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He drove to the end of the block, turned another corner, and continued toward the center of town and the hotel.
“No more pop quizzes, okay?” Pallas said after a while.
He stopped at an intersection and glanced at her. “What are you talking about?”
“You deliberately took the wrong turn back there inside the clinic so that you could show me those two rooms. I’m okay with that. It was a reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. But you should have warned me.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment opportunity and I grabbed it. There wasn’t time to explain.”
“Bullshit. I swear, if you pull one more stunt like that without warning me I’m going to end this investigation and leave you here on your own.”
She was sitting very still, staring straight ahead through the windshield. Her hands were in small fists on her lap.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been slogging through this mess on my own for a while now. I’m not used to working with a partner.”
Pallas shot him a wry smile. “I noticed.”
He tightened his hands on the steering wheel and drove slowly through the intersection. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Forget it. Let’s get back to the hotel. I need to draw.”
“Do you mind if I ask you one more question?”
“You want to know if I was telling Jodi Luckhurst the truth when I said I guessed that the main staircase was the one on which Carnelian broke his neck.”
Ambrose smiled a little. “It wasn’t a guess, was it?”
“Nope. I don’t need to draw to know that he died on that staircase. What’s more, he had a little help going down.”
“What makes you sure he was pushed?”
“Someone was there with him, and that someone was savoring the thrill of revenge.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ambrose drove intothe hotel garage and parked. Pallas got out of the passenger seat. Together they walked to the elevator. She glanced at him, aware that he was having a hard time suppressing his anticipation. He wanted answers. So did she.
“Why do you need to go into a trance before you can draw what you saw back there in the clinic?” he asked.
“Beats me,” Pallas said. “All I can tell you is that the trance is a form of automatic drawing but the pictures are not always easy to interpret. The more information I have, the easier it is to understand what my intuition is trying to tell me.”
Ambrose considered that while he used the hotel room key card to summon the elevator. “Until I met you I’d never heard of automatic drawing. I was aware of automatic writing. Works like a Ouija board, I think. In the old days fake psychics used it to scam their clients.”
Pallas looked amused. “Who says the psychics were all fakes?”
“Good point.”
“All I can tell you is that I slide into a trance and start drawing,” she said, slipping past him into the elevator. “I can feel the emotionsthat I’m translating onto the paper, but the pictures come out of a dreamscape.”
He followed her through the doorway. “What emotions did you pick up back there in the other patient’s room?”
“Rage and panic, mostly,” Pallas said. She shivered at the memories. “Pain.”
“That fits with my memories,” Ambrose said, sounding gratified.
She started to warn him not to leap to conclusions, but she stopped when the elevator doors opened and revealed a large crowd milling around the hotel lobby.
“Uh-oh,” she whispered.
