“He was dying. He would have been terrified. At the very least, terribly disoriented. I doubt that he was thinking clearly.”

“I’m not so sure of that.” Sam slipped the pistol beneath his jacket and went slowly back down the aisle. He stopped a short distance from the body and studied the spines of the dusty, leather-bound volumes on the shelves. “I assume he had a logical way of organizing his books?”

“Of course.” Abby came to stand at the far end of the aisle. “Thaddeus devised a very elaborate system years ago. It was based on alchemical symbols and numbers. Each section is labeled. See that little placard on the end of each shelf     ?”

He glanced at the nearest bit of yellowed cardboard. There was a handwritten notation on it. The combination of old symbols and numbers looked like some ancient, incomprehensible alchemical formula.

“Can you tell what kind of books he kept in this section?” he asked.

Abby came down the aisle and examined the faded handwriting on the cardboard for a few seconds. “This is a history section. Reference books that were written about alchemy by late-nineteenth-century scholars. These would all be secondary sources, as far as serious collectors are concerned. Some are interesting, but none are unusually rare or inherently valuable.”

“None of them are hot?”

“No. Most of them are available from other antiquarian book dealers or large academic libraries.”

Sam studied a small gap on one of the shelves. “One of the books is gone.”

“He probably sold it recently.”

“No, look at the way the dust on the shelf is smeared. That was done by a hand groping for the book and pulling it away from the others. Whoever grabbed that volume was in a big hurry.”

He went down beside the body again and took another look at the scene from the lower vantage point. A slim leather-bound volume lay just out of sight in the shadows beneath the last row of shelving. He retrieved the book, opened it and read the title aloud.

“A Brief History of the Ancient Art of Alchemy, by L. Paynter.” He looked up at Abby.

“Paynter was a Victorian-era scholar,” she said. “One of the first historians of science.”

“I know.”

“By that time, alchemy had long since fallen into disrepute. It was the province of crackpots and eccentrics. Anyone who considered himself a serious scientist or researcher was into chemistry and physics by then. But Paynter was of the opinion that if Isaac Newton had been intrigued by alchemy, there had to be something to it.”

“Paynter was right.” Sam handed the book to her. She paged through it quickly, pausing midway through the little tome.

“There’s a page missing,” she said. “It was ripped out, not cut out. The damage was done recently. You can tell because the crinkles and jagged edges haven’t been pressed into place the way they would be if this book had been sitting unopened on the shelf for a few years.”

“I knew I was missing something,” Sam said.

The sense that an ominous darkness was closing in on them was getting stronger. Spending time with a dead body will do that, he reminded himself. This is important. Take your time and think. You need to find whatever it is that you aren’t seeing clearly. He patted down Webber’s pajamas and bathrobe. It was unpleasant work, but this was not the first time he had performed such a chore. When his palm passed over the pocket of the robe, he felt a small bulge. Probably a tissue or a handkerchief. There was a faint crackling sound. He reached into the pocket and drew out the crumpled page.

“That’s it.” Excitement quickened in Abby’s voice. “That’s the missing page. He tore it out of Paynter’s history in the last moments of his life and stuffed it into his pocket.”

“He knew we were on our way, that we would probably be the ones who found him. He did his best to leave us a message.”

Carefully, he smoothed the old page and studied the illustration. The cold sleet of psi that had been stirring his senses all morning transmuted into an ice storm.

“What?” Abby asked.

“This message isn’t for you. It’s for me. He knew that I would be with you when you got here.” He shoved the page into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Let’s move.”

“I don’t understand. What does that drawing mean to you?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re in the car.”

Mercifully, Abby did not question the decision. She followed him quickly out the front door. Newton dashed ahead, more than enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving the grim scene.

He got Abby and Newton into the SUV, climbed behind the wheel and drove swiftly back toward the main road. The icy-cold feeling on the nape of his neck was getting more intense.

“What’s the rush?” Abby asked, fastening her seat belt.

“Damned if I know.” He took one hand off the wheel long enough to rub the back of his neck. “Just a feeling.”

“What is it about the page that Thaddeus tore out of the book that has you so worried?”

Sam reached inside his jacket. He pulled out the torn page and handed it to her. “Take a look.”

She took the page and examined it closely. “It’s an artist’s rendering of an alchemist’s laboratory. Competently done, but it certainly isn’t Dürer’s Melencolia. So?”

“Look at the setting.”

“It’s different from most pictures of an alchemist at work, because the setting is clearly Victorian,” Abby mused. “Scenes of this type are usually set against medieval or Renaissance landscapes. This has got more of a Frankenstein vibe. The mad-scientist thing. But there is the usual mishmash of allegorical images from Egyptian and Greek mythology.” She looked up from the picture. “What makes this illustration different?”

“That picture is not an artist’s generic vision of an alchemist’s lab. Take a closer look at the fire on the hearth.”

Abby glanced down. She stiffened. “The flames are formed by the stylized wings of a phoenix. Oh, geez, Sam. The bird looks an awful lot like that tattoo on your shoulder.”

“Where do you think I got the idea for the tat?”

“You’ve seen a copy of this book?”

“Not that particular text but some related writings. I told you that when Dad and his partners found the crystals, they did a lot of research into the scientific literature. They were trying to track down references to previous discoveries of similar crystals. They didn’t find much that was useful, just some old alchemy texts. But they did come across a few notes made by the guy in the picture. Dad gave them to me.”

Abby read the title under the drawing. “Scene from Dr. Marcus Dalton’s laboratory.”

“Dalton conducted some experiments on crystals that he called the Phoenix stones. Very little of his work survived, unfortunately. He sensed the latent power in the stones, but he never figured out how to access it. He theorized, however, that in the hands of someone who could tap the energy of the crystals, the stones could be used, among other things, as weapons.”

“Like that crystal bug zapper you used on poor Nick?”

He let the poor Nick comment pass. “Yes, but on a much larger scale. The most I can do with my little zapper is temporarily paralyze certain currents in an individual’s aura. It’s probably similar to what you do when you channel the energy in an encrypted book into someone’s aura. And I need physical contact to achieve the results. Dalton believed the crystals had the potential to create much greater destruction, and from a distance. But he also theorized that the crystals could be engineered to create a source of power.”

“Which, presumably, is why your father doesn’t want to destroy all the records of the experiments and why he doesn’t want to obliterate all traces of the Phoenix Mine.”

Sam smiled. “Good guess. The world is going to need new sources of power in the future. Engineered correctly, those crystals might be an answer.”