It doesn't fit. It doesn't gel. Still too many gaps.
Then there was the one detail that really nagged at her. It certainly didn't explain the Seattle phone number.
That was an open door again, banging in the wind at night and keeping her awake. Kinnery's story about his security adviser almost held water until she heard the Skype recording. He'd just skipped over Weaver's comment about using the Seattle number as a starting point to look for old friends based in Washington. Dru would have expected him to remind Shaun what the Seattle number actually was, and correct him. But he didn't even react.
He's a goddamn liar. If he's lied for years, it's second nature now.
If Weaver didn't have his own doubts, it was because he knew something she didn't, or because he wasn't as smart as she thought.
Or maybe he's got another plan he hasn't shared with me.
Dru finished her sandwich and went back to her office, her old suite on the third floor, not the basement. It was sunlit and felt almost threatening now, an exposed arena with too many people walking in and out of the HR department and too many directions to watch. Knowing how insecurity took hold was no defence against falling prey to it. She got an odd look from Bobbie as she unlocked her door, but she didn't understand why until she logged in and read the e-mail addressed to all HR staff, tagged as confidential and bearing the header HR STAFF CHANGES.
Dru got that shivery, bristling feeling in her scalp as she started to read it.
It'll be me. The bastards. It'll be me. Just try it, Weaver.
But no, it wasn't: the casualty was Sheelagh, her boss.
She was out the door – culled, pink-slipped, surplus to requirements. Halbauer's head of HR was taking over and Sheelagh Thompson was leaving. Dru could breathe again. When the axe was swung within your own castle walls, you the last to know, especially if you were the target. But the blade had missed her. That was all she could afford to care about.
Dru could see Bobbie through the frosted glass panel in the door. She tapped to come in.
"You saw the e-mail?" Bobbie asked.
Dru nodded. "Yes. Before you ask, no, I've never met the incoming manager."
"Are they going to honour our vacation arrangements?"
Comradely solidarity was a wonderful thing. Perhaps everyone would sign a nice sorry-to-see-you-go card. "I hope so. I already booked my time off over Thanksgiving."
Dru wondered what this did to the hierarchy in the department, but she was determined not to get involved in jockeying for position. She went back to reading her mail. The thought of Kinnery's patchy story wouldn't let her go. She made an appointment to see Weaver in the morning.
Her paper files from the Ringer investigation were locked away at home. There was nothing on the premises to show that it had ever taken place – not from her end, anyway – and therefore there was nothing for an incoming manager to stumble across. That was the way it had to be.
She didn't need to wait until the next day to see Weaver, though. As she left for the day, she stepped out of the elevator into the parking garage and saw him locking his car, heading into the building.
"Hi Dru," he said. "You heard about Sheelagh, I take it."
"I did. Have you got five minutes?"
"Sure."
"I know you said Kinnery was done and dusted, but I have serious doubts."
Weaver shuffled his briefcase impatiently from hand to hand. He'd obviously rushed back for something important, but she had his attention. "What, the phone number again?"
"Mostly, but there are still other gaps that worry me."
"I'm really hoping I've buried whatever ill-advised actions Charles may have taken. Is there a good reason for disturbing the soil again?"
"Is that an instruction to stop keeping an eye open?"
Weaver tilted his head slightly as if he was considering the implications. "Anything active runs the risk of starting this off again." He lowered his voice. "But you've still got a budget. I don't want PIs hired, people contacted, or anything that'll get noticed. Passive observation only. And if you locate anything, you stop immediately and hand it over to me. That's as far as you need to go."
"Okay." Well, that was a definite order to carry on digging. "Understood."
"Do you mind my asking what you think is still missing?"
"There's a man involved," she said. She still didn't want to mention anything too specific, like names. That just created expectations she might not be able to deliver on. "Maggie might have had a male relative."
"The one
The Slide
mentioned? Well, any gene therapy she underwent wouldn't have been germline, so she couldn't pass it to a son. She'd have been forty-plus at the time anyway. You think Charles had a second subject?"
"The point is that I can't make a son, husband, or grandson fit the story as it stands without finding out more. If the number was Maggie's and not Kinnery's security, then it raises questions about the timing of calls and who had access after her death. We know she's dead. That's
all
we can verify from an independent source. The rest is all Kinnery's word."
"I see what you mean," Weaver said. "But no dramas, okay?"
"Don't worry. My ex-husband never saw it coming either."
Weaver didn't smile. "Keep me posted."
Dru drove home, working out what she could monitor now without needing to tell or involve anyone else. There were keyword alerts and any number of feeds, and she could observe Dunlop Ranch in a roundabout way. Realtors would know if the property was put up for sale. It might have already been sold, and if it hadn't been, a relative or someone close to Maggie now owned it. Trying to get a copy of a will was too risky. Dru would have to approach this sideways.
While Clare was doing her homework, Dru shut herself in her study to set up a watch system of alerts and feeds. She started typing keywords and wildcards.
Shape-shifter. Shape shifter. Morph. Morph*. Trickster. Werewolf.
She struggled to think of more terms.
Change form. Changeling. Polymorph. Mimic. Mimic*. Ringer.
It was probably worth adding surnames and locations as well.
Dunlop Ranch. Athel Ridge. Maggie Dunlop. Ian Dunlop. Charles Kinnery. Shaun Weaver.
Who else? There were a couple of scientists whose names had cropped up in the Ringer files, plus the senator who'd been involved, the one Weaver called to cover his ass. Adding those might at least filter out thousands of irrelevant pages at some stage.
Lawrenson. Dominici. Brayne.
She'd add more as they occurred to her. The next step was to bookmark sites and forums that might discuss shape-shifting. Zoe Murray would have this information network at her fingertips; it was a shame they couldn't collaborate. The realtor sites would probably take more hands-on searching and maybe even some calls, but at least Dru had an automated eye on the places most likely to yield results.
But this could take years. I'm obsessive. It's official. And If I go crazy reading those UFO forums, I'll make a master's thesis out of it.
The timeline of events would be the key. Dru tried to avoid pet theories in case they blinded her to better ones, but the one lead that kept surfacing and waving to her was the significance of the British guy who took that call.
If he wasn't Ian Dunlop, then he probably knew where Ian was.
CHALTON FARM, WESTERHAM FALLS
ONE WEEK LATER.
The old face still hadn't returned.
No amount of meditating, willing, and pleading with whoever might be Up There had changed a thing. Ian psyched himself up in front of the bedroom mirror, torn between accepting this was the look he'd have to hang on to and busting a gut to get back to the way he'd been. Rob had never explained how to tell the difference between giving up too soon and knowing when make the best of a bad job.
But this isn't me. I don't really like this face.
He still had his new muscles, though. That was something.
Livvie said a few months of meditation caused physical changes in the brain that showed up on scans. This stuff was
real
. But it wasn't doing a goddamn thing to turn him back to the way he wanted to be. He kept a split-screen image on his phone, made up of the photo of David Dunlop and the picture that Livvie had taken on the way back from the garden centre, scaled to match. He concentrated on the twin images for hours until it gave him a headache. Something should have triggered whatever it was in his brain that told the various nerves, muscles, and pigment cells to do this or do that.
Perhaps he needed to try something different. When he'd morphed in Livvie's car, the moment had been a real mess of stressful emotions; fear of who was tailing him, anger that they'd dared to, and shame that Livvie felt she had to protect a grown man. If he wanted to recreate those conditions, he'd need to go do something dumb and dangerous.
Yeah, but look what happened when I got worked up in a boxing match. A friendly one that I knew wouldn't really damage me.
I should go out on my own. Test myself a little. Nobody's stopping me.
He couldn't stand in front of the mirror all day feeling sorry for himself. He went to find Mike, intending to go straight to the gym to do some phys, but Mike was in his study with the door open, reading something on his computer.
"Hey Ian. Want to see where your money is now?"
Ian wandered in. "Would I understand it? You're the money expert. I mean, I trust you to know what to do."
"I still need you to know about it. Transparency. Education. Whatever." He beckoned Ian over to the desk and showed him documents on the screen. "That's the proceeds from the sale of the ranch. When we get your ID sorted out, you can open your own checking account, but this is the trust the lawyer set up for you. The money can sit there until we can move it somewhere you can access easily."
Ian felt it was time to ask. "You bought the ranch yourself, didn't you?"
"Yes." Mike shrugged. "We had to hide the ownership from prying KWA eyes as fast as possible."
"It cost you."
"Damn, you're picking up Rob habits. You do realise how much money we have, don't you? And I mean that in a don't-worry kind of way. Not an I'm-loaded kind of way."
Ian hoped that Livvie kept an eye on Mike's generosity. A high IQ and a good education didn't make a guy sensible, and throwing money away was dumb, no matter how much you had.
"I promise I won't take advantage of you," Ian said.
"I know that."
"What use am I to you, though?"
"You don't have to be useful. Not to me. Not to anybody."
"Okay, I
want
to be useful. How do I earn my keep? Can I do stuff for your new company?"
Mike looked to one side of the monitor as if he was taking the idea seriously. "Well, you could help us brainstorm. We've got to come up with something soon. We're looking at doing security assessments for organizations setting up overseas."
"Sure." Ian had no idea what that entailed, but he he'd make sure he found out. "I just want to be ... well, you know. Make a difference. Even if I can't join the Army."
Mike shook his head slowly, just one side to side movement. "I really do know, buddy. I'm
still
trying to make a difference."
"But you served."
"In the Guard."
"You make it sound like that wasn't real."
"Oh, it was real enough in Iraq. I'm not being disrespectful to all the guys who got killed and injured. They made the same sacrifices as everyone else. I just got frustrated with the organization. Rob says I'd have felt even worse in the Army."
"Is that why you spent all that time and money on private training?"
Mike didn't talk about it much, but Rob had told Ian all the details. Mike's instructors had been former SEALs, USMC, and Delta guys, even SAS and French Foreign Legion. He'd been trained to do things he wouldn't have experienced even in a full-time infantry career. Ian didn't have a word for it, so he invented one:
hyper-legitimizing
. Mike had to go further and do tougher stuff than anyone else to prove he wasn't playing at it.
"Private contractor work was the only thing left for me when I quit the Guard," Mike said. "I needed the best skills I could get."
It made perfect sense, but Ian could see same need in Mike that he saw in himself. Rob was different. He had his validation. That green beret told Rob everything he needed to know about himself, and he didn't fret about changing the world. He knew that he'd done his utmost and that he could do nothing more.
"Where's Rob, by the way?" Ian asked.
"He's taken his shoulder to the sports physio. Age, buddy. Everything takes longer to heal. That's you in twenty years. So take a day off."
Ian worried that if he skipped a session he'd lose his self-discipline as well as muscle mass. "Okay. Can you give me ride into Westerham, please? Is that okay? I'd like to wander around on my own."
Mike nodded, but he still looked worried. "Sure."