Lethal Exposure Read Online Free Page B

short, dark hair. She always moved in a straight-line path, never stopping to deviate along the way.
    “Craig!” she said. “So good to see you again. Thanks for coming.” She gave him a quick formal hug, which he returned stiffly. They backed apart, perhaps more quickly than was necessary, and she looked at him through subtle, wire-framed glasses that showcased her sepia eyes.
    “Good to see you again, too. Your call was quite a surprise.” He fumbled for words. “Um, I’ve brought Ben Goldfarb with me. You might remember him.”
    “Of course I remember Agent Goldfarb.” She reached out a slender hand to grasp his.
    “If you’re going to call me Agent Goldfarb, do I have to call you ‘Doctor LeCroix,’ or can I just go back to calling you Trish, and you call me Ben?” He grinned at her.
    Trish laughed. “All right, first names then,” she said, “but you may as well call me Patrice. Trish was from a long time ago. A kid’s name.”
    Goldfarb glanced at Craig and shrugged. “Whatever you say, Ma’am.”
    Trish turned all business. “I’m sorry we had to get together again like this. It’s been a very difficult few days for me, Craig, as you’ll see in a minute. You’ll need to get moving before it’s too late.”
    “Too late for what?” Craig asked. “And why were you here in Chicago? I thought you were at Johns Hopkins—”
    Trish was already marching toward the elevators. “Come on, I want you to meet the victim.”
    “Great way to start out my day,” Goldfarb said as he trailed along.
    Visiting hours had not yet begun, but the three had to contend with orderlies and nurses on the early morning shift. They found a spot in the next elevator, but instead of going down to the morgue as Craig had expected, Trish took them to the third floor and down a corridor through doors marked “Intensive Care.”
    “It’s because of my work in PR-Cubed, Craig,” she said, “You know I’m very active in the Physicians for Responsible Radiation Research.”
    Craig nodded, stifling his distasteful expression. PR-Cubed was all she had talked about for months, but to him they seemed to be a bunch of blowhard Chicken Littles screaming that the sky was falling.
    “We were here for a conference and seminar, and we met with the Director of Fermilab. He’s very anxious to make a good impression on us.”
    “Did you know the victim?” Goldfarb asked.
    “Yes, I know him. I met him in the Ukraine when I went over there to do my Chernobyl follow-up. That’s why I called you, Craig. I need to cut through the telephone-tag games and get somebody on this right away. He doesn’t have much time.”
    She led the way to a room where the lights were on. A patient lay on the bed, a man with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, long sideburns, and a sharp aquiline nose. A telemetry monitor hung from a bracket in the ceiling, connected to him. Four round sticky patches on his chest held small clips to wires that led to a single cable plugged into the monitor. The man received oxygen through nose prongs, and an IV line snaked from a plastic bag stenciled with 0.9% NaCl.
    The man was half dressed, scribbling equations on a piece of scratch paper. In frustration he crumpled the paper, struggled to a sitting position, and tossed the paper toward the wastebasket. He looked up, startled to see them at the door.
    “Georg, you’re supposed to be lying down!” Trish scolded. “You’re only making things worse.”
    “Worse?” he said in a rough, scratchy voice. “I am wasting time—and that makes things worse.”
    Trish sighed and introduced them. “Georg, these are two FBI agents, Craig Kreident and Ben Goldfarb. They’re here to look into your case. This is Dr. Georg Dumenco, one of the most prestigious scientists at Fermilab. He’s on the short list for this year’s Nobel Prize in physics.”
    Craig frowned, then lowered his voice. “I thought you said we were going to see the murder victim. Are you playing games with