“And you?” Silver asked.
“I'm Ryu's… girlfriend.”
“You're his girlfriend?” Silver asked, his voice clearly indicating that he thought tracking mass murderers was not the proper place for people's “girlfriends.”
I ignored him. “Now will you put the gun away?”
Silver thought for a minute and then shrugged. He turned back to the room behind the bookcase—which I could see had a toilet and sink, an army cot, a control deck for the security system, tons of leather-bound books, and a big box of files—in order to put the gun down. He also picked up the box and then walked past us, toward the living room, as the door to the panic room slid shut.
“I was dead when I opened that door,” he said, over his shoulder. “So I might as well have a brandy.”
In single file, we shuffled after Silver's disheveled, wild-haired form as if we were in some bizarre pantomime performance of the Pied Piper. Silver put his huge box down in order to pour himself a stiff belt of booze, and the rest of us all joined him when he offered. It had been a long night, and it was just beginning.
“Here's what you came for,” Silver said, kicking the box over to Ryu. “Everything is in there. Well, everything from my time, so I don't know how much it'll help.” The old man's face grew grim. “I'm not responsible for what happened after I left… But there's Conleth's childhood, the records of the testing we did, and records about everyone who worked with me at the laboratory. What's not on paper is on the data sticks at the bottom.”
Ryu contemplated the box like he'd just been given a great big gift horse, one he now had to look in the mouth. He finally bent over and started rummaging.
Camille came over to Silver, and I could feel her glamour reaching out to him, trying to soothe and relax him, magically buttering him up. She sat down on the ottoman next to him.
“You were in charge of everything until a few years ago,” Camille said gently, staring Silver in the eyes. “Why did that change? Who took over the lab once you left?”
Silver shrugged, blinking slowly. “I don't really know. Until a few years ago, we were basically functioning as Conleth's guards. With his powers, he couldn't be released into the general population. So even though we weren't experimenting on him anymore, the government paid us to keep him. We knew how to handle him. We were the only thing he knew. I think he considered us family. But then we got word from our corporate offices in Chicago that we'd been bought out by a new company and that we had a new sponsor. A private sponsor. That's when everything changed.”
“Changed how?”
“It started small. New nurses. Who weren't really nurses in my estimation. Then new technicians. They were rough and they started doing their own ‘experiments' when I wasn't there. Things that could not really be called… science.”
“Such as?”
“Strange things. Invasive. And that couldn't have been pleasant for Con. I started looking into it and voicing my opposition, and was I summarily fired. They replaced me with the worst of the new technicians. He was… off. I don't know what his deal was, but he wasn't right. On any level. I don't know what they did to Con for the last few years, but it must have been horrifying. The boy I left wouldn't have done those things. He wasn't really a prisoner to us. And I think he loved us, and we cared for him, in our own ways. But now… Whatever they did to him changed him, completely.”
Silver took a deep pull from his drink as we fell silent, each wrapped up in our own thoughts, until Camille spoke again.
“Do you have any idea who this company, or this sponsor, was?” she prompted, trying to tease his memory with both her questioning and her glamour. I could sense her magic probe, but every time she did so, Silver's face went slack. I realized his mind had already been messed with, and not by us.
The old man's jaw worked, as if he were forcing himself to speak. “The company's information is in one of those files. Well, what I could find, which wasn't much. It seems to be a shell organization, hiding God only knows what. As for the new sponsor, when we first got the news, there was a liaison sent to look everything over. She spent a lot of time with Conleth.” Silver frowned, his gaze losing focus. “It's… fuzzy. She's… hard to remember. I know I met her, but…” He fell silent as his face went blank. “What were you asking?” he said suddenly, looking at Camille as if he wasn't sure when she'd sat down.
Oh yeah, he'd been fucked with, all right. His memory was shot full of holes so big Ryu could have driven through them.
I'm surprised he even remembered she was a woman. At least that's something.
“Did you ever meet the actual sponsor?” Camille asked, knowing that Silver would never remember anything about the female liaison.
Silver shook his head. “Only the higher-ups, the money people, ever met him. Which is why Con must be working with someone,” he insisted. “Someone who knows the power structure.”
“We haven't found any evidence that Conleth is working with anyone,” Ryu said, soothingly. “Everyone from the laboratory he's attacked, he's attacked on his own.”
“Well, then, who's killing the others?” Silver demanded, his voice rough with fear and grief.
“Others?” we all asked together.
Silver stood, slowly and stiffly, and walked to the box. He took out a sheaf of papers.
“These are from a woman named Dr. Donovan, who went between Boston and Chicago. She worked for the old company that owned us, as the person who approved the testing. And she's the only person I know who stayed on after corporate changed hands. For the few years I worked for the new company, she's the only one I ever dealt with. Everything came down to me, to our lab, through her.”
Ryu took the papers. “And?”
“Brenda and I worked for years together. She was always in and out of Boston on business, and we spent a lot of time together. We… we had an affair, briefly. But even after the affair, we stayed friends. We trusted each other, and she had my private e-mail, my addresses, everything. But we had a falling out over the new administration after I was fired. I wanted her to tell me what they were doing to Conleth and she refused. She was ambitious… Anyway, we lost touch. Which is why I was so surprised to get that first e-mail, there.” Silver pointed to the paper on top of the stack. “She sounded so scared. That came about a week after Conleth escaped.”
“Is that why you went into hiding?” Ryu asked.
“I didn't know what Con would do when I knew he'd escaped. So yes, I hid from Con at first. But he only killed people from after my time. There are tons of employee files I have there, in that box. The people who were with Conleth from the beginning, but who were fired by the new administration, are still alive. I've checked up on them. So at first I hid from Conleth, yes. But then I hid because of what Brenda told me in those e-mails.”
“Which is?” Ryu prompted.
“She starts off by telling me that something isn't right, asking me questions about who and what Conleth could have known about people in corporate. I tell her that he couldn't have known anything, unless things had changed that much since I was in charge. Hell, I didn't even know anything about who had taken over, and I was at the top in Boston. She e-mails me back saying she was wrong to get in touch, nothing was happening, and she'd just been overtired. Then she starts writing me letters…”
I watched as Ryu flipped through the papers, nodding at Silver's words.
“Brenda writes to tell me that her e-mail is monitored and so are her phones. Hence the letters. She tells me that the people above her are disappearing. That they're showing up dead. Burned. She asks me how Conleth could have known about the people in Chicago, who worked with her in corporate.
“But he couldn't have,” Silver insisted. “Everything was set up so it went through Brenda and me, or whoever replaced me. We were as high as anything could be traced, and Brenda was the buffer keeping even me from knowing anything. I know because I tried like hell to find out more about that company even before I was fired, and I've got some pretty impressive contacts. Nothing could be discovered. Nothing.”
“But you'd been replaced,” Ryu interjected, gently. “Maybe things had changed.”
“Bullshit,” Silver swore. “There's no way a company puts that much effort, money, and influence into remaining invisible just to rip off the veil one day.”
“What happened to Donovan?” Ryu asked.
“Last page,” Silver said. “The photo.”
The photo showed a picture very similar to the ones Ryu had shown me at the laboratory. Dr. Donovan was dead, her body burned.
“You're sure it's her?” Ryu asked.
“Dental records,” was the only response.
“When was this? And where?”
“Right after Conleth killed his family here. But Brenda was killed in Chicago.”