Yesterday's Thief: An Eric Beckman Paranormal Sci-Fi Thriller (22 page)

“Uncle Zaharia raised me. His wife, Lia, had … died.” Her face darkened. “More on that later. I am tired now.”

I checked my watch. Four a.m. I took her hand in mine, and we sat in comfortable silence. “I have many questions, but we don’t have to talk now.”

She lay down on the couch and put her head on my lap, her eyes closed. Her words came out faintly as she drifted away. “Yes … long day …
sunt foarte somnoros
…
hunted his wife … killed her like pig …
care se încadrează la o scară …”

Whoa!

* * *

I woke with the sun in my eyes. I was still on the couch, but Viviana was gone. I ran to the garage, and the Porsche was still there.
Come on. Trusting, remember?

I walked to the hall. The shower was running. That made sense.

I checked out the kitchen and found top-quality cookware and utensils. Where did she get her money? I found plenty of materials for a bacon, brie, and avocado omelet—did Romanians eat that kind of thing for breakfast?

While I was setting the table, Viviana walked from the bathroom to the bedroom wrapped in a towel.

She came out minutes later in a yellow dress. I guess it’s called a sun dress. She came to me, pulled me down, held her mouth against my ear, and whispered, “Am glad you are here, Dr. Beckman.”

Some heat rose into my cheeks—would it show? Come on, grow up, Beckman.

She pecked me on the cheek. “That’s for cooking. I like omelets. You do, too?”

“Foarte mult.”

She sat down and crossed her arms. “Am not talking until you say how you know so many Romanian words.”

“I only know a few. I counted on my fingers.
Foarte, mult, acum, ce.
Only four. Not so many.”

She put her hand over her mouth and shook her head.

I took a few bites. Not bad. She hadn’t moved. “Okay. I’ve been taking Romanian lessons. To help me find you.”

She started eating her omelet and then buttered her toast. “That makes no sense. That wouldn’t help you find me. And how is it you found me, but the FBI couldn’t?” She pointed her fork. “You are holding …
out
… on me. You don’t trust me. Yet.”

I nodded. “Yes, I have some secrets, but I have to hold them for now. I will tell you when the time comes. I promise.”

“You have some special, secret skill for finding people?”

I looked into her deep brown eyes and nodded. Sheesh, I had really fallen for this woman.

She got up and moved to the chair next to me. She put her hand on my forearm and squeezed. “Will you help me find my uncle? Uncle Zaharia?”

“I will, yes. I’ve wanted to find him also. I think he may hold a solution to the energy catastrophe we’re having.”

“Yes! Yes, he does. He has device that pulls energy out of seawater. I’ve seen it work. We had it in our house. But no one believed him.”

Right. His demonstration at the Paris Expo had failed, and he’d been ridiculed.

“And he made the time machine,” I said.

“What time machine?”

What?
“The machine you—”

“Am just kidding, Eric. Am so bad.” She laughed. “You should have seen your face. Am surely going to go to hell when I die. Yes, of course he made time machine, too. He said time machine and
minge de energie,
energy ball, worked on same principle. Some kind of physics …
scurtătură
. You know that word?”

I brought out my tablet. She told me how to spell it. “Shortcut.”

She snapped her fingers. “Yes. That’s it. Physics shortcut. Nobody believed him.”

“Is that why he went forward in the time machine?”

“Yes, partly. He figured he was ahead of his time—he was—so he wanted to fix that. Someone in future would listen to him. Time machine wasn’t perfect, but he finally was—how do you say?—fed up, and he just went. That was in 1979, one year before I jumped.”

“Maybe he hasn’t arrived yet.”

“No, no.” She told him about their system with turning the urns. “I went to meeting place, Coit Tower, on November 1 at noon, day after my surgery. He wasn’t there. But he’s here and he’s alive. I can feel it.”

Her face darkened. “I think maybe he is sick again. Sick in the head.”

“Like when he hunted his—”

Viviana’s nostrils flared, and she snapped at me. “What? What do you know?”

I made a mental note to never make her angry in the future. “I’m sorry, Viviana. As you fell asleep on my lap, you were talking. Talking in your sleep.” I took her hand. “You said he hunted his wife and killed her.”

She took a deep breath. She came to me and sat in my lap. I was surprised, but I went with it. I held her close. It felt natural and right.

After a while she spoke. “It was rumor. No one knew for sure. In 1940, when he was twenty, he got some brain disease. I don’t know what it was. Maybe you would know. This was before I was born. He went mad. They say he got angry at his wife, Lia. They say he let her loose into forest and then … then he hunted her down and killed her. He was never convicted.”

She buried her head into my neck. Not sobbing. She just held herself there. I felt guilty for taking pleasure in the feel of her body when she was apparently just seeking comfort. A lot of pleasure, actually.

Finally, she raised her head and looked at me. “But they fixed him. He had some kind of operation, and he quickly became himself again. When I was child, he was wonderful, loving parent to me. And he was smartest person in the world. Does that make sense to you?”

I nodded. I had the germ of an idea about what had happened. “What about you? How did you use the time machine?”

“Right. Had always helped him out in the lab. I knew how to use it. Kept lab going even after he left.”

She was quiet, then continued. “I did one heist too many. My sickness.” She held her hand up. “I promise I am done with that now. Had planned ahead of time to use the machine. When the police were about to catch me, I got into the machine, and … you know the rest. Will you help me find him?”

“Yes, I will. I’ve already started, in fact.”

Her sunny disposition was back. She wore a sly smile. “And, Dr. Eric Beckman, I have important question to ask you.”

I raised my eyebrows.

She put her lips against my ear again, kissed me, and asked, “What is hard thing I am sitting on?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Viviana and I spent the next day, a cozy Sunday, getting to know one another. We left her house only to retrieve my car. To be honest, we spent a lot of time in the bedroom.

Early Monday morning, sunlight streamed onto the bed’s purple comforter, and the scent of woodsmoke drifted in the open window. A pair of blue jays made a racket, but Viviana slept on.

I started to get up, but her arms tightened around me. Not asleep, apparently. Her body fit mine as if designed for nothing else.

With her head buried against my neck, I stared at the ceiling. What were my priorities? One, help Viviana stay hidden, for now at least. Two, find her uncle, if he was alive. Three, get Uncle Zaharia to present his device to the world. The global energy catastrophe was getting worse by the day. Right. Eric Beckman saves the world. I chuckled.

“What funny?” Her voice was deeper in the morning.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

No response. Had she fallen back to sleep? She pushed her new nose farther into my neck. “Coffee first.”

I kissed her forehead. “I think it’s your turn to make coffee.”

Another pause. “Make stronger today.” Apparently, more demanding in the morning, too.

After forty minutes of what I hoped would become our morning routine, we cleared away the breakfast dishes and sat side by side with our computers.

I brought up my browser. “Okay. First, we’re going to follow the money.”

“
All the President’s Men.
”

“What?”

“‘Follow the money,’ comes from movie. Before your time?”

I Googled it. A 1976 movie. Four years before I was born. Would I ever get used to this? I’d just had sex with a woman born seventy years ago.

“Okay, stocks. I’m not sure your uncle could have just turned in those paper stock certificates. The world has moved away from unregistered stock purchases, but what are the stocks he had?”

From memory, she listed the ten stocks her uncle held. She even remembered the number of shares for each. Her intellect shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, she shared genes with the physicist who’d invented a time machine. I entered each stock into my computer. Yes, all worthless.

“So much for that.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “He had gold and diamonds in his urn?”

She shook her head. “Some. Not like me. I couldn’t give him mine. He didn’t know I was thief.”

“The smartest man in the world, and he didn’t know?”

She turned to me, frowning, her jaw clenched. Uh-oh. Then she softened. “Maybe he knew. He never said.”

“So he didn’t have your ill-gotten—”

I stopped when her eyes flashed again.

She pulled on her ear. “He was rich. He put gold in urn … wait. Stocks worthless, when?”

“What do you mean?”

“His stocks are worthless now, yes?”

“Yes. I entered in the symbols, and the companies don’t exist anymore.” I pointed to my screen. “You’d have to be lucky—”

“Worthless now. But maybe not when he arrived.”

I stared at the ceiling and nodded. Right. He could have jumped back to the real world any time after 1980. I plotted the stock prices of all the companies. All had done well, for a while. One had made incredible gains before crashing.

If Zaharia had redeemed that one at its peak, he would have made—whoa—$10 million. But it was iffy. No way he could have walked into a brokerage with anonymous bearer shares and walked out with millions. Maybe with a good lawyer …

I leaned back and tapped a finger against my chin. “I’m not sure the stock certificates would have worked out for him. Maybe. What else did he have in his urn?”

“Stamps.”

“You mean like—”

“Rare stamps. He was collector. His collection was famous in Romania. He started when he was child. He put many stamps in the urn.”

That made sense. Stamps were small, light, and valuable. “Did he own any that would have been newsworthy if he sold them?”

She shrugged. “Was boring to me.” Viviana went into the kitchen, pulled a pack of Peet’s coffee from the cupboard, and loaded the espresso machine.

We worked for hours, looking for anything unusual. Peggy called my cell, asking where the hell I was. I’d have to deal with that later. I told her I was working on a hot lead. She sounded skeptical.

After lunch, I found what we were looking for: a news article from 2009.

San Francisco Chronicle Archives

March 7, 2009: Millions in Rare Stamps Sold

A Mr. Emil Dobra today auctioned off his rare stamp collection at the annual meeting of the American Philatelic Society, receiving a record eight million dollars. The star of his collection was a Mauritius stamp from 1847, a stamp featuring a prominent typo.

The article went on to describe Dobra as a foreigner with a marked Eastern European accent, around fifty years old. It included a photo. I could understand why Viviana had used a false name. Why had Dudnic?

I turned my tablet to Viviana.

She jumped up. “
Da!
That’s him. Oh, Eric.” She gave me a well-deserved kiss.

“He looks pretty good. Perfectly healthy.”

Viviana nodded. “Age fifty-nine then, if he landed in 2009.”

“Now don’t get your hopes up, yet.” I pulled her onto my lap. “That was eleven years ago.”

But with his name, we made rapid progress. He had purchased an estate in the Santa Cruz mountains with a huge tract of wilderness.

“It’s only an hour away.” I looked at my watch. “We can go tomorrow, first thing.”

“What you mean, tomorrow?” She scowled and put her hands on her hips. “We go right now. Come.”

Viviana was high maintenance.

* * *

We drove to Zaharia’s in her Porsche. A nondescript car is a better choice when investigating, but when I suggested we take the Yaris, Viviana laughed.

She drove well but a bit too fast. Just eager to see her uncle again? I looked in the glove compartment. “You don’t have a GPS?”

She frowned at me. No, of course not.

This place was as isolated as a vampire’s castle. The dense forest held only bare trees, with brown leaves covering the ground. A perfect setting for a Gothic horror movie.

Coming to a T intersection, she stopped the car. Ahead of us stood an eight-foot-high, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.