Nate pressed the phone to his ear. “I didn’t bring my car, and it’s a ten-minute walk from my office to your lab. Not to be lazy, but… can you just tell me what you found?

“Trust me, come over here. This shit just got weird, and I need someone else to verify what the hell I’m seeing.”

That was a strange request. But Nate had worked with Hendrickson before, and he was a level-headed guy and a solid lab analyst. He glanced up at the clock; it was near the end of the day. “It’s 4:55 right now. I have a few things to finish up here and then I’ll come over. Will you still be there at 5:30?”

“Yup, no problem. I’ve got other evidence to process anyway.”

“Okay, see you in a bit.”

Nate hung up and sat back in his chair. He couldn’t help but wonder what had gotten the lab tech acting so excited.

###

When Nate first joined the FBI as a member of the Evidence Response Team Unit, the world-renowned FBI forensics lab had been intimidating. It was a massive, five-hundred-thousand-square-foot campus entirely dedicated to processing everything from fingerprints to DNA to hazardous materials. They did it all.

Now the double doors swung open with a whoosh of air, and Hendrickson, a green-haired tech in a well-worn lab coat, greeted him with a crooked smile.

“Here, put this on.” He tossed Nate a lab coat. “You know the drill.”

Nate stepped through the outer doors into an airlock. As he put on the lab coat and slipped protective cloth booties over his shoes, he felt and heard the whooshing of air as the lab was sealed from the outside. The lab’s air was highly filtered, and the airlock was there both to prevent the escape of hazardous materials from the lab and to prevent any contamination of evidence from outside sources.

Nate put on a pair of latex gloves and peered at the thirty-year-old tech. “Green hair? Really?”

Hendrickson’s face flushed red. “I did it for a St. Patrick’s Day party. The shit won’t wash out.”

Nate chuckled. “Well, it looks… it looks terrible.”

Hendrickson scowled. “Gee, thanks. Come on. I’ll fill you in on the simple stuff on the way to the DNA lab.”

The two men walked through a room filled with lab benches laden with state-of-the-art analysis equipment.

“Basically, all of the burnt samples had an accelerant on them. But I’m pretty sure you’d figured that out already.”

Nate nodded. “I smelled something. Did you figure out what was used?”

“Yup. It was basically a mixture of gasoline, benzene, and polystyrene.”

“Shit, that’s napalm!” Nate exclaimed.

“Napalm B to be exact. And the swab you took off the dead guy had the same trace elements from your samples. He was around that place when it was being torched, no doubt about it.”