Leo swung around. "Are you serious?"
"Why not? I could use some backup. Just in case."
Twenty minutes later Leo studied a small nondescript house through the Synchron's front window. "How do you know that this Alfred Wilkes is the man who forged the journal?"
"The source of my information on this is highly reliable." Nick opened the door. "You coming?"
"Yeah. I'm coming." Leo looked wary but determined. He got out of the car and stood waiting as Nick came around the front of the vehicle. "The name on the mailbox is Boyd, not Wilkes. You sure this is the right place?"
"I'm sure. Let's go." Nick went up the walk of the house.
"You're going to just knock on the guy's door?" Leo asked, incredulous.
"Got a better suggestion?"
"I guess not. But Wilkes must know who you are. Why would he open the door to you?"
"Maybe because he'll be afraid to not open it." Nick knocked twice and waited.
There was no response.
"See?" Leo looked morosely satisfied. "I told you he wouldn't answer."
"Let's go around back."
"Huh? Wait. What are you going to do?"
Nick did not bother to respond. He walked quickly around the corner, down the narrow space that separated Wilkes's house from its neighbors, and arrived at a small, tidy backyard. Leo followed, looking more uneasy than ever.
He stood watching as Nick studied the door. "Look, if you're thinking of breaking in or something, you can count me out."
"All right. Wait for me in the car." Nick examined the lock as he pulled the thin driving gloves out of his pocket. He was interested to see that the mechanism was much more sophisticated than most jelly-ice house locks.
But it was still child's play for a matrix-talent whose every instinct was to seek out patterns. Even without a prism to focus for him, Nick had no problem with locks. He pulled on the gloves and set to work.
Leo made no move to return to the car. He stood watching, first with sharp concern and acute disapproval and then with gathering curiosity and fascination as Nick made short work of the lock's secrets.
"Where'd you learn how to do that?" he asked as Nick opened the back door.
"I had what some would call a misspent youth."
"Yeah, I'll just bet you did."
Nick stepped into the kitchen. "Feel that?"
"Feel what?" Leo glanced around at the pristine interior. "Something wrong?"
"I don't know yet. Don't touch anything."
"Believe me, I wasn't going to touch a damned thing."
"Good." Nick walked through the house the same way he had once walked through the jungles of the Western Islands, with every sense on full alert. The feeling of wrongness was strong, but there was no outward sign of it.
"Looks like Wilkes is a perfectionist to a fault," Leo observed in a subdued voice as he glanced into the small bathroom. "A place for everything and everything in its place."
It was true, Nick thought. Each of the rooms in the single-story house was in painstakingly neat condition. He noted absently that there was a pattern to the order of everything from the way in which the books were shelved to the arrangement of the furniture. Taken as a whole, it all formed a coherent matrix that spoke volumes about Alfred Wilkes.
There was no sign of the owner of the house. But the sense of wrongness persisted.
"Maybe he's out grocery shopping," Leo suggested.
"I don't think so." Nick sent out a short surge of talent.
Without a prism he could not hold a focus. But he could use the wild energy long enough to catch some glimpses of the internal workings of the patterns that surrounded him.
For a few seconds the scene around him came into exquisitely sharp focus. The position of every item in the room assumed a deeper significance.
Too neat. Too orderly. The condition of the house was too perfect, even for an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist. Nobody lived in these rooms. This was a forgery of a real house.
Realization came to Nick as his flickering talent dissipated. He looked up. "There's no attic, so there must be a basement. Look for a door."
Leo frowned. "I don't see one."
"It has to be here somewhere."
"Not everyone is into secret rooms that way you are, Chastain."
"Whoever owns this house definitely has another place where he lives and works." Nick walked slowly back through each of the perfect little rooms.
He found no telltale lines in the walls, no secret doors inside the closets. Together he and Leo pulled up the area rugs, but there was no trapdoor in the floor.
"The rooms where Wilkes really lives have to be here somewhere. Stonebraker is never wrong when it comes to this kind of stuff." Nick reached the kitchen and stood gazing at the various appliances. "Notice anything missing?"
Leo glanced around. "Nope. Looks like a normal kitchen."
"Except for one thing. The icerator isn't humming."
Leo looked at the large white appliance in the far corner. "You're right. Maybe he turned it off."
"Or maybe he uses it for something besides keeping food cold." Nick walked across the kitchen and opened the icerator door.
There were no shelves or containers of food inside. The interior was at room temperature. At the back of the wide appliance was the thin, almost invisible outline of a door.
Nick reached into the icerator and shoved hard against the back panel. It swung open without protest to reveal a flight of steps.
Leo whistled soundlessly. "Five hells. How did you guess?"
"You've seen one hidden entrance, you've seen 'em all. Ready?"
"Yeah. I hate to admit it, but this is getting interesting."
"It does kind of grow on you." Nick stepped into the icerator.
Leo followed quickly.
Halfway down the basement steps, Nick knew that he had found the real house, the place where Alfred Wilkes lived and plied his trade.
There was another complete apartment here, including kitchen, bath, and bedroom. But most of the downstairs suite was devoted to what was obviously a workroom.
And it was a shambles.
Leo whistled softly. "Synergistic hell."
Benches, racks of chemicals, tools, reams of paper, and various instruments were scattered around the room. Drawers stood open, their contents in jumbled disarray. A lamp lay smashed on the floor.
Nick studied the scene closely. Superficially, it bore a striking resemblance to Morris Fenwick's ransacked bookshop. But there was something different about the matrix pattern of this mess. Unlike the other situation, which had struck him as a completely random piece of vandalism, this bore the subtle earmarks of a frantic but deliberate search.
"Someone really tore this place apart." Leo sounded shaken.
"The question is, did he find whatever it was that he was looking for." Nick crouched down to study some papers scattered on the floor.
They were miscellaneous receipts for some expensive office equipment. Forged receipts, he concluded after a closer glance. Probably commissioned by one of Wilkes's clients for use in an embezzlement scheme.
"If Wilkes was a professional forger he must have made a few enemies over the years," Leo noted.
"Yes." Nick rose and began to walk slowly through the disarray, searching for some pattern that would give him a clue to the object of the hasty search.
"I wonder what happened to Wilkes."
"I don't see any signs of a struggle. No blood on the floor. I don't think he was around when this happened."
Leo looked up from an examination of a small printing press. "He probably decided to take a long vacation in one of the other city-states after he finished forging the Chastain journal. If I'd been in his shoes, I'd have gone all the way out to the Western Islands. Maybe a little farther. He must have known that sooner or later you'd come calling."