The Bliss Factor (33 page)

“Great,” Harry said, “all I have to do is stick my finger in a light socket and kill off a bunch of brain cells, and I’ll be all set.”

SUNDAY MORNING ARRIVED ON A STIFF NORTH-
EASTERLY wind, bringing a sharp drop in temperature, clouds that seemed to be all talk and no action, and a mean case of second-guessing on Conn’s part.

“We already checked out all the booths on the map,” Rae reminded him.

“Except these two.”

“I was in Paper Moon, and I thought you ruled out Madame Zaretsky based on my parents’ opinion that it wasn’t her.”

“I have a gut feeling.”

Rae rolled her eyes, since one of those booths was Hans Lockner’s, and the other was probably just a smoke screen. Conn seemed hell-bent on making Hans’s acquaintance, so there was no point in arguing about it.

Madame Zaretsky read palms and tarot out of a tent pitched not far from the tilting grounds where the “jousts” were held, but away from the permanent booths ringing the Grove. She looked like the typical palm reader: gypsy dress, scarf wrapped around her graying hair, gold coin earrings brushing her shoulders. In real life she was a grandmother of twelve, named Edith Whipple, from New Jersey. With really bad eyesight, and an equally bad accent. Her predictions, however, tended to be spot-on. She’d been traveling with the group on and off for as long as Rae could remember. The tourists didn’t really buy her shtick. The circuit gypsies claimed she had a cosmic gift. But then, they tended to be a superstitious lot.

A girl in her early teens sat on the threadbare velvet ottoman across the table from Madame, a fog-filled crystal ball between them. The girl got up and joined a group of friends standing nearby, all of them blushing and giggling as they wandered off. Judging by the sidelong glances going Conn’s way, Rae figured it wasn’t all about the reading.

Conn nudged Rae toward the ottoman. Rae had no intention of putting her butt on that stool. She already knew how her future was going to play out—at least in the short term, short being however long it took her to get over Connor Larkin.

“Sit, sit,” Madame Zaretsky said, peering up in the general direction of Conn’s face.

Conn crossed his arms and glared at Rae.

“He’s shy,” Rae said to Madame.

“He ees afrrrraid?”

Conn blew out a breath, folded his long body onto the stool, and laid his hand, palm up, on the table. But he was looking at Rae.

She popped up an eyebrow and stared back until he turned his attention to the task at hand—which was keeping Madame Zaretsky busy while Rae searched the premises for a printing press. Not that Madame was much of a challenge since she had to practically put her face in Conn’s hand just to see it.

“Verrrry interrrrresting,” Madame said, tracing the lines on Conn’s palm with her finger. “The road you walk is not easy, or straight.”

Or truthful
, Rae thought as she slipped behind Madame and pretended to browse the stacks of tarot cards and aromatherapy candles, the bins of stones possessing various useful properties, and the racks of preprinted zodiacs and personality charts. Madame Zaretsky also printed horoscopes to order, one hour or less.

Rae took a quick glance around, and when it was clear she slipped into the tent. There was no printing press, just a computer with a screen saver running. When Rae put her hand on the mouse, a menu popped up for state-of-the-art publishing software, and there was a printer that looked pretty sophisticated and expensive to her untrained eye. But when she brought up the list of files there were only three, and none of them contained artwork for counterfeit money.

Besides the computer, there wasn’t much else inside the tent except a bigger table where Madame worked up the special-order horoscopes and apparently ate her lunch, since the remains of something unidentifiable but definitely food-based was spread out on one end.

She eased out of the tent, just in time to hear the end of Conn’s palm reading.

“You arrre not long for this life,” Madame was saying. She traced the lifeline on Conn’s palm, which curled from his wrist, around the pad of his thumb to the index finger side of his hand. “See here where the line breaks? You are in a time of great upheaval. You will not overcome.”

Rae’s heart skipped. She drew in her breath and held it against the sudden pain. Even if Madame Zaretsky’s accuracy hadn’t been well proven, Rae had never considered Conn’s danger, not really anyway. He seemed so . . . impervious, so rock solid. She’d seen him fight off men with swords, for Pete’s sake. But he was as mortal as the next man. He could be hurt. He could be killed.

The thought of it devastated her. She knew he would leave; she’d come to terms with it. But in her mind’s eye she’d always seen him going on with his life. She’d resented him for it, but maybe it was for the best after all. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could live day-to-day, never knowing if the man she loved would come home to her at the end of his next assignment. This way she could always think of him as he was now—alive, vital. And more than a little snarky.

“I’m not going to kick it today, am I?”

“You mock me now,” Madame said in her faux-Russian accent. “But you will remember Madame Zarrretsky long after you leave.”

“If I believe you,
long
isn’t a concept that applies to me.” Conn tucked a five-dollar bill into Madame’s hand as he got to his feet. “Next time,” he said when he joined Rae, “it’s your turn to be the distraction.”

“But you do it so well,” Rae said, not entirely sarcastic since he’d done a pretty damn good job of distracting her.

“It’s not Madame Zaretsky. She has a pretty sophisticated computer set up in the tent, and the latest in print shop software, but I don’t think she has the knowledge to use it for forgeries. She didn’t even password protect the system, and I couldn’t find anything suspicious.”

“She was a long shot anyway. An elderly woman with bad eyes? Not a good bet for this kind of enterprise.”

“She says artificial lenses interfere with the ‘sight,’” Rae told him. “But she wears glasses the rest of the time.”

“Still crossing her off the list.”

“She has a pretty good track record, you know.”

“Are you saying you believe her?”

“My mother calls her the Jeane Dixon of the Renaissance circuit.”

“Who’s Jeane Dixon?”

“She predicted the assassination of John Kennedy.”

“Anything more recent?”

Rae frowned, coming up empty.

“I’ll be careful,” Conn said, deadpan voice, bland expression, not taking Rae or Madame Zaretsky seriously.

Fine, Rae thought, she’d tried. If he wanted to play fast and loose with his life, well, it was his life to play fast and loose with.

“Answer your phone,” Madame Zaretsky called after them.

Conn took out his cell phone, just in time for it to ring. He frowned over his shoulder at Madame, who was smiling, probably because she’d expected that reaction even if she couldn’t see it.

“Yeah,” he said into the phone. He listened for a few seconds, then said, “Go to your booth and act normal . . . I’m sure . . . Rae’s fine. We’re both fine, and we can finish our part of this faster if we know you’re safe.” And he snapped the phone closed.

“My mother?” Rae said.

He chose not to state the obvious. “They identified the engraver. Cornelia Ferdic.”

“No. Really? She didn’t strike me as the type.”

“How about your parents? Ever think they’d be involved in something like this?”

She got his point, even if she chose not to say as much. “So I take it she doesn’t have the plates.”

“No.” Conn reached out and tapped the pendant Rae had bought from Cornelia less than a week before. “Judging by her merchandise, she’s good enough to make them.”

He hadn’t actually touched her, but her heart was pounding so hard, just at the close call, that Rae had to struggle to focus on what he was saying. Concentrating on the life-and-death stuff put it all back into perspective. Keeping her eyes off him helped.

“Your parents have done their part so I sent them back to work. Best to keep everything as normal as possible, while we close the rest of the circle.” Conn pulled out his cell phone and speed dialed, not bothering with a greeting. “Cornelia Ferdic,” he said into the phone. “She’s been with the group . . .”

“Not more than ten years,” Rae supplied. “She joined up after I went off to college.”

Conn relayed that information into the phone, then said, “Yeah, I know the Secret Service checked the group out before I was sent, and they came up empty. There were a lot of people to check out, especially when you factor how they come and go. Do me a favor and put one of our guys on it. Have him peel back another layer or two on this woman. Those plates are just too damn good for her to be a beginner.” And he disconnected.

“That was your FBI handler?”

“Yeah. He’s going to check Ferdic out and get back to me.”

Rae frowned. “You really think she’s some sort of professional counterfeiter?”

“There’s no way those plates are novice work, especially if they were made in the time frame your parents gave me. The Secret Service ran background checks on everyone affiliated with the group, and they came up with nothing. Now that we have a name, it’s worth taking a deeper look. If we don’t find anything, it’s just a little time lost.”

“And if you do find something?”

“It could give us a direction on the guys who are running the show. Get this over with faster.”

“By all means,” Rae said dryly. “We wouldn’t want to trespass on your time any longer than necessary.”

Conn ignored the sarcasm. “If we cut off the head of the snake, the rest of it will die with no collateral damage. The other players won’t get off scot-free, but at least they’ll be alive.”

If there was a way to keep her parents safe, Rae was all for that. She headed for the next booth on their list, but Conn took off on a tangent that ultimately led directly to Hans Lockner’s booth, Paper Moon.

Rae pulled Conn to a stop a hundred yards away. “Is this really necessary?”

“Because he’s a pervert, and I want to smash his face in?”

“Because being a pervert doesn’t make him a criminal.” She grinned. “But it does mean he has good taste.”

“He strikes me as the kind of guy who goes for quantity, not quality.”

Rae could have taken that as an insult, but she was too busy cluing in to the physical subtext beneath Conn’s words, the muscle working in his jaw, the way he stared, blue eyes laser sharp, at Hans’s booth, the general aura of leashed control. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said Conn had something against Hans Lockner, and it wasn’t about the case. The case was his job; this was personal.

He flashed her a look that had her jumping to conclusions she had no business landing on under the current circumstances. And then he made a beeline for the booth, his strides too long for her to keep up.

A teenager with black eyeliner and multiple piercings stood at the counter. When Rae walked in he was huffing out breath. “Don’t bother, man,” he said to Conn. “I been waiting here for, like, ever.” He tossed down a print of a dragon hovering over a frail-looking woman, her skirts blowing in an artistic wind and leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination. “Dude who runs this place oughta be glad I’m not of a larcenous inclination,” and he stomped out.

Conn leaned over the counter, then walked behind it. “Kid’s right,” he said. “There’s nobody here, but this guy isn’t even trying to hide what he’s doing.”

Rae joined him in the back room, in time to watch him pull back a huge gray tarp and reveal what she figured must be a printing press. “Everyone minds their own business around here,” she said, deciding not to think about Hans’s estimation of her intelligence if he thought she’d ignore a hulking piece of machinery just because it was under a tarp. Then again, Hans probably thought he could dazzle her with his attributes. Yuck.

Conn started at one end of the contraption and worked his way methodically to the other end, flipping a switch that made the machine whir to life, spitting out a sheet of paper without a single mark on it.

“Fuck,” he said, scrubbing a hand back through his hair.

“No plates, I take it.”

“No plates.” He turned the machine off and replaced the tarp.

When he started to search the small back room, Rae went to work helping him, the two of them circling the place methodically. They came up empty-handed.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” Rae said. “If we’re going to search his campsite we’ll have to hurry. A lot of the regulars will be heading back there soon.”

Hans owned a pop-up camper that he dragged around behind a rusted-out Chevy pickup. When Rae and Conn got there they found the place trashed, even beyond the best efforts of a complete slob. Furniture was overturned; food boxes were sliced open and emptied on the table, counter, and floor; and every storage compartment in the place was open and vomiting its contents.

“Do you think they found the plates?” Rae asked Conn.

“No. They would have stopped searching.”

“Unless the plates were the last place they looked.”

“It’s always the last place you look,” Conn said, “but the odds are against them having to tear everything apart, so we go on the premise the plates weren’t found.”

Rae followed him outside and watched him kneel to peer under the pop-up, then the Chevy. He climbed up to look on top of both, then jumped to the ground.

“They’d be close,” he said, turning in a slow circle and surveying their surroundings.

Rae made a beeline for the nearest tree, an old beech with gray bark and a hollow base. She didn’t look there, though, instead climbing the stubs of long-shed branches until she was high enough to reach into the canopy of yellow leaves starting to fall. “I learned this from an old guy who traveled with us when I was a kid,” she said. “He was a hobo for part of his life, and he used to hide everything he owned in a tree at night.”