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Faith looked at Nina. The woman didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest by Turk’s actions. “Do you mind if I join my dog?” she asked. “Just to make sure he doesn’t get into anything he shouldn’t?”
“Oh, there’s nothing up there that will hurt him,” Nina said, “but if you insist, you can join him.”
Faith looked at Michael. Michael nodded, and she got to her feet and headed to the stairs. Behind her, she heard Michael ask Nina, “So what got you into alchemy in the first place?”
As Nina launched into a monologue on her introduction to the “hidden science,” Faith looked up the stairs where Turk had vanished.
Had he identified the same smell that lingered at the crime scene? Could Nina be the alchemist she was looking for?
Heart pounding with fear and anticipation, Faith ascended the stairs.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As soon as Faith reached the top of the stairs, all sound seemed to fade. It was as though a felt blanket was draped over the floor. The downstairs had been clean, but here a layer of dust lay over everything, not so thick as to make it feel abandoned, just neglected. The air felt heavier, too, thick and musty. It seemed to Faith that she had entered the lair of some old shaman who had delved so far into his mysteries that he maintained only a tenuous connection to the mundane world.
Or she. Faith recalled the medical examiner's warning that their killer could be a she, and they shouldn't assume he was male just because serial killers usually were. Faith had assured him that they only used male pronouns for convenience, and she wouldn't let that assumption color her investigation, but that hadn't been entirely true. Shehadbeen looking for a man. Maybe that hadn’t hindered her, really, but she now wondered if Nina were as innocent as she seemed.
As a matter of fact, she didn’t seem all that innocent. She all but admitted that she believed in alchemy, and she expressed a great deal of admiration for the practice. Faith wondered if she admired the killer. Of course, she also wondered if Nina could be the killer herself. It didn’t seem like such a stretch.
Turk trotted ahead of Faith, stopping every few seconds to sniff the air and the ground. That elusive smell that he was tracking was here, but still elusive, still faint. Or maybe, like Faith, it was a feeling Turk followed rather than a concrete sense.
He walked into a room. Faith followed and saw that it was a bedroom. The bed was made, and the furniture decorated in a similar manner to the first floor, but also covered in the thin layer of dust that covered everything here.
Maybe the first floor had looked the same until Michael called and asked to speak to her. Maybe Nina had polished up the ground floor to hide the fact that she cared little for the appearance of her house, that it had ceased to matter to her whether her home was presentable to strangers. None of this confirmed that Nina was anything other than eccentric, but eccentric people made eccentric killers, and Nina was obsessed with alchemy.
Turk stuck his nose under the bed but found nothing to hold his interest. He tried the closet and found nothing there either. He snorted irritably and stood still with his head cocked, concentrating.
“Take your time, boy,” Faith encouraged. “Make sure you find whatever it is.”
Turk gave her a slightly irritated look at the somewhat contradictory instructions. Faith decided to stay quiet and let him work.
He trotted from the room, and she followed. Rather than explore the other rooms on the second floor, he returned to the stairs. A second flight led to a hatch in the ceiling that presumably led to Nina Verbeck’s attic.
Faith’s heartbeat quickened when Turk climbed that flight of stairs and pressed his nose to the hatch. Faith reached instinctively for her gun, then drew her hand back. Then she drew the gun anyway. Maybe Nina wasn’t the killer herself. Maybe she was harboring him.
Turk didn’t seem that concerned, though, merely interested. He stood, tail wagging, and waited for Faith to push the hatch open.
He jumped through, and Faith followed. Here, finally, was a level of dust that indicated not even a cursory interest in cleanliness. There was no ambiguity at the cobwebs that dominated this room.
Faith was about to call Turk back downstairs when he barked and trotted to a large chest of drawers that sat on one wall. He stopped in front of the chest and barked again.
Faith holstered her weapon and walked to the chest. “You got something boy?”
Turk barked again and looked at her. Heart pounding, she pulled open the top drawer.
And everything fell into place. The drawer was filled with little glass vials. Each glass vial was filled with a different color of mica powder. Faith noticed that one vial was missing of black, one of white and one of yellow. With a chill, she saw that a red vial was absent as well.
Nina Verbeck was their killer. She had left Michael downstairs with their killer.
“Shit.”
She slammed the drawer shut and drew her weapon. “Go to Michael, Turk. Now.”
Turk shot off like a bullet, barking and flying down the stairs. Faith followed as quickly as she could. When she reached the second floor, she heard Nina scream. “Hey! What is this? What is he doing?”
Faith reached the first floor and rushed to the kitchen to see Turk standing protectively in front of Michael, snarling at Nina, who pressed against her wall, her face blanched in fear.
Michael looked questioningly at Faith. Without taking her eyes off of Nina, Faith said, “We found mica powder. A lot of it. Guess which colors were missing vials?”
