“Feels like I’ve been asleep for a lot longer than that.”
Luca grinned. “You have. About—” He checked the time on the cell phone. “—five hours total.”
“You’ve been sitting here three hours?”
“Sure.” He tapped the computer. “Gave me time to do some research, since I didn’t get to at the hotel.”
“You should have woken me up.”
“Why? You were tired.”
“I shouldn’t have slept that long.” And Nox sounded bothered by the fact he had.
“You’ve done a lot.” He’d killed multiple Anubis in a span of minutes. Then he’d become one of them. Luca tried to push that knowledge out of his mind and failed.
“It’s still unusual. Did you ever…” Nox tracked the people outside the van.
Luca waited. “Did I what?”
Nox swallowed over and over, his gaze skipping from person to person. Was he aware of how he looked at them? A predator observing prey.
“Nox?”
“Yeah?”
“You asked, ‘did I ever?’”
“Oh. The computer…. Did you ever find anything?”
“A little.” Luca put the computer in the back. “It looks like Dr. Dante taught high school biology for a while. During that time, he wrote a lot of papers about disease and curing it through gene therapy. I didn’t understand any of it.” An understatement. After two paragraphs, Luca wasn’t sure what he’d read had been written in English.
Nox nodded. “From what I can remember, he was a good man.”
“I don’t suppose you know where he is?”
“No, why?” Nox returned to staring out the window.
“Because he disappeared off the map about nine years ago. I found a ton of articles where he’d partaken in some big deal discoveries, then nothing. I can’t even locate him on the internet. So he either died or worked really hard to erase himself. I’m sure if I keep digging, I could find something.”
“I know he didn’t die. He was at the facility until about three years ago.”
“Exactly. So I looked up the names of the people he’d co-written articles with. Brenda Haze, Matt Harriet, and a Gary Echols.”
Nox jerked his attention back to Luca.
“I take it that last one sounds familiar?”
“Yeah. I think he was in charge.”
“What about the others?”
“No.”
“Damn. Because Dr. Echols fell off the map too.”
“Another dead end?”
“Not quite. Another name popped up several times with Dr. Echols. Dr. Jermone Markus. He wasn’t in the same field as Dr. Echols or Dr. Dante. But I’m pretty sure they knew each other because they were in several magazine articles together.”