Skin Tight (7 page)

This morning, there was an obscene sparkle in his eyes that said he’d killed again. Gillie doubted anyone else would notice the outward signs. Rowan kept his euphoria tightly leashed, but she had no doubt the power was singing through his blood as he studied her.

Was he imagining what it would be like to sink his hypodermic needle into her skin and hold her while she trembled through her death throes in his arms? Unlike the others, Silas answered her questions directly when she asked, so she knew what went on in those dark and silent halls. She knew about the women who screamed—and those who didn’t. She knew about the man who wept and tried to gouge out his own eyes if he wasn’t tied.

Dr. Rowan ruled them all.

He might have been attractive if not for the coldness of his hazel eyes. Like hers, his skin was pale; he seldom saw the sun. In other aspects, he looked normal—a man you would never glance at a second time if you didn’t know of his taste for death. For Gillie, he was the bogeyman made real.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He smiled, and it was horrid, all teeth and gums—like a bloodred rose laid across the gaping mouth of a desiccated skull.

Doubtless he fancied he had a charming smile and that she enjoyed his visits.

Maybe he thought he was doing her some kindness, offering social interaction to the perpetual shut-in, but she preferred the harmless celluloid company offered by her DVDs.

“Thank you for checking on me.”

She tried to hide her loathing. Intuition told her that things would get worse if Rowan ever figured out how she truly felt. Right now, he looked on her as a favored pet, one who performed the required tricks admirably, reliably, and without complaint. That status could too easily change. He could take away her comforts, such as they were.

She’d learned early on the dangers of refusing to cooperate, and she wasn’t strong enough to die.

“It’s my pleasure.”

God, she feared it was. “Did something happen tonight? You look . . . odd.”

Would he confide in her? She didn’t think his social life was any more active than hers. Gillie feared crossing the line toward intimacy, and yet she wondered if she could use his fondness to her own advantage somehow.

He brightened visibly, as if he enjoyed her attention. “Yes, in fact. Would you mind making me a cup of tea?”

She went to the kitchen without complaint and microwaved two mugs of hot water. When she returned, she found that he’d made himself comfortable in her front room, legs stretched out as if he meant to stay awhile.

Feeling sick, she resigned herself to the reality. Nobody was coming to save her. If her parents had tried to find her, they’d long since given her up for dead. That was, most likely, what the Foundation had told them. In a way, it might even have been kinder.

“You were saying,” she prompted softly.

“We lost a test subject tonight.”

He really meant he’d put her down. Gillie knew how he operated. But she pretended ignorance, as he wanted her to. “Oh no, that’s terrible. What happened?”

Rowan went on at length, describing the hopelessness of the patient’s prognosis. By the time he finished, Gillie realized that he had convinced himself it was a mercy killing, something sacred and well-done. Her fingers trembled against the mug holding the tea she hadn’t touched. She couldn’t stop thinking of him as Hades this morn, and if she drank in his presence, she’d be trapped here forever.

But she didn’t drink the tea.

“Anyway, I must be getting home,” he said at last. “But you understand why I wanted to check on you.”

She kept her tone casual. “To reassure yourself of the good you’re doing.”

“That’s right, Gillie.” He brushed his fingers along her cheek in passing, and every fiber of her being tensed in revulsion. “If you could only see how well the people you’ve cured are doing. That’s an idea . . . Perhaps you’d like to see some candid videos of the way they’ve been able to resume their lives, thanks to your extraordinary gift.”

Yes, of course she would want that. Why wouldn’t she? Show the girl who has nothing—no family, friends, or freedom—the people to whom she gave everything. Why wouldn’t she be delighted? Gillie curled her hand into a fist and tucked it beneath her thigh. Sometimes it was so hard, all the pretending.

But it would be worthwhile. If she gave up hope, she gave up everything. So she clung to the only thing she had left: a pipe dream. To see the sky again before she died and feel the sunlight on her face. In her darkest moments, she imagined turning her face up to that glorious warmth and reveling in the feel of the wind on her skin.

Because she knew she was meant to—ever dutiful and agreeable—she said, “That would be lovely. Can you arrange it?”

His awful smile shone again. “I can do anything I want here, anything at all.”

And God help her, it was true.

The next week
passed uneventfully enough.

Mia hadn’t made up her mind whether she really meant to leave Strong alone as promised. Her anger had mostly faded. Maybe she was being too trusting again, but she believed him when he said he’d been sure no harm would come to her. That didn’t mean she liked him for it, but she understood the need to be ruthless in dedication to completing a goal. She hadn’t built her business on sweetness and gumdrops.

As far as she could tell, he appeared to be doing a stellar impersonation of a human resources director. That didn’t mean he was harmless, of course. It wouldn’t surprise her if he meant to delay his plans until she completed her task and left the facility. He possessed that sort of unearthly patience.

Fortunately, she had other matters to occupy her mind. She made a list of the ten most likely suspects and then went about investigating them. Two she checked off almost at once. They’d been caught together in the copy room in flagrante delicto, an indiscretion so ridiculous that she refused to believe either of them was smart enough to pull off embezzlement on the scale Micor had reported: nearly four million dollars in the past two years.

The date stuck in her mind as she went over the data.
Two years . . .

Thomas Strong had only been employed at the facility for three months. And Mia knew very well where he’d been a year prior. So, without a doubt, he wasn’t the thief, nor in all likelihood did he have anything to do with the missing money. She felt absurdly glad he’d been proven honest in this, at least.

However, if this case followed the precedent set by others she’d worked, the perpetrator had a set amount he wanted to reach and then he’d make a run for it. When an employee went missing without notice, that was all the evidence a company needed. At that point, resolution passed beyond Mia’s purview and went to bounty hunters. It could get ugly fast; she had no illusions about that. So she wasn’t just trying to catch a crooked employee; she was also trying to save a life.

“The labs are reporting a network issue,” Greg said, interrupting her reverie.

Her “boss” was proving to be a pain in the ass. He didn’t like it when he caught her going over paperwork, as if he suspected her of some petty espionage. More likely, he thought she was analyzing his Net usage logs. He spent more time looking at Busty Beauties than doing any real work, as far as Mia could see. Lucky for him, she hadn’t been brought in as an efficiency expert.

“I guess you’d like me to take the call?”

“You’re the low man on the roster.”

Mia forced a smile. “No problem. But I thought we weren’t allowed to go in the labs. All the classified research and all.”

“We’re the only department that can.” Greg managed to make it sound like a boast. “How else can we fix their computers if there’s a problem? Here’s the pass. It will get you in the security doors.”

Hm.
She made a mental note of where he’d stashed it in his desk: top drawer, right side. Things couldn’t be all that hush-hush in the secure side if a guy like Greg controlled the access.

Of all the places she’d worked—and Mia had rotated through many companies in the course of her inquiries—this one most gave her the creeps. The halls were always silent, people clinging to their own departments as if they offered sanctuary from the wolves that roamed the corridors. She saw no one on the way to the east wing, which seemed odd, given the size of the complex.

She slid the pass through the card reader and then it demanded her ID. She scanned that and the door unlocked. The precaution made sense; if someone lifted the pass from Greg, the computer first confirmed that the user was a member of a department that would have business in the labs. She didn’t imagine that anyone outside of IT could pass the check.

As she stepped through the doors, she half expected ominous music or mysterious shadows, but it looked exactly the same on the other side. More interesting, there was another sealed door, down at the other end of the hall. On this side, they had set up what looked like a couple of computer labs, including servers.

But why would they separate their experiments from the equipment?

She supposed they might have more behind the wall that someone else maintained, someone in the labs. Otherwise, the workers would have to pass security checkpoints in order to log findings or use the computer stations for research. The first option made more sense, but she didn’t like what it portended.
They’re doing something so secret, they don’t want to permit their IT people so much as a glimpse of it, even after contracts and NDAs?

Her unease grew.

There was one way to find out. She could ask Strong for a look at the personnel records of all the lab techs, including their résumés. If one of them had a background in computers, then they surely had a second network hidden behind those other doors. She was surprised nobody else in IT had asked about it. But maybe they liked getting paid too much for too little work and had all the natural inquisitiveness of dead clams.

With a shrug, she swung right into the first computer room. All the computers seemed to be networked fine.
Internet access, check. Intranet, check
. Intracompany e-mail let her send a test to Thomas Strong. She stifled a smile at what he would make of her cryptic text.

That left the lab on the left. In here, a woman sat, frowning at her terminal. She appeared to be in her midtwenties, brown hair, plain face. Her white coat said she worked past the second set of sealed doors. Mia repressed the urge to question her about what she saw over there.

“What’s going on?”

The other woman started, a testament to the eerie silence. When she saw Mia, she didn’t relax much. “I called in a complaint about the network,” she said, uncertain.

“And I’m here to fix things.”
In more ways than one.

“What’s the error?”

“I’m trying to copy some research to a flash drive, but it tells me ‘file not found.’ ”

“Did you accidentally delete the file? Have you checked the trash?” She leaned over to pop open the folder, but it was empty.

“I’m not stupid,” the woman, whose badge read “Kelly Clark,” snapped. “That was the first thing I tried.”

“You did a search?”

Mia spent ten minutes helping the woman configure an advanced search with all the specific data she could remember, but the hard drive still came up with nothing.
Very, very strange.
The file was just gone, and it would take more sophisticated equipment than Mia had with her to attempt data recovery.

“I don’t understand it,” Kelly finally muttered.

“Does anyone else use this workstation?”

“Sure, lots of people. But I’m the only one who logs in under my name and password. My work should be private.”

Which made Mia wonder why Kelly wanted to put something on a flash drive. Was she taking it past the double doors back to the secret computer lab or out of the facility in violation of her NDA? Micor was setting off all kinds of alarms, but she wasn’t being paid to investigate inconsistencies or possible corporate espionage. If they had someone stealing secrets as well as money, they could pay her a second time to find out about it.

“If you remember when you’ve logged in, I could print a list for you. That would at least tell us if someone has gotten ahold of your password and deleted your data.”

Kelly nodded, her brown eyes glinting with comprehension. “Yes, I keep a log. If you could get me that list, it would be exceedingly helpful.”

Mia complied; she ran a search for the username and then printed a log of all access periods for the last sixty days. The lab tech took the list and got out her personal record. It didn’t take her long to find the discrepancy.

“Here,” she said, tapping the printout. “I took a personal day last week. But it shows I was in the system. I bet that’s the day my work went missing, too.”

“How much trouble will you be in?” It was really none of her business, but she had a prying nature, which was part of what made her good at her job.

That same trait had earned her a friend for life in Kyra because she wouldn’t leave the other girl alone. They’d shared such a short time together as neighbors, but they were fast friends by the time Kyra’s dad took her away again. Mia had cherished the letters that came after, her little window into the world, since her view never changed.

“I’m not sure. Yet.”

“Is there anyone who would benefit from making you look bad?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kelly said abruptly, as if she’d realized she had told Mia more than she’d intended. “I’ll sort it out. There’s nothing more you can do.”