We certainly hadn’t heard anything from the company itself, and were currently working on the presumption they still wanted us to find Professor Wilson’s missing research notes. But that didn’t mean Jackson hadn’t heard other rumors about the company. He had more contacts than I had years behind me.

“I seriously doubt that,” he said with a half laugh, replying to my thought rather than my actual question. “And I haven’t got a contact who’d actually know anything about Rosen Pharmaceuticals.”

“Then how did you find out all this stuff about Janice? Via your police contact?”

“No, taxation. There’s no better source for basic information.”

That was true given just how much information the Taxation Department wanted from people these days. “Janice’s place is on the right—the one with the high picket fence.”

He drove past and pulled into a driveway two houses down. I twisted around. Thirty-eight was a small, white-painted weatherboard home with a weatherworn tile roof and a small green carport on one side. There were two cars in the driveway—one a Hyundai, the other a small Honda.

I looked at Jackson’s notes again. “Janice drives the Honda.”

“Wonder who the other one belongs to. Because if I remember right, she isn’t married and had no lovers.”

“It might be a friend rather than a lover.”

He glanced at me, amusement evident. “At lunchtime? On a workday?”

“People have been known to go home for lunch.”

“They’ve also been known to go home for a bit of afternoon delight.”

“Did she seem like the type for a little lunchtime rendezvous to you?”

“Well, no, but never judge a book by its cover and all that.”

I snorted and glanced back at the house—just in time to see the front door open and Amanda Wilson—the professor’s less-than-loving wife, and a woman who’d been bleeding him of information for the sindicati from the very first time they’d slept together—step out. “Duck,” I said, and slid down behind the headrest.

“I’d really prefer just to grab the bitch.”

“Do that, and we might just lose our one chance of uncovering who her controller is.”

Jackson grunted and lifted up enough to look at the side mirror. “She’s in the car.”

“You follow her. I’ll go inside and see if Janice survived the encounter with our black widow.”

He frowned at me. “Do you really think it’s a wise move to split up?”

“Given Amanda’s history, yeah, I do.”

“But she has a history of seducing men for information, not women—”

“Which doesn’t mean anything if her mind has been seized.” I watched the Hyundai reverse out of the driveway. “Wish we had a damn tracker.”

“We do. It’s in the little bag of tricks I threw onto the backseat.”