difference?”
“It does if they’ve been tampered with.” Ganza’s skeletal frame with sloped shoulders was bent over the center counter as he dissected a glazed cruller.
Maybe there was something wrong with Tully because, tampered with or not, the cruller still made his mouth water. He’d had only coffee for breakfast, most of it spilled over the interior of his car, and lunch was a couple hours away. He glanced instead at a couple of white-coated scientists in the glass-enclosed labs across the hallway. Tully disliked his claustrophobic office, four floors below the earth back at BSU, but he knew he’d never be able to work here in the labs where your every movement could be observed. Each lab—the techno-term was “biovestibule”—really amounted to a glass cubicle, a sterile workstation surrounded by metal contraptions, test tubes in trays and microscopes attached to computers. The glazed cruller on Ganza’s stainless-steel tray seemed out of place.
“Doughnut places don’t deliver, do they?” Tully asked, thinking out loud.
Ganza looked up at him, pale blue eyes over half glasses that had slid to the end of a hawkish nose. He reminded Tully of a friendly version of a mad scientist or of a tall scarecrow wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. The cap forced Ganza’s thinning gray hair to stick straight out over wide-rim ears, adding to the overall picture. His lined and haggard face registered a perpetual frown, and now he shot Tully a look that said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but Ganza would never say that. He knew that ridiculous questions sometimes ended up cracking a few cases.
“There might be a place in the District that’ll deliver, but out here to Quantico? I’d guess, no.”
“We’re going over everyone who came and went this morning. So far there’s been no unusual activity,” Tully said.
Tully noticed that the box was plain white cardboard with no logo imprinted anywhere outside or inside.
“From the note it sounds like the doughnuts were only a means to deliver the threat,” Tully said, “rather than the actual threat.”
“You never know.” Ganza slid crumbs from the cruller into a test tube.
Ganza was a process machine, a scientist before a law officer. He didn’t decide what needed to be done, he simply did it, discounting chance, luck or speculation. For Ganza, the evidence always told the story. It wasn’t just props for a story or theory already in progress.
He poured a clear liquid into the test tube, capped it with a rubber stopper and began to agitate it. Tully watched him rock back and forth on the balls of his feet as he rocked the test tube, almost like someone would rock a baby to sleep. He tried not to think of Ichabod Crane doing the Robot or he might burst out laughing. That was the kind of morning he was having.
Tully’s stomach growled and Ganza raised an eyebrow at him. They caught each other glancing at the counter where the remaining doughnuts sat in their box.
“There’s a tuna sandwich in the fridge. You’re welcome to half,” Ganza offered, nodding toward the refrigerator in the corner where Tully knew there were also lab specimens. Possibly bits and pieces of tissue and blood. It would all be contained, bagged or capped, even on a separate shelf, but still too close for Tully.
“No, thanks,” he told the lab’s director, trying to sound grateful instead of disgusted.
Tully had watched Ganza eat between tests and he had seen his partner Maggie O’Dell eat a breakfast sausage biscuit once during an autopsy. But Tully viewed it as his last bastion of civility that he wouldn’t cross that line. There were so few in this business left to cross. At least, that’s what he told others. Fact was, it made his skin crawl just a little to combine the idea of eating a meal with the blood and guts of a murder.
Tully was still thinking about his stomach when he picked up the two plastic bags, one containing the note, the other the
“It does if they’ve been tampered with.” Ganza’s skeletal frame with sloped shoulders was bent over the center counter as he dissected a glazed cruller.
Maybe there was something wrong with Tully because, tampered with or not, the cruller still made his mouth water. He’d had only coffee for breakfast, most of it spilled over the interior of his car, and lunch was a couple hours away. He glanced instead at a couple of white-coated scientists in the glass-enclosed labs across the hallway. Tully disliked his claustrophobic office, four floors below the earth back at BSU, but he knew he’d never be able to work here in the labs where your every movement could be observed. Each lab—the techno-term was “biovestibule”—really amounted to a glass cubicle, a sterile workstation surrounded by metal contraptions, test tubes in trays and microscopes attached to computers. The glazed cruller on Ganza’s stainless-steel tray seemed out of place.
“Doughnut places don’t deliver, do they?” Tully asked, thinking out loud.
Ganza looked up at him, pale blue eyes over half glasses that had slid to the end of a hawkish nose. He reminded Tully of a friendly version of a mad scientist or of a tall scarecrow wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. The cap forced Ganza’s thinning gray hair to stick straight out over wide-rim ears, adding to the overall picture. His lined and haggard face registered a perpetual frown, and now he shot Tully a look that said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but Ganza would never say that. He knew that ridiculous questions sometimes ended up cracking a few cases.
“There might be a place in the District that’ll deliver, but out here to Quantico? I’d guess, no.”
“We’re going over everyone who came and went this morning. So far there’s been no unusual activity,” Tully said.
Tully noticed that the box was plain white cardboard with no logo imprinted anywhere outside or inside.
“From the note it sounds like the doughnuts were only a means to deliver the threat,” Tully said, “rather than the actual threat.”
“You never know.” Ganza slid crumbs from the cruller into a test tube.
Ganza was a process machine, a scientist before a law officer. He didn’t decide what needed to be done, he simply did it, discounting chance, luck or speculation. For Ganza, the evidence always told the story. It wasn’t just props for a story or theory already in progress.
He poured a clear liquid into the test tube, capped it with a rubber stopper and began to agitate it. Tully watched him rock back and forth on the balls of his feet as he rocked the test tube, almost like someone would rock a baby to sleep. He tried not to think of Ichabod Crane doing the Robot or he might burst out laughing. That was the kind of morning he was having.
Tully’s stomach growled and Ganza raised an eyebrow at him. They caught each other glancing at the counter where the remaining doughnuts sat in their box.
“There’s a tuna sandwich in the fridge. You’re welcome to half,” Ganza offered, nodding toward the refrigerator in the corner where Tully knew there were also lab specimens. Possibly bits and pieces of tissue and blood. It would all be contained, bagged or capped, even on a separate shelf, but still too close for Tully.
“No, thanks,” he told the lab’s director, trying to sound grateful instead of disgusted.
Tully had watched Ganza eat between tests and he had seen his partner Maggie O’Dell eat a breakfast sausage biscuit once during an autopsy. But Tully viewed it as his last bastion of civility that he wouldn’t cross that line. There were so few in this business left to cross. At least, that’s what he told others. Fact was, it made his skin crawl just a little to combine the idea of eating a meal with the blood and guts of a murder.
Tully was still thinking about his stomach when he picked up the two plastic bags, one containing the note, the other the
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