“So you got confronted by the dean again?”

“Afraid so.”

“What did she do?”

“Bawled me out big-time. Gave me a lecture about being a troublemaker. Threatened to have me kicked out of school.”

“Shit!” George commented.

Pia checked her watch. “Actually I was just about to go back to Rothman’s lab. I’m just waiting until it’s late enough. I don’t want to run into anyone, especially not the dean.”

“Pia, the last time I looked, the dean isn’t working security. They have a whole staff for that, and they caught us in about five minutes the last time we went to the lab. Bourse made it pretty clear you’re not supposed to go back to the lab. Now she’s spoken to you a second time. Maybe they’re right. You are crazy.”

“I think I have an aptitude for science, George. There are facts here, evidence that doesn’t add up. No scientist is going to just walk away from that.”

“Then tell me this: What are you going to do when you get kicked out of this place? That would make you an ex-scientist. Or not even. More like an ex-almost-qualified scientist. I don’t think there’s a great deal of demand for them in the job market today. You’re going to graduate in a couple of months, if you’re lucky. Yes, Rothman’s death is a bad experience, a terrible one, but you might be compounding it and throwing away a career before it’s even started.”

“Career? Right now I don’t see that I have a career. And I couldn’t live with myself if I gave up now. Do you know if Rothman’s lab is still officially closed?”

“How would I know? Well, I do know it’s closed to you.”

“The epidemiologists must be done by now,” Pia said, ignoring George’s point. “If they’re not still checking the place out, there’s no reason I can’t go. I do have stuff I left in there. The dean was upset that we went in when it was still officially closed. If it’s still officially closed, I won’t go in, I promise, but if it’s not off-limits, I will. At the very least I need to check the contents of that storage freezer in the level-three biosafety unit, which we didn’t get a chance to do last night, remember? I’m one of the few people who knows the code that Spaulding uses in the logbook for the storage freezer. I want to be sure that all the samples that should be in the freezer are in the right place.”

“Who’s Spaulding?”