Falling Awake(62)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

The carriage rolls past the window. She looks into the next room and sees Martin Belvedere slumped over his desk. The door to his inner office is closed. As she watches it opens. But it is Randolph who walks into the scene, not her. He smiles.

“Going to be some big changes at the center now that my father is gone,” Randolph says. “No more lemon yogurt.”

She continues to stare into the dream chamber and realizes she is peering into a seemingly bottomless well of night.

She hears the rattle of harness and the iron-shod hooves of the horses striking the paving stones. The carriage starts to roll forward. But just as the scene starts to slip away she sees a shadowy figure move in the hall behind Randolph. He is not alone at the scene of the crime. She leans forward, trying to get a clear picture of the other person but the darkness of the hall is too deep.

Somewhere in the distance her dream lover calls her name, shattering the trance.

“Isabel . . .”

She came out of the dream with a suddenness that evidently annoyed Sphinx. He lashed his tail.

“Ellis?” She sat up slowly, shaking off the trancelike effects of the Level Five dream.

“Sorry, honey.” Ellis moved in the shadows, reaching out to switch on one of the reading lamps. “Didn’t realize you were asleep.”

“It’s okay.” She swung her feet to the floor and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I was dreaming.”

“Yeah?” He watched her with dark curiosity. “Regular or extreme?”

“Extreme. Gavin Hardy and Martin Belvedere featured prominently. What about you? Any luck?”

“Yeah, but if I’m right, the problem is even bigger than I thought.” He lowered himself into the wing-back chair. Controlled tension radiated from him. His eyes were sharp and cold. “I went into the dream to search for possible patterns involving Scargill and the men he used from that behavior modification program at the Brackleton Correctional Facility. But the images that kept recurring did not involve him or the prison.”

“What did you see?”

“Lawson,” Ellis said. “Sitting at his desk, his phone in his hand. He had either just talked to Beth or he was about to talk to her.”

“Go on.”

“He tells her everything. She’s still his partner, even if they are having problems at the moment. He couldn’t run his operation without her.”

“Back up, you’re going too fast for me.”

Reflectively, Ellis massaged his right shoulder with his left hand. “If I’m right about Scargill faking his own death, he had one real big issue to worry about after he staged his grand finale.”

“What?”

Ellis dropped his hand and shrugged. “He needed to know whether or not Lawson bought the story. To feel safe, Scargill had to find a way to keep tabs on what happened at Frey-Salter after he disappeared.”

She let that sink in. The implications were unnerving.

“You think he has an accomplice in Lawson’s operation?” she asked uneasily. “Someone who leaks information to him?”

“It’s a possibility. He uses other people when he needs them, but he wouldn’t want them to have too much information.”

“So how do you think he arranged to figure out how his game plan was going down with Lawson?”

“I can’t be positive, but I’ve got a feeling the message in my dream is that he did it the old-fashioned way. He bugged Lawson’s fancy, high-tech, super-encrypted phone.”

For an instant she was speechless. “But that means that every time you talked to Lawson—”

He nodded, his face hard. “And every time Lawson talked to Beth, Scargill may have been listening.”

She folded her arms and thrust her hands inside the sleeves of her robe. “Was he good enough with computers to do that? What about opportunity? Could he have simply walked into Lawson’s office and messed around with the phone?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m inclined to doubt that Scargill was that good. He was sure big on playing the online games but I never saw him take an interest in any of the serious software programs that Lawson uses for dream research and analyses. And Lawson sure as hell never mentioned anything about Scargill being a tech wizard.”

“So?”

Ellis’s mouth tightened. “So there was someone at Lawson’s agency who was good enough to bug an encrypted phone, someone who would have had opportunity and who might have had motive.”

“What motive?”

“Love.”

Comprehension hit her in a shock wave. “Katherine Ralston.”

“Yes. I think he used her to bug the phone for him after he faked his death. Hell, maybe he used her to change the morgue records at the hospital, too. Then he murdered her.”

She shuddered. “You’re right. This is a really big problem.”

Ellis was silent for a beat. “There is one bit of good news in all this.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve been careful about what I’ve said to Lawson on the phone in the past few days because I didn’t want him to think that I had gone completely over the edge where Scargill was concerned. He doesn’t know about my suspicions concerning the fire in your storage locker, and I haven’t had a chance to tell him about the link to the behavior modification program at Brackleton.”

“You did tell Lawson that you were suspicious about Gavin Hardy’s death,” she reminded him.

“Yes, but Lawson ordered me not to get involved, remember? He said he’d have Beth keep track of the police investigation and then he advised me that there was no hard evidence to indicate that Hardy’s death was anything but a hit-and-run.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. Assuming Scargill does have a bug on Lawson’s phone, all he knows for sure is that you’re here in Roxanna Beach because Lawson asked you to recruit me for Frey-Salter.”

“It’s something, at least. One thing’s for damn sure. I can’t risk telling Lawson anything else about this situation until I can get him outside Frey-Salter. Same goes for Beth. Those two share everything.”

“Except a bed, apparently.”

“The current separation is only temporary. Sooner or later they’ll get back together.”

She rested a hand on Sphinx’s broad head. “You said this particular separation has gone on much longer than usual because Beth discovered that Lawson had had an affair a few months ago.”