Birthright

course.”
    “Okay, I’ve got something in mind. Any news I should know about?”
    “They spent hours cleaning up the site. I know the team’s discouraged, and shaken. I think there are some serious concerns the funding might be cut off—at least temporarily. If the police have any leads, they aren’t sharing.”
    “Take care of yourself, and Ty-Rex.”
    “You can count on that. Come home soon, Doug. Come home safe.”
    “You can count on that.”
    A t three A . M ., the phone beside the bed rang, and shot his heart straight into his throat. It was pounding there as he grabbed for the receiver.
    “Hello.”
    “You have a lot to lose and nothing to gain. Go home, while you still have one.”
    “Who is this?” He knew it was useless to ask. Frustratingly useless as the line went dead.
    He set the phone down, lay back in the dark.
    Someone knew he was in Boston, and didn’t like the idea.
    That meant there was still something, or someone, in Boston to find.

Twenty-five
    I t wasn’t just the long hours, or the fact that her work was both physically and mentally demanding. Callie had worked longer hours, and under much more arduous conditions.
    Here, the weather was sliding gracefully from summer toward fall, offering warm days and cool nights. But for a few scattered hints of yellow on the poplars, the leaves were still lush and green. The sky remained bold and blue.
    Under other circumstances, any other circumstances, working conditions would have been ideal.
    Callie would have traded those balmy September days for baking heat or torrential rains, for clouds of biting insects and threats of sunstroke.
    Because her thoughts leaned that way, she knew she came home exhausted every evening not because of the work itself. It was her scattered focus, the fractured concentration.
    She had only to look over at the charred ground where Digger’s trailer had been to relive it all.
    Intellectually, she knew her reaction was exactly what they wanted. But the core of the problem was not knowingwho they were. If an enemy had a face, she thought—she hoped—she could and would fight it. But there was no one to fight, and no place for her to gather and channel her anger.
    It was the sense of uselessness, she knew, that brought on the dragging fatigue.
    How many times could she study the dateline she and Jake had put together? How often could she reconfigure the connections, scrape at the layers of people and years and events?
    At least Doug was doing something tangible by talking to people in Boston. Yet if she’d gone in his stead, given herself the satisfaction of action, she’d have let the team down when they needed her most.
    She had to be here, going through the routine, hour by hour and day by day. The facade of normality was essential, or the project would erode like her own morale.
    She knew the team looked to her to set the tone. Just as she knew they were talking about details of her personal life. She’d noted the glances shot her way, the whispered conversations that stopped abruptly when she walked into a room.
    She couldn’t blame them. Hot news was hot news. And the gossip tangled on the grapevine sizzled that Dr. Callie Dunbrook was the long-lost Jessica Cullen.
    She’d refused to give interviews or answer questions. It was one thing to want to dig down to the truth, and another to lay herself bare for the media and the curious.
    But the curious came anyway. She was well aware that as many people stopped by the dig to see her as to see the project itself.
    Though she’d never been one to shy away from the spotlight, it was an entirely different matter when that light glared on you, and not on your life’s work.
    She was irritable, jumpy and distracted. All three moods collided when the door to the bathroom opened while she was sulking in the shower.
    She grabbed the handheld showerhead off its hook, gripped it like a weapon while the sharp violin notes from Psycho squealed in her head.
    She curled her fingers at the edge of the shower curtain, prepared to whip it back.
    “It’s Rosie.”
    “Goddamnit to hell and back.” Callie thunked the showerhead back in place. “I’m naked in here.”
    “I certainly hope so. I’d be more worried about you if you’d started taking showers with your clothes on. Bathroom’s about the only place I figure we can talk in private.”
    Callie tugged the curtain back an inch. Through the steam, she watched Rosie drop the lid on the toilet and sit.
    “If