E Is for Evidence

went?"
    "He left the plant." She was licking the cracked nail experimentally, as if the chemistry of her saliva might serve as adhesive.
    "He left?"
    "That's what I said."
    "Did he say how soon he'd be back?"
    "Mr. Wood doesn't consult with me," she said snap-pishly. "If you'd like to leave your name, I'm sure he'll get back to you."
    A voice cut in. "Something wrong?"
    We both looked up to find a dark-haired man standing in the doorway behind me. Ava Daugherty's manner be-came somewhat less antagonistic. "This is the company vice-president," she said to me. And to him, "She's sup-posed to be in a meeting with Lance, but he left the plant."
    "Terry Kohler," he said to me, holding out his hand. "I'm Lance Wood's brother-in-law."
    "Kinsey Millhone, from California Fidelity," I said, shaking hands with him. "Nice to meet you." His grip was hard and hot. He was wiry, with a dark moustache and large, dark eyes that were full of intelligence. He must have been in his early forties. I wondered which sister he was married to.
    "What's the problem? Something I can help you with?"
    I told him briefly what I was doing there and the fact that Lance Wood had abandoned me without a word of explanation.
    "Why don't I show you the warehouse?" he said. "At least you can go ahead and inspect the fire scene, which I'm assuming is one of your responsibilities."
    "I'd appreciate that. Is anybody else out here autho-rized to give me the information I need?"
    Terry Kohler and Ava Daugherty exchanged a look I couldn't decipher.
    "You better wait for Lance," he said. "Hold on and I'll see if I can find out where he went." He moved toward the outer office.
    Ava and I avoided small talk. She opened her top right-hand drawer and took out a tube of Krazy Glue, ignoring me pointedly as she snipped off the tip and squeezed one clear drop on the cracked fingernail. She frowned. A long dark hair was caught in the glue and I watched her struggle to extract it.
    Idly I tuned into the conversation behind me, three engineers in a languid discussion about the problem before them.
    "Now maybe the calculation is off, but I don't think so," one was saying,
    "We'll find out," someone interjected. All three men laughed.
    "The question came up… oh, this has occurred to me many times… What would it take to convert this to a pulse power supply for the main hot cell?"
    "Depends on what your pulsing frequency is."
    "About ten hertz."
    "Whoa."
    "Anything that would allow you to modulate a signal away that was being influenced by the juice going through the susceptors. You know, power on for nine-tenths of a second, off for a tenth. Take measurements…"
    "Urn-hum. On for a half a second, off for a tenth of a second. You can't really do it easily, can you?"
    "The PID controller could send the output that fast. I'm not sure what that would do to the NCRs. To the VRT setup itself, whether that would follow it…"
    I tuned them out again. They could have been plot-ting the end of the world for all I knew.
    It was another ten minutes before Terry Kohler reap-peared. He was shaking his head in apparent exasperation.
    "I don't know what's going on around here," he said. "Lance had to go out on some emergency and Heather's still away from her desk." He held up a key ring. "I'll take you over to the warehouse. Tell Heather I've got these if she shows up."
    "I should get my camera," I said. "It's with my handbag."-
    He tagged along patiently while I moved back to Lance Wood's office, where I retrieved the camera, tucked my wallet in my tote, and left my handbag where it was.
    Together we retraced a path through the reception room and the offices beyond. Nobody actually looked up as we passed, but curious gazes followed us in silence, like those portraits where the eyes seem to move.
    The assembly work was done in a large, well-venti-lated area in the back half of the building with walls of corrugated metal and a floor of concrete.
    We paused only once while Terry introduced me to a man named John Salkowitz. "John's a chemical engineer and consulting associate," Terry said. "He's been with us since 'sixty-six. You have any questions about high-temper-ature processing, he's the man you want to ask."
    Offhand, I couldn't think of one-except maybe about that pulse power supply for the main hot cell. That was a poser.
    Terry was moving toward the rear door, and I trotted after him.
    To the right, there was a double-wide rolling steel door that could be raised to accommodate