Chimera

1 EMMY “You eat it.” “No, you eat it.” I shoved the plate of haggis back across the table to Sky. “You ordered it.” “I thought it would be a little less gross.” “It’s offal, onion, and oatmeal cooked in a sheep’s stomach. The description on the menu didn’t give you a clue?” “Yeah, but it’s Scotland’s national dish—I figured it must have at least one redeeming feature.” “Perhaps if you tasted it…” Sky poked at the lump with her fork and wrinkled her nose. “Or maybe I’ll stick with the potatoes.” “Tatties.” “Whatever.” This year, Newcastle had been selected to host the New Dawn Film Festival, but one of the featured documentaries turned out to be a tad controversial, and death threats had left the organisers understandably twitchy. Blackwood, the security firm I co-owned along with my husband and two others, had been hired to provide security, and since this was a new, high-profile client, I’d flown to the UK with Sky to carry out additional checks before the event. And from Newcastle, it had only been a short hop up to Edinburgh to make one last attempt to solve a cold case that had been bugging me for ages. Seven-year-old Mila Carmody had disappeared five years ago, snatched from her bed in the middle of the night in every parent’s worst nightmare. No witnesses, no ransom demands, and no sign of the little girl despite a manhunt involving half the cops in Virginia plus the FBI. The only physical clue had been a tiny speck of blood on the latch of Mila’s window, a speck that didn’t belong to her or anybody else in the various DNA databases the authorities maintained. When the cops failed to find her kidnapper, Mila’s wealthy family had hired us to do a case review. Then they’d fired us when we suggested a family member might have been involved. There’d been signs of an inside job—no evidence of a break-in, a lack of a struggle, and not one peep from the family’s dog. But when we’d asked questions about Mila’s uncle, her father—his brother—hadn’t been impressed. And now it seemed we might have been barking up the wrong tree entirely. A trail of breadcrumbs had led us to Scotland, and if the genetic genealogist advising us was right, the owner of the blood speck found in Mila’s bedroom had relatives living on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Our job this week was to collect a few DNA samples to see if she was right. Coffee cups, cigarette butts, used tissues… People tossed their DNA away every day. All we had to do was follow them around and pick it up. Blackwood’s London forensics lab was on standby to process the samples, and in between waiting for results and strategising, we had time to kill. So far, Scotland was living up to my expectations—this afternoon, we’d climbed a bloody great hill in the rain because it was “scenic,” and then we’d got stuck in a traffic jam caused by cows. Oh, and Sky was absolutely right about the haggis—it was gross. But I couldn’t admit that. “How are you gonna survive jungle training if you can’t even eat pub food?” “Do they have oatmeal in the jungle?” “So you’re saying it’s the oatmeal that’s the problem?” “Shut up.” Hallie sat beside her, looking oh-so smug with her fish and chips. She’d tagged along because the Carmody file had landed on her desk several months ago, and she’d grown as curious about it as I had. Now she opened the guidebook. “We could do a ghost tour tomorrow? Walk around the underground vaults and the graveyards?” “What, you think we haven’t seen enough dead people recently?” Surprisingly, Hallie’s body count was higher than mine for the past month. I’d been slacking. “Okay, then how about a trip to Loch Ness?” “How far is that?” “The app says three and a half hours, so with you driving, it’s around two hours away.” “A four-hour round trip to see a giant pond? The monster can rest easy. We still have samples to collect, and that’ll take up most of tomorrow.” Not so long ago, I’d have said we didn’t have time for any sightseeing at all, but I’d come to realise the importance of R&R. Ditto for my husband. A wake-up call involving a mental breakdown and a near-death experience respectively had led us to re-evaluate our priorities. Now we tried to spread the load and also take the occasional vacation, although those didn’t always work out as intended. “So, the ghost tour?” Hallie asked. Which would be a waste of time. “Ghosts don’t exist.” “How do you know?” Sky stole a forkful of my lasagne. “You snooze, you lose.” “Hey, eat your haggis.” I moved my plate farther out of reach. “There’s no evidence ghosts are real, and plenty of evidence of people faking them. Pretty sure the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist either.” “There are photos.” “And most of them have been discredited.” “Most of them.” “Okay, fine, we’ll go on the ‘ghost’ tour. Happy now?” Sky glanced at the mess on her plate. “Partially.” Out of curiosity, I forked up a piece of haggis. I’d once eaten a raw bat—albeit out of necessity rather than by choice—and lived to tell the tale, so I figured I could do this. Hmm. It wasn’t quite as bad as I’d anticipated. “Well?” Sky asked. “If sausage and porridge had a love child and sprinkled it with pepper, this would be it. Did you ever go to that dodgy kebab place on Mile End Road?” “Maybe.” “Then you’ve survived worse. Woman up and try the haggis.” “Or I could skip straight to dessert.” “That’s against the—” My phone rang, and Sky sat back, grinning. Dammit, what did Nick want? “Did anyone ever tell you what an impeccable sense of timing you have?” I asked him. Nick was a former Navy SEAL, an ex-lover, a current colleague, and one of my oldest friends. But like me, he rarely called someone to shoot the s**t, which meant he had either a question or a problem. “Are you still in Scotland? What did I interrupt?” “Yes, and Sky’s attempt to eat haggis.” “Sorry I missed that.” “Just don’t mention it to Bradley, or we’ll be having a ceilidh before you know it.” My darling assistant would use any excuse for a party. If I blinked, my entire house would be covered in tartan. “And then we’ll all be eating haggis.” An added bonus of treating the trip as a semi-vacation? If we wasted enough time, we’d miss the Thanksgiving nightmare Bradley had planned for next week. “Does haggis really taste that bad? Bet we’ve both eaten worse in the jungle.” “You’d also have to wear a kilt.” “Right.” “And, as tradition dictates, no underwear.” “Guess I’ll keep quiet about the haggis,” Nick said. “Glad we’re on the same page.” “How’s the DNA collecting going?” “Two samples down, four more to go at this stage. But you didn’t call to discuss haggis and DNA, did you?” “I need a favour.” See? “What sort of favour?” “Kind of a… I guess you could call it a welfare check.” “On who?” “You remember Fletcher?” “Your half-brother?” Who could forget him? He was a younger, cuter version of Nick, except because his father wasn’t a callous arsehole the way Nick’s had been, Fletcher hadn’t built up the same hard shields. His sweetness ran closer to the surface. “Isn’t he counting puffins in the Arctic?” “The Antarctic, and it’s penguins, not puffins.” “Tell me you don’t want me to take a trip to the Antarctic.” Antarctica was thousands of bloody miles away, and I hadn’t set foot there in years. I was far closer to the Arctic. A quick hop over to Iceland or Norway… “No, Glendoon.” “Glen-what?” “The map suggests it’s roughly an hour north-west of Edinburgh.” I was lost. The waitress came back and began clearing away the remains of Sky’s haggis, which was something of a disappointment because she still hadn’t taken a bite, but I conjured up a smile and pointed at the sticky toffee pudding on the dessert menu. If Nick was about to ruin my evening, I at least wanted cake first. “You’re gonna have to start at the beginning. What does this have to do with Fletcher?” “Last year, he spent the summer in Thailand, volunteering at a turtle sanctuary, and he got to know a girl there. Not in that way—she had a boyfriend, and Fletch wouldn’t muscle in—but they stayed in touch.” “She’s Scottish?” “No, the boyfriend was Scottish. Paige—that’s the girl—is from Wyoming, but she was studying at Berkeley.” “Still not seeing how this gets us to Glendoon? Is it the girl that you want me to check up on? Paige?” “Fletch is worried about her. They emailed back and forth for months, and then suddenly…nothing. He figured she was just busy moving—she’d planned to study abroad for a year at Edinburgh University—but after a bunch of emails went unanswered, he called me for advice. So I suggested sending one last message asking her for a single sentence if she was okay, the same if she wanted him to leave her alone. If he didn’t get a response, then I’d dig into things.” Hallie had obviously been eavesdropping because she slid her tablet in my direction. According to the website she’d found, Glendoon—population 357 humans and twice that many cows–was famous for its whisky distillery, for hosting the local cheese festival, and for spawning the runner-up in the caber toss at last year’s Highland Games. Place sounded like a riot. “Paige replied?” I asked Nick. “She called. In tears. She split with the boyfriend right after they bought a house together, and now she’s stuck in Scotland.” Ah. “In Glendoon?” “Right.” “And how the hell did she end up buying a house in Glendoon?” “By accident. Fletch got that much, but then the call cut off, and now she’s not answering her phone. His research project wrapped up last week, but a storm’s stopping him from flying out himself right now.” “So you want me to make sure she’s still breathing?” “I’ll buy you lunch if you do.” “Not haggis.” “Anything but haggis,” Nick confirmed. “And you’ll wear a kilt?” “You know what? I’ll just head to the airport myself.” I sighed. I wasn’t about to let a damsel stay in distress, and Nick knew it. “Fine, I’ll go. Got an address?” “Like a house number and a zip code?” “Postcode in Scotland, and that’s generally what an address consists of.” “So that’s a negative, but the place is half-derelict and—I quote—creepy as all get out.” Fantastic. “Lunch just became dinner. Three courses and wine.” Nick blew me a kiss. “Babe, I’ll even throw in a bottle of good Scotch.” If I’d known what we were about to get into, I’d have bought my own damn Scotch, poured it down my throat, and then hit myself over the head with the empty bottle. My husband always joked that trouble followed me around, and I was beginning to think he might be right.