Assassin's Promise, The Red Team Series, Book 5 Read Online Free Page A

flushed too. She pressed her lips into a thin line, then lifted her chin and started down the hall to her office.  
    Papers were spread out on the round table in her office. She indicated a chair. “Please, have a seat.” She took the chair next to his. Her knee bumped his thigh as she leaned forward to rearrange the papers. His eyes shot to her face to see if the touch was intentional.  
    It wasn’t.  
    He cleared his mind, since he obviously was the only one on that page.  
    She looked at him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find the girl you’re looking for. That might not be the name she’s using with the Friends. Or perhaps she really is not with them. I don’t know.”
    “She’s from that community. I’m certain of it.”
    The professor looked at him as if she was deciding something important. She took a long breath, then jumped in. “I’ve done some charting of the population changes in the community over one hundred fifty years. Some interesting things popped out.”
    “Any of this have to do with Sally?”
    “Possibly. Bear with me.” She pulled a graph with fifteen bars on it, showing the changes in population over the years from 1870 to 2010. The first census showed a community of one hundred twenty-five people, spread across a range of ages. It declined to barely forty people by the 1930 census. It doubled in each of the next two censuses, then halved again by 1970. In 1980, and each census after that, it grew rapidly until it was now over three hundred people.
    This corroborated what Lion had told Max about the community nearly dying out.
    “What drove this recent growth?” he asked the professor.
    She shook her head. “Until your question, I hadn’t focused on the bigger picture of changing population patterns in the group. I’ll do some additional research to see if I can correlate the major turning points in the community to economic and/or political shifts in the wider U.S. population.”  
    She set the graph aside and looked at him. “But that’s not why I brought you back.”
    Greer waited for her explanation.  
    “I dug deeper into the last five censuses. I realized that while the overall population is increasing steadily, the proportional count of adolescents is decreasing. I can’t explain this either. In each of the five censuses, the number of children fourteen years and younger is increasing at a pace I would expect as the adult population increases.”
    “So what’s happening to the teenagers? And how can the adult population be growing if there are fewer adolescents coming into adulthood in the group?”
    “Great questions. Really great questions. I don’t know. I need to get back to the community and dig a little deeper. As closed a community as it is, it would surprise me if outsiders are coming in.”
    “Perhaps they’re swapping people from other communities like theirs. Keep the gene pool fresh.”
    The professor’s eyes met his. He could almost feel the alarm he saw in them as the wheels of her mind shifted into motion. He shrugged. “Just a thought.”
    “I wouldn’t have seen this if you hadn’t sent me looking for Sally. And my research would have been incomplete. So to thank you, I made this list.”  
    She moved through the jumble of documents and pulled out another sheet. This was a list of blond teenage girls in the community. Eight of them. “I couldn’t find anyone named ‘Sally,’ but perhaps that’s a nickname. I’ll be visiting with these families when I make another trip to the community. I can try to find out if any of them is your girl.”
    Greer lowered the paper and looked at the professor. “Let me come with you.”
    “No. I have built rapport with them. They trust me. They don’t know you. If you’re with me, then I fear they won’t talk even to me.”
    Greer pressed his lips together, rejecting her decision. She reached over and touched his forearm. Her hand was cool, her fingers long, her nails neat, topped by white crescents.