What were the odds she’d actually believe him? “I think there’s someone out there pretending to be you.”
Her confusion deepened. “Why would they do that? How would they do that?”
He shaded his eyes and looked around the lot, and the dusty trailer and camper. One bare-bones light post had a floodlight, just enough to cover the parking area. And a surveillance camera. “Where do you save your security footage? Mind if I take a look?”
“Do you really think someone is out there pretending to be me?”
“Yeah. And I need to find them.” He sighed. “My name’s Cormac Bennett, I got mugged on the side of the road and I’m just trying to figure out who did it.” No reason she should believe him. But she nodded.
“I’m Aubrey,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Okay. Just a minute.” She went to the Subaru, popped open the back hatch and rummaged around for a set of clipboards. He waited as patiently as he could. He really wanted to get on this woman’s good side.
With less hesitation than he expected, Aubrey invited him into the trailer. A fan sitting to the side and going full blast didn’t do much to move the air, which was hot, heavy, dusty. One half of the space was an office, a couple of card tables pretending to be desks, folding chairs, computers, and piles of paper. All of it looked temporary. The other half—that seemed to be where the real action was. Cormac stepped over to look. Cramped metal shelving held tubs, trays, and stuff. More tubs and trays sat on a table, where a couple of people worked with lamps, magnifiers, brushes, and tiny
picks on pottery shards. Dozens of shards, stone tools, arrowheads, other bits and pieces, detritus. It all looked like junk but the pair of what must have been students or interns or something, as young they seemed, worked with a focus that suggested it was treasure.
Amelia would love this. Cormac shunted that thought aside. Best he not think about Amelia until he had a real plan of action. A target.
The people working here, grad students or archeologists or whatever, looked up at him, glanced over at Aubrey skeptically. “Everything okay, professor?” one of them asked.
“I think so,” she called back.
Aubrey was waking up one of the computers. “The security footage all comes through here. If we have someone sneaking around who shouldn’t be here, I’d really like to know about it.”
He pulled over a folding chair and sat next to her.
“When do you think this person was here?” Aubrey asked and brought up a list of video files.
The person impersonating Walker had contacted him a week ago, and he’d agreed to the job a couple of days after that. “About four days ago,” he said. “Let’s start there.”
She clicked open the file and fast-forwarded through the footage. Time zipped by on the screen, the sun rising, shadows in the parking lot shifting with the hours. Cars drove in, parked. People got out, gathered. The dig’s day seemed to begin at dawn with a group of people meeting by the front door, then they scattered to cars and drove, presumably to the actual dig site.
“You’d recognize a car that wasn’t supposed to be here?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “We’re a pretty tight group. You just about have to be, working on a project like this all summer.”
She’d called him out straight off, so yeah, that made sense.
Nothing from the first day’s videos caught their attention. The second day—same cars, same people. Then—
“Wait,” Aubrey murmured and paused the playback. She rewound, played again.
In the middle of the day, when only her Subaru and another SUV were parked there, a tan CR-V pulled into the edge of the surveillance range. A woman got out, glanced around, and marched with purpose to Aubrey’s Subaru. Her features were obscured; she wore a coat and wide-brimmed hat even in the summer heat. But she was tall, svelte, and moved with confidence. Quickly, methodically, she popped the lock—she must have had some kind of tool to help her—and opened the driver’s side door.
The woman reached in and slipped something into an envelope she’d had in the pocket of her coat. She didn’t waste any time looking around, just closed the car door and walked away. The whole thing took no more than ten or twenty seconds. If no one had had a reason to review the footage, she might never have been discovered.
“What’s she doing?” Aubrey asked, leaning in, fascinated.
“She’s taking a hair off the headrest,” Cormac said. And with that hair. . .it would be a powerful, complex spell, using a hair to form the basis of a disguise. But it would also be a really good disguise when it was done.
Aubrey sat back in her chair, nonplussed. “A hair? That’s it? Why?” It wasn’t like she’d sabotaged the car or tried to steal artifacts. It must have seemed so harmless.
“She’s a witch,” Cormac said simply.
“Huh. Like, for real? Like eye of newt and magic wands and the rest?”