Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) (14 page)

I frowned, furrowing my eyebrows as if her attitude confused me. Letting that puzzlement leak into my voice, I sighed, giving an indifferent kind of shrug.

“Okay. Sorry. I’ll just ask him. I was trying not to bother him since he’s always busy, but I guess I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell me. Thanks anyway!”

Lizbeth continued to look faintly horrified, but I pretended not to notice as I smacked the top of the counter in a friendly way, smiling wider before I turned to go.
 
Giving her a brief wave over my shoulder, I began walking briskly away from the reception desk and towards the corridor that housed the back offices.

Lizbeth had his password memorized of course.

I knew she would.

She wasn’t the kind of person who would risk writing anything down.

I also knew if I got her flustered enough, she’d probably think of what it was, so I wouldn’t have to go looking for it. Using Black’s first name was kind of a cheap trick, but it worked.

Thank goodness for old school administrators.

THE OFFICE DIDN’T fully clear out until about eight p.m.

By the time I actually sat down in front of his computer, I’d already spent a few hours doing other kinds of research, mainly in the company’s databases on trafficking networks in Asia and Eastern Europe. I didn’t learn much that I hadn’t already known.

I did learn a few things.

Mainly, I learned I’d been right about Lucky having made a few enemies over the years. Not only trafficking rivals and law enforcement, but also a few governments and at least one off-the-grid militia-type group. I wasn’t sure if I could use any of that, but it was good information to have. Anyway, I already had some thoughts about how I might find out more.

As the office emptied out, no one seemed to notice that I stayed behind.

Or if they did notice, it didn’t cause any kind of concern.

They all knew I had a key to Black’s apartment, so if they thought about it at all, they probably assumed I planned to stay there for the night.

When I switched from my computer to Black’s, I made sure the network cable was unplugged on his computer before I turned it on.

I also plunked a wireless signal blocker down on his desk and switched that on as well, after grabbing it from the equipment locker earlier. The last thing I needed was for one of his tech guys to flip out because the firewall had been breached in Black’s office.

Because of course Black had his own firewall.

Of course he would have something in place in case anyone logged onto the network from one of his machines, too. I didn’t doubt either thing for a second. Knowing Black, he probably utilized linked virtual proxy networks housed on government satellites that got routed through Uzbekistan before all of his data got military-grade encrypted and reached him via a third or fourth VPN run out of the Pentagon.

He was ex-intelligence, well-connected and liked gadgets.

Given all that, I knew there was a good chance I’d set off some kind of alarm no matter what I did. But I had to figure whatever he wanted me to look at sat on his actual hard drive, or he wouldn’t have bothered telling me to look at all.

Dropping my briefcase next to his chair, I sank into the high-backed leather seat, firing up his desktop computer after only a few seconds of fumbling around on the power strip where he had everything plugged in. His monitor was bigger than the last television I’d had––but then, I’d always been more of a book than a television person anyway.

Once I got through his password and opened up his file directory, it only took me a few more minutes of clicking around before I saw it.

He had it on his hard drive all right. It lived inside a larger folder named “Three.”

Unfortunately, when I clicked on that, a box formed on the front of his monitor.

“Voice recognition...”
it intoned.

I hesitated, then leaned closer to the screen.

“Miriam Fox,” I said, tentative.

The image reformed. Seconds later, the file directory lay open in front of me.

I just stared at it for a moment, sitting back in his chair.

“Huh,” I said to myself.

I began scanning names inside the main directory. About halfway through the list, I found myself leaning forward once more. He’d labeled a secondary folder
Blackfish.

One of the folders inside that was labeled
M.

The
M
folder wore the same image he’d shown me in my mind––the same detailed drawing of a leaping orca and three stars that lived on the pendant I wore around my neck. Fingering the design there etched in silver, I clicked on the folder and started skimming through the names of files. There were a lot of them. Most were labeled with numbers, but I couldn’t make sense of the naming convention, assuming he even had one.

Whatever those numbers meant, they definitely weren’t dates.

Picking one at random, I opened it up.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what I was looking at.

I finally realized they were blood tests––two of them––with a map comparing the different sets. The names had been blacked out, but squinting between them, I saw an analysis showing differences as well as similarities. Most of that analysis consisted of numbered shorthand.

I couldn’t make sense of the notes, which were handwritten and scanned.

Closing that file, I opened another. It was a checklist of some kind, but written in a language I didn’t recognize. I found myself thinking it might be the one I’d seen written on the walls of the Legion of Honor, but I couldn’t be certain, given that those words had been written in blood.

The third file I opened contained a scanned birth certificate––mine.

The fourth was a text document written in that same language I didn’t know.

The next five or six files I tried at random looked like lab results as well, only written in different languages than the first few. Only one of those languages even looked vaguely familiar to me. I suspected it might be the written form of Sanskrit, but I wasn’t exactly up on my Sanskrit, either.

“Damn it, Black,” I muttered. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

I clicked on a few more subfolders. A lot of those subfolders contained subfolders, too. Seeing one called
images-M,
I clicked on it, only to find it full of pictures of me, pretty much at every age. He even had baby pictures of me.

Another folder, named
images-S
had pictures of my sister, Zoe.

Some of those, I didn’t even have. A few I’d never even seen.

He had another folder,
images-P,
that turned out to contain pictures of my parents. Only then did the “S” make sense for Zoe.

Parents. Sister.

Two other folders lived among the image files as well, one labeled,
Faustus?
(with the question mark), and the other labeled
Phaelen.

Opening both, I was surprised when I recognized the people in those pictures, too.

Images in the “Faustus” folder turned out to be of my Uncle Charles, the only blood relative of Dad’s I’d ever met. “Phaelen” was one of mom’s old friends, “Uncle Phil,” a man who hadn’t been an actual blood relative, but someone we’d treated as one.

I hadn’t seen either of them since before my parents died, when I was ten years old.

We’d spent a lot of time with them as kids, going on camping and kayaking trips a few times of year, as well as the more usual barbecues and dinners and birthday parties. We’d visited Uncle Charlie at his house in Big Basin at least a few times a year in addition to all that, often spending the whole weekend and hiking to the coast.

The last time I’d asked about either of them, my mom’s sister told me Uncle Phil was sick, cancer maybe, and living overseas. I never heard anything concrete about Uncle Charlie, but the rumor was he’d come out as gay and was living with his boyfriend somewhere in Asia.

I’d considered asking Nick to help me track them down. I came close to approaching him with it a few times, but in the end, I decided to leave them alone.

If either of them had wanted to stay in touch, they would have.

I didn’t even know if they knew about Zoe’s murder.

Looking at their faces now in the images on the screen, how happy and carefree they looked in most of those pictures, I couldn’t help but see that happiness as indifference. I felt my throat tighten as I realized just how much of my past I’d shoved into the untidy attic spaces belonging to the time before my parents turned up dead.

Mostly, I wanted to forget any of it ever happened.

Uncle Charles and I had been close. Closer than me and my dad in some ways.

He hadn’t so much as dropped a condolences note when his brother and his brother’s wife died. He hadn’t even bothered with a postcard for Zoe.

Feeling my throat tighten more, I closed the file, fighting to blank my mind. The emotional rollercoaster I’d been on for the past few months didn’t make that easier. I found myself back there again, in that period after Mom and Dad were first gone, when I’d tried a lot harder to keep those sparks alive for Zoe. But then Zoe turned up dead, and all of it had been for nothing. I knew some part of me would never forgive any of them for not being there. My uncles who disappeared. My mom’s family, who just didn’t understand.

Some part of me hated all of them a little. Even Mom and Dad.

Rubbing my eyes angrily, I shoved it out of my mind yet again, forcing myself to focus on the task in front of me.

Other folders contained pictures of more distant relatives.

Pretty much all of those were Mom’s family.

Pictures of my grandparents on my mother’s side, including the grandfather who’d made the orca and stars pendant I now wore around my neck. He’d died while I was over in Afghanistan, during the war. I’d been working for intelligence by then and didn’t even find out until the funeral was already over and he was in the ground.

Fighting that worsening tightness in my chest as I clicked through pictures, I struggled again with just how much of my childhood and past I’d shoved under that carpet. It all came rushing back now as I looked at pictures of family gatherings up north, potlucks and pow-wows by the fires on the northwest coast. Pictures of me and Uncle Charles, holding paddles next to kayaks. Pictures of my dad and me fishing. Pictures of my mom and my grandmother, laughing over some story while they sat by the fire.

Pictures of relatives whose names I’d forgotten but whose faces and smiles I remembered. Pictures of aunts and cousins I’d stopped calling and stopped writing, even on social media.

Eventually it was too much. I got out of the picture folders altogether.

Still, I wondered...
 
even as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand for the third or fourth time since I’d started this...
 
how the hell Black managed to find all of this stuff.

Clearing my throat, I went back up to the main
M
folder.

I would deal with the emotional side of trying to forget my family later. For now, I needed to find whatever the hell Black had been pointing me towards.

I found at least two more blood tests in another subfolder, and what looked like a scanned image of a family tree, that time written in a language I recognized but couldn’t read. It was the written form of a Native American language from one of the tribes my mother came from.