My eyes closed and I drifted into a half sleep. I awoke to the sensation of lips on my cheek. Karen’s lips. Her mouth slid over to mine, and soon we were engulfed in each other. I liked her taste. She wore no scent or makeup. No flower or spice or store-bought musk. Just skin and tongue. Very pure. Very simple. Very human.
I don’t know how long we went on like that. It could have been twenty minutes, it could have been hours. Our hands moved slowly up and down each other, outside our clothes, brushing a more sensitive zone now and again. We stopped for periods of time and simply rested with one another, drifting.
At some point, I found my hand sliding under her shirt. I felt the strap of her bra, and then, under the material, her breast. Her breath quickened. I nudged the nipple with the tip of my finger, and felt her hand moving up along my thigh. We let the moment linger on the edge of something more. Somehow it was more erotic and delicious than the most avid sex. I felt close to Karen, disconcertingly so in just two days.
I kissed her neck once and put my arms around her, tightly. My head came to rest on the pillow of her hair. She returned the embrace, and we were still.
30
I awoke to find a blanket over me and a pillow under my head. Light streamed in through windows unknown to me, but it was hard to tell what time it was. Nor could I fathom what was I doing on a plaid sofa.
A faucet turned on in the kitchen and it all came back. Marion’s house last night. Abe. Dugan. Karen.
She poked her head out of the kitchen. I blinked at her. She smiled. “Just checking.”
I was still in my clothes. That was good. I shuffled into the bathroom, splashed myself with some cold water, and shuffled into the kitchen. The kettle was humming over a burner.
“Did you sleep all right?” she asked.
“Like a wall. I didn’t know where I was for a minute.”
She folded her arms and leaned against the sink. Her form was hidden under a long flannel nightshirt decorated with bluebells. I stood by the refrigerator with my hands in my pockets. The patina of morning brightness fell from her face. She looked at me from under lidded eyes. I remembered why it had been so nice to kiss her.
“I’m sorry Bill. Last night, I—”
I stepped forward and took her hands. “Same for me.” I was sorry, too, though I wasn’t sure whether it was for what happened or what didn’t happen. Not that I would have cheated on Jenny — more out of principle, I had to admit, than direct feeling at the moment. The little pang of guilt I’d felt when I awoke did not center on Jenny, but on Sheila. As if somehow we’d taken advantage of her death.
Karen touched a finger to my lips. “You have the nicest little fold at the corners of your mouth. And eyes.”
I kissed her forehead. She gave me a slap on the hip. And we got on with our morning. She fitted a filter into a coffee cone. I hunted up some food in the cupboards and refrigerator. We moved past each other easily in the kitchen, as if it were a familiar choreography.
We ate quietly, looking through the Sunday paper. Karen did the crossword. It was a pleasant fiction to eat the little smorgasbord we’d rustled up — toast, apples, cheese, tomatoes, olives, jam — as if we had nothing much else to do today.
At eleven-thirty I folded the paper and said it was time for me to go to LifeScience.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Karen asked.
“I better go alone. Marion is taking me inside. You never know, Dugan might be hunting for you.”
“Nah, he’s scared of me now.” The hint of bravado in her smile told me she didn’t mind staying in.
I tucked in my shirt and put on my jacket. The DAT and mini-DV were still in the pockets. I changed the DAT cassette and cued it up. Karen gave me a peck on the cheek and asked at what point she should start to worry about me. I waved it off, but she fixed me with one of those direct looks.
“I’ll check in around three. Call Wes if you don’t hear from me.” I borrowed her pen and wrote Wes’s number on the crossword.
“Fine. What do you plan to do when you get inside?”
I’d started thinking about it last night on the way back to the condo. “I’ll see what else I can get out of Doug Englehart and Frederick McKinnon. New information tends to make people talkative. Marion’s going to look for more on MC124. I’ll try to find other senior people in the company, too. With the big Curaris deal happening tomorrow, I expect they’ll all be working. I’ll tell them I know how Sheila died. I won’t accuse anyone; I’ll act like I think someone else is to blame. Then I’ll watch how they react. See what I see on their faces, listen to what they say, and decide on my next move.”
“What if you run into Dugan?”
“I’ll hope I don’t. But if I do — same as the others.”
Karen nodded and sent me off. The sky was an immense plate of scalloped ridges, puckered with billows and whorls. The first big rain front of the season was approaching from the Gulf of Alaska. The barometric pressure had dropped, and there was an expectancy in the air.
Marion was waiting for me about a hundred yards down the street from the turn to the LifeScience parking lot. I motioned for her to follow me, then I drove another quarter mile to an empty industrial street. I parked the Scout and got into her car.
The first thing I did was explain why I’d invited Abe Harros to her house the night before. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t sore about Dugan showing up. “I was trying to bring Abe over to our side,” I said.
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed it. If you ask me, Dugan practically convicted himself. All we need to do is gather a little proof, and we’ve got him.” Her elbows flapped with excitement as she took the turn into the parking lot. She disliked Dugan more than I did, if that was possible.
We parked in the back. Marion used her card to get in through an electronically controlled door to the agri division. She was wearing a slim pair of black jeans, a sweater, and a scarf. I asked if I could put the scarf over my head just long enough to get through the door. “For the video cameras,” I explained.
The halls of the agri division were empty. We had to pass through the central tower of executive offices to get to Doug’s lab. We crossed over on the second floor to avoid running into anyone before we were ready: Dugan’s office was on the fifth floor, McKinnon’s on the fourth.
In the next wing, we took stairs up to the lab on the third floor. I waited in the stairwell while Marion checked out the lab. “Doug Englehart is working by himself. I can’t poke around with him there.”
“I’ll draw him into his office.”
She nodded. I unpaused the DAT recorder and went in. Doug gave me a glare, but it was a hard-at-work glare. He had a deadline tomorrow and didn’t want to be interrupted.
“Give me just ten minutes,” I said. “I have new information about Sheila.”
“What is this, social hour?” he growled. But he went with me into his office. I made a point of closing the door.
“We — Karen Harper and I — know how Sheila died,” I said.
This brought only a disappointingly small lift of his brows. “You were going to bring the notes.”
I ignored the request and went on. “It was a combination of MC124 and a shellfish protein genetically engineered into a tomato. The protein wasn’t pure enough to induce anaphylactic shock on its own. But it was enough to stimulate MC124 into triggering a severe immune reaction.”
Doug’s fingers were spread on his desk. He was startled now, but not stunned. A flash of respect crossed his face before a mask of denial descended.
“Any connection to MC124 is coincidental. Where did this tomato come from?”
“Carl Steiner’s garden, by way of LifeScience’s agri division.”