Falling Awake

  She had opened the door of the office and found the body . . .

  She contemplated that for a moment longer. Then, on impulse, she closed her eyes and summoned the carriage that she used to take her into her gateway dream.

  She waits for it at the top of the steps as she always does. The long skirts of her gown and cloak drift lightly around her. It is midnight and the only lights are those in the windows of the empty mansion behind her.

  She hears the vehicle before she sees it. The clatter of hooves and wheels on the paving stones grows louder, establishing a familiar rhythm.

  The elegant, black-and-gilt equipage comes into view, a dark shape against the greater darkness of the night. There is no coachman but the horses know what to do.

  The carriage halts in front of the mansion. She descends the steps, counting them off one by one. Fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven . . .

  When she reaches the last step the door of the carriage opens. She steps inside. The door shuts. The vehicle sets off, carrying her into the dreamscape.

  t he cars slam down the incline, rocket through a steep, tight turn and rush toward the first scene. He tries to examine every detail, aware that his dreaming mind has fashioned the vision out of the images and data he had fed into it earlier. He has learned that in the dream world, incidents and objects are often weighted differently than they are in the waking realm. A small detail that meant nothing when he looked at it in the light of day can assume great significance here.

  So he looks at the scene very closely as the cars fly past. He sees Lawson sitting at his big, government-issue desk, bald head gleaming in the light of the fluorescent lamps, reaching for the phone.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Lawson says. “Gotta call Beth.”

  The cars zoom past the image, whip through a loop-the-loop and careen toward another scene.

  Lawson again. He is just hanging up the desk phone. “Beth says she checked the hospital computer records, herself. The body they mistakenly handed over to the funeral home was Scargill. She did a DNA match using some blood they took in the ER. Cause of death was severe head trauma. Looks like he caught some fallout from the explosion. . . .”

  The cars sweep past the scene, round another swooping curve and drop straight down into a twisting stretch of track. Adrenaline slams through him.

  t he carriage turns down a narrow lane. Dark stone buildings loom on either side of the passage. There are lights in some of the windows. She catches glimpses of people moving about inside the rooms. One of them turns to look at her. She recognizes Gavin Hardy. He is wearing one of his favorite Las Vegas tee shirts.

  She can see that he is seated at a card table. There is someone beside him, a familiar figure with a beaky nose, sharp blue eyes and a mane of unkempt white hair.

  “Hi, Isabel.” Gavin waves cheerfully. “I finally made it back to Vegas. Look who’s here. The Old Man himself. But the SOB doesn’t even see me. So what else is new, huh? He’s got a good hand, though, and since he’s not paying any attention, I think maybe I’ll help myself to one of his cards.”

  The carriage rolls past the window. She looks into the next room and sees Martin Belvedere slumped over his desk. The door to his inner office is closed. As she watches it opens. But it is Randolph who walks into the scene, not her. He smiles.

  “Going to be some big changes at the center now that my father is gone,” Randolph says. “No more lemon yogurt.”

  She continues to stare into the dream chamber and realizes she is peering into a seemingly bottomless well of night.

  She hears the rattle of harness and the iron-shod hooves of the horses striking the paving stones. The carriage starts to roll forward. But just as the scene starts to slip away she sees a shadowy figure move in the hall behind Randolph. He is not alone at the scene of the crime. She leans forward, trying to get a clear picture of the other person but the darkness of the hall is too deep.

  Somewhere in the distance her dream lover calls her name, shattering the trance.

  “Isabel . . .”

  She came out of the dream with a suddenness that evidently annoyed Sphinx. He lashed his tail.

  “Ellis?” She sat up slowly, shaking off the trancelike effects of the Level Five dream.

  “Sorry, honey.” Ellis moved in the shadows, reaching out to switch on one of the reading lamps. “Didn’t realize you were asleep.”

  “It’s okay.” She swung her feet to the floor and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I was dreaming.”

  “Yeah?” He watched her with dark curiosity. “Regular or extreme?”

  “Extreme. Gavin Hardy and Martin Belvedere featured prominently. What about you? Any luck?”

  “Yeah, but if I’m right, the problem is even bigger than I thought.” He lowered himself into the wing-back chair. Controlled tension radiated from him. His eyes were sharp and cold. “I went into the dream to search for possible patterns involving Scargill and the men he used from that behavior modification program at the Brackleton Correctional Facility. But the images that kept recurring did not involve him or the prison.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Lawson,” Ellis said. “Sitting at his desk, his phone in his hand. He had either just talked to Beth or he was about to talk to her.”

  “Go on.”

  “He tells her everything. She’s still his partner, even if they are having problems at the moment. He couldn’t run his operation without her.”

  “Back up, you’re going too fast for me.”

  Reflectively, Ellis massaged his right shoulder with his left hand. “If I’m right about Scargill faking his own death, he had one real big issue to worry about after he staged his grand finale.”

  “What?”

  Ellis dropped his hand and shrugged. “He needed to know whether or not Lawson bought the story. To feel safe, Scargill had to find a way to keep tabs on what happened at Frey-Salter after he disappeared.”

  She let that sink in. The implications were unnerving.

  “You think he has an accomplice in Lawson’s operation?” she asked uneasily. “Someone who leaks information to him?”

  “It’s a possibility. He uses other people when he needs them, but he wouldn’t want them to have too much information.”

  “So how do you think he arranged to figure out how his game plan was going down with Lawson?”

  “I can’t be positive, but I’ve got a feeling the message in my dream is that he did it the old-fashioned way. He bugged Lawson’s fancy, high-tech, super-encrypted phone.”

  For an instant she was speechless. “But that means that every time you talked to Lawson—”

  He nodded, his face hard. “And every time Lawson talked to Beth, Scargill may have been listening.”

  She folded her arms and thrust her hands inside the sleeves of her robe. “Was he good enough with computers to do that? What about opportunity? Could he have simply walked into Lawson’s office and messed around with the phone?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m inclined to doubt that Scargill was that good. He was sure big on playing the online games but I never saw him take an interest in any of the serious software programs that Lawson uses for dream research and analyses. And Lawson sure as hell never mentioned anything about Scargill being a tech wizard.”

  “So?”

  Ellis’s mouth tightened. “So there was someone at Lawson’s agency who was good enough to bug an encrypted phone, someone who would have had opportunity and who might have had motive.”

  “What motive?”

  “Love.”

  Comprehension hit her in a shock wave. “Katherine Ralston.”

  “Yes. I think he used her to bug the phone for him after he faked his death. Hell, maybe he used her to change the morgue records at the hospital, too. Then he murdered her.”

  She shuddered. “You’re right. This is a really big problem.”

  Ellis was silent for a beat. “There is one bit of good news in all
this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been careful about what I’ve said to Lawson on the phone in the past few days because I didn’t want him to think that I had gone completely over the edge where Scargill was concerned. He doesn’t know about my suspicions concerning the fire in your storage locker, and I haven’t had a chance to tell him about the link to the behavior modification program at Brackleton.”

  “You did tell Lawson that you were suspicious about Gavin Hardy’s death,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, but Lawson ordered me not to get involved, remember? He said he’d have Beth keep track of the police investigation and then he advised me that there was no hard evidence to indicate that Hardy’s death was anything but a hit-and-run.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. Assuming Scargill does have a bug on Lawson’s phone, all he knows for sure is that you’re here in Roxanna Beach because Lawson asked you to recruit me for Frey-Salter.”

  “It’s something, at least. One thing’s for damn sure. I can’t risk telling Lawson anything else about this situation until I can get him outside Frey-Salter. Same goes for Beth. Those two share everything.”

  “Except a bed, apparently.”

  “The current separation is only temporary. Sooner or later they’ll get back together.”

  She rested a hand on Sphinx’s broad head. “You said this particular separation has gone on much longer than usual because Beth discovered that Lawson had had an affair a few months ago.”

  “That’s right. He broke the ground rules of their relationship.”

  She looked at him, careful to keep her expression as neutral as possible. “You sound like you don’t subscribe to that set of rules.”

  “Hell, I couldn’t handle a screwy relationship like that one in the first place, much less figure out the rules.”

  She smiled. “It does sound complicated. You know, this is going to seem a little far out, but just how mad was Beth when she found out that Lawson had the affair?”

  “Real mad. Furious.”

  “Mad enough to want to try to exact some revenge?” she asked softly.

  At first Ellis seemed bemused by the question, as though he did not understand it. Then she saw understanding dawn.

  “You think Beth might have teamed up with Scargill to punish Lawson?” Ellis asked in a tone that suggested he wanted to be absolutely sure he had got it right.

  “Just a thought.”

  Ellis turned that over silently for a respectable period of time and then shook his head. “No. Leaving aside their personal relationship, which has always seemed screwy to me, they need each other professionally. They have to work together, even when they’re not sleeping together. It’s been like that for over thirty years. Can’t see it changing now. Besides, Beth definitely has a temper, but she’s not vindictive. I can’t see her going to such lengths to get even for Lawson’s stupid fling.”

  “You know them. I don’t.”

  He sat forward, fingers linked between his legs. “It’s an interesting scenario, though. One that probably should have occurred to me but didn’t. Good observation on your part.”

  She was pleased by the compliment. “Thanks. I know I’ve got a lot to learn about the investigative side of this business but I like to think I’ve picked up a few things working for you and Lawson this past year.”

  He smiled briefly. “Think you’ve got a talent for the profession?”

  “I sure hope so. It pays so much better than the Psychic Dreamer Hotline or my brother-in-law.” She huddled deeper into her robe. “Now it’s my turn. Want to hear about my dream?”

  He leaned back, hands gripping the arms of the chair. “Yes.”

  “I’ll admit I haven’t had any experience setting up clue-hunting dreams but I’ve walked through a lot of yours so I decided to give it a shot tonight. And there is one aspect of this case in which I probably have a lot more context than you do.”

  “Are you talking about Gavin Hardy?”

  “No,” she said. “Tonight I dreamed about Martin Belvedere.”

  Ellis waited.

  Her hand stilled on Sphinx’s head. “I think that he might have been murdered.”

  Ellis did not move for a few seconds. She could see him processing the information and wondered if he would dismiss the conclusion out of hand.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked simply.

  “Two reasons. One of them is Sphinx.”

  He glanced at the cat. “Go on.”

  “The door to Belvedere’s office was closed when I went to find him. But Sphinx was out in the hall.”

  Ellis looked thoughtful. “You said you found him at your door acting agitated.”

  “Right. Sphinx had free run of the place but he has a strong commitment to saving energy. His own.”

  “I did get the impression that he’s not a great believer in unnecessary exercise.”

  “No, although he often made the trip into my wing to see me. I think he liked my windowsill in the afternoon because of the sunlight. But other than that, he stayed in Dr. B.’s inner office most of the time.” She sighed. “I suspect that Belvedere cared more about Sphinx than he did about any human, including, apparently, his own son. The point is that I’m almost positive he would never have closed the door of his office if he knew that Sphinx was out of the room.”

  “Not even to have a private conversation with someone?”

  She hesitated. “He might have done that but as soon as the person left, the door would have been opened.”

  “Unless he collapsed from a heart attack before he could get to the door.”

  “True. But there’s another reason why I think he was killed. There was no yogurt carton in the trash can beside the desk.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “He had come to my office earlier, around midnight, to talk about the dream report I was analyzing. He was carrying a carton of lemon yogurt. He had just started it. He loved lemon yogurt. But when I found him later, there was no empty carton in the trash can in his office. No spoon, either. It didn’t register with me at the time because I was so shocked by his death. I was frantic, dialing the emergency numbers and trying to give CPR. But tonight the image of the empty trash can came back to me in the form of a bottomless well.”

  “What do you think happened to the yogurt container?”

  She breathed deeply. “The message I took from my dream is that it’s very possible someone injected the yogurt with the poison that killed Dr. B. and then returned later to remove the evidence.”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “Drugs,” Ellis finally said softly.

  “Yes.” She shivered. “Dr. B. died of a heart attack. But there was no autopsy. What if someone used a drug to stop his heart? There are a number of meds that could do that if the wrong dosage is given, although the average person probably wouldn’t know how to use them to commit murder.”

  “But we’re not dealing with the average killer here.” Ellis’s mouth crooked downward. “Scargill could certainly have picked up not only some heavy-duty research meds but also a working knowledge of how to use them while he was at Frey-Salter.”

  She met his eyes. “In my dream I saw Belvedere slumped over his desk just the way I found him. The door opens. But it isn’t me who walks into the room; it’s Dr. Randolph Belvedere.”

  “A guy who would know a thing or two about sleeping potions,” Ellis said softly.

  She hesitated, thinking about the dream. “I think there was someone else with him but I couldn’t get a clear picture.”

  “Your dreaming mind was probably trying to insert Scargill into the dreamscape because you know he’s involved in this. But you don’t know what he looks like so you couldn’t get a clear picture.”

  “Okay, that makes sense.” It didn’t feel right though, she thought. She reminded herself that, while she had analyzed a lot of crime scene dreams, tonight was the first time she had engineered one for herself
. She lacked experience in this end of the business. She shook off the uncertainties because there was nothing she could do about them now. “What happens next?”

  “I’m going to pay a visit to the center tomorrow. Do a little looking around, ask some questions.”

  “Maybe I should go with you,” she said eagerly. “I know my way around there.”

  “No, I want to go in without anyone knowing who I am or why I’m there. Besides, you’ve got your first official Kyler Method class tomorrow and the weekly reception for the seminar attendees in the evening, don’t you?”

  She groaned. “Forgot about both. I’d better not miss either or Farrell will really be ticked.”

  Ellis checked his watch. “I need some sleep. I’ll go back to the inn, get some rest and leave first thing in the morning.”

  She took a deep breath. “You can sleep here if you like.”

  He smiled his slow, sexy smile. “I like.”

  30

  isabel insisted on fixing breakfast before he left the next morning. He ate it sitting at the kitchen counter, and savored every bite. It took him a while to understand why the scrambled eggs, rye toast and phony soy sausages tasted so good. Then it hit him that the best part of the meal was that Isabel was sharing it with him.

  He wasn’t accustomed to having breakfast with his dates, he reflected while he munched toast and watched Isabel feed Sphinx. Probably because long ago he had made it a rule never to spend the entire night with any of them. Hanging around for breakfast was a step he had not wanted to take. Too much like taking off his sunglasses, maybe. He had sensed that a woman would look at him differently in the morning light, maybe see the side of him that he preferred to keep safe in the shadows. Maybe he would look at her differently, too. Maybe he would be tempted to leave the safe zone.

  But somewhere along the line he had already taken the leap in the dark with Isabel. He looked at her and wondered what she was thinking about this business of sharing breakfast together. One thing was for sure, this was not the time to ask.