Road Less Traveled (3 page)

Great.

“Okay, what happened?” Allison asked again as Jo carefully made her way toward them. “Where are the Thunderbird eggs?” It didn't surprise Carter at all that she knew what the lab held. She knew everyone in GD and everything they were working on. It was part of what made her so good at her job. The other part was that she knew when to be supportive, when to be patient, and when to be demanding. Now was one of the latter times.

“Somebody broke into the lab and killed the alarms,” Carter explained. “Fargo noticed and triggered them manually. We got here, found the door open, and stepped inside, but we couldn't see anything—Fargo said something about a containment field leak, I think. Somebody else was in here, but we couldn't clearly see who it was. He or she had two eggs, though.” He winced at the memory. “One of them . . . broke.”

“It broke?” Allison was shaking her head. “Do you have any idea how much time and money has gone into this project? Each of those eggs represents several million dollars' worth of research!”

“Makes one hell of an omelet, too,” Carter joked. But she just scowled at him. Right, not the time for jokes. “Anyway, the Thunderbird got loose, and—”

“Wait, you saw it?” Now Allison bore a different expression: excitement. Carter tried not to notice how attractive she was with her eyes lit up like that, or her lips slightly parted, or—“What did it look like?”

“A bird made of thunder and lightning and storm clouds,” Jo answered. “Maybe the size of an ostrich, a little ungainly, with a raptor beak and long talons.”

“Yeah, kind of like a Muppet version of a thunderstorm,” Carter added. “With wings.”

Allison ignored that. So did Jo. Even Fargo just rolled his eyes. What was it with everyone today?

“What happened to it?” Allison wanted to know. “Was it stable? Did it escape?” She looked around wildly, like she expected to find the Thunderbird hiding behind a cabinet or curled up under one of the tables.

“No, it . . . drained away.” Carter held up his belt and handcuffs. “It attacked Jo, and was going after me next. I had to do something.”

It only took her a second to realize what he'd done. “You used the belt and handcuffs as a lightning rod. Smart.” She shook her head. “And the bird was probably too young for its body to have stabilized completely; it was still mostly energy. That's why the whole Thunderbird dispersed when its lightning fed through the belt and into the floor.” She sighed. “I'm not sure Boggs and Korinko will be happy to hear that. The bird's longevity has been one of our major concerns the whole time.”

“Why would you even want something like this?” Carter asked. “I mean, it was cool looking and all, but unless you're in the market for a guard dog that doubles as a night-light, I don't see the point.”

“Think about it, Carter,” Allison admonished, though gently. “These things are living, breathing storms. They generate more than just thunder and lightning—they produce wind and rain as well. Imagine hatching a dozen of these in a desert somewhere. Or over a drought-stricken farmland.”

Carter let that thought sink in. These birds could bring water, and therefore crops, to places that had never been able to sustain themselves before—and to ones that hadn't been able to for years. Yeah, he could see the value in that.

Which meant he could also see why somebody would want to steal them.

“How many people knew about the Thunderbird project?” he asked as Allison led them back out of the room. He and Jo squelched as they walked.

“No idea,” Allison answered. “It wasn't classified, so Boggs and Korinko were only under the usual nondisclosure agreements and strictures. They could talk about their work with anybody who had sufficient clearance, which is most of GD.”

“Great. That's a lot of potential suspects,” Carter muttered. Beside him, Jo nodded.

“But whoever did this knew how to bypass the alarms and deactivate the containment fields,” Fargo pointed out. “Not everybody could do that.”

“You could,” Carter answered.

“Hey, I didn't take them!” the little researcher whined immediately. “I'm the one who called you! I was behind you when you got to the lab, remember?”

“You're also the one who let the thief escape,” Jo pointed out sharply. She hated to fail at anything, and Carter knew letting the burglar get away definitely counted as a loss in her book. He felt the same way. “If you hadn't activated the sprinklers, the Thunderbird wouldn't have hatched and we could have caught him. Or her.”

“You couldn't see three feet in front of your face,” Fargo countered. “And it was getting worse instead of better. I was monitoring the readings outside. The containment field was still leaking. You'd have started feeling the effects in another thirty seconds, and you'd have been in no shape to catch anybody!”

“He's right,” Allison agreed, though she seemed to do so grudgingly. “I know how those fields work, and what sort of gases they contain. You'd have experienced dizziness, nausea, drowsiness, and shortness of breath.” She frowned. “The ratios are carefully maintained, but when the field was torn open the valves must have gotten jammed open somehow. They were continuing to pump those chemicals into the room. You could have asphyxiated if you'd stayed. And then the gas would have spread into the hall and into the neighboring labs, then throughout the building.”

“There, you see!” Fargo puffed out his narrow chest. “I saved everyone at GD!”

“Yeah, by letting our burglar escape with a Thunderbird egg!” Jo snapped.

Carter shook his head. Fargo had done the right thing, he realized. The gas had been the immediate threat, and not just to them. Fargo had taken care of that. It wasn't really his fault that the solution had triggered the egg, and that in countering that problem, Carter had then let the burglar get away.

But that was often the case around Fargo. He always meant well, and some of his solutions were brilliant, but they usually had unintentional side effects.

“At least nobody got hurt,” Carter reminded them. Jo arched an eyebrow at him, then pointedly glanced down at her blackened, smoking shirtfront. “Much.” He sighed and ran a hand over his short, wet hair. “Now we just need to figure out who the burglar is, catch him or her, and retrieve that remaining egg.”

“We also need to figure out how they got through the lab's security and took apart the containment field, all without triggering any alarms,” Allison reminded. “I'm not real happy that someone can just waltz in and remove projects whenever they want. If they work for GD, they're violating all kinds of regulations. And if they don't, well, then we have a bigger problem.”

Carter nodded. “Absolutely. We'll start by—” He was interrupted by the ring of his smartphone. “Hang on a sec.” He pulled it from his pocket and raised the slim device to his ear. “Sheriff Carter.”

Then he listened. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Really? No, I believe you. Yes, I'm sure you do. No, I'm not being condescending. I'll look into it right away. Yes, absolutely.”

He hung up and pocketed the device again. Allison, Fargo, and Jo were all watching him, waiting to hear what the call had been about.

“You're not gonna believe this one,” he told them, then corrected himself. “Of course, you will. Why not? That was Mrs. Hendricks, over on Albany Court. She said there's a cold front and she wants me to fix it.”

Fargo laughed. “Wow, some people have an exaggerated faith in your abilities, Sheriff! They think you can change the weather?”

“Apparently so.” Carter frowned. “The thing is, Mrs. Hendricks says the temperature has dropped twenty-seven degrees in the past six minutes. It's currently thirty-eight degrees in her house, and the heat isn't helping one bit.”

“Thirty-eight degrees? It's the middle of April,” Jo pointed out. “That shouldn't be possible.”

“I know,” Carter agreed. “And even if this was some sort of freak cold front, it wouldn't have hit that fast. Or with no warning. Or with her being the only one affected.” As if that were a cue, his phone rang again.

“Okay, not just her,” he corrected a minute later. “That was David Boyd. He's got the same freak cold snap.”

“Isn't he also on Albany Court?” Allison asked. Carter nodded. So did Fargo and Jo. A few months back, Boyd's house had been one of many that had been switched, exchanged for a house from outside Eureka. That had been a nightmare! For obvious reasons, most of the addresses of the houses involved had stuck in their heads.

Carter's phone rang again; this time it was Dan Harlowe on Durbridge Drive, which was one block over from Albany Court. By the time they'd reached GD's main lobby again, Carter had received four more calls, all of them complaints or concerns about the sudden chill. And all of them from the same part of Eureka.

“Something's causing the temperature to plummet, but only in a four-block radius,” Jo summed up. “What could do that? A freeze ray?”

“Don't even joke about it,” Carter warned. He glanced at Allison, but she shook her head. Good, no freeze ray. That was a relief.

Allison pursed her lips a second later, however. “I think I know what could be the cause, actually.” Her gaze settled on Jo. “Albany, Durbridge, Pershing, Restin—Silver Road's right around there, isn't it?” Carter was annoyed for a half second that she'd ask Jo and not him, before he admitted to himself that he would have done the same thing. He knew his way around the town, of course, but Jo seemed to have a perfect map of Eureka imprinted in her brain. She knew every single street, corner, alley, building, streetlight, turn signal, stop sign, and park bench. He knew for certain because a couple times he'd tried quizzing her. That never lasted long.

Right now his deputy was nodding. “It's right between them, actually. Albany and Durbridge cross it; Pershing's on one side and Restin's on the other.”

“That's what I thought.” Allison grimaced. “Savile.”

“Is that another street?” Carter asked her.

“No, it's a name—Steve Savile.” Allison led them into her office and tossed him and Jo towels while she talked. He guessed they were there for when she nursed or changed Jenna, her little girl, but right now he was just happy they were clean and dry. “He's one of our researchers. Been working on a portable ambient heat sink. He must have taken it home with him.” She shook her head, looking for all the world like a mom dealing with a kid who'd just done something a little silly. Which, come to think of it, probably summed up a lot of her day-to-day interactions with GD's scientists. Far too many of them still acted like little kids. Really, really smart little kids.

“Okay, so this portable any-bent heat sink is going in reverse and freezing the neighborhood instead?” he asked. He could tell from the looks he got that this wasn't the case. Oh well. He was used to it by now.

“A heat sink,” Fargo told him, taking on that pompous tone that made him even more annoying, “is a device you attach to a heat source, like a computer. It siphons off the heat and energy so the source can run without overheating. A portable heat sink would be one you could carry around and attach to any device whenever you needed it.”

“Exactly,” Allison agreed. “But Savile's been working on something a little more universal. An ambient version. You don't have to attach it to anything—it draws the heat from its surroundings, cooling everything down at once. You could set one of these in a computer bank and maintain all of them simultaneously.”

“Only he's drawing the heat from his neighbors by mistake, and turning that part of Eureka into Iceland.” Carter nodded. “Got it. So I just need to get him to shut the thing down and everyone should thaw out again.”

He turned to Jo. “Go back to the lab while I'm dealing with this. See what you can find there. I don't want the trail to get cold. We've got a burglar to catch. Oh, and stop by the infirmary to make sure you're okay.” He gestured at the blackened patch where the Thunderbird had zapped her, and she nodded briskly. “And take Mr. Wizard there with you.” He jerked a thumb toward Fargo and watched his deputy's eyes narrow.

“Why?” was all she asked, but the way she ground the word out between her teeth made it clear she would have some other, more choice things to say about this suggestion later.

“He knows the containment field, and the lab, and the people, and the project,” Carter pointed out. “And he's already involved.” He glared at Fargo, deflating the little researcher's sudden preening. “And he's at least partially to blame for the burglar getting away, so the least he can do is help us catch him or her properly.”

“Of course, I'm happy to help, Sheriff,” Fargo responded, straightening to attention and snapping off a pitiful attempt at a salute. “Come on, Jo.” It didn't help that he had a painfully obvious crush on Jo, and had for years. The look Jo shot at Carter as she followed Fargo from the room made him wonder if Savile had left one of those heat sinks here as well. Carter was shivering, and not from his recent rain shower.

“Why don't I come with you?” Allison suggested as Fargo and Jo headed back to the bio lab. “I know Savile, so I can help you talk to him.”

“Sounds good.” Carter wasn't about to turn down Allison's company. “Let's go.” He tossed the towel onto her couch and headed for the door. He hoped Allison wouldn't mind his blasting the heat on the way.

They drove in silence, mainly because Carter was still
busy mentally running through possible suspects for the Thunderbird theft. It wasn't doing him much good, though, because while he did know a fair number of people around Eureka by now, there were still plenty more he didn't know. And a lot of those people worked at GD. Plus, he couldn't limit himself to GD employees, or even to Eureka residents. What if some think tank somewhere else had gotten wind of the Thunderbird project and sent someone to steal the notes or whatever else they could find? What if it was ecoterrorists, worried that the Thunderbirds were a threat to the natural order of things? What if it was Greenpeace?