“There’s no way to be absolutely certain of the source,” Judson said. “Rocks are rocks. They don’t come with tidy little stamps stating the place of origin. But this rock is definitely hot just like the others in the vault. And there’s one other thing that makes me pretty sure it came from the Phoenix.”
“What the hell is that?”
“I recognize the energy in it. Some of the crystals are identical to the one in my ring.”
“Son of a—” Elias broke off, thinking. “Well, wherever the hell it came from, we need to get it up here to Copper Beach and into the vault as soon as possible.”
“I agree, but someone is going to have to come to Wilby to pick it up. I can’t leave town yet. The client insists on staying here until we find out who killed Ballinger.”
“This would be the client who happens to be one of Abby’s two best friends?” Elias asked.
“Gwen Frazier, right.”
“Does she have any idea how the dead woman got hold of that rock?”
“Gwen says Ballinger bought it online about two years ago.”
“Damn Internet,” Elias growled. “Talk about the perfect black market. Anyone can sell anything and not leave a trace. Can’t believe Ballinger was using that rock to fuel a bunch of hot mirrors. It’s a miracle that she didn’t blow up her lab and maybe the whole town.”
“Gwen says that Ballinger knew the rock was powerful. That’s why she kept it in a steel box. But it’s obvious she didn’t know what kind of fire she was playing with when she decided to use it as fuel for her engine.”
“No one knows what kind of fire those rocks are capable of igniting. That’s what makes ’em so damn dangerous,” Elias muttered. He paused. “Huh.”
“What?”
“I’m no ace detective like you, son, but it strikes me that stone would be a mighty fine motive for murder.”
“That thought did occur to me.”
“Wouldn’t put it past Barrett to do whatever it took to get hold of one of the Phoenix rocks.”
Judson suppressed a groan. He had been expecting this. His father’s long-standing feud with Hank Barrett, the owner of Helicon Stone, had achieved the status of legend, not only in the family but in the global mining business. The origins of the feud were locked in secrecy. Judson was fairly certain that his mother, Willow, knew how it had all started, but she kept Elias’s secrets.
“I don’t think Barrett would resort to murder,” Judson said patiently.
“Sure he would,” Elias shot back. “But it’s more likely he’d send his son to do his dirty work. Gideon Barrett is a chip off the old block, and we know that he’s a powerful talent, like you and Sam and Emma.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Judson said. “If Ballinger was killed for the stone, the murderer failed to achieve his objective. The rock is sitting here in my room at the inn. I’m looking at the box that contains it as we speak.”
“Don’t let it out of your sight. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
Sixteen
The storm hit just as they were finishing dinner. Gwen was very glad that Judson had insisted on driving the short distance to the restaurant. She knew that he was more concerned about security than the weather. It was easier to transport the strongbox—presently at his feet under the table—in the SUV. But when the weather turned bad in the Oregon mountains, it did so in a hurry. It would have been a very wet walk back to the inn.
“Gonna be a bad one,” the young waiter said when he returned with the bill. “They’re sayin’ there’s another one coming in tomorrow.”
Judson signed the credit card receipt, got to his feet and helped Gwen into her jacket. Then he picked up the strongbox.
She glanced at him as they walked toward the door.
“I still can’t believe your father thinks that geode is so important that he’s going to come here personally to collect it,” she said.
“Dad has spent a good part of his adult life tracking down any and all rumors linked to the stones from the Phoenix,” Judson said. “Under normal circumstances, he would have sent Sam or me to pick up the geode, but my brother and I are both otherwise occupied at the moment. So he’s going to take charge of the mission himself.”
“No offense, but your father sounds like a bit of a control freak.”
“Oh, yeah.” Judson smiled. “Mom says the trait runs in the family. Which is why Sam and I started our own business.”
“Neither of you could work for your father?”
“Right. We reached a compromise, though. Sam and I both consult for Coppersmith, Inc. Sam handles the R-and-D lab in Seattle. I deal with company security.”
“What about your sister, Emma?”
“My sister is what you might call a free spirit,” Judson said. “Translated, that means she can’t hold a job for long. Can’t settle on a career path, either. She claims she’s gaining life experience. Mom says she just needs time to find herself. Dad thinks it’s time Emma got a life.”
Outside in the wet night, Judson opened the passenger-side door of the SUV. Gwen bounced up onto the seat. She watched him walk around the front of the vehicle, the collar of his jacket pulled up against the rain. The downfall plastered his dark hair to his head.
He opened the rear door, set the strongbox on the floor and then opened the driver’s-side door. When he got behind the wheel, he brought a rush of the wild energy of the storm with him. Gwen’s senses stirred in response.
It felt good to be here with him in the intimate confines of the darkened cab, she thought. Not just pleasant or comfortable. It was exciting, thrilling and, yes, a little dangerous.
The intense, intimate energy that had flared between them that first night in Seattle was getting more powerful and more unpredictable with every minute they spent together—at least it was on her side. She was walking an invisible psychic high wire without a net.
“Do you think there’s anything to your father’s theory that his competitor, Hank Barrett, might have murdered Evelyn for the rock?” she asked.
“I doubt it.” Judson fired up the engine and drove out of the parking lot. “Dad and Barrett have been fierce competitors for years, and there’s no question that Barrett can be ruthless when it comes to business. But I honestly don’t think he would murder a harmless, seventy-two-year-old woman to get a rock, even one as valuable as the geode.”
“In other words, he would draw the line at murder?”
“Can’t say for sure, but he and my father definitely have a few things in common. So, based on what I know of Dad, I think it’s safe to say that while Barrett is capable of going to great lengths to achieve an objective, in the case of something like the geode, he would have used more subtle tactics.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“Barrett probably would have sent his son, Gideon, to grab the rock. And if Gideon Barrett had come after the geode, he would have been successful. The fact that the stone is now sitting in that box in the back tells me that the Barretts aren’t involved in this thing.”
Gwen watched the rain beat a steady tattoo on the windshield. “What do you know about Gideon Barrett?”
“Not a whole lot aside from the fact that he’s some kind of talent. Sam had a close encounter with him a while back. According to Sam, the one thing he learned from the experience is that Gideon is brilliant with PEC technology.”
“What’s that?” Gwen asked.
“Stands for psi-emitting crystals, the paranormal equivalent of light-emitting diodes and liquid crystal displays—LEDs and LCDs.”
“Good grief, you mean there’s another company besides Coppersmith, Inc., fooling around with para-physics and psi-technology?” Gwen shuddered. “That’s a scary thought.”
“Here’s an even scarier thought,” Judson said. His hands tightened on the wheel. “There are other folks out there fooling around with psi-tech weapon design, and some of them have been successful. Don’t forget, someone made that camera that Zander Taylor used to
kill all those psychics and your friends.”
“You’re right—that is a scarier thought. I suppose I was thinking of the camera as just a crazy one-off invention that Taylor had engineered in a basement.”
“I hope that’s true in this instance because it means that when we find the killer, the case will be closed. No loose ends.” Judson paused. “I don’t like loose ends.”
Gwen thought about all the ghosts she had seen in her life. “Neither do I. But I’ve got to tell you, this does make a person wonder how many psi-weapons are out there floating around the world.”
“The good news is that from everything we’ve been able to discover at Coppersmith, there are still a whole lot of serious limitations on PEC technology.”
“The distance problem you mentioned,” she said.
“Right. Even for a strong talent, it’s hard to focus paranormal radiation beyond twenty feet. Also any beam of psi-energy strong enough to kill has to be very narrow and intensely focused, which means that, pragmatically speaking, you can only take down one target at a time. And para-weapons tend to be fragile and unstable. Doesn’t take much to set up a self-destructing oscillation pattern.”
She raised her brows. “You’ve done a lot of thinking about crystal-based weapons, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “The subject has been on my mind for a while now.”
“Ever since your last case?”
“Yes.”
“You encountered one on the island?” she asked, probing cautiously.
“It’s a long story.”
“Which is another way of saying you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Not tonight,” he said. “I’ve got other priorities.”
“Okay, I think I get the point. Can you tell me about the Phoenix Mine instead?”
Judson pulled into the inn parking lot and shut down the engine. He sat quietly for a while. Then he seemed to come to a decision.
“You’ve got a right to some answers,” he said. “You’re in this thing pretty deep already.”
“That’s certainly how it appears to me.”
“My father has been in mining all of his life. He’s got what you might call an affinity for crystals and ores.”
“Is he some kind of crystal talent like you and your brother and sister?”
“In a way, but he’s not nearly as strong as the three of us. He doesn’t think of himself as having any psychic ability. He calls his sensitivity old-fashioned miner’s intuition. Forty years ago, he realized that the rare earths were going to become increasingly important because they are so critical to the high-tech industries.”
“He called that right,” she said.
“He teamed up with a couple of other miners, Quinn Knox and Ray Willis. All three of them had a feel for crystals and ores. They were all nearly broke, but they scraped up every dime they had and bought the rights to an old abandoned mine, the Phoenix. They opened it up and discovered a cache of geodes like the one in the strongbox. As soon as they split a couple open, they knew they had hit on something really big. They just didn’t know what they had.”
“What did they have?” Gwen asked.
“That’s the problem. We still don’t know. The only thing that seems clear is that the crystals inside the geodes can generate power of a paranormal nature. But modern technology isn’t sufficiently advanced to harness that kind of energy.”
“Are you saying that there is a whole mine full of rocks like the one in the back of this SUV?”
“No one really knows what’s still down in the Phoenix because things got complicated,” Judson said.
“Complicated, how?”
“Ray Willis was a mining engineer who, it turned out, had a fair amount of psychic talent, more than Dad and Knox realized until it was too late. Willis conducted some experiments and concluded that the crystals had phenomenal potential. He decided to get rid of his two partners and take full possession of the Phoenix. He rigged an explosion in the mine. Dad and Knox nearly died that day.”
“Good grief, Willis tried to murder them?”
“Yes, but it was Willis who died instead. It’s not clear exactly what happened that day, but Dad managed to get out of the mine with a sack full of the geodes. Those are the rocks that are in Sam’s vault at Copper Beach. What Dad and Knox did not discover until years later was that in the days before he tried to murder them, Willis stole some of the geodes and hid them. No one knows where those rocks wound up.”
“You think Evelyn’s geode may have come from Willis’s pile of stolen rocks?”
“I think that’s the most likely explanation, yes,” Judson said.
“What happened to the mine?”
“Following the explosion, Dad and Knox agreed to bury the secret of the Phoenix, at least for the foreseeable future. They concluded that the rocks are just too damn dangerous and modern science is not sufficiently advanced to deal with the energy in the stones. But at the same time, Dad doesn’t want to destroy all records of the mine because he knows it’s only a matter of time before the world hits a wall when it comes to energy resources. Sooner or later, civilization will need a new way to fuel itself.”
“In other words, your family has assumed the burden of guarding the secret of the Phoenix?”
“That’s what it comes down to, yes,” he said.
“What happened to Knox?”
“He’s dead.”
“Let me get this straight,” Gwen said carefully. “The members of your family are the only ones who know about the Phoenix stones and the fact that there’s an abandoned mine full of paranormal crystals somewhere out in the desert?”
“We wish we were the only ones who knew about those crystals. Life for the Coppersmith family would be a whole lot simpler if that was the case. Knox is dead, but it turns out there’s nothing harder to kill than rumors of a lost mine that supposedly holds a cache of priceless stones. Dad is sure that Hank Barrett, for one, is aware of the story of the Phoenix.”
“But, then, your father is a tad paranoid about Hank Barrett,” Gwen said.
“True, but you know the old saying: even paranoids have enemies.”
“The history of the Phoenix sounds like a dangerous secret to know.”
“It is,” Judson said.
“Abby knows about the mine and the stones, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” Judson turned in the seat to face her, one arm resting on the wheel. “And now, so do you.”
Seventeen
She was halfway across the state of Nevada when the ghost in the mirror stopped her.
“You need to go back to the beginning and start over,” the ghost said. “You missed something important.”
“I probably should have waited until tomorrow to make this road trip. I’m exhausted. It’s been a very long day.”
“I’ve got news for you,” the ghost said. “It’s been an even longer day for me. And tomorrow doesn’t look like it’s going to be any shorter. Being dead is incredibly boring when you’re stuck in a mirror.”
“Sorry, you’re right. I’ll go back to Oregon and try this again. It’s just so damn frustrating.”
“Yes, I know. But you need to find what you missed before you set out on this road trip.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t forget the names that I wrote on the back of the map. They’re important, just like the names of the cities I circled.”
“Right.”
“Remember how we matched things up the last time in order to find the pattern,” the ghost said.
“I remember.”
“And please hurry, dear. I’d really like to get out of this mirror.”
“Gwen, wake up.”
Judson’s voice shattered the delicate threads of the trance dream. Gwen slipped into the strong, disorienting currents of the river between the underworld and the waking world and struck out for the far shore.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Judson silhouetted against a senses-dazzling
fire of amber ultra-light.
She reached for his hand to lead him out of the lightning storm.
“Judson,” she whispered. “Come with me.”
His hand closed around hers. He was very warm to the touch. She knew intuitively that the heat was paranormal in nature. She could see it in his eyes. Or was it her own temperature that was rising?
“Come with me,” she said again. “You need to leave this place.”
“Take it easy,” he said. “Everything is okay. You’re safe.”
“You’re the one who is in danger.”
“Not now,” he said. “Not tonight.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her arm. “You’re still dreaming. Time to wake up.”
A heavy weight thumped down beside her on the bed. Max meowed loudly.
She realized that she was still swimming in the dark, eerie river of dreams. It wasn’t the first time she had found herself trapped in the strange currents. She crossed this river every time she went into and out of one of her own trance dreams.
She always made the passage as swiftly as possible because it was a dangerous place, a scary place with unseen depths. Each time she made the treacherous passage, part of her was afraid that if she did not reach the safety of the opposite shore quickly, she would be swept over the falls into a cauldron of churning energy from which there would be no escape.
But she’d had a lot of practice making the crossing.
She took a deep steadying breath, pulled on her talent and hauled herself up out of the treacherous currents. She lowered her talent and allowed the real world to coalesce around her.
The first thing that struck her was that she was not alone. Judson was there. She had forgotten to lock the connecting door.
She had a rule about deep dream trances. She never went into them unless she could be sure that she would be alone and undisturbed. She had learned long ago that her self-imposed lucid dreams, like her habit of talking to ghosts, unnerved others.
She was propped up against the pillows on the bed, dressed in her nightgown and the white terry cloth bathrobe and slippers provided by the inn.