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reached for his jacket. “Where’s Julia? I thought she was with you this afternoon.”
    “Mom and Dad took her to get ice cream. I wanted beer. I was outvoted.” He shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans while Ryan moved around the room, gathering his things. “They’re leaving tomorrow morning and wanted to take her out for a little fun before they head back to Seattle.”
    Ryan was all too aware they were leaving. He loved seeing his in-laws, but this week had been too emotional with the recent crash. He was looking forward to getting his house back to normal. “I thought you were going to Chicago, some geologist’s conference?”
    “I was. Opted out. Not really feeling like traveling right now. I have a ton of work sitting on my desk. We’ve identified a new site off the coast of British Columbia. It’s pulling in all kinds of controversy.” He rolled his eyes. “This one chick, this editor for the Geologic Times , wrote this article totally bashing our oil company and any sort of exploration off Queen Charlotte Sound. Made some smart-ass comments about our drilling possibly causing massive earthquakes and tsunamis in the area. It’s such bull, and she had basically no scientific evidence. So now I’m stuck running interference, trying to convince the investors it isn’t a big issue. Like we’re not monitoring the fault lines seismically and testing radioactive gas emissions day and night as it is anyway.”
    Mitch could drone on and on about geology and not care if anyone was listening. In that respect, he was just like Annie. In fact, this was one of those controversies Annie would have loved to argue with him about. She’d always goaded him about his career choice as an engineering geologist working for an oil-and-gas conglomerate. While she’d claimed her work as a seismologist was important to the world of science, she’d teased him that his was only important to the world of profit.
    “I bet she doesn’t even have a degree in geology,” Mitch went on. “She’s just some nut-job editor who’s read one too many papers and now thinks she’s an expert. I ran a search on her. No credentials listed at all. I bet she’s some environmental hippie chick. Probably a tree hugger.”
    “Who?” Ryan was barely listening. He grabbed his cell phone and dropped it in his briefcase.
    “That editor who wrote the article.” Mitch followed him out into the lobby. “I think her name was Kate Alexander, something like that.”
    They rode the elevator to the parking garage while Mitch mumbled on and on about some article Ryan could care less about and the idiot who’d written it. Ryan pinched his forehead as they climbed into Mitch’s mud-coated Land Rover.
    “She’s here in San Francisco. I think I’ll go over to her office tomorrow and give her a piece of my mind.” Mitch pulled out into traffic.
    “You do that,” Ryan said.
    “Oh, hey, forgot to tell you. You got a call this evening, some lawyer here in town. Um, Simone Conners. Sounded pretty sexy.”
    Ryan recognized the name. “She’s an old friend of Annie’s.” He knew Simone lived in the area, had seen her at several charity functions, but preferred to ignore her. He generally ignored anyone who had known his wife. Making polite chitchat about the good old days wasn’t his idea of fun. “What’d she want?”
    “Don’t know, wouldn’t say. If she was a friend of Annie’s, she was probably calling about the crash the other day, though.”
    “Yeah, probably.” Ryan looked out the window at the city lights.
    “You gonna call her?”
    “What?” He glanced over. “I doubt it. She was more Annie’s friend than mine. I didn’t know her that well.”
    “Sounded pretty hot on the phone.”
    “You can tell that just from hearing her voice, huh?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “She was married the last time I talked to her, at Annie’s funeral.”
    “So maybe she’s not married anymore.”
    “She was Annie’s friend,