“Yo. Brig. Her phones aren’t bugged, but both of them are tapped.”

Phoebe turned to look over the back of the couch, and there was Hooter Duffy, holding up a little monitor with a light that actually glowed green. “They’re tapped?” she asked.

Hooter nodded. “I’d guess your stalker has a listening post close to here that lets him hear everything you say on the phones. And, for that matter, if he’s technically proficient, he could set up a way to make your phone ring before he talked to you on either line so that you would think you were answering real calls. Calls made through a tap from a listening post wouldn’t show up in a *69 search, either.”

Brig was on his feet and across the room in just a couple of steps, looking at what Hooter was showing him.

“That’s how he’s doing it?” Phoebe gasped. “That’s the way he’s been reaching me? Oh, my God.” And then she felt herself get light-headed. “Oh, my God. Then that means that he’s been inside my house. Touched my phones. Was actually in the house when he left the rose on me.”

She realized Brig was staring at her with a strange expression on his face. “What exactly did you think was happening?”

“I thought... I don’t know. That Michael’s spirit was doing it.” She felt her face go hot and her hands flew over her mouth. “I know it’s stupid. Or gullible. But I didn’t want to believe that he had actually been in here. Because as bad as a ghost would be, a real live person is worse.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Brig said. “We’re going to have to have someone watch your place, Phoebe. And have a couple of detectives go door to door and see if they can find out where your stalker has his watch post. Someone has to have seen something.”

Phoebe closed her eyes.

The techs were moving into the downstairs bedroom to see if they could find any evidence of the stalker in there. Brig headed for the door.

Phoebe just stood there, while the truth that someone had been in her house — with her there — settled in.

She overheard Brig tell Alan, “You two look beat. Why don’t you take her over to your place for a couple of days — if you wouldn’t mind having her there. Looking at the two of you, I’m guessing you wouldn’t. Just until we have a chance to get this all sorted out. The guys are likely to be here all night, and if you’re here you’re going to be in the way.”

Alan said, “Sounds like a good idea. I’ll help her pack up a bag and get going.”

“I have to go, too, but they’ll call me if they find anything more,” Brig said. “And I’ll call you.”

Phoebe started to protest that she wasn’t really ready to be pulled out of her house, and then she thought of Michael standing over her while she slept and putting a rose on her chest — and she thought of the nightmare in which he was touching her and she couldn’t wake up. And she shuddered. “I’ll go pack right now,” she said.

She hurried into her room and shoved a couple of pairs of jeans, shirts, and underwear into a brown paper bag. Gathered her toothbrush from the bathroom, along with a hairbrush and some shampoo. Packing took her about three minutes.

“I’m ready,” she said, and Brig and the techs and Alan all turned to stare at her.

Brig said, “You’re kidding.”

“I live light.”

She grabbed her tarot decks in their silk-and-wool bags and dropped them into the brown paper bag.

“What are those?” Brig asked her.

“Tarot decks.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t want to leave them behind. I don’t want Michael touching them.”

And Brig said, as gently as a man could who was showing clear signs of annoyance, “Michael Schaeffer is dead, Phoebe. Dead. We don’t know who is doing this to you, but we know who isn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “The man who calls just sounds like Michael.” She let it drop, but she was still sure that somehow, somehow, it really was Michael coming after her.

Alan and Brig exchanged glances, and Phoebe felt a little twinge of uneasiness. They thought she was crazy. Or unbalanced. Or something.

But Alan came over to her and put an arm around her and said, “The techs have all the stuff they need right now, and you have a little stuff. We can just head over to my place for a while. A couple of days, probably, and they’ll find out where this lunatic is hiding, and they’ll put him in a cell, and then you can get your life back.”

Phoebe couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her laugh.

He didn’t say anything as they walked from her place to his. He just held her hand.

At Alan’s she started to put her things in his guest bedroom. “I don’t want to crowd you,” she said, but he smiled at her.

“You aren’t crowding me. You’re the best thing that has happened in my life in longer than I can remember.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. For an instant he looked like he was hurting. Phoebe suspected that he was remembering his lost daughter.

“Hey,” she said, “think good thoughts.”

He smiled at her. “Better thoughts, anyway.” Then he sighed and shoved his hair back from his forehead in a worried gesture. “Could you let me talk to Chick again? Find out some more details about what she’s been trying to tell us, maybe?”

Phoebe shook her head slowly. “I’m not a medium. I have only heard spirits, I guess twice in my life. Once was when I heard my grandmother telling me to run, in the few days before Michael caught up with me. And I didn’t listen then. The second time has been with Chick, who has gone to a lot more effort to force me to pay attention. I can’t call her, though, Alan. Mediums say that they can see the spirits of the dead surrounding the living. I can’t do that. I look at you and all I see is you. I read cards. I’m pretty good at that, and sometimes I get very specific answers by reading cards. I could do a reading about Chick if you want. But I can’t bring her here. I can’t even promise I’ll hear her the next time she talks to me. I don’t know how she does what she’s doing, and if she doesn’t do it again, we won’t hear from her again.”

He looked down at his feet then away from her. “I figured it was something like that.”

“I’ll read for you,” Phoebe said. “Maybe I can get something useful about Chick that way—”

“Don’t,” he said. “I was serious when I told you up in my office that I don’t think I could stand to hear any more about Chick, or my future. It’s too strange.” And then he said, “But since you have your cards, could you do a reading about Brig? He’s — should I tell you what’s going on with him?”

“Why don’t you let me tell you?” Phoebe suggested. “And maybe when you watch his reading, you’ll decide that you want to take another look at one about Chick, or about you. It’s not a spooky thing. Really.”

As she picked up her card bags, he stood and gave her a quick hug. “Not to you. But honestly, I’d love to see you do a cold reading of Brig. I know him pretty well, so I can tell if you’re on with him or not. And if it’s about him, it won’t be spooky for me.” He grinned a little. “In some regards, I’m a big chicken.” He headed out toward his kitchen table, then looked back over his shoulder. “And this way I can pass on anything cool that you get to him and see what he has to say.”

That impish grin took her breath away. “I can do that,” she said, thinking there were other things she’d really rather be doing.

She sat at his very sturdy dining room table and shuffled her Universal Waite cards. Seven times — always seven. Closed her eyes, feeling the cool cardboard slide against her skin, familiar as the air she breathed after so many years.

She put the deck on the table facedown, cut the cards into three decks, and with her left hand chose the deck from which she would read.

She started putting down the cards, looking at them as they fell.

“He’s alone right now, afraid to take chances, afraid to be made a fool of. Fool, reversed — Significator. Ick. He has some very hard feelings about that. His life at the moment is all about turmoil and change — the Tower, upright — stuff just crashing all around him so that he doesn’t know which way is up, where the ground is under his feet, or what is going to fall on his head next.” She put down the next card — Queen of Diamonds, reversed. “His obstacle is a woman. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that she’s young, pretty, confident, and money-grubbing. Has he been through a divorce recently?”

“Shit,” Alan said. “His wife walked out on him a couple of months ago and currently is trying to take him for all he’s worth. How the hell did you get that from the cards?”

Phoebe shrugged. She kept reading, but suddenly the tenor of the reading changed.

“I’m not reading for Brig anymore,” she said, feeling a chill run down her spine. “But this is something that is going to mean something to him.” She looked at the cards and started to feel scared.

“Alan — this is really bad. Write this down for me as I tell you what I’m getting here, will you?”

He said, “Hold on. I’ll get paper and pen.”

When he came back she started right in. “In his recent past, there is someone that Brig knows or is looking for. A pretty girl. Dark hair. Teenager, I think — definitely a young woman not yet in bloom. I think she’s... dead. Murdered.”

She was putting out cards, staring at them as they dropped into place. “Her father is responsible. He was...” She dragged out the round Motherpeace deck, because she’d been using the Universal Waite for Brig. “Hang on.”

Alan said, “I’m writing, I’m writing.”

The Ten of Swords popped up, and Phoebe felt her stomach flip. The image was one of her least favorite in the entire deck. Women holding swords and jumping off a cliff — committing mass suicide. Men behind pursuing, intent on— “He was raping her,” Phoebe whispered.

“What?”

She tried again, managed to say it a little louder. “He was raping her.”

“The father?”

“Yes.”

Then the image of the father, the Patriarch, the one in charge. In control. “He’s done a very good job of pretending he had nothing to do with this, and Brig may even like him. May think highly of him. Think he’s respectable, upstanding.” All the signs were there.

And in the back of Phoebe’s mind, two pictures, one after the other. A diary, hidden away. And a shiny silver locker.

She closed her eyes, trying to bring the images closer, to get more detail, but nothing was coming. “There’s a diary or a journal or a notebook involved in this — probably the girl’s, probably with incriminating evidence in it. It’s hidden, not destroyed. And I think... I think lockers are involved. Shiny. Silver. Like school lockers, except — this sounds silly — except chrome. They’re essential. Brig has to know about the lockers.”

She looked up to see Alan frowning at her. “Lockers?”

“I don’t know why. That was the image I got. Sometimes when I’m reading cards, I get pictures, too. Not often, usually not very clear. But when I get them, I’ve learned to make note of them. I saw two pictures — one of a diary with a lock hidden in a dark place. And the second, one big locker in a row of shiny silver lockers.”

“And you don’t know what the locker picture could be about?”

“No. But it’s important.”

Alan sighed. “The reading you had on him was dead-on. But you know the odds are that Brig is going to look at this and shake his head and think you’re nuts.”

“I know that. But it might mean something to him, and I don’t want to not tell him. I have a high tolerance for scorn — and if I’m right on this, it’s something important to him. So I’ll take my chances.”

He shrugged. “We’ll give this to him the next time we see him, then.” He looked around the townhouse. “Do you want to stay here? Or go out to eat or something?”

“I want to sleep. Could we do that?”

“I don’t know that I can. I’m sort of wound up from everything today.” He reached over and took her hand and held it in his. “Some of it has been absolutely amazing.”

Amazing. Yes. That would pretty much sum up the doctors’ lounge. Everything before that — tense and frightening. Just about everything after that — tense and frightening. But that short time with Alan had been miraculous. And all Phoebe could think was that she wanted more.

“You wouldn’t by any chance still have a few of those condoms with you, would you?”

She loved the expression of hope mixed with lust that crossed his face. He replied by pulling several out of his pocket and spreading them across the table.

“Red this time?” she asked, pointing to one.

“I’ve always thought red was a fun color,” he told her. He kissed her, scooped her into his arms, and carried her into his bedroom.