Lethal Exposure Read Free Page B

victim’s in trouble? What are you talking about?” Craig’s brows knitted. “You said it was a murder case.”
    He hadn’t heard from Trish LeCroix since they had gone their separate ways two years before. They had been together for two and a half years in a comfortable if slow-burning relationship. They each had their own interests and they each had careful walls between them, never completely opening up.
    In retrospect, after the pain had dulled, Craig realized they had both fooled themselves for a long time, but still he hadn’t been the one to make the break, and that hurt him all the more. Trish had finally chosen a path that would force them apart, take her to the other side of the country as she pursued her medical career at Johns Hopkins, specializing in nuclear medicine and radiation treatment.
    They had parted amicably, promised themselves they would always be good friends, kissed each other good-bye . . . and had somehow managed not to speak to each other since.
    “Craig, I need your help,” she said, and the tone in her voice alarmed him. Trish had always been relatively emotionless, intellectual, focused on her thoughts instead of her heart—much like he himself was. The plea in her words seemed out of character. “I’m calling in every favor I still have. The FBI is already at Fermilab, but they’re more interested in the explosion than in the murder. They think it’s just an accident—the murder, I mean. But believe me, this is a homicide case unlike anything you have ever seen before. I want you here. I trust you.”
    Craig shook his head, growing more confused with Trish’s conversation. “I’ve seen plenty of unusual murder cases,” he said, dancing around the subject. He leaned back in his chair. The suit jacket had become uncomfortable, his shirt sweaty. He shuffled his feet beneath the desk as if he might somehow kick up appropriate words from beneath the floor.
    “I’ll bet you dinner,” she answered, “a nice dinner, mind you—that this one is different. You have to come out to Chicago. I’ll meet you here.”
    Craig knew he couldn’t say no to her. He pulled out a scrap sheet of paper, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear. “I’ll see what I can do, Trish. I’ve got some vacation time built up.”
    He scrawled down her contact information and then hung up, realizing that his hand was shaking. He pressed his fingers down hard on the desktop to get himself under control again. He had longed for an excuse to go out to Fermilab, and now he had one—but before, the motivation had been to visit Paige Mitchell.
    After his first case out at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, when he had investigated the bizarre death of controversial scientist Hal Michelson, he had spent an increasing amount of time with Paige, a DOE protocol representative. She had been his escort through the Livermore Lab and had again helped him out while trying to crack the militia infiltration of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.
    But after the distressing events in Nevada, Paige had changed jobs, using her DOE connections to get her a similar job out at Fermilab near Chicago—a national laboratory that did no weapons work, concentrating instead on high-energy physics with the nation’s largest particle accelerator.
    Now, the thought of spending time with his former girlfriend made him uneasy . . . no , he thought, be honest with yourself—it makes you downright nervous .
    Some things were better left alone.

CHAPTER 3
    Tuesday, 5:15 A.M.
    O’Hare International Airport
    Chicago, Illinois
    Craig was convinced that whoever had designed the red-eye flight from San Francisco to Chicago should be shot. The plane departed at 11:20 P.M. and arrived into O’Hare at 5:30 in the morning.
    Even so, the flight was packed full of weary passengers who had either been willing to put their bodies through this ordeal to save a few bucks, or too pressed for time to come in the day before. For Craig,