Osiris stepped into the room and stretched before curling up in the corner near a floor vent.
Peyton smiled at the cat. “You got any ideas? Can you hunt out the gnome for me?”
The tabby meowed.
The researcher’s phone chimed. “Oh, yeah, forgot about that. Don’t want to get my priorities messed up.” He picked up the phone.
His eyes widened. The message on the screen was far more important than the location of a gnome.
“I got a response, Osiris!” Peyton cheered.
His cat rested his head on his paws. He didn’t even bother to look up at the man, as if signaling his utter apathy toward the human’s excitement.
Peyton couldn’t wipe the grin off his face as looked at his important message…from a dating app.
Hi. It says we’re supposed to be a good match, and I liked your message. Sure, I think we could go out for drinks sometime.
After his last disastrous attempts at dating, Peyton had almost given up and convinced himself that dating wasn’t a possibility. That he’d have to sacrifice it to stay alive. He’d even convinced himself that Shay had been right, and maybe he should be hiding in the warehouse.
But that was bullshit.
Shay had pissed off far more people than he had in both of her lives, and was living a full life. She traveled, operated in public, went out with friends, and was even dating a famous bounty hunter. If she could have a life, he could have a life.
Not that she needed to know about his life.
Another alert popped up from a different dating app. Much like searching for a missing gnome, finding the right woman required patience and a wide variety of tools.
Peyton dashed off a few quick messages. He didn’t want to get himself too excited until he’d verified that the dating responses weren’t from bots, but it was a good start.
He set the phone down and returned his attention to his computer. Several filtered results filled a small window on his second monitor.
Peyton nodded. “Okay, these are definitely looking promising. Huh, what’s this? Guess it’s time to take a poke around a few National Reconnaissance Office servers.”
Peyton yawned and looked at the two side-by-side satellite photos before clicking over to the next comparison set.
A day of gathering and filtering data had already yielded a few possibilities. A few research strands had suggested that someone named Bosvid had come to the United States from Germany right after the end of the American Civil War, but the only proof of that was a few lines on some county tax records in Maine.
That would be easy to ignore, but a trail of unusual events and legends starting in Maine and heading west corresponded with the years following the arrival of Bosvid. Those were revealed not by Peyton’s searching or the Project Houdini information, but by a file recovered from a hidden IRS server—a document entitled The Difficult Issue of Magical Tax Evasion: A Historical Perspective.
No matter how much the world changed, death and taxes remained constant.
Peyton chuckled at the thought as he continued looking at the satellite photos.
Several convergent lines of evidence from archaeologists, historians, and government sources pointed him toward Iowa, not all that far outside of Des Moines. He magnified a few sections of the satellite photos and clicked to inspect images taken on different dates.
Too perfect. The images hadn’t changed. He’d managed to gather dozens of satellite images of what was allegedly a large farm, but all the images looked exactly the same, regardless of the date or the source satellite, including the layout and density of the rows of corn and the exact positions of the vehicles.
Even if the farmers parked the same place every night, he’d expect at least one daytime picture of the vehicles out in the field. The presence of non-fallow fields argued against the idea the farm was abandoned.
Suspicious. Damned suspicious.
Peyton brought up another picture, an aerial photograph taken in the 1950s. The closer distance changed aspects of the image, but the layout of the buildings and corn remained the same.
He narrowed his eyes. Other than the angle, everything else was identical. He ran an image comparison analysis between the 1950s photo and the satellite images.
Chance of match: 96.5%.
Peyton isolated only the vehicles in the older photo and then compared them to the satellite images.
Chance of match: 99.7%.
He chuckled. A farmer might take good care of his equipment, but he doubted he was using the same trucks and tractors for eighty years.
“Iowa, though?” Peyton shook his head. “Why would the gnome be in Iowa?”
Shay probably wouldn’t care if she found out I was dating, as long as I made it clear I was lying to the women. She’s let me move out of the warehouse.
Maybe Brownstone knows someone? Then again, Brownstone is dating Shay, so I don’t think I want him to try and hook me up with anyone. I couldn’t handle a woman like Shay.
Peyton shuddered at the thought.
He nodded to himself as he pulled off the highway in his rented Toyota SUV. He hit a country road leading to what was supposed to be Morris Farms. Their web presence was non-existent, something that made Peyton just twitch thinking about it. He only knew the name because of local property tax records.
Someone was hiding something at Morris Farms, and they’d gone through the trouble to use magic or technology to hide from satellites—which meant they knew what they were doing.
The road grew bumpier, and Peyton blew out a breath. Shay might understand about him dating someone and hanging out in LA, but running off to Iowa by himself would probably earn him another death threat or the return of the cubicle apartment.
“She doesn’t need to know,” he murmured. “It’s not like she’s going to demand I lead her through the search process point by point.”
He nodded to himself, satisfied with the need for a little lie-by-omission. Shay kept plenty of things
