It was time to reinforce the idea that everything was possible if you had the right mental attitude. Rob steered Ian to the food court and sat him down at a table, then handed him his phone. He flicked through the photos until he found a folder that he usually kept to himself. It was painful to remember being that spotty little boy. "There. You work out who that oik is, and I'll get lunch."
When he came back with the noodles, Ian was still looking through the photos.
"Was that really you, Rob?" he asked.
"Yeah. When I passed PRMC. Royal Marine selection." Rob put a bowl in front of him and took the phone back for a moment. "And this is me after thirty-two weeks." Rob swiped to the formal picture taken after his passing out parade, his transformed spotless self in a new green beret, packing a lot more muscle and generating a gigawatt of confidence. "You're still only eighteen. Come on. Eat."
Rob stopped at the health store on the way out to the car park and bought Ian a tub of protein powder, more for its psychological value than anything. Before he drove off, he sat explaining to him how it took time to build lean muscle and that he'd fill out naturally, so there was no need to worry. Ian kept glancing in the wing mirror. It took Rob a while to realise that he was checking that he hadn't morphed again, not keeping an eye out for KWA ninjas.
"You know what Livvie said about meditation?" Ian said. "Controlling stress?"
"Yeah. You'll get the hang of it. Early days, mate. Early days."
"But it's more about not doing something. More stopping than choosing."
Rob glanced to his left. One bay away from him, a woman driver who'd pulled in gave him a long look and smiled. He smiled back. And there was absolutely nothing he could do to follow up. Shit. He went back to conversation.
"Explain."
"I mean that maybe I should decide what I want to look like, and visualize that," Ian said.
"Do you ever revert to a previous face?"
"I don't know. I never tried, because I didn't think it was real."
"So where do the different faces come from? Something you've seen and remembered?"
"I don't know."
"Does your body change too?"
"Yeah, skin and hair colour. That's about it. As far as I can tell."
Rob didn't know Ian well enough yet to ask the dick question. It occurred to him that investments could go down as well as up, and you could accidentally morph yourself something a lot shorter. Maybe it wasn't such an asset after all.
"Well, I'd visualize what I wanted." Rob said. He glanced to his left again, but the woman driver was gone. "If you're a green chameleon and you end up on a brown tree, then something's got to kick in and make you think, 'Okay, I better match that shade before some bugger eats me.' It's some kind of decision."
Ian looked a bit dejected. He read the label on the protein powder, frowning.
"You'll crack it," Rob said. "Really. You will."
"That woman who was checking you out." Ian really didn't miss a thing. "If I wasn't with you, what would you have done?"
Rob wasn't sure what to say. The question threw him. "Not sure."
"Really? I didn't get in the way or anything?"
"She was probably married with six kids. Or a serial killer. She might even have fancied the Jag instead."
"So what did Livvie have to put on hold because of me?"
Rob knew where this was heading now. "You've got a wide arc of fire today, I see."
"Not really."
"Okay. They've been trying to have a baby for years." There was no point treating Ian like an idiot. He'd just keep asking until he got an answer. "Loads of treatment sessions. But don't go thinking you've screwed things up for them, because it was Mike's decision to bring you back, and I think Livvie needs a break. There. That's the truth."
Ian nodded sagely. "Thank you."
"Home now?"
"Yeah. Thanks."
Ian was more relaxed on the way home. All he seemed to want was a dose of truth, however awkward or embarrassing. Rob was starting to understand how he thought. Everyone needed some benchmark of reality. If everything you'd thought was true had disintegrated in front of you and you didn't even know what you were supposed to look like, then any truth was solid ground to build on.
"Okay, I might have waited until she came back, and struck up a conversation with her," Rob said, awash with guilt for some reason. "The woman in the car park, I mean."
Ian just nodded. "Maybe there'll be a next time."
"Yeah," Rob said. "There usually is."
EIGHT
Charlie, I'm going to have to take Ian out of school and teach him at home. He's started to change. Are you pleased now? Are you happy that your goddamn experiment worked, you son of a bitch? Is he going to get worse? You don't know, do you? Well, fuck you, Charlie.
Maggie Dunlop in a call to Charles Kinnery, on Ian's first morphing incident, aged seven.
LLOYD HOUSEHOLD, LANSING, MICHIGAN
AUGUST.
Dru stood brushing her teeth, her mind coasting, unable to silence a nagging question that wouldn't shut up and die.
How had Weaver made the jump – a big jump – from conspiracy theory allegations about human chameleons to the theft of KWA's property via a mule?
She rinsed and spat, searching the mirror for new wrinkles. No, maybe that was a perfectly reasonable way to explain how Zoe Murray could have made a werewolf story out of embryo research. Introduce genetic engineering into a discussion, and rationality went out the window. Dru could understand that. Patent disputes, gene therapies going wrong, headline-grabbing luminous cats – it didn't inspire confidence in the layman. They were scared of that kind of thing.
That's me. I'm a layman. I don't really understand this.
But it wasn't her job to understand the science, merely to find out if Kinnery had taken KWA's intellectual property. Now she had leads in Maggie Dunlop and a vague location. She grabbed a plate of cherry muffins from the kitchen and settled down at her desk in the back room, invigorated. The job had suddenly become compelling.
Kinnery. Clever bastard.
Dru picked a whole cherry out of the soft crumb and studied it. It wouldn't be that easy to extract stolen genetic material from a human body. The lawyers could argue about intent and informed consent for months. How did the law treat a thief who couldn't return stolen goods because they were permanently embedded in him?
"Awesome," she said aloud. It didn't resolve the unanswered question about exactly what would happen to the mule, especially if he didn't cooperate, but it was probably all hypothetical anyway. "I should have been a lawyer."
Clare appeared in the doorway, still in her pyjamas. "Mom, it's Saturday. It's six in the morning. Are you talking to yourself? And working?"
"I'm on a roll, sweetheart," Dru said. "I have to work while the muse is upon me."
"I don't think there's a muse for stalking."
"I'm not stalking."
"I heard you making those calls. You don't have an aunt."
Dru felt her face flush. She's caught me lying. God, that's a terrible example to set your kids. How the hell did she explain or justify that?
"You shouldn't be listening, Clare." Dru tried not to sound pompous. She was on shaky ground. "I'm working on something really sensitive."
"I came downstairs to get a drink. I wasn't eavesdropping."
Clare had transformed into her middle-aged persona, the one who seemed slightly disappointed in Dru but forgave her for falling so short of expectations.
"I'm sorry," Dru said. "I'm not proud of that."
"But you're really good at it."
So I'm an expert liar. There's damnation if ever I heard it.
"I'm trying to find out if someone stole some stuff from the company years ago, that's all," Dru said. "If they have, it's worth an awful lot of money."
Clare just looked at her without the slightest hint of excitement. It was Dru's mother's expression, the one that glanced at the messy painting br
ought home from class and forced a smile.
"If you get it back, I hope your boss gives you a raise," Clare said, took a muffin, and wandered off.
Dru wondered whether to go after her and have a timely parental chat about ethics, but that might have made more of it than was healthy. She'd catch her later and discuss it in a chatty way, a harmless way, dressing it up as the kind of painstaking, necessary work that police had to do.
Maybe that was the career she should have picked, investigation or research of some kind. She enjoyed digging up fragments and assembling them into a picture of perfect revelation. But she'd chosen wrong. She had to make the best of it.
Larry called it self-pity, but it was more a dread of the abyss. If she looked too hard at the choices she'd hadn't made, she'd see all the things she could have done and been but now never would. If she gave in to it, there'd only be regret; it was better not to look at all. Nobody wanted to accept that they'd squandered so much of their life on a mistake. It was a big bill to pay for nothing.
She shook it off and settled down at the computer to search for place names. There was a town called Bethel after all. Well done, Dr Missiakos. But when she checked the map, it was too close to Seattle and didn't fit the rural backwater he'd described. She browsed the local directories for Bethel and the surrounding area, looking for the name Dunlop. There were some, but the first names didn't tie up.
Okay, Missiakos said he didn't quite remember. What else sounds like Bethel?
Dru began compiling a list of place names in Washington and physically checking the map instead of relying on word searches. There was nothing beginning with B that met the criteria.
How did people remember words, though? It was often the general sound, not the initial letter.
Bethel.
Something-el?
Something-thel?
For all she knew, it could have been an F instead of a TH in the name, or nothing like that at all, simply the name of the house itself, like Bethel Farm. She began searching for farms, sites of scientific interest, meteorological data, and any sites with a state list or a database, reading the names aloud in case one sounded plausible.
Then she saw the name Athel Ridge on a geology site, and it smacked her right in the eye.
Not Beth-el something, then: it was Ath-el something. It was a natural mistake to make after all those years. Eventually she found it on the map. It looked like a backwater. That was good enough to warrant time spent on more in-depth searches for Maggie Dunlop.
It was hard to believe that there was anyone alive who hadn't left some footprint on the Internet, or had someone else leave it for them, but Maggie Dunlop seemed to be that rare animal. She wasn't on the county voter's register, at least not under Dunlop, or even in a phone directory. She'd probably married, though. There was no way to guess her surname if she had.
But it had been her parents' place, according to Missiakos. Maybe Dru would find Dunlop somewhere in the county land register records. She clicked on the property search and typed in the surname field.
D,U,N,L,O,P.
And that was when everything started falling into place with an ease that surprised her. The search threw up Dunlop Ranch, Athel Ridge.
Got it. Wow.
It was like finding the Holy Grail on an auction site. She wondered if she was creating false patterns, but Athel Ridge was a small town. The chances of Dunlop Ranch not being connected to Maggie Dunlop looked increasingly small.
The online GIS map of the ranch showed a big plot of woodland and pasture with a stream running through it, some miles from the town itself. Dru opened a satellite map to look at the aerial view.
Does someone do that with my house?
It was an uncomfortable thought. She wasn't sure she really wanted to know. She'd seen sat maps as a handy way to find a restaurant or parking lot, but now she was spying on someone, even if this wasn't real-time data, and it didn't feel quite so harmless.
She toggled back to the property register results, trying to shake off the thought. The ranch was in the name of Margaret and Ian Dunlop. That was fascinating. Maggie was either married by the time she was at university, or she'd kept her maiden name and the ranch was co-owned with a male relative. It didn't matter. Dru had the lead she needed. The slog through small, tedious detail and an informed guess had paid off. She savoured the moment.
So what's Ian to Maggie? Husband, brother, son?
The satellite view showed just how rural the location was. Asking a PI to keep an eye on Kinnery in a city was one thing, but hiding in a hedge to watch a remote ranch was getting into the realms of FBI skills. Surveillance wasn't the answer, though. She had no idea what the theoretical mule might look like. It would be a case of following Maggie Dunlop's trail to see what lay at the end of it. Grant could get an affiliate to do the leg work, but that meant Dru would need to share more information with more people. She couldn't even give him a description of what he'd be looking for. He could make what he liked out of The Slide's piece, if he'd spotted it, but she couldn't give it credibility or add detail to it.
And she had a deadline. Weaver wanted this resolved or buried by the end of the month.
I'll do it myself, then. I have to. I'm dull and grey. Nobody's going to notice me.
Damn, she actually wanted to. She could do this. It was her investigation. Whenever she'd bitched to Larry about big bikes and midlife crises, she'd been sure that women didn't have them, at least not in the same I-can-still-cut-it kind of way. Female midlife angst was about staring into mirrors and buying face creams that couldn't possibly work, a grudging slide into acceptance that once her power over men had faded – the kind that sprang from the subconscious would-she-let-me-do-her game that went on in both minds – it had to be replaced by the application of financial sanctions and psychological pressure.
Dru e-mailed KWA's travel agency with a request to book her flight and hotel, passing it off with the universal project code that silenced anyone in the company these days: Halbauer. Then she made lunch while Clare phoned Larry to arrange her stay. If the bastard backed out now, Dru would throttle him. But whatever he said had made Clare really happy. She came bouncing into the kitchen, grinning.
"He says I can come over on Monday evening."
"Great." Dru dished up the enchiladas. "Did he ask questions? He always does."
"Not really. I told him you were away on business."
"Gee, thanks."
"Well, you told me not to make him think you had a new man."
"Okay. I concede that point."
"He said he wasn't surprised."
Dru wasn't offended. She preferred Larry as a snarky bastard. If he'd been nice about her, she'd have regretted the divorce, but he wasn't, so the parting of the ways had therefore been necessary and inevitable. All was right with the world again. She had no reason to miss a man like that.
While she did the laundry that afternoon, she rehearsed her plan for Athel Ridge. She visualized herself knocking on the door and introducing herself. What happened after that was the difficult part.
Hello, are you Maggie Dunlop? My name's Dru. I work for KWA.
She was going to ask a total stranger if she'd helped Charles Kinnery steal research and DNA from his former company. It was something that law enforcement and government agents did every day, but she was neither of those no matter how many parallels she drew. Her authority ended at KWA's gates. What the hell was she thinking? However she worded it, however clever her con trick, it was confrontational. She hadn't fully considered that until now. But it was too late to back out. Reality began to sap her bravado.
Maggie would ask why she'd shown up on her doorstep. If she was what Dru suspected she was, someone Kinnery trusted, then she'd tip him off right away, and the only good that might do would be to panic Kinnery into making a mistake. But the mule – if he existed – would go to ground.
Perhaps I should just treat it as a recon and see if it's worth coming back later or trying ano
ther tack.
And maybe it won't be Maggie who answers the door. Maybe it'll be that British guy who answered the phone.
Maybe he was Ian Dunlop. If Maggie was in her sixties, then the guy sounded around the right age to be her son, but the nationalities didn't make sense yet.
Kinnery's in Vancouver. Washington's right next door to Canada. A lot of Brits end up in Canada. There could be a loose family connection somehow.
Dru had been thinking in terms of the mule as someone bound by trust, fear, or dependency, not blood. The idea that Kinnery might have parked the engineered genes in a relative was freshly disturbing.
It's never like this on detective shows, is it?
As soon as the thought struck her, she began doubting every connection she'd made. A lot of things that she thought she knew probably weren't true. Like anyone else, her mind was prone to retrieve memories and imagined facts that didn't come from the real world at all, but from something she'd seen on TV or read in a book and then forgotten.
And why did I think I could handle this? Because I've watched it so many times on TV that I think I know how it's done.
Realisation of her limits didn't change a thing, though. Weaver didn't want any official investigation; it was her problem. Everything flowed from that. He'd made it impossible for her to tell anyone else the truth, and deception begat deception. Lies were a lot like cookies. It was hard to stop after just one.
After being lied to for an entire marriage, including the lies she realised she'd told herself, Dru actually craved some truth. She went back to the computer to start a fresh search for names, not confined to Washington. A lot of Ian Dunlops were thrown up; none of them had any relevance to the area, though. For a mad moment, she considered dialling Kinnery's landline just to see how he reacted.
Idiot.
She could have kicked herself. Instead of trying the Seattle number first, she should have dialled the number it was calling –Kinnery's dedicated line. But he'd be on his guard now if her wrong-number English guy had any connection.
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