“In my office. Second floor in the Oaks building.”

“Just a minute.”

Ben heard the dispatcher talking to a patrol car before returning to Ben’s call. “Is your door locked?”

“No. But it will be.” Ben went and locked the door, wondering what good it would do. “I need to go now.”

“Okay, sir. Don’t let anyone in. I’m calling Officer Frick at home.”

“Wait. He’s not a regular deputy,” Ben said, heat rising into his neck and face. “Would you please send someone else.”

“He’s a special deputy with the rank of sergeant and fully empowered,” the dispatcher said. “”He’s also chief of security there at Sanker. I’m going to call him now.”

Ben hung up. It would be a waste of precious time to argue. Frick had used the political power of Sanker and taken great pains to get himself fully integrated into local law enforcement. Frick had been brought in by Sanker almost a year previous, not coincidentally around the same time that Ben’s research had started finally to become known in a general way to Sanker executives. In small communities retired cops could get special reserve commissions.

From what Ben had been told, the county sheriff didn’t much like Frick and was trying to find a politically graceful way to get Frick out of his department or at least severely limit him.

From his closet Ben pulled out jeans and a shirt. People who swam in the ocean as part of their work tended to keep extra clothes. His morning’s outfit remained in the dive room.

Now came the most important part. Ben ran back to the spacious lab and went to work destroying everything that mattered.

Next he took a wooden box full of 50 mm freezer tubes bundled in five different lots, each lot with its own color, and removed it from a freezer then ran with it down the stairs and a long hall to a workshop. There he pushed aside shelving that disguised a hidden door. He stepped into a secret study, most of it taken up with a Revco minus-eighty-degree freezer set to minus 20 degrees. He put the box in the freezer and slammed the door.

Then he gathered his lab notes and took them to his office. There he added them to some other notes hidden in a large-scale replica of a blue whale affixed to the wall. He didn’t touch the wall safe, even though he was supposed to be the only one with the combination.

A beep sounded; the light under his office’s security camera was flashing. The Foundation was rife with security measures that Ben had once considered excessive. It was a part of the corporate culture of this rich, private foundation that Ben had always disliked – dislike that had turned darker after what they’d done to Haley.

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