"This is crazy. Implausible."

Carrel weaved before his computer. He blinked to force his eyes to focus. He had been poring over the stolen documents he had copied to the memory card, flinching every time he heard a car door shut in his neighborhood.

Mrs. Owen, the elderly neighbor who split the duplex with him, nearly gave him a heart attack when she rang his doorbell early in the morning. He shouldn't have snapped at her like he did when all she wanted to do was make sure he wasn't sick. She explained that she had been worried when she didn't see his car leave for work on time like it did every morning.

Morning faded into the lunch hour without his notice as he digested the contents of the documents. Much of them were useless, but the items he suspected were linked to Leslie's death were collected into a new folder.

By late afternoon, his stomach was churning angrily and he took a break to grab a box of crackers from the pantry and a block of sliced cheese from the refrigerator. The bottle of Pinot he grabbed off the counter as an after-thought had not been a good idea.

He picked up the bottle of wine and swirled the last swallow before tipping it up, downing it and banging it back onto the desk.

"All my research!" he shouted into the quiet. "All my goddamn research! This is not what it was meant for!"

He pulled at his hair, getting angrier. He suddenly swiped the papers off his desk onto the floor. They separated in the air and flew like birds scattered by gunshot. With a yank, he pulled the keyboard free of the hard drive and hurled it at the wall. The chair was next. It careened off the wall with a loud crash and skidded back at him as a picture hurtled to the floor and erupted in an explosion of glass. He kicked the chair away with a furious shout.

Spinning back to his desk, he jerked the bottom drawer from his desk and flung it away. Binder after binder was pulled from the shelves and thrown to the ground amid shouts full of anger and pain. Slipping on the debris under his feet, he turned to the five-drawer filing cabinet and hauled on a drawer. Frustrated when the drawer stuck, he thrust his shoulder into it to knock it over. It budged but it didn't tip, so he put his shoulder into it again. Garnering no response, he turned once more to his desk and wrenched out the center drawer.

As it flew open, a small black Smith and Wesson slid to the front, and he stopped. He glowered at it in anger. When he snatched it up to his temple, his finger found the trigger without thought. The barrel felt cool against his head where sweat had beaded up on his scalp. He switched it to his mouth and thumbed the trigger.

A picture knocked backward onto the desk caught his eye. He took the gun out of his mouth and slid to the ground cradling it with the photo. Tears coursed down his cheeks.

"I'm so sorry, Leslie. So sorry." The words came out choked and stuck in the back of his throat. He turned the picture over to look at her face. "I miss you so much."

The photo had been taken on their wedding day. Leslie glowed. The photographer had caught her just as she snuck under his arm to ask him when they would leave. She had been smiling devilishly and looking up into his face when the flash went off.

He was reviewing candidates for the research project Maverick BioScience had assigned to him. The research involved monitoring the health of the subjects under a rigorously controlled diet. Maverick provided packaged meals that each subject would pick up once a week and consume. Subjects charted how much they ate and, then rated flavor, consistency, and visual appeal. He took those charts and asked questions as needed to fill in the missing gaps of information that subjects invariably forgot or didn't understand. He also made sure the subjects did their blood draws when they were supposed to. The lab reports painted a clear picture of what was going on inside their bodies and confirmed they were sticking to the strict diet.

It had been a long day of looking at medical charts and conducting interviews, and she was his last candidate of the day. When she walked in the door, he didn't even look up. He reached his hand out, took her chart, and started reading. She remained standing in front of his desk.

"You're pregnant. You can't be in this trial." He signed his name at the bottom of the document with a sigh.

"What?"

Her tone of voice had caught him off-guard and he looked up, straight into a pair of shocking blue eyes cresting with a wave of tears. "Oh. You didn't know, did you?"

She shook her head and a teardrop splattered the folder he was handing back to her. Her hands were pulled back into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. He saw they were hiding ragged fingernails bitten down to the quick when she took the folder and wiped at the teardrop.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"No, I'm sorry." His insides cracked into a million pieces. "Are you okay?"

She nodded.

"You don't seem okay. Sit down." He waved at the chair behind her and she took a seat brushing away more tears at the corners of her eyes. "Why are you sorry?"

Head bowed, her eyes avoided him. "For taking up your time."

"It's okay." He leaned across the desk and took the chart from her hands. "Let's try this again."

She looked up.

"I'm Dr. Carrel. Congratulations..." he checked the name on the folder and continued with forced enthusiasm, "...Leslie. You're going to have a baby."

"Thank you, Dr. Carrel." She burst into tears.

"Hey hey hey." He came around the desk and put his arm around her. "It will be okay. You don't have to do this on your own. What about the father?"

She shook her head.

"Your parents?"

She shrugged.

"Coffee?"

She looked at him confused. "What?"

"Would you like to go get a cup of coffee?"

She nodded, and they went to a café down the block. On the walk, he learned that the father wouldn't be around. She wasn't even sure who the father was.

Over their cups of coffee, she shared that her father had passed away when she was a child and her mother had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. They talked for hours, sharing stories about their parents, and in the weeks that followed, they fell in love. Leslie spent more and more time at his apartment. She became a permanent fixture, filling the rooms with the symphonies of Bach and Brahms after attending her first piano concerto. She hung pictures on every wall, insisting he purchase brightly colored prints at local art fairs to support who she said were the true starving artists. She told him his world was too dark, and Carlos Carrel had felt his world get lighter and brighter with her in it. Three months later, they were married.

Lost inside the seeds of the golden sunflower print covered with shattered fragments of glass, he realized with a start that someone was pounding on the front door. His world came back into focus. He dropped the gun on the desk with a thump and kicked an erratic path through the strewn papers to the front door.

"Mr. Carrel? It's the police," a muffled voice came from the other side. "Please open the door. Mr. Carrel? We are going to break the door down if you don't open up."

He whipped the door open, weaved and tried to focus.

"What the hell do you want?" he shouted. His French accent slurred thickly in his drunken anger. "I'm a citizen in my own home and you're going to break my door down? Did the company send you to do their dirty work?"

An officer stood outside the door with his gun drawn. "Don't move! Are you Carlos Carrel? If you're Carlos Carrel, you need to tell me right now!"

The officer kept his eye on him and glanced inside the room. "Are you alone, Mr. Carrel?"

"Get out of my home!" Carrel roared. He moved to push the door closed but found a second officer had twisted his body in between the door and frame and thrust it hard against him. Weaving on his feet, Carrel fell back a step. The officer moved in behind and forced him against the brick wall to the side of the door twisting his arm painfully behind his back. He forced Carrel to his knees and then pushed him face down on the ground while the first officer kept his gun trained on him.

The officer strapped Carrel's hands together with a zip strip, and once he was secured, he searched his pockets. Carrel's wallet was retrieved from his back pocket, and then he was pulled into a seated position in the entryway.

The officer flipped the wallet open while Carrel sat panting on the floor. "Okay, Mr. Carrel, take it easy. You can't just assault an officer when he knocks on your door. That's not allowed here in America."

Carrel leaned over and threw up. He started to cry.

The first officer squatted down beside him and softly asked, "Is there anyone else in the home, Mr. Carrel? Your neighbor thought she heard fighting."

"You don't understand," he lamented. Carrel shook his head to clear the fog enveloping his brain. "They're using my research to murder people. They murdered my wife."

The officer stiffened and swung back to the open door. He poked his head forward with a quick motion to scan the room. "Who murdered your wife, Mr. Carrel? Is she inside?"

"No, no, no. It wasn't ALS. Don't you see? They killed her with their poison the same as if they held a gun to her head. You need to let me go." He struggled to his knees but the officer held him in place.

From his seated position, he watched the officer move from the living room to the kitchen and out of sight. When he came back to the door, he held up Carrel's gun by the trigger. "It's clear. Mr. Carrel, I think for your own safety, you are going to have to come with us for the night. I'm going to bag this and take it to the station to check the ID. Are you okay with me doing this, Mr. Carrel?"

"Yes, of course. But I'm not a danger to myself. You can take the gun, but let me go back inside."

"I really don't think that is a good idea, sir." The two officers hoisted Carrel to his feet. The door to his home was pulled shut, and they led him to their waiting car where the flashers were flickering blue and red in the oncoming gloom of evening.

He stared out the window at his condo and caught the twitch of curtains at Mrs. Owen's half of the duplex. The old busybody. His head drooped as his eyes settled on a piece of vomit on his pants.

At the station, Carrel stood rubbing the circulation back into his hands. Calmer following the ride to the station, he allowed the intake officer to fingerprint and photograph him, then followed her like a sheep to slaughter. He entered a cell and sat down on the plastic bench as the door shut with a clang of finality behind him.

Remember Andrew and Evan? If you don't, let me know. It's been a few chapters, but is it too many?

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