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.
Miles tried the door, but found it locked. He looked to Vic nervously and said, “That wouldn’t be standard practice if you were with a client, right?”
“Doubtful.”
He knocked twice, sharp and deliberate. Nothing moved inside that he could see through the neon-cluttered window.
He moved to the door and looked through the small square of glass in the upper panel, pressing close to get a useful angle on the interior.
The glass was old and slightly distorted, but what it showed him was clear enough.
The lower half of a person was visible on the floor.
He could see just below the knee, both legs lying still at the angle of a person who had dropped and not moved.
The shoes were a woman's flats, dark leather, and they were not pointed at the ceiling the way they would have been if someone had sat or knelt.
They were pointed slightly outward, the way feet went when a person had simply fallen.
He was already stepping back when he registered what he had seen.
“There’s a body,” he told Vic. And that was all he got out before he started attacking the door.
He hit the door just below the lock with the flat of his foot, putting his weight behind it.
The old wood held, but groaned and cracked.
He hit it again in the same spot, angling his kick slightly inward this time, and on the second impact the frame split along the latch and the door swung hard into the wall behind it.
They went in fast, both drawing their guns in nearly perfect unison.
The front room of the studio smelled immediately of something scorched and sharp, a burned electrical smell that was distinct and unmistakable.
It registered before Miles had fully processed what he was seeing.
The room was narrow, with a reception desk to the left and a short hallway ahead leading to the treatment room.
The neon pieces in the window were behind him now, still running, and their combined light threw overlapping color across the floor.
Catherine Valdez was on the floor on her back, positioned just in front of a low treatment table.
Miles recognized her from the website photograph: the dark hair, the composed features.
She was wearing a white linen top and dark slacks, and her right arm was extended outward from her body at an angle that suggested she had been thrown.
The burn marks were on her right hand and extended up her forearm, the skin darkened and slightly swollen.
On the east wall behind the treatment table, the neon mandala was still partially powered.
It was flickering in an irregular, dying pattern, the amber and violet tubes cycling between dim and dark, the current disrupted by whatever had happened to the circuit.
A thin ribbon of smoke was rising from the transformer housing mounted behind the wall panel, visible through a gap where the panel had shifted on its bracket, and the acrid smell in the room was coming from there.
The wiring harness connecting the transformer to the mandala's internal frame showed the familiar stripped section, the bare conductor in direct contact with the metal structure of the piece.
Miles could obviously not tell from a brief glance, but he had no doubt that they would find that it had undergone the same modification—the same deliberate removal of the ground.
The same targeted adjustment to push the output and prevent the breaker from tripping.
The smoke was still fresh, and the mandala was still losing power in real time, the tubes going dark by increments as the damaged circuit completed its degradation.
Miles crossed to Valdez and crouched beside her.
He pressed two fingers to the side of her neck and held them there for several seconds.
He already knew what he was going to find, but he held them there anyway, giving it the time it needed.
There was nothing. Her skin was still warm to the touch, which was almost worse than cold would have been, because warm meant recent, and recent meant minutes.
He stayed crouched beside her for a moment, his hand still at her neck, his jaw tight. Then he stood and said, “She’s gone.”
"Miles." Vic's voice came from the wall beside the mandala, level and deliberate. "There's a note."
He walked to her. The note was taped directly to the wall beside the mandala's mounting frame, positioned at eye level. It had been written on the same kind of small index card as the previous two, the same small even block lettering. Vic had her phone out and was photographing it.
Miles read it where it was, again feeling that eerily comforting anger rising up.
"Catherine Valdez has spent years selling light she does not possess.
She has called herself a healer and charged accordingly, and the desperate have paid her because they needed to believe there was something she could give them that they could not find elsewhere.
There was not. She offered enlightenment and delivered expense.
She offered guidance and delivered dependency.
She told people she could see their aura, that she could read their energy, that she could sense what was blocked and what needed releasing.
She told them this over and over, session after session, at a hundred and sixty dollars per fifty minutes, and they came back because she had given them no tools to stop coming back.
This is not healing. It is a subscription.
The neon in her window was the most honest thing about her.
It at least required actual electricity to produce its light.
She did not. She performed luminosity and called it a gift, and the people who needed real help went away with nothing but a lighter wallet and one more reason to distrust their own perception.
The current does not perform. It does not advertise.
It simply is what it is, and it does not apologize for the truth of itself.
False light has no defense against the real thing. "
Miles looked at it for a long moment after he had finished reading.
His hands were not steady and he did not try to make them steady.
He had been twelve minutes away from this room when he and Vic had left the precinct.
Probably less. He had been sitting at a table five miles from here while this was happening, narrowing a list that had her name on it, and she had still ended up on the floor.
He took his phone out and called for an ambulance.
He gave the address and described what they had found, and he stayed on the line until the operator confirmed a unit was en route.
He kept his voice even throughout, which required a specific and deliberate effort.
When he ended the call he stood in the middle of the treatment room and looked at the mandala, which had gone almost entirely dark now.
The last tube was fading to nothing as the power finished bleeding out of the damaged circuit.
The smoke was thinning, but the smell was not.
"He was just here," Vic said quietly.
"Yeah," Miles said. "He was. We just missed him."
He looked at the door to the hallway, which was standing open, and then at the window, visible from where he stood as a rectangle of evening light at the end of the corridor.
The street outside was ordinary and indifferent, a few cars passing, a man walking a dog on the far sidewalk.
Whoever had done this had left through a door that they had locked behind them, walked out onto that street, and was now somewhere in a city of a million people.
Miles put his phone back in his pocket and stood very still, looking at the window, until he heard the siren start up somewhere in the distance.