Jayne Castle: After Dark

"I see." Her voice was as brittle as glass. "What made you think that I could help you?"

"I did a little research."

"You mean you went looking for a P-A who was not employed by a legitimate excavation team?"

He shrugged and took a sip of the truly awful wine. He congratulated himself on not wincing.

Lydia's smile was getting colder by the second. "Did you work on the assumption that any P-A who could not get respectable employment on a team or in a museum must be involved in the illegal trade?"

"It seemed like a reasonable theory. I regret any misunderstandings."

"Misunderstandings?" She leaned forward slightly. "Calling me a thief comes under the heading of insults, not misunderstandings."

"If it makes any difference, I'm not especially concerned with your professional ethics."

"It makes a difference, all right," she said ominously. "A big difference."

"Be fair, Miss Smith. No one expects to find a legitimate para-archaeologist working at a place like Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors." He paused. "And then there was that business with the body in the sarcophagus this morning."

"I knew you were going to hold that against me." She flung out a hand in disgust. "One lousy body and you leap to the conclusion that I'm up to my ears in the illegal trade."

"It wasn't finding the body that made me think you might have some contacts in the business, it was the fact that you seemed well acquainted with the victim. I'm told that, among other things, Chester Brady was a ruin rat."

Her mouth opened, closed, and then opened again. "Oh." After a moment she settled wearily back into her chair. "I suppose that could lead a person to some inaccurate conclusions."

"I appreciate your cutting me some slack on that point." He took another cautious swallow of wine and pondered the razor-thin view of the Old Wall. "So how did you come to know Brady?"

Lydia slanted him a meditative glance. Out of the corner of his eye he studied her expressive, intelligent face. He got the feeling that she was debating just how much to tell him. He would no doubt get the highly edited version of the story, he thought. She had no reason to confide in him.

Not that he didn't already know a good deal about her. In the past twenty-four hours he had made it a point to learn a lot. He was aware of the two days she'd spent trapped underground in the Dead City six months ago. His people in Resonance had briefed him on her medical reports—reports that were supposed to be private and confidential but that were extraordinarily easy to come by if you had money and connections. He had plenty of both.

This morning when he'd walked into her office and seen the gutsy determination in her eyes, he'd immediately dismissed the opinions of the para-rez psychiatrists. Whatever else she was, Lydia was not weak or delicate. He knew another fighter when he saw one.

The little rush of pure sexual awareness that went through him in that first moment was a warning. He had chosen to ignore it. That, he reflected, might not have been one of his smarter decisions. But he knew himself well enough to realize that he was not going to change his mind.

"I met Chester a few years ago," Lydia said after a while. "He was a strong ephemeral-energy para-resonator."

"A tangler?"

"Yes. But he came from nothing. No family, no proper schooling. He never went to the university. Never studied archaeology the way most good tanglers do. He was never allowed into the Society."

"That's not exactly a mark against him. Everyone knows the Society of Para-archaeologists is as arrogant and elitist as they come."

She glowered. "I agree that the Society is inclined to be a bit stiff-necked, academically speaking. But it's because of their high standards and strict admission requirements that tanglers haven't got the same disreputable public image as those ghost-hunters in the Guilds."

"The Guilds have standards," he made himself say in a neutral tone.

"Hah. What the Guilds have are bosses who run things the way gangster bosses run their gangs, and everyone knows it. In this town, the Guild boss is Mercer Wyatt, and I can assure you that whatever standards he imposes have nothing to do with academic qualifications or credentials."

Emmett contemplated the bright flash of anger that lit her eyes. "It's no secret that there's a lot of professional rivalry between hunters and tanglers, but you seem to have taken it to an extreme."

"Whatever else you can say about the members of the Society, we're respected professionals, not members of an organization that is only one step above an underworld mob."

"I believe that we were discussing Chester Brady."

Lydia blinked a few times, scowled, and then subsided back into her chair. "Yeah, Poor Chester."

"You said he never gained admission to the Society?"

"He preferred to work the, uh, fringes of the antiquities trade."

"Meaning he was a thief?"

"Well, yes. But I sort of liked him anyway. At least, when I wasn't mad as hell at him. He really was an incredible tangler, you know. Very few could resonate with the ephemeral energy in the illusion traps the way he could. I once saw him de-rez a whole series of vicious little traps in one of the catacombs." She broke off abruptly and dabbed surreptitiously at the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her shirt.

"How did you become friends?"

"He runs—ran—a little shop in the Old Quarter near the east wall. Sort of a combination pawnshop and antiquities gallery. Small-time stuff. Anyhow, a couple of years ago he ripped off a little tomb vase from the lab where I was working. I traced it to his shop. Confronted him. We got to talking, and one thing led to another."

"You bonded with a small-time thief? Just like that?" Emmett said in surprise.

Her jaw tightened. "I got my tomb vase back first. As a gesture of thanks for not handing him over to the authorities, Chester did a small favor for me. As time went on, he did other favors."

"What kind of favors?"

She turned her glass between her fingers. "He knew everyone involved in Dead City work, legal and illegal. He knew who could be trusted and who would rip you off without a second thought. He also knew who was hiding a major find and who'd just secured funding from questionable sources. There's a lot of competition among the excavation teams, you see. Inside information is useful."

"There's always a lot of competition when there's a lot of money at stake."

"It's not only the money. Careers are made and broken out there on the sites."

"So good old Chester clued you in on the players in the business?"

"Something like that."

Emmett looked at her. "What did you do for him in return?"

"I… talked to him. And once I listed him as a consulting source in a paper I published in the Journal of Para-archaeology." She smiled sadly. "Chester really got a kick out of that."

"You said you talked to him." Emmett paused. "What did you talk about?"

"Lots of things. Chester spent years underground. Illegally, of course, but he sure knew a lot of stuff. Sometimes we talked about how it felt to go into para-resonate mode with the really old illusion traps. The kind that can suck you into a nightmare before you know what hit you."

"I see."

"Chester was a loner, but even loners get lonely occasionally. And tanglers need to talk to other tanglers sometimes. The Society provides more than just decent career opportunities for ephemeral-energy para-resonators. It functions as a club. A place where you can meet and talk to other people, share experiences."

"But Brady wasn't a member of the club."

She shook her head. "No. So he talked to me instead."

"In other words, Brady was an outcast tangler who sometimes pined for company, and you provided it?"