Rogue Oracle Page 5

  Galen flexed his fingers, feeling his hand cramp. Like a molting snake, his skin flaked away, and he absently scratched at it. His attention was seized by a lump on his left ring finger, and he dug more deeply at it. The skin sloughed away, revealing Lena’s ring, embedded in his finger, just below the last knuckle. He gave it an experimental tug, but it would not pull free. Not yet.

  Galen padded, naked, to the bathroom. He stretched, and a few extra vertebrae in his back popped. He knew this stage was temporary. After he’d consumed Lena, it would take some time to finish digesting her. His fingers roved over the planes of his face, grown a bit lopsided in the mirror, like wax too close to a flame. He was reminded of the Dali painting of the melting watches, running out of time.

  He ran his hands over his scalp. A few strands of Lena’s long hair clung to it. It smelled like jasmine. He pulled it across his nose to enjoy the fragrance before reaching for the electric clippers. The buzz of the blades against his skull scythed through the bits of Lena’s hair, leaving Galen with a bald, lumpy scalp and a nest of hair in the sink.

  He looked more human when he was finished. Not like himself, yet. But less like Lena.

  He turned on the shower, let the hot water beat upon his flesh. He grasped a stiff bristle brush and scrubbed at his body. Skin sloughed away in parchment-thin flecks, circling the drain. He scrubbed until his skin was raw and pink, until he could see the glitter of Lena’s gold ring more clearly.

  He wrapped a towel around his body, dug around under the sink. The ring was an inorganic compound. He wouldn’t be able to digest it. It would have to come off.

  Galen slapped his hand down on the edge of the sink. He grasped the edges of the ring with a pair of pliers and pulled. The ring shifted a bit, but wouldn’t budge over the shiny red knuckle. He’d waited too long; he could feel it grown into the bone.

  He grasped the pliers again, with more determination, feeling the bite of them against the circle of metal. With all his strength, he twisted and pulled. He could feel his knuckle split, and warm, red blood seeped down over the pliers. He cast the bent ring into the sink with a clatter.

  Wrapping his bleeding hand in a towel, Galen picked up the ring. Lena remembered it. She remembered when Carl had given it to her in Red Square. Carl had said it was a promise, but Carl had forgotten.

  But Galen wouldn’t. Resolutely, he turned back to the nest of papers on his bed. He picked up his pen, determined to write everything Lena knew down, before her bones dissolved into his and her memory faded.

  Before he was alone, again.

  Chapter Four

  TARA ALWAYS found it difficult to assimilate into an investigation already underway. There was always a good deal of playing catch-up, and she hated being at a disadvantage. Sometimes, all she could do was retrace the steps of the previous investigators. She knew from the file that Carl had been married, with four children. The Lovers card had appeared in her reading, and she suspected that there was more to Carl and Lena than it first appeared. Had they run away together?

  The only way to find out would be to see for herself.

  She stood outside the Starkweather house, a nice house in a suburban Falls Church neighborhood. The house was a bit too big for the tiny lot, but each one of the other houses on the cul-de-sac had been built that way. She guessed this was a neighborhood populated by government workers, imagined that nobody could speak much about what they did at block parties. They probably talked more about the shiny, late-model cars in the garages and the kids pedaling their tricycles in the driveway than what anyone actually did for a living.

  The pansies lining the walkway were a carefully mulched blend of violet, white, and red that grew in a riot of color. Tara wondered if gardening was Mrs. Starkweather’s hobby, or if they had a gardener. The front walk had been freshly power-washed, and the grass clipped short in diagonal furrows across the lawn. Whether she was doing the work herself or overseeing it, Mrs. Starkweather had been keeping busy.

  Tara rang the doorbell and waited. She heard the mincing tap-tap of impractical shoes on the inside floors. Eventually, the front door opened. A tanned, blonde woman in cropped pants and a pink tank top looked at her. She was easily a decade younger than Carl, very beautiful, in a California beach girl way. Nothing like Lena. “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Starkweather? I’m Tara Sheridan, from the Department of Justice, Special Projects. I’m investigating your husband’s disappearance.”

  “Oh.” Her well-manicured nails flexed on the door handle. “You people were just here.”

  “We just have some additional questions.”

  Carl’s wife nodded, opened the door. “Please give me a moment to send the kids out to play.”

  “Of course.”

  Tara stepped into the foyer. The travertine floors had been freshly waxed, and Tara could smell lemon cleaning solution. Mrs. Starkweather rousted two children out of a kitchen shiny with stainless steel appliances. The kids were about nine and twelve. The kids clomped down the hall, and Mrs. Starkweather gestured for Tara to take a seat at the kitchen barstool. She scrubbed at a sticky mess left by the kids with a dishcloth. Her left hand was heavy with a diamond setting the size of a bottle cap.

  “Your children are beautiful,” Tara said.

  Mrs. Starkweather beamed. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so. The house feels a bit empty, now that Jamie’s off to summer school and Mark’s a college student working an internship in New York this summer …” She trailed off, continued to scrub at the stain on the granite before it set up.

  “Thank you for talking with me, Mrs. Starkweather. I really appreciate it.”

  She grimaced. “Mrs. Starkweather sounds like Carl’s mother. Please call me Suzanne.”

  “Suzanne, can you tell me the last time you saw Carl?”

  Suzanne rinsed the dishrag out in the spotless sink. “Two weeks ago, he said he was going to Vegas with some of his old friends. I dropped him off at the airport.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she savagely wrung out the dish-rag. “I kissed him good-bye, and he took his suitcase and went into the terminal.”

  “Did Carl travel often?”

  Suzanne nodded. “He was always prone … to a kind of wanderlust, I guess.” She carefully arranged the dishcloth over the faucet so that it would dry out. “It’s just the way he is. After he retired, he got restless. I guess he was used to always being on the go.” She looked up at Tara. “Would you like something to drink?” She wandered over to the refrigerator. “I have juice, milk, regular and diet pop, iced tea …”

  Tara felt some sympathy for her. She had the impression that Suzanne tried hard to make things perfect for Carl, keeping the perfect house and watching over the children. Her body was well toned and tanned, her hair expertly highlighted. She did her best to make him happy, to support him, and now he was gone. Not by an assassin’s bullet on the job, in a hero’s fall and folded flag. He was simply gone, with no explanation. “Thanks. An iced tea would be great.”

  Suzanne pulled a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with ice from the refrigerator door. The iced tea pitcher was full of lemon slices. Tara smiled when she tasted it. It was perfect, sweet but not too sweet, just enough lemon.

  “We’re looking into a number of disappearances of people who have worked with Carl,” she said, reaching into her attaché case. “I’m wondering if you know any of them?” She fanned out pictures of Gerald Frost, Carrie Kirkman, and Lena Ivanova. Tara watched how Suzanne’s gaze lingered on Lena’s picture, and how her jaw tightened.

  “Carl golfed with Gerald every Sunday, before he went overseas. Carl said he vanished, but suspected he found some Russian girl to keep him company in his old age.” Her collagen-enhanced lips thinned. “I don’t know her.” She pointed at Carrie’s photo.

  “What about this one?” Tara slid Lena’s photo across the granite to Suzanne. It wasn’t very current, but still showed the flush of Lena’s exotic beauty, ten years ago.

  Suzanne w
ouldn’t touch it. “She worked with Carl.”

  “She’s gone missing, too.” Tara watched the play of emotions crossing Suzanne’s chemically frozen brow.

  “That son of a bitch.” Suzanne’s well-manicured hands balled into fists. “Did he run away with her?”

  “I don’t know. Were they—?”

  Suzanne glared at the photo. “I told him that I never wanted him to have anything to do with her again. I heard all the excuses. He was half a world away, he was lonely …” She shook her head. “I told him that if he dared divorce me, I’d take everything. And I meant it.” Tears glistened on her eyelashes. “I did everything for him. Everything.”

  Tara impulsively reached across the counter to pat Suzanne’s hand. Starkweather had been consumed by his career, to the exclusion of his personal life. Tara didn’t wish that on Suzanne. “We don’t know anything for certain.”

  Suzanne dabbed at her eyes. “Have you ever been married, Ms. Sheridan?”

  “No. No, I haven’t.”

  Suzanne’s mouth was set in a hard line. “Don’t get involved with a man who works in shady government business, who works with secrets. You’ll wind up being alone. You do everything alone—fixing the furnace, making sure the kids’ report cards get signed, taking them to the emergency room.” She shook her head. “It’ll only bring you suffering.”

  TARA DOZED IN HARRY’S CAR. IT HAD BEEN ALMOST TWO DAYS since she’d snatched more than an hour or two of sleep, and it had begun to drag at her. She’d wrapped her arms in her jacket, feeling the warm night air blowing on her face, when Harry spoke over the click of the turn signal:

  “Um. So, do you want to stay with me while you’re in town?”

  Tara opened one blue eye. Illuminated by the green dash lights, she could see a shadow of worry over Harry’s eye. This was awkward for him. And her. It had been months since they’d been together, and it felt like they were renegotiating boundaries all over again.

  “I mean, you don’t have to.” His words tumbled over each other. “Special Projects will put you up at a hotel. I just thought …” He trailed off, floundering, as he changed lanes on the freeway.

  “Sure,” she said, winding her fingers in her sleeves. “Thanks.”

  She’d often wondered where Harry lived. She wondered if he lived in a posh neighborhood with nightlife, like Old Town Alexandria, with a view of the Watergate lights playing on the Potomac. Or did he find a place near a college, like in Georgetown? On the phone, he’d never really talked about where he’d moved to.

  Harry exited south of DC, just over the line into Virginia. He wound down some residential side streets, past a donut shop, a nondescript grocery store, and several fast-food places, and into an apartment complex with tan vinyl siding, a pool, and a freshly paved parking lot under yellow streetlamps.

  “It’s not fancy,” he said, shutting off the engine in a numbered parking spot. “But, as far as short-term leases go, it was a good deal.”

  “Why the short-term lease?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral.

  Harry lifted Tara’s suitcase from the trunk. “I don’t know what’s in store for me at Special … at the Little Shop of Horrors. I’m still on temporary transfer. No telling where they’ll send me next.” He slammed the trunk and frowned. Tara left it alone.

  Harry led her up the steps to a second-floor apartment. His keys jingled in the lock, and he opened the door. “Home, sweet home.”

  The light clicked on to reveal a living room with plush tan carpet. The vanilla paint on the walls still smelled new. A black leather couch was pushed up under the living room window, tags still dangling from the back, facing a flat-screen television. Cardboard boxes stacked neatly up against the walls, along the line of the living room wall into the galley kitchen.

  Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I haven’t really unpacked.”

  Tara nodded. “No worries.” Deep down, she suspected what Harry did: that he wouldn’t be here very long. “It’s a nice place.”

  “Thanks. I call the décor ‘Overworked Federal Agent.’” He bent down to pick up the mail scattered on the floor that had accumulated through the mail slot.

  “It’s attractive. I especially like the clock.” Tara gestured to the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It was shaped like a black-and-white cat, and the eyes moved right and left in time with the switch of the pendulum tail. It looked over the kitchen sink, where a lonely coffee cup stood.

  Harry rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Pops sent that to me.”

  “It’s cute,” she insisted. Harry’s adoptive father had an odd sense of humor.

  “He also sent me a banana hammock as a housewarming gift.”

  Tara blinked. “He sent you a what?” Perhaps Harry had been having more of a wild time in DC than the solitary coffee mug suggested.

  Harry plucked an item off the counter to show her, a sheepish expression on his face. It was a C-shaped device on a wooden base with a hook at the terminus of the C. “You hang a bunch of bananas on it to keep ’em from bruising. Pops calls it a banana hammock.”

  Tara laughed out loud. It felt good to be in the small, warm circle of light in Harry’s modest kitchen, with the cat clicking time over them. It felt almost like the way things had been, months ago. “I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a banana hammock before,” she kidded him, with an arch glance.

  “Pops will be thrilled.”

  Harry brought her suitcase to the only bedroom, set it on the bed. Tara followed with her hands clasped behind her back, but her heart thudded under her tongue. Harry stepped away, hands in his pockets, jingling the change in them nervously.

  “I’ll take the couch. Make yourself comfortable, and uh … let me know if you need anything.”

  Tara nodded, swallowed, smiled. “Thanks.” But she wanted to say: It’s okay. You don’t have to sleep on the couch.

  Harry closed the door behind him, leaving her alone. Again. She sighed, turning back to her suitcase. She unzipped it and began pulling out her clothes. She opened Harry’s closet to hang her suits, and noticed a hole in the wall beside the closet.

  She frowned, running her fingers over the chalky dent. It was at her shoulder level, the perfect crater of a fist. She wondered at it, worried at the kind of stress Harry was under that would drive him to take it out on his walls. She’d never known Harry to be needlessly violent. That … that was out of character for him. Was Special Projects devouring him, causing stress fractures in his personality as it gnawed through him? She would hate to see it chew Harry up and spit him out, as it had done with her.

  She turned her attention back to the closet. Harry’s closet was nearly bare. His suits and shirts hung on the left side, shoes lined up below. Tara hung her clothes beside his, but gave them a respectful distance, so they weren’t touching. She turned on her heel, taking in the sparse room. Some part of her wondered if Harry always slept in his bed alone. The boxes stacked in the corner made her wonder if the memory of her was packed away with the rest of his past, not urgent enough to unpack in the present. If there was someone else, she didn’t really blame him. And she didn’t really want to know.

  She took off her watch and placed it on a dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. Even the bedside lamp sat on the floor. Aside from the kitchen implements, Harry’s dresser was the only other place in the apartment that showed any evidence of his personality. A glass peanut butter jar held coins, probably dug out of his pockets at the end of the day. A framed picture beside it showed Harry and his adoptive father, Martin, holding fishing poles. On the mirror above the dresser was tacked a scrap of paper. Tara reached for it, and her heart skipped.

  It was a Tarot card, Strength. Ragged and torn, it depicted a woman holding closed the jaws of a lion. It was Tara’s card, from the deck she’d inherited from her mother, long ago. The deck had been destroyed, and this had been the only part of it that remained. Tara fingered the grimy, faded inks. It still smelled like earth, where H
arry had found it, months before.

  A smile touched her lips, and some of the tension drained out of her shoulders. She knew that Harry had not forgotten her.

  She undressed quickly, averting her eyes from the mirror. A Jack Frost pattern of white scars crossed down her throat, over her abdomen, ending over her right hip. Stipples of scars puckered over her right arm, under her left breast, and onto one thigh. Gifts from the Gardener. Tara was self-conscious enough about them not to want her gaze to linger. She shrugged quickly into her black knit pajamas: wide-legged pants and a long-sleeved top that covered most of them. She didn’t need the reminders when trying to sleep … or work.

  Tara reached for her cell phone and climbed into bed. She dialed the number for the farmhouse. She picked her cards out of her purse and laid them on her lap. As the phone rang, she shuffled the cards. She plucked one from the deck, turned it faceup: the Priestess. A woman in heavy robes and headdress in the shape of a crescent moon gazed serenely back at her. Tara made a face. This was the guardian of esoteric mysteries, the card of intuition. It was also the card she associated with the Pythia.

  “Hello, Tara.” The Pythia answered. Tara didn’t know if she knew who was calling because she was squinting into her cigarette lighter, or whether she was using caller ID.

  “Hello. Is Cassie awake?”

  “Just a moment.” The phone was placed down, and Tara heard footsteps and the murmur of voices. Tara had no doubt that Delphi’s Daughters would be listening in to the conversation. She plucked another card from the deck, the Star. It depicted a young woman pouring water into a stream with a bright yellow star shining overhead. It was the card of hope, of the future. It was the card she associated most with Cassie.

  “Hi, Tara.” Cassie’s voice sounded tinny over the connection.

  “Cassie. How are you?”

  “Good. How was your trip?”

  “Tiring. Got some sleep on the plane, but it’s been nonstop running since I got here.”