“What do you think?” Amelia asks as we walk away. “Who do you think burned the fields?”
“I don’t know,” I admit as we climb into her truck and her phone rings—two lines of “Under Pressure,” David Bowie and Freddie Mercury.
“Hey, Babe,” she says a second later. With the abducted, alien-girl lilt to her voice, I’m guessing she and Rudy made up.
I stare out the window as they talk. As she tells her boyfriend my idea about how the drugged chile killed Eslee and hurt Mari, I wonder what clue I’m missing. Who burned the fields and why?
Amelia hangs up and starts the truck, but before she puts it in drive she says, “There’s something I don’t get. If Bulldog laced the chiles, how did liquid gold get into the chile Mari took before he got hold of it?”
Although I’ve been wondering the same thing without coming up with an answer, her question sparks something new in my brain, something I learned in chemistry class: solvent partitioning. How certain chemicals dissolve in certain substances. In his trailer, it looked like Bulldog was making a paste with the chile on the counter and then adding oil to the paste. He sucked off the oil layer with that turkey baster, and what did he have? An oily, gold-colored substance that could be slipped into a drink: in other words, a liquid gold.
“What if liquid gold isn’t added after the chile is harvested?” I say, turning to face her. “What if it’s added before it’s harvested? Before it’s even grown. When it’s a seed.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if it’s being genetically engineered? What if liquid gold is being grown inside the chile as a way to sell a drug that nobody can detect?”
“Are you serious?” she asks, eyes widening.
“Totally.”
“But who—?”
“I don’t know,” I interrupt, unwilling to speculate further until I have more time to think and investigate. “I have to get to work. I’ll do some research and call you as soon as I have an answer.”
Thirty-one
When Amelia drops me off at SCPG, everyone already knows about the fire. Dr. Richmond and Esha are on their way to speak with the police. I want to get to Esha before she leaves and tell her what I know, but as I approach her, my momentum tanks. I can’t say why exactly, but I decide it’s best for now to keep my thoughts to myself.
“You okay?” she asks when I come to a halt several inches from where she’s standing.
“No, I mean, yeah. I’m fine. This is just so awful.”
“I know, but we’re not letting Holly Redding’s tactics stop us. The board meeting is this Friday and we’re going ahead with it.” Despite how fatigued she looks, she speaks with conviction, and I can’t say I’m not the tiniest bit impressed. “The fire is a setback, but it won’t stop us.”
I consider asking about what Holly told me—how Esha had invited her in to talk to Dr. Richmond, saying Dr. Richmond had called the meeting, but my phone rings. I check the screen and see it’s Virg. I tell Esha I’ll see her later and step into the hall to take the call.
“Hey,” I say, once I’m alone. “What’s up? Did you get my message? Did you find Bulldog—I mean Cruz?”
“Yes. I got your message. I just called to say that we’re following up on your information,” he says—cop talk for I ain’t telling you nothing.
***
What if it’s added before it’s harvested, when it’s still a seed? I think as I stare at my computer screen late that afternoon back in the dorm, the question a singularity in my consciousness. If liquid gold was added to the chile as a seed, it was genetically engineered that way and there are only two people who could’ve done such a thing: Esha and Dr. Richmond.
Dr. Richmond’s the one who sequenced Brugmansia. She’s the one, according to Holly, with the unethical past and the conflict of interest, the one trying to keep the company from tanking. So what if she’s the one engineering a liquid gold chile for a profit? I Google her name and consult the oracle of information to see what more I can learn.
Fifteen minutes later, I know the following: Dr. Richmond did own over fifty thousand dollars in stock in the agrochemical company that sponsored her research on the herbicide they manufactured as Holly had said. No, she didn’t disclose that information to anyone, and yes, the results of her research were glowing. However, what I also find out, and what Holly failed to tell me, is that Dr. Richmond paid to have her research independently verified, and not just that, she divested all her assets in the company and publically apologized for not disclosing the information. So, if anything, her reputation wasn’t tarnished. It was varnished. She came out glowing. The independent research confirmed her findings. She gave back the money. She wasn’t just clean; she was antiseptic.
And Esha? The oracle tells me little about her that I don’t already know.
I turn away from the computer, the late afternoon sun slanting through my window, and let my thoughts wander to everything I’ve learned about Esha over the past few weeks—Peru, dating Bulldog, the fact that she feels like Brugmansia and the financial fiasco was her fault, how Jonah said she wants to make it up to Dr. Richmond.
As music drifts in from the hall, some morose-sounding indie thing, I hypothesize the following: Jonah said Esha and Bulldog were a thing, so maybe he was the boyfriend who gave her the necklace. Jonah also said Bulldog had a taste for liquid gold. He also said there’d been a bad scene with Bulldog and Esha. What if the bad scene was about drugs?
My heart bashes my ribs as this idea moves into my mind. What if the reason Esha wanted Dr. Richmond to sequence Brugmansia was because she and Bulldog were using liquid gold and Esha wanted to have the sequence so she could engineer the drug herself?
I can’t stay seated as the pieces fall together. I pace and think. Esha studied in Peru and learned about Brugmansia. She came back and got Dr. Richmond to sequence the plant. She accessed the sequence, modified her own chile, and voila! She and her guy had their own personal drug. I kick clothes and shoes out of my way as I stride from one wall to the other, hard thwaks against the floor. Did she want liquid gold for personal use and then she started selling it at a profit—income she could use to pay back SCPG and show her worth?
The story is a great theory, but without evidence, it’s just that—a theory. Dizzy with disgust, I stop pacing and close my eyes. If I were evidence, what would I be? Back in Philly the evidence of the clinical trial was as simple as medical records. What’s simple here—a note or some kind of data? Then it comes to me. Rudy’s chile. I still have it.
I open my eyes and race to my dresser. I open the top drawer and take out the plastic container with the chile. I could sequence this; see what’s hidden in the genetic code. But no. That would take too long to learn and be too obvious. I need to look at something that’s already been sequenced. I put the container with the chile on my desk. As I put it down, I know just what to do.
Data. Esha had her chile sequenced at SCPG. I enter the bar code for that sample.
I’m so busy developing a plan to get into the lab so I can look at Esha’s chile data, I almost miss the knock-turned-pounding on my door until I hear Clem in the hall shouting: “Baked macaroni’s getting cold!”
Thirty-two
I open the door, set eyes on Clem, and my brain turns off.
In a gush of hormones and libido, my arms are around him. He’s totally surprised, but then his arms are around me, too. Not just arms. Lips. Oh, lips. That very soft, very warm, very wet point of contact. Somehow we end up in my room, door closed, pressed against each other, fumbling and embracing, and then he stops.
“Not exactly platonic,” he says.
I’ve never been more out of words. It’s like someone hit my verbal off switch. I perch on the edge of my bed and take another deep breath, my lips still tingling from the kiss.
“What do you think?” Clem asks in a soft voice, almos
t a whisper in my ear.
My body/brain goes geographic, with my brain in the North Pole, saying no, and my body in the South Pole, saying yes. The South Pole wins. “Try again?”
An answer to which he heeds. He sits down next to me, and this time the kiss is slow, not desperate. His heart ticks against mine. His hand is on my back, under my shirt, but it’s not just my back that feels the touch. Who knew toes and earlobes and thighs and hair follicles had so many nerve endings? The kiss is its own language; our lips utter the last syllable, and it’s done. We’re quiet for a few minutes, a thing without name radiating between us.
“So, what’s next?” I finally ask, as much to myself as to him, because for once I have no answer.
“I don’t know,” he says with a sheepish shrug. “Dinner?”
***
We sit in the back of the cafeteria, our usual spot by the bathrooms. Not because we enjoy the odor of toilets, but because it’s the most private place in the very unprivate setting. It’s impossible to eat baked macaroni after that kiss and my food languishes on my tray, getting cold.
“So,” Clem says, the “so” filling in for about seven thousand things we could/should/need to say. “We don’t need to decide anything. I’m not pressuring you. I mean we don’t have to…”
My phone rings, giving him an excuse to stop fumbling for words. I don’t pick up, though. I let it go to voice mail. His fumbling interrupted, it’s my turn to try. “You’re right. We…I mean…I— Can we just…?”
It rings again. I’m about to turn off the ringer, but Clem says, “Answer it. Someone really wants to talk to you. We can talk…or whatever…later.”
I check and see that it’s Amelia calling again and tell Clem who it is in case he thinks it’s Jesse. “It’s kind of private,” I add, thinking she wants information about the chiles and not wanting to talk about it in front of Clem. “Do you mind?”
He says he doesn’t mind. We lock eyes for a second as if unsure whether our parting should now include a kiss. I guess we haven’t reached the kissing in public stage because as I get up to go, he gives my hand a quick squeeze and tells me he’ll see me later.
“So if the liquid gold was put into the chiles when it was a seed, how would you find out?” Amelia says when I answer, as if we’d been in the middle of a conservation.
“Hold on.” I take my tray to the kitchen and leave the cafeteria for some privacy. “I was thinking about that before, too,” I say once I’m alone in the hall. “I need to go to SCPG and look at some data.”
“When?” she asks. “Tonight?”
“Tonight? No way,” is my immediate response, but then I pause and think, why not? Nobody will be there, and it’ll be impossible to go through Esha’s data when everyone’s around. “Actually, yeah,” I correct. “Tonight.”
“Perfect, I’ll pick you up.”
“Wait,” I blurt before she can hang up. “What I’m going to do might not technically be legal.”
“Illegal activities?” she says. “I’ll be there in ten.”
***
When we go inside SCPG it’s dark in that horror-movie kind of way just before the deranged killer enters the house. Even though I have a key and I’m not breaking and entering, snooping through someone’s data, as I’m about to do, isn’t just unethical, it’s possibly illegal, so I don’t turn on a light. We feel our way down the stairs and into the lab in the dark.
“We don’t have a lot of time and this could take a while. We need to connect to the server, but that’s simple,” I say, as we reach my desk and my Nerd Girl alter ego springs to life. When my home screen comes up, I access the program Esha showed me how to connect to the central server where SCPG stores results from its big sequence analysis jobs.
“What exactly is it we’re doing?” Amelia asks, sidling up to me, two butts sharing my chair.
“Esha had her extra-hot chile sequenced. If she’s growing a liquid gold GMO, she’d need to sequence it to make sure the changes in the DNA are there and to find out how many copies of the new genes there are and which chromosomes they’re on. That sort of thing.” I can tell from her silence that “that sort of thing” means nothing to Amelia, but I keep going. “What I have to do is look at her sequence and compare it to a normal chile genome and see what I find. If what I said before about there being liquid gold produced in her chiles is true, the answer’s hidden in plain sight. It’s that simple.”
“How exactly is that simple?”
“Dr. Richmond’s already sequenced a normal chile genome, so we have a reference to compare our data to. It’s what I’ve been learning. It’s called bioinformatics. All we have to do is take little short DNA reads that came off the sequencer and find out where they line up to the reference. Then we can see how Esha’s chile differs from a normal chile.”
I glance at Amelia to see if she’s following. Her expression tells me she’s not.
“Okay, how about this?” I say. “Imagine you have a long sentence, plus a bag of words. The sentence is the reference and the words are your sequence reads from Esha’s chile. You take the words and find their matches in the sentence. That way you can find missing letters and spelling mistakes. You might even have extra words that aren’t in the sentence.”
Amelia twists an eyebrow ring. “But why would she leave all the data on the computer?”
“Like I said, it’s hidden in plain sight. The people in the lab sequence DNA for hundreds of sources. That’s their job. To sequence, not to interpret. Nobody ever actually examines the data. It would be like a postman reading your mail.”
“And I’m guessing going into someone else’s data is a violation of privacy that could get us both into a ton of trouble?”
“Kind of,” I say, wondering if she’s getting cold feet.
She smiles. “Cool. What are we waiting for?”
With Amelia at my side, I browse through computer folders and files, looking for Esha’s data. That’s when the first problem occurs. The dreaded password. Esha told me big data systems usually have shared areas, no password needed. But no. When I find Esha’s folders on the server, I need her password. All my Nerd-Girl sparkle extinguishes and dies.
“What’s wrong?” Amelia asks.
“I need Esha’s password.”
“Then let’s go find it. People usually keep passwords written down somewhere.”
I’m going on three hours sleep and this could take hours, but if we want answers, what choice do we have? “Okay, let’s try her desk.” I lead Amelia to Esha’s cubicle and flip on a small light.
I’m on my knees, digging through papers in the bottom drawer for anything that could be related to a password, when I find something that makes me freeze.
“Found it?” Amelia asks.
“Nope, but I found something really interesting.” I lay a single sheet of paper on Esha’s desk. “Why do you think Esha has a paper with the UpsideDown! logo in her drawer?”
“It’s easy to copy a logo and type a letter,” Amelia says, letting out a soft whistle. “Could Esha be the one who wrote the threat letters to Ernie?”
The fire and the events leading up to it stagger through my mind as she says this. Esha invited Holly to SPCG. She said it was Dr. Richmond who wanted to talk to her. What if Esha wanted Holly to create a scene and make her look like a whack job capable of arson. What if she was already planning the fire, but when she found out I’d gone up to Ernie’s to harvest the chiles for the board meeting, she had to act quickly.
“What if Holly is telling the truth and she didn’t set the fire?” I say. “What if Esha burned them so there’d be no more evidence of her liquid gold chiles?”
“Oh, man,” Amelia says, the words filling in for the hugeness of the possibility.
I slip the paper back into the drawer for police evidence, should we get that far, and continue to search. T
hirty minutes later the clock’s ticking, and we’ve totally struck out. Operation Failure. No password. No database. I slump back onto my hands, defeated and pissed—and no way giving up.
Amelia sits in Esha’s chair, elbows on the desk, checking out the photos. “Who’s that?” she says, glancing at the monkey.
“Waldo,” I say, feeling totally dejected. “Wait…work mascot… people always use their pet names as passwords.” I race back over to my desk and type in Waldo. Nothing happens. I try again, this time with a capital W. Still nothing. I sit in frustrated silence and try Esha, then Esha Waldo. Nada. I try about twenty different words I associate with Esha— Peru. Plants. Botany. All are strikes.
“Can I try?” Amelia eventually asks.
“Be my guest.” I back away and hold my hands up, certain there’s no way Amelia’s going to crack Esha’s password.
Amelia sits down and types with me peering over her shoulder. A second later the screen opens and just like that, I assume Esha’s identity. Her own personal corner of the system is suddenly available.
“How the hell did you do that?” I say, astonished that she did; annoyed that I didn’t.
She shrugs and gets up, so I can resume prime computer position. “I figured the photo was a clue. The monkey with the band name? If she didn’t write down her password, she kept it in her mind that way. WaldoU2. Simple.”
“Simple, right,” I mutter and lean back in my chair. “First thing is to see if Esha’s aligned her chile genome reads to the reference yet. If she has, that will save us hours,” I say, thinking through all the bioinformatics Esha’s been teaching me the last few days, the practice drills I’ve been doing. After a few minutes of searching her files, I strike gold—a folder called genome_chile_alignments. Together we look at the folder, containing a series of files, each named similarly: some number followed by “.bam.”
“Any idea what this stuff means?” Amelia asks.
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