I’d given the rest of the team, probably, but I wasn’t in the mood for details, and if he was so damn brilliant, he could figure it out.
“Your current... merges.” He wasn’t asking for confirmation; I’d been right, and his scary-brilliant brain had already leapfrogged over the basics and was going into the possibilities. And, knowing the boss, his possibilities had nothing to do with the personal lives or preferences of either of us, but what it would mean for PUPI.
Considering the sideways looks and uncomfortable body language I’d left behind in the office, I actually preferred Stosser’s reaction.
“Can you hear him now?” he asked.
“No. They have him drugged too deeply.” I could feel him, this close, and with his walls down under the drugs’ influence; restless fingers fluttering at the edge of my awareness. If I dipped in, I knew I’d be inside his morphine-dreams. So I stayed out.
“All right. There’s nothing we can do here – they’ll keep him drugged for a few more hours, and he won’t welcome either of us hovering. Come on.”
“Where?” But I knew, even as I followed him. The client had put Ian Stosser’s best friend and partner in the hospital. The boss was going to take a direct hand in the investigation, now.
Part of me wanted to stay in the hospital, lurking in the god-awful waiting room, to be there when Venec woke up, and to hell with what he would or wouldn’t welcome. But I went with Stosser. Boss was brilliant, and way more high-res than the rest of the office put together... but he had no damned idea what to do on a crime scene, and would probably do more harm than good, if unsupervised.
Besides. I’d know the instant Ben woke up.
We exited the hospital through the main door, and I blinked in the sunlight, relaxing a little now that we were out of direct surround of all that technology.
I figured that we would take a cab back to the site, because there was no way Ian Stosser used mass transit, but I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the high-res do things different than us peons. The only warning I got was his hand coming down on my shoulder, and the quick tingle of current, and we’d Translocated.
Most people knew better than to Transloc blind, out of line-of-sight, without prepping the destination, if it wasn’t an emergency. Ian Stosser was not most people. I guess he was arrogant enough to assume everyone would get the hell out of his way, somehow.
Apparently he was right, because we hit the street without so much as a bump or stare, mainly because, unlike the crowded avenue outside the hospital, there was nobody on this residential street to bump or stare.
The house looked pretty much exactly the way Sharon had re-created it in the diorama, at least from the street. Ian landed us just inside the shrubbery surround, on the well-trimmed, if muddy lawn. I took two steps toward the house, and almost fell to my knees.
The grass wasn’t muddy. It was bloody. Ben’s blood. I knew it without even looking, the way the images flooded my brain like my own memories. A wave of woozy nausea hit me, like it was my own blood there, flushed from tears in my own flesh. Oh, god. I’d almost lost him. Oh, god.
“Keep moving.”
It was an order, not a suggestion, and my feet kept moving, carrying me forward onto dryer ground. The memory remained, but its hold on me faded enough that I no longer felt it in my own flesh.
I didn’t think Stosser noticed anything except his own thoughts. I was wrong. “This Merge-thing. It can be a problem, too.”
“Yeah.” Boss had that right, and then some.
We were met at the door by the housekeeper. She seemed a little less together than Sharon and Nick had described; I guess a break-in, however damaging, was easier to deal with than a guy almost dying on your front lawn.
“Mr. Wells is not home... ”
“We’re not here to see him,” Stosser said, walking past her as though she’d invited us in. “I want to see the room where the missing objects were kept.”
She looked at me, and I gave her my best “I’m just the flunky” look. “Best to give the man what he’s asking for,” I suggested. “He’s kind of cranky about one of his people almost being puppy chow.” The flippancy cost me, but it worked. Her lips tightened, but she led us to