Julie Miller - Beast in the Tower

Mental note: add security cameras to stairwell.

He didn’t like being at a disadvantage, but instead of standing there like some adolescent fool, damning his left hand for having just enough functional nerve endings to remember what the swell of her breast had felt like in his unintended grasp, Damon turned his attention to a more familiar purpose. He crossed the lab and shut off the Bunsen burner beneath the variable ingredient of this morning’s test formula. The liquid was hot enough to destabilize the molecules and recombine them with the regeneration mixture he’d already synthesized. When the new formula cooled, he’d add it to a petri dish along with a few skin cells from a volunteer subject who shared the same allergic predisposition Miranda had exhibited, and see if normal, viable tissue would grow.

This time Miranda’s Formula would work.

“That’s right, Doc. Jinx it.” Inhaling deeply, Damon buried that twinge of emotion and turned his back on his work. He didn’t believe much in the power of positive thinking anymore. He believed in cold, hard facts. Either the formula would work or it wouldn’t. But he refused to hope.

Time to return to the security monitors and the less formal experiment at hand—his observational study of Katherine Snow. This time, he swore to remain purely objective.

But there was still no sign of her on any of the screens.

“Where are you?” An educated guess would indicate she’d continue her previous pattern and climb the stairs to the fifth floor. But unless she’d twisted an ankle, she should have shown up by now. “Unpredictable, hmm?”

Odd for a scientist. Maybe she was following some logical pattern of her own design. Unexpected. But far more engaging than waiting for a mixture to cool.

With a few quick keystrokes on the computer, he pulled up the cameras for the sixth and seventh floors. With no movement detected on either level, Damon switched to views of the lower floors. There was plenty of activity to observe in the lobby, where his current contractor, J. T. Kronemeyer, was arguing on the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear, and handing out assignments to his foremen.

But no Katherine Snow.

Damon typed in more commands. He accepted the challenge she unknowingly presented. “I’ll find you.”

Eighth floor, ninth floor. Where had she gone?

He absently massaged his brow bone, easing the phantom eye strain that settled behind the patch masking the left side of his face. “Come out, come out, wherever you…” Damon smiled and blew up the image on screen three. “Gotcha.”

Breathing deeply after what must have been a quick, steady climb, his subject stepped out into the hallway on the thirteenth floor.

Feeling something akin to victory coursing through his veins, Damon raised his mug to his unwitting opponent and drained the last of his coffee. As he watched Katherine Snow squat down to study something on the tile floor, her quizzical expression piqued his own curiosity.

What was she doing on a cordoned-off floor, anyway? One that Kronemeyer’s renovation crews hadn’t even gotten to yet? The previous company Easting had hired, and subsequently fired for too many delays and “misplaced” supplies, had replaced the exterior windows, stripped the doors and added structural reinforcements to bring the settling walls up to code. But the thirteenth floor belonged to a different phase of the remodeling project. It wouldn’t see any finishing work for several months. Miss Snow had no business being there.

Yet there was something beyond his camera angle that caught her eye. She stood and made the odd choice to walk along the edge of the tiled hallway. Why not take the middle path others had used?

Others?

“Curious.” Damon typed as he sank onto the stool in front of the monitors. Was that…? He squinted his good eye and blew up the image on the screen. Footprints. In the thick layer of plaster dust that coated the floor. Fresh prints. Recent.

And Katherine Snow was following them.

“No, no,” he admonished the monitor, wishing he could transmit some sort of telepathic warning to her. “You don’t belong there.”

Neither did the footprints.

“Be smart. Go back.” Damon was already shrugging out of his lab coat. Had she heard a sound earlier? Was she following someone? Before any definitive answers could form, she turned a corner and disappeared from sight. “Damn.” He tossed the coat and pulled up the next camera to find a shot of her. “Come back to me.” He was searching. Searching. “C’mon.”

Was that a door? Two? Three, hanging back in place? As Damon panned down the hallway, he discovered that some unsanctioned work had taken place. Floors thirteen through twenty-five should have been stripped down to bare bones. No way had Kronemeyer’s crew gotten ahead of schedule. Since that electrician’s unfortunate death, the missing crew member and the superstitious rumblings about the curse of landing a job at the Sinclair Tower, Kronemeyer’s men couldn’t even catch up. So who’d authorized replacing the doors?

“Where are you? Yes!” Damon shook a triumphant fist when her fresh-scrubbed face reappeared.

She was trailing her fingers along the wall, slowing her step as she reached the second door. Damon’s pulse quickened to a bolder beat, feeling the same edgy anticipation reflected on her face.

“Don’t do it.” But his fingers were turning in the air, right along with hers, as she reached for the doorknob. He was just as curious as she to know what lay on the other side.

The instant the door swung open, two arms snaked out and latched on to her wrist.

Damon jumped. “What the hell?”

Man’s hands. Suit-coat sleeves. Dragging her into the room out of the camera shot.

Damon cursed and ran from the lab. He swiped his key card through the security lock that accessed his private elevator and typed in the activation code. Once in, he pressed thirteen over and over until the doors slid shut.

Objectivity be damned. Katherine Snow was in trouble.

And he owed it to Helen to keep her safe.

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