Copper Beach

managed to call an ambulance or a neighbor, that would explain why he unlocked the security system.”

    “Maybe.” But he knew before he went up the three concrete steps that whatever he found inside the little house was going to be bad.

    The front door was ajar. He pushed it wider.

    Abby eyed the open door. “This isn’t good.”

    “No,” Sam said. “It isn’t.”

    Sam took another look at Newton. The dog’s ears were flat, and his tail was down. He stayed close to Abby, but he did not have the go–for-the-throat vibe he’d had earlier, when Abby had confronted Dawson.

    Sam moved across the threshold. An all-too-familiar miasma iced his senses. He knew that Abby felt it, too. But, then, most people, psychic or otherwise, could sense death when it was close by.

    “Dear heaven,” she whispered. “Not Thaddeus, please.”

    Sam went along the small front hall. The house felt empty and filled with the silence of the dead. There was no other sensation like it. He heard Abby and Newton behind him.

    The place looked like the home of a hoarder, but as far as he could tell, the only things Thaddeus Webber had ever hoarded were books. There were thousands of them on the floor–to–ceiling shelves. Hundreds more were stacked on the floor.

    “It’s hot in here,” he observed. “Psi-hot.”

    “Most of the books in this house have a paranormal provenance,” Abby said. “Get enough hot books together, and you can feel it. If you think it’s warm up here, you should see the vault.”

    “Where is it?”

    “Downstairs in the basement. That’s where Thaddeus keeps his most valuable books.”

    Sam turned the corner at the end of a row of shelving and stopped at the sight of the crumpled form sprawled on the floor.

    “Thaddeus,” Abby said.

    She said the name with grim resignation. She had known this was coming, Sam thought.

    She slipped past him and hurried to the end of the aisle to crouch beside the body. Newton hung back, whining a little.

    Abby touched the dead man’s throat. Sam knew there would be no pulse. He was sure that Abby knew that, too.

    She drew her fingertips away and looked up at him. There was a forlorn sadness in her eyes that he knew he would not soon forget. He walked to the body and hunkered down beside it.

    “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

    “There’s no blood,” Abby said. “I don’t see any wounds. Perhaps he died of a heart attack or a stroke. He was eighty-six, after all.”

    “The authorities will conclude that the death was due to natural causes, but you know as well as I do that is probably not what happened here.”

    “He was just an old man who loved his books,” she said.

    An old man who loved his books so much that he was willing to do business with some very dangerous people, Sam thought. But he did not say it.

    He turned Webber faceup. The body was surprisingly heavy. They always are, he reflected. There was a reason the term dead weight had been coined a long time ago.

    Scraggly gray hair and a wildly overgrown, unkempt beard framed sunken cheeks and a bulbous nose. Webber was dressed in a tattered robe and ancient pajamas.

    “He heard an intruder during the night,” Sam said. “Came out of the bedroom to see what was going on.”

    “Someone got past his security system.” Abby rose and looked around. “It would have taken a lot of digging to find this place. He did all of his business anonymously over the Internet.”

    “As you pointed out, if you want to find someone badly enough, it’s usually possible. Even the most sophisticated computer security systems are vulnerable.”

    “I know,” Abby said. “Thaddeus shelled out for a high-end system, but it’s not like he was a large corporation or the military.”

    “Which, as we all know, get hacked, too. The thing that narrows our list of suspects in this situation is the cause of death.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “I’ve seen this kind of thing before, Abby. This was death by paranormal means. Not many people could kill this way. It almost always involves physical contact.”

    “Are you certain?”

    He got to his feet. “This is the kind of crime I investigate for that private contractor I told you about. No, I can’t be absolutely certain yet, but death by paranormal means is my working theory until proven otherwise. A heart attack would be way too much of a coincidence.”

    Abby took a deep, shuddering breath. “Maybe someone used one of his encrypted