The pleading in her eyes almost broke Rachel’s heart. She had never felt so cruel. She nodded. “You can go now. I’m sorry it had to be this way.”

“Open this,” Catch said. He was tapping a candlestick on Rachel’s shoulder.

While Amanda untied Effrom’s wrists and ankles and rubbed them to restore the circulation, Rachel examined one of the candlesticks. She gave it a quick twist and it unscrewed at the seam. From the weight of it, Rachel would have never guessed that it was hollow. As she unscrewed it, she noticed that the threads were gold. That accounted for the extra weight. Whoever had made the candlesticks had gone to great lengths to conceal the hollow interior.

The two pieces separated. A piece of parchment was tightly rolled inside. Rachel placed the base of the candlestick on the table, slid out the yellow tube of parchment, and slowly began to unroll it. The parchment crackled, and the edges flaked away as it unrolled. Rachel felt her pulse increase as the first few letters appeared. When half the page was revealed, her excitement was replaced with anxiety.

“We may be in trouble,” she said.

“Why?” Catch’s voice emanated from a spot only inches away from her face.

“I can’t read this; it’s in some foreign language — Greek, I think. Can you read Greek?”

“I can’t read at all,” Catch said. “Open the other candlestick. Maybe what we need is in there.

Rachel picked up the other candlestick and turned it in her hands. “There’s no seam on this one.”

“Look for one; it might be hidden,” the demon said.

Rachel went to the kitchen area of the cabin and got a knife from the silverware drawer to scrape away the silver. Amanda was helping Effrom get to his feet, urging him across the room.

Rachel found the seam and worked the knife into it. “I’ve got it.” She unscrewed the candlestick and pulled out a second parchment.

“Can you read this one?” Catch said.

“No. This one’s in Greek, too. We’ll have to get it translated. I don’t even know anyone who reads Greek.”

“Travis,” Catch said.

Amanda had Effrom almost to the door when she heard Travis’s name. “Is he still alive?” she asked.

“For a while,” Catch said.

“Who is this Travis?” Rachel asked. She was supposed to be the one in charge here, yet the old woman and the demon seemed to know more about what was going on than she did.

“They can’t go,” Catch said.

“Why? We have the invocation; we just need to get it translated. Let them go.”

“No,” Catch said. “If they warn Travis, he will find a way to protect the girl.”

“What girl?” Rachel felt as if she had walked into the middle of a plot-heavy mystery movie and no one was going to tell her what was happening.

“We have to get the girl and hold her hostage until Travis translates the invocation.”

“What girl?” Rachel repeated.

“A waitress at the cafe in town. Her name is Jenny.”

“Jenny Masterson? She’s a member of the coven. What does she have to do with this?”

“Travis loves her.”

“Who is Travis?”

There was a pause. Rachel, Amanda, and Effrom all stared at empty air waiting for the answer.

“He is my master,” Catch said.

“This is really weird,” Rachel said.

“You’re a little slow on the uptake, aren’t you, honey?” Effrom said.

29

RIVERA

Right in the middle of the interrogation Detective Sergeant Alphonse Rivera had a vision. He saw himself behind the counter at Seven-Eleven, bagging microwave burritos and pumping Slush-Puppies. It was obvious that the suspect, Robert Masterson, was telling the truth. What was worse was that he not only didn’t have any connection with the marijuana Rivera’s men had found in the trailer, but he didn’t have the slightest idea where The Breeze had gone.

The deputy district attorney, an officious little weasel who was only putting time in at the D.A.’s office until his fangs were sharp enough for private practice, had made the state’s position on the case clear and simple: “You’re fucked, Rivera. Cut him loose.”

Rivera was clinging to a single, micro-thin strand of hope: the second suitcase, the one that Masterson had made such a big deal about back at the trailer. It lay open on Rivera’s desk. A jumble of notebook paper, cocktail napkins, matchbook covers, old business cards, and candy wrappers stared out of the suitcase at him. On each one was written a name, an address, and a date. The dates were obviously bogus, as they went back to the 1920s. Rivera had riffled through the mess a dozen times without making any sort of connection.

Deputy Perez approached Rivera’s desk. He was doing his best to affect an attitude of sympathy, without much success. Everything he had said that morning had carried with it a sideways smirk. Twain had put it succinctly: “Never underestimate the number of people who would love to see you fail.”

“Find anything yet?” Perez asked. The smirk was there.

Rivera looked up from the papers, took out a cigarette, and lit it. A long stream of smoke came out with his sigh.

“I can’t see how any of this connects with The Breeze. The addresses are spread all over the country. The dates run too far back to be real.”

“Maybe it’s a list of connections The Breeze was planning to dump the pot on,” Perez suggested. “You know the Feds estimate that more than ten percent of the drugs in this country move through the postal system.”

“What about the dates?”

“Some kind of code, maybe. Did the handwriting check out?”

Rivera had sent Perez back to the trailer to find a sample of The Breeze’s handwriting. He had returned with a list of engine parts for a Ford truck.

“No match,” Rivera said.

“Maybe the list was written by his connection.”

Rivera blew a blast of smoke in Perez’s face. “Think about it, dipshit. I was his connection.”

“Well, someone blew your cover, and The Breeze ran.”

“Why didn’t he take the pot?”

“I don’t know, Sergeant. I’m just a uniformed deputy. This sounds like detective work to me.” Perez had stopped trying to hide his smirk. “I’d take it to the Spider if I were you.”

That made a consensus. Everyone who had seen or heard about the suitcase had suggested that Rivera take it to the Spider. He sat back in his chair and finished his cigarette, enjoying his last few moments of peace before the inevitable confrontation with the Spider. After a few long drags he stubbed the cigarette in the ashtray on his desk, gathered the papers into the suitcase, closed it, and started down the steps into the bowels of the station and the Spider’s lair.

Throughout his life Rivera had known half a dozen men nicknamed Spider. Most were tall men with angular features and the wiry agility that one associates with a wolf spider. Chief Technical Sergeant Irving Nailsworth was the exception.

Nailsworth stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed over three hundred pounds. When he sat before his consoles in the main computer room of the San Junipero Sheriff Department, he was locked into a matrix that extended not only throughout the county but to every state capital in the nation, as well as to the main computer banks at the FBI and the Justice Department in Washington. The matrix was the Spider’s web and he lorded over it like a fat black widow.

As Rivera opened the steel door that led into the computer room, he was hit with a blast of cold, dry air. Nailsworth insisted the computers functioned better in this environment, so the department had installed a special climate control and filtration system to accommodate him.

Rivera entered and, suppressing a shudder, closed the door behind him. The computer room was dark except for the soft green glow of a dozen computer screens. The Spider sat in the middle of a horseshoe of keyboards and screens, his huge buttocks spilling over the sides of a tiny typist’s chair. Beside him a steel typing table was covered with junk food in various stages of distress, mostly cupcakes covered with marshmallow and pink coconut. While Rivera watched, the Spider peeled the marshmallow cap off a cupcake and popped it in his mouth. He threw the chocolate-cake insides into a wastebasket atop a pile of crumpled tractor-feed paper.