Stephenie Meyer - The Chemist

Now for the heavy lifting. If it was de la Fuentes keeping tabs on this man, the tracker would probably be external. She threw the shoes into the woods beside the road first – they seemed the most likely culprit of his clothes; lots of men would wear the same pair every day. Then she stripped off his shirt, grateful for the button-down, though it was still hard to get it out from under the weight of his body. She didn’t bother trying to get the undershirt over his head; she pulled a blade from her pocket, untaped it, and cut the fabric into three easily removable pieces. She scanned his chest – no suspicious scars or lumps. The skin on his torso was fairer than his arms; he had a faint farmer’s tan, no doubt from building houses in Mexico with a T-shirt on. Or from acquiring superviruses in Egypt – also very sunny.

He had what she thought of as sports muscles rather than gym muscles. No hard-cut edges, just a nice smooth alignment that showed he was active without being obsessive.

Rolling him onto his stomach was hard, and he fell into the foot space, draped over the hump between seats. He had two light scars on his left shoulder blade, parallel and even in length. She explored them carefully, prodding the skin all around, but she couldn’t feel anything besides the normal fibrous, hypertrophic tissue that should be there.

It didn’t take her long to realize she should have removed his jeans before rolling him over. She had to climb on top of his awkwardly positioned form and reach both arms around his torso to get the button fly open. So very thankful that he was not wearing skinny jeans, she then climbed out the other passenger-side door and yanked the pants off over his feet. She was unsurprised to see that he wore boxers rather than briefs. It fit his clothing profile. She stripped the boxers off, then the socks, and then she grabbed up the rest of the clothes, walked them a few feet off the road, and stuffed them behind a fallen log. She made another trip for the backpack. The laptop would be a very good hiding place for any electronic device someone wanted him to carry around unknowingly.

This wasn’t the first time she’d had to strip a target down herself. In the laboratory environment, she’d had people who prepped a subject for her – Barnaby called them the underlings – but she hadn’t always been in the lab, and during her first field trip to Herat, Afghanistan, she’d learned to be deeply grateful to the underlings. Stripping down a man who hadn’t bathed in months was not pleasant – especially when she didn’t have a shower available for herself afterward. At least Daniel was clean. She was the only one working up a sweat today.

She found the screwdriver in the trunk and quickly changed the DC license plate for one she’d pulled off a similar car in a West Virginia scrap yard.

Just to be thorough, she did a cursory examination of the backs of his legs, the bottom of his feet, and his hands. She’d never seen a tracker on the extremities, probably because extremities sometimes got cut off to make a point. She didn’t see any scars. She also didn’t see any calluses that suggested he trained with guns or used them frequently. He had soft teacher hands, with just a few hard spots that spoke of blisters from inexperienced labor.

She tried to roll him back up onto the seat but quickly realized it was a vain effort. It wasn’t a comfortable sleeping position, but he wouldn’t wake up regardless. He would be sore later. Though it was completely ridiculous to even think of that.

As she repositioned the blanket and tucked it around his body as best she could, she was constructing a story about him from the documents she’d read and the evidence in front of her.

She believed Daniel Beach was mostly the man she saw now, the pleasant all-around good guy. The attraction for the avaricious ex was understandable. He was probably easy to fall in love with. After some time had passed, enough time for the ex to take love for granted, she would have been able to shift her focus to the things she didn’t have – the nice apartment, the big ring, the cars. She probably missed this side of Daniel now, the grass always being greener and whatnot.

But there was also darkness in Daniel, buried deep, perhaps born from the pain and unfairness of losing his parents, aggravated by his wife’s betrayal, and then ignited by the loss of his final family member. That darkness would not surface easily. He would compartmentalize it, keep it away from this gentle life, pack it into the dark spaces where it fit. No wonder he could speak of Mexico so blithely. He would have two Mexicos: the happy one the teacher loved, and the dangerous one the monster thrived in. They probably weren’t anything close to the same place in his head.

Not a true psychotic, she hoped. Just a fractured man who didn’t want to give up the person he thought of as himself but who needed the release the darkness gave him.

She felt comfortable with this assessment, and it changed her plan a little. There was a great deal of performance to what she did. For some subjects, the very clinical and emotionless persona worked best – white coat, surgical mask, and shiny stainless steel; for others, it was the threat of the crazed sadist (though Barnaby was always more successful with that play; he had the face and hair for it – unruly spikes of white, I’ve-just-been-electrocuted hair). Every situation was slightly different – some feared the darkness, some the light. She’d been planning to go clinical – it was the most comfortable role in her wheelhouse – but she decided now that Daniel would need to be surrounded by darkness to let that side come to the surface. And Dark Daniel was the one she needed to talk to.

She did a little evasive driving on the way in. If someone had been tracking Daniel’s clothes or possessions, she didn’t want that person coming along any farther on this trip.

She considered the possibilities again for the millionth time. Column one, this was a very elaborate trap. Column two, this was for real and a million lives were on the line. Not to mention her own.

During her long drive, the balance finally shifted to rest solidly on one side. This wasn’t a government agent in her car, she was sure of that. And if he was an innocent citizen, picked at random to draw her out, then they’d already missed their best opportunities to bag her. There hadn’t been one attack, not one attempt to follow her… that she’d seen.

She thought of the mountains of incriminating information on Daniel Beach, and she couldn’t help herself. She was a believer. So she’d better get to work saving lives.

She pulled into the farmhouse drive around eleven, dead tired and starving but 95 percent sure that there was no trail that could lead either the department or de la Fuentes to her doorstep. She looked the house over quickly, checking to see if anyone had broken in (and died, as he or she would have upon opening the door), and then, after disarming her safeguards, she drove the car into the barn. As soon as she’d pulled the barn door shut and reset the “alarm,” she went to work getting Daniel prepped.

All the other tasks were done. She’d bought timers from a Home Depot in Philly and plugged lamps into them in several rooms of the farmhouse; like a traveler leaving for a few weeks, she made certain that the place looked occupied. A radio was plugged into one of the timers, so there would be noise, too. The house was good bait. Most people would clear that before progressing to the dark barn.

The barn would stay dark. She’d constructed a kind of tent in the middle of the barn space that would hide light and muffle sound, while also keeping Daniel completely ignorant of his surroundings. The rectangular structure was about seven feet high, ten feet wide, and fifteen feet long. It was constructed of PVC pipe, black tarps, and bungee cords, and lined inside with two layers of egg foam duct-taped into place. Rough, yes, but more functional than a cave, and she’d handled that in the past.