Running Hot (The Arcane Society #5)(31)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“What made you do that?”

The question threw her for a couple of seconds. Why would the company librarian care about the boss’s aura?

“I suppose,” she said simply, “because he was Martin Crocker. In the world in which he moved, he was a rock star. And he was my boss.”

“I assume you profiled him?”

She nodded and concentrated on the horizon. “He was a complicated man. Driven.”

“Were you attracted to him?”

“Not in the way you mean.” More truth. “But I suppose you could say I admired him. Everyone in the company respected his business abilities. He was Martin Crocker, after all. He built an empire.”

“Go on.”

“During the last few months of his life, Crocker was working on a major project. He requested a number of detailed searches.”

“All of which were hand delivered by you?”

“Yes. I made a number of trips to the executive suite and on several of those trips I saw Crocker. Something changed in his aura during that time. I noticed the dark energy waves. They were small, almost undetectable at first. But they grew stronger as the weeks went by.”

“What did you think was happening?”

She folded her arms very tightly. “It occurred to me that he might be developing some sort of mental illness that was psychic in origin. Something about his dark energy scared the living daylights out of me.”

He considered that a moment. “Okay, it’s spooky stuff, I’ll give you that.”

“One day when I was summoned to the executive suite, I noticed two men going into Crocker’s office. Both gave off bad vibes. You couldn’t miss them, not if you were an aura talent.”

“You checked out their patterns.”

“Sure.”

“And?” he prompted.

“And I saw the same dark energy patterns in their fields.”

“What did you do?”

“Started working on my résumé. What else? I’ve been around enough freaks in my life to know when it’s time to bail. But before I could land another job, the news broke that Crocker had disappeared while on a trip to his private island. There was a lot of speculation. If you followed the story, you know that everyone had a theory. There were rumors. Some of them hit the papers.”

“What rumors?” he asked.

“That Crocker was involved with some drug lords and there was a falling-out. That was when I assumed that Crocker himself was doing drugs.” Okay, that was a minor tweaking of the truth.

“The theory was that the drug lords got rid of him?”

“It wasn’t exactly an off-the-wall conclusion,” she said. “Crocker World was headquartered in Miami, after all.”

Luther was silent for a long time, his expression cop-hard. Quickly she reviewed her story. It sounded tight. She was satisfied with it, especially given the fact that she’d had only a few minutes to put it together. It helped, of course, that most of the facts were true, including the rumors about Martin’s involvement in drug trafficking.

She risked a peek at Luther’s aura. Her heart sank. He believed parts of her story but not all of it. Maybe it was time to pull out one of the handful of identities she had constructed from the Society’s genealogy files and disappear. Good thing she hadn’t gotten a dog. She was surprised by how much the thought depressed her, though. One night with Luther and she had begun building a fantasy of happily ever after. She, of all people, should have known better.

“I’m going to call Fallon,” Luther said.

He took out his phone.

FIFTEEN

“You’ve got three Nightshade operatives under surveillance?” Fallon demanded. The fierce excitement in his voice vibrated through the phone. “Eubanks is one of them?”

“Three possible Nightshade operatives,” Luther said, clamping a lid down on his own adrenaline rush. “Plus their bodyguards. There is also that unidentified hunter in the vicinity, the one we ran into last night. Don’t forget him. Looks like we have a regular little convention of psychics here.”

“You say that you and Grace can both identify the Nightshade people by the patterns in their auras?”

“Slow down, Fallon. I’m telling you that we can see some very unusual energy in their fields, and Grace says that the psychic aspects of all of the profiles are abnormal. We think the effect is caused by some kind of drug. That’s all we know for certain at this point.”

“Any drug that has such a consistent effect on psychic talent in several different people has got to be based on the founder’s formula.”

“Okay, I agree that sounds like a reasonable assumption. But what if there’s another drug out there that produces similar effects?”

“That would be one hell of a coincidence,” Fallon said. “No, this is Nightshade. Don’t forget, Eubanks is a respected member of the Society. All the evidence indicates that the Nightshade organization has some high-ranking, well-connected talents planted within the Arcane community. That’s probably how they got their hands on the formula in the first place, and that’s how they’ve managed to stay one step ahead of us.”

“Wait a second. Are you telling me that you think Nightshade still has people planted within the Society?”

“Yes. What’s more, Zack Jones agrees with me. We’ve been talking about the problem damn near every day since he took over the Master’s Chair a few weeks ago.”

Fallon had been known to leap off the deep end occasionally when it came to his beloved theories. But Zack Jones, the new Master of the Society, was, by all accounts, cool-headed, smart and highly intuitive. If he was on the same page with Fallon when it came to Nightshade, there was a good chance Fallon’s conclusion was right.

“Okay,” he conceded. “Here’s something else to chew on. Grace has seen similar waves before.”

“Shit. Where?”

“In the aura of her old boss, Martin Crocker, and in the auras of two men with whom he had dealings.”

“Son of a bitch,” Fallon said softly. “So Crocker was Nightshade.”

“You’re leaping to conclusions again.”

“It’s what I do. Damn. You know, I was getting suspicious of Crocker. He was high profile and he was Arcane so he popped up on my radar occasionally. I had started to wonder if he was into some dirty side business. Figured it was either arms dealing or drugs, though. Never made the Nightshade connection.”