Jayne Castle - After Glow

"I slept with the woman for a time, Emmett, I didn't make her my best friend."

"She must have said something about her past during that time."

"Let me think for a moment."

The line went silent. Emmett leaned back against the desk and waited. A sense of urgency was building in him.

"She was stunningly beautiful," Mercer said after a while. "But not in a glamorous way, if you know what I mean. There was a sort of sweet, pure innocence about her. Hard to describe. She seemed fragile in some ways and in others she was sophisticated beyond her years."

Sophisticated in bed, for instance, Emmett thought. All he said was, "Go on."

"I remember one night when I arrived at her apartment, she seemed sad," Mercer said slowly. "It was unusual for her to be down. One of the reasons I enjoyed her company, aside from the fact that she was lovely, was because she was always in a cheerful, upbeat mood. Not one of those whiney, demanding, clingy types."

"I need hard information, not your personal impressions about her personality."

"That night, I could tell she had been crying and drinking. Her face was all red and puffy. There was some obnoxious music playing on the stereo."

"What kind of music?"

"Some of that screaming-loud, high-rez stuff that no one my age can take for more than five minutes without going crazy."

A tiny alarm bell went off somewhere. "She say anything about the music?"

"She mentioned that the songs she was listening to went back to her college days. I got the impression she had once been involved with some young man who had had his own band."

Emmett stilled. "She say anything else about this guy?"

"I don't think so. She turned the music off right away. We had a couple of drinks together and that was all there was to it."

"She ever mention where she went to college?"

"Not that time. But a month or two later we happened to catch a late-night sports report on the rez-screen. The announcer was giving the results of an upset game between two college teams. Old Frequency College had pulled out a last-minute save. Sandra got excited and said something like 'Go, Freaks. "

"Did she attend Old Frequency?"

"I asked her that. Instead of answering directly, she brushed the question aside. I got the impression that she didn't want to talk about it. I figured maybe she had dropped out or flunked out and didn't want to admit it."

"And now she's dead, along with Master Herbert and Dorning," Emmett said softly. "That makes three. Someone is definitely mopping up."

"What the hell are you talking about, Emmett?"

The door opened. Perkins walked in, notepad in hand. He was clearly troubled.

"Hang on, Mercer." Emmett looked at Perkins.

"I have that address for you, sir," Perkins said. "It was somewhat complicated to track because it was unlisted and the first address that came up is evidently an error. I had to do some rather involved cross-checking."

"Just give it to me, Perkins."

"Number Twenty-seven Ruin View Drive." Perkins looked up, more anxious than ever. "It doesn't make any sense, sir. That's Gannon Hepscott's address. You know, the big developer?"

"Hell, I should have put it together sooner."

"What's going on there?" Mercer demanded. "I heard Perkins say something about Gannon Hepscott."

"Hold on," Emmett said. Leaving Mercer hanging on one line, he dialed Lydia's office.

"Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors," Melanie said cheerfully. "Be sure to see our latest attraction, the Harmonic children's picture book of—"

"This is Emmett, Mel. Where is she?"

"Who, Lydia? She had an appointment with her big-time client this morning. Left here about forty minutes ago. I had to help her sneak out the back way because the reporters are still loitering around in front."

"She went to Hepscott's office?"

"Not today. He asked her to come to his home up on Ruin View Drive. Just imagine; our Lydia is drinking tea in one of those big fancy mansions up there even as we speak."

"Shit." Emmett cut the connection and went back to Mercer. "Lydia's in trouble. She's in your neighborhood. I need some help."

"You're Troy Burgis," Lydia whispered.

She had dropped the portfolio but she clutched her purse very tightly and forced herself to look away from the gun. She had to watch Gannon's eyes, she thought. Like all technology from car keys to heavy construction equipment, the mag-rez gun required a small pulse of human psi energy to activate it. If she paid attention she might catch the telltale signs of increased concentration that meant he was sending power through amber to enable the trigger.

Gannon looked annoyed. "So Maltby did put it all together. I was afraid of that. I had him taken care of immediately after he was seen leaving the sector that night. He managed to break into some private files down there. But how the hell did he get the information to you?"

"Let's just say he put your face in a milk carton. But you've changed a lot since college, haven't you? I wouldn't have recognized you if it hadn't been—" She broke off quickly.

"Yes, Lydia? If it hadn't been for what? I need to know how you figured out that I used to be Troy Burgis. I make it a point to not repeat my mistakes."

She shrugged. "There were a lot of little clues along the way," she lied. "But the one that I finally picked up on today was the music. I found your old recordings."

"How did you know about my band?" he asked sharply.

She was not about to drag Karen Price's name into this, she thought. She would keep it vague. "According to your college yearbook you formed a band." She angled her chin toward the collection of unmarked recordings. "That's your music on those old tapes, isn't it? You rented a studio to make them but you couldn't afford to have fancy dust jackets created for them."

Gannon looked startled. "You got that information out of a yearbook?"

She didn't answer that question. "The clipping about your death mentioned that you were obsessed with Vincent Lee Vance. What was that about? The man was a wanna-be dictator, for heaven's sake. Not exactly a great role model."

"Vance was a brilliant, powerful man who came within a hairsbreadth of ruling all of the city-states."

"And you really thought you could finish the job? Sheesh, talk about delusions of grandeur. What gave you the idea? Finding his secret headquarters under Old Frequency?"

"Yes." Gannon hesitated and then shrugged. "He had left behind some of his early journals and a few battle maps. One of those maps appeared to show the location of the underground chamber that he intended to use as his headquarters when his forces took Cadence."

"The library."

Gannon's mouth twisted. "Vance did not know what was inside at that point. The note in his journal says that the chamber was unusually well guarded by a very difficult trap. He said he hoped that Helen Chandler would be able to de-rez it. He was convinced that the Harmonics had used the trap to protect some great secret inside that room."

"A secret that would be his when and if he got into the chamber."

Gannon nodded. "I assumed he and Chandler had died somewhere in the catacombs, but I decided to try to find the chamber he mentioned in the journals."

"You talked your three band buddies into disappearing with you so that you could all search for the tomb together."

Gannon shook his head ruefully. "We had such dreams in those early days. We were sure that whatever we found in that chamber would make us all rich and powerful. But nothing went right."

"What do you mean?"

"The maps were badly flawed. I suspect that Vance made the mistakes deliberately as a sort of code so that no one else could find the chamber. The result was that the four of us blundered around for over two years underground trying to find the chamber before we realized the enormity of the task."