Sam turned the corner at the end of a row of shelving and stopped at the sight of the crumpled form sprawled on the floor.
“Thaddeus,” Abby said.
She said the name with grim resignation. She had known this was coming, Sam thought.
She slipped past him and hurried to the end of the aisle to crouch beside the body. Newton hung back, whining a little.
Abby touched the dead man’s throat. Sam knew there would be no pulse. He was sure that Abby knew that, too.
She drew her fingertips away and looked up at him. There was a forlorn sadness in her eyes that he knew he would not soon forget. He walked to the body and hunkered down beside it.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“There’s no blood,” Abby said. “I don’t see any wounds. Perhaps he died of a heart attack or a stroke. He was eighty-six, after all.”
“The authorities will conclude that the death was due to natural causes, but you know as well as I do that is probably not what happened here.”
“He was just an old man who loved his books,” she said.
An old man who loved his books so much that he was willing to do business with some very dangerous people, Sam thought. But he did not say it.
He turned Webber faceup. The body was surprisingly heavy. They always are, he reflected. There was a reason the term dead weight had been coined a long time ago.
Scraggly gray hair and a wildly overgrown, unkempt beard framed sunken cheeks and a bulbous nose. Webber was dressed in a tattered robe and ancient pajamas.
“He heard an intruder during the night,” Sam said. “Came out of the bedroom to see what was going on.”
“Someone got past his security system.” Abby rose and looked around. “It would have taken a lot of digging to find this place. He did all of his business anonymously over the Internet.”
“As you pointed out, if you want to find someone badly enough, it’s usually possible. Even the most sophisticated computer security systems are vulnerable.”
“I know,” Abby said. “Thaddeus shelled out for a high-end system, but it’s not like he was a large corporation or the military.”
“Which, as we all know, get hacked, too. The thing that narrows our list of suspects in this situation is the cause of death.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen this kind of thing before, Abby. This was death by paranormal means. Not many people could kill this way. It almost always involves physical contact.”
“Are you certain?”
He got to his feet. “This is the kind of crime I investigate for that private contractor I told you about. No, I can’t be absolutely certain yet, but death by paranormal means is my working theory until proven otherwise. A heart attack would be way too much of a coincidence.”
Abby took a deep, shuddering breath. “Maybe someone used one of his encrypted books to do this, someone with my kind of talent.”
“It’s a possibility, but I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, there just are not a lot of folks who can do what you do. For another, being able to short-circuit someone’s aura long enough to knock him unconscious is one thing. The ability to actually stop a man’s heart with psychic energy is something else. It would take a whole different level of talent.”
“Maybe not.” Abby rubbed her arms as if she was cold. “If the victim was old and frail and was having heart problems, a severe shock to the senses might be all it would take.”
“There is that. Let’s take a look at that vault you mentioned.”
“All right.”
She led the way to the small kitchen, Newton hanging at her heels, and opened what looked like a closet door. Sam saw a flight of stone steps that went down into darkness. Abby flipped a light switch, revealing a concrete chamber piled high with cartons, crates and shelves of books.
“I don’t see a vault or a safe,” Sam said.
“That’s because Thaddeus took care to make it as invisible as possible. The door to the vault is in the floor.”
She went down the steps ahead of him, wove a path through the crowded space and stopped at what looked like a nondescript section of the concrete floor. She shoved aside a heavy book cart and revealed a small computerized lock set into the floor. She crouched, entered a code and stepped back.
“Webber gave you the code?”
“I think I’m the only one he ever trusted,” Abby said.
A large square section of the floor rose on invisible hinges. A heavy wave of psi poured out of the lower basement, jangling Sam’s senses. At the top of the basement steps, Newton whined again.
“I see what you mean about the heat in the vault,” Sam said. “It would take at least some degree of talent just to push through that high-energy atmosphere.”
“Thaddeus kept all of his most valuable items down there.” Abby descended a few steps and flipped another switch. She looked around. “I don’t think the killer got this far. Nothing appears to be disturbed.”
“Whoever killed Webber was not interested in anything except the lab book.”
“Which Thaddeus did not have.” Abby turned off the lights and climbed back up the steps. “The bastard killed him for no reason.”
“Not necessarily. The killer may have been after information.”
Abby entered another code into the vault lock. She watched the section of floor glide back into place with an expression of pain mingled with anger. “Such as?”
Sam took a few seconds to put himself into the mind of the killer. “If it were me, I would have come here to get the identities of the most likely auction dealers.”
Abby gave him an odd look.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s just that for a moment there you sounded like you actually knew what the killer was thinking.”
He said nothing.
Abby blinked and collected herself quickly. “Right. That’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Thaddeus knows all the players. If there is an auction about to go down, he would have known the dealers most likely to handle it.”
“The question, then, is whether or not Webber gave up the information before he died.”
“He would have had no reason to risk his neck to save his competitors. In the deep end, it’s every man for himself. Yes, if he felt threatened, he would have given the killer a few names and contacts. I’m sure the monster got what he wanted, and then he went ahead and murdered poor Thaddeus anyway.”
“Let’s go.”
She turned quickly and went up the steps to the main floor of the house. Sam followed her. Newton was waiting for them. He seemed relieved to have them aboveground again. Sam closed the basement door.
Abby surveyed the crowded shelves. “It won’t be long before everyone in the rare-book community knows that a cache of extremely valuable books has been left unguarded. But only a very small number of people know the location of this house.”
“The killer found Webber,” Sam pointed out. “That means others can find this place, too.”
“What are we going to do about Thaddeus? We can’t just leave him there.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “We can, and we will. As soon as we get to an anonymous phone, we’ll call nine-one-one and tell the authorities that we’re concerned neighbors who are worried about Webber because no one has seen him outside his house for a time.”
She frowned. “Why does the call have to be anonymous?”
“At this stage, I don’t want anyone to know that we found the body. We need to leave. Now.” He started toward the front door and stopped.
“What is it?” Abby asked.
He looked back toward the body. “What was Webber doing in that aisle when he died?”