Jackie stood at the door to the necropsy lab and blinked. Cabinets gaped open and her scalpels and saws were strewn across the floor. She opened the freezer and gasped. The top shelf was empty. The tissue samples she’d so carefully collected from the North Bay harbor seals were gone. So were the water samples.
“We should call the cops,” Gage said as he came up behind her.
“No.” She swallowed hard, but it didn’t ease the lump of tension in her throat. “An investigation will alert the Department of Agriculture. Though we know we’re up to snuff and good enough for the animals, the USDA inspectors might not think so.”
She’d sweet-talked her way around the regulations for the fish kitchen and had ramped up the filtration system for the pools, but they needed more time and money to address the other items on the USDA’s list and the necropsy lab was at the top of it. Just because she thought their complaints were nitpicky didn’t mean the Feds wouldn’t shut them down.
Gage walked toward the cabinet where they kept the drugs locked up. It too gaped open, and the contents were strewn across the floor. He sorted through the cabinet, then turned and scanned the vials and bottles on the floor. Shards of glass surrounded wet spots where some of the vials had shattered.
“The lock’s been forced, but it doesn’t look like they came here for the drugs,” Gage said.
She turned and shut the door to the freezer.
“North Bay samples gone?” He wasn’t asking.
“All of them.” She leaned against the steel table next to the freezer and put her head in her hands. The darkness and pressure helped calm her.
“Want to tell me exactly why anyone would be hot to get at those particular tissue and water samples?”
She pulled her hands from her eyes. He had a right to know, but there was still so much that was just conjecture. “I’m not sure.”
She lowered her hands to the cold steel of the table, pressed into it, and then met his stare. “It’s a nitrogen-based fertilizer causing the diatom bloom.”
“Last I checked, agricultural runoff isn’t a punishable offense.”
“At the levels our samples tested, it would be. It’s not runoff, it’s dumping. Or maybe it’s both. I don’t know.”
She leaned away from him and took a mustering breath. “It’s what I asked Bradley to help with. There’s not much to go on, not yet. But the water samples tested positive for radioactivity.”
Gage stared at her, his eyes growing wide.
“This tells me we might be onto something.”
“This,” he said, nodding to the mess on the floor, “is out of our league. Radioactive anything is out of our league.”
“Bradley’s not sure. He’s having the samples retested.”
She knelt and began to sort through her scattered instruments.
Gage knelt beside her and sorted through the drug vials that hadn’t broken. He stopped and leaned back on his heels.
“The cops, Jackie. This is serious.”
“I—we—need a few more months,” she said firmly, “to get this place into shape. With all the animals pouring in, we can’t afford to get shut down on a technicality.” She felt his protest coming and grabbed his arm. “They’ll all die, Gage. We’re all they’ve got.”
The solemn look on his face wasn’t one she was used to; she needed an argument to forestall his good sense.
“Whoever they are, they wouldn’t try this again. They got what they came for.” The declaration didn’t come out with the confidence she’d intended.
“You don’t have a criminal mind,” he told her. “You don’t know what they’ll try next.”
He had her. Evidently the press conference had caught someone’s attention. No matter how concerned she was about the USDA shutting the Center down, it wasn’t fair to endanger the volunteers. She looked out the lab window and over to the main building, heard the laughter coming from it as the crews and newbies enjoyed their meal.
“I’ll hire a night watchman,” she said. “We can say it’s support for maintenance. There’s no need to spook everybody.”
She grabbed a steel tray and started stacking her scalpels onto it.
“And, Gage, I see that you like him, but if Alex Tavonesi misses more than three shifts, he’s out of here.”
“Got through to the impervious Dr. Brandon, did he?”
“He gets the same treatment as everybody else. If you don’t tell him, I will.”