the company, security clearances and access were parsed out like the place was the Pentagon and everyone was a spy. Hell, even the labs themselves were not titled by division names at their entrances, but rather a code of numbers that she still, four years later, didn’t completely understand.
Her own division was in the eastern corner of the complex, and she swiped her ID at the card reader by the steel door. As her clearance was accepted, there was the sound of an air lock releasing and then she was inside the front office portion of the layout.
This section looked like your bog-standard office space, cubicles with gray partitions lined up in a row, a conference table and a little break area off to one side. Her desk was over on the right and she went across and put her backpack on it. She had spent so many hours here in her chair, at her corporate computer, on her corporate phone, talking about her research, her discoveries, her clinical trials on how cancer cells could be killed by the immune system under the right conditions. Her contacts included colleagues, researchers and oncologists around the world.
She had done good work, she realized. In spite of everything that had happened with Gerry.
But she had already left, hadn’t she. As she looked around at her fellow BioMed employees’ cubicles, she saw pictures of husbands, wives, children, dogs. Knickknacks. Mementos. Dilbert science jokes. Internet memes.
There were a lot of Einstein riffs.
Her cubicle? Nothing. After Gerry’s death, she hadn’t been able to concentrate with pictures of him around, so she’d stashed them in the bottom drawer of her desk.
Taking a deep breath, she turned away and walked across the gray carpet to another set of frosted doors. Using her pass card again, she gained access to the laboratory itself, the temperature-controlled, largely sterile, stainless steel and white-tiled area full of microscopes, refrigerators, testing equipment, centrifuges.
One thing that had always been true of BioMed was that they spared little expense when it came to equipment.
For a moment, she forgot why she’d entered. Then she looked at one of the storage units of pathology slides. It was full of tumor and blood samples from patients who were the true heroes of the effort, the real ones that mattered, the pioneers braver than Sarah would ever be.
Although considering what she was up to tonight?
Well, she was certainly woman-ing up in a way she never could have foreseen.
As darkness finally fell, Murhder woke up in an unfamiliar room, although it took no time at all to recognize the modest contours of Xhex’s hunting cabin. He had slept upright in a chair in the little central room that he imagined would, were he to pull back the blackout drapes that covered every window, provide a view of the mostly frozen Hudson River, the wintered-up shores of the waterway, and Caldwell’s twinkling downtown buildings and highways on the far side.
He groaned as he sat forward, his spine having worked out some kind of intimate relationship with the back of the chair that it apparently did not want to end. Everything else on his body cracked and popped as he got to his feet, but he forgot about the aches and pains as he looked to the closed door of the bedroom.
Ingridge was in there. On the bed. Wrapped in clean white batting.
It was twenty or so degrees Fahrenheit in that part of the cabin, only the main room, bathroom, and kitchen winterized and currently heated. She would hold.
At first, he had been frustrated by how long it had taken to get transport for the remains to be taken out of the farmhouse. But then Rhage had let him borrow a cell phone, and it was then that he had done his research on the lab that Ingridge had named in her partially written letter—said Internet search performed under the guise that he was reading the New York Times online as the Brother snoozed in a corner.
Murhder had been careful to delete his website history when he returned the phone. And then the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles had cut through the meadow’s silence as surely as they ruined the mostly undisturbed snow cover.
The body had been put on a sled, and the Brothers had done Murhder the honor of allowing him to drive her the twenty miles through the woods to where a blacked-out van awaited at the side of a rural road. By the time they had gotten things settled here