Falling Awake(14)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

Ellis did not take his eyes off the photo. “A meek, lonely, nervous little spinster, huh?”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“She might be meek. She might be lonely. She might be a spinster. But whatever else she is, I seriously doubt that she’s the nervous type.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Hell, Lawson, given the kinds of dreams you and I have asked her to decode this past year, she must have nerves of steel.”

There was a short pause on the other end. Somewhere in the midst of the long silence, Ellis became aware of an unpleasant, burning smell.

The soy sausages. He had neglected to turn off the burner.

“Damn.” Straightening suddenly, he seized a towel, wrapped it around the handle of the frying pan and whipped the singed phony sausages off the stove. Smoke wafted across the kitchen. Alarmed that it would set off the detector, he opened a window.

“Everything okay there?” Lawson asked.

“I just burned lunch.”

“You still sticking to that mostly vegetarian diet you started a while back?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t see how you can stand all that healthy green stuff. Doesn’t seem natural, you know?”

“You get used to it after a while.” Sort of. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the fake sausages.

“A man’s gotta have protein. How can you survive without the basic nutrients in good barbeque?”

“I still eat a little fish. Could we get back to the subject of Isabel Wright?”

“I was about to say that I’ve had a lot more experience with the research-oriented personality type than you have. Trust me, that kind can deal with stuff that would make a hardened agent shudder as long as they only have to look at it in a lab setting. Put them in the field and they fall apart, sure, but they’re happy as Santa’s little elves when they’re surrounded by their computers and their instruments.”

Jack Lawson was right ninety-nine percent of the time when it came to judging other people, Ellis reflected. It was one of the things that made Lawson so good at his job.

But one percent of the time he was wrong. When Lawson did make mistakes, they tended to be big ones.

Ellis was pretty sure that Lawson was wrong about Isabel Wright. He had picked up enough telltale hints and nuances to know that when she decoded his dreams, she didn’t do it from some safe, detached academic place. He did not think she was immune to the violence embedded in the really bad dreams he sent to her to analyze.

“What if Isabel Wright doesn’t want to work for you?” Ellis asked. “Got a fallback plan?”

“Don’t need one. You’re going to convince her that Frey-Salter would be a terrific career move. Tell her about the medical benefits.”

Absently Ellis rolled his right shoulder, trying to ease the dull ache. He’d already had two operations on it and the orthopedic surgeon was talking enthusiastically about eventually doing a complete joint replacement. The doctors had assured him that there was a high probability that arthritis would set in a couple of decades earlier than normal because of the damage done by the bullet.

“Forget it, Lawson, you don’t want me to go into the details of Frey-Salter’s fabulous medical benefits. My viewpoint on that subject is a little skewed, due to the fact that I nearly got killed working for you.”

“So push the retirement plan, instead. I don’t care what you have to promise her to convince her to come into Frey-Salter. Just don’t let her get away. I can’t afford to lose her.” Jack gave it a beat before adding, “Neither can you.”

He couldn’t argue with that. “Got to admit, she’s a business asset for me.”

She was a lot more than that, but damned if he would admit it to Lawson. He was having a hard enough time acknowledging the truth to himself.

“All right. I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But no guarantees. Got a new address for her?”

“Beth faxed it to me a few minutes ago. Hang on a second. It’s here somewhere.” The sound of papers and files being pushed around on top of a desk filled the phone line for a time before Lawson spoke again. “Here we go. Town called Roxanna Beach, somewhere on the coast out there in California.”

“I’ve heard of it. Never been there. Somewhere north of LA, I think.”

“She’s got some family there. Sister and a brother-in-law. Beth says she’s renting a house. Here’s the address. Ready?”

Ellis reached for a pen and a pad of paper. “Yeah.”

“Number Seventeen Sea Breeze Lane.”

“Got it.”

“Get moving on this, Ellis. As things stand, Isabel Wright is a loose cannon. I want her back under control as soon as possible.”

Ellis tossed the pen aside. “Uh-huh.”

“Call me after you find her.”

“Right.”

He hung up the phone, folded his arms and contemplated the photo on the refrigerator.

It was a picture of a slender woman dressed in a white lab coat. She had excellent shoulders and a proud, determined way of holding herself. She also had an interesting, intelligent face with big, mysterious eyes veiled by a pair of black-framed glasses. Her dark hair was pulled straight back into an elegantly severe twist that called attention to the delicacy of the nape of her neck.

In the photo she was smiling joyously, almost glowing, as she examined a vase of orchids that sat in the middle of her desk. He had no trouble at all imagining the passion hidden behind the lab coat and the glasses.

Definitely not a meek, nervous little spinster, he thought.

Tango Dancer.

5

the auditorium was filled to capacity. Isabel sat in the third to the last row, notebook and pen on the small desk that extended from the arm of the plush, theater-style seat. She was watching the speaker onstage, concentrating so she would not miss anything Tamsyn Strickland said, when she felt a whispery, atavistic thrill stir the hair on the nape of her neck.

Following an instinct that was probably as old as the species, she turned her head to look back over her shoulder to see who or what was closing in on her.

A man had entered the dimly lit chamber. He stood in the shadows behind the last row of seats. It was difficult to make him out clearly because of the low level of illumination but she could see from the way he stood that he was not interested in what was going on at the front of the room. Instead he took off a pair of dark sunglasses and examined the group of seminar attendees the way a large hunting cat studies the crowd gathered at the watering hole. Selecting his prey.