Zinnia (6 page)

He brooded over the altered matrix for a long time.

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. The private line. Nick picked up the receiver and heard the muffled sound of street noises.

“What is it, Feather?”

“Sorry to bother you, boss, but I don't think she's headed home. Want me to stay on her?”

“Where are you?”

“Second Gen Hill. She's driving real slow.”

“Second Generation Hill?” Nick surged to his feet. “That's where Fenwick's book shop is located.”

“Looks like she's going to park on a side street.”

“Five hells. Keep an eye on her but don't do anything until I get there.” Nick slammed down the phone.

He knew exactly what she was going to do. Zinnia was going to break into the book shop to see if she could find any clues to Morris Fenwick's fate.

Nick crossed the gilded red chamber toward the door. He glanced at the black-and-gold watch on his wrist. Breaking and entering would not be routine for a woman like Zinnia. With any luck he would get to Fenwick's shop before she worked up the nerve to try her hand at it.

Then again, his luck had been nothing less than bizarre all evening.

* * * * * * * * * *

This was probably not a good idea. Unfortunately, she did not have a better one. She knew something was wrong. Morris Fenwick was an eccentric, neurotic, mid-range matrix-talent, but he was a client. And he was delicate. She could not help worrying about him.

Zinnia took one more look at the shadowed alley. The mingled light of the twin moons, Chelan and Yakima, gleamed dully on the lid of a large trash container. The rest of the narrow bricked passageway lay in dense shadow.

She took a grip on the unlocked window. If she did not do this right now, she would lose her nerve. She could not go home tonight until she had taken a look around the shop. She had to be sure that Morris was not lying dead or injured inside.

A strong sense of foreboding had settled on her after she left the casino. No surprise, she thought. She was not used to this kind of excitement. It was not every evening that she got jumped by a genuine psychic vampire and then went on to have a jolly little
interview with the reclusive owner of the most notorious casinos in town. No doubt about it, her social life was a lot more exciting lately than it had been in a very long time.

She shoved hard on the sill. The window opened with a moan. The musty odor of old books wafted past her. This was not technically breaking and entering, she decided. After all, she had found this window unlocked.

She eased first one leg and then the other over the ledge and dropped lightly to the floor. She was in Morris's back room. The place where he stored his less valuable stock.

The darkness was absolute. She took a tentative step forward and immediately stubbed her toe against something hard. Stifling a groan, she switched on the small flashlight she had retrieved from the glove compartment of her car.

The narrow beam of light revealed a maze of boxes stacked on the floor. Each was stuffed with books. She raised the light and used it to scan her surroundings. The storeroom was crammed from floor to ceiling with volumes of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions. The shelves that lined the walls sagged beneath the weight of aging tomes.

The stillness was even more disconcerting than the darkness. The light beam wavered a little. Zinnia realized her pulse was racing.

The sense of dread intensified. She glanced at the open window. It would only take a couple of minutes to get back to the safety of her car. Another few minutes and she would be at the door of her loft apartment. The knowledge was tempting.

But she could not leave yet.

If only Aunt Willy and Uncle Stanley could see her now, she thought ruefully. They would faint with shock. They still had not recovered from the dizzyingly swift decline in the Spring family fortunes which
had followed the death of her parents four years earlier. Nor had they even begun to rally from the humiliation they had been forced to endure eighteen months ago when she had gotten herself involved in what had become known as the Eaton scandal.

Only her younger brother, Leo, would be likely to appreciate tonight's adventure. She suddenly wished he was with her.

She made her way through the storeroom and cautiously opened the door on the far side. The smell was a lot worse in the main room. She realized it must have been shut up for some time.

The blinds were pulled closed on the windows that faced the street. The darkness was very dense.

She paused on the threshold and flicked the flashlight around the interior of the high-ceilinged shop. The sight that greeted her made her jaw drop.

“Dear God.”

Chaos reigned. She gazed, stunned at the mess. Books had been pulled from the shelves and dumped on the floor. The glass counter top had been smashed. The surface of Morris's heavy old-fashioned Later Expansion Period desk was strewn with papers. The contents of the drawers were scattered every which way. The aging swivel chair lay on its side.

She took a step back. Every instinct she possessed was screaming at her to get out of the shop. She had to find a phone so that she could summon the police, she told herself. That was reason enough to leave.

Then she remembered that the nearest phone was the one on Morris's desk. She picked it out with the flashlight beam.

With an effort of will she made herself start toward the instrument. She was halfway across the room when she saw the crumpled form at the edge of the circle of light. The too-still figure lay at the foot of the tall rolling ladder that was used to access the highest shelves in the shop.

“Morris.” She started forward. “No. Please, God, no.”

“For what it's worth, my advice is not to touch him.”

She gasped and spun around at the sound of Nick Chastain's dark disturbing voice. Her heart pounded as she aimed the light at the doorway of the storeroom.

Nick stood cloaked in the shadows. He wore an enigmatic mask on his cold ascetic features that was about as comforting as the expression of one of the proverbial Guardians at the gates of the Five Hells.

In that moment of acute awareness, she knew that he possessed strong psychic abilities of some kind. Even without a focus link, she could sense the metaphysical as well as the physical power in him. Math-talent or game-theory-talent, she thought. That would fit with his choice of career.

She realized that he must have entered the shop through the same unlocked window that she had used a short while earlier. For a minute she was too disoriented from the horror of her discovery to comprehend the significance of his presence.

Then it hit her. Nick Chastain had followed her.

The flashlight trembled again as she pinned Nick in the beam. She struggled to keep her hand from shaking.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I would have thought that was obvious. We both have a serious interest in Morris Fenwick. And apparently we aren't the only ones.” Nick ignored the glare of the flashlight to glance at the body on the floor.

Nothing flickered in his gaze as he studied Fenwick's motionless figure. Perhaps encountering dead bodies was not that much out of the ordinary for him, Zinnia thought. She realized she was hovering on the edge of hysteria.

“I think—” She broke off and tried again. “I think he's—”

“Dead?” Nick moved out of the light. He went to stand looking down at the pathetic shape on the floor. “Yes, I think we can safely assume that much. Looks like someone smashed in his skull with a heavy object. Most likely that stone figure.”

Zinnia jerked the flashlight to follow him. The beam gleamed briefly on his collar-length black hair, which was brushed straight back from a peak above his high forehead.

She moved the light downward. A familiar face carved in pale marble lay on the floor near the toe of one of Nick's very pricey black leather shoes. She swallowed when she spotted the reddish-brown stain on one corner of the statue.

“It's the bust of Patricia Thorncroft North that Morris always kept on the counter,” she whispered.

“North?” Nick's brows rose slightly. “The philosopher who discovered the Three Principles of Synergy?”

“Yes. Morris specialized in the early theoretical works on synergy. He has, I mean he
had,
a fine collection of North's writings.” Zinnia knew she was babbling. She had to get control of herself. “The police. I was about to call them.”

“I'll do it.” Nick turned away from the body and crossed through the rubble to the desk. “Why don't you see if you can find the light switch?”

Belatedly Zinnia realized that she was still holding the flashlight. There was no longer any need to conceal her presence, she thought. Morris was dead and the police would soon be on their way. She walked to the wall and found the switch that activated the old fashioned jelly-ice lamps.

Their soft warm glow spilled across the wreckage that had been Morris's book shop. Zinnia did not look at the crumpled body near the ladder.

When she turned she saw Nick reach for the phone. For the first time she noticed that he was wearing a pair of thin black driving gloves. She stared, riveted by the sight of his powerful long-fingered hands, as he punched in the emergency number.

He glanced at her, an expression of polite interest in his green-and-gold eyes. “Something wrong?”

She would not let him reduce her to a trembling mass of jelly-ice. She was a Spring. The family coffers might be empty and the tabloids may have labeled her the “Scarlet Lady,” but she still had sufficient pride to face down the owner of a gambling casino.

“I just wondered why you bothered to wear a pair of gloves here tonight,” she said. “No offense, but it gives the impression that you came prepared for something illegal.”

“Yes, it does, doesn't it? At least one of us was prepared. Unfortunately, you've probably left your prints all over the windowsill and everything else you've touched so far.”

His sarcasm outraged her. “I have no intention of denying that I was here tonight. Why would I lie to the police?”

“If you can't think of a reasonable answer to that question, there's no point getting into an in-depth discussion of the subject.” Nick broke off to speak into the phone. “Give me Detective Anselm, please.”

Zinnia listened as Nick spoke briefly with the person on the other end of the line. There was a marked note of casual familiarity in his voice. This was obviously not the first time he had dealt with the police. Given his line of work, that was probably not surprising, she thought.

“Yes, we'll both wait until you get here,” Nick concluded. He replaced the receiver with his black-gloved hand and looked at Zinnia. “Anselm said he'd be here in a few minutes.”

She relaxed slightly. The authorities were on their way. It would all be over soon.

“Poor Morris.” She tried to think of something constructive to do. “I wonder if I should call his wife.”

Nick's gaze sharpened. “Fenwick is married?”

“Yes, I think her name is Polly. The two of them haven't lived together for several years. Morris told me once that Polly moved out a long time ago because she thought he was getting too weird.”

“I see.”

“A very sad situation. They couldn't get a divorce, of course, so all they could do was separate. Morris blamed himself. Everyone knows matrix-talents are difficult to match properly.”

“So I'm told,” Nick muttered.

“Morris said that when they were dating, he and Polly had gone to an agency where the syn-psych counselors warned them that it wasn't a good match, just barely passable. But they went ahead and got married, anyway.” Zinnia closed her eyes. “Good lord, I'm rambling, aren't I?”

“Let the police notify Mrs. Fenwick,” Nick suggested with surprising gentleness. “It's their job.”

“Yes. Poor Morris.”

“Do you think you could stop calling him 'poor Morris'?”

“He was irritable and eccentric and secretive, and he was forever concocting conspiracy theories the way matrix-talents are inclined to do, but I got to know him. I was fond of him. At heart he was just a harmless little man who loved old books. I can't imagine anyone killing him. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

She glanced around uneasily. “I wonder if this is connected to the Chastain journal.”

“Not likely.” Nick surveyed the room with a single
assessing glance. “For one thing, as far as I know, I'm the only one who wanted the journal badly enough to do something this drastic.”

She felt as if she had just stepped into an empty elevator shaft. “My God, are you saying that you would have
murdered
someone in order to get your hands on the journal?”

His mouth curved with deep cynical amusement, as if he had expected her to make the accusation.

“Only as a last resort,” he said.

“If that's a joke, it's in extremely poor taste.”

“I'm noted for my lousy taste. But that's another matter. Bottom line here is that I prefer to pay for what I want and Fenwick knew that. He had assured me that he would let me top any offer he got and I believed him. As I told you, we had an understanding.”

“A gentlemen's agreement, you mean?”

“I'm flattered that you classify me as a gentleman, Miss Spring. I had the distinct impression that you thought I was one of the lower life forms.”

Guilt assailed her. She knew that she had been very rude. “I'm sorry. I certainly did not mean to imply that I thought you were a, uh, lower form of life.”

“It's difficult to accuse a man of kidnapping without insulting him in the process,” he observed.

“Yes, I suppose so.” She was thoroughly mortified now. “I beg your pardon. I'm afraid that I jumped to some unfortunate conclusions.”