Fatal Reaction

building. Even though I had no way of knowing whether my suspicions were correct, my curiosity would not allow me to sit still.
    I took the service stairs to the basement and found myself wondering whether it was really true that the only way out of the building was through the front door even at this time of night. What about the men from the biohazard company? Surely they came in and out through the loading dock with their containers. How did they get in and out? And what about on Friday when everyone was frantically working to get the building ready for the electricity to be cut off? The door to the loading dock had been open most of the afternoon as tracks had come to pick up animals and the freezer unit was delivered. No doubt there would have been ample opportunity for someone to have slipped in or out unobserved. That, of course, was the trouble.
    The trouble also was that everyone who worked in this building was so wrapped up in his own little world, in his own submicroscopic sliver of the universe, that he was completely oblivious to what was actually going on around him.
    I took the shortcut past the mechanical room and the machine shop and turned the corner behind the animal labs. The animals, now all returned to their proper environment, scratched and snuffled in their darkened cages. As I passed by the cold rooms I couldn’t help but suppress a shudder. Both were now padlocked from the outside—a compromise Elliott had worked out with the police rather than sealing them off with crime-scene tape.
    Glancing down the hall I was surprised to see a pool of light spilling out of the aquarium window of the crystallography lab. I told myself not to be alarmed. No doubt Michelle had left the light on by mistake—either that or one of the cleaning people who’d gone through earlier had forgotten to turn it off. I’d seen Michelle talking to Stephen earlier as they’d waited for Borland and the others to join them for dinner.
    I peered cautiously through the window and immediately felt ridiculous. The room was empty. Nothing sinister was afoot, just a light carelessly left on, nothing more. I stepped inside and looked along the wall for a switch. That’s when I saw it.
    Draped on the back of a chair behind the computer console was a white lab coat. It wasn’t the lab coat that held my attention, but what was clipped to the front of it. Michelle had not only left the light on in her hurry, but had left her ID card behind as well.
    Slowly, I crossed the room to look at the ID. The picture was the usual unrecognizable blur, and all but the first five letters of the name were obscured by the bulky rectangular radiation tag, but instinctively I knew there was something wrong. I read the letters out loud: M, I, C, H, A—Michael, not Michelle. With my heart beating faster I knelt down to be sure. I squinted at the picture. The ID belonged to Michael Childress, not Michelle Goodwin.
    I rocked back onto my heels as the various pieces of the puzzle clicked noiselessly into place. Not some man who’d been having an affair with Danny, not someone intent on bringing down the company, but quiet, shy, fiercely obsessed Michelle. Michelle, the woman whose dreams of the future hinged on her solving the structure of ZKBP and getting the credit for it.
    I never saw what hit me. Something heavy swung with terrific force. I don’t remember the moment of impact or the moment when I first realized I was hurt. The only sensations were the warmth of my own blood oozing through my hair, and watching the world spin around me. My reactions no doubt slowed by concussion, I fell to the ground and looked up just in time to see Michelle Goodwin getting ready to take another swing at me. In her hand was a metal instrument that looked like a small baseball bat. Borland had one just like it in the protein lab. It was a special heavy-duty pestle used to pound spleen tissue into a bloody pulp.
    Instinctively I curled up into a ball to ward off the impact of the next blow and, without consciously deciding to do so, rolled under the desk. The pestle hit the edge of the desk with a terrific impact as I scrambled to my hands and knees, trapped like an animal. Michelle had all the advantages. Not only did she have a weapon, but she was in tremendous shape physically. Mentally, she had already shown herself capable of killing two men.
    Terrified, I realized my best chance was to try to get away from her even if only out into the hallway, where