A belated thanks to Pooh_bah, who has been very kind to beta this stuff, and very patient with whiny e-mail from the author about how badly this story is going.

Go ahead and review. If you like it, tell me how I can do better. If you hate it, mention what particularly makes you want to barf. (unless you just hate Lydecker, in which case I don't want to hear it)

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The girl who had been calling herself Zoe stood silently in the girls'(or was that women's?) locker room, holding her breath. No sound of breathing, no motion, just the drip of water from somewhere in the back of the showers. On her way back into the lockers, she caught a glimpse of her red curls in the mirrors, and had to remind herself to be calm.

Aisle number three, between two banks of blue-painted locker doors, and down to the fifth from the end. She dropped her knapsack into the bottom of the empty locker, then hung up her brown canvas coat.

She extracted the H&K pistol and its holster from the inside of her waistband, checked the chambered round, and wedged the pistol behind the knapsack. That left her with just the ceramic knife taped to the inside of her left arm, and all the weapons she was born with.

Long ago, someone had decided that she would never be without a weapon, and worked hard to make sure that she knew it. He had wanted her to know that, awake or asleep, she was dangerous. She had learned.

"Don't think about your reasons," she told herself. "Just remember who the target is." A target that she hadn't seen in over a month. A target that didn't want to be found.

The identification in her wallet said 'Zoe Morgan Braun.' A driver's license and student ID, both fake. The girl in the picture was her, though. Her photos stared back at her with calm hazel eyes, in a square face. Some cash, and nothing else. The wallet went into the back pocket of her khaki pants.

"Just this, and I can get back to being me." She closed the locker and snapped the combination lock into the latch.

On the way out, she checked her hair in the mirror, and made sure that the clip with the bow held her ponytail securely at the base of her neck. "You are just another college student," she told herself, and headed out into the main hall way.

As the front door swung closed behind her, she could hear a conversation to her left.

"Let's start with the graduate library," said a woman's voice.

"You go ahead. I've got a couple of errands, and I'll meet you over there for lunch."

Her target! She broke into a run, expecting to catch sight of the pair. But, when she rounded the corner, there was no one except a woman in a red nylon jacket, with a notebook under her arm and an annoyed expression.


****

Dawn let the armload of scientific journals drop on to the green vinyl tabletop in the study cube. The window at the end of the cube was open just a crack, and sunlight streamed in, reminding her that she could be doing something fun. But she was here instead. She settled into the chair with a sigh.

"And I thought Dek was going to help," she muttered to herself. He had invited himself along on her research trip, then abandoned her the moment she parked the truck. But he had promised to meet her for lunch.

She opened her notebook to today's page. Every one of the books and magazines on the table had been identified as missing or 'checked out' when she looked in the computer. The listing of things that she'd actually found on the shelves filled most of the page. Now she had to read through each one of them and figure out if they had anything in common.

It was tedious work, and her mind tended to drift from the cool black and white of the paper in front of her to the smudged pencil graffiti on the tabletop. She quickly discovered that it was almost all pornographic. She guessed that horny grad students spent far too much time here on the third floor, with the dark, dusty shelves of books stretching away on one side, and some tiny drift of breeze and sunlight on the other.

She dragged her mind back from consideration of some of the more lurid cartoons to the stack of journals. The next one down on the stack felt wrong, somehow. It fell open on the desk, open to the cut edges of half a dozen pages which had been removed with a knife or a razor. When she turned to the table of contents to find out what was missing, she found the entry blacked out with a magic marker.

When she held the page at the right angle in the sunlight, she could read "Genetic Analysis of American Indian Remains-Motivation and Techniques. Dr. S. P. Hayworth."

A quick examination of the rest of the journals found five more articles removed. All were by Hayworth.


****
Zoe felt the smell of old books fill her nose. She let the door to the stairwell close silently behind her, and started her carefully inconspicuous search of the third floor. Her eyes rapidly adjusted to the little bit of light that wasn't soaked up by the dull colors of the bindings.

This floor had study cubicles on the East wall. She slunk along the center aisle, looking down each row between the shelves.

There was the familiar face, from the street next to the gym. The red jacket was hanging on the back of her chair, and the girl was twirling a lock of brown hair as she paged through something thick and scholarly.

"Time to make contact," Zoe thought to herself. A quick check confirmed that the man she was looking for was nowhere near by.

"Mind if I sit down?" she asked the brunette, who looked up at her in surprise.

The girl shrugged, so she perched herself on the end of the table.

"Have you ever been shot?" Zoe inquired, venting just a little bit of her growing frustration. The girl's blue eyes widened.
"No," said the girl, shrinking back in her chair just a bit. "Is this something I should worry about?"

"How much do you know about your boyfriend?" She wanted to tell this poor ignorant girl everything: the project, the shooting, the dead kids.

"I don't know what you're talking about." The girl was turning an interesting shade of pink. Zoe congratulated herself on a lucky guess.

"If you want to get into his pants, you'd better hurry." Zoe flashed a quick, nasty smile, showing teeth. "Some people have other plans for him."

"You must have mistaken me for someone else," said the girl, who was doing a remarkable job of keeping her voice steady. The girl's racing heart was giving her away.

"You also need to know that Dr. Hayworth, who you are so carefully researching," she waved in the general direction of a page of scribbled notes. "is scheduled to be terminated sometime this afternoon."

"Terminated?"

"Killed, executed, assassinated, whatever." Zoe shrugged, emphasizing square shoulders under the green knit. "I'm not sure how it is supposed to happen, but it will be fast and efficient."

"And you know this how?"

"I hear things." She could also hear the stairwell door opening, and quiet footsteps that brought back painful memories. So she ducked back in to the rows of bookshelves before the girl could stop her.

*****
Dawn got back to the desk to find a man wearing a baseball cap that said 'CAT' sitting in her chair. He was wearing a jacket that featured a design of bark, twigs, and oak leaves, in shades of brown and olive. His elbows were resting on her notebook, and he was staring at her with green eyes.

"I like college towns," said the man, somehow using Dek's voice. "If you look like a redneck, no one ever bothers to look at your face."

Dawn felt her jaw detach itself from her face, as she mentally subtracted the camouflage jacket and the obnoxious baseball cap. It was, in fact, Lydecker.

"Who was just here?" he asked, taking off the hat and dropping it on the table.

"I'm not really sure," she answered. "Did you see her?"

"Just a glimpse, but I saw you go after her. What did she look like up close?"

"Red hair, in a ponytail. A green sweater in that military shade. Matched her eyes." Dawn closed her eyes and visualized the woman. "Athletic build, square face, strong cheekbones. I think she's about twenty. No nail polish, no makeup, no jewelry. She's not quite as tall as I am, but I couldn't catch her."

"She had a head start, Dawn. Did your mysterious red-head have anything to say?" Lydecker leaned back in the chair.

Dawn repeated as much of the conversation as she could remember.

"Sounds to me like she was trying to extract information, and failed," he offered. "Or trying to rattle you, and succeeded."

"Now," he continued, pointing at her notes. "What have you found?"

"Someone is trying to make Hayworth's research vanish. The stuff available on the Internet is already gone. So I think she might be right about someone trying to kill him."

"Do you think she might be the killer?"

"Why would she warn me? And why is she threatening you?"

"I don't think she is. Can we get one of your grad student friends to find out where Dr. Hayworth is supposed to be for the rest of today?"

Dawn was distracted for a moment. "Since when does Dek have green eyes?" she asked herself. The hazel brown she expected was still there at the edge of the irises. "A trick of the light," she decided.

"Yeah," said Dawn. "I'll go ask around."