The Council of Shadows (7 page)

Then, louder: “George, what did I tell you? Not unless I say you can!”

The mauling continued, and beneath it the choked, muffled shrieks. Adrienne sighed and looked at the water, frowning. It turned from crystal blue to a rosy pink, and steam began to rise from it. After a moment it boiled, and the tentacles withdrew with a sudden rush, as quickly as the first attack. The water smoked and roiled, and from beneath it came a bubbling shriek of agony as the creature cooked and cooked but could not die.

Cheba was pushing herself backwards, naked, her body streaked with blood and welts, her mouth working, and white showing all around the dark irises of her eyes. Then she stopped and froze. A moment later she felt behind her.

“It's quite fetching,” Adrienne said, as Cheba's fingers made contact with the fluffy white doe's tail at the base of her spine. “And symbolically appropriate for your role in this little drama we're about to have.”

Cheba bolted upright, pawing frantically at the sides of her head. The ears she felt there were tall and pointed and furred, and twitched.

“I'm the only deity here,” Adrienne said, feeling the other's control crack. “Ooooh, yes, that's right. Panic, despair, horror, very stimulating, you saucy, sexy minx. Now you run away, sweetie. And when I catch you, I do some really
awful
, wonderful things to and with you.”

Cheba turned and bolted through the trees and into the scrub. As she did a line of wasps rose from the underbrush and followed her, malignant shapes as long as a human hand, whining as they flew.

Adrienne watched her go, then clapped her hands together thoughtfully under her chin.

“Darkness,” she said.

The sunlight faded, and sunset cast long shadows through air the color of burnt umber. She'd always liked that time of day; it was so full of little magics and possibilities.

“Not quite perfect,” she mused. “Something . . . it needs just a little something.. . .”

A delighted laugh. “I know! She's phobic about spiders. Spiders it shall be! About the size of Chihuahuas, I think. Anything bigger would be kitsch.”

A sobbing scream of loathing came echoing towards the pool. Adrienne laughed again, and
willed
. The change was easier and smoother than when she was night-walking in the real world, and here the sun was her imagination and not a deadly enemy to the aetheric form.

The great timber wolf raised its head and sniffed the air, snarled happily, and loped through the trees with its tail wagging.

 

 

One of the joys of a policeman's life,
Eric Salvador thought the day after the Tarnowski case opened, wishing he'd taken more Tylenol with his breakfast.
You meet all kinds of people. Most of them hate you.
Así es la vida.
At least she's not likely to try to blow me up with a fertilizer bomb.

Giselle Demarcio was in her fifties, with a taut, dry, ageless appearance and a slight East Coast accent, dressed in a mildly funky Santa Fe look, silver jewelry and a blouse and flounced skirt.

Sort of a fashionista version of what my great-grandmother wore around the house
, Salvador thought cynically.

His family, the Spanish part, at least, had been in Santa Fe since the seventeenth century.

There was a dash of Irish in his background too, on his mother's side, and the
indio
part of the Salvador line had probably thought,
There goes the neighborhood
, when the
conquistadores
showed up asking about those gold mines the pueblo down the river had sworn existed around here.

She had a white mark on her finger where a wedding ring would go, and she fit in perfectly with the airy white-on-white decor of Hans & Demarcio Galleries. He was
not
, he noticed, being invited back to her office; this was a semipublic reception room. The art on the walls was something he could understand, at least—actual pictures of actual things. Not the cowboy-pueblo-Western art a lot of the places on Canyon Road had either, mostly older-looking stuff. There was a very faint odor of wood smoke from a piñon fire crackling in a kiva fireplace. The whole thing screamed
money
. It had been a very long time since Canyon Road attracted artists because the rents were low.

Santa Fe, the town where ten thousand people can buy the state and fifty thousand can't afford lunch,
he thought.

“Jeanette, take care of the Cliffords, would you?” Demarcio said to a sleek-looking assistant. Then: “Coffee, Detective?”

Wait a minute
, Salvador thought.
She's not really hostile. She's
scared
for some reason. Not of me, but scared silly and hiding it well.

“Thank you,” he said, and took the cup. “That's nice.”

It was excellent coffee, especially compared to what he drank at home or at the station, with a rich, dark, nutty taste. He enjoyed it, and waited. Most people couldn't stand silence. It wore on their nerves and eventually they blurted out something to fill it. Salvador had learned patience and silence in a very hard school.

“I'm worried about Ellen,” the older woman said suddenly.

The detective made a sympathetic noise. “Ms. Tarnowski worked for you?” he said.

“Works. She's my assistant, even if she didn't show up this morning, that's understandable with the fire and all. Not a secretary, she's an art history graduate from NYU, and I was bringing her in on our acquisitions side. I'm . . . She's a sweet kid, but she's gotten mixed up in something, hasn't she?”

“You tell me, Ms. Demarcio,” Salvador said.

“I never liked that boyfriend of hers. She met him playing tennis at the country club about a year ago and they, well, it was a whirlwind thing. He gave me this creepy feeling. And then his sister showed up—”

Salvador blinked.
The sister . . . the woman who was with Tarnowski?

“Boyfriend?” he asked.

“Adrian Brézé.”

“Ah,” Salvador said.

As he spoke he tapped the name into his notepad's virtual keyboard and hit the rather specialized search function. He'd long ago mastered the trick of reading a screen and paying attention to someone at the same time.

“Now, that's interesting. Do you have a picture of him?”

It was interesting because Salvador
didn't
have a picture; or much of anything else. Usually these days you drowned in data on anyone. There was nothing here but bare bones, a Social Security number, a passport number and an address way,
way
out west of town. Just out of Santa Fe County, in fact. A quick Google Earth flick showed a big house on a low mountain or big hill, right in the foothills of the Sangres, nothing else for miles and miles and miles and miles. The state real property register was a mess, but a check on that showed what seemed to be a single parcel of several thousand acres at least, a chunk of an eighteenth-century grant.

Not even a passport picture to go with the number, and he owns ten square miles of scenery. Someone likes his privacy,
he thought, looking at the address. Then:
Hey, if you had enough pull, could you blank yourself out? Nah, nobody can evade the Web.

Demarcio hesitated, then pulled a framed picture out of a drawer. The glass was cracked, as if someone had thrown it at a wall.

“She told me she was going to break up with him. Couldn't take the emotional distance and lies anymore. Then she didn't show up to work yesterday.”

“So she's missing the day before the fire,” Salvador said, looking at the picture. “She didn't call in? Just nothing?”

“Nothing this morning. That's not like her. She's the most reliable person who's ever worked for me.”

The photo beneath the cracked glass showed a youngish man, though on second thought perhaps Salvador's own age. Or maybe somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dark hair worn a little longer than was fashionable these days, a vaguely Mediterranean-looking face that could have come from anywhere. Handsome, perhaps a little too much so, though not quite enough to be called pretty.

“He's . . .” Demarcio frowned. “You know, I met him a dozen times and I listened to
her
talk about him a
lot
and I really can't tell you much. He's wealthy . . . very wealthy, I think. Some sort of old money, but that's an impression, not knowledge. He wouldn't tell Ellen anything about that either, just some vague bullshit about ‘investments.' American born but he has a slight accent, French, I think, which would fit with the name. I know he speaks French and Italian and Spanish . . . and yes, German too, all of them very well. I couldn't tell you where his money comes from, or where he went to university or, well, anything.”

Salvador looked at the photo. Unobtrusively he brought up the composite picture on the notepad. The resemblance to the reconstruction of the man the Lopez family had seen standing motionless outside their house just before the fire was unmistakable. He scanned the picture into the notepad, and the program came up with a solid positive when it did its comparison.

“Would you say this is Adrian Brézé?” he said, and showed her the screen.

“Absolutely,” she said.

“And this is his sister?” he said, changing to the composite of the woman the Lopezes had seen with Ellen Tarnowski earlier.

“Well . . .” The picture wasn't quite as definite; they'd glimpsed the face only in passing and through a window. “Yes, I'd say so. It's a striking resemblance, isn't it? Like twins, only they'd have to be fraternal.”

“Have you seen
this
man?”

The composite this time was the older man with the gun who'd frightened the Lopezes out of their home . . . and probably saved their lives, considering how fast the building had gone up.

“No, I can't say I have. That is, he's similar to any number of people I've seen, but he doesn't bring anyone immediately to mind.”

Salvador grunted; it was a rather generic Anglo countenance, in fact. Offhand he'd have said Texan or Southern of some sort, there was something about the cheekbones that brought Scots-Irish hillbilly to mind, and the long face on a long skull, but even that was just an educated guess. The corps was lousy with that type.

“Do you think Mr. Brézé is capable of, mmm, violent actions?”

She paused for a long moment, looking down at her fingers. When she met his eyes again his alarm bells rang once more.

“I think he's capable of anything. Anything at all.”

“Had a temper?”

She shook her head. “No. He was always a perfect gentleman. But I could
feel
it. Sort of a, um, potential.”

Which would be a
big
help in court.

“Now, you saw Ms. Tarnowski later that evening?”

Now Demarcio flushed. “Yes, with Ms. Brézé . . . Adrienne Brézé. At La Casa Sena, they were having dinner at a table near mine.”

That was an expensive restaurant on Palace, just off the plaza, in an old renovated adobe that had started out as a
hacendado
's town house. Not the most expensive in town by a long shot, but up there.

“You didn't speak with them?”

“No. They, um, didn't seem to want company.” Her eyes shifted upward and she blushed slightly. “They seemed sort of preoccupied.”

Ah
, Salvador thought.
That sort of preoccupied. Is this an arson case or a bad movie? Sister catches her on the rebound from her brother, so brother burns the house down? Where do this sort of people
come
from? Do they step out of TV screens or do the screenwriters know them and use them for material?

“You knew Adrienne Brézé socially?”

“No. I'd never seen her before. Didn't even know Adrian had a sister.”

“Then how did you know the woman's name?” he said.

An exasperated glance. “I asked the maître d'hôtel at La Casa Sena, of course! I'm a regular there. So is Adrian.”

He hid a smile.
I think Ms. Demarcio is a nice lady. She's concerned about Tarnowski. But I also think she's a gossip of the first water.

“Thank you, Ms. Demarcio—”

“Well, aren't you going to
tell
me anything?”

He sighed. Usually you
didn't
, but he needed to develop this source.

“We're investigating the circumstances of the fire at Ms. Tarnowski's apartment, and trying to find where she is.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly; that meant,
We think it was torched
, without actually saying it.

“I talked to the Lopez family, and there was a man with a
gun
.”

He sighed. Santa Fe was a small town. “True. We've got Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the state police all looking.”

She hesitated, twisting her fingers together. “I . . . I got a call from Ellen today.”

Salvador came alert without tensing.

“You did?” he said, the sort of polite verbal placeholder you used to keep people talking.

“She . . . she called me on a videoconference link. She said she was staying at Adrienne Brézé's place in California. That she was . . . working for Ms. Brézé now, cataloging her family's art collection.”