“Do you want it to go back to normal?”
“Of course I do. I want to be able to work in my own lab again. To go home at night and not worry about creepy calls.” Home alone. Without Nick. She squeezed her eyes shut. “No. I don’t want it to end then. Okay? But it’s going to. He’s so far out of my league it’s ridiculous, okay? Are you happy now? Go back to work.”
“Hmm. It looks to me like you could use a break from all this.” Steph gestured down the hall, though Genie wasn’t sure whether she meant to point toward the developer room or to Nick’s office. Or both.
Instead of leaving Steph reached across Genie’s desk, picked up the phone and dialed an extension. “Jill? Finish up what you’re doing, get Molly and meet me at the elevators. We have a mission. And bring your passkey because I can’t find mine.”
A mission. That sounded like fun. Genie never had missions; she had jobs. Projects.
Steph held out her hand. “Come on, Dr. Watson.”
“Come where?” Genie allowed herself to be hauled out from behind the desk and propelled toward the door. “Where am I going?”
Steph wrapped an arm around Genie’s shoulders and steered her toward the elevators, where Nick’s assistant Jill and Genie’s tech Molly were already waiting, dressed in their light fall-weight coats. “We’re going shopping.”
“Oh.” Genie stopped just inside the hall, feeling like an outsider when she saw the three grinning friends waiting together by the elevator for a lunchtime excursion. “I’d better let you get going.”
“No, dummy.” Steph grabbed Genie by the arm and pushed her through the elevator doors as soon as they opened. “We’re going shopping. To be exact, the three of us—” she indicated herself, Jill and Molly “—are taking you shopping. If you’re going gunning for game as big as Beef Wellington, you’re going to need some stronger ammunition than that.” She indicated Genie’s sensible brown suit.
The doors closed. Genie was trapped in the descending elevator with a trio of lab techs bent on a makeover.
“But I—I’m not ‘gunning’ for anyone, certainly not Dr. Wellington.” She didn’t bother to defend her suit. She knew it was boring. Unsexy.
Grown-up.
Molly rolled her eyes. “Then you’re blind as well as stupid.” She then glanced over at her boss and cringed. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Genie didn’t think anyone had ever called her stupid before. She kind of liked it. It sounded very normal. However, in this case, she wasn’t stupid.
He was way out of her league. They’d even said it themselves: big game. But she smiled shyly at Molly. “Consider me neither blind nor stupid.”
The elevator doors opened and the four women joined the lunchtime crowd streaming out of the building. They paused outside the building and Steph, the ringleader, turned to Genie.
“We’ll be safe in Chinatown as long as we stick together, okay? So nobody goes anywhere without the others, and if anything happens it’s rape-whistle first, pepper-spray second. Agreed?” When everyone nodded, she linked her arm through Genie’s and started walking. “So? Do you like Nick?”
Molly snickered. “What is this, high school?”
“It’s a valid question,” Steph insisted, and Jill nodded.
Genie dug her toe into a chunk of loose mortar as they waited for a light to turn. “He’s not… He doesn’t…” She blew out an impatient breath. Now she was starting to sound like a dummy. What was happening to her? This is why she stayed away from men. And women. Interpersonal relationships were more complicated than X-ray films. She tried again. “I don’t…”
“She doesn’t think he likes her,” Molly translated.
Jill grinned and said, “He’s crazy about her. You should see him today. He’s walking around in a fog, talking to himself and whistling something that sounds like the theme from Live and Let Die. Is this the Dr. Wellington we all know and drool over?”
The others shook their heads in the negative and Genie felt a spurt of excitement. He might actually be thinking of her if he was whistling a Bond theme.
Or else he was just delirious from exhaustion.
“But why doesn’t he…” Genie broke off with a groan. “Never mind.”
“He doesn’t…? Oooh.” Jill grinned. “Why don’t you tell us all about it while we buy you a new wardrobe that’ll ensure he…does, if you get my meaning.” Keeping a sharp eye on the pedestrian traffic, looking for…who knew what, they threaded their way through the garment district that backed up to Chinatown.
“And I need to pick up something for Friday night,” added Steph.
“Another date with Mr. Petrie Pharmaceuticals? Do tell, Steph! This Roger sounds like the real deal, kiddo. And you deserve it after all that you’ve been through.” Jill swung them toward one of the designer markdown basements. “And then Molly can tell us about Charlie the Wonderlover from Bentley’s yeast lab—I personally could never date a man who worked with yeast—and then I’ll complain about having to share my lab bench with Jared.”
Genie stalled on the threshold of the store and the others looked at her. Molly asked, “Something wrong?”
“I—” Genie scrambled furiously to put the feeling into words. This is what friends do, she thought, they go shopping at lunch and talk about their lives. This is what Marilynn and I used to do.
These days she shopped alone or ordered from a catalog when she was busy. It was an errand, a chore to be handled when necessary. It wasn’t a pleasure. Wasn’t a social event.
Jill’s eyes softened and she touched Genie’s shoulder. “My brother was a concert pianist by the age of seven. He didn’t have many friends when he was a kid. He still has a hard time being around people his own age, but he’s learning.”
Genie nodded gratefully. Somebody understood, if only a little. It helped. She took a deep breath and tried to explain. “It’s like I took all these classes, learned all these things I’ll never need to know, but somewhere along the line they forgot to teach me all this other stuff, like how to have friends and what to do when the man you’re interested in doesn’t seem interested in you.”
She gestured to encompass the whole conversation. “I can tell you what hormones are released at what stage of sexual excitation, what blood goes where and which pieces of the brain are activated.” She shrugged. “But I don’t have a clue what to do when he looks at me and I start shivering and sweating at the same time and my stomach quivers like I’m going to throw up but I’m not.”
Jill nodded, Molly fanned herself and Steph pretended to swoon. Genie’s lips twitched and she demanded, “When do they teach you that stuff? Fourth grade? Fifth? High school? Was there a course in college I missed?”
Molly laughed, but it wasn’t a cruel laugh. She laughed as though she’d thought the same things once or twice. “There should be a course, or an owner’s manual at the very least, but there isn’t. Love is one of those things you make up as you go along. You try stuff and it either works or it doesn’t and you learn from your mistakes.”
“But I don’t want to make any mistakes.” She didn’t want to practice. She wanted Nick.
Steph grinned and slung her arm across Genie’s shoulders in a friendly hug. “Then you ask your girlfriends for advice.”
Genie smiled tentatively. “I don’t think I’ve had girlfriends before.” Not for a long time, anyway.
“Well, Dr. Watson, you’ve got three of ’em now,” proclaimed Molly, and the others nodded.
Genie felt as if the sun, which had been hidden behind a bank of clouds for so long, had suddenly come out to shine yellow and warm on the little group outside the discount designer store.
“You can call me Genie,” she said. “I’m not Dr. Watson. I’m Genie.”
She had friends. A mental note bubbled from the recesses of her brain. Get a life.
It seemed she was on her way.
As she and her new friends entered the store, Genie thought she caught a flash of motion
out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked again there was nothing to see. She shrugged.
Must’ve been a shadow in the sunlight.
WHERE THE HELL WAS SHE? Nick scowled and drummed his fingers on the lab bench. Again. Jared looked up from his experiment, watched Nick fidget impatiently, and looked back down at his notes.
They had repeated this sequence at least twenty times in the past ten minutes.
The lab was quiet. Deserted. Jill had disappeared hours ago, leaving a note that she was shopping and would be back before her experiment was finished running. The new grad student, whose name escaped Nick at the moment, was in class, and Ahmed, the post doc, was off wrangling with officials over his temporary visa. Genie’s lab area seemed equally as barren and the whole floor was giving Nick the creeps.
It was as though he and Jared were the only two people left alive on the planet. What a terrifying thought. And the empty labs echoed like the setting for some B-grade horror movie.
Nick’s tired mind kept wandering, flickering between trying to figure out where everyone was and picturing an army of animated clown dolls marching through the labs, wreaking havoc on all the equipment and lying in wait for the unsuspecting scientists to return.
Kind of like the guy in the developer room, except he was no clown.
“I’ve gotta get some sleep,” Nick muttered, and shoved his fingers through his hair in an attempt to rub the fatigue away. “Where the hell is she?”
Then the elevator dinged, the doors opened and there she was. Nick was across the lab and grabbing her arms before he even knew he had moved. “Where have you been? Are you okay? You scared the hell out of me, disappearing like that!”
Genie froze and looked at him like a rabbit pinned in a pair of headlights. “I was…I was shopping. I’m sorry.” The fear in the back of her gray eyes leaped to the front. “Did something happen? Was somebody else hurt?” She dropped a trio of shopping bags and grabbed Nick’s wrists, which were still on her shoulders. “What happened?” She shook him slightly. “What else happened? Why are you so upset?”
Nothing. Nick inhaled deeply and heard the blood thunder in his ears. Nothing had happened to her. She’d been shopping with the girls. She was fine. Safe. The maniac hadn’t gotten her.
But he could have. The adrenaline coursing through Nick’s body redirected itself and he grabbed her arms again and shook her slightly, thinking of Lucille, who’d shopped voraciously toward the end of their marriage. “What do you mean, you were shopping? What the hell were you thinking, wandering around the city unprotected when there’s a murderer after you?”
The look of fear was replaced by one of pique and she repeated, “I was shopping. And as you can tell, nothing happened to me. We stayed together and we had our rape whistles and pepper spray at the ready. We were as safe—if not safer—than we are here.”
She wasn’t his problem. She couldn’t tell him any clearer than that. She didn’t want or need his help, and that just pissed him off worse. Here he’d been going out of his skull with worry and she was shopping. Didn’t women ever think of anything else? He bellowed, “He could’ve grabbed you just now, did you ever think of that? How could you be so stupid?”
That did it. Anger kindled deep in Genie’s eyes, flashing silver and red against the clear gray of her irises. She yanked away from Nick and stood facing him with her puny hands balled into fists.
“I’ve had just about enough of well-meaning people calling me stupid today. Do you hear me?”
In the background Nick saw Jill, Molly and Steph looking on raptly while Jared grinned. The new grad student had come back from class and was trying very hard to disappear behind a notebook.
“Do you hear me?” she repeated. Apparently the question hadn’t been rhetorical.
“Uh—”
“Shut up. Do you honestly think that I could forget for one minute what’s going on around here? That I could forget a boy was killed yesterday because he turned on my car? That you were hurt? That I was almost raped? Gee, Nick. You must think I’m pretty dumb to forget about all that. Do you think I’m dumb?”
Her anger calmed Nick’s to a mellow burn that quickly changed to something else entirely.
He’d never seen Genius Watson like this, with her cheeks fiery red and sparks shooting out of her eyes. She was breathing deep, fast, and her free-flowing hair hissed and crackled around her head as though it too was angry. She glowed from within with a seething, roiling passion borne of anger and frustration and fear, and Nick had never before in his life seen anything so magnificent.
This is how I want her, he thought, this is how I want her to look beneath me when we make love.
When. Not if. Somewhere along the last few days, his mild fascination had blossomed to a sizzling lust that blotted out almost every other rational thought save one.
That he could not, would not, take advantage of the situation. He would not coax her into his bed when she was in danger, when she was under his protection, vulnerable.
But God help him, he wanted to.
“Well, do you?”
He almost said, Hell, yes! until he remembered that the actual question had been whether he thought she was stupid. He didn’t think that yes was the answer she was looking for there.
“Uh—”
“Never mind. Of course I’m not stupid. Of course I knew there was danger in me going out today. But do you know what? I’m in danger here in the lab. I’m in danger in my car, or I would be if I still had one, which I don’t because the sick son of a bitch blew it up.” She muttered, “I’ve gotta get a new car,” as if recording the thought in her brain, then returned to her harangue. “So you tell me, was I really in any more danger going shopping than I am staying right here?”
She included Jared in her question, but he pretended a great and deep interest in a bottle of acetone at his elbow and she turned back to Nick. “Well, do you?”
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think you’re any safer here, which is what has me all worked up.” He looked straight at her and said, “I care, Genie. Whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, I care what happens to you.”
While Genie failed to respond to his declaration, Nick thought he saw the three female techs give each other high fives. The elevator dinged out in the hall and Sturgeon buzzed to be let through the security doors.
Genie hurried to let him in as if grateful for the distraction. “Detective Sturgeon! Did you catch him yet? Are there any new leads?”
Sturgeon returned her greeting absently while his eyes noted who was in the lab.
“Can we go to one of your offices? I have some upsetting news.” Sturgeon’s cheeks puffed in and out, in and out, in a rapid tempo that bespoke agitation.
Genie balked. “Whatever you have to say you can say in front of my…friends. It seems that they may be in danger just by working here.”
“Suit yourselves.” Sturgeon pulled out a fresh peppermint and contemplated it. “We found the guy who rigged your car yesterday.” He didn’t seem overjoyed by the break.
“Where?” Nick had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the answer. As if sensing the same thing, Genie moved closer until her arm brushed against his.
“Floating in Boston Harbor with a bullet in his brain.”
Chapter Eight
“So you’re saying this Ramirez O’Shea was paid to blow up my car?” Genie’s stomach roiled and the shrimp tempura she’d giggled over not an hour before threatened a return visit. She was vaguely aware of Nick’s solid, comforting presence beside her, but both the happy buzz created by the shopping trip and the heady anger of her temper tantrum had quickly faded in the face of Sturgeon’s news.
“That’s correct, Dr. Watson. One of our informants reported that Ramirez had come into some serious cash recently, and was overheard bragging that he had been paid to have a little fun at a parking lot in Chinatown.”
A little fun. Genie gulped and sternly ordered her lunch to re
main where it was. Is that what this was to these people? Fun?
“I’m going to shut down the lab. Now. Today,” she blurted. There was no way she was endangering any more lives. If this guy wanted her to close up shop, then she would. He’d done his job and scared her into shutting down.
“Now, don’t be hasty,” suggested Nick. “You can’t just stop everything in its tracks. Think of your employees. Think of their work.”
“I am thinking of my employees. I’m thinking of keeping them alive. That’s more important than science, don’t you think?”
If someone had told her four days ago that she would value something more than her job, Genie would have snorted and said they were crazy.
“There’s no guarantee he’d stop harassing you if you closed the lab, Dr. Watson,” Sturgeon said. “Ramirez told our informant that the man who had hired him was, in his reported words, ‘not quite right in the head.’ Shutting down the lab isn’t the answer. Finding this guy is.”
He pulled out a stack of index cards and Genie wondered when her case had graduated from torn notebook paper to index cards. “Now, I’ve spoken to all of the primary investigators involved in the Fenton’s Ataxia project, and done light checks on most of the employees on the lists you gave me. Nothing has jumped out yet, but we’re still looking.”
“How about Dixon?”
Genie turned toward Nick. “I really think you’re wasting your time on George. He’s a worm, sure, but worms don’t have spines. That applies rather aptly in this case. The only reason I took out that restraining order was to get him to stop singing love songs to my answering machine. He’s a nonstarter.”
“My partner would tend to agree.” Sturgeon paused to unwrap a fresh peppermint, and Genie noticed that today’s supply was green-and-white pinwheels. He must’ve run out of the red ones. “Detective Peters interviewed Mr. Dixon at his home, confirmed with his doubles partner that the injury came from a racquetball game, and established that Mr. Dixon was playing a fantasy role-playing game at a friend’s house at the time of last night’s phone call.”
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