First I need to get Harry to check out which of the local councilors are known to have flexible morals and see if George has suborned them. Meanwhile my clerk can start researching the deed restrictions for the area for me. Damn, this is going to be a hell of a job. But I will succeed. Failure is not an option.
* * * *
Thanks to all the time she’d spent on the Thorne House Clinic case, Sierra was buried under a mountain of work and refused to even talk to Fergus and Cam, so they offered their Saturday to help Danny Davies. The clinic’s carpenter, and the man he’d recently hired as a general maintenance man and handyman, Quinn Johnson, wanted to move everything out of one side of the barn which they were going to use for storage. Danny wanted a lockup area so tools could be kept safe and for chemicals, gasoline, and other flammable substances to be out of sight. It all seemed reasonable to Cam so he and Fergus had arrived in old jeans and work boots, ready to lend their muscles to the program.
Cam liked Danny, and as always he had a complete plan for what needed to be done, including what would move where to minimize double handling.
Cam was also happy to spend time with, and learn more about, Quinn. The man had only started work at the clinic a couple of weeks previously, and he was a human, which was interesting as so many of the original staff were shape-shifters. After all, the clinic had been founded to help shape-shifters so it was only to be expected many of the staff would be paranormals. But Quinn was human.
“How do you feel about working for a pack of wolves?” he asked Quinn as they were waiting for Danny to move his truck and Oscar’s car out of the barn.
“Didn’t your friend tell you?” asked Quinn, nodding at Fergus.
“What? Did they try that cute puppy dog trick on you, too?”
Quinn laughed. “Yeah, after I was hired Ambrielle told me they’d done it to her. I’m sitting in the reception area waiting to be called into my interview and the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in my life walks into the room and its fur is red. I said to myself, ‘Either this mutt has had a can of red paint sprayed all over it, or it’s a shape-shifter.’”
“I’ve been meaning to ask. How did you know about shape-shifters?” asked Fergus.
“I love animals and get on really well with them. I’ve got an old property well out of town and have eleven dogs, four cats, two horses, a goat, rabbits, chickens, fish, pretty much everything you can name. I like them all and we understand each other. It wasn’t much of a leap to know that some animals were really people.”
“Does that mean some of your animals are shape-shifters?” asked Cam curiously.
“I couldn’t rightly say,” said Quinn as Danny walked back into the barn.
Cam was kept busy shifting boxes and cans of equipment for the next hour, but he continued to think about Quinn’s answer. Did he mean he wasn’t going to tell them? Or did it mean he wasn’t sure himself about some of his roommates? That was an interesting little puzzle indeed. It also showed that Quinn himself was much deeper and more complicated than he appeared on the surface. At first glance he was very open and chatty. The friendliest person Cam had met in a long time. Yet it would appear the man still kept some things close to his vest.
Cam enjoyed the day’s hard physical labor and sheer delight of seeing, at the end of it, things neatly stacked on the brand-new shelves they’d all built, and the door of the new storeroom securely locked to keep things safe.
Besides, with Oscar’s cousin George still an unknown entity, keeping chemicals and flammable liquids out of sight sounded good to him, as well as locking away the sharp tools. He certainly didn’t want to meet an enraged cousin holding an ax or a nail gun any time soon. It was good to know so many of the staff were thinking about protecting the clinic, making it a safer place and more difficult for George to attack if he decided to get physical about wanting to take it away from Oscar.
“Quinn and I will be changing the rest of the locks on Monday. You’ll all get new keycards to the areas you need access to, but there’ll only be two doors everyone can open—the main front entry to reception and the back door in from the parking lot,” said Danny.
“That sounds very sensible. Now there’s more staff and more patients, we don’t all need to be able to go everywhere,” said Fergus.
“Besides, Ambrielle usually knows where we are and she can get us to fetch things for you if you can’t get them yourselves,” added Danny.
“It was something Harry Harrison suggested and it’s been a smart move,” said Cam. The more protection they had in place the better, just in case George proved to be a problem. If he didn’t, no worries, they’d tidied up their act anyway. And if he did cause trouble, at least there was some hope of stopping him before he did anything too bad. Cam really didn’t trust him. Between what Oscar had told them all, and the few things he’d heard from Sierra, the man seemed fixated on getting the clinic. There was no understanding the motivations of some people.