Guild Boss (Ghost Hunters #14)(56)

Otis chortled excitedly.

“Did you find Pitney’s hole-in-the-wall?” Lucy called from the alley door.

“Looks like it. There’s definitely a lot of Underworld heat. Come on over, but follow my footprints.”

“On my way.”

Lucy picked a path through the ash and soot. When she reached his side, he got a pleasant little shiver of awareness and knew she had heightened her senses.

“Definitely tunnel heat,” she said. “But even if Pitney had a secret vault down below, how can we find it? We’d need the coordinates.”

“Finding things is what I do, remember? If Pitney frequently came and went from a chamber in the tunnels, there will be a trail.”

“How will you be able to recognize it?”

Gabriel took one of the pendants out of his jacket. “If Pitney was the tuner who worked this amber, his vibe will be infused into it.”

Lucy smiled. “Excellent.”

“Let’s go.”

He went down the steps, senses at high rez. Otis scampered ahead of him. Lucy followed.

Pitney’s hole-in-the-wall was easy to locate. He had secured it with an impressive mag-steel door and a serious-looking lock. Green quartz energy seeped around the edges.

“I don’t think your pry bar will work on that door,” Lucy said.

“It’s a frequency lock. I’ve got a jammer that could open it, but we’re not going to have to go to any trouble.”

“Why not?”

Gabriel grabbed the steel handle and hauled the door open. “Because whoever went through this door last either did not know how to reset the lock or wasn’t worried about locking up. I think we can assume that person was the killer. He was looking for Pitney’s vault. The question is, did he find it?”

The heavy vault-style door swung open. Acid-green energy spilled through a ragged, two-foot-wide crack in the quartz wall. A shivery thrill rezzed his senses. He had spent a lot of his life in the Underworld, but he still got the rush.

He glanced at Lucy. There was a gleam in her eyes that told him she felt it, too.

Otis fluttered through the opening first. Gabriel and Lucy followed. Once inside, they stopped to double-check their nav amber and the locator. Otis could always be counted on to lead the way to an exit, but years of professional training and experience ran deep. You never went into the Underworld without well-tuned nav amber and a functioning locator.

“All set?” he said.

Lucy touched the amber in her bracelet and nodded. “Yes.”

He gripped the pendant in one hand and focused on the unique frequency of Pitney’s tuning vibe. A thread of identical energy appeared on the green quartz floor.

“Got it,” he said.

Lucy gave him a curious look. “You can sense Pitney’s vibe in here?”

“I can see prints on the floor. It isn’t usually this easy, but it looks like Pitney spent a lot of time down here. He left a clear trail, and it’s hot.”

“Hot?”

“The last time he came this way he was … agitated. Scared, maybe.”

He started walking, concentrating on the path he was following. If he stopped focusing, the prints faded immediately. Lucy fell into step beside him. After a couple of moments Otis seemed to realize what was going on. He dashed ahead.

“He must have figured out we’re following Pitney’s vibe,” Lucy said.

“He’ll probably get us there faster than I can.” Gabriel kept his attention on the faint path of energy. It was just barely visible in the glow of the quartz. “The next question is whether the arsonist got there first.”

“I doubt it. Not many people can do what you do,” Lucy said.

“The killer might have forced Pitney to reveal the location of the vault before he murdered him.”

“So whether or not we find something useful is what we here in Illusion Town like to call a crap shoot.”

“Trust me, there’s always something left at a scene.”

Otis disappeared around another corner and then reappeared, chortling.

“He thinks we’re playing a game,” Lucy explained. “Dust bunnies, I have discovered, are big on games of any kind. They excel at hide-and-seek.”

The trail led into a vast rotunda. There were over a dozen arched openings marking the entrances to more tunnels. Otis was waiting for them at one of the openings. He waved his miniature dust bunny and bounced up and down.

Gabriel studied the energy path on the floor. It led straight to where Otis stood on his hind legs, barely able to contain his glee.

“Got it,” Gabriel said. He went forward to join Otis. “Now to see what’s left.”

Pitney’s vault was a small chamber to the right inside the tunnel. It had not been cleaned out. Glass and steel cases held heaps of unpolished, untuned amber.

Lucy came up to view the interior of the chamber. “And this is what we here in Illusion Town call hitting the jackpot.”

Otis scampered toward a glass case and hopped on top, apparently trying to figure out how to open it.

Gabriel walked slowly through the space, pausing here and there to examine the collection. “This is incredible. I’ve never seen examples of some of this amber except in museums or in the vaults of the big amber-mining companies. Pitney must have spent his life collecting rare rez amber.”