Maybe he hadn’t.
“Their mother drank a lot when she was pregnant,” Mandy said, her expression a mix of love and sadness. “I arrived here five years ago, right before her liver failed, and the kids… well, there was nowhere for them to go. This is all they’ve ever known. And since their mom had already established this as a bird sanctuary, and what I needed to do was track down some birds—”
“You met a need,” Carl said, and Michael wondered how hard it was to have such a polite conversation when there were years and years of things they each wanted to know.
“So,” she said, sounding for all the world like a woman in a restaurant, “did you ever catch those car thieves?”
Carl chuckled. “Took me two tries,” he said, his eyes going sideways to Michael, who grinned because he knew the story. “But yes, they’re currently rotting in a prison in Hungary, which is good because they were not nice people.” He inclined his head. “I take it you were sent on assignment while I was gone?”
She gave half a shrug. “It was supposed to be no big deal,” she said, and only the sadness in her eyes told Michael that this five-year-old ache had changed her life. “There was a vineyard that had reported losses due to difficulties with birds. The company sent me to simply estimate how much of the crop had been eaten and then made a recommendation to compensate the winery on the condition that they try something new in the way of pest control.”
“Falconry,” Carl said.
Mandy inclined her head. “You’ve done your research.”
“I had to get a whole new crew to make up for your loss,” he said, and his hand sought Michael’s, and he twined their fingers. Michael squeezed back and realized that for all this polite back-and-forth, this sipping iced tea in the kitchen coziness, Carl felt for the bright-eyed girl who seemed to have been living a wealth of sadness since he’d seen her last. “So, Matteo di Rossi?”
Mandy grimaced. “So I looked into this new version of ‘pest control,’ as the company called it. The wineries in Napa have been using it for years, so I came here, and I ran into Matteo. He was playing big cheese at one of the wineries, and we got….” She swallowed.
“Close?” Carl asked softly.
She nodded. “Close. And I told him that we were looking at renting falcons to help keep the crows away. He got very, very serious and told me that I had to be very careful. Most of the falconry outfits were legit. And purists, in fact, who thought of their job as sort of a religion. Bonding with birds, training them—that takes a full-time commitment. Those people get intense. But apparently, more recently, somebody at Serpentus had wanted shortcuts.” She grimaced. “You know how that company likes shortcuts.”
“Results,” Carl said, his voice arid. “They don’t look for answers. They look for results.”
“Well, their result was to hire a gene-splicing lab in Mexico—because there were laws here, whether or not they were enforced—and there weren’t there. Not five years ago. And their results were….” Mandy gestured furiously toward the mews outside. “They were a big fucking mess is what they were.”
“Is that why you disappeared yourself?” he asked.
She blew out a breath. “I went down to Mexico and discovered they’d sold two birds to a prince in Qatar and thirty-six of those things to someone in California to be set loose into the wild. That included four breeding pairs. God, Carl, do you know what kind of damage they could do?”
At that moment, a cry that could rend metal permeated the house. Sunny looked up, her face blank, and said, “Kill it now?”
“No,” Mandy said, but her grim expression told Carl that sometimes the answer was yes. “We try to domesticate them. They’re scary intelligent, but they’re also—” She made helpless gestures with her hands.
“Flying dinosaurs?” Michael hazarded, because God, that thing’s cry had rattled his bones.
“Pretty much,” she said, nodding. “So I went down to Mexico, saw what was happening, and sent word to Matteo. He’d been up here, working with legitimate breeders, trying to develop a new breed of houbara that was resistant to a pathogen that was killing off the species in the Middle East. His work was legitimate. He’d put his own money into it, and he’d cleared it with customs. But we hadn’t realized two things.”
“Tell me,” Carl said as the hybrid outside screeched again.
“Well, the first was that the pathogen had been lab-cooked. I didn’t discover that until about three years ago, the last time I left this place for more than a trip to buy supplies. There was—was, mind you—a prince from Qatar who was trying to instigate a coup, and he thought that the way to do it was to kill off the food source of the royal birds. He actually bought two of the super-predators and released them in Qatar. It was symbolic, really. For show.”
“Like when King Henry VII had the dogs fight the lion,” Carl said.
Mandy’s smile made her years younger. “Yes, exactly!”
“He sent the dogs to be killed?” Michael felt bad for derailing the conversation, but he was appalled.
“Worse,” Carl told him soberly. “The lion was old and sick. The pit bulls killed the lion, so the king hung them in the square the next day. The prince in Qatar, I would guess, wanted to kill off the bustards so there would be nothing to bring the tribes together to talk. He could backstab and undercut the older leaders in the country without them ever realizing that the reason their falcons could no longer hunt was that he was a greedy asshole who had no respect for the ways of his country.”
Mandy nodded, her mouth twisted in a grim smile. “I’d forgotten how quick you were,” she said. “God, I’ve missed a lot of people. My mother, my sisters, the guy who used to deliver Chinese takeout to my apartment. But I’d forgotten how much fun you were too.”
“I knew,” Michael said, determined to contribute something, even if it was only possession.
Her eyes gentled as she acknowledged him. “Smart boy,” she said softly.
“So Matteo was doing legitimate work,” Carl said. “Why was there no paper trail? And what happened?”
She swallowed angrily. “Besides the fact that the lab he was using burnt down the day after he died? The best I could figure is that I happened. Like I said, we were lovers. But I still had a job to do, and I thought I was working for the good guys, no matter how often you told me we weren’t always and to use my best judgment. So his contacts sent me to Mexico, I discovered the flying velociraptors, and the first thing I did was tell the people back at Serpentus.”
“Ginger Carson,” Carl said.
Her face bleached white, and the hands that held the iced tea glass trembled as she set it down carefully on the condensation ring on the table. “Is she still there?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Does she know I’m alive?”
“Possibly.” Carl shook his head. “I asked about Matteo, and she shut me down, so we hacked her files and found an old photo from about three years ago.”
“Mexico,” she muttered. “The one lousy time I went back. I had to see how many more predator birds had been released and to make sure they weren’t breeding. I absolutely had to visit the lab again.”