The Council of Shadows (2 page)

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“I am sorry that you have the dreams,” he said. “I'm glad that I can help.”

“Oh, brother, do you ever!” she said, and sighed. “It can't be much fun, being on a honeymoon with someone who wakes up screaming every five or six days, and . . . well, you know, freezes up sometimes.”

He chuckled. “Anyone else would be catatonic, or dead, or mad beyond help after six months as my sister's prisoner. You are a very strong person, my love.”

Ellen laughed too, ruefully, stretching, aware that she smelled a little of stale fear-sweat.

“I'm sort of a
stinky
person right now. I'll go shower.”

“And I will see to breakfast,” he said.

God, he's tactful,
she thought—right now she wasn't in the mood for a shower
à deux
, something they often enjoyed.

But then again, he's telepathic. Men keep saying women
expect
them to read their minds. It's a little odd being married to one who really
can
do it.

Adrian was usually fairly tactful about reading her actual
thoughts
, but apparently he couldn't help picking up her feelings. The really important thing was that he
cared
about them, too, but actually knowing for a fact what they were made him feel marvelously sensitive to her.

The hot water leached tension out of her muscles; she let it cascade over her face and sighed.

A new life,
she thought.
After a near-death experience . . . I don't really miss my old one. In the old one, I didn't have Adrian. But I do miss being
normal
, the way I was back in Santa Fe. Funky-artsy normal, at least. I wonder what's happening back there? Have they forgotten me already? How did they react when I just . . . vanished?

 

 

The Santa Fe Fire Department was turning off their hoses; dank steam rose into the night, and chilly water dripped from the buildings to either side where they'd sprayed to keep the flames from spreading; there was a blank wall across the street. It was high-desert winter, cold, dry, moonlight visible on the white peaks of the Sangres floating off to the north. No city stink, which he liked; there were only sixty thousand people in what passed for New Mexico's capital city.

Capital large town, maybe,
Eric Salvador thought.

“So what made it burn down, hey?” he asked the investigator from the fire marshal's office.

“Arson,” she said to the detective. “And it burned
up
.”

“Yeah, arson. Some specifics would be nice, Alice,” he said.

“That's the thing. I can't find any reason it
should
have burned. None of the usual indicators. It just did.”

“Very much.”

He ducked under the yellow police tape, a stocky man of thirty or so with a mustache and a blue jowl who'd put on a few pounds lately, not many, not enough to hide his hard outlines, with his coarse black hair still in a high-and-tight. There was a deep scar across one olive cheek, and he rubbed at it with a thumb; it hurt a little sometimes, where the flying metal of the IED had cracked the bone. The scar ran down under his mustache, giving a bit of a quirk to his mouth.

“One thing I can tell you,” the investigator said. “This thing burned
hot
.”

“Heavy accelerants? I can't smell anything.”

“Right, gasoline or diesel you usually can. But damned if I can prove it yet, maybe with the lab work . . . I'd say yes, though. I've never seen anything like it. It's as if it
wanted
to burn.”

“Alice . . .”

“You know I'm not superstitious. But there's no sign it started in one place and spread. Everything capable of combining with oxygen just went up all at once,
whoosh
. The
cutlery
melted, and that's a lot hotter than your typical house fire.”

The building had been a little two-story apartment house, one up and one down. This wasn't far off Canyon Road and the strip of galleries, and close to the Acequia Madre, the ancient irrigation canal, which meant it had been fairly expensive. But not close enough to be real adobe, which in Santa Fe meant
old
and
pricey
. Brown stucco pseudopueblo-Spanish style built over frame, like nearly everything in town that stayed on the right side of the building code.

Alice had worked with him before. She was a bit older than he—mid-thirties—and always looked tired, her blond hair short and disorderly. He liked the way she never let a detail slip by, no matter how hard she had to work at it.

“ ‘Santa Fe, where prestige is a mud house on a dirt road,'” she said, quoting a local saying. “So it's not likely an insurance torch. Not enough money here.”

“Yeah. I couldn't afford
this
place either. When it was still here. You're right, it must have gone up like a match head.”

There wasn't enough left to tell any more details. There
was
a heavy wet-ash smell where bits and blackened pieces rested on the scorched concrete pad of the foundation. He blinked again. That smell, and the way the bullets had chewed at the mud brick below the window flecking bits of adobe into his face. The way his armor had chafed, the fear as he made himself jerk up over the sill and aim the M-4, laying the red dot, the instant when the mouj had stared at him wide-eyed just before the burst tracked across his body in a row of black-red dots and made him dance like a jointed doll . . .

“Eric?” Alice said, jarring him out of the memory.

“Sorry,” he said. “Deep thought.”

She spared him any offensive sympathy and he nodded to her in silent gratitude, still feeling a little shaky.
Got to get over this. I can have flashbacks later
.

“Let me have the workup when you can,” he said.

Of course, when I was on the rock pile I said I'd deal with it later, when it wouldn't screw the mission. This
is
later, I suppose.

“I'll zap it to your notepad,” Alice said. “I've got to get some more samples now.”

He turned away. Cesar Martinez was talking to the Lopez family, minus the three children who were with some neighbor or relative; the couple was sitting in one of the emergency vans, and someone had given them Styrofoam cups of coffee. His own nose twitched at the smell, though what he really wanted was a drink. Or a cigarette. He suppressed both urges and listened to his partner's gentle voice, calm and sympathetic. He was a hotshot, he'd go far, he was
good
at making people want to help him, soothing them, never stepping on what they had to say.

“I was going to go back in. They were gone, and I was going to go back in and then—” the husband said.

Cesar made a sympathetic noise. “You were having dinner when the man forced you out of the house?”

“Take-out Chinese, from Chow's,” the wife said. Her husband took up the thread:

“And this man came in. He had a gun . . . a gun like a shotgun, but smaller, like a pistol,” Anthony Lopez said. “It still looked pretty damn big. So was he.”

He chuckled, and Salvador's opinion of him went up. It was never easy for civilians when reality crashed into what they thought had been their lives.

“How could you tell it was a shotgun?”

“Two barrels. Looked like tunnels.”

“And the man?”

“He was older than me—fifty, sixty, gray hair cut short, but he was moving fast. He had blue eyes, fair, sort of tanned skin, but you could tell he was pink underneath?”

“Anglo, but weathered?”

“Right. And he was dressed all in black, black leather. And he shouted at us, just, ‘Go, go, go, get out, run, keep running.' We did.”

“Exactly the right thing to do,” Cesar said.

“But I was going to go back. Then it burned . . .” he whispered. “If I had—”

You'd be dead
, Salvador thought.
On the other hand, if the guy hadn't run you all out, you'd all be dead. There's something screwy here. Arsonists don't care who gets hurt and they
certainly
don't risk getting made to warn people.

Mrs. Lopez spoke again. “There was a younger man outside, when we ran out. He didn't do anything. He just
stood
there, with his hands in the air, almost like he was high or something. And there was a, a van or a truck over there.”

She pointed to the wall of the compound across the street from what had been her house. Salvador made a note to see if they could get tire tracks.

“When we were across the street the younger man sort of, oh, collapsed. The older man with the gun, the one in black, helped him over to the van, not carrying him but nearly, sort of dragging him and putting him in the backseat. Then they drove off.”

Cesar tapped at his notepad and called up the face-sketch program.

“The younger man looked like this?” he began, and patiently ran them through the process of adjustment.

Salvador stared, fascinated as always, watching the image shift, slowly morphing and changing and then switching into something that only an expert could tell from a photograph of a living person. He knew that in the old days you'd had to use a sketch artist for this, but now it was automatic. It would even check the final result against the databases with a face-recognition subsystem. When they'd given all the help they could Cesar went on:

“Thank you, thank you both. We may have to talk to you again later.”

He blew out a sigh as the couple left and turned and leaned back against the end of the van, looking at the notepad in his hand. Salvador prompted him:

“Their stories were consistent?”

“Yeah,
jefe
. Right from the start, it wasn't just listening to each other and editing the memory.”

He touched the screen. “Okay, sequence: When Mrs. Lopez got home with the kids, around five, Ellen Tarnowski's car, she's the upperfloor tenant, was there. Mr. Lopez, the husband, got home a little later and noticed it too. Because she's usually not back from work by then.”

“They friends with her?”

“They know her to talk to, just in passing. Said she was nice, but they didn't have much in common.”

The senior detective grunted and looked at
his
notepad, tapping for information; Mr. and Mrs. Lopez were a midlevel state government functionary and a dental hygienist, respectively. Ellen Tarnowski . . .

Works at Hans & Demarcio Galleries. Okay, artsy. God knows we've got enough of
them
around here.

There were three hundred–odd galleries in Santa Fe, plus every other diner and taco joint had original artwork on the walls and on sale. Half the waiters and checkout clerks in town were aspiring artists of one sort or another, too, like the would-be actors in LA. She looked out at him, a picture from some Web site or maybe the DMV: blond, mid-twenties, full red lips, short straight nose, high cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Something in those eyes too, an odd look. Kind of haunted. The figure below . . .

“Jesus.”

“Just what
I
said. Anyway, she comes downstairs just after Mr. Lopez arrives. Mrs. Lopez looks out the kitchen window and notices her because she's wearing—”

He checked his notes again.

“—a white silk sheath dress and a wrap. She knew it was Tarnowski's best fancy-occasion dress from a chat they'd had months ago. Another woman was with her. About Tarnowski's age, but shorter, slim, olive complexion or a tan, long dark hair, dark eyes . . .”

“Really going to stand out in
this
town.”

“
Sí
, though if she's going around with
la Tarnowski
she will! I got a composite on her too, but it's not as definite. Mrs. Lopez said her clothes looked really expensive, and she was wearing a tanzanite necklace.”

“What the fuck's tanzanite?”

“Like sapphire, but
expensive
. Here's what she looked like.”

He showed a picture. The face was triangular, smiling slightly, framed by long straight black hair. Attractive too, but . . .

“I don't think she's Latina, somehow,” he said aloud, as his fingers caressed the slight scar at the base of his right thumb.

“Yeah, me too, but I can't put my finger on why. Incidentally let's do a side-by-side with the composite on the man they saw standing still outside, when the old goatsucker with the gun ran them out past him. The one he shoved into the backseat later.”

Salvador's eyebrows went up as the pictures showed together. “Are they
sure
that's not the same person? It's an easy mistake to make, in the dark, with the right clothes.”

His partner nodded; it was, surprisingly so under some circumstances.

“Looks a lot like Dark Mystery Woman, eh? But it was a guy, very certainly. Wearing a dark zippered jacket open with a tee underneath. Mrs. Lopez said he looked real fit. Not bulked up but someone who worked out a lot. She got a better look at him than at the woman, they went right by. Nothing from the databases on either of them, by the way, but look at this.”

His fingers moved on the screen, and the two images slid until they were superimposed. Then he tapped a function box.

“Okay, the little machine thinks they're relatives,” Salvador said. “
I
could have figured that out.”