“If you’re all right, Doug…” she muttered as she moved down the hall. “If you’re perfectly fine and out enjoying yourself while I’m a worried wreck here searching your pitch-black apartment, I’m going to kill you.”

She flashed the penlight’s dim beam around the front room and found nothing out of place. Same with the second bedroom he used as an office. Odd to see his computer dark and dead. He hardly ever turned it off.

Nadia felt some of her prior annoyance creeping back as the penlight beam came to rest on Doug’s phone. The least he could have done was check his voice mail before he went out. She idly lifted the receiver and put it to her ear.

Dead. That was odd.

Last stop was Doug’s bedroom. The bed was unmade, but that was the rule rather than the exception, and everything looked pretty much the same as ever. Then what had made that noise? And why this deep cold apprehension gnawing through her? Why this vague feeling that she wasn’t alone here?

Nadia moved toward the closet in his bedroom and had her hand on the doorknob when her penlight died. That does it, she thought with a sudden stab of plain old fear as another flash of lightning blazed through the bedroom window, casting weird shadows into the corners. I’m outta here.

But first… she moved back to the blessed light of the hallway and scribbled on the pad of sticky notes she kept in her bag:

Doug—

I was here. Where was you?

Call me as soon as you get in.

Love.

N.

Nadia hurried to Doug’s office, stuck the note to his monitor screen, then dashed back to the hall. As she closed the door and locked the bolt, she was plagued by the strange sensation that she’d missed something in there, something important.

MEMORIAL DAY

1

Nadia snatched up the phone on the first ring. “Doug?”

A heartbeat or two of silence on the other end. A throat cleared and then a familiar voice came over the wire, but not Doug’s.

“This is Dr. Monnet.”

“Oh. Dr. Monnet… good morning.”

Nadia leaned back on her mother’s old sofa, straining to hide the crushing disappointment. She’d been trying Doug’s number for hours—before she’d left for the clinic, and while she’d been at the clinic—but yesterday’s busy signals had been replaced by a robotic voice telling her that the line was out of service.

“Good morning,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all. I just got back from the clinic.”

I just wish you were someone else.

“Such devotion.”

“Well, as we both know, diabetes doesn’t recognize national holidays.”

“How true.” He cleared his throat. “I was wondering if you were going to be in the lab today.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

Actually she had, but only to remove the Berzerk from the imager’s sample chamber. After that she might never go back, at least not until she had a good explanation as to why the inert form of a street drug matched the inert form of a molecule she’d been assigned to stabilize.