Superman: Dawnbreaker (DC Icons #4)(23)

“This place has nothing to do with my dad’s business,” Corey said, sounding a little irritated. “It’s my friend’s research firm.” He turned back to Lana. “Anyway, we can talk philanthropy if you want.”

“You sure?” Lana said. “I know you’re probably impossibly busy.”

Clark was impressed by how seamlessly Lana had transformed herself into a ditz. It always struck him how often her interviews involved some form of acting.

Corey looked toward the hall again, then back at Lana. “Fine, we can do it here. But only if you give me your number this time. In case, you know, I think of something later that I forgot to tell you.”

“Of course,” Lana said in an overly excited voice.

“Cool. Hang on.” Corey hurried into the hall, past the door he’d pulled closed.

As soon as he was out of sight, Clark turned to Lana and said, “I think Ditzy Lana’s working. Make sure you ask him the Dawn Project question, too. I think there’s something there.”

She shushed him.

Just then Corey returned with two metal folding chairs. “Sorry,” he told Clark. “Only have these two.”

“No, you guys go ahead,” Clark said. “I’ll just…do my own thing.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Corey snapped. “Like I said, this isn’t my office. And my friend’s super particular about his things.”

Clark linked his hands behind his back while looking around the room. “You have my word.”

Corey placed the chairs side by side on the opposite side of the room from Clark, and he and Lana sat down, awkwardly close, and began talking.

Now it was time for Clark to get some answers of his own.

He’d noticed how concerned Corey had been with the door he’d closed in the hall. What was he hiding? Clark inched toward it nonchalantly, occasionally glancing back at Lana and Corey to make sure they were still caught up in their conversation. When Clark made it to the wall nearest the closed door, he stared at it intently, trying to get his X-ray vision to punch through.

Every other time he’d tried to do this on command, he had failed, but to his great relief, this time it actually worked. He was now looking through the thin wall, into the small office on the other side, where a man he recognized immediately was sitting at a tiny wooden desk, working on a laptop.

Dr. Wesley.

So he was the “friend” who was “particular” about his things.

Clark stared at the back of the scientist’s head, recalling the way Bryan had cringed when describing the man. He’d said Wesley was creepy and connected to bad people. Clark looked around the small office: the ugly brown rug, the motionless ceiling fan, the hodgepodge of coffee mugs lined up along the bookshelf to the right of the desk. The wall on the opposite side of the office was covered with large photographs that had been tacked up. The photos were mostly of farm fields. And farmhouses. A few barns and grain elevators. Clark recognized Smallville landmarks in a few of the photographs. These were local farms. The angle of the shots suggested that the photos had been taken from a helicopter.

One of the photos that had been circled with a marker showed a deep crater on Tommy Jones’s family farm—the farm they’d just sold. Which struck Clark as odd. Some of the other photos were taken with a strange filter, too, with the objects in the photos a variety of bright colors, almost like infrared.

Clark blinked, momentarily losing his view. He stared at the wall again, concentrating even harder this time, and eventually his vision penetrated the wall. This time he found himself staring at a particular cluster of photos that made his skin crawl.

It was his farm.

There was a photo of their farmhouse. And one of the pond. And several of the crater near the old barn. He flashed back to last night, recalling the trespasser with the metal detector. But the photo that triggered a sick feeling in Clark was the picture of the old barn itself. The photo was blown up and had been taken with the strange filter. The barn was lit up in different shades of green and yellow. And there was a handwritten black arrow pointing from the crater to the barn.

Dr. Wesley got up from his desk, walked over to the wall, and stared at the photo of the crater at the Joneses’ farm. He pulled out the tack and took it down and examined it closely before putting it back up. When Dr. Wesley turned toward the door, Clark spun around and started for the lobby, only to have someone grab his arm.

It was Lana. “Clark, you okay?”

“Can we leave? Like, now?”

Lana turned to Corey just as the door in the hall opened. “My friend’s sick,” she said. “Gotta go. Sorry!” She pulled Clark toward the front door and opened it just as Dr. Wesley emerged from his office.

“Wait!” Corey shouted. “I didn’t get your number!”

“See you Friday night!” Lana called to him through the closing door.

The two of them walked casually past the window of the building, then took off in a brisk jog. They didn’t stop until they had made it all the way back up the library steps. The pair ducked inside the front doors, and Lana leaned over, out of breath, saying, “What was that all about?”

Clark pretended to breathe hard, too.

He wanted to tell her exactly what he’d seen in Dr. Wesley’s office, but he wasn’t sure how to go about it. He couldn’t tell the truth, that he’d seen some suspicious-looking photos through the wall using his X-ray vision. He’d have to tell it slant. “When that guy opened the door of his office, I saw pictures of farms hanging on the wall. Smallville farms, Lana.”