Siofra was weird enough.
Her Gaelic name meant fairy or changeling, hailing from a time in Ireland’s history when superstitious parents feared fairies might replace their babies with changeling twins.
She supposed the name fit. She’d lost track of whether she were herself or a changeling twin a long time ago.
Either way, now she had a drone to play with.
She’d charged the drone in her hotel room and scoped the perfect place to use as a launch and landing area—an unoccupied mansion not far up the river from The Loggerhead Inn. A week earlier, she’d borrowed the owner’s paddleboard for another mission. In towns like Jupiter Beach, it wasn’t difficult to find empty vacation homes, even if the owners alleged to live there six months and a day in order to claim Florida residency and avoid state taxes.
Sitting on the tax-dodgers’ dock, she plugged her phone into the controller and the drone sprang to life, a buzzing angry wasp, rising into the air.
She touched the controller’s forward arrow and the drone shot away from her toward the trees lining the opposite bank.
Too fast.
She acclimated herself to the controls and video feed before pushing the mechanical bird toward The Loggerhead.
Perched in the mansion’s waterside lounge chair, Shee’s knee bounced at the sight of the familiar hotel on her phone’s screen.
There it is.
On her command, the drone ascended until it hovered parallel to the uppermost windows of the building. She buzzed closer. The angle of the sun against the southern-facing windows sent light streaming through the impact resistant glass, illuminating the face of a man lying in bed.
Dad?
Shee glanced at her watch to find it nearly ten-thirty.
Mick McQueen hadn’t slept past six a.m. a day in his life.
What’s wrong with him?
Through the drone’s eye she scanned the room. A chair and a pair of side tables clustered around the centerpiece of the room—a silver-edged hospital bed. Shee noted the matching Tetons of Mick’s feet beneath the covers before turning the drone to its nine until the camera focused on her father’s face.
Mick’s eyes were shut. Zooming in, she spotted tubes of various sizes and colors leading into his forearm.
A lemon rolled from somewhere in her chest and lodged itself in her throat, lumpy and sour.
What have I done?
She let the drone hover there, hands frozen on the controls.
I waited too long—
The camera shook, waking Shee from her building panic. Her fingers scrambled to keep the drone from dropping. Steady once more, she wiped her eyes and studied the screen.
What was that?
It was if something had struck the drone.
A bird?
A large insect?
She left the device hovering another moment hoping her father would open his eyes or move—anything that made him look less dead.
Squinting, she wished she’d brought her peepers from the car. Her forties had played hell with her reading eyesight.
Did his chest rise and fall?
Moving her focus to the end of the bed, she searched for a chart that might reveal his illness. Her angle kept that area hidden. No one had done her the favor of scrawling his diagnosis on the wall above his head.
She panned the room, zooming in on anything she thought might be of interest.
Nothing.
She forced herself to guide the drone to the next window.
The rest of her father’s apartment appeared empty, and hadn’t changed since the last time she’d been in it, over a dozen years earlier.
Dad still isn’t a decorator.
Snorting a little laugh, she wiped away a wet bubble ballooning from her nose.
Get hold of yourself, Shee.
Something moved near the bottom of the screen and she focused on it, hoping to identify what had hit the camera.
Not a bird.
The movement came from someone in the room, sitting with their back to the window, the back of their head visible above the sofa cushions.
The person twisted to peer at the drone. A woman in nurse’s scrubs.
The buzzing of the drone. She’d heard it.
Shee watched the woman scowl.
Time to go.
She jerked the drone away from the window and retraced the Intracoastal Waterway back to her dockside perch. The contraption hummed into view and landed beside her.
That’s something, anyway.
She’d confirmed her father still resided at The Loggerhead Inn. She wasn’t positive she’d seen him breathe, but felt ninety-nine-percent sure he was alive.
No reason to hire a nurse to watch a dead man.
He had all his limbs. She didn’t notice any marks on his body. Flu? No. A hospital bed implied something more long-term. Cancer?
Am I too late?
She swallowed and popped her phone from the controller cradle. Time to get some lunch and review the video.
Time to think.
She dropped the drone into its packaging and paused to check its body for a sign of what had knocked it off course. A smooshed bug, a feather or—
Hold on.
Shee fingered a small black disk stuck to the side of the drone.
That’s new.
Plucking at it, she peeled it from the ’copter’s exoskeleton.
Hm.
Shee awakened her phone and reviewed the drone footage as it approached her father’s window.
There it is.
Tucked in the corner where one angle of The Loggerhead’s roof met another nestled what looked like a gun. Her imaginary clock told her the drone had dipped toward its nine as if it had been hit from its three.
That has to be it.
She studied the disc in her palm.
A GPS tracker.
Smaller than a quarter, the device wasn’t over-the-counter spy fun—this was military-grade. Cutting edge.
Why had her father set
