Ben would approve — a girl like that, nobody ever saw the man walking by her side. Even other women stared at her. Perfect camouflage. But she noticed embarrassing things and asked awkward questions.
He kissed the tip of her nose, avoiding the stud. He never could see that thing without visualizing her with a cold, sneezing and runny nose and shredded Kleenex. Yecch. Well, a tongue stud would be worse.
He matched her whisper. "What makes you think I'm scouting security?"
"Your eyes are all over the place, instead of on me. It's enough to give a girl a complex. And you're the first guy I've ever dated who took me to the university museum rather than a dance or a movie or a nice dark dorm room." She cocked her head to one side and lifted the opposite eyebrow.
Gary shrugged. "Hey, if you go for dark dorm rooms, we can do that. I thought it'd be rushing things a bit, taking you for granted, you know. Anyway, my sister wanted me to look for something here."
They moved on to the next exhibit, a big cedar-wood box made for a Haida potlatch, with sides formed by a single plank steamed and bent and joined, painted with stylized ravens and orcas and bears, oh my. It sat on a pedestal rather than in a case, so you could examine it from all sides, but a velvet rope kept spectators beyond reach. Gary noted the pressure sensors under opposite corners and close-in IR beam detectors — the museum folks didn't want people touching it and leaving greasy fingerprints. At least the curators seemed to have the labeling correct on this one.
Jane waved a purple-nailed hand at the sensors he'd just listed. "I rest my case. And which sister was that, buddy-boy? The one who just turned thirteen, or the one who's nearly nine? I know I wasn't asking much about Native cultural artifacts at that age."
Damn! Gary's own alarm system triggered, bells and sirens and flashing strobes. "I don't recall talking about my sisters."
She smiled, her eyes narrowed. Not a malicious smile, just . . . taunting. "Newspaper archives, kiddo. Court records. Obituaries, Probate Court, trustees, guardianship, that sort of thing. Public records. All available on-line. You don't think I'd go out with a guy without Googling him?"
Sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose . . . "You mean records like divorce papers and custody fights and some juvie court stuff that shouldn't have been made public but got pulled into the mudslinging as proof of unfit parenting?"
She flinched. Gritted her teeth. Then nodded. "Oooo-kay. New ground rules — I don't hack you, you don't hack me. Whatever I got into hasn't left me with any diseases or habits that depend on illegal chemicals. And I'm not after your money — Mom and Dad kind of soured me on the concept of marriage and joint property. I was the baby King Solomon said to split in half, and neither of them said 'No!' Good enough?"
Rather carefully worded. "Illegal chemicals," not illegal habits. "Good enough."
Besides, he found certain illegal habits quite attractive. Some of the things she'd said in class combined with things he'd found in hacker groups to point to a shadowy figure with the unisex online name of "ambidextrous." "Ambi" never claimed anything, but it had a nasty habit of asking questions of hackers who claimed to have counted coup. Questions that suggested "ambi" had been there first and left no traces.
She nodded, shook her head, and they moved on to the next exhibit. Mayan relief, this one, it looked like it had been chopped free from a bigger piece of limestone. Classic looting job. The museum collection was a mishmash, with a lot of random stuff from a "donor" who had not been too careful about provenance. Which fit Caroline's question perfectly.
And brought him back to Jane's question. Which was legit, if unsettling. "Different sister, probably not in any records. She's a grad student in anthro out West, wants me to look for something that oral history says should have ended up here. They tried a search under NAGPRA and came up empty."
"Nag-pra?"
Hah. Found something she doesn't know. For a kid who'd spent fifteen years shuttling from one parent to the other, with detours into foster care and the street and various shelters, she sure had picked up a hefty education. Of various kinds.
"Stands for 'Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.' It provides for the tribes to recover looted bones and religious artifacts, all that cultural slavery stuff."
That earned him a pair of lifted purple eyebrows and a measuring stare. "You're an Indian? No mention of that in the records."
He held out a hand, flipped it palm up and palm down a couple of times. "She is, Naskeag. Different mother, same father. I'm probably an eighth or a quarter. Not really enough to show."
"Holy shit, a cyberspace scalp-hunter. You gonna kidnap me and keep me as a naked sex-slave in your teepee?" She didn't look like the threat bothered her much.
"Naskeags mostly did bark lodges. And we'd probably have traded you to the French for ransom. How much would your folks pay to get you back?"
She winced. "About ten cents. If either of them had it handy, exact change. Hey, let's quit banging heads. You're supposed to be sniffing at the other end."
She kept saying things like that. The first time they'd talked was after a class where the TA seemed to know less about the subject than they did. They'd discussed some machine language tricks, loopholes and back doors and general pig-headedness in some operating systems, and then she'd come out with something that loosely translated as "You're cute and I like the way your brain works. Let's find some quiet place and fuck."
He'd damn near swallowed his tongue, then stammered something about another class in fifteen minutes and
