Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

He peremptorily clasped his hands in front of him. “Good morning, Dr. Piter. Thanks for seeing us again.”

Piter appeared flustered. “It’s been quite a busy day already. I even had to have one of my graduate students show your colleague around.”

“Is something wrong?” said Craig.

“We got a long string of spurious results in the middle of the night-I’ve been here since about three in the morning. And right when we’re trying to verify the run, construction activities on the Main Injector caused a fatal fluctuation in the beam and we had to shut the Tevatron down.” He sighed. “And we’ve got more anomalies, probably caused by Dumenco’s unfortunate accident.”

The graduate students continued to peck on their screens, bypassing safety interlocks to massage their results. They seemed to be functioning well enough after the substation explosion the previous Sunday evening.

“You’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little disjointed.” Piter sounded embarrassed.

“Was there a serious problem?” Craig asked innocently. “Is this going to affect your own experiment?”

Piter’s face twisted. “While we were at dinner last night, the p-bar production rate went up dramatically, then went back down again. Unexpectedly. Actually, the increase was in line with what Dr. Dumenco had projected. But it seems quite curious that it would happen now. All by itself.”

Paige said, “Isn’t it good news to increase the antimatter production?”

Piter gave her a thin smile. “In a physics sense, of course, because the p-bars give us the opportunity for many high-energy experiments. But unless we find out why the production rate is fluctuating so drastically, it means nothing.”

Craig followed an idea that had just occurred to him. “Could antimatter have caused that substation explosion, Dr. Piter? Some sort of buildup that went critical? Wouldn’t that explain your missing p-bars from the flow?”

Piter looked sharply at him. “In theory, I suppose- but there’s no way for the antimatter to have left the main Tevatron ring and gone into the beam-sampling substation. It’s preposterous.”

“Could one of your grad students have tampered with the support equipment?” Craig spoke quietly, looking at the technicians at the control panel.

Piter suppressed a scowl, and didn’t even try to keep his voice low. “In an experiment this major, Mr. Kreident, the grad students have little real responsibility. They are just hired help, nothing more.”

“Then I see nothing much has changed,” said Craig tightly.

“Ah, you have been a graduate student?” Piter looked at him, eyebrows arched as he lifted his chin. “In the FBI?” He moved away from the console and started for the door; Craig and Paige followed.

Craig shook his head. “I majored in physics at Stanford before going on to Law School. I took a course and worked at the Linac-the Linear Accelerator-my senior year. Since I wasn’t going on to study physics, I didn’t have the pressure on me like the real grad students, but I certainly remember what it was like.”

“I see.” Piter continued down the huge opening. They walked briskly down another set of stairs to the underground entrance. Their shoes echoed hollowly against the bare cement walls. “We can go inside the Tevatron, now that the beam is shut down. We don’t have to worry much about residual radioactivity.”

Piter took a right-hand turn and stopped before another control room door. He used a badge-locked key with a magnetic strip and access code, making three attempts before he finally gained access. “Too many disconnections and supposed upgrades,” he said. “Nothing works the way it should anymore.” Ahead, the underground tunnel curved around, vanishing around a bend in the distance.

Glaring lights shone down on wide conduits mounted to the walls. Banks of superconducting magnets surrounded the beam channels, and substations, and fuse junction boxes; diagnostics stood out in regular intervals.

Technicians moved down the line, a pale young woman with dark hair and a twentysomething man with a goatee and the build of a weight lifter. The woman stopped at each junction box, checking readings as she munched from a bag of fat-free pretzels.

Craig stepped up and spoke quietly. “Dr. Piter, can you verify that you were at the lab early this morning, when you said you were called in?‘’

Piter looked up with an astonished look on his face. “Of course I can-but what on fool’s earth for?”

“Someone attempted to kill Dr. Dumenco in his hospital room this morning. The killer got away, but we have a witness.”

“Then why are you bothering me if you have an eyewitness?” Piter drew himself up to his full five feet six inch height. He purposely brushed lint from his suit and straightened his tie. “Surely they don’t think it’s me?”

“I just want to eliminate as many potential suspects as I can.” He paused. “That includes everyone, Dr. Piter.”

Piter drew his mouth tight and lifted his chin. “You may confirm my presence here with any one of those technicians. Or one of my grad students, Frank Chang- he’s showing your partner around as we speak. We’ve all been here putting in a lot of hours. I refuse to believe that you would seriously consider me, the Director of High-Energy Research, a possible suspect in any scheme to harm my esteemed colleague, Dr. Dumenco.”

“People have plenty of motives to do things out of the ordinary, Dr. Piter. How about the Nobel?‘’

Piter took a step backward and blinked. “That’s just an award, Agent Kreident. It certainly isn’t worth killing someone over! In fact, even coveting the prize is considered quite unprofessional.”

Craig just watched him, knowing that Piter coveted the Nobel a great deal.

He thought he would be going back and forth between the medical center and Fermilab quite a few more times before he had answers to this case.

Thursday, 1:03 p.m.

Fox RiverMedicalCenter,

Main Cafeteria

“Have lunch with me,” Craig said to Trish, gesturing toward the cafeteria. “It’s hospital food, but it’s the best I can do right now, considering Jackson is meeting me here at three. And I’m paying. I owe you anyway, because you won our bet.”

“Our bet?” she asked with an uncertain smile. She adjusted her delicate glasses, falling into step beside him.

“When you first called me on the phone, you swore that this case would be unlike any of the others I’ve worked on. You were right.” He held open the swinging cafeteria door for her. The food inside smelled as if it had gone through an automatic dishwasher, but his stomach rumbled anyway.

“So I get fine hospital dining,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Good thing I’m not normally a gambling woman.”

In the cafeteria line they each took a tray and studied the unappealing selection of foods. Craig refused to take one of the bowls of jiggling, brilliantly colored Jell-O, choosing tapioca pudding instead. He ladled out a serving of mushy spaghetti and meatballs. Trish looked at him sidelong, and Craig decided it might be better if he didn’t eat the meatballs after all. Trish chose a dubiously fresh salad, a helping of fruit cocktail, and a carton of skim milk.

They settled down at a table at the far end of the cafeteria. Craig scanned the mix of doctors, nurses, volunteers, and families visiting patients. The noise droned around them, giving them complete anonymity. He still had the nagging suspicion that she knew or suspected something about that morning’s attack, and he decided to follow his intuition.

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently,” Trish said, self-consciously removing her glasses.