“Hi, Paul, I was just thinking about you.”

“That’s nice, but listen, Pia!” His voice was low as if he didn’t want to be heard by anyone around him. “This is serious. I think we’ve got another one.”

“Another what?”

“An athlete from Nano, on his way into the ER. A cyclist this time. Where are you?”

“I’m at home, give me ten minutes and I can be there. What do you know about the cyclist?” Pia pulled on her sneakers and grabbed her car keys and a jacket and left home running as she talked into the phone jammed between her shoulder and her ear. She’d been sitting around waiting for something to happen, and now it seemed like it had.

“He’s at the far end of the Carter Lake Loop,” said Paul. “I know the ride. A member of the public was a couple hundred feet behind him and saw him go down and called nine-one-one. The ambulance relayed the details of the call to us so we can prepare the ER, and they said the rider is supposedly unresponsive. He’s an Asian male, and he’s wearing a cycling suit with a Nano logo.”

“Oh, God, that’s great! I mean, it’s not great, but we can try to keep this guy in the hospital once we have him, right? And we can get some more blood.”

“We can try, Pia.”

“Does Nano know about him?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Okay, I’m in the car, how much time do I have?” Pia was pleased. Paul was keeping the small blood sample from the jogger that he had held back from the batch that had disappeared at the lab. At first Pia was going to bring it back to her lab to run some tests on it, but then had hesitated. The problem was that there was such a small amount, she couldn’t waste any. She decided that before she did anything, she would need to have a better idea of what kind of tests she wanted to run. Besides, Mariel Spallek had been riding her too hard to risk any kind of extracurricular activity like that, but a larger sample of blood would give Pia an incentive to find a way to test it to see if it could explain what had happened to the victim.

“The ambulance is about halfway there, so my guess is he won’t be back here for a while, depending on what they find at the scene. Come over and we can strategize. Noakes isn’t here today, thank goodness, and I’ve called the police. So yes, let’s try and hold on to this one.”

Even though the ambulance hadn’t yet reached the rider, Pia raced over to the hospital and excitedly found Paul in the center of the ER in front of the main desk.