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I slap my palm down on the desk. "Are we done blethering yet? I do have a serious problem, ye know."
"Sorry. I got excited because we've all been betting on when Thane Buchanan would finally get hitched. Won't be long now, for sure." Jessica waves at Rebecca again. "It was nice to meet you. Bye."
"Great to meet you too."
Jessica climbs off Grey's lap and walks away.
I squint at Grey. "Who is betting on my personal life?"
"The American Wives Club, of course."
While Grey goes back to fiddling with the data packet, I interrogate Evan and Errol. "I want to know what your wives have been havering about that has to do with my life."
Errol grins and punches my chest, though not with any real force. "You know what they've been talking about. How can you be shocked that the American Wives Club is plotting against you? After all, you took part in the shenanigans they arranged for Domhnall and Fiona."
"Aye, but that was different."
Evan arches one brow. "How, precisely, was it different?"
"Because---Well, it just was."
Errol laughs heartily and even lays a hand over his belly as if his guffaws have strained his abdominal muscles. "That's what every bloke says right before he finds out the American Wives Club is on the case. Just ask Domhnall, Munro, Jack, Magnus, even me. No point in fighting it."
"Those barmy lasses can't harass me now. I have bigger problems."
"Here it comes," Grey declares. "Should be coming up on your screen at any second."
Just as he predicted, a map appears on the screen.
I squint at it. "Not sure a point map is the right tool."
"Sort through it yourself. That's your specialty, isn't it?"
"Aye. But it's been years since I did this sort of thing."
Rebecca gazes up at me with the sweetest look of admiration. "You can do it, Thane, I know you can."
I wave a hand at Evan. "Let me sit in the chair. It will be easier for me to do this when I'm right in front of the data with a mouse in my hand."
Evan stands up and moves to the side of the desk.
I begin to comb through the first map. "This has geocode location data. That's good. Grey gave me a GIS application too, which ought to make things a wee bit easier."
Rebecca stands behind my chair and massages my scalp. At first, I dinnae understand why she's doing that. But then I realize the lass is trying to help me stay focused and relaxed. She's a clever woman.
I switch to a cluster map but get nothing useful from that. Then I decide a heat map might be more meaningful. It gives me deeper data, but I switch to a data space distribution map for even more points of reference.
And then I see it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rebecca
Thane has stopped in the middle of whatever he was doing, and though he still holds the mouse in his hand, he doesn't move it or click on anything. He simply stares at the screen. Whatever it shows looks very strange to me, but then, I'm not a geospatial analyst. The map has a dark-blue background with black lines that I assume represent streets. Several lines in various brighter colors look like paths that lead to...somewhere. Most of them just stop in the middle of the map. I also see gray blocks with numbers in them.
Though I desperately want to ask Thane what he's doing, I don't want to interfere with his analysis of the data. He swiftly flips between various layers of what I assume is a map, but I can't keep track of any of it.
"How's it going?" Errol asks. "That rubbish looks like something a nauseous bear coughed up."
