He grasped the knob.
The lights were off inside. He slipped out a small pen flashlight he normally used to look at tonsils and panned it across the bed. No Leroy. He moved the beam over the rest of the room. Jeans, overalls, and dirty shirts hung from every peg and littered the floor. Candy wrappers had been crumpled and tossed into a corner as if the corner itself were the wastebasket, and the tiny quarters smelled faintly of bleach and foot odor and the general stale, stagnant odor of a human confined to a small space.
Ron hesitated, then turned to Biddi and said in a conspiratorial tone, “Would you be able to act like you’re cleaning the hall, Biddi? And, perhaps, rap on the door if you see Leroy coming?”
The woman waggled her eyebrows and snatched a dust rag from a back pocket. “Of course, Doctor.”
“Good girl.” He shut the door gently, turned the lights on, and proceeded to search the room quickly but thoroughly. As a physician, he had no training in how to toss a room, but as a former marine, he knew every nook and cranny people used to hide things in a bunk. Five minutes later, however, having lifted the mattress, run his hand along ledges and under frames, and peeked behind drawers, he had to admit defeat. If there was anything to be found, he wasn’t going to be the one to discover it. The man could use a lesson in personal hygiene, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Except that its occupant was nowhere to be found.
He took a look around the room, decided it wasn’t any messier or neater than how he’d found it, then cracked the door to the hallway. “All clear?”
“As a pane of glass.” Biddi was dusting the door frame and walls. He slipped out of the room and watched as his accomplice locked it.
She looked at him. “Should we sound the alarm?”
“No, not yet. Though, if you see him, would you call me?” Biddi nodded. He paused. “And let’s keep this to ourselves, please?”
She mimed locking her mouth and tossing the key. “Not a word, Doctor.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Biddi.”
She winked and went back to dusting the frame. Ron strode down the hall, a small knot of worry growing in his stomach.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Carla had been running a difficult set of tests on crystalline structures, a task that required her to be glued either to the small electron microscope in the biology lab or to the two computer screens that were capturing and recording the results in real time. Even as a grad student, her reputation for total concentration on a test had been legendary, to the extent that she’d often gone sixteen, twenty, and once twenty-four hours without leaving her chair.
But today, the first phase of the test wrapped up early and she sighed in relief as she backed away from the microscope, stretched with both hands on her lower back, and rolled her neck in circles. Grinning, she grabbed a cup of cold coffee and put her feet up on her desk with relish, something that would’ve surprised her colleagues, who assumed she thrived on the unblinking concentration her tests usually required.
In fact, Carla would’ve liked nothing better than to fire off a few lines on a command prompt and go to lunch, like the stargazers over at COBRA. But, in biology, if you missed a few significant tics, the results were inconclusive or mixed or open to interpretation. So, if you were going to bother running an experiment at all, why wouldn’t you put everything you had into the process? If you couldn’t take ten hours of frowning into the eyepiece of a microscope, maybe you should try a different field of science. Like geology, where the time scale ran into the millions of years and the tons of rock. Make a mistake? Wait awhile or bust open another geode.
She smiled a little, thinking of how peeved her favorite geologist would’ve been if he were there to read her thoughts. Cute, serious Colin. Brilliant in his field, but as obtuse as the samples he tapped apart with his rock pick, capable of flaking apart millimeter-thick layers of shale but clueless at doing the same for the simplest social cues. She wondered if he were as baffled in bed. Talk dirty to me, Colin. Pause. What do you want me to say, Carla? Scenarios along those lines coaxed her into a daydream for long minutes and, had anyone come into the office, they would’ve found her staring raptly into the depths of a skuzzy tank of Antarctic pearlwort like she was in love.