“You realized that my family probably still had the crystals.”

“I decided my best bet was to get a job with Coppersmith Inc.,” Frye said. “With my talent, it wasn’t hard to work my way into the Black Box facility.”

“You became a trusted employee, but you couldn’t find what you wanted most, the location of the Phoenix. And there was no record of the geodes that my father had carried out of the mine the day of the explosion.”

“Since the stones were not housed in the lab vault, I knew they were most likely either here on the island or down in Sedona,” Frye said. “Couldn’t see the Coppersmith family letting the crystals get too far out of sight. After a couple of visits here, I realized that your private lab was the most likely place.”

“But my security is good, and you didn’t even know where the vault was located. You needed to get someone inside. And then Cassidy came on the scene, and you saw your opportunity. How did she find the vault in the wall?”

“There aren’t that many firms that specialize in high-end vaults and safes here in the Northwest. I eventually tracked down one that had a record of an installation here on Legacy a few years ago. There weren’t many details, but a contractor had left some handwritten notes that made it clear the safe had been installed in a basement wall.”

“Cassidy had the freedom of the whole house when she stayed here with me. But I still don’t know how she found the vault. I never showed it to her.”

“Finding it wasn’t that hard,” Frye said. “I knew there had to be a phony wall somewhere, and that the vault would be behind it. I gave Cassidy one of the high-end metal detectors we use in the lab. It didn’t take her long to find the lever that opens the wall.”

“After that, the two of you figured you were home free. You weren’t concerned about your ability to crack the vault. Given your lab equipment and your talent, you assumed that would be a piece of cake. You chose a night when you knew that I was going to be away from the island on a consulting trip.”

“When you go off on one of those trips, you’re generally gone for several days,” Frye said. “We knew we’d have plenty of time.”

“You and Cassidy came to the island in a private boat. You anchored in one of the small pocket beaches to make sure no one in town witnessed your arrival. You made your way here and managed to disarm my house security system.”

“I’ve always had a talent for locks, and yours had come straight out of a Coppersmith lab,” Frye said. “That part was easy. Cassidy and I came down here to the basement. She showed me the mechanism that opens the fake wall.”

“You got the wall open, but then you discovered that there was a new lock on the safe, one you couldn’t hack.”

“That damn crystal lock is your own design, isn’t it?” Rage flashed in Frye’s voice and in his aura. “I realized immediately I wouldn’t be able to open it. The only option was to blow it. That’s what Cassidy wanted me to do. But I hadn’t come prepared for that. I knew enough about the crystals to know they were volatile. The last thing I wanted to do was use an explosive device. She was screaming at me.”

“So you cut your losses and murdered her.”

“I had to kill her,” Frye said. “I had no choice. She was raving mad, furious with me for failing to get into the safe. She said I was a screwup. I’m pretty sure she intended to kill me. I acted first.”

“Plan B, stealing the crystals, had fallen apart. You went back to plan A, trying to find the Phoenix Mine. This time, you decided to go at it using a research approach. You spent a lot of time in the Coppersmith company library. You even started a relationship with the librarian, Jenny O’Connell.”

“Jenny knows a great deal about the hot-books market,” Frye said. “Between you and me, she’s fascinated with it. She even hangs out in some of the underground chat rooms. I asked her to help me search for a forty-year-old lab notebook rumored to contain some experiments performed on some rare earths from an old mine in Nevada. She got a real kick out of the challenge.”

“Does she know why you wanted to find that notebook?”

“No. Of course I didn’t tell her anything about the Phoenix or my connection to it. I had to be very careful. Jenny’s a true-blue company employee. She would have gone straight to someone in the Coppersmith family if she had suspected that she was prying into your family secrets.”

“Good to know,” Sam said.

“Jenny suddenly caught nibbles of a forty-year-old book that was rumored to be coming up for sale in the private market. The underground chatter was that the book was a notebook containing records of some crystal experiments and that it was encrypted. I knew I had to get hold of it. But Jenny didn’t have the kind of connections required to do a deal deep in the underground market.”

“Her lack of connections didn’t matter, anyway, because you didn’t have the kind of money you needed to go after an encrypted book. They’re expensive. You had to find another angle.”

“Yes,” Frye said. “I needed someone in the underground market who could not only find the book for me but also break the code.”

“So you set out to find your own freelancer. You got lucky and came up with Abby.”

Frye rocked a little on his heels. “How did you put it together?”

“You made one critical mistake. You used the Summerlight Academy student records to find the local talent you needed.”

“You know about that? I admit, that does surprise me.”

“You were obviously aware that the Summerlight Academy had more than its share of talents among the alumni, because troubled teens with certain para-psych profiles often ended up there. How did you discover that? Were you a student at the academy?”

“No,” Frye said. “My mother was one of the counselors at Summerlight for years. She had some talent herself, enough to realize that several of the so–called troubled teens in the school were actually psychically gifted. She wanted to follow them and study them over time. She even went so far as to shape the admissions criteria to ensure that families dealing with teens who displayed certain kinds of psychological issues were encouraged to enroll their kids in the academy.”

“In time, she created a very handy database of talents throughout the Pacific Northwest.”

“For all the good it did her,” Frye said. “Most of the real talents at the school either dropped out of sight after they graduated or refused to cooperate in her research study.”

“But you were able to use the records to trace Abby.”

“The files were very complete,” Frye said. “I found family names and addresses, and the name of the college she had attended. With all that to go on, the investigator I hired had no trouble locating her. After all, she had never left Seattle.”

“Before you contacted her, however, you wanted to be certain that she could actually deal with serious psi-encryption.”

“I certainly didn’t want to risk another disaster like the Cassidy Lawrence fiasco,” Frye said.

“So you set up an experiment to test Abby’s abilities.”

“When she took the job cataloging Vaughn’s library, I saw the opportunity to conduct my test. Thanks to Jenny, I knew that Hannah Vaughn was rumored to have a small collection of encrypted books in her collection, including The Key.”

“To run your experiment, you needed another talent, someone you could manipulate with the prism. You chose Grady Hastings out of the Summerlight files, too. How did you get the prism into his lab?”

Frye snorted. “That was simple. I mailed it to him, explained it was a free sample from an online company that made scientific and research equipment. Miss Radwell passed the test with flying colors.”

“But you knew that you couldn’t afford her, even if you could get someone to refer you, so you started sending blackmail notes. Abby, however, immediately contacted Webber. By then he had heard the rumors about the lab notebook. He realized that Abby might be in danger. He sent her to me.”