“Are they?” Carl asked, and Michael echoed his alarm. “Breeding?”
“No.” Mandy shook her head. “There were three pairs that ostensibly could have, but so far, no nests have been spotted.” She let out a breath. “The good news is that they seem to age faster than their counterparts. A falcon or an eagle can live between fifteen and twenty years, but these guys seem to be getting creaky at five. There’s hope that they can die out before they obliterate the small bird population of the state.”
“Yikes,” Carl muttered, shuddering, and Michael nodded in agreement.
She gave them a grim smile. “So how’d you end up here?”
“I’m not stupid!” Carl gave a laugh and finished off his tea. “Like I said, we hacked Serpentus and realized that you and Matteo had both been ‘killed’ at about the same time. Then my hacker went searching for you, found a picture in San Diego—did you stop there on the way to Mexico?”
“I did indeed,” she said grimly. “The fact that Serpentus knew that is terrifying by the way, but go on.”
Carl shrugged. “Since we were looking around the wineries already, we tracked you down. A bird sanctuary wasn’t too much of a leap. So you told Serpentus, because you still believed in Santa Claus, and they—what? Why would they have Matteo killed?”
“I don’t know. The best I can figure is that Matteo figured out what Ginger was doing and that it was illegal. Because I might not have. Serpentus wasn’t putting their name on anything. She was. It wasn’t until after his death that I realized Serpentus—or somebody slapping their name on things—might be involved in the giant fucking birds,” Mandy said bitterly. “I told her about Matteo because—” She swallowed a lump of fury that Michael could only imagine. “—because I knew she had contacts at the DOI and thought she could help his quest to repopulate the bustard population. I was going to take leave and assist him after my trip to the lab where I found out about the birds. I left Nayarit and took a plane to rendezvous with Matteo at the yacht, and the night after I arrived, the crew warned me that men were coming—bad men. They hustled me overboard, and there I was, treading water, hoping there weren’t sharks or oil spills, when I saw the company logo. It was our guys, Carl. Our fixers. The ones who look like police but don’t have any real authority? They boarded the yacht and came out with all of Matteo’s paperwork and computers and stuff.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I swam ashore and walked away with the clothes on my back and a few contacts that wouldn’t rat me out. And Matteo was…. He was dead. I heard that much when I was disappearing myself. I—”
“You tracked the monster birds,” Carl deduced, “because you had nothing else to do.”
She let out half a sob. “Five years, and I haven’t been able to tell a soul that story. Who would believe me?” She shook her head and wiped her face on her shoulder. “One of my contacts had a sister out here who ran a bird sanctuary. She’d written to him about the fucking velociraptors because they were killing all her peregrines and harriers and pretty much decimating their food sources. I came down to check them out and… and she was dying. And she had Sunny and Harry, and this is the only place they’ve known. The place makes its money on online donations, and that keeps us alive and keeps us hunting the damned birds.”
She wiped her face again. “And now you’re here, and I don’t know what it means!”
Carl released Michael’s hand under the table and captured hers where it rested on top. “It means you’re not alone, for one thing. We’re here working for Matteo’s brother and his son—”
“His son?” her voice squawked indignantly, and Michael felt a little vindicated. Possessiveness was a thing.
“The son he never knew about,” Carl said, his voice soft.
“Oh.” Mandy’s eyes grew bright. “His father…. He told me his father was a very bad man.”
“Yes.” Carl nodded. “So was the girl’s father. Keeping the boy’s parentage hidden was a safety measure.”
“Why’d he go looking now?”
Carl breathed out through his nose. “Matteo’s son got ill,” he said softly. “His uncle—Matteo’s brother—was… God, he was thrilled to find out about the boy. Jumped at the chance to help him out. But then he told us about the circumstances behind Matteo’s death and—”
“And you wanted to know more,” Mandy said softly. “What brought you to Napa?”
“Monster trucks and bustard eggs,” Carl said, and Michael remembered Danny and smiled “And falcons. And suspicions.”
Some of the sadness in Mandy’s eyes eased up, and she stood for a moment, stretching her hands over her head and popping her spine. “Here,” she said. “You boys can stay in here and rest, if you like. Or cook dinner if you want to make yourselves useful. We’ve got to go feed the raptors, and if we wait too long….” She shuddered.
“We can throw some food together,” Carl said, standing. “We’ve eaten up a lot of your afternoon.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“So would I,” Michael said apologetically. “I’m starving.”
Carl grinned at him and nodded. Then he turned to her. “Do you have a landline we can use? There’s no cell service here—”
Her mouth hardened. “Carl, we can’t be caught out here. I don’t even know how you drove in. We let the road stay washed out on purpose.”
“Ha!” Michael muttered. “I knew that was insane.”
“Chuck would have thought it was fine,” Carl said, and Michael rolled his eyes because there was a reason neither of them were with Chuck and he knew it.
“I’m calling a hacker,” Carl said. “With the world’s most secure and encrypted phone. Someone with as much to lose as you if the company figures out what we’re doing and why we’re here.”
She looked skeptical. “Hackers are famous for being bought,” she warned.
“This one’s got his own fortune. And if I don’t make contact with him, he’s going to send in the cavalry. And I’d rather he didn’t because right now they’re checking out wineries to find the monster truck that killed Matteo.”
Her mouth fell open. “One of the wineries was behind his death? I always thought it was Ginger.”
“She may have had something to do with it,” Carl said. “But one of the trucks was used to herd him into a cliff, and two of the wineries have events using the damned things, and also hire falcons to guard their livestock. We saw the eggs, figured falcons, and saw the truck and figured―”
“Wineries.” Mandy paused in the act of grabbing her shotgun from the doorway. “Can’t fault your logic,” she said, and for a moment, Michael’s heart froze as he thought, This is it. We’ve given her everything, and now she’s going to kill us and feed us to the birds.
But she didn’t. She just grabbed the gun and nodded to the young people.
“Carl, the phone’s in the living room, back in the corner. There’s a pen and paper there too. C’mon, guys. We’ve got work to do, and they’re going to make us dinner.”