Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(29)

Checking her page was a ritual. Mark liked rituals. They soothed the screaming inside his brain.

Noah had lectured them ad nauseam about stress flashback management. Know-it-all prick. He’d busted them out of that place, so he thought he owned their asses.

Yessir nossir anything you say sir Captain Gallagher, hup hup! Be good soldiers, now, and never use your powers against the unmods because of ethics and morals and blah blah blah di-f*cking-blah! Right.

Noah’s AVP management techniques had never worked for Mark. He couldn’t stand being motionless, concentrating on the inside of his own head. Slow death by boredom. He’d been tortured enough already, at Midlands. Fuck that shit.

Rebellion day had taught him all he needed to know about AVP management. That day had been a mind-opening crash course. Killing those researchers had helped him like nothing else possibly could. Struggle. Blood. Death. Yes.

Afterwards, in hiding with Noah’s group, he’d begun to slip out alone, hunting for what he needed to calm the constant inner screaming. And he had found it.

He’d been careful. Restrained. He’d picked only lost, wrecked people. Ones that no one would miss. He’d used his AVP to clean up the scenes. The cops never had a clue, but Noah . . . he could read a sig like no one else. Noah had been on to him.

After a few moments of staring at Caroline’s boring feed, Mark stopped and scrolled back, nerves tingling.

Caroline was tagged in a photo posted by a dark-haired, toothy woman named Gina Minafra. In the photo, the two women held up masks of dragon’s heads. The text read, A blast from the past! Caroline’s magic, from the summer stock production of The Littlest Dragon!

Masks. Theater. The filter was getting more specific.

Mark set the machine to search for images of masks in recent theatrical productions, and dove back into the data stream. It scrolled on the screen in a blur, over fifty images per second. After a while, he saw it.

Stop. He stopped, worked backwards until he found it again. Not a mask. A costume, of a night moth. Blue-black stretch velvet over a wire frame, ragged edges fluttering. A muscular black girl wore the wings over a black leotard. She was leaping as if she were taking flight. Those wings had Caroline written all over them.

He’d seen enough of her stuff to know her tics, her obsessions. Her so-called “art” was worthless crap made of paper or cloth, wire hangers, pipe-cleaners, chicken-wire. It was full of elements that fluttered and bobbed and swung. Mismatched colors, recycled materials. Her pieces looked like they had been cobbled from repurposed garbage. They bothered him on a visceral level. He wanted to sweep them off his field of vision.

He compared Caroline’s eccentricities with the moth costume the way that a criminologist would compare fingerprints, point for point. After fifteen seconds he was convinced that Caroline had designed it.

The website was of a community youth theater group in Seattle, the Mean Streets Players, doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The moth was Titania, Queen of the Fairies. He scrolled around until he could find a clickable playbill with credits. There it was. Costumes by Bounce Entertainment.

Bingo.

In Bounce’s online inventory, dozens more pieces bore Caroline’s distinctive stamp. Productions of Beauty and the Beast and Thumbelina. The Blue Feather Playhouse’s interpretation of The Tempest. The Bremen Town Musicians, again by the Mean Streets Players.

Mark studied the owner’s smiling headshot. Gareth Wickham. The name sounded kind of fake. He looked fake, too, like a soap opera heartthrob. There was a landline and a cell number. It was after business hours, so he dialed the cell phone.

Wickham picked up promptly. “This is Gareth Wickham.” A crisp, professional male voice. Young, artsy, gay.

Mark instantly manufactured his own young, artsy gay persona. “Hi! My name is Rob Vasquez, from the Vermilion Players in New York City? I’m producing a dance piece? And I saw images of masks that your designers at Bounce created for Beauty and the Beast and The Bremen Town Musicians. It’s just beautiful work!”

“Glad you liked it,” Gareth said. “What can I do for you, Mr. Vasquez?”

“Please, call me Rob. I was wondering if you could hook me up with that designer. I loved Titania’s moth wings. Our director is looking for that ethereal quality. Those wings were built by the same designer who did the Bremen Town and the Beauty and the Beast masks, right?”

“Ah . . . uh . . .” The guy stammered. “I, um . . . well, we all worked on those.”

Mark smiled thinly. What a moron. “But who designed the basic concept? The style is sooo distinctive!”

“Actually, those costumes were a ragbag collection of stuff we had in stock,” Gareth’s voice gained strength as he figured out his response on the fly. “Mean Streets has a shoestring budget, and they couldn’t afford custom designed—”

“Could you put me in touch with the designer? I’d love to talk to him. Or her.”

Gareth hesitated a beat too long. “I don’t appreciate people poaching my staff.”

“Oh, no!” Mark injected mortified distress into his voice. “I’m sorry if I gave that impression! I certainly didn’t mean to—”

“Leave your name and number—no, better yet, go to the website form, and do it via email. Tell us what you want and when you need it. We’ll send you a quote.”