The Astral (16 page)

He sat down in a chair in front of the screen, staring at it, hardly even noticing what he saw. He knew who she was, too.

Catherine Desmond. Why hadn't he tumbled onto it sooner? And she had been here, just minutes ago. Maybe not in the flesh, but her ghost, her something.

He was sure of it.

* * * *

Going through the door had been as easy as pie after all, the wood no more substantial to her than a wisp of a cloud. Outside, Catherine looked back at the house she had just left, a fake New England cottage that years ago had probably been charming. Once white paint was now dingy and peeling, dark green shutters hung askew. A curdle of shrubs, overgrown and badly in need of a trim, lined the walk and a bamboo fence, eight feet high, blocked the view from the street.

A rusty van and an Oldsmobile of questionable vintage sat in the drive, both license plates splattered with mud so that all but one or two of the numbers were illegible.

Chang needed an address. The house numbers too had been disguised, but the paint that had been daubed over them had not quite covered them. Three seventeen, she thought, or maybe fourteen. All she needed, then, was a street name.

Moving along the drive was oddly like walking, she could almost feel her steps making contact with the cement, though she knew that wasn't possible. Or was she gaining physicality?

No sidewalks here, only a narrow strip of weedy grass. A rusty mailbox tilted starboard on a bare wooden post. She reached for the mailbox door, thinking there might be letters inside, but her hand went right through the metal latch. So much for physicality.

She heard the familiar growl of a car's engine and the whine of tires going fast on pavement. The headlights of a car shot past an intersection maybe fifty yards away.

Of course, even in the country, even where people made it clear they wanted to be left alone, streets and roads were marked, weren't they? She moved in that direction, found it easy to hurry; found, in fact, that she could move as fast as she wished, virtually flying.

Yes, there was a street sign: Morning View Road. And the cross street...she came closer to the sign, and found the scene before her fading rapidly, growing paler. She paused, took a step back. Her sight grew slightly clearer.

She thought about that for a moment. It was Paterson to whom she traveled, to whom she was linked, and apparently, she could only travel so far away from him before the link began to weaken.

She tried again to get close enough to read the next sign. She made out a letter A. Au. Or was it Av? Yes, Av, Avalon, she was sure of it, but when she moved closer still, wanting to confirm, it faded into oblivion, and she felt the solidity of her sofa beneath her. She was back in her apartment, Jack leaning over her anxiously, Chang watching from her chair.

“Are you all right?” Jack asked.

“Yes,” she said after a moment of mental inventory. “Yes, I'm fine.” She even managed a smile. “And they didn't see me, I'm sure,” she added. It had been a relief to find that she could indeed conceal herself from Paterson. She need not be so frightened of him, then, surely. “And, I saw our ‘third person' at last. Danny O'Dell, he was there with them.”

“The children's show, the little twirpy guy with the checked suits?” Chang said. “And you're saying he's actually Danny the Diddler? Crap, that is disgusting, isn't it? Are you sure he was into this kiddie stuff with them? There could be all kinds of reasons why he was there. Maybe he sells Tupperware on the side?”

“No, he was buying a movie,” Catherine said. “Paterson talked about the kid on it, a little boy, and O'Dell paid him a thousand dollars.”

Chang whistled. “A thousand bucks. For sure that was no travel video. Jeez, that's a great lead. I can have this O'Dell creep put under surveillance. If he's actively into this filth, we'll get him.”

“There's more, too,” Catherine added triumphantly, “I heard Paterson call his friend—the one I called The Bear—he called him Collie. Like the dog.”

Chang made a note. “If he's got any kind of record, we can find him in the computer. What about an address? Did you get that?”

“Three seventeen, or it might have been three fourteen, Morning View Road, cross street, Avalon, I think. It's the first house down Morning View, maybe a quarter of a mile. And, it's out in the country, very rural, a large open field across the way, no houses close around that I could see.”

“That should do it,” Chang said. but there was an odd hesitation in her manner.

Jack sensed it. “That's enough for a warrant, surely, isn't it?” he asked.

Chang was thinking that maybe she was going too fast, asking for a warrant, with nothing more to support it than Catherine's astral visit. She was still having a hard time getting her teeth into this ghost business. And King wanted something concrete, not just visions.

On the other hand, they couldn't take a chance on Paterson slipping out of their hands, could they?

“I'll see my boss tomorrow,” she said aloud. “And ask for the warrant.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jack found himself staring at the two images of Trash Can Paterson on his computer screen, trying to read the expression in the eyes of what were, after all, only an artist's renderings: the original and the revised one that Chang had sent them.

He looked from the computer to the photo of Catherine on his desk. She smiled fondly at him from within its silver frame. It had been taken at the marina one evening, her hair blowing in the wind. You could just glimpse, if you knew to look for it, the scar at her temple.

It was almost as if Paterson had branded her with that bullet, he thought, marked her as his own. The two of them were linked, maybe, as Catherine believed, on some supernatural level. Even if it were only in her mind, though, the result was the same, wasn't it?

He thought, not for the first time, that what he was fighting was not Paterson, but something within Catherine herself, something more than just the need to avenge her daughter. The two of them, she and Paterson, were on a collision course, racing toward one another with an equal and frightening determination.

When the collision finally came, what then?

Or would it end, as Catherine seemed to think, with Paterson's arrest? Today, assuming Chang got her warrant.

He stood and got his jacket and left the office for a scheduled meeting with the big brass. Not until he was in the elevator and ascending swiftly did he remember that he had left the sketches of Paterson on the computer screen. He considered going back and closing the file—but, really, even if someone saw them, what harm could it do? They were just drawings of a man whom certainly no one here at the studio could know.

* * * *

Kitty came out of her own office, only half reading the letter from her sister Doris back in Cleveland. It didn't require careful perusal. She could have rattled it off almost by rote. The usual insincere expressions of affection, sugar coating for the unsavory taste of the letter's real message: send money. Nothing quite that blunt, of course. It was always about their father's deteriorating condition, the medical expense, the pills, the trips to and from the doctors.

That little man with his always dirty fingernails (“he's a gardener, of course his hands are dirty,” her mother used to argue) and his poker-stiff back, spent his hours now huddled in a leather wing chair in their front room, carefully placed so that he could see out the front window, though there was no evidence that he was at all conscious of what lay beyond the glass.

Yet, even in the convalescence of his Alzheimer's, even unable to remember his name or know clearly where he was, Roger Fane still managed to tyrannize his remaining daughter. Just as he'd always done, just as he used to tyrannize his wife, just as he tyrannized Kitty herself as a girl, with his muted but nonetheless potent sadism. He had been their jailer, the three of them his prisoners. Her mother escaped from that unhappy life by dying. At her funeral, looking down into her mother's coffin, it seemed to Kitty that her mother wore a faint smile of satisfaction, of relief.

Thank God she had managed to escape, too, and not by that means. There had been a man. Looking back, she supposed he hadn't been the nicest of men, but he was excited enough by her beauty, and eager enough to despoil her fifteen-year-old innocence, that he was agreeable, if a trifle reluctantly, to meet the demands she'd made: not marriage, she hadn't cared for that prospect either, not with him, but she wanted an apartment of her own, money, new clothes. The means to remake herself.

She took all that he would give, and gave as little as possible in return, and wasted no time trading in her reluctant lover for a newer, and more agreeable model—and by choosing carefully from among what quickly proved to be a long list of candidates, had carefully and steadily improved her place in the world.

The only difficulty was when Roger Fane tracked her down and tried to use her age to make her return home. She countered by using the trump card he had dealt her the first time he crept down the hallway at night to her bedroom. In the end, he saw the wisdom of acquiescing in her freedom.

Of course, he had never stopped resenting her, and she had no doubt that her escape had made things all the more difficult for Doris, whose bed had surely replaced hers and who was stuck in the bargain with caring for him now, changing his soiled clothes, feeding him with a spoon—and wishing him dead, Kitty had no doubt.

Well, he was to her, at any rate. She had tried many times over the years, for her own sake, not for his, to think of something good about him, something she could say in his favor. The best she had ever been able to manage was: he grew lovely roses.

She stuffed the letter back into its envelope. She would send money. She always did. It was a small enough price to pay to assuage any guilt she felt at leaving Doris stuck with the burden she herself had so happily chucked.

She was on her way to the cafeteria, but she suddenly found the thought of a cup of coffee alone less than appealing—she had no friends among the women on the staff, and the men would be reluctant to be seen socializing with her. Not that she minded; she had no interest in worker bees. She had learned her lesson early—aim for the ones at the top of the heap. They were the ones who could do her the most good.

Jack McKenzie popped into her mind. If he was not quite at the top of the heap, he gave every indication that he one day would be. Of course, there was his lady friend, but in her experience, lady friends came and went, and they did not often mean a man wasn't amenable to the right approach from the right woman. A quiet lunch
à deux
couldn't hurt, surely, maybe at that little bar-
cum
-restaurant on Vermont, where no one from the studio would be likely to see them and fuel studio gossip?

Thinking that it couldn't hurt to ask, she detoured in the direction of Jack's office. His secretary was on the phone. Kitty finger-waved at her as she went by. The secretary started to say something, but the other line flashed just then, and she answered that as Kitty disappeared through the door.

She was disappointed that he was not there, was about to turn around and leave, but some instinct made her change her mind. She was a newsperson, after all, and curiosity was a newsperson's greatest asset. And, if she were to make any progress with Jack, she needed all the ammunition she could gather. So long as she was here and, for the moment, at least, unhindered, why not see what there was to see.

Which was, unfortunately, not much. The top of his desk was as clean as a whistle, no papers, no scribbled notes, no clues as to what might have been on his mind before he left—only a pen set in its marble holder, and the picture of his lady friend, Catherine. She picked that up and looked at it. Not terribly pretty, she thought, hardly the sort she would have expected to catch Jack McKenzie's fancy.

She put the picture back and as she did so, jostled the mouse to his computer, and the dead gray screen came to life. She had intended to take a quick peek inside the desk drawers, but she found herself instead staring at the computer screen, at drawings of two men.

No, she corrected herself quickly, one man, in two different renderings. She looked from one to the other. One of the pictures looked familiar, teasing her memory. She had seen it before—but when, where?

She glanced around the room, as if she might find the answer somewhere nearby, and her eyes fell on the silver framed photo on the desk.

Catherine. Catherine Desmond. The name popped into her head, and with it came the memory of the newspaper brouhaha months ago, the child kidnapped, found murdered, and the drawings of the perpetrators aired for hopeful identification.

The drawing on the computer screen, the one on the left, was one of those—and the other was clearly a redrawing of the same face. Yes, the broken nose, fixed. The mole removed. The hair cut short, and darkened.

He'd changed his appearance, and this was what he looked like now. Only, she had not seen this picture publicized. Jack had it, on his computer. Which meant Catherine Desmond almost certainly did too, and the police, the F.B.I.

And nobody else. It would seem that so far the updated picture had not been released to the press. It came to her in a flash that what she was looking at was not just a pair of drawings. She realized with a sense of exultation that she was looking at a news scoop. Maybe, even, a promotion from weather-person to reporter, if she played her cards right. And she had the top dealer in that game in her pocket, so to speak—Thaddeus Tremayne.

She typed her e-mail address into Jack's computer, selected the drawings, and hit the send button. Safer to print them out in the privacy of her own office—or Tremayne's.

Jack's secretary, her expression peevish, was just on her way to Jack's door when Kitty came out. “You might have told me he wasn't there,” Kitty said as she went past her.

* * * *

It was a win-some lose-some sort of case, as Chang saw it. The King agreed to the search warrant for the Morning View house, not without some reluctance.

“She saw this in a dream, right?” he asked and gave her a cautious look. “You know, don't you, if this turns out to be a fiasco, we're going to have a lot of egg on our faces.”

“In an astral projection, yes,” Chang said, and added, “I believe her, sir.”

“Well, let's go with it,” he said with a resigned sigh. “We should have the warrant this afternoon, this evening at the latest. Assemble a team. Take all the guys you want. We don't want anybody getting away over a back fence. You'll have to include the L.A.P.D., this Conners, obviously. And the locals. It's county, right? Sheriff's deputies, then.”

For a moment she came close to urging him to move the warrant along, try to get it right away. Already time had passed since Catherine paid them her astral visit during the night. If Paterson had any inkling...but she dismissed her impatience as needless stewing. Paterson had no clue. Catherine was convinced of that. There was no reason to worry about his slipping out on them. She let that slide.

“What about this Danny O'Dell?” she asked instead. “What about a warrant to search his place. Desmond says she saw him with Paterson.”

“Another of Mrs. Desmond's visions?” He snorted. “Could be imagination. Could be indigestion. Hell, if Desmond has a mean period we could be staking out Mrs. Butterworth. The guy's a TV star. My kids watch him. I don't want them kicking my butt because I made a false bust on their idol. And all we've got to charge him with is this dream thing of Desmond's. That's about as substantial as a fart in a whirlwind.”

“She saw him buy a movie.”

“She says. Could be
The Sound of Music
.”

“A thousand bucks? That's porn for sure. Special porn.”

“Hell, then it could be a bunch of nuns balling the pope. We need the goods. You want a warrant, get me the goods. I want you on him like flies on dog poop. If he's diddling the kiddies on the sly, I want to know. I want to know what he eats, when he sleeps and whether he hangs to the left or the right. For the moment, what we've got on him is squat. Squat doesn't buy warrants. Especially psychic squat.”

“And the picture? The reworked drawing?”

“Don't need it now, and it would only freak Paterson if he saw his face on television. Anyway, by the time we got it out there, we'll already have him, won't we?”

* * * *

Paterson's pictures hit the noon news. Chang was wolfing down a sandwich at a favorite bar when she saw it, and nearly choked. Mere seconds later, her cell phone rang. She needed no special intuition to tell her it was the King.

“Damn and hell fire,” The King swore when she entered his office less than twenty minutes later. “How did this happen?”

“Reporters,” was all Chang could say. “Someone got nosey. I'll look around, but it may be hard to pin down. Desmond let something slip, maybe, or the boyfriend.”

“So, what's your read on this?”

“It might spook him,” Chang said dejectedly. “He could run.”

He thought about that. “But, would he? You get your picture on the TV, would you run, or hide? This place of his, you said it was totally isolated? No neighbors anywhere close?”

“Yes,” Chang agreed reluctantly.

He lifted an eyebrow. “Well, there's no way he could know we've tumbled to his hiding place, right? Desmond was sure they didn't see her, you said.”

“Yes, she was sure, but....”

“But?”

And what was bothering her, anyway, she asked herself? Paterson hadn't known she was there. Catherine had been sure of that. That was the point, really, the key to how Paterson would react. The King was right. So long as he thought his lair was safe, Paterson was far more likely to lay low. If only she didn't have these doubts—if only she believed wholeheartedly in Catherine's astral projections...but this was no time to share those doubts with The King, not after she had persuaded him to go ahead with a warrant. For sure he'd tear her a new one now if she said she wasn't sure....

“No, he doesn't know we know where he is.”

“Then, he thinks he's safe there. He'll go to ground. He's got this partner, the Collie, to run errands. All he's got to do is sit tight till things die down. He'd be a fool to make a run for it, which only ups the chances of his being seen, and he doesn't strike me as a fool. What's your time on the bust?”

“We thought we'd go in late tonight,” Chang said. “The idea was to catch them in bed asleep.”

“Move it up. How soon can you put it together?

Chang thought for a moment. She could most likely get a team together in an hour, two at the most, but she wanted this to go down perfectly. Rushing things was an invitation to mistakes. “Five-thirty?” she said, making a question of it.

He nodded. “Do it. And let's hope he doesn't watch a lot of television.”