Just what he did not need, Davis thought. Another attempt at matchmaking by his mother.
“Where’s the mail?” he asked.
“There wasn’t much today. Couple of bills.” Trig handed him a crisp white envelope. “And this.”
Davis took the letter and glanced at the return address. He recognized it immediately. It was the third letter he’d had from the Glenfield Institute in the past three weeks.
“I’ll be in my office.” He held out his hand to Max. “Let’s go, partner.”
Max scurried up his arm and resumed his position on Davis’s shoulder.
Davis went through the door of his office, dropped the briefcase beside the desk, and sat down. Max bounced down onto the desk and went straight to his favorite source of amusement, the green quartz vase that held a mound of paper clips. He settled down on the rim of the vase and began rummaging through the shiny heap.
Davis leaned back in the chair and stacked his heels on the corner of the desk. He tapped the envelope against the arm of the chair a couple of times, debating whether to rip it up without reading it or read it first and then rip it up. Decisions, decisions.
Eventually he reached for the letter opener, slashed the envelope, and removed the sheet of letterhead inside. The message was the same as the previous two letters.
Dear Mr. Oakes:
It has come to my attention that you have missed all of the follow-up appointments that were scheduled for you after you left the Institute. I urge you to call my office as soon as possible….
The signature at the bottom was the same, too: Gordon R. Phillips, DPP. The initials stood for doctor of para-psychiatry.
He leaned over the arm of his chair, shoved the letter and the envelope into the shredder, and rezzed the machine. There was a high-pitched hum as the device turned the paper into confetti.
He settled back into the chair again. Trig was right. Dating someone involved in a case was against all the rules.
“Probably a mistake, Max.”
Max selected a shiny paper clip, removed it from the vase, and carried it across the desk to Davis.
“Good choice,” Davis said.
He attached the paper clip to the chain of clips that dangled from the reading lamp. Satisfied, Max hurried back to the vase and started searching for another suitable clip.
Davis thought for a while. Then he took his feet down off the desk and rezzed up the computer. There hadn’t been an opportunity to do any research on Celinda Ingram this morning. Things had been moving too fast, what with finding the body, contacting the police, and tracking down the new owner of the relic.
It was time to take a closer look at his date.
Within a couple of minutes he found himself reading the first of a number of lurid headlines in the Frequency City tabloids.
LOCAL GUILD COUNCIL MEMBER’S SECRET MISTRESS IS MATCHMAKER TO CITY’S ELITE
The next one was similar in tone.
HIGH-RANKING MEMBER OF THE FREQUENCY CITY GUILD INVOLVED IN AFFAIR WITH SOCIETY MATCHMAKER
There were several more in the same vein. They all included grainy photographs of Celinda. In several she was seen leaping out of a rumpled hotel room bed. The photos had been cropped in a bow to good taste, but it was clear that she was wearing only a filmy negligee. There was a man in the background. He had a towel wrapped around his waist. In two other shots Celinda was shown in a white spa robe running barefoot across a parking lot.
He checked the dates. The salacious news stories were all dated four months earlier. The scandal had taken about ten days to run its course. After that there was no further mention of Celinda Ingram or her business, the Ingram Connection.
He tried the online Frequency City Directory, found a number, and dialed it. Someone answered almost immediately.
“Ruin View Pizza.”
“I was given this number for the Ingram Connection,” Davis said.
“Yeah, we get that a lot. The Ingram Connection had this number before us. It went out of business a few months ago.”
“Thanks,” Davis said. He ended the call.
Max had selected another paper clip. Davis attached it to the chain and then settled back to read some of the tabloid pieces in greater depth. The sensational story about the matchmaker who had run the most elite marriage consulting agency in Frequency City had obsessed the papers. That wasn’t surprising. Illicit sex always sold well. Add a powerful man and a woman whose personal reputation was one of her most important business assets, and you had the ingredients for a perfect scandal.
…Benson Landry, a high-ranking member of the local Guild Council, is reported to be involved in a torrid affair with noted matchmaker Celinda Ingram. The two were photographed together in intimate circumstances at the exclusive Lakeside Resort & Spa last weekend. The couple was registered under false names in an obvious attempt to avoid prying eyes.
Miss Ingram, whose exclusive matchmaking agency, the Ingram Connection, handles only Covenant Marriages, is the most sought-after marriage consultant in the city. There is speculation that Benson Landry will soon be tapped to head the Frequency City Guild when current chief Harold Taylor steps down….
He did a quick search on the Ingram Connection and learned that the agency had quietly closed its doors less than a week after the photographs at the Lakeside Resort & Spa had been taken.
No wonder Celinda had been so anxious not to get involved in Guild business. She’d been badly burned by a high-ranking Guild man.
He did a quick search on Benson Landry. It was no surprise that Landry fit the profile of most of the ghost hunters at the top of the Guilds: a strong dissonance-energy para-rez talent, extremely ambitious, hints of ruthlessness, and enough gaps in the record to indicate that he had some secrets.
Davis looked at Max. “Wonder what the hell she saw in him.”
Chapter 4
HE HATED THIS GREEN HELL, BUT IT WAS THE PERFECT HIDing place for the gun. He pushed it inside the small grotto and covered it with a few leaves and palm fronds. The foliage was green, but not the natural-looking green you saw on the surface. Everything down here in the underground rain forest was a weird shade of iridescent green, like the luminous quartz that had been used to construct the catacombs. Even the artificial sunlight was an eerie green.
It wasn’t just the colors in the jungle that were strange. Most of the flora and fauna bore a vague resemblance to the plants and wildlife on the surface of Harmony, but down here evolution, modified by the underground environment, alien engineering, and the constant presence of a lot of ambient psi had produced several startling twists and turns.
The experts theorized that the aliens had engineered the belowground ecosystem because the one aboveground was toxic to their kind. It was clear that the aliens had never been at home on the surface of Harmony. They had evidently lived most of their lives in the vast maze of tunnels and chambers they had built beneath the surface. When they had fashioned cityscapes aboveground, they had surrounded them with massive green quartz walls. It was believed that the psi energy given off by the quartz and by something here in the jungle had been an antidote to whatever it was that had been dangerous to them aboveground.
He surveyed his handiwork and was satisfied. The gun was well-concealed, but it would be easily available if he needed it again in the future.
He hurried quickly through a stand of tall fern trees. It made him nervous to get out of eyesight of the gate. He had an amber-rez compass with him, but they were not infallible down here where vast currents of psi energy called ghost rivers could distort the delicate devices. He had a great fear of getting lost in the jungle.
The hot, humid atmosphere was almost smothering. It would rain soon.
A large green bird took flight directly in front of him, startling him so badly he cried out. The creature flapped madly, shrieking its annoyance, and then disappeared into the heavy green canopy overhead.