"One moment please." She turned away from the screen. The overhead lighting caught her hair, turning the black strands a rich dark blue. They'd certainly worked on making her realistic, Sam thought. Wisps of hair swayed with every move, and if you looked hard enough, you could see her breathe.
"A.D. Stern's phone is currently offline."
"Turned off?"
"Yes."
In the time she'd known him, that phone had never been turned off. "Who's on the cleanup team at Greenvale?"
"Agents Michaels and James."
"Could you patch me through to Michaels?"
"One moment please."
Christine disappeared, to be replaced a few seconds later by Warren Michaels' drawn features.
"Agent Ryan. What can I do for you?"
"I'm looking for A.D. Stern. He still there?"
"Left about forty minutes ago. Why?"
She hesitated. "He asked me to report in. I'm just trying to find him."
"Tried his viaphone?"
"No, I thought I'd call you first, just to piss you off."
Michaels raised an eyebrow, a slight grin twitching his mouth. "Yeah, dumb question I suppose. I guess you've tried his home number too, in which case, I can't help you."
She bit her lip. Gabriel was fine when he'd left her at Han's, which meant something must have happened on the way to the murder scene or at the scene itself.
"Did anything strange occur while he was there?"
Michaels snorted, and rubbed his eyes. "If you can call discovering your sister was one of the victims strange, then, yeah, I guess it did."
"What?"
"Yeah. He was shaken, as you would expect. Left pretty much immediately after."
She rubbed her eyes. "You got an official ID?"
"Yeah. Miranda Stern, current address fourteen Hillsyde Street, Strathmore."
Miranda. The sister he'd been desperate to find. Her name must have been on the list of Hopeworth adoptees. Christ, what a mess. "Who's listed as next of kin?"
"A Jessie McMahon."
"Got an address or number?"
"Yeah, hang on a sec."
An almost fierce look of concentration came over his face. After a second, Jessie McMahon's address and phone number appeared on a slip of paper from the side of her viaphone. She shoved it into her pocket. She had no right, and no real reason, to call just yet.
"That fax through okay?" he said. "I hate these things. I'd only just got the hang of the old phone."
She grinned. "Came through perfect. What about the murders? Anything different from the first four?"