Falling Awake(3)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

The shrinks had a word for it. Closure.

the following morning Ellis flashed his Mapstone Investigations ID at the manager of the apartment house on the outskirts of Raleigh where Katherine had lived and asked to borrow the key.

“Place hasn’t been cleaned yet,” the manager warned.

“No problem,” Ellis said.

He let himself into the apartment, closed the door and took a moment to steep himself in the gloomy shadows. He was intensely conscious, as he always was on such occasions, of the respect owed to the memory of the dead.

After a moment, he walked slowly through the apartment, examining every detail closely, storing up the images to be examined later in his dreams.

The blood that had soaked the beige carpet had dried to a terrible, all-too-familiar shade of muddy brown. The killer had toppled the bookcase, emptied drawers and yanked pictures off the walls, no doubt in an attempt to create the impression of a wild, frantic burglary.

When he finished the unpleasant tour he returned to the living room and stood for a while near the patch of dried blood.

That was when he noticed the one object that did not look as if it belonged in the apartment. The crime scene tape had come down. The police had obviously not considered the item to be evidence. He picked it up and tucked it under his arm.

At the door he paused one last time, allowing the dark, haunting atmosphere to flow over and around him.

I’ll find him, Katherine, he vowed.

2

BELVEDERE CENTER FOR SLEEP RESEARCH, NEAR LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

i had this really weird dream last night,” Ken Payne said from the doorway of Isabel Wright’s tiny office.

“Sorry, Ken, I don’t have time to talk about your dream right now.” Isabel picked up a stack of computer printouts that was only a little higher than Mount Rushmore. She started toward her desk. “I’ve got an appointment with the new director in a few minutes.”

“This will only take a minute.” Ken lowered his voice and checked the hallway furtively. “In the dream I’m driving a car toward an intersection and I know I have to brake or there will be a crash but I can’t take my foot off the accelerator.”

“Ken, please . . .” The toe of her shoe struck the heap of dream logs she had been forced to pile on the floor because every other surface in the cramped room was covered with books, journals and notebooks.

She staggered under the impact. The stack of printouts in her arms wobbled ominously, affecting her balance. She felt herself start to topple to the side.

“Oh, damn.”

“Here, let me take those.” Ken moved out of the doorway and deftly plucked the printouts from her hands.

“Thank you.” Relieved of her burden, she grabbed the back of her desk chair and managed to steady herself.

Sphinx, Martin Belvedere’s large, ill-tempered tortoiseshell cat, glared from behind the steel grid door of his carrying cage. Isabel knew that excessive human commotion irritated him. Actually, there were a lot of things that irritated Sphinx. He was not in a good mood in the first place because life had changed drastically for him a few days earlier, when Martin Belvedere had dropped dead from a heart attack. Now he was fuming because she had stuffed him into the carrier.

Ken peered around the stack of reports, searching the cluttered office. “Where do you want me to put them?”

She pushed several annoying tendrils of hair out of her eyes, mentally cursing Mr. Nicholas, her new hairstylist.

Mr. Nicholas was only the latest in a long series of stylists who had promised her the sun, moon and stars. More to the point, he had practically guaranteed that the new cut he had created for her, a style that curled just above her shoulders and framed her face with airy wisps of hair in various lengths, would give her instant sex appeal. The sucker had lied through his perfect white teeth. Her social life had not taken a great leap forward since the last trip to the salon. It had, in fact, slid backward a few notches.

But deep down she knew that, even as she mentally heaped recrimination upon his handsome head, she could not really blame Mr. Nicholas. She had no one to blame for her wretched social life but herself.

For as long as she could remember, the only thing men wanted to do to her or with her was tell her their dreams.

Not that she was interested in dating Ken Payne, she thought. He was a cheerful, good-natured sort, always ready with a smile and a funny story; the kind of friend you could call when you needed someone to help you move. He had no doubt been the class clown back in elementary school. But he was in love with a woman named Susan. Isabel knew that the only thing stopping him from asking his girlfriend to marry him was his recurring dream.

She motioned toward the corner of her desk. “You can set the printouts there.”

“You sure? What about those old dream logs?”

“Just put the printouts on top of them, please.”

“Okay.” Ken cautiously set the stack down. He took a step back, eyeing the unstable-looking result with a dubious expression. “What the hell happened in here, anyway? Place looks like a cyclone hit it. Your office is always a little chaotic but this clutter is a lot worse than usual.”

“The new Dr. Belvedere ordered all of his father’s papers cleared out of the executive office this morning when he took charge. The janitors were told to take everything to the trash bin out back. I barely managed to catch them in time to rescue this stuff. Five minutes later and I would have had to dig it all out of the garbage.”

Ken grimaced and looked at Sphinx. “So, you not only wind up saving the old man’s cat from the pound, you also salvaged thirty or forty years’ worth of Belvedere’s crazy private research. You’re too soft-hearted, Isabel.”

Sphinx flattened his ears. Isabel stiffened and pushed her new, black-framed glasses up on her nose. In addition to spending a fortune on hairstylists in the past few months, she had also invested heavily in expensive, fashionable optical wear in an attempt to find a look.

The exotic, elegantly sculpted frames had been designed in Italy. The salesperson in the optical shop had assured her that they made a statement and brought out the green-gold color of her eyes but she had serious doubts. She had a nasty feeling that another trip to the optician’s shop was on the horizon.

That was what came of finally obtaining a professional-level position with an excellent salary and benefits, she thought. The exhilaration of having a stable income at last had enabled her to splurge on a variety of long-delayed indulgences. Her former career as an operator on the Psychic Dreamer Hotline had not stretched to high-end salons and Italian spectacles.