“We need to run some tests,” Lopez said. “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.”

Angie ran over and hurled herself on Fasken. He let her hug him for a few seconds before pushing her away. “Ange, whatever they’re talking about, you better not have given it to me!” he warned. Then he turned to Lopez and Kilburn. “You got nothing to hold me on, right?”

“No,” Lopez said, sounding disappointed.

“Jakey!” Angie cried but didn’t move toward him.

Without any assistance from Fasken, it took ten minutes of cajoling and reassuring to calm Angie to the point where she agreed to go with them voluntarily. Fasken walked with them only as far as the room’s door. When Angie tried to hug him again, he turned and walked away. “Later, Ange,” he called out over his shoulder.

After they loaded Angie into the waiting ambulance, Lopez and Kilburn walked across the street to her car. Once inside, Lopez pulled a disposable alcohol wipe out of her glove compartment and offered one to Kilburn. They cleaned their hands in silence.

After tossing the wipe in the plastic garbage container by the ashtray, Lopez looked up at Kilburn with a frown. “She’s lying, Graham.”

“Maybe,” Kilburn said. “But she’s so strung out on crystal meth, it’s hard to know what’s going on inside her head. She might just be paranoid.”

Lopez shook her head slowly; her face was etched with determination. “Did you see how spooked she got when I mentioned the dealer? She knew exactly who I was talking about.”

Before Kilburn could respond, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He dug a hand inside and pulled it out. “Graham?” the voice asked gruffly. “It’s Lonny.”

“Hey, Lonny,” Kilburn said, surprised to hear from his favorite microbiologist, Lonny McKee. “It’s already after lunch, aren’t you done for the day?”

“Funny,” McKee grunted, “I thought you might be interested in my news.”

“What news?”

“Those pills you dropped off at the lab and made such a big fuss about us testing,” McKee said.

“What about them?” Kilburn felt the anticipation rising.

“Well bottle A wasn’t worth a damn. I might as well have pissed on the culture plates for all the use they showed.” McKee paused, deliberately drawing out his disclosure. “But bottle B was a different story.”

“How different?” Kilburn snapped, breaking into a big smile that drew Lopez’s wide-eyed attention.

“Very. Those pills worked like a hot damn on three separate MRGAS culture samples,” McKee said merrily. “They cleared out the colonies around them like Napalm on a dry forest.”

“Get out!” Kilburn chirped. “MRGAS is sensitive to Oraloxin?”

“Extremely sensitive.”

Relief swept over Kilburn like a wave. He felt as elated as if the failed brakes on a runaway car had just kicked back in.