Dark Alchemy (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 5)

by Sarah Lovett

  By 8:30 P.M., when she signed in at the front desk of the gym, a light rain had begun to fall. Inside the facility, the air, as always, held the strong scent of chlorine and the faint smell of mildew. A mist was visible above the pool's turquoise water, and above the pool, on the high ceiling, lights shimmered in reflection. In the Jacuzzi, two plump middle-aged women were talking to an elderly man. The child care center looked quiet. As she entered the women's locker room, she glanced vaguely at the bulletin board, where posters advertised CPR and spinning classes, and business cards had been left for various services—massage, house-sitting, memberships to share.

  The locker room was deserted. She chose her usual locker near the door, number thirty-one, tossing her purse and coat inside. She changed quickly into workout clothes, noticing from the sound of voices in the bathroom that at least one or two women were still using the facilities.

  In the workout area, a man and two teenage girls were covering countless miles on aerobic machines, while a handful of people were lifting free weights on the far side of the room. Sylvia stepped up to the first in a series of circuit trainers. She wrapped her fingers around the thick metal bar and began to stretch.

  While her muscles loosened, her mind worked. She reviewed conversations with Rosie, with Serena, and a phone call from her mother, Bonnie, a week earlier. She and her mother weren't close, yet they'd managed to renew ties after years of semiestrangement. Bonnie would attend the wedding. On the phone, neither of them had said a word about Sylvia's father. He'd disappeared so many years ago, and neither of them knew if Daniel Strange was dead or alive. He remained a liminal figure, neither existing nor not existing.

  Her mind moved from thoughts of her own father to thoughts of Christine Palmer—and her father, Fielding Palmer.

  She found herself drawn back to the puzzle of character—that combination of traits at the core of each human being, long-lasting, indelible, consistent through life, but always acted upon by environment. She imagined character as a massive rock deep in the ocean, indestructible, unmovable, yet worn away and shaped by wave after wave.

  One father, a man from poor but tenacious roots, a man who ran away from life . . . the other father, brilliant, gifted, a man who qualified as royalty in the world of science. Two men who couldn't be more different—except that each left a trail, each marked his daughter's life in a profound, indelible way.

  She ran on the treadmill, picking up pace, reaching full stride. Forty-five minutes of blessed numbness. When she lay back on the floor and closed her eyes, lengthening her muscles, her mind floated.

  The question presented itself: could she have helped her father take his own life if he was suffering? If so, at what cost?

  She didn't know the answer.

  The music, which had been playing softly in the background, abruptly went silent. A hint that the staff was getting ready to close. Sylvia opened her eyes, then sat up slowly to check the clock. She had another ten minutes before they would get really serious about locking doors.

  When she reentered the locker room, she heard the sound of a shower. Good. A deserted locker room always felt eerie, and the gray-cast sky, the rain, had created an encompassing darkness that seemed to penetrate the building. She grabbed her towel from her locker, and then she slid the combination lock through the hasp with a click.

  The water ran hot, tingling her skin, awakening cells. She rinsed her hair before shifting the hot water to cold, surrendering to the resulting sensory crash.

  When she stepped out of the shower, she wrapped herself quickly in her towel.

  She had the sense that someone had just left the room. She stood still, listening, but there was nothing to be heard—only the routine quiet of a deserted locker room. She hurried out to locker number thirty-one.

  Everything was in place. She shook her head, feeling paranoid. Still, when she opened the locker and saw that her possessions were all there, including her wallet, she breathed a sigh of relief. Okay, she was being jumpy, but considering the material she'd been living with . . .

  There was no attendant at the counter when she exited the health club. Outside it was dark, misty, and the lights above the parking lot shone down on two dozen vehicles, most of which belonged to diners at the adjacent restaurant. She started toward her truck.

  Her mind was still caught up in her work, reviewing first impressions, analyzing data, searching for stray facts, and most important, for those bits of information that refused to meld smoothly with the rest of the picture. She'd been preoccupied for several days now—this occupation of another dimension was always part of the profiling process—and she felt only half present in the world. Even during her workout, much of her progress was dictated by muscle memory instead of in-the-moment awareness.

  But now, suddenly, after dark, in an almost deserted parking lot, she felt dashed into the present as if time were a wave and she had just hit shore. She didn't get the chance to wonder what had sucked her back from the world of rumination. As she approached her truck, she heard footsteps.

  "Dr. Strange?"

  She turned to find herself only a few feet from Christine Palmer. The reaction was visceral—a shiver passed through her and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. "Dr. Palmer."

  "I startled you."

  "I'm surprised you recognized me."

  "I have an eye for faces."

  Sylvia shrugged. She'd begun to take in details: Palmer was wearing street clothes; she had a cream-colored leather bag slung over her left shoulder; her hair appeared slightly damp, and it was pulled back from her face in a style that would look severe on a less attractive woman. So it had been Palmer in the locker room while she was showering.

  Sylvia said, "I didn't know you belong—"

  "I'm not a member, but I use the racquetball courts now and then."

  "Did you play today?"

  "Actually, we did." Palmer inclined her head toward a light blue convertible Jaguar, a drop-dead sports model (very new from the looks of it) parked directly beneath a twelve-foot light standard. It took Sylvia a moment to see that a red-haired man was standing beside the passenger door of the Jag. Dr. Harris Cray seemed to be turning up everywhere. He was dressed in sweats and athletic shoes. "But it was more of a warm-up than a match," Palmer added.

  "Who won?"

  "I make a habit of winning." Palmer smiled, backing away. "I have an advantage over Harris—he's still adjusting to the altitude after England. He's come to replace Dr. Thomas on the project. But you know that." She turned, tossing the words over her shoulder as she began to walk slowly toward her car. "I believe you two met at BioPort."

  Sylvia failed to reply—what could she say? She watched in surprise as Dr. Cray raised his arm in a greeting.

  She unlocked her truck and climbed inside. She waited, watching as Palmer pulled out of the lot. The Jaguar—definitely new—caught the light and glimmered expensively as it rolled silently past. Still Sylvia didn't move. About thirty seconds after Palmer had disappeared, a dark gray Lincoln pulled out from another row.

  "Hello, FBI," Sylvia said softly. She locked her doors—then checked them again before driving home.

  The news traveled like wildfire.

  It covered four thousand miles—from New Mexico to Washington, D.C., and back. By 11:30 P.M. Thursday evening, the director of LANL had heard a disturbing story of harassment in his own laboratory against a world-renowned toxicologist—harassment that just might involve the FBI.

  The director decided to look into the situation immediately.

  The decision had a ripple effect, a warning coming down from on high: Lay off Dr. Christine Palmer.

  CHAPTER

  18

  alchemist: let's get one thing straight

  redrider: yes

  alchemist: from now on I make the moves

  redrider: yes

  alchemist: you have endangered yourself/ me

  redrider: have faith

  alchemist: they're closing
in

  redrider: of course

  alchemist: have you planned ahead?

  redrider: don't insult me

  alchemist: escape plan?

  redrider: I know you want out too

  alchemist: yes

  redrider: one question / no! / I demand answer / will you trust me?

  . . . . . .

  redrider: trust me

  alchemist: yes

  CHAPTER

  19

  On Friday morning at 5:18 A.M., Special Agent Darrel Hoopai gulped breath and began the three-mile ascent of the mountain. He was following the Target. Jogging. Scrambling to keep pace with the skinny, pasty white, knock-kneed runner just ahead. Hoopai's calves were burning. He could already feel a blister forming on his left heel.

  A cyclist passed him up; so did a young kid with million-dollar running shoes that flashed on and off like miniature traffic signals. Without breaking a sweat, the kid breezed by the skinny, pasty-white, knock-kneed runner, then he passed a couple in matching Lycra, and now he was gaining on the Target.

  Breathless—his throat raw—Hoopai swore silently; another minute and he'd be eating the Target's dust. Sleep deprivation, that was the problem, he thought as he forced one foot in front of the other; his leg muscles felt as if they were made of lead. The Target went to bed too late and got up too damn early. Who functioned on four hours' sleep, anyway? It was weird, people who could live on a schedule that would leave ninety-nine percent of the population sleep-deprived. Something biochemical had to be going on with people like that.

  At least he was doing better than Weaver, who couldn't skip his way out of a paper bag. Hoopai'd always wondered how a guy as klutzy as Weaver ever made it through the academy in the first place. Probably because he was a monster when it came to numbers. Still, all trainees had to pass the basics.

  Thinking about Weaver seemed to conjure up the agent; Hoopai heard the faint radio-transmitted voice in his earphone, and he huffed back his status update.

  Hoopai was a slow-end runner bordering on jogger—he managed to do a couple of miles on the track or at the gym almost every day, but his triathlete days were a blur in a distant past.

  The Target was burning up ground.

  Hoopai's heartbeat quickened—the poor muscle was about to explode—when the Target disappeared over a rise.

  He'd give her points—she was in shape. She could take the mountain with the best of the early-morning Olympiad wannabes. LANL had its share of these guys. Dawn or dusk, lunch hour and coffee breaks, weather permitting, they were out doing the fitness thing: cycling, hiking, running, skiing.

  He was familiar with her morning routine; she liked to start the day with a kickboxing or yoga class. She'd run once before—on the second day of surveillance, two days after Doug Thomas, the molecular toxicologist on the Target's project, slammed his car into a truck. Hoopai remembered they'd scrambled to keep up the surveillance without breaking cover.

  His shoe caught on a wedge of asphalt. He stumbled, caught himself, and kept going. Another cyclist passed him, and another—a peloton, a school of wheels, went swimming by in their skimpy outfits.

  The day Doug Thomas died, Palmer had passed through LANL security at 4:15 A.M., and she'd been at work in her lab by the crack of dawn. (The thing about poison—you can be thirty miles or three hundred, miles away when your victim dies.)

  Hoopai crested the rise and took a deep breath, ready and relieved to head downhill for the next thirty yards—when he realized he'd lost her. The Target. She was nowhere in sight. He slowed, cursed under his breath, picked up pace again, and scanned the area, which was wooded, rocky, and filled with hiding places.

  Hoopai had a grandfather who'd been a Navajo code talker. His grandmother, still alive, was a healer. They'd taught him how to track stray goats and sheep that strayed from the herd. He swore at himself for not paying attention—this was a stupid mistake.

  Then he saw her. Sitting on a hillock beneath a huge ponderosa pine. A cell phone was pressed to her ear. S.A. Hoopai's eyes were good—twenty-twenty—and he'd swear she was smiling.

  Through gritted teeth, he whispered harshly into his transmitter. "The Target has spotted the Hawk. Time for a drive-by."

  Hoopai kept jogging—he had no choice—up the next hill, finally slowing when he knew for sure the Target wasn't following him, finally turning around.

  An eighth of a mile back down the hill, he ran straight into the lab's physical security guys with their M-16s and their pretty white jeep.

  "Palmer caught the agent jogging on her heels—she called security." Sweetheart watched from the passenger seat as Sylvia took the 502 hill in fourth gear. "On top of that," he said, "word came from LANL's director, who's wondering if there are security issues surrounding senior lab staff that need to be addressed. Now LANL's given the feds an ultimatum: come up with something definitive, or back off Christine Palmer. We're skating on thin ice."

  "She's playing with us." Sylvia was riding the gas, pushing the engine, ignoring signals to downshift.

  "We don't know if the FBI agent blew his cover or not," Sweetheart continued over the grind of the engine. "Palmer called lab security and reported a man behaving suspiciously."

  "What's to know? He blew his cover, and she's using her political connections to fight back."

  "Either way, the feds are down to the wire." For the past thirty minutes, Sweetheart had made a point of ignoring Sylvia's volatile mood, her razor-sharp edge, but the task was becoming more difficult.

  "She knows she's being watched." Sylvia jerked the truck into the left lane to pass a slow Subaru. "It's stupid and dangerous to assume she doesn't."

  "I'm not assuming anything. Do you want to back off and shift the damn truck, Sylvia?"

  She took a breath, downshifted, and murmured, "Sorry about that."

  He grunted, accepting her apology. Then he said, "After Wen Ho Lee, Hannsen, McVeigh, everyone's touchy. This isn't the FBI's golden moment. In the case of Doug Thomas, there's no official homicide investigation, and no one's ready to accuse Palmer of murder. The lab's caught between a rock and a hard place. LANL would have their throats cut in civil court if they did anything that stained the reputation of a respected scientist who turned out to be innocent; and they'd lose their heads if someone ended up getting hurt by a scientist working on LANL property, one of their own. Basically, they've been looking the other way when it comes to federal surveillance. But now they're balking."

  "They don't want to touch her because she's too valuable," Sylvia said harshly. "No one can duplicate her research." Her gaze crossed the white volcanic cliffs with their sculpted swirls, their caves, their breathtaking angles favored as nesting sites by birds of prey.

  "To give them their due," Sweetheart said, "there's not enough evidence to support probable cause with Palmer."

  "I never said there was." She honked her horn at a flatbed truck that had been weaving across lanes for the past mile. The truck bed was dangerously overstacked with cedar and piñon logs. "I'm not blind, I can see LANL's point." She honked again.

  Sweetheart had called her early that morning, rousing her from sleep. She was still exhausted and off balance—in less than forty-eight hours they'd traveled from desert to London cityscape and back to desert. But it was more than geography that had her spinning internally.

  She was still trying to distinguish the various stratum—geo, psycho, social—of this investigation. The assignment of profiling a serial poisoner—with all its historical intricacies of inquiry—was difficult enough; but they'd pulled back the first layer to find whispers of Palmer's involvement in a secret bioweapons project. Now all information regarding that project had to be ignored; the scope of their job was profiling a serial killer. Period. End of discussion.

  Talk about compartmentalization.

  She honked again, kept her palm pressed down.

  The driver of the pickup flipped her the bird.

  She flipped him back—then glanced a
t Sweetheart. "Does Christine Palmer know that Paul Lang might be in the area?"

  "Not unless he told her himself—the feds got held up on the phone tap."

  Sylvia groaned. "If he's planning to take personal revenge for Samantha Grayson's death, he won't call Palmer first."

  "Lang's a wild card, but we've got Palmer under surveillance—at least for a few more hours."

  With a swift look at her passenger, she asked, "What are you telling me?"

  "We've run out of time," Sweetheart said tersely. "It's all or nothing. We need to give the agents, the investigators, whatever we've dug up on Palmer. Hard data, wild theories, anything they might be able to use."

  "To use?" Her mind struggled to register.

  "At most they've got thirty-six hours to flush her out."

  "How?"

  "Bait."

  The meeting took place at the Hilltop Motel, smack-dab in the heart of downtown Los Alamos. The two-story building was distinguished by its faux-château style.

  Sylvia followed Sweetheart from the parking lot, up a flight of stairs, along a paneled hall. Sweetheart tapped on the door of 217, which opened almost immediately. Sylvia was introduced to special agents Simmons, Weaver, and Hoopai (the one Palmer had tagged, the one with the Navajo cheekbones) and their supervisor, Special Agent in Charge Jeff Hess (who bore a faint resemblance to Cary Grant). She'd already met Drew Dexter, LANL's deputy division director of internal safety and security. Judging from the expression on his face, he looked as if he disapproved of the gathering. Not a total surprise, considering he was representing the lab.

  When everyone was settled, Agent Jeff Hess addressed the group. "Let's get going, people. We're glad you all could make it. We're here this morning to consolidate information and come up with a strategy. We've reached a crossroads in the investigation—it's time to produce results or back off.