What he’d been listening to wasn’t romance. It appeared Mary Lee and this fellow were in cahoots, but what was the object of the exercise? Linton Reed, obviously, but in what context? Pete swapped out the tapes, inserting a blank on the off chance another call might transpire while he was gone. Once he was back at his desk, he put the recording into his player and listened to it twice. At first, he was annoyed he couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Clearly, Mary Lee Bryce and Owen Pensky were trying to get the goods on Linton Reed, and if Pete hoped to profit, he needed to know what he was talking about. Faulty information was useless. “Glucotace” was the word he’d missed. He deciphered it on the third go-round and figured it must be a medical condition, maybe a test of some kind. There’d also been mention of cooking numbers, which must be what it sounded like. You cook numbers, you’re slanting the results. That’s why Linton’s getting the big grant put so much at stake. He worried the subject, turning it this way and that. As far as he could tell, there was only one interpretation. Linton Reed had been falsifying data. He wasn’t sure how Mary Lee picked up on it, but she’d known him in the past and apparently, she’d been an early victim of his shady manipulations.

At 5:00, he gave up, locked the office, and headed for home. He was just pulling into his garage when he had a flash. He’d been thinking he couldn’t move forward until he filled in the blanks, and how was he to do that when he didn’t have a clue? What occurred to him was that all he had to do was go over to the medical library at St. Terry’s and have somebody look it up. Linton Reed was vulnerable. Pete had no idea how, but he knew Owen Pensky and Mary Lee Bryce were closing in on him. Judging from their phone chat, the good Dr. Reed hadn’t quite caught on yet. Pete would be doing him a personal service by alerting him to the danger. There might even be a way to head off trouble, which was bound to be worth something to a bright young fellow with a rich wife and his whole life ahead of him.

14

The route from Santa Teresa to Bakersfield isn’t complicated, but there aren’t any shortcuts. I could drive north on the 101 and head east on Highway 58, which meandered a bit but would finally put me out on the 99 a few miles north of Bakersfield. Plan B was to drive south and cut over to Interstate 5 on the 126. It was going to take me two and a half hours either way.