The guard snorted, putting his paper aside. "You and everybody else." He took Remo's identification, inspecting it carefully. "You don't look like an agriculture agent," he said eventually, looking up over the card.
"The corn-husk hat gave me dandruff, and my sorghum pants chafed," Remo said.
Peering across his foyer desk at Remo's tan chinos and white T-shirt, the guard seemed doubtful. He finally shrugged, sliding the card back to Remo.
"What the hell. After yesterday, we'll all be out on our ears anyway. Third floor." He picked his paper back up, jamming his nose back inside the sports pages.
"I'm gonna take a leap and chalk this all up to crummy security," Remo muttered to himself. Leaving the vigilant security guard to read his paper, Remo crossed over to the elevator.
THREE STORIES ABOVE the BostonBio lobby, Dr. Judith White was throwing a fit. According to the tally kept by her lab staff, it was her seventh that morning.
"I can't believe this shit!" she screeched. She waved a copy of the morning paper that one of her staff had had the temerity to bring in that morning. "You're all a pack of sniveling Judases! You're buying into this character assassination! I'm the one responsible for this project, not any of you! I could have fired every last one of you, and the Bos camelus-whitus project would have gone on!"
With angry fists, she balled up the newspaper, flinging it at the man who had pulled it from his desk drawer when he thought Dr. White was busy in her office. It struck him loudly in the forehead. She'd thrown it with such ferocity, he hadn't even had time to duck out of the way.
"You people all make me sick!" she screamed. Spinning away from the guilty-faced staff, she marched back inside her office. The high lab windows shook with the violence of her slamming door.
The lab staff didn't seem to know how to react. It had been this way all morning. Dr. White had refused treatment for her injury from the night before. It was probably a mistake, since the blow to the head she had received seemed to have made her even more vile-tempered than usual. Of course, her mood might not be the result of a concussion. Dr. Judith White had been perched on the edge of sanity for a long time. The stress of the BBQ theft might just have been the thing that finally toppled her over.
In any event, without their lab specimens, there was nothing much for the lab technicians to do. No BBQs meant no work. The lab staff had merely stood around for the past two hours, anxiously awaiting the next outburst from their project director.
It was into this tense atmosphere that Remo strolled.
Inside the lab, Remo flashed his bogus Department of Agriculture ID at the first unoccupied white coat he met. The man was a microbiologist with a pronounced overbite, a receding hairline and a name tag that identified him as Orrin Merkel.
"Post," Remo said, tone bored as he repeated his alias. "Investigating the theft of the cookouts last night."
"Of the what?" Orrin asked, perplexed.
"Those animal jobbies in the paper," Remo said, himself confused. For a moment, he thought he was in the wrong lab. "Didn't you build them here?"
"Oh," Orrin said. "The BBQs. " There was an angry snort from behind a distant closed office door. "That's not their real name," he said, pitching his voice low. "And Dr. White doesn't approve of the nickname."
"She's the one who was here when they were stolen?" Remo queried, jabbing a thumb at the door. Orrin nodded. "Thanks."
Remo headed for Dr. White's office.
"Uh...I don't think you want to see her," Orrin said, hurrying up beside Remo. "Guys? Help?" He glanced around for support, but when Remo's purpose became clear, the rest scattered from the room like frightened cockroaches. Orrin was left alone with the agriculture man.
Remo was steering a beeline for the door.
Orrin had to leap across a desk to get in front of him.
"You really don't want to see her," he insisted.
Remo stopped. "Why not?"
Orrin shot a worried look at the door. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "For one thing, she's a drug user," he confided. "Heroin, I think."
"The director of this lab uses heroin," Remo said skeptically.
"She shoots up after hours. Some of us have seen her. So far it hasn't affected her work." Orrin considered. "Although I guess it could account for her mood swings. Sometimes she's a real B-I-T-C-H, if you know what I mean."
"Nope, I don't," Remo said. "But then, spelling's not my strong suit. After ten years with the department, I still spell agriculture with two Ks."
"There's a whole psychiatric textbook back there," Orrin whispered, nodding to the door. "Aside from the drug use, she exhibits strong antisocial tendencies and, as far as anyone here can tell, she is one hundred percent, completely and totally amoral. Possibly sociopathic, as well."
"Doesn't sound like the woman who's going to cure world hunger," Remo said.
Orrin bit his lip. "There's some good in everybody, I guess. Dr. White might be a lot of things, but she's also a genius. Maybe she's just misunderstood."
"I'll be sure to put that in my report to the undersecretary for husking and threshing," Remo said. He sidestepped Orrin. Despite frantic gestures from the microbiologist, Remo knocked on the closed office door. Orrin was across the lab and out the front door before Dr. White even had a chance to respond.
"Hurry up and come in already!" a gruff female voice barked in response to Remo's knock.
After the impression he had gotten from the young scientist, Remo wasn't sure precisely what to expect beyond the door. When he pushed the door open, any preconceived notions he might have had melted in a stunned instant.
Dr. Judith White was beautiful. Her black hair was long and full around her face, shaped vaguely in the tousled, confident manner of a lion's mane. Her nose was aquiline, her dark red lips full and inviting. The teardrop shape of her green eyes was vaguely Asian.
As far as her body was concerned, the parts Remo could see as she sat behind her desk would have turned a Playboy model green with envy. When she stood in greeting, he realized that the same model would have gone from green to blue before dropping dead from terminal jealousy. In Dr. Judith White, the female form had achieved a level of physical perfection unheard-of on Earth.
When she smiled, a row of dazzlingly white teeth gleamed brilliantly, framed between perfect lips. The smile was not one of politeness. It was more a perturbed rictus.
"What do you want, Mr. Post?" Judith asked. Remo was confused at her use of his cover name.
"Have we met before, Dr. Boobs?" he asked absently. He was staring at her ample chest.
"What?" she said, voice icy. Her eyes could have cut diamonds.
"Hmm?" Remo asked. He pulled his gaze up to her face. It was an effort. They liked it where they were.
For some reason, Judith seemed annoyed. She scowled as she retook her seat. "I heard you mention your name to Orrin, the Dweeb." She waved a hand toward the lab. "These morons haven't figured out yet that I can hear everything from this office."
Remo looked through the open door to the spot where he had spoken to Orrin Merkel. It seemed too far for her to have heard his conversation with the microbiologist. He was frowning when he turned back to her.
"Washington sent me to investigate the theft of your BBQs," Remo said. He took a seat before her desk.
Cluttered bookshelves lined the walls behind Dr. White and to her left. To the right, half-raised miniblinds opened on the well-tended grounds of BostonBio.
She shuddered, closing her eyes with overemphasized patience. "Please don't call them that," she said.
"Isn't that what everyone's calling them?"
"Everyone's wrong. They are Bos camelus-whitus. BCW would be more accurate than that other ridiculous appellation."
"But nowhere near as lunchbox ready," Remo pointed out.