A FEW MINUTES after noon, Lydia knocked on the door across the hall from Professor Lawrence Maltby’s apartment. Cornish opened it cautiously.
“You’re back.” He squinted at her with deep suspicion. “How come?”
“I want to take another quick look inside Professor Maltby’s apartment. But the door is locked now.”
“Owner came by and locked up yesterday.”
“I see.” She shot a speculative glance at the closed door on the other side of the corridor. “I wondered if, by any chance, Maltby might have given you a key?”
“Key?”
“Neighbors do that sometimes,” she explained.
Cornish snorted. “Not in this part of town, they don’t.”
“Oh.” Well, so much for the easy way. She thought about the window that opened onto the alley. The intruders had busted the lock the night she and Emmett had discovered them inside. Perhaps the owner of the building had not had time to get it replaced.
Cornish looked sly. “But Maltby was always lockin’ himself out on the nights he went down into the tunnels. He took to hidin’ a key under a loose floorboard on the back stairs. I saw him use it a couple of times. He never knew I knew about it. Expect it’s still there.”
“Will you show me where it is?”
“Depends.” Cornish squinted. “Heard you and London got married. That makes this a Guild matter, right?”
She cleared her throat. “Sort of.”
“So if I do you a favor, it’s like doing one for the Guild.”
She cleared her throat. “Sort of.”
“A hundred will get you the key.”
“If I pay you, it’s not exactly a favor.”
Cornish shrugged. “Up to you.”
She sighed and reached into her purse. “Try twenty bucks.”
“Get real. The other night London paid me a hundred just to tell him a couple of things about Maltby. That key’s gotta be worth at least that much.”
“A hundred bucks to show me where the key is hidden? That’s outrageous.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“I don’t have a hundred on me.”
Cornish did not appear concerned. “If this is a Guild matter, London won’t stiff me. He can send the cash tomorrow.”
She did not have a lot of options here, Lydia reminded herself. “Okay, okay. A hundred bucks. Payable tomorrow. If the key works in that door.”
“It’ll work.” Cornish darted out into the hall and scuttled down the dingy corridor toward the fire stairs. “Used it myself a few times to see if he’d left any Chartreuse behind when he went out.”
“It’s so nice to have neighbors you can trust.”
Key in hand, she let herself into Maltby’s apartment and closed the door. She stood quietly for a moment, taking in the stale, sad feel of the place. No one had cleaned yet. Maltby’s books and papers still littered the floor. The overturned furniture, torn cushions, and crumpled rug appeared to be in the same positions in which the intruders had left them. It did not look as if they had returned to risk a second search. Perhaps they had concluded that whatever they were looking for was not here.
She put her purse down on the kitchen counter and began to wander slowly through the small space. The first time she had been here, there had been no opportunity to do a thorough search because there had been a dead man lying on the floor and Emmett and the cops had been pounding on the door.
When she and Emmett had come back it had been at night. They had had only the flashlights for illumination. The trapped milk carton had been a major discovery so they had not lingered to do a more in-depth search.
Today she was hoping that there might be something else of interest here. She did not know what she was looking for or what she hoped to discover, but there was simply no place else to go. All the leads from the Old Frequency College Alumni office had led to dead ends, literally.
She rezzed a light switch and discovered that the building’s owner had turned off the power in the apartment. Luckily she had remembered to bring along a flashlight. More important, today she had the added benefit of natural light coming through the small windows in the front room and the study.
She opened the refrigerator to see if there was anything else of interest inside and immediately regretted the move. In the short time that the power had been cut off, the few items of food stored inside had gone very bad.
Holding her breath, she opened her psi senses, probing for illusion-trap energy. Nothing.
Hastily she closed the door and moved on to the kitchen cupboards. In the dull light of day, she saw several small things that had escaped her notice on the first two visits: a box of matches, some poison meant for various types of urban vermin, a foul-smelling sponge. But none of the odds and ends looked promising. None carried the taint of psi energy.
She moved back out into the living room and methodically went through every book and journal on the floor and the few that had been left on the shelves. She got down on her hands and knees and searched beneath the overturned sofa.
Nothing.
She did the grimy bathroom next, checking inside tissue boxes and investigating drawers.
Nothing.
She saved the small room that Maltby had used as a study for last on the assumption that, between the intruders and Emmett and herself, it had been thoroughly searched. Nevertheless, she took her time, painstakingly exploring every nook and cranny.
She was on her hands and knees beneath the desk, about to give up, when she saw the little amber bead.
It had rolled into the corner and lodged in a dusty cobweb. The filmy stuff coated the bead, dimming the natural glow of the amber. If not for the weak sunlight plus the beam of the flashlight, she doubted that she would have noticed it at all.
Leaning forward, she poked the hilt of the flashlight into the abandoned web, breathing a sigh of relief when no seriously annoyed spider made an appearance.
The bead rolled free, making a delicate clatter on the wood floor. She picked it up and scrambled out from under the desk.
Rising to her feet, she blew off the dust and debris and held the bead to the light.
The amber gem was about half an inch long, cut in an oval shape and pierced so that it could be threaded on a string. No doubt it had once been part of a necklace or a bracelet.
Don’t get too excited, she thought. It had probably belonged to Maltby. He had been a tangler and, according to Cornish, he had spent a lot of time underground. That meant he would have worn amber.
But few men wore rez-amber in the form of beads or bracelets; besides, she had noticed Maltby’s amber the day she found his body. It had been set in an inexpensive ring.
Had Maltby had a female visitor before he died?
She rolled the bead in the palm of her hand. A small, elegantly inscribed letter A had been cut into one side. The owner’s initial?
A memory tingled at the back of her mind. Recently she had heard a woman’s name that began with the letter A.
She concentrated for a few seconds and then it came to her. Burgis’s girlfriend, the woman who had been Karen Price’s roommate at Old Frequency College, had been named Andrea Preston.
Excitement flashed through Lydia. Coincidence? I think not.
Okay, so she was feeling smug. She had a right. The bead was a genuine clue.
She removed a tissue from her shoulder bag and carefully wrapped it around the bead. She could hardly wait to show the amber to Emmett tonight.