“Do you believe he was there?”
“Maybe,” she said. “He’d never been to my house, but he knew about the ladies. I could see him hiring Travis to break the window as a distraction.”
I could see a fellow paleontologist refuse to poison birds, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Open-and-shut case,” I said. “Except for the murder.”
“And Jason says the hard drives were wiped, and then smashed apart,” she said. “I shouldn’t care about that, not now, but…”
“Yeah.” I went to pour myself a cup of coffee. When I came back to the table, I said, “What do you need? Do you need to go home alone, or to a hotel alone, or do you want me to stay with you? I have access to a very nice lake house not too far from here, if you want to escape for a few days.”
“The lake house sounds great, but Rachel said I shouldn’t leave the city,” she said. “Home, I guess.” She looked up at me, dark eyes red from crying. “And I don’t want you to leave.”
I promised her I’d stay with her as long as she wanted, and I meant it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chanda’s house was quiet. Even the crows were silent in their roost. It matched her mood: she hadn’t spoken on the drive. I had told the driver to stop at a diner, and had picked up a big platter of lasagna. This lay on the kitchen counter between us; I had hastily replaced the tinfoil covering when I had made the first cut and the red sauce had spilled into the brown meat and the creamy mess of cheese, and Chanda had run to the bathroom to throw up.
She was still gone when the crows began squawking up a storm. I checked Chanda’s security footage and found Brian, Mrs. Leung’s limo driver, standing on the front stoop. Behind him, the limo purred patiently by the curb.
“Hey, Chanda?” I called up the stairs, in the direction of the bathroom.
After a moment, she shouted back, “Let him in.”
Brian declined to come inside. Instead, he waited until Chanda felt presentable, and then in a repeat of that morning, he escorted us to the curb. Again, Mrs. Leung was waiting for us in the limousine. She nodded to Chanda. “Dr. Kelson,” she said. “I have someone who would like to speak with you.”
She flipped on the limo’s monitor. The image was a video feed of a woman in a cluttered laboratory. It appeared to be a two-way feed, as the woman lit up in a smile and began to speak rapid-fire Mandarin the moment she spotted Chanda. To my surprise (I know, I know), Chanda replied in the same language. Then, the woman on the other end of the feed seized the camera, and moved it to show a large rock. The woman brought the camera closer to the rock, and a small skeleton came into focus.
“Agent Glassman, you have my permission to confirm this feed is live,” Leung said.
I followed the signal, tracing it back along its journey from the limo to a satellite, and then down to a series of signaling stations across mainland China. “The signal originates at a location outside of the city of Tangshan,” I said to Chanda.
She nodded and said, “Good, that’s good,” to me, before resuming her conversation in Chinese. Finally, she and the other woman smiled at each other, and Chanda pressed her fingertips against the monitor. The other woman did the same.
“Are you satisfied that your colleague is safe, and the fossil has been returned to her?” Leung asked.
Chanda turned to Leung, suspicion still weighing her down. After a moment, Chanda nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Leung said. “Thank Agent Glassman.”
“I see,” I replied. “Tell your employers that OACET will remember the favor you’ve done for Dr. Kelson.”
Leung nodded. “I will.”
I tried to meet her eyes. “Will you still be at the Embassy event this week?”
“Unlikely.” Leung opened the door for us herself. “Have a good evening, Agent Glassman.”
Chanda and I left the limo. It vanished down the quiet residential street, a slow-moving panther of a car. I wondered if I’d see Leung again, and then decided I would: this was one of those coincidental events that had spiraled out of control. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, except for the person who started it all.
Chanda didn’t ask me any questions. She merely turned and walked back into her house.
I followed.
She settled herself in a leather chair in front of her fireplace, pulled a blanket over her legs, and sat, unmoving. After a few quiet minutes, she asked, “What happened?”
“I don’t have answers,” I replied. “Just guesses.”
She nodded silently.
“Someone took your fossil. Someone rich and powerful. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was rare, or maybe just because they could.”
“Probably because it’s rare,” she said. “The last of its kind.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I sat down in a matching chair directly across from her. “And they wiped out the data, too.”
She finally lifted her head, staring at the window and the dark of the night outside. “Why?” she asked. “The data didn’t make the fossil any less special. In fact… In fact, once it was published, it’d make the missing fossil that much more valuable.”
“I don’t think whoever did this did it for the money. I think they wanted something unique, maybe to keep it for themselves, or maybe to keep it away from the rest of the world.” And then I had to add—because it would have been the worst lie of omission if I didn’t: “I think I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I think I made this worse, just by implying the presence of OACET. I think they had this planned so they’d steal the fossil, then steal the data, and leave. They wouldn’t have had to turn Rudnick into a fall guy to hide their tracks.”
I didn’t add that the crows probably would have been poisoned. That wouldn’t have helped anything.
Chanda reached over and pressed a button on the gas fireplace. Flames burst across the fake logs, as if conjured by sorcery. “Come here,” she said.
Her chair was oversized and it made for a snug fit for two. I pulled her onto my lap, and tucked the blanket around the two of us. She was shivering, as if we were in the dead of January, not September with autumn barely knocking on the door, and I held her because I couldn’t do anything else.
I thought she fell asleep. I was close to drifting off myself, when she said, “I know this wasn’t my fault, but it sure feels like it. If I hadn’t gotten you involved—”
I cut her off as quickly as possible. “Remember, I’m only guessing,” I said. “If I’m wrong about any of this, then it’s possible that you and your colleague would have ended up dead, too, your head caved in by the same person who had bashed open Rudnick’s brains with a—
“No.” I said, my mind made up. “I’m glad you came to me. The Chinese government knows who did this. If anything happens to you or your colleague, they’ll make sure that person is punished. That threat will keep you safe.”
“Unless something happens to you,” she said quietly.
I chuckled. “I’m part of a cybernetic hivemind. If someone goes after me, they go after all of OACET. We’ve made it very clear that the world has nothing to fear from us, as long as nobody tries to hurt us.” I held her as close as I could. “Or those we care about.”
Chanda was crying.
“Stay,” she said. “Stay here with me. I fall in love too fast. It’s a problem, so I put up walls, and… But with you, I just…”
I kissed her. “As long as you want,” I promised her. “I’ll be right here for as long as you’ll have me.”
We fell asleep like that, tangled together in front of the fire.
We woke up to Travis kicking in the front door.
It was momentary chaos: a loud BANG! followed by the unearthly cacophony of crows, and then glass breaking as Travis took a baseball bat to the light fixtures. He was shouting—he was screaming!—and I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. He came straight at us, swinging the bat…
The coffee table saved us. Travis
couldn’t get around it fast enough; I threw Chanda over the back of the chair, and shoved the table at Travis. The bat came down, wood cracking against wood, and he kicked the table aside so he could come at me.
“Fuckin’ kill you—” Travis was muttering and screaming at the same time, the words blurring into violence. His eyes were blurry and unfocused: he was high on something, and that was just too much of a coincidence.
“Who paid your bail, Travis?” My mouth was on autopilot while I groped around for a weapon. I needed something! A brick, a fireplace poker, anything! But Chanda’s living room was too clean. All I had was the blanket we had been sleeping in, and that wouldn’t stack up against a baseball bat. “They upped the charges on you, buddy! If you couldn’t afford bail for breaking a window, there’s no way you’d afford the bail for participating in a homicide!”
Travis said something else, something incomprehensible, and swung the bat as if he was planning to score a home run with my skull. I ducked. The bat whistled past my head, far too close for comfort. I managed to get the blanket wrapped around the bat, but Travis kept moving, kept the momentum going, and the blanket was torn from my hands.
I went in low and tackled him around the stomach, planning to shove him straight into the fireplace. Instead, Travis took the bat in both hands and brought the handle down in the middle of my skull with a crack!
White ate up my vision, and then I saw the floor rush up towards my face.
I hit the ground and rolled, kicking at Travis. He blinked, unable to process how I shouldn’t be conscious and yet was still moving. It made him slow, but not slow enough; he stepped back and started a single brutal swing at my head.
All I could do was throw up my arms in self-defense: I might have space-age alloys where my parietal bone used to be, but brain trauma is still brain trauma and—
“Hey, Travis!” Chanda’s shout took Travis by surprise. He paused just long enough for Chanda to step over the ruins of her coffee table. “Say hello to my little friends!”
For a moment, I thought the blow to my head had done more damage than I expected. That was the only reason Chanda was walking across her own living room like a furious queen, standing in the middle of a cloud of moving, shimmering black—
The crows attacked.
They went straight for Travis, and…and I don’t want to describe what that was like. Let’s just say that their feeding frenzy before had been gentle and controlled in comparison. But now? The crows?
The crows were pissed!
That’s all I saw before Chanda covered me with her body to protect me from her ladies, as Travis screamed behind us.
EPILOGUE
Were you hoping for a tidy resolution to the mystery?
Yeah, so was I. But that’s not how life works, especially when people are involved. People are gloriously messy, and even when we try to clean up after ourselves, we leave long smears of fingerprints across the glass. So, Mare, you asked for the story of how I met my second wife, and I gave it to you.
But we’ll probably never know who stole the dinosaurs, or who killed Rudnick, or who bailed out Travis and made sure he had enough meth in his system to try and turn us into the victims of a semi-plausible unfortunate double homicide.
Rachel says she’s added both the thief and whoever paid him to her to-do list. She’ll find them. It might take a decade or more, but she’ll still find them.
I’ll tell you what I do know: Chanda’s raw data turned up. It hit the servers of four paleontology websites simultaneously. When asked, she verified its authenticity; so did her colleague in China, who had enough fossilized chunks of the microraptor left to help validate their story. So, even though they didn’t get the professional fame which would have followed introducing their discovery to the world for the first time, they did get the naming rights. After some discussion with her colleague, Chanda announced that Microraptor oaceti would be added to the textbooks.
(I don’t know for sure that the Chinese government was behind the data dump, but it’s pretty likely, considering it was wiped away everywhere else. I’ve asked Mrs. Leung to pass on my thanks to her employers anyhow, just in case.)
The stolen modeling data that had driven Chanda to seek me out in the first place never reappeared. She had to rebuild it from scratch from the raw data and what remained of the fossils. It took her eight months of hard work. I helped where I could, but most of it was Chanda and her labor of love.
We spent part of that time happily married, and then we weren’t happy, and then we were divorced.
If it weren’t for the crows, we might still be married.
I couldn’t do it, Mare. I just could not do it! The idea of living with those birds... Mare, I had seen one of them pluck out a human eyeball! I tried. I did. Then, the day Chanda and I had our first fight, a swarm of shrieking black feathers blotted out the kitchen window. I realized that while crows might be intelligent, and while Chanda’s crows might tolerate me—they might even like me!—she was their family. I was one tense discussion over a rate hike on the power bill away from getting pecked apart.
She wouldn’t leave her ladies, and I couldn’t stay in that house without waking up to the sound of crows. I began having crow nightmares on top of the usual OACET nightmares. Bad nightmares. There’s nothing I can do about being part of OACET, so I had to put some distance between myself and the crows.
I left. Chanda took it extremely hard. I had promised to stay with her, after all, until she wanted me to leave, and she didn’t want me to leave. She didn’t understand why I couldn’t stay. I finally broke down and told her about the brainwashing, about why I had nightmares in the first place…
We tried again, this time in separate houses. It worked for a while, but the crows began to follow her to my place. They’d hang out on the balcony, trying the windows to get inside. Sometimes they did.
The nightmares came back.
I tried to convince her to leave the house her family had lived in for generations, and things went sour. Then, the crows began to follow me around the city, even when Chanda wasn’t around. Oh, it was a bad couple of months.
The worst breakup I’ve ever had was over birds. Yes, Mare, she had to choose between me or her ladies, and she chose them.
God, I miss her. Same city, and we can’t even see each other without—
Anyway. Here we are, at the end of another story. I hope this is what you were looking for. Maybe give me a day or two to process before you come and find me, okay? This dug up some memories.
Besides, I’m going to have to get my head together before I start talking about my third wife. That’s where things start to get rough.
But you already know all about how I married my third wife, don’t you, Mare?
Remember?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and as many dogs she can sneak into the house. She is the author and artist of A Girl and Her Fed, where Josh and the Agents of OACET are alive and well. Additional information about these and other projects can be found at kbspangler.com.
BOOKS
THE JOSH GLASSMAN ADVENTURES
The Russians Came Knocking
The Dinosaur Heist
THE RACHEL PENG MYSTERIES
Digital Divide
Maker Space
State Machine
Brute Force
THE HOPE BLACKWELL ADVENTURES
Greek Key
Spanish Mission
The Dinosaur Heist Page 9
