Page 24 of Wrong Way

Miles stopped pacing. "Both of those words."

"Both of them, yes. Guidance and enlightenment…that’s verbatim, in her services description." Vic clicked on the studio's main page, and the thumbnail that loaded showed the front window of the studio. "And look at the signage."

The photograph showed a storefront window that was almost entirely occupied by neon. There were at least six separate pieces visible from the exterior alone, in overlapping colors, the signs stacked and arranged in the window so that there was almost no clear glass visible behind them. The overall effect was not elegant, and Miles wasn’t sure it was meant to be. It was dense and vivid and slightly overwhelming, a wall of colored light that declared itself from the sidewalk with considerably more force than most of the other businesses on the list.

"That's a lot of neon," Kowalski said.

"It's almost aggressive," Vic said. "I counted six signs from the exterior photo alone. There is more inside, according to the gallery on her website." She pulled up the gallery tab, and the interior images confirmed it. A neon mandala on the east wall was the centerpiece, but there were smaller pieces throughout the treatment room and along the hallway leading to it. It appeared that the studio had been decorated around the light rather than the other way around.

Miles stood over her shoulder and looked at the screen. The word enlightenment was in the second sentence of Valdez's services description. The word guidance appeared twice more, further down the page.

"She's on the list because of the neon," Vic said, "but I’d say the language is what puts her at the top of it."

"Have you called her?" Kowalski asked.

"Just tried." Vic held up her phone, shaking her head, and said, "Voicemail. The recording says she's with a client and to leave a message or call back during business hours." She set the phone down. "Business hours, according to the site, run until seven today."

Miles looked at the window photograph again—the density of the neon, the specific language on the website, the unanswered phone on a day she was listed as open and available. None of those things individually constituted urgency. But together, they were more than enough.

"What's the drive from here?" he said.

Kowalski had already pulled it up on his phone. "Twelve minutes in current traffic."

Miles looked at Vic, who was already closing her laptop.

"Kowalski," Miles said, "can you keep working the list with your people? If anything on it looks comparable to Valdez in terms of the neon density or the language, flag it and call us." He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. "We'll go check Valdez out."

"You want a unit?" Kowalski asked.

"Not yet. We don't know that there's anything to respond to. It could just be a massive waste of time. We're just going to talk to her." He said it straightforwardly, because it was true. The visit was precautionary…but the alternative was to call again and leave another voicemail and wait, and that didn't seem like the right call when the drive was twelve minutes, and the match was this clean.

Miles and Vic went out through the bullpen and down to the parking structure. The afternoon was warm and the air outside the building carried the particular dry heat of a Texas afternoon in full sun. Miles pulled his jacket on as they reached the car, which was counterintuitive in the heat, but it had quickly become a habit after he’d officially stepped into the role of field agent at the start of this Kane nightmare.

Vic pulled up the address on her phone and set it in the cupholder between them, the navigation screen visible from the driver's seat.

"The fact that she didn't answer doesn't mean anything," Vic said. Her tone was not quite reassurance, but more out of a habit of staying level, and not reading ahead into worst-case scenarios when the actual facts were still limited.

"I know," Miles said. He pulled out of the structure and turned onto Eighth Street, heading south. "But the language on that site was specific enough that it bothered me."

"Me, too," Vic said. "That's why I flagged it. And good God, the amount of neon…”

The route took them south and then east, moving through blocks that shifted from the downtown core into quieter residential stretches before picking up commercial density again closer to East Cesar Chavez. Miles drove at a pace that was brisk without being aggressive, making the lights where he could and not pushing when he couldn't.

Eight minutes later, the navigation announced a right turn, and he took it, and half a block down, the Luminary Wellness Studio came into view on the left side of the street. Even from a distance and in afternoon daylight, the front window stood out…which Miles assumed was the point of such a tactic. The neon was still running, all of it, the signs casting their colors against the interior glass in overlapping bands. From the sidewalk, even in full sun, the effect was considerable. At night it would be visible from the end of the block.

Miles pulled to the curb across the street, and they sat for a moment, looking at it. “Well, if she truly is with a client, she’s just going to have to be pissed at us,” he said.

“I’m good with that,” Vic said.

With that, they stepped out of the car and, much like two buzzing insects, hurried toward the glaring lights in the window.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The front window was a bigger mess than even the online pictures had suggested…which was saying something; it was a concentrated mess of competing neon. There was a large piece in deep magenta that spelled out the studio's name in a flowing script. Below it, a second sign in pale green read HEALING ARTS in block capitals. Beside that, a violet piece formed the shape of a lotus flower, its petals done in a single continuous tube of glass. A fourth sign in warm amber read WALK-INS WELCOME. A fifth, positioned in the lower right corner of the window frame, was a simple spiral shape in white that served no apparent communicative purpose beyond adding another source of light to a window that already had more than enough of them. A sixth piece, hung at an angle from the upper left corner, displayed what appeared to be the word AWAKENING in a bright, almost caustic orange.

The combined effect in the late afternoon light was visually aggressive in a way that a single sign never would have been. Each piece was ordinary on its own. Together they created a density of color and light that drew the eye even from across the street, not because it was beautiful but because it was simply too much to ignore. The window glowed like something with a fever.

The front door was old and predominantly wood, dark-stained with a small square of glass set into the upper panel. A hand-lettered placard beside the door listed studio hours. The lights were clearly on inside. The neon was running. The sign with business hours in the lower corner of the window backed up what they’d seen online—that the place was open until seven.