Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic (25 page)

Dorrie exclaimed in delight at the RV’s compact furnishings, the chairs that became tables and beds and the tiny kitchen and shower.

Conan threw in their suitcases and shook his head in disgust. “You have hysterics over my expensive beach pad and coo over this piece of junk?”

“But look at how beautifully designed it is! This is absolutely
cunning
.” She turned back the cushions and lifted the table, locating the lock that held it in place. “
Chi
can be happy anywhere. The door to the water closet automatically closes so the energy circulates freely. It’s adorable!”

“You’re certifiable,” he muttered, grabbing a beer and trying to fit his legs beneath the crappy table. “And this has been a damned long day. Your story better be good.”

She inspected the refrigerator. They’d left most of their groceries behind for the kids. “Will you eat frozen lasagna?”

“I could eat a bear right now. Zap whatever. Start talking.”

“Your brother at least
tries
to sound pleasant when he bullies,” she admonished. “I’ve been told what to do all my life, and I’ve decided not to cooperate in my own imprisonment any longer.”

“Good for you. You may starve and drive me crazy in the process, but you’ll have a spine. And you haven’t heard bullying until you’ve heard Magnus.” Conan shut up and swigged his beer. She would never hear Magnus. It was hard to believe a force of nature like his brother could be gone from this earth.

Which was probably why Conan was sitting here making an ass of himself.

Dorrie hit the microwave button, shoved the table aside, and slid into his lap, putting her arms around his neck and peppering his bristly cheek with kisses. That eased his mood considerably.

“My brother is a walking GPS,” she told him in between kisses. “When I talk to Grandmother Ling, I’ll ask her if she knows any good psychics who can pick up his thoughts. If he’s alive, maybe he can send us his coordinates and we’ll find your brother there, too.”

Conan sighed. If that was how she meant to solve their problems, he was better off leaving her home.

“A human GPS?” Conan asked dubiously.

Dorrie nibbled his ear, felt his arousal through her thin leggings, and slid off his lap when the microwave bell rang. “That’s how Bo could find the kids so quickly. He not only knows his precise coordinates, but he has some kind of instinct for finding his targets, sort of like our cousin Cho.”

“Bo and Cho,” Conan muttered, obviously struggling with the concept as she handed him the first small lasagna.

She stuck in one for herself before returning to the table with beers for both of them. “Explaining simply isn’t possible, which is why my family never talks about what we do. You’ll simply have to take my word that Bo can do it. It looks to me that if criminals are gunning for Bo’s family, then the problem has to be about him, right?” she asked, setting the stage for the next level of impossibility.

“I don’t see how your brother and the foundation thief or shooter have anything to do with each other,” he said with surliness, shoving a fork into the hot pasta.

“No sex until you listen,” she countered. She’d never said anything like that in her life, and she wondered where it had come from. She almost sounded like her mother.

He shot her an evil eye but obediently held his tongue.

Keeping Conan from burying himself behind his fortress of computers might be a very wise idea, she decided. Just watching him across the table gave her goose bumps. His whiskey-colored hair was disheveled and falling in his eyes. He had blood on the shoulder of his t-shirt where he’d probably scooped up Amy and run with her to his car. Muscles strained the seams of the old shirt. He fought impatiently with the gooey pasta, but he wasn’t yelling at her, even if he wanted to. Dorrie took that as a good sign.

“I don’t understand any more than you do,” she said. “I thought no one cared if I existed, but you’re essentially telling me that someone is setting me up to take the blame for theft and has been doing so for years.”

He glared. “That’s how it looks. Even the LAPD suspect you. They’re not going to buy psychic.”

“Which has been my problem all along,” she warned. “Since my mother died, there has been no one who will
buy
anything I say or do, even if I know I’m right. So I’ve learned to shut up and fit in where I can and hope for the best.”

“How’s that working for you?” he asked, irritatingly.

“Pretty well, actually.” She got up and claimed her lasagna and a fork and returned to the table. “I didn’t have people shooting at me, at least—not until I acted on my instincts and we started looking into Bo’s disappearance.”

“You weren’t looking, I was,” he corrected. “And all I’ve done is play around in a few computers and hire a detective. And climb a fence. That’s not enough to implicate you.”

“I was there when you climbed the fence. The vibrations were seriously negative, and that was before security talked to me and saw my car. And if anything that minor sounded an alarm, then we’re on the right track by looking into Adams Engineering. Only someone with something to hide, someone who knows me, would care that
I
was hunting a cat instead of some Jane Doe.”

“Someone who knows you?” he asked in suspicion. “Are you back to your mother’s killers again?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but it can’t be coincidence that Feng Li got out of prison last week.”

“His probation is strict. He shouldn’t be going anywhere. I checked. Despite all evidence otherwise, I’m good at what I do.”

Dorrie shuddered. “Even house arrest wouldn’t be enough. I don’t ever want to see that man’s face again, but he haunts me. I want to believe that it’s all over, but I can’t. That’s why I need to call my mother’s family.”

“Not computing,” he pointed out, but his curiosity level had shot up and his surliness disappeared.

Dorrie pushed a curl out of her face and wished she didn’t have to do this. Even she had difficulty believing in what she considered to be a legend, but she couldn’t ignore anything that might give them a direction. Her mother’s murderers might want revenge for what Dorrie had done, but there was no explanation of why they would be after Bo or his kids—unless all the crimes were related. Reluctantly, she pulled out the ancient family stories.

“My grandmother’s family came to the United States because they were being persecuted by communist scientists, decades ago,” she told him. “I don’t know the whole story, just the whispers I overheard when my mother was killed.”

“Like the California Malcolms.” he said unexpectedly. “You claim you and your brother have extraordinary talents. If all your family is gifted, the Chinese culture is more likely to accept that than U.S. scientists.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t compute either, but yes, I believe it was my family’s
other
abilities that the scientists wanted to manipulate. That long ago, they didn’t have satellites in orbit, so a human GPS would have been extraordinary. If Bo has that ability now, some predecessor might have had it. I assume a talent like that would be useful to a spy. But my family is dead honest. Spying would go against the grain. As did communism,” she added wryly. “They’re entrepreneurs. And they weren’t poor even then.”

“So your whole family fled Communist China back in the what…the fifties? Settled here, and managed to keep their other abilities out of the limelight after a few missteps.” Conan looked interested, not disbelieving.

His interest made it easier for her to continue. Dorrie poked at her lasagna, wishing she could believe that revealing her sins would save Bo. Instead, she feared it would put Conan off her forever. But it was better to do this now, before she came to rely on him too much.

“You’ve been prying again if you know about my family,” she said. “It will get you in trouble someday.”

He snorted. “I’ve pried into Homeland Security and I’m still alive. Quit stalling.”

His confidence was almost contagious. She took a deep breath. “I think my family feared the scientists or the Chinese government watched them even after they came here. I suppose persecution causes a form of paranoia.”

She paused, but Conan didn’t question her surmise, so she continued. “My mother was an extremely talented feng shui expert. I was told that she used to work with her family to protect their homes and businesses. They didn’t tell me that her purpose was to lead spies astray, but now that I’m feeling paranoid, I can guess it. I assume the rest of my family did the same for each other, in whatever ways their talents lay. But when Mei, my mother, married my father, she moved down here, away from her family’s protection.”

“I can’t imagine a feng shui expert would be of much use to the communists,” he said pragmatically. “And wealth is a shield of its own. She should have been safe. I thought it was an angry competitor who went off his meds and tried to rob her.”

“That’s the police theory and what the papers printed. Feng Li, the man they’ve just let out of jail, is half Chinese. He owned an antique shop, not an interior design firm. He claimed my mother hexed him, which is why the police think he’s nuts. All I know is that my mother refused to deal with him. I don’t know why, but I assume his
chi
was negative, at the very least. At worst, he may have been a communist spy. I was young, and Mei would have kept me away from bad energy, so I can’t objectively judge him after the fact.”

Conan got up and got more beers while he pondered this angle. “Still doesn’t explain why anyone would kill an interior designer.”

“No, and if he was off medication, then it’s possible her death really was entirely random, and he’s no further threat. I’ve had no reason to believe otherwise all these years. There are a few problems with that theory.”

Conan opened the bottle and set it down in front of her. “You’re going to tell me you were a witness, aren’t you?”

“I’m that easy?” she asked, rubbing her brow and not drinking. “I was there. I knew there were two men, not one. My father and his lawyer had the police keep me out of the papers. I didn’t even have to go to court because Feng Li’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon and the door and everything else. They just needed me to give them a name and they took it from there. The police had no evidence of an accomplice.”

“There’s something coming I’m not going to like.” Conan slid into the booth across from her and took her hands across the table.

Dorrie clung to his strength as she tried to find the words. “Remember, I was only twelve and hysterical. I watched two men break into my mother’s shop and shoot her. She didn’t have a chance. I was afraid I’d be next. I hid, but they’d heard me scream.”

She released his hands to slug back the beer when he still said nothing, forcing her to continue. “They came after me, and I used
dim mak
on them,” she said with finality, revealing the secret she’d harbored all these years. No one knew what she’d done.

Of course, only she was likely to know what
dim mak
was. Conan merely looked puzzled.

Reluctantly, she explained. “It was instinctive, like throwing up a shield to keep them away, except energy doesn’t work like that. At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. I just summoned all my fury and fear and the energy exploded like… an AK-47. Rat-a-tat-tat, boom, boom, boom. I was a hormonal teen, brimming with the emotional instability of all adolescents, not able to clearly judge right or wrong. I wanted them dead. I shot them as surely as they shot my mother. Screaming in pain, they ran. I hit them, no doubt about it.”

Conan shoved the table aside, lifted her from the bench, and settled her into his lap, holding her tight. Dorrie buried her face in his shoulder, but even his strength couldn’t ease the searing pain of the memory. She’d killed a man, just as surely as if she’d pulled a trigger.

“Quit shaking,” he ordered, driving his hand into her hair and kissing her brow. “It’s okay. Any of us would have done the same, if we had any clue what
dim mak
is.”

She chuckled at his perspective. “It’s a legendary ability. We speak of masters who can use it so that their victims drop dead a week later and no one knows it is murder. It supposedly takes decades of training to develop the mind skills necessary to kill. I did it without thinking. I’m a
killer.
”

“Your mother’s murderer went to jail. He’s not dead,” he reminded her. “Although dead would have been too good for him.”

“Masters can shield themselves, especially from someone as untrained as me.” She pulled back from Conan’s hold to meet his eyes. “Don’t you see, if I am right, that means Feng Li is not a half-mad antique dealer. He could have feng shui skills like my mother’s, making him a competitor, indeed. He may have
dim mak
skills like mine. He could very well come after me anytime he likes, unless they’re forcing him to take his medication.”

“C’mon, Dorrie. That’s all speculation. What happened to the other guy?”

“He’s the one who died,” she said, going limp again and resting her head on his shoulder. The memory was faded now, along with the anger and fear. “He was younger, possibly not as skilled. Perhaps with no skill at all. He came looking for me days after I went to stay with my father. I knew who he was, and I ran. I ran away from the house as a quail runs from its nest because I didn’t want him to hurt my father or brother or anyone else.”

Conan held her tighter, trying not to freeze in disbelief. He ached for her grief and fear. He wanted to punch out her father for not protecting her better. He suffered so many conflicting emotions that he thought he might internally hemorrhage from trying to contain them.

But even his limited imagination could make the connections. “You led him to the cliff?” he asked in disbelief, letting her weight in his lap and her arms around his neck reassure him of a more pleasant reality.

She shrugged weakly. “I was hoping he’d run off the cliff. Instead, he shot at me with a gun, so I arrowed him with my fury again. He collapsed and died in front of my father’s gardener without my laying a finger on him.”