Copper Beach

for several days,” Frye said. “We knew we’d have plenty of time.”

    “You and Cassidy came to the island in a private boat. You anchored in one of the small pocket beaches to make sure no one in town witnessed your arrival. You made your way here and managed to disarm my house security system.”

    “I’ve always had a talent for locks, and yours had come straight out of a Coppersmith lab,” Frye said. “That part was easy. Cassidy and I came down here to the basement. She showed me the mechanism that opens the fake wall.”

    “You got the wall open, but then you discovered that there was a new lock on the safe, one you couldn’t hack.”

    “That damn crystal lock is your own design, isn’t it?” Rage flashed in Frye’s voice and in his aura. “I realized immediately I wouldn’t be able to open it. The only option was to blow it. That’s what Cassidy wanted me to do. But I hadn’t come prepared for that. I knew enough about the crystals to know they were volatile. The last thing I wanted to do was use an explosive device. She was screaming at me.”

    “So you cut your losses and murdered her.”

    “I had to kill her,” Frye said. “I had no choice. She was raving mad, furious with me for failing to get into the safe. She said I was a screwup. I’m pretty sure she intended to kill me. I acted first.”

    “Plan B, stealing the crystals, had fallen apart. You went back to plan A, trying to find the Phoenix Mine. This time, you decided to go at it using a research approach. You spent a lot of time in the Coppersmith company library. You even started a relationship with the librarian, Jenny O’Connell.”

    “Jenny knows a great deal about the hot-books market,” Frye said. “Between you and me, she’s fascinated with it. She even hangs out in some of the underground chat rooms. I asked her to help me search for a forty-year-old lab notebook rumored to contain some experiments performed on some rare earths from an old mine in Nevada. She got a real kick out of the challenge.”

    “Does she know why you wanted to find that notebook?”

    “No. Of course I didn’t tell her anything about the Phoenix or my connection to it. I had to be very careful. Jenny’s a true-blue company employee. She would have gone straight to someone in the Coppersmith family if she had suspected that she was prying into your family secrets.”

    “Good to know,” Sam said.

    “Jenny suddenly caught nibbles of a forty-year-old book that was rumored to be coming up for sale in the private market. The underground chatter was that the book was a notebook containing records of some crystal experiments and that it was encrypted. I knew I had to get hold of it. But Jenny didn’t have the kind of connections required to do a deal deep in the underground market.”

    “Her lack of connections didn’t matter, anyway, because you didn’t have the kind of money you needed to go after an encrypted book. They’re expensive. You had to find another angle.”

    “Yes,” Frye said. “I needed someone in the underground market who could not only find the book for me but also break the code.”

    “So you set out to find your own freelancer. You got lucky and came up with Abby.”

    Frye rocked a little on his heels. “How did you put it together?”

    “You made one critical mistake. You used the Summerlight Academy student records to find the local talent you needed.”

    “You know about that? I admit, that does surprise me.”

    “You were obviously aware that the Summerlight Academy had more than its share of talents among the alumni, because troubled teens with certain para-psych profiles often ended up there. How did you discover that? Were you a student at the academy?”

    “No,” Frye said. “My mother was one of the counselors at Summerlight for years. She had some talent herself, enough to realize that several of the so–called troubled teens in the school were actually psychically gifted. She wanted to follow them and study them over time. She even went so far as to shape the admissions criteria to ensure that families dealing with teens who displayed certain kinds of psychological issues were encouraged to enroll their kids in the academy.”

    “In time, she created a very handy database of talents throughout the Pacific Northwest.”

    “For all the good it did her,” Frye said. “Most of the real talents at the school either dropped out of sight after they graduated or refused to