Still, there were signs of progress. They no longer had to keep him locked up in the attic. Baby steps.
He turned around to confront his uncle.
“Tell me about Catalina Lark,” he said.
Victor grimaced. “It’s complicated.”
Victor was in his early midfifties and in excellent physical shape, which he attributed to a regimen of daily laps in his indoor pool, a mostly vegetarian diet—he did eat fish on occasion—and red wine at dinner. He had the strong, bold profile and fierce amber eyes that ran in the male line of the Arganbright family.
Today Victor’s features were set in the grim expression that was his default mode these days. Five years ago, when he had assumed the helm of the Foundation in what some of the staff referred to as a hostile takeover, he had been energized by the daunting task of transforming the secretive organization into a modern, smoothly functioning operation. He’d had some success, but in the past few months he had become obsessed with what he was convinced was a mortal threat, not only to the Foundation but to the country.
The problem for Victor was that with the exception of his husband, Lucas, no one else believed the danger actually existed. The truth was that rumors questioning Victor’s stability were starting to circulate among the Foundation staff. Some wondered if he had fallen down the rabbit hole of a conspiracy theory. That theory had a name—Vortex.
Aware of the rumors about him, Victor no longer talked openly about his concerns. But Slater and Lucas and others in the family were well aware that he had not stopped obsessing over the legend. There was a driven quality about him. His amber eyes were shadowed with the resolve of a man who has a clear vision of the task in front of him; a man who fears time is running out.
The only outward indication of his obsession lay in the paintings that currently covered the walls of his paneled office. The pictures were everywhere, hanging one on top of the other. Several more were stacked on the floor. A few were valuable works of art by the old masters. Others had been created by modern artists. There were also a number of sketches done by Victor himself.
All of the paintings in the room were focused on the same theme: the Oracle of Delphi.
Most of the pictures depicted the Oracle in the classic pose, draped in a hooded robe and seated on a three-legged stool that straddled a crevice deep inside a cave. In that position she inhaled the mysterious vapors that wafted up from the fissure in the rocky floor of the cavern.
Under the influence of the unknown gases, the Oracle hallucinated and saw visions. She delivered prophecies and predictions, usually in the form of cryptic phrases that had to be interpreted by those who paid handsomely to obtain the otherworldly information.
The oracle business had been a very profitable enterprise for the ancient city-state of Delphi, Slater thought, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t why Victor was obsessed with the ancient legend. Victor already had money—a lot of it. He had made a fortune with his hedge fund before retiring to take control of the Foundation.
His first major change was to move the organization from its old headquarters in Los Angeles to Las Vegas. He had made no secret of his reason for the decision. In a town that specialized in creating the illusion of endless night, a world in which Elvis impersonators, magicians, ageless entertainers, shady characters and those afflicted with gambling fever all coexisted, it was easy for an enterprise dedicated to paranormal research to vanish into the shadows.
“Walk me through this,” Slater said. “Why is Catalina Lark going to be a problem?”
Victor heaved a melancholy sigh. “There was an unfortunate incident in Seattle several months ago while you were recovering.”
“You mean while I was locked in the attic.”
Victor glowered but evidently decided to move on.
“A man named George Ingram died,” he said. “The body was found in a vault in his private gallery. The death was attributed to natural causes, but Ingram was a … collector, so I decided to take a look at the scene.”
When Victor used the term collector it went without saying that the individual he was talking about was not a standard-issue connoisseur of art. It meant the person was obsessed with objects, artifacts and antiques that had a connection to the paranormal.
“You wanted to know if Ingram was murdered because someone was after an artifact in his collection,” Slater said. He did not make it a question.
“I knew something of Ms. Lark’s talent and I was aware that she had a Fogg Lake connection. I asked her to consult on the case.” Victor grunted. “Paid her very well for her time, I might add. It’s not as if I stiffed her when it came to the bill for her services.”
Victor sounded defensive now. A sure sign that he had really screwed up.
“What kind of assistance did you request, and what went wrong?” Slater asked.
Victor had a computer for a brain. He could leapfrog over a dozen scraps of data and reach the logical conclusion. But sometimes you had to take things step-by-step. He tended to skip right past pesky little details that indicated he might have miscalculated.
“It was just a routine analysis job,” Victor muttered. “Nothing to it. All she had to do was take a close look at the scene of Ingram’s death.”
Take a close look was one of Victor’s favorite sayings.
“What’s her talent?” Slater asked.
“She … senses things.”
“A lot of people from Fogg Lake sense things,” Slater said. “Be more specific.”
Victor switched his brooding gaze to one of the paintings of the Oracle of Delphi. He contemplated it as though it contained some secret that he needed to know, as if people’s lives depended on acquiring that knowledge.
“Miss Lark sees visions,” he said quietly.
“Hallucinations?”
“No, the real thing,” Victor snapped. “There’s a difference between hallucinating and seeing visions, and you damn well know it.”
“Speaking from experience, I can tell you that there are times when it can be tough to tell the difference.”
Within the paranormal community, the ability to control hallucinations was the working definition of sanity. It was what made it possible to pass for normal.
“Miss Lark’s visions are a manifestation of her strong intuition,” Victor said. “She can read someone’s aura and pick up on the vibe of what the individual is likely to do next.”
Slater glanced at the nearest Oracle painting and shook his head. “You’re not going to tell me that she can see the future, are you? That kind of nonsense is for the Freak crowd.”
Over the years, a number of those who had been affected by the vapors released on the night of the Fogg Lake Incident had found themselves unable to cope with their new senses. Those who failed to gain control of the psychic side of their natures lost the ability to use logic and reason and old-fashioned common sense. All too often they fell into cults or obsessed over conspiracy theories. Some ended up in the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals.
The Freaks had appeared online a couple of years ago. The group had popped up on the Foundation’s alert file almost immediately, because several people with links to Fogg Lake had found their way into the secretive group.
Until recently Victor had not been particularly concerned, because the Freaks had appeared to be just another relatively harmless bunch of conspiracy theorists.