In Too Deep

to fight off their friends and neighbors, who would all try to get into the shelter.”
    “Right.” Henry squinted again. “You’re wondering how the black-ops people knew about this shelter in the first place, aren’t you?”
    “The question does come to mind.”
    “I don’t have an answer,” Henry said. “All we can tell you is that they must have known that the shelter was here. Moved right on in as if they owned the place.”
    Isabella narrowed her eyes. “Sure sounds like someone set up a clandestine government lab here.”
    “A secret lab, yes,” Fallon agreed. “But I doubt that it was connected to any of the standard issue intelligence agencies. They’ve got plenty of underground research facilities of their own. They wouldn’t need to buy an old motor lodge with a bomb shelter out back.”
    Isabella beetled her brows. “I’m not so sure about that. Looks like a perfect cover to me. Just the kind of thing a black-ops project would use. And you said yourself this stretch of the coastline is a nexus. They probably knew that.”
    He looked at her. “I’m supposed to be the conspiracy theorist in this agency.”
    She smiled. “Learn from the best is my motto.”
    He decided the only thing he could do with that was ignore it. “Whatever the hell was going on here, I’m ninety-eight-point-five percent certain it was not a secret government lab.”
    “Hmm.” She considered that for a couple of beats. “A private research lab, maybe?”
    “I think so, yes,” Fallon said.
    “Under contract to one of the intelligence agencies?” she prompted hopefully.
    “No.” He tried to quell her with a warning look. “Just some private researchers who somehow got their hands on one or more of Mrs. Bridewell’s curiosities.”
    “Ah,” Isabella said. “So we’re talking mad scientists. What about the funding?”
    He abandoned the attempt to introduce a degree of logic into the discussion. “What funding, damn it?”
    “Who financed this small, private lab?” she asked with an air of sweet reason. “Labs take money. Lots of it.”
    “I don’t know who financed the project,” he admitted. “But I doubt that it was the government.”
    Isabella was disappointed, but this time she stayed silent.
    Fallon turned back to Henry. “You said this lab was only in operation for about a month?”
    Henry scratched his ear. “That’s all. Right, Walker?”
    Walker nodded in his jerky fashion. “And then s-something real bad happened down there.”
    “Tell me about that part,” Fallon said to Henry.
    Henry heaved a massive shrug. “Who the hell knows? Whatever it was, it killed one of the three researchers. They hauled the body out of the shelter, threw it into the back of a van and drove off. Like I said, no one ever returned.”
    “Did they take anything with them in addition to the body?” Fallon asked.
    Vera and Henry turned to Walker.
    “Book,” Walker said, voice ringing with certainty. He jiggled anxiously. “One of them had a book. Black cover.”
    “Sounds like a lab notebook,” Fallon said.
    “Like I said, they took off in a hurry,” Henry said. “At that point we figured everyone in the Cove was probably walking six feet under.”
    Isabella stared at him. “You thought you were going to die?”
    Henry grimaced. “Hell, as far as we knew it was a secret weapons research lab and something had gone real wrong. What else were we supposed to think? Figured we’d all been irradiated or poisoned.”
    “Of course,” Isabella said, nodding in sympathy. “Those are certainly the first two possibilities that would come to my mind.”
    Fallon looked at Henry. “What did you do?”
    “In another life I was trained as an engineer,” Henry said. “I drove to San Francisco and bought a radiation detector and some basic soil, water and air-quality test equipment. Brought the instruments back here. Ran every test I could think of. There was no detectable radiation. No traces of any poisonous gas leaking out from under the ground.”
    “So you decided to go down and take a look, didn’t you?” Fallon asked.
    “Yeah.” Henry shook his head. “Guess it was the engineer in me. I had to know what we were dealing with.”
    “A-alien technology,” Walker rasped.
    “I agree with Vera and Henry,” Isabella said to Walker. “This looks more like a black-ops group conducting research on paranormal weapons.”
    Walker pondered that. “Alien paranormal weapons.”
    “Well, that’s