He gathered her up in his arms and held her, and she grabbed on to him like she was drowning. He had the horrible feeling that he was losing her to something beyond his control, as if she was slipping away bit by bit and being replaced by a creature that looked like Jessica, sounded like Jessica, but wasn’t really her at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Flint had lied over the phone, just a little.

More like a fib, an embellishment, really, to make things sound more serious. Although he had his suspicions, he had no way to prove the chemical in the water samples had come from the hydroelectric plant. And at the moment, though the lab tests had caused the deaths of several animals, the majority were still living. But the majority of those were seriously fucked up, so much so that even the lab techs, who were trained to understand these things, couldn’t make heads or tails of it all. So the week he left open before he flew to St. Boudin was as much to give the lab time to run more tests as it was for Pierce to go hunting for answers.

Flint walked from the elevator to the stairs, flashed a clearance badge at the tired-looking guard on duty, who waved him by with a yawn, and descended the stairs to the first hallway in the area of the building most people never saw. Hell, most people didn’t even know this place existed. It was a well-kept secret for several reasons: number one, because it kept the animal rights groups off their backs (there were a lot of pretty nasty things going on); number two, because it kept corporate spies from keeping one step ahead of them; and number three, because the government just had too much fucking money. Why not burn some on a top secret, prisonlike facility with all the security of Fort Knox? It seemed that this was the only way to get things done these days—hide the tests so that the politicians wouldn’t find out about them and yell foul. And he realized self-consciously that the more time he spent working here, the angrier he became about the whole thing.

He needed a vacation.

He slid a card into a slot on the wall, and a heavy door opened in front of him. Another hallway stretched out before him. Doors were spaced every five or ten feet on each side, all closed. Set into the center of each was a small window. The rooms looked like cells in a prison, and despite the glint of the metal walls and polished linoleum floor, the single row of fluorescent lights on the ceiling did nothing to lighten the atmosphere.