The two Fords pulled to a halt in front of the stand of trees. Three men and a woman climbed out. Gabriel walked across and chatted to them for several minutes, then came back, carrying two plastic bags.
“Here’s a pair of pants to change into.” He tossed her a bag. “I want that leg seen to before you do, though. You’re bleeding fairly heavily.”
She glanced down. Her right boot was covered in blood, yet she hadn’t even felt any pain. It was amazing what fear and anger could do. “Whose clothes are we borrowing?”
“No one’s. I asked Sandy to pick something up.”
“Sandy being the blonde, I gather?”
“Yes.”
“So how does she know my size?” She didn’t bother asking how Sandy knew his size. That was patently obvious.
“I told her you’re roughly the same size as her.” His voice was as cold as the look in his hazel eyes. “She’s got a medi-kit in the car. Get over there and let her look at that wound.”
“Immediately, sir,” she said, and saluted him.
His gaze narrowed and he muttered something she couldn’t quite catch before turning away. Good, she thought. It was about time she started getting some of her own back. She walked over to the second car. Sandy was your average model type—leggy, a figure to die for, and sapphire-colored eyes. Stunning, in other words—though the term “bitch” also lingered in Sam’s thoughts.
“Agent Ryan,” Sandy greeted her, a warm smile touching her full red lips. “You’d best sit down while I tend to that wound. You’re losing a fair amount of blood there.”
Sam felt her hackles rising and couldn’t understand why. The woman was being nice, for Christ’s sake. Maybe that was the problem. It was something she wasn’t entirely used to—especially given her partner’s behavior of late.
She sat on the backseat and pulled up her pant leg. “I’ll survive.”
Another white smile flashed, revealing teeth that were as perfect as the rest of her. Sandy knelt, medi-kit in hand. “Yeah, I suppose you’re used to it, being Gabe’s partner.”
Gabe. Not Stern, not even Gabriel. Gabe. “You two are friends, I gather?”
“Old friends,” Sandy agreed, without looking up.
No dark roots, she thought. Either the dyeing techniques had improved dramatically or the woman was a natural blonde. “Do you still go out?”
“Occasionally. When we’ve both got free time.”
Which confirmed what she’d thought earlier. And shot her theory that Gabriel was little more than a hermit who lived for work to hell. “That’s nice.”
“It usually is,” Sandy agreed, glancing up.
The look in her eyes left Sam in no doubt that she was referring to horizontal rather than vertical pursuits. And somewhere deep inside, a vague spark of jealousy stirred. This woman saw a side of Gabriel she probably never would—but it was a side she wanted to see, and with a fierceness that was totally surprising.
Of course, to have a chance of seeing that side, she’d have to either stop being his partner or stop constantly sniping at him. And she wasn’t sure which was the lesser of two evils.
“You can change in the car, if you like. I’ll make sure the men don’t bother you.”
Like that was going to worry her, especially after ten years of sharing locker rooms with the men in State. But she nodded. Sandy picked up the medi-kit and shut the door, then sauntered across to the fire trucks to join Gabriel and the three other agents.
The pants turned out to be a pair of black denim jeans that fit like a glove. She wondered how Gabriel had guessed her size so precisely, because she and Sandy definitely weren’t the same size. He’d certainly never got into her pants, and waist size wasn’t something she’d felt inclined to mention. She threw her dark gray slacks into the bag, then climbed out of the car.
Sandy had finished tending to Gabriel’s wounds and was currently standing shoulder to shoulder with the man. They made a good-looking couple, Sam thought, and she resolutely stomped on the desire to march over there and wedge them apart.
Instead, she leaned against the trunk of the car, crossed her legs to take the weight off her injured calf and waited. Gabriel finally walked over about ten minutes later, but not before giving Sandy a nice little kiss on the forehead.
God, anyone would think the man meant more to her than just an attraction that was never going to lead anywhere.
“Just got a report from the home—Roy Benson didn’t make it,” he said, stopping several feet away and regarding her somewhat warily.
“No surprise, given he’d had half his face and chest sucked off.”
“Yes.” He hesitated, then added, “Ready to go?”
She waved a hand. “After you.”
He didn’t move. “Sandy’s just a friend.”
“Look, it’s really none of my business, is it? Let’s just go.”
He regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “We’re taking Sandy’s car. Mine’s probably too bent to drive.”
Just like its driver. The retort tingled on the tip of her tongue, itching for release. But if she annoyed him too much, he was likely to give her some inane task and send her hiking back to headquarters. She climbed into the front seat and slammed the door instead. Slamming doors was undoubtedly childish, but right then she was feeling particularly childish.
He started the car and headed back to Kensington. A third gray Ford sat outside Roy Benson’s retirement home—obviously, Gabriel had called in a cleanup team to tend to the second kite attack. She wondered why. Surely it was a task he would normally have forced her to handle, especially given that it might be connected to Lyle’s murder.
He drove on. Mark Allars lived a block away from the retirement home in a single-fronted Victorian-style house that was probably worth a fortune, despite its run-down appearance. She studied the building as she climbed out of the car. The small front yard was filled with gate-high weeds, and the window to the right of the door was boarded up with wood. It looked abandoned—until you looked up and saw the state-of-the-art satellite dishes sitting on the roof.
The gate creaked when Gabriel opened it. Sam limped through and knocked on the door.
“Who the hell is it?” a rough voice demanded.
She raised her eyebrows and glanced at Gabriel.
“He’s your average, cranky recluse,” he said, then raised his voice slightly. “It’s Gabriel Stern. Charles’s son.”
Footsteps shuffled toward the door. Seconds later it was flung open. An old man stood before them, wearing blue pajama bottoms and a battered, smoke-stained sweatshirt. His feet were bare, his toenails yellow and a good inch longer than his toes.
He leaned forward, peering at Gabriel with red-ringed, watery eyes. “So it is. Fancy that.” Then his gaze turned to Sam and recognition flickered through the rheumy eyes. He stiffened, his knuckles white as he clenched the door.
“You,” he breathed softly. “You’re dead. They said you were dead!”
SAM GLANCED BRIEFLY AT GABRIEL, then back to Allars. “I have to say, I don’t feel dead.”
The old man blinked, and then he smiled. “You don’t look it, either.” His red-rimmed gaze went back to Gabriel. “What game are you playing here, son?”
“Mark, this is my partner, Sam Ryan.”
Allars studied her for a moment. “No relation to Meg Moore, then?”
Hope leapt. Meg Moore was one of the four women listed on Sam’s birth certificate. “I might be. I’m not really sure.”
“Interesting. You look the spitting image of her.” He hesitated and leaned close. His breath was a lethal combination of whiskey and salami. “Except for the eyes. Meg had real pretty green eyes.”
Gabriel touched the old man’s arm, drawing his attention away, and Sam took a deep breath of fresh air.
“Mark, do you mind if we come in?” he asked. “We have a few things we need to discuss with you.”
“Sure thing, son. Just don’t mind the mess.” He stepped back and opened the do
or wide. “First door on your right.”
Sam limped in after Gabriel. The air in the old house was a combination of staleness, sweat and old person. Dust lay thick on the baseboards and telephone table, and in the hallway, spiders hung in ropes from the ceiling. The old man obviously spent most of his time in the living room, because the dust and webs were absent there. Instead, newspapers and betting slips were scattered all over the coffee table and small sofa. A TV dominated one corner, and a comfy old recliner sat several feet back from it, one arm lined with remotes.
Gabriel swept the newspapers lying across the sofa into a pile, then stacked them in one corner. Sam sat down in the cleared space. Gabriel sat next to her, his thigh brushing hers, sending little tingles of electricity up her spine. She ignored it, though part of her wanted to confront it—confront him—about the awareness and what could be happening between them. If he ever let it.
Damn it, what was so wrong with her that he didn’t want her as a partner and wouldn’t consider her as a potential lover?
Allars shuffled across to the recliner. “Now, what can I help you with, son?”
“Emma Pierce. You recognize that name?”
“Sure thing. She worked at Hopeworth, same as Meg and me.”
“What on?”
Allars smiled slightly. “Secrets Act, son. Even now, I can’t talk about it.”
“Can you remember who else you were working with at the time?” Sam asked quietly.
“It’s just the body that’s gotten old, girlie, not the mind.” He hesitated, rheumy eyes distant. “Let’s see—in my project there was Meg, Mike Shean, David Wright, Jeremy Park, Alice Armstrong, Rae Messner and Fay Reilly.”
Sam crossed her legs, not just to ease the ache in her calf, but to keep in check the sudden rush of excitement. Those names were all on the birth certificate. Finally, she’d found someone who might know something.
“And Emma?” Gabriel asked.
Allars shook his head. “No. She was several years younger than us. That was a completely different project.”
“Different how?” Gabriel’s voice held a touch of impatience. “And don’t quote me that ‘secrets’ rubbish. You haven’t worked at Hopeworth for a good twenty years, and the project’s probably obsolete by now.”
Allars’s smile was jovial, but there was something almost cunning in his eyes. “You’d be surprised.”
“Mark, four people have been murdered in the last week. The only connection we have between any of them is Emma Pierce and Hopeworth. We have to find out what Emma was involved in. It may provide our only real hope of finding the murderer.”
Allars’s gaze was assessing. “Why don’t you put in a request to Hopeworth itself?”
“I have,” Sam said, and Gabriel gave her a brief look of surprise. Why, she had no idea, when it was the logical next step. “But you and I both know I’ll only get the runaround. We need to catch this woman before she kills again, and we need you to help us.”
“I like you, girlie. You’ve got guts.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you intend to help us?”
“I’m not sure that I can.” Allars shifted slightly, bumping one of the remotes onto the floor. “But what’s in it for me if I do?”
“Maybe your life.”
Allars’s rheumy gaze met hers. In it, she saw a shrewdness that spoke of a sharp intelligence. The aging body was definitely no indication of the mind trapped inside.
“Now what makes you say that?”
“Do the names Hal White, Peter Lyle and Roy Benson mean anything to you?”
“Yeah. Benson lives a block away.”
“Lived,” Gabriel corrected bluntly. “He was murdered about an hour ago.”
The old man raised an eyebrow. “And you’re thinking I might be next?”
“We don’t know, Mark. Nor do we know if the murder of White, Lyle and Benson is related in any way to our serial killings.”
“But they could be?”
“Maybe.”
The old man sighed. “Lyle, White and Benson were three of the eighteen scientists involved in our project.”
“What about Cooper and Haynes?” Sam asked.
Allars nodded. “Them, too.”
So did that mean someone was going after people who worked at Hopeworth? And how did the death of Emma Pierce and the murder of the scientists link to the serial killings? Because Sam was sure they were linked. It was just too much of a coincidence for both these killings to be happening at the same time.
She leaned on the arm of the sofa and covertly massaged her temple. Her headache had sprung into high gear again. Maybe it was working in sympathy with her calf, which had at least died down to a muted ache. “What project were they working on?”
“In truth, I can’t really say. It was real hush-hush. All I know is that it went by the code name Penumbra.”
Penumbra? Where in hell did the military get these names? “How were you involved?”
Allars smiled. “I was a lab rat, much the same as the others. I provided cell samples, semen samples, stuff like that.”
If Hopeworth was taking cell and semen samples, they were obviously delving into genetics. “For what reason? Isn’t Hopeworth a weapons development center?”
“Yeah, they are. But there’s all kinds of weapons, girlie.”
Meaning Hopeworth was developing human—or rather, nonhuman—weapons?
Gabriel rubbed a hand across his chin, his expression thoughtful. “Were the other seven people involved in your project shifters as well?”
“No, I was the only shifter. David was a changer, Meg a werewolf and Alice a vampire. I’m not real sure about the other four. I didn’t really have a lot to do with them.”
Or he didn’t really want to talk about them, for whatever reason. She tried a different tack. “What about the other scientists on the project? You said there were eighteen in total.”
“Most died some fifteen years ago. A massive fire took out half of Hopeworth, and what wasn’t destroyed by the fire was taken out by a quake. There were half a dozen other projects destroyed as well, I believe. I think Cooper and Haynes survived, but I have no idea where they might be nowadays.”
She remembered her dreams, remembered the fire that had danced across Joshua’s fingers, and a chill ran down her spine. Were the two connected? Was she—were they—Hopeworth brats?
“Hopeworth still stands, so the quake and fire obviously didn’t destroy everything. Surely they had backups?”
“That’s the thing no one can figure out. There was a good fire prevention system in place, but none of it worked. Everything was destroyed. The buildings, the computers, every scrap of data on Penumbra—backup systems, storage areas, everything—including the personnel who were in the buildings at the time. Nothing escaped.”
“Nothing except five men.” If the motive was revenge, why leave five alive? She glanced at Gabriel. “Maybe someone’s making amends for a past miss?”
“But why wait fifteen years? It makes no sense.”
“That it doesn’t, lad. Especially when whoever set fire to Hopeworth managed to get in and out without ever being seen. If they could do that, they could finish it off properly.”
“Could it have been an inside job?”
“Doubtful. Everyone in Hopeworth is microchipped. Every move is tracked.”
Someone had microchipped her. Was that confirmation that she’d been a part of Hopeworth?
“Were there many families at Hopeworth?” Gabriel asked, obviously following her line of thinking.
Allars snorted. “Hopeworth is no place for kids, believe me.”
“Then why do they employ an obstetrician?”
The old man shrugged. “The military has many strange ways.”
“What about you, Mark?” she asked. “Did you ever have kids?”
Allars’s smile held more than a little bitterness. “I couldn’t. Some of the tests they did on us back then made us sterile. They
compensated us, of course, but I know the women—and Meg in particular—were real resentful.”
There was an edge in his voice that made her ask, “Just how well did you and Meg know each other?”
“We might have gotten married if we hadn’t been in the military. Marriages between personnel weren’t allowed. Once we’d left the military, things seemed to change.” The old man shrugged, yet the sudden grief in his eyes belied his casualness. “Meg changed. She just wanted to be friends. We lived together, you know, here in this house.”
“What about Emma Pierce, then?” Sam asked, feeling sorry for the old man. His life certainly hadn’t gone the way he’d planned—but then, neither had hers. And at least he could remember his life. “Where does she fit into all this?”
“Emma was a friend of Meg’s. She came to Hopeworth about three years after us.”
“What sort of project was she involved in?”
Allars shrugged and dug a handkerchief out of his pajama pocket to wipe his watery eyes. “We didn’t really share information. It was code-named Generation 18, and I do know that everyone involved was either a shifter or a changer.”
“Did they take cell samples from Emma, as well?”
Allars snorted. “They took a damn sight more than cells. They took her damn ovaries.”
Sam blinked. “They what?”
“Yeah, real nice of them, wasn’t it? Emma wasn’t aware of it until much later, of course. At the time, all the women were on medication to prevent ovulation, anyway.”
“But how could you not know you’d undergone major surgery like that? Surely there would have been a scar, at the very least.”
“They were cutting into her, and the others, all the time. Taking little samples of skin, pieces of this, pieces of that. It was part of the job. Emma had volunteered to be a lab rat, like me and Meg. The pay and living conditions were top rate, even for Hopeworth. But so were the costs, as we later discovered.”
“What price did you pay, Mark?” Gabriel’s voice was soft and held a hint of compassion. “Besides losing Meg, I mean?”
“I’m barely sixty, and look at me. Shifters have a life span almost double that of humans, and here I am, ready for the scrap heap. But I’m luckier than some. Many developed cancers. Meg—” Allars hesitated, his gaze drifting to a photo on top of the TV of a gray-haired woman. Sam could see nothing of herself in that photo, despite Allars’s earlier statement. “Meg developed skin lesions all over. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t quick.” He hesitated and wiped his eyes again. “I never saw her die, you know. The military came and took her away from me.”