett had taken care of the problem a couple of weeks ago when he had quietly prodded the Guild into establishing a troop in the neighborhood. He had even gone so far as to take an active interest in the newly formed group.

All of the boys, Zane included, idolized Emmett. He was, after all, one of the most powerful para-rezes in the city. Young males,
Lydia had discovered, were very impressed with raw power.

“Got in around three o’clock this morning,” Emmett said. “Dropped the boys off at their homes and went to my place to crash. Didn’t want to wake you up. The phone rang just as I was walking in the door.” Absently he rubbed his jaw. “I haven’t been to bed yet.”

Sirens wailed in the distance. About time,
Lydia thought.

“Who called you?” she asked. “Why didn’t you get to bed?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll explain later.” He eyed her closely. “Meanwhile, please tell me this dead guy doesn’t have anything to do with your new consulting job?”

“Oh, no, things are going great with the Hepscott project,” she said, relieved to be able to give a positive, upbeat answer for once. She cast an uneasy glance at Maltby. “This was a, uh, private matter.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.” Emmett’s expression hardened a little more. “This is connected to those questions you’ve been asking along Ruin Row for the past couple of weeks, isn’t it? The ones about your so-called Lost Weekend?”

She should have known that he was aware of the discreet inquiries she had begun making here in the Old Quarter. Emmett was an ex-Guild boss. He had connections.

“Maltby called me,” she said briskly. “I didn’t call him.”

“You just can’t let it go, can you? You’re determined to prove that you were the victim of some kind of ghost-hunter conspiracy. You won’t accept that what happened to you was a really bad accident.”

She narrowed her eyes. “This is precisely why I didn’t tell you I was doing some investigating on my own. I knew I’d get a lot of rez-static.”

“And this is
why
you would have gotten the static from me.” He pointed at the body. “Things like this happen in this part of town. At the very least, you should have called me before you came to ask your questions.”

“I knew that you would be getting back very late last night. I assumed you’d be sleeping late this morning.”

“Would you have called to invite me along if you had figured I’d be up?”

She was starting to feel cornered. “I know my way around the Old Quarter, Emmett. I’ve lived here all my life. I don’t need an escort.”

“Maybe not in the district where you live, but that’s over on the other side of the Quarter. In this neighborhood, you need an escort.”

She tightened her grip on the strap of the purse. “You know, this really isn’t the time for a lecture on personal safety.”

“On my way to this flophouse I passed three drug dealers who offered to score me some high-grade Chartreuse, a couple of hookers, a guy who tried to sell me a hot rez-screen, and one of those smiling idiots in green bathrobes who promised to reveal the secrets of true bliss if I would buy a book. And that was just in the half block between here and where I parked the Slider. I’ll be lucky if the car’s still there when I get back to it.”

“I’m sure you’ll find the Slider right where you left it. No one would dare touch it. Everyone knows who you are, now, Emmett, thanks to that stupid article in the
Cadence Tattler
last week.”

Much to Emmett’s disgust, the popular supermarket tabloid had featured a photo of him on the front page. The picture had been accompanied by some breathless prose questioning the real reason for his presence in Cadence. The headline,
Next Guild Boss?
had said it all.

Emmett fit his hands to his hips. “You scare the living daylights out of me,
Lydia.”

“Nah. You’re a ghost-hunter. Nothing scares you.”

She spoke lightly but deep down she was relieved that he was backing off the argument. They were only a few short weeks into this very complicated relationship and things were unsettled enough as it was. They did not need a major confrontation.

They listened to the sirens halt abruptly outside in the lane.

Emmett raised his brows. “Mind if I ask what you plan to tell the cops?”

She winced. “I’m hoping they won’t ask too many questions.”

“This is the second time in a month that you’ve reported a dead body. Got a hunch there are going to be a few questions.”

Someone pounded on the door of the apartment.

“I’ll go let them in,”
Lydia said. She turned and went down the hall.

When she opened the front door of the apartment she found two medics, a uniformed police officer, and an all-too-familiar face crowded together in the dark hall.

“Hello, Miss Smith,” Detective Alice Martinez said. “You do turn up in some interesting places.” She switched her tough cop’s gaze to a point beyond
Lydia’s left shoulder. “So do you,
London. What is it? The two of you can’t think of anything more romantic to do on a date than find dead bodies?”

One of the medics looked at Emmett. “Where’s the dead guy?”

“Down that hallway,” Emmett said.

The two medics and the officer headed for the study.

Lydia did not like the dark cloud she sensed gathering over her head. “What are you doing here, Detective?” she asked warily. “This isn’t a homicide.”

Alice did not take her attention off Emmett. “Actually, I was looking for you, Mr. London. I called Miss Smith’s office to see if she knew where you were and was told that both of you were probably at this address. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Miss Smith had just phoned in a report about a dead man.”

“Detective.” Emmett inclined his head politely.

Lydia got the impression he was not surprised to see Alice Martinez. The cloud overhead got darker and more ominous. There would be rain any minute.

“Why do you want to talk to Emmett?” she asked sharply.

“I need to ask him a few questions,”
Alice said. “Just a formality.”

“What?”
Lydia was outraged. “You can’t be serious. Surely you don’t think that Emmett had anything to do with Professor Maltby’s death? I’m the one who found the body. Emmett is not involved in this. He just happened to be here when you arrived.”

Alice and Emmett both looked at her.
Lydia got a nasty feeling that she had overreacted. Not the smart thing to do around a cop, she told herself.

“I hadn’t planned to talk to Mr. London about Maltby’s death,”
Alice said calmly. “Although, I may have to revisit that decision. But we’ll let that go for now. The reason I tracked him down this morning was to ask him some questions concerning another problem that I’m handling at the moment.”

“Problem?”
Lydia glanced from
Alice’s face to Emmett’s and then back again. A fresh wave of dread ruffled her nerve endings. “What problem? What is going on here?”

“Someone tried to kill Mercer Wyatt early this morning,” Emmett said quietly.

“Whoever it was nearly succeeded,”
Alice added. “Wyatt is in intensive care at
Cadence
Memorial
Hospital under an armed guard. The doctors finished operating a couple of hours ago. His condition is listed as critical.”

Lydia relaxed slightly. “I see. Well, that’s unfortunate but I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised. Wyatt is a Guild boss, after all. No one rises to that position without making enemies. Guild politics are notoriously messy. At least they are here in Cadence.”

“True,”
Alice agreed in a very neutral tone of voice.

Lydia frowned. “So, why do you want to question Emmett?”

“Because the word on the street is that he’s the new acting head of the Cadence Guild.”
Alice’s smile was ice cold. “The way I heard it, he will take over permanently if Wyatt doesn’t make it out of intensive care.”

H
E HAD KNOWN
this would not be easy.

Three hours later Emmett watched
Lydia de-rez the lock on the front door of her apartment. She had not said a word during the drive home following the
formalities
at Detective Martinez’s office. The continuing silence was a bad sign.
Lydia was normally never loathe to let him know exactly what she was thinking.

It was as though she was suffering some form of shock but he was not certain how to deal with it. For starters, he was not sure what had upset her the most, finding Maltby’s body or the news that the man whose bed she was sharing on a fairly frequent basis was the temporary chief of the Cadence Guild.

He had the unpleasant feeling that it was the second piece of news that had made her go tense and silent.

Lydia was convinced that she had good reason not to trust ghost-hunters and she made no secret of her negative opinion of the Guild. That she was involved in an affair with him did not mean she had changed her mind on either point, he reminded himself.

And the fact that she had been quietly pursuing her own private investigation of the mystery of her Lost Weekend without asking for his help really pissed him off.

They were sleeping together, damn it. That meant they were supposed to discuss stuff before she ran around doing potentially dicey things like trying to find proof of criminal actions on the part of a couple of Guild men.

The fact that he would have put his foot down very heavily on such a project did not constitute grounds for keeping her plans to herself, he thought. In spite of her low opinion of the Guild, she probably didn’t have a clue of the kind of risks she was running.