She didn't go to her parents.

She didn't stop to think about anything when she left the apartment: not where she was going, what she would do when she got there. She barreled out of the elevator with her rolling case and the bag over her shoulder, her winter dress coat hanging open over her running shorts and t-shirt, and bolted past Bruno, the startled security guard, and out into the falling snow. Halfway to the station, a cabbie stopped his carriage for her in the Old Town and she got in. Paid him and got out when they were there. Harper rattled off the 'address' for John's home world without thinking, and when the creature at the ticket counter asked for a point of destination, 'New York City' came out of her mouth as 'Los Angeles'.

After she used her cred chit to pay for the departure and return orbs, because something kept prickling underneath her immediate dismay, she asked for a couple of extra transport orbs of the type used for guests or for emergency returns from other destination points. Then she glanced at the station clock before pocketing the extras and moving to an egress cubicle to squeeze the one in her hand. Just after ten p.m. RST. It would be morning in L.A. Ten? Eight? She wasn't sure how that worked.

It was her last thought before the jump. She emerged on the other side, staggering from the drop into an empty utility closet in LAX. It was then that she realized she had no idea where Bernard lived.

The attendant glanced up from the magazine he was reading and waved her out into the corridor leading to the debarking area in Terminal A. "Might want to lose the coat. You'll stick out," he said. She peeled it off and wrapped it around the handle of her roller bag a couple of times, then ducked out of the room and merged into the early morning crowd of arrivals to hunt out a phone book.

"I hope he's listed," she mumbled through her teeth as she flipped through the Bs and tried to push the red throb of hurt to the back of her mind long enough to navigate. The phone book for the Greater Los Angeles area was broken into parts - the information was just too big for any one tome to contain, no matter how massive. There were three listings for Bernard Benandanti in the book: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Culver City. He was, interestingly, not the only Benandanti in the book; but she couldn't really appreciate the full impact of just how interesting that was in her current mindset.

"F*ck," she hissed. A woman in the booth next to her shot a sympathetic grin over her shoulder at Annie. Harper managed a passing slant of acknowledgement, swiped the debit card they'd issued her at the station across the magnetic reader on the payphone, and dialed the number. The prickle was back, almost like she was being watched. She punched in the last digit and hunkered in with her back against the metal walls of the phone stand; looking around her, up, down, waiting for the call to connect.

"Hel-loooo," sang the man himself a few rings later.

"Bernard!" She tried not to let the wail building in the back of her throat slip out. Sucking in a deep breath, she began again. "Bernard, it's Annie."

" ... Annie? Baby girl ... " there was a pause and rustle, " ... what are you doing here?"

"I - " She was not going to cry. She was not going to cry. "Are you going to be home? Can I come over, or can you pick me up?"

"I'm out running some errands. Where are you?"

She looked around her again, until she found a gate sign. "I'm at LAX, Terminal A, near the baggage claim for gates 47-52."

"Okay." The sound of some tune with a trippy beat faded in the background. "It's going to be close to an hour before I get there, I'm way off in BFE Sherman Oaks right now. Hang tight, call me back if you need me to stop and pick up anything."

"I'm at a payphone. I don't know if my cell phone will work here." The woman in the next booth glanced over again and gave her an odd look. She turned away and lowered her voice. "There's something called a T.G.I. Friday's across the walk here. Can I wait for you there?"

"Yeah, but don't order any of the food. They put crack and way, way too many nitrates in it. You haven't colored your hair purple or anything, have you?"

She hiccupped something between a laugh and a sob. "No."

"Okay. I'll be there ASAP." He pronounced it as a word. Paused. Said, "For a chain, their mixed drinks aren't bad. Ciao." click!

She hung up the phone, her hand lingering on the receiver for the seconds it took for her to glance up and see the woman in the next booth chattering away to whoever was on the other end of her line. Their eyes met, briefly, and Annie turned again, picked up her bags, and headed to the Land of Bad Cholesterol.

One hour later, the Most Beautiful Man in the World strode long-legged and lanky into a TGIF at LAX. Bernard was wearing a deep dark violet crepe fitted tuxedo shirt, an equally tight pair of skinny jeans, and combat boots, and he moved like he was strutting down a catwalk. More than one head turned; the expressions were a mix of interest, envy, amusement and misplaced recognition. Ooh, he's hot. Ooh, I want to look like that. Oh my God, swish. And isn't he that guy who was in that thing that one time ... ?

Annie-Love was curled into the back corner of a corner booth looking out across the restaurant and into the terminal. She was hunched over the final few sips of a Mai Tai that she'd been nursing since she'd arrived, bleary-eyed and rumpled by comparison in the Stones t-shirt and running shorts she'd worn when she'd left. He tracked through the restaurant looking for her, making eye contact unashamedly with this person and that - Bernard was not someone to look away hurriedly if he was caught staring. He kept going with a small smile on his face until he found her in that back corner booth. Alone. There went the smile. "Hey," he said, a little breathless, and examined her. His mouth had been open to ask a question, but he shut it down. And he just looked at her. Took her in.

There were a cluster of wadded up napkins littering the table around her glass, another clutched in her left hand being wrung into oblivion at that very moment. She hadn't been crying - yet - the idea of breaking down in a public place surrounded by strangers was too appalling to her to permit it. But it was a close thing when she saw him coming. "Oh, Bernard!"

He looked at the wads of tissues. He looked at the single fruity drink. "Okay," he said, and offered her one hand out of the booth while swiping up her bag and tossing it onto his shoulder, then picking up the case with the other. "Time to go."

"I'm so sorry to just show up like this," her fingers, when she took his hand, were ice cold. "I just ... " She didn't seem to know what to add to that.

?It's no problem." He tugged her out of the booth and onto her feet, and took that hand along with him. "Are you paid up?"

Her sneakers squeaked once against the airport tile flooring before she fell into step beside him. "Yeah."

"Okay. We're out, then." He flicked his fingers around the handle of the roller in a cheery little farewell wave. One last look around the restaurant at the mouth, as if he half-expected John to roll out of the bathroom or something. But the only thing rolling was her suitcase. The sleeve of her coat waved farewell to TGIFs as they left.

Out in the mezzanine she glanced this way and that, letting him lead her along. "Are you staying at my place, or do you need a hotel?" he asked. The shark tooth attached to a snowflake obsidian ring that rode the thong around his neck bounced against his chest as he loped across the terminal and over to the escalators.

"Oh, God. I hadn't even thought about that. Everything happened so fast I don't know what I'm doing."

"We can head home and you can decide later. The places in Santa Monica are a little pricier, but, you know, fewer methwhores." He smiled brightly at a passing businessman at the end of the comment, flashing approximately ten million blindingly white teeth.

"Methwhores," she repeated like an idiot savant. "Great." She watched the businessman go by, craning her head around as they passed. Walking from a frigid, snowy night in RhyDin into the temperate sunshine of Southern California was a bit surreal at the best of times. This wasn't the best of times.

"Don't worry, honey, they're scared of fags." He smiled reassuringly at her and led her out into a blast of mid-sixties sunshine laden with exhaust and even more noise than there'd been inside. A plane took off from the terminal behind them, angling up in its climb directly over the parking garages. The flash of sunlight off its wing was nearly as bright as Bernard's smile. It made her squint, and she almost lost her grip on his hand. "I'm in the short term," he half-shouted at her, and tightened his grip. An overhead light at the crosswalk changed, and they merged into a morass of humanity surging back and forth across the street.

She nodded mutely. The throng of people and lines of vehicles distracted her enough that the temptation to give into her tears abated. To their right, a truck driver laid on his horn. The Latino woman in the red sedan in front of it flipped him off and went back to applying her lipstick.

The parking garage was a many-leveled beast on the other side of the terminal. He led her up, down, and around for what felt like a mile before finally reaching a sleek copper-gold SUV. He pointed at it. It chirped. "Door's open." He opened the back and got her bags settled. Harper went around to the passenger side and climbed in. It was a weird feeling. She hadn't been in an SUV since their trip to Chicago. She buckled the seatbelt and the shoulder strap slid into place.

He joined her a minute later, and the exodus commenced. The trippy beat came on as soon as he started the car; he pushed a button on the console and it shut off. Twisting to look over his shoulder, he backed out, shifted into first and started toward home. Her eyes stung and burned as she leaned her cheek against the window and stared out at the passing landscape. The differences in traffic signals and car models that she would have remarked on with John barely got a glance from her now.

"How long are you staying? And have you eaten?" Bernard was quick on the shift and constantly checking his mirrors; she never got more than a fast glance at a time as he merged them into the traffic headed for the freeway.

"I don't know. I'm not hungry ... I had dinner in the oven, but ? " She shook her head.

"Okay." He floored it, rolled over into the HOV lane and settled in for a spell. Bright blue eyes chased another glance over to her.

Los Angeles flew past her in a blur. She panted against the glass and watched it go, unseeing. "He left." It was a place to begin.

"Left."

Annie turned the anguish of her dry eyes to him. "He came home from work tonight, late. He took a new job, but he won't say much about it. And he works nearly as much as he did as the M.E. He's in some kind of trouble, Bernard. I don't know what it is, but trouble. And I told him - quit the job, we'd manage, you know? But he said no, that it wasn't the job. But it is - I could tell - and he said whatever it was he's involved in, he's in deep, that I'm in danger, too. 'Deep, deep sh*t.' That's what he said. And then he told me he was moving out." She was gasping for air at this point. "The apartment is fitted out for him, and the building's secure, better than almost anything in RhyDin we can afford is. So I did the only thing I could think of. I told him that I'd go. Oh, Bernard, he let me leave."

"And you don't know what it is." He checked his mirrors, dropped out of the HOV lane and blew past four other lanes of traffic easy as breathing on his way to merging with a westbound into Santa Monica.

"No," her voice was thick, and she cleared her throat, turning away from him before continuing. "He wouldn't tell me. And the only thing I know about his job is that it's some kind of pharmaceutical research. And - I didn't know this until Christmas - but he's working for a woman I know. I thought she was my friend, but, I don't know now." She looked at him blankly for a long moment. "It's connected, somehow," she assured him. "I'm certain of it."
He slanted another glance at her, quick and gone again. "What about this woman?"

She groaned and banged her head back against the seat. "Morana. She told me she was a reporter." She sniffed. "She's beautiful, and smart and sexy - like some businesswoman in New York you see in those magazines. My dogs hate her. I think I do, too, now."

Bernard frowned. "So she's lying to somebody. Or John's lying about that, too."

Her eyes welled up. "Yeah."

"Here's the thing, though." He eased into the exit lane. "John's not a liar. So my guess is, unless you have absolute proof, it's not the job, and this other woman's lying." He was frowning. "Do you know if he's still there?" he wanted to know next.

She thought about that, and he was right about one thing: John wouldn't lie to her. Her chest rose with a breath, and she tried to get it together again. "At the apartment?"

"Yeah." The Alfa Romeo coasted through a yellow light, scooted around a corner. He shifted gears.

"He was still there when I left. It's been maybe three hours?" The time inversion always threw her.

"So he wouldn't tell you what it was, and said that he was moving out. I vote we go back and dig around in his sh*t." This was espoused calmly as he slid in through an opening gate and into a darling little bungalow-style community.

She seized on the idea with both hands. "Will you come with me? Please?"

"Yeah, of course. I can't stay more than a few hours, I've got a shoot lined up tomorrow." He pulled into the driveway of something that would have done the 1940's proud, refurbished into a slate-and-green glory.

"God, thank you. Thank you, Bernard." She would have flat-out kissed him if it weren't for the seatbelt. She added in the tiniest voice, "I'm so scared for him."

"Come on. I at least need something to eat." His look was more troubled than his calm questions implied. "We can head out after that." He cut the engine, popped his seatbelt and slid out of the car.

"Okay. I've been back to see Bruno a couple of times." Surprise, surprise, he hadn't mentioned that. "And I am never ever going to get used to this. It feels just disturbing." He ambled out into the living room and her bags.

"It always feels like that last drop of a rollercoaster, to me."

"It feels like twenty-four hours of nonstop My Chemical Romance, to me. I want to break out the eyeliner and start cutting." He rolled his eyes expressively and picked up the bags. The smaller one, he offered to her.

"Huh?" She took the bag. "Your chemical what?" She dug through her pockets until she'd found the three silvery orbs. She offered one to him and kept the spare in her pocket.

"Bad music," he said, after a second of looking at her like he could not think of any reason in the universe why she wouldn't get the pop culture reference. "Very bad music, trust me." He took it the orb, made a face at it.

"Never heard of them." She agreed, and gave him an encouraging albeit tight little smile. "These'll drop us at the building instead of the sector."

"Okay. Well, here goes nothing." He sucked a breath in and crushed the little ball between his fingers. A heartbeat later, he winked out of existence.

She fell out of the other side of the hereafter and landed next to him on the pavement in front of the apartment building with the flip-flop roll of her stomach that always accompanied the trip. It was freaking cold. She should have reminded him to bring a coat. Oops.

"Ugh!" he snarled. "Ugh. Hate hate hate." A convulsive shiver, and he looked around himself. ?Could have warned me about the weather, darling." Getting a grip on the strap, he sashayed toward the building.

The fresh fall was already dusting their hair and shoulders and they had to wade through the foot on the ground to reach the walk Bruno had cleared. "I'm sorry - I wasn't thinking. Come on - it's warm inside." She jogged past him to tap the access code into the panel at the door.

He swept in as soon as the door opened and trilled, "Honey Bunny!"

Bruno, who'd stepped out into the hallway at the call, looked surprised. Then he blushed, just as Bernard descended upon him with a hug and a surprisingly tender cheek-kiss. "Hey," he said, and didn't seem to know what else to say.

"Honey bunny," she greeted Bruno, eyes ticking between the pair. She couldn't remember if she'd even spoken to him on the way out.

Bernard seemed disinclined to let go. "Is John upstairs?"

"The doc?" Bruno looked between the two of them. "No, he left about ... fifteen, twenty minutes ago. Had a bag with him," he added, eyeing the one in Harper's hands before dark brown eyes returned to Bernard.

"Did he say where he was going?" And that was just her glasses fogging up in the warmth of the lobby. She snatched her glasses off and busied herself with wiping them on the tail of her shirt.

"Mm ... no, didn't say a word to me." He shook his head, gave Bernard's waist a last squeeze and disentangled himself.

"Right." She shoved her glasses back on and started for the elevator. "I'll leave the door unlocked, if you two want to talk for a minute." The lift dinged and the doors slid open. Harper stepped on and pressed '4'.

"I'll be up in a minute," Bernard agreed, and turned back to Bruno. There were not actually stars in his eyes. That was just the lighting.

Her "Okay," was cut off with the closing of the doors.

The apartment looked almost as it had when she left. Dinner was still working its way toward room temperature on the stove. The vid screen had been shut off. John's coat was missing from its spot on the kitchen chair. She could still smell his cologne. She set her shoulder bag down on the table and looked around the place. Dogs were still playing poker. The clock in the kitchen was still ticking away. She couldn't remember it feeling emptier. His bedroom door was open. The scarf and briefcase were missing from the table, as well.

She dropped her coat on the chair his had occupied, and started for - she had come to think of it as their bedroom. The closet door stood open. Two of his suitcases were indeed missing, and a good-sized swath of clothing: suits and ties, more casual clothes, shoes. The drawer he kept his t-shirts in stood open a half-inch. He left. She couldn't get past it for the time it took her to note all of these things. He really left.

She forged a path through her denial into the room and started with his dresser, pulling the top drawer fully open to poke around in it. Socks. More socks. Boxer briefs. Shirts, more shirts, boxers, shorts, clothes to work out in. She picked through every piece. Slamming that drawer shut, she yanked open the second with a little more force than was warranted. Nothing and more nothing.

She turned her attention to the closet next. One of his Smith & Wessons was in its case. The other was missing, she noted with a frown. Suit jackets and pants hung in orderly rows along the lower rod where he could reach them in the wheelchair, along with some of his jeans. The higher rod was all jeans, sweaters, long-sleeved shirts. She was thorough. She went through every pocket.

She found a cred receipt for a place called Tamarind out in Star's End, from almost a year ago. There was a single silver piece in one of the jeans pockets. She curled the coin and receipt in her hand, the paper crumpling around the silver. The other clutched at a sweater's sleeve, which she fruitlessly banged her head against. She stood with her face buried in the wool of his sweater for half a dozen breaths, then turned to the nightstand and pulled open the drawer.

The nightstand on her side was full of junk: lunch receipts, an odd little sketch of an x-y graph with a couple of lines and no labels, a single empty condom wrapper from God knew how long ago, notes for a report from his job at the medical examiner's office, one of her silk stockings, a candy bar wrapper. She looked closest at the receipts and the graph. Nothing that clicked there.

Chewing on her lower lip, she went around the bed to look in the other nightstand. More notes. A Bible in Latin with English annotations. A plain manila folder: full of papers of different sizes, some of it lined, some unlined, a napkin, a communications bill, all of it written on in longhand. She pulled all of it out and sat on the edge of his side of the bed. His scent wafted up from the sheets to wrap a ghostly arm around her as she opened the folder and picked up the first sheet.

Dear Annie, read the first sheet. I wish I could have explained to you why Simon's so protective. I told you a little bit about what happened to me, but I kind of downplayed it. I told you that my pelvis, the ribs, my shoulder and my back were broken.

"Annie?" Bernard called from the living room.

?Just a minute ... " her hand was shaking so that following his longhand was challenging, but she kept reading.

I kind of threw out that I had some road rash. But they really thought I was going to die. My pelvis was crushed. My liver was ruptured. Two of my ribs punctured my lung, so a pneumothorax collapsed it.

My kidneys were touch and go for a couple of weeks. I had a hairline skull fracture, hence the medical coma they kept me in. And I lost a lot, a lot of blood. I think they said they had to replace my total blood volume twice during the initial surgery because I was leaking so much.

The church can?t allow the position to go unfilled. Even though Pop is in New York, there has to be a backup. Someone had to be ready to take my place, to be the next Benandanti. And Simon was the second oldest son, so he was it.

It went on to describe Simon's anointing and added a few prescient comments regarding the trouble Simon's marriage was currently in. It read about his fear of honesty and loss. It mentioned the dance at Ridge, the dinner at Nobu. It was signed with John's name, and dated February of the previous year. "John," she whispered over the page, smoothing her fingers along it, after she'd finished, before turning to the next sheet.

It was scribbled on a piece of paper with the medical examiner's office header, dated late January. It was an apology for eating the last piece of a box of pizza, and a statement that he'd rather have had her on the table. She giggled before she remembered herself.

She held up and read the next sheet.. My Annie, it read. It?s funny. I tried tonight, I really did. I tried to say to you, ?let?s just try to be friends.? And I couldn?t do it. I ended up picking a stupid, pointless fight with you instead. I don?t want to just be your friend. I don?t want to settle. So I?m hurting you, because I?m trying not to hurt you.

She knew his brother was out in the hallway, but she couldn't seem to tear her eyes away. Each word was a whisper from his heart to hers. Tears prickled her eyes. You?re so sure I?m trying to get with this Morana woman. I tried to think of a way to explain to you what it was like when she walked in, and the best thing I could come up with is this: she?s evil. It comes out of her like rain or sunlight, and I felt it before I even knew she was there. All the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I felt the wolf in me ready to go to work even without God?s voice. I want to kill her. I want to see her lying red and broken on the floor and hear His wordless ?well done? in my head. I don?t think I?d be sick afterward, either. Not after her.

It, too, was dated February of last year. Her breath caught, and she read it again, double-checked the date to be certain. Almost a year ago. But she didn't remember her from back then. A complete blank. She met her, she was certain, later - that summer at the library. She was evil. And he worked for her. He wanted to kill her. But he worked for her. She started flipping through the folder, looking for other mentions of her, looking for more recent dates. But that was the only one.

"Annie, I'm going to drink up all your orange juice," Bernard informed her, and the refrigerator door whapped shut.

She opened the Bible and started leafing through it. There were notes written both in the Bible and in sheets of paper tucked into it, in a mix of Latin and English. John spent a lot of time arguing with the book, apparently.

"Bernard," she called, reading through what she could decipher on the loose sheets first.

"Yeah?" He and the last of the orange juice stood in the bedroom doorway.

?We need to go to New York." She managed to keep her voice relatively level, as she tucked his letters back into the folder. "Would you call and give your dad a heads up while I change into something else?"

"Okay." He eyed her and the papers strewn around her on the bed, then fished his phone from his pocket and ambled off again.

She took the folder with her, loath to let go of a single one of the letters to her for even a minute, and went through the bathroom into the walk-in to change. When she emerged a couple of minutes later, she was wearing jeans, boots and a turtleneck. Ducking back into the bedroom, she fished through John's closet for a sweater and jacket for Bernard.

"He's at lunch right now, but he says he's got a full day teaching," Bernard informed her a few minutes later from the doorway. "He'll be home around five-thirty."

"By the time we get to the station to get the transport, and then through the subway to their place, we won't be that far ahead of him, I don't think." She'd tucked the folder into a purse, slung over her shoulder when she handed him the clothes. "I think these will fit well enough. It'll be cold there, too."

"Did you find something?" He looked at the clothes, made a face, then dropped the coat and pulled the sweater over his head.

"Maybe. He took a gun with him," she said to buy herself time to think about what she could say and what she couldn't. "He must really be concerned." She looked exhausted, but a wellspring of anger fueled her now and glittered behind her glasses. It would do to get her where they needed to go.

"A gun?" He looked surprised. "I didn't know he even had any guns. I tried to get him to buy one when Phoebe was going all nutty on him and he wouldn't."

"He's good. We practice together sometimes. Do you shoot?" She dug through her carryon in the dining room to get her wallet and keys and tuck them into her purse. After a moment's thought, she went to the kitchen and pulled her own gun case down from the cabinet there. Punching the combination into the lock, she cracked it open, and prepped her sidearm, sliding a clip into place and making sure the safety was on before holstering it and tucking it into her bag as well.

"No." He followed her through the house, watching her work with increasing surprise. "One of Pop's brothers was a cop who was killed in the line of duty. Ma never wanted us to handle guns after that."

"A gun is just a tool," she murmured, though she understood the fear that drove his mother to make the demand. "If you know how to handle one safely, it's a useful tool in the right circumstances."

"I didn't know he had any," he repeated, and braced his tight ass on the back of the couch to watch her.

She picked up the phone on the counter to call down to the desk. "Bruno," she said when he picked up. "Can you call a carriage for us?" He could. "Thanks," she said a beat later, and hung up. After that, she didn't seem to be sure what to do. She picked up the pan of manicotti she'd made, dropped the glass lid on the dish, and stuck it in the fridge. Then she was really at a loss.

He sat with his arms folded and his jacket over his arm and asked, "So what did you find?"

She was panting again, silently, and scowling at the baseboards. "I'm not sure. But it has something to do with that woman I told you about. Maybe."

"Hm." He looked at her. He looked out at the rest of the house. "Where did you look?"

"Dresser, closet, nightstands. I didn't check the bookshelves." She slowed and lifted the frown toward him. "Or the office."

"Do you want any help?"

Annie-Love started for the hallway. "Yeah. Sorry. I can't believe I didn't ... " She was tired. Or something. She slipped on the office light and stopped to just look around her before they touched anything. He followed along behind her.

John's computer, one of those little flip-book models, was unsurprisingly missing. His desk was packed full of papers, though, visible in each and every cubby. She groaned, wiping her hand over her mouth and pointed to the desk. "You look through the left, I'll look through the right side."

"Okay." Bernard cracked his knuckles and dug in. Going through the files in the top drawer, he kept up a running commentary. "Power bills, communications bill - what's that? - medical bills, more medical bills ... bank statements, wow, he was socking it in the last few months. Um, this looks like a ... Star's End Range?"

On her side was older notes and reports for the medical examiner's job, all of them unfinished. Notes for something that looked like a book or a dissertation. And, closest to the front of the drawer, notes on something with the header: N-methyl-3-phenyl-3-hexan-1-amine: Serenity. She stopped through the papers she was sifting through to look over at the sheet he was holding. "Sounds like a shooting range. I don't think we've been to that one together." She pushed the M.E. sheets aside, glanced briefly over the book notes, and then pulled the Serenity folder out and moved to her chair to sit and look at it more closely.

LD-50 still unacceptably high in rats, cats, rabbits, mice. Mice and rats present with uniformly advanced ischemic disease and evidence of multiple myocardial infarctions. All species present with liver necrosis in all lobes, read John's scrawling script. R-Floxoletine and S-Floxoletine are produced in 7th step of reaction chain. S-Floxoletine is presumed to be toxic. Chemlab is failing to separate racemates. Start second round of testing tomorrow to confirm, make sure that the new digital scanner is up and running and the mass spectrometer is calibrated.

"More bills. Note to someone named May Ashanti ... looks like a rough draft of his resignation," Bernard was saying.

Her gaze ticked up and over to him once, and she nodded. On a whim, she rose and crossed over to the little copier they had, and put the sheaf of lab notes through it. "I'm not sure if this is anything, but I'm not going to have time to read it all before the driver gets here," she murmured.

"I'm not really finding anything, I don't think," he said, sounding vaguely disappointed.

"How's your chemistry?" She pulled the last sheet from the copier and put the originals back where she found them.

?For sh*t," he admitted. "I was a lib-arts kid, no lie."

"Mine is rusty. But I'll see if I can piece some of it out. Looks like this is his project at the new job." She clipped the pages and stuffed them into her bag.

The phone in the kitchen rang. He wandered off to get it. A minute later he popped his head back into the office. "Your carriage has arrived, m'lady." He tugged his bangs.

She put her glasses back on and rose to join him. "Come on, Holmes. The game is a-foot."