“But the blood’s frozen. I need to look at it under a microscope.”

“Yes, Pia, it’s been in the freezer. I didn’t know how long I was supposed to be keeping it. And I never imagined you’d need it at five minutes’ notice in the middle of the night. “

“Okay, okay. You go home, and I’ll be right over as soon as I can, okay?”

They quickly went back outside. Pia climbed back into her car, which she’d left running, but Paul kept her door from closing. “Do I have to worry about you? Where exactly are you going?”

“No, you don’t have to worry. I’d love to tell you everything, but it would take too long to explain. I’ll be back as soon as I can to your apartment to fill you in. Turn on your phone, and I’ll call you, or I’ll just ring your buzzer again. Whatever! Now let my door close!”

Pia’s door slammed shut, and she backed up quickly and headed for the exit. Paul watched her go. She was a trip, that was for sure. Headstrong was not quite a forceful enough word for him to describe her. She could be exasperating, yet that was part of her charm. Paul found himself worrying about Pia, despite her protestations. He knew he wasn’t going to fall back asleep until she showed up.

•   •   •

WHITNEY JONES OFTEN had trouble getting back to sleep once she’d been awoken. But when her cell phone had finally stopped informing her of Zachary Berman’s movements, she’d fallen into a deep slumber. She’d heard the ping as Berman left the inner lab and, quickly, another as he apparently moved around the Nano complex. By the time the phone sounded again, when Pia exited the Nano bio-lab building, Jones was asleep.

But her rest was short-lived.

Now, as she woke again, she was irritated. Whitney snapped on the light to see what was going on this time. She wished she could just switch off the damn phone, but being apprised of her boss’s movements was part of her job. Whitney got a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and sat at her counter. She saw that Zachary Berman had gone back into the Nano complex, just after four o’clock in the morning. But she knew he had just left—where had he been? What the hell was he doing?

Whitney scrolled back to her texts to see what her boss had said in reply to her query about what he was up to. But there was no text from Berman. She was momentarily confused, but then she realized that what she had assumed to be a text from Berman was the security system at Nano telling her that he had reentered the lab he had been in before. Why was he doing that? It didn’t make sense.