Deadly Chemistry (Entangled Ignite) (7 page)

First, he had to try one more thing. “There was graffiti on the wall of that room your boss uses for growing her algae.”

“The cell culture room?”

“Whatever. There was a weird threat about killing things, but that’s not what struck me.”

“No? Please share.”

Mike walked over to Dylan and flicked up the sleeve of his T-shirt, revealing the tattoo that he had yet to have removed.

Dylan jerked away, but not before Mike tapped him right in the middle of the Devil’s Rangers gang tag inked into his brother’s skin.

Dylan’s expression was a mixture of fear and revulsion. “Dude. I didn’t do this. I swear. Dr. Kane is awesome. I
wouldn’t
do this.”

Mike wanted to believe his brother. He wanted to believe him so much that he could have cried. But he couldn’t ignore the evidence. Lauren’s face flashed through his consciousness, along with the feel of her in his arms.

He tossed the Diet Coke in the sink and replaced it with a beer.

Chapter Nine

Saturday morning, Lauren put her giant mug of Earl Grey tea on the little table outside the lab and wondered for a moment if that was a good idea.
’Cause you never know when someone’s going to walk by and spike your drink with radioactive thymidine while you worked.
Nothing like some senseless vandalism to turn up the paranoia to eleven.

The double door at the end of the hallway clanged, and Lauren looked up to see Dylan White clumping down the hall. “Dylan!” He’d never just shown up out of the blue before, and especially on a weekend. Weren’t college kids supposed to be sleeping off hangovers on early Saturday mornings? “What brings you here?”

The young man ducked his head. “I feel bad that I didn’t come by yesterday. I had a…thing…and I got caught up in that.”

“That’s okay. It wasn’t your day to work anyway.” She looked at him closely, trying to find a resemblance to Evan or Mike. There was something about their eyes, a sort of tilt to the eyelids, maybe. Dylan also had the same straight blade of a nose, but it was still too big for his face. And he had that ridiculous chinstrap beard. He’d grow into the nose, but the beard? Hopefully, he’d outgrow that.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. Yesterday was kind of crazy, anyway. I take it you heard—”

“Yeah, I heard. That’s really fu—messed up.” Dylan hiked up his baggy plaid shorts and grimaced. “I should have been here to help yesterday. But maybe I can work today and help you out?”

“Well—”

“We don’t even have to put it on my timecard if you don’t want. I just thought…”

He looked so earnest, with his big brown eyes and even bigger nose, that Lauren’s heart—already pretty mushy when it came to Dylan—melted a little more. “Well then, strap on a lab coat and glove up. Maybe you can show me how this computer tracing GPS app thing that IT put on my laptop is supposed to work.”

“They did that for my computer when they set me up with a campus log on,” he said. “Is your laptop here?”

“It’s at home, but the tracking program is on my desktop over there,” she said, waving in the general vicinity of her desk. “And on my phone. My scientific competence doesn’t extend to computer literacy.” A fact that Alex the Ex had mentioned on more than…a dozen occasions.

“My computer skills are second only to my ability to scrape algae off test tubes, and equally at your service,” he said with a flourish and a bow.

Lauren laughed. He was a good kid.

When he entered the room, he brought with him some sort of too-piney-too-sandalwoody whirlwind of scent, and she sneezed.

“Uh oh,” Dylan said.

“What is that? A new cologne?”

“Yeah.” His cheeks were red. “It’s called Rebel Max. It’s supposed to have women falling over themselves to get close to me.”

“Um…” She sneezed again.

“I guess I need to stay downwind of the ladies, or they’re going to be falling over themselves to get away.”

How to be diplomatic? “Um…maybe you should work over by the fume hood, so the smell gets sucked out by the ventilation system.”

Once they found a configuration where Dylan’s cologne didn’t send Lauren into anaphylactic shock, they got busy putting the lab to rights. Working for an hour or so, they chatted about television shows and YouTube videos. At about six-feet-two and about a hundred and sixty pounds, Dylan shocked Lauren when he told her he’d be playing rugby in the spring. Not only was the kid way too skinny for that kind of a contact sport, he seemed a little too—hip, or cool, or something—to go out for a gritty sport like rugby.

“Wow, that sounds…challenging,” she finally said.

“You’re too nice. My brother’s words were ‘bleeping stupid as bleep’.”

Lauren wanted to know about Mike’s relationship with Dylan—and Evan for that matter—but she didn’t know how to ask without sounding like she was fishing. Which she was. Which she shouldn’t be, because she had no business thinking about Mike Gibson under any circumstance.

Well, except that he’d hugged her last night. And sort of, maybe, almost kissed her the night before that, in front of the animal shelter. That moved their relationship to some sort of level above “just met,” she figured. Not that she should be figuring out anything to do with her and Mike.

What she
needed
to figure out was how the heck she was going to get her algae back.

While Dylan went to check on some items that he’d put in the autoclave, Lauren’s cell phone rang. She checked the caller ID, saw that it was from the animal rescue group, took the call, then spent the next ten minutes trying to pay attention as she was relayed the sad life story of a recently deceased race horse and the miniature pig that had been its companion. The pig was in mourning after the death of its horse friend and wasn’t getting along with the other pigs that it was being fostered with. She was needed to drive the pig to a new home in Ohio.

When Dylan walked back into the room, she was desperately trying to explain why she couldn’t drive a pig around various counties on a Saturday. She broke off when Dylan waved at her, trying to tell her something.

“I can do it,” Dylan told her. “If you don’t mind me driving your SUV.”

“Are you sure? It’s a good forty-five minutes each direction.”

“No prob. Just give me directions.” When she nodded, he took his phone from his pocket and started madly hitting buttons, then stepped into the hall.

Lauren got the details from Lee and followed Dylan out to give him the Post-it with information on it.

“Can’t you make up a story?” Dylan was saying, then suddenly, as if realizing he was no longer alone, added, “Okay, gotta go. See you in a few.”

“Everything okay?” Lauren asked, sneezing again when she got near him.

“Uh, yeah,” Dylan said. “It’s cool if my friend rides along with me, isn’t it?”

“Sure, as long as you remember to roll the windows down to air it out when you’re done. The pig smell probably won’t bother me as much as that cologne.”

Dylan left with Lauren’s keys, and she went back to sorting slides. Unfortunately, the work was boring enough that her mind wandered into dangerous territory, and she found herself thinking about Mike. Again.

About that hug last night. About how the hard planes of his chest had felt against her softer self. Biologically, she knew that the contrasts between men and women—the mass of male pectoral muscles and female breast tissue—had different evolutionary origins, but she had to wonder if maybe God had thrown some of that hard/soft, strong/gentle business in there as part of the magnetic force that drew opposites together.
Argh.
Again, with the magnets.

She wasn’t sure, mostly because she wasn’t good at this stuff or had a lot of empirical data with which to compare, but she kind of thought Mike felt the same pull she did. There wasn’t any room in her life for a relationship—part of it was that her career was too time-consuming right now, but it was more about the fact that he was a little too…too large and in charge, with the potential to suck the life out of her ambition. But boy, she was enjoying the heck out of imagining what it would be like to be with him, to ignore all the reasons she shouldn’t.

…

Mike clenched his fingers tightly around the steering wheel of his F-150 as he drove toward campus. He’d been on the computer at his house all morning, trying to Google “fake heroin,” “Dino Romain,” “Devil’s Dust,” and “Tucker University,” and had gotten nowhere. No connections were on the internet, but that didn’t mean there
wasn’t
a connection. After slapping the laptop shut, he’d gone to wake up Dylan and get him to help give Possum her morning pill, only to realize the kid wasn’t there. Instead, on the floor in Dylan’s room was a note saying he’d gone off to work.

Yeah, right. On a Saturday. At least he’d already dosed the cat.

So Mike did what he did best—hit the streets on the hunt for information—and headed over to Tucker U. He wanted to find out what was happening in Lauren’s lab, and wanted to know what the hell his little brother was up to. He’d lain awake far too long the night before, trying to come up with a good reason for Dylan to have lied about being in the lab with Lauren the night before the destruction. And then he just thought about Lauren.

Damn.

Feeling her soft curves against his body yesterday, even though it was just a moment… No wonder he couldn’t sleep last night.

He parked, noticing Lauren’s SUV in the lot next to Dylan’s car. Was that good or bad that both of them were there? Seeing Lauren was a distraction…but she also might have information he could use, especially if Crawford was in communication with her. Mike couldn’t contact Crawford, but he could talk to Lauren. See what she’d been told by the local police. He stepped out of his truck into the late morning sunshine just in time to see Dylan drive out of the parking lot in Lauren’s SUV.
What the
—?

“Hey!” he called, but Dylan either couldn’t—or chose not to—hear him. He tried calling the kid’s cell phone, to ask where the hell he thought he was going, but his call went straight to voicemail.

Dylan had no business driving her car. No business driving
anyone’s
car. The kid was on probation. Getting caught could send him back to jail.

Blood boiling, Mike stormed across the green to Lauren’s building, then had to scan his access card three times before the door opened. He strode down the hall, then swung open the door to Lauren’s lab.

Her head jerked up at the sound, and she nearly knocked whatever she was working on off of the counter. “What on earth is wrong?”

“What the
fuck
is Dylan doing in your vehicle?”

Lauren put the slide box down and stood, fisted her hands on her hips, and faced him. “Good morning, Mike. Nice to see you.” She turned her back to him and wrote something in a notebook.

He came into the lab, undeterred by her deliberate attempt to point out his rudeness. He strode to where she stood. “Where did Dylan go in your car?”

“Is there some emergency that prevents you from asking nicely?”

Okay.
He was being an asshole. But he only backed up half a step. Just far enough to cross his arms so that he didn’t accidentally smack her in the head when he moved. The smell of her shampoo took some of the wind out of his spinnaker, although he still vibrated with tension. “Good morning, Dr. Kane. Might you be so kind as to tell me where my brother—who is on probation and only supposed to drive to work and school—is going in your vehicle?”

“What?” Her pen clattered onto the counter. “What’s he on probation for?” She pushed Mike away and walked halfway across the room before stopping. She looked through the window to the parking lot, as though someone out there would be holding a sign, explaining things to her.

“Didn’t you already know this?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Because he works for you.”

“He’s a student worker. He walked in here and asked for a job, and I told our business office to put him on my grant. We don’t run the kids’ fingerprints through IAFIS to clean algae tanks.”

“Does he have a key to your lab?”

“No,” she said slowly.

“No?”

“Um…I’ve let him have mine a few times, when I couldn’t be here and needed him to do some work.” She paused, and her mouth opened, shut, then she said, “You can’t possibly think he did all this! Besides, I keep the dried algae and the step two drug locked up.”

He looked at the safe, closed up now, but it had been hanging open yesterday. “Does he have the combination?”

“No?”

Mike waited.

She sighed. “I keep it written down on a sticky note in the top drawer of my desk. But I’ve never taken it out and said, ‘Look, here’s the combination to the safe.’ I have no idea how the bad guys got that open. And the bad guys don’t include Dylan.”

He didn’t want to do this, but she clearly didn’t have a clue. “Last year, right after he turned eighteen, he got arrested for vandalism.” There was more, a lot more, but Mike couldn’t tell her the rest of it without having to explain his own actions, and he wasn’t interested in showing her his dirty laundry.

“What? How did that happen?”

The obvious answer—
he went somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, and there was serious collateral damage
—didn’t seem to be what she was looking for. So Mike gave her the other answer. Part of the real answer. “I left him alone too much after our Grandma died, and he joined a gang.”

“A gang? In Tucker?” She stared at him.

“No, Cincinnati. He lived with me at the time, right after our grandmother died, and I was…involved in some pretty heavy undercover work. I wasn’t home much.” Jesus, he hated talking about this shit, but her huge eyes seemed to be sucking the truth out of him. Pretty soon he was going to be spilling the whole messed up thing, all the way back to when Mike nearly got Dylan killed.

“What about Evan? Where was— Oh, I remember. He was in Central America.”

Mike nodded. Yep, Grandma had died while Evan was in the rainforest collecting frogs, and by the time Mike was able to get him a message, she was buried. Mike hadn’t asked Evan to come home and take on part of the responsibility for their brother. All things considered, Mike wasn’t sure Evan could have handled things any better, but at least he could have kept Dylan out of the city. Hell, he’d let her house sit empty for all that time, he could have moved them back here sooner.

Lauren seemed to come to some sort of a conclusion then, because she nodded. “Well, he seems to be doing pretty well now. And he’s on a mission of mercy, so we’ll consider this a work-related outing and not turn him in, huh?”

“I can’t wait to hear this explanation,” Mike said, leaning back on the bench. “And it had better be good. Because if he’s back to his old tricks, I’ll take my baby brother to the station myself.”