Progress was slow, and worst case scenarios were starting to play out in her mind.

She'd had more luck finding out what she could about leeches than Umbrella, and her search for articles written by Marcus himself had been almost, unusually, fruitless. If they existed, and they had to because she'd seen them referenced, they were either old enough or obscure enough, that no one had a copy of any of them.

Even Professor Rice was puzzled by it, calling it a mystery because clearly they'd been published, otherwise they wouldn't be referenced, but he couldn't find any evidence of them existing. According to him, it looked like Marcus and the individuals he'd worked with, had all dropped off the map shortly after he'd started doing work exclusively for Umbrella. It was an interesting trend, but not that unusual, or so he'd said.

Rebecca thought it was plenty unusual, but she knew more about the situation than he did, not that she could say anything. Instead, she kept her conversations with him focused on the leeches, not wanting to lose him as a resource, even if there didn't seem to be much he could do for her, other than offer random facts on annelids and crazy, but utterly believable, tales of the misadventures he'd gone on.

Still, she knew more about leeches than she had to begin with, and was doing a better job of keeping them happy and herself comfortable.

She'd learned that the leeches were probably some species of medicinal leech judging by coloration, eyes and what she assumed Marcus had been working with, or at least they had been originally. Whatever Marcus had done with them, had changed them drastically. They were far too large, much more aggressive and reactive, not to mention the metachrosis was unique to them. In all her research she was unable to find any information about leeches capable of camouflaging themselves that way, and she'd stopped short of asking Professor Rice about it, because it was just too unbelievable, especially if he asked her for details about what they were mimicking.

She'd kept talking to him about the leeches though, her leeches as he affectionately called them. He doubted that she'd discovered a new species of leech, but was open to the idea that she might have discovered a region specific variant and was eager to know more, encouraging what he assumed was a hobbyist's interest.

Thanks to him, she actually knew something about them, had a better sense of just how strange Marcus' leeches were.

Knowing about them was part of a backup plan she was putting together, just in case nothing else worked. She'd figure out a way to safely send Professor Rice a specimen and somehow arrange for him to incidentally discover the Tyrant virus. That was sure to bring attention to the area, and eventually to Umbrella, especially if, once things got underway, she could figure out a way to bring up that they might have been the decedents of the leeches that Marcus had been working with before he vanished, having somehow escaped and started breeding in the wild, because she hadn't given up on that angle of things. Professor Rice thought that the man was her role model, that she was inspired by his having worked near where she lived.

And maybe she'd encouraged that line of thinking, calling Marcus' disappearance yet another local mystery when she was talking to him.

She'd gone as far as getting a disposable camera to take picture of the leeches as proof if it came to that. She hadn't taken any pictures yet, mostly because she was afraid. Not of someone recognizing the leeches, but of getting too immediate a response and ending up being asked to send a leech for study. She'd need to kill the leech first, shipping it alive would be too dangerous. If it got out at any point, there was no telling what it might do and if whoever she sent it to wasn't careful they'd be in danger.

So, killing it first was the only safe option.

Except, that would mean killing something making her.

There were enough leeches that she had extras, but the thought of it made her skin crawl.

After all she'd been through, she didn't want to lose any part of what made her.

The thought was purely her own too, because she'd seen firsthand that the leeches didn't care. She'd watched them eat their own dead, the ones that she'd accidentally killed during her first cleaning efforts. So she'd already killed some of them, by accident, but they had no way of knowing that.

Killing one or two of them wouldn't do her any harm, but it got her thinking about what would happen to her if enough of the leeches died.

It was something for her to worry about later, after dealing with Umbrella. That was how she'd taken to prioritizing things, everything could wait until after Umbrella. Still, learning what she could about leeches to help make sure they stayed alive wouldn't hurt her. Like how she'd learned that they breathed through their skin, which was why letting them start to dry out had caused her so much discomfort.

Once she knew enough to feel confident that she wouldn't accidentally hurt herself, she'd resumed her research at the library, trying to find out what she could about Umbrella, figure out a way to start working against them.

She'd spent hours in the microfilm room, which wasn't as bad as it should have been. Hardly anyone else came in there, and the room was dark enough that the leeches found it comfortable. As long as she remembered to stop and refill her thermos of water regularly, it was a pleasant enough way to spend the day, better that sitting around her apartment waiting for phone calls and watching the leeches crawl around.

In the beginning, she'd gone with what little she had, focusing on the Umbrella itself, which proved more challenging than expected. With nothing else to go on, the history of the global pharmaceutical giant had been a natural choice and presented the problem of there being too much information. Umbrella was an enormous company, involved in pretty much every major medical field, funding all sorts of research and grants, producing several common prescription and over the counter drugs, with at least two dozen new ones in testing, hosting events and contributing to numerous charities, meaning that filtering the information was the real problem. And all that was before taking into account all of fields outside of medicine that Umbrella was involved in, ranging from cosmetics to industrial cleaners, and everything in between.

If she'd been able to get help, it wouldn't have been such a problem. She'd been good at group work and delegation of tasks in college, and if she'd had a team of five or more people, she'd have been able to assign each of them a different aspect of the company to look into to see if they turned anything up, but since it was just her, the amount of information she had to wade through, filtering out what was useful from everything else, the task was daunting, especially when she didn't even know what she was looking for.

The only logical choice had been to start at the beginning, with the founding of the company.

Oswell E. Spencer, a British eccentric who was famous and infamous in equal measure, had founded it, along with two friends from college, Edward Ashford and James Marcus, that much was common knowledge, but reading about it helped put things in perspective. Of the three, Marcus was the only real scientist, the other two had technically gotten doctorates, but they'd been dabblers, pursuing the trends of the times and generally following whatever caught their attention, with no obvious goal in mind. The company hadn't started with an idea or any particular breakthrough, it was a pet project of Spencer and Ashford, one that began after a trip to Africa. They'd found something there, something that justified a massive expenditure of resources, both monetary and intellectual. She'd pursued that for a time, looking into when and where Umbrella had chosen to build facilities, what sort of talent it had managed to pull in to work at them.

The African facility, which should have been the most promising, since that was where things should have started, based on the timeline of events, was paradoxically the least productive, a sink of time and money. Funds went in, but nothing substantial ever came out, at least nothing that justified its continued existence. There was the occasional new organic compound discovered, ones that were potentially medically useful, but the facility seemed largely defunct.

If she'd been an accountant, with access to the relevant numbers and figures, she was sure that the situation would have set off all sorts of alarms, but as it was, she had nothing and it all meant nothing to her. Africa was where it started, but it was a dead end.

She tried looking at the medical research Umbrella was involved in, but it was too much, too many mundane drugs and harmless supplements. The most frightening things she found was the use of Red No. 3 in children's chewable vitamins, and research involving transgenic 'fish tomatoes', both of which were more scare mongering than anything else. Occasionally, the specter of Spencer's supposed fascination with eugenics would rise up to dog the company, but those claims were largely unsubstantiated, or attributed to youthful follies. Marcus on the other hand, had been regarded as a divisive man, loved and loathed in equal measure, depending on which of his colleagues was asked about him. As for Ashford, little was said about him as a business man or scientist, but the papers loved him. Right up until his untimely death, there had been articles about him, calling him a 'real life Gatsby' and offering nothing of substance on the man.

Of them, Spencer was the only one still alive, keeping mostly to himself and having only limited involvement in the company he had helped found. Ashford had been the first to die, early on in the company's history. The circumstances were mysterious and vague, another dead end. Marcus, she knew about all too well, and was once again a dead end. He wasn't even officially dead, he'd just disappeared one day and was a missing persons' case that remained open.

Umbrella had its share of missing researchers and accidents resulting in the death of employees, but the ones that got the most media attention were the least useful to her, because of all the things Umbrella was involved in, ranging from agriculture to cosmetics. The accidental death of a janitor in a plant where cosmetics were produced was useless, and the majority of reported deaths were exactly like that, mundane accidents.

Looking into missing persons wasn't much help either. There were plenty of them right in Raccoon City, but no more so than would be expected in a city of its size. The most noteworthy case, famous for spawning local urban legends, was that of the Trevor family. George Trevor had been a fairly renowned architect, well known for drawing inspiration for his designs from the Winchester Mystery House, and had disappeared, along with his wife and teenage daughter, while overseeing the construction of the Spencer Mansion.

She'd looked into the Mystery House, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else, due to her experience in the Spencer Mansion, and what she found explained a lot. It also explained why the story of the Trevor family made for such a good ghost story. An architect with an interest in a mansion built to ward off ghosts, vanished during the construction of a similar house. The story was practically ready-made.

It was something she'd wished that she'd known about before her meeting with Chief Irons. If she had, she might not have fallen so easily into the trap he'd set for her.

It looked more, and more like she was going to have to focus on the leeches, and in desperation, she went back to the different projects the company was involved in, this time focusing on the more purely academic ones. The research in transgenic organisms had the most promise, more so than virology, since so much of that was easily linked back into the company's legitimate medical research. Of course, a company with an African branch would be interested in Ebola, the most feared and infamous virus of modern times. It was good publicity to say that a vaccine was being looked into, and again, it tied in with funds being sent to the mysterious African branch, which like a zombie, refused to die.

Transgenics was a newer field with quite a few practical immediate applications, and that was where Umbrella was investing a lot of money and pulling in a great deal of talent, almost a disproportionate amount, but not being an accountant, she couldn't really judge. It did line up with Marcus' leeches, the Tyrant virus and the other things she'd encountered, so she jotted down some names, took notes on different projects and started looking into those.

It was there that the real progress began. There were some names that showed up frequently, only to vanish from the news right when they were on the verge of some major breakthrough. A few phone calls to people she knew from college who had access to the relevant databases, and she was able to confirm that they stopped publishing articles about their findings at the same time they vanished from the public eye. It was just like with Marcus, proving nothing other than that Umbrella liked to control what its employees released to the public. There was no proof that any of them were dead, to the contrary, it was obvious that several of them were still alive and working for the company, but for all intents and purposes, they were no longer involved in research.

Researchers got transferred at the strangest times, some ending up in the seemingly defunct Africa facility, others ending up even more bizarre locations. Umbrella had an Antarctic research base of all things, supposedly for climate research, but it ended up with a surprisingly large number of virologists and geneticists.

So there was evidence that Umbrella was up to something shady, it was just that it required someone to either already know what was going on, or to make an impossible leap of logic. Not the best situation, but it was still useful, especially if she could figure out a way to help people make that leap of logic.

With that in mind, she started letting information slip in her phone conversations with acquaintances from college, hinting that she was looking into Umbrella, because she'd been offered a job with the company, but something about it sounded too good to be true, and she was trying to figure things out before saying yes. Too many researchers with the company seemed to fall off the map, she'd told them, and she didn't want that to happen to her, she wanted to be sure that she'd get into a project that would actually go somewhere.

And it worked, some of them actually started to notice things, seeing trends that didn't quite line up.

The problem was, it was too slow to accomplish anything, and just telling them the truth was impossible. Chief Irons had driven home how outlandish the story sounded, and without an understanding of why Umbrella was doing what it was doing, there was no way for her to make a convincing argument.

Umbrella was making monsters, but why? There had to be a reason behind it, some end goal.

Spencer had dabbled in eugenics, she was sure of it.

Wesker wanted a weapon.

Marcus had been content to make monsters.

Ashford, the company's charismatic face, had died of unknown causes.

And somehow all of it was connected, she was sure of it.

There was some missing piece, something big and obvious that she couldn't see from where she was looking, something that could bring it all tumbling down. It was something that only someone in the company would understand.

That was what she needed, an inside source and Umbrella certainly employed enough people. She just needed to figure out which one of them would be safe for her to go to. Someone who knew enough to be helpful, but wasn't so deeply involved that they had reason not to go public, to the contrary she needed to find someone who had reasons to admit what was going on, but hadn't. If she could find them and give them a little push in the right direction, everything else would fall into place.

The only problem was finding this person, if they existed, and getting in touch with them.

Then there was the breakthrough that happened purely by chance, looking over her list of names, one jumped out at her, Birkin. The article had nothing to do with Umbrella, just a little snippet in the local events section of one of the local papers. 'Congratulations and best wishes to the newlyweds, William and Annette Birkin' and it went on to talk about how the two had met, while working for Umbrella. It was cute, made the company look good and gave Rebecca exactly what she'd been looking for.

Marcus had mentioned someone named William Birkin having been involved in his death, and the dates lined up well enough that it worked. If one or both of the Birkins was still around, then it would be perfect.

Leaving the microfilm room and going down to the payphones to check the phonebook, she found it, both Annette and William Birkin were listed. A pair of Umbrella researchers right under her nose, involved in who knew what.

Her intent had been to call Barry, to let him know so he could tell the others, but instead she found herself calling the Birkin residence. She didn't know why, maybe to warn Annette that her husband was a murderer, and that the man he'd killed was out for revenge.

She imagined Annette as a fearful, concerned wife, worried about what her husband was involved in, while she herself worked a far more mundane job with the company, in one of its legitimate fields. In her mind, Annette worried about her husband, and maybe the one conversation would be all it took to convince her to confront him, and seeing her so upset would move him to confess everything for her sake.

It was a nice little story to imagine, but would it really play out that way? She could always hang up, go to Barry and tell him what she'd found, let him take care of things for her.

The phone rang twice, nowhere near long enough for her to figure out what to do, why she was even calling.

"Hi! You're early!"

The cheerful voice on the other end caught her off guard.

It was a little girl.

"I…" Rebecca stopped dead. She'd never imagined that they might have a child. All the more reason for one, or both of them to act, "Is your mommy or daddy –"

"They're at work," the little girl interrupted, sounding impatient.

"Do you know when they're getting home?" Rebecca asked, wondering if she should leave a message and her number. According to Director Marcus, William Birkin was a murderer, or at least an accomplice to murder. What would happen if she gave him her phone number? Would that put her in danger? But he was married, had a little girl, that didn't line up with her image of a man like that. Murderers didn't have families, except apparently they did.

"No, I don't," the girl's answer interrupted her train of thought, "And I'm expecting a very important call, so I don't have time to talk."

A little girl expecting an important call? If her life hadn't already been so surreal at this point, she would have burst out laughing, "An important call?"

"Yes, a very important call," was the utterly serious reply, "Daddy's going to call me when he gets a break. We're reading The Phantom Tollbooth together."

"Oh."

Rebecca hung up the phone.

It was the wrong number, it had to be, because even if it was her most promising lead, it was one she wasn't going to follow through on.

Because, she didn't want to imagine that there was someone working for Umbrella, who was both a murderer and a father, who would sneak time at work to make a phone call to read a book to his little girl, or let his little girl read to him. Rebecca wasn't sure which and didn't want to let her imagination start filling in possibilities.

She'd spent too much time imagining things already. It was time for her to face the facts, and work with what she had.