Adam rapidly sorted his thoughts. “I know that the existence of wraiths has bled into pop u lar consciousness. I wouldn’t be surprised if people tried to make sense of what is going on through music and art. But I haven’t pursued it as a research focus at Segue. Why do you ask?”
She inclined her head. “I think you may have missed something.”
Adam sat forward. “How so?”
“It’s what I was working on in Phoenix, before the wraith caught up with me. I was tracking down an artist. If you have a minute, I’d like to show you what I’ve found. I think you’ll find it interesting, at the very least. I don’t know if it will help with Jacob.” Her gaze flicked to the screen. Like Custo and Patty, he knew she’d have understood what Jacob’s choice meant to him.
“Could you come over to my office? Take a look?” She was chewing on her lip again, plumping it to ruby red. The worry was still in her eyes, so it couldn’t have been Spencer that bothered her. Had to be something else. Maybe something she’d found.
Adam stood and gestured toward the exit. “Absolutely.”
She used her new code to open the door, glancing out over her shoulder at him with a look of thanks, and then they stepped inside.
The room echoed with emptiness. Bare shelves lined the far wall, a couple of someone else’s thick books stacked and forgotten on one shelf. The walls were plain white, scuffed here and there from equipment and storage. A dark wood conference table stood in the middle, her laptop open at one end. As far as he could see, her near-death research remained in cardboard boxes, but instead of on the table, where he had put them himself, now they were beneath, acting as a footrest.
“You know you can requisition anything you need or want for this space,” Adam said, looking around for signs of her personality, her work, of someone moving in with the intent to stay. He really wanted her stay. He’d be thrilled if she’d drain Segue’s account to make herself comfortable. If he could make her comfortable.
She beckoned him over to her laptop and hit the space bar to void the field of stars moving across the screen as she took a seat.
An image appeared, a photograph of a sculpture in a gallery setting. Adam bent low to make out a mixed-media, abstract creation, a representation of a human form writhing in agony and trapped by encircling mesh layers. Adam’s gut responded to the piece, aching in sudden sympathy for the futility with which the figure fought his trap. The figure could be anyone, but Adam saw himself.
“Very powerful,” he said, ignoring the way the sculpture thinned the air in his lungs. It was exactly the way Jacob made him feel. Trapped.
“Did you look at the name of the piece?”
Adam glanced down again. The image wasn’t labeled in text on the screen as he expected, but if he squinted, he could just make out words on a placard on the floor in the photograph. MAN OF SHADOWS.
“That’s not…You don’t think…” She couldn’t possibly believe that the sculpture was a rendering of the Shadowman.
“I do.” Talia smiled. Her eyes finally lit with excitement, her darker emotion buried under the thrill of discovery. The expression set his nerves zapping. Pleasure made her positively beautiful. He had to tear his eyes away to concentrate on the screen.
“Aside from the name, how do you know?”
Talia held up a wait-for-it finger while she scrolled through the many files she had open on her screen and clicked with the other hand. Another image popped up, a black-and-white photograph, manipulated with digital illustration to create a desolate landscape, a figure similarly writhing, harried by a subtly transparent whirlwind around his body. The rendering was more surreal than the first, like a Salvador Dalí, but the effect was comparable.
His eyes flicked to the title, scrawled in pencil in the white margin beneath the image. Shadow’s Man.
“Coincidence,” Adam argued. “Believe me, I’ve checked out every reference to Shadowman on the Internet…”
Talia shook her head from side to side, eyebrows lifted.
“What?” Pressure built up in Adam’s chest in a strange combination of frustration and excitement. He hated the thought that he had missed something all these years, but if there were more answers to be had this day, he’d take them gladly.
“I can show you six more, all similar. The images don’t come up on an Internet search. Like you said, nothing related to Shadowman does. Somebody out there is controlling that. However, text inside images is not searchable, and in each of these cases, the titles are part of the image. You have to know the names of the artists and what to look for to find anything.”
Adam grabbed and dragged a chair squealing on its wheels to sit next to Talia. “Explain it to me.”