The Collector. Cameron Cruise

liked that best about Velvet. She was high-class, never grasping for his money. Jewelry seemed so much more civilized an exchange. And he knew she found him attractive; many women did, liking that air of power that could only come with age and experience. And David kept himself fit. Velvet had often complimented him about his gray eyes and silver hair. She didn’t have a problem with the age gap—almost forty years—between them.

      As soon as she felt his touch, she turned and kissed him, gracing him with that lovely perfect smile as she caressed his face. But Velvet knew her business. Quickly, she slipped out from beneath the silk sheets. Donning a robe he’d bought her, an artistry of lace from a particularly fabulous lingerie shop in Paris, she hurried off to the kitchen.

      Over a breakfast of jackfruit Danish and Vietnamese drip coffee, he read the paper. His beautiful Velvet sat across from him in the condo’s jasmine-scented courtyard, reading some tome on corporate taxes. Velvet was finishing her law degree at Whittier. He looked forward to hiring her on as in-house counsel for Gospel Enterprises, a privately owned development company that made more than the gross national product of most small countries.

      It wouldn’t be easy to lure her in—she’d have many lucrative job offers. David anticipated that Sam Vi, Velvet’s thug of a cousin, would be his chief rival. David smiled against his coffee cup. He knew work at Gospel Enterprises would appeal to Velvet’s imagination. What could she really do for Sam other than keep his ass out of jail?

      Of course, she’d have to get over the whole sleeping-with-the-boss issue. That’s one of the things he found tantalizing about Velvet. She had scruples.

      Today, she would find a beautiful pair of ruby earrings waiting for her on the bedside table—he’d bought them just last week. They were antiques, presumably worn by Marie Antoinette herself, although he wasn’t naive enough to pay a premium for something so improbable. But Velvet would like the story.

      He reached for the newspaper, thinking of what Velvet would look like wearing the earrings and nothing else. Suddenly, the image of her naked and reaching for him vanished.

      David sat up, staring at the newspaper on the table. The smile faded from his face as he read the headline: Vietnamese Fortune-Teller Murdered in Ritual Killing.

      There was a photograph of Mimi. A publicity shot by the looks of it, taken some years ago. He felt his body go numb.

      “What’s the matter, David?”

      Velvet didn’t have a hint of an accent. Though her parents had immigrated, she’d been born in Orange Country and was American through and through. She looked at him anxiously. Her eyes dropped to the newspaper.

      “Oh, my God!” Her law book fell to the floor as she stood. “Oh, my God. I have to call Sam.”

      David closed his eyes, hearing Velvet’s bare feet on the kitchen tile as she raced for the phone inside. His whole life wasn’t just crashing down around him, he told himself. It wasn’t.

      He didn’t wait for Velvet to get off the phone. He wasn’t going to fight Sam for her attention, not now. Back in the bedroom, he dressed quickly. Within a few minutes, he was driving like a demon, weaving through traffic on the 55 Freeway to reach the empty carpool lane. He was alone in the vehicle, but didn’t worry about being pulled over in the black Aston Martin he drove at breakneck speed. David Gospel paid for posh dinners at fund-raisers for important candidates to local and state office. He didn’t pay for anything as mundane as a speeding ticket.

      When he arrived home, he found his wife waiting in the front room. Meredith rose to her feet from the sofa, a mousy woman who looked as if she were trying to make herself disappear, she was so thin. On the glass coffee table, she had the morning paper opened to Mimi Tran’s photograph.

      “It’s not what you think,” she said in that whisper of a voice.

      Over the years, David had come to realize it was her voice he hated most—more than her Bible-thumping or her thinning brown hair, or even that stick figure she preserved like some prima ballerina. Her voice grated in its softness. It seemed to say, Don’t pay attention, I’m not here, I won’t disturb.

      “David?”

      He ignored her, instead heading for the stairs. The house had been designed around its fabulous view of the main channel and a sweeping staircase with its railing made entirely of Lalique crystal. But the beauty was lost to him now as he headed for his office, his wife at his heels.

      “Listen to me, David. You’re wrong! You’ve been wrong all along! Please, David—”

      He shut the office door in her face. His wife made some feeble attempt at a knock, but even in anger she couldn’t manage the strength for a decent pounding. Him, he would have used both hands. Knock the fucking door down!

      There’d been a time when Meredith could give as good as she got. But that all changed after she found God. These days, his wife was nothing more than a dried-up Puritan of a woman. A fanatic.

      He grabbed the remote control off his desk and gunned it at the mirrored wall across the office, punching in the code. Immediately, a section slid open, revealing a hidden room behind the glass.

      Gospel Enterprises had many businesses under its corporate umbrella, including a security company specializing in safe rooms or “panic rooms,” a place sealed off from the rest of the house where clients could wait out a home invasion until the police or on-site security arrived on the scene to save the day.

      David’s room had a very special purpose. The place was more like a giant walk-in vault. Inside, he could control temperature and humidity. Hell, he could house the fucking Mona Lisa here if he had to, probably under better conditions than the Louvre and its conga line of tourists.

      Inside the vault room, he punched in yet another code, this time using a keypad on the wall just above the built-in wooden cabinetry, one of five such keypads in the room. A velvet-lined drawer slid open, the kind often used to house expensive jewelry. David’s held a much different collection.

      He stared down at the clay tablet written in a script adapted from cuneiform, one of the oldest written representations. This particular tablet dated back to the seventh century B.C., but the story from ancient Sumeria was far older. The Epic of Gilgamesh was, in fact, the oldest written story on Earth.

      There was a heated debate in archaeological and linguistic circles concerning whether the epic was composed of eleven or twelve clay tablets. Many translations didn’t include the twelfth tablet, considered by some to be an independent story, or perhaps more of a “sequel.” But David knew better. He was staring at a missing thirteenth tablet, one he had purchased for his collection through the efforts of people like the now very dead Mimi Tran.

      A necklace lay to the right of the tablet. It was a beautiful piece, the unstrung beads placed in a half circle around a central crystal, jewelry purported to have belonged to the goddess Athena herself. In this light, the gems appeared a deep blue. But he knew how easily the crystals could change to a bloodred.

      The central stone, the Eye, looked more like a milky, raw diamond the size of a peach pit. In the low light, it had a lovely blue sheen. Like flaws, bits of metal floated, trapped inside. Several strands of wire had been wrapped around the crystal, creating a pendant that could hang from a necklace. It stared up at him, clouded and unseeing.

      He felt himself shaking. There was little in this world that David feared. Normally, it was matters beyond the physical realm that held his imagination. But his son—Owen’s capacity to completely fuck up—could grab David by the throat and bring him to his knees.

      Leaving the drawer open, he stepped out of the vault. He dropped onto the leather couch of his office and stared at the mirrored opening, the remote still in his hand. Inside that vault waited some of the greatest treasures the world of the occult had to offer. Precious pieces he’d carefully brought together, willing to meet the price of the greediest tomb raider.

      David was not a young man. It had taken forty-two of his sixty-plus years to gather his collection. The tablet, of course, was the centerpiece, a map that