Pam was working at one of the biosafety hoods in Karl’s lab, preparing brain cell cultures for drug testing as soon as they got Ed Coleman’s mass spec results. So far he’d analyzed nine of their thirteen candidates. None matched the real drug. What if none of them matched? She put that thought out of her mind. One of the remaining four had to be it.

She just had two more dishes to go when Karl came over to the hood. It was after one and she knew he’d be clamoring to go to lunch, which he almost religiously ate at noon.

“Hang on just another minute,” she said. “Let me finish this and I’ll buy you an extra sandwich.”

“No, it’s not lunch. I got a call from Ed Coleman. He has news.”

She whirled around on her lab stool to face him. “What?”

“He didn’t say. Just that we should come over.”

She put the dishes aside and got up to follow Karl out of the lab. This could be it. But it could also be another setback. Why didn’t Coleman say anything?

Karl had to struggle to keep up with her as she hurried across campus to the chemistry building. When they reached Coleman’s office, his door was open and several sheets of paper were spread out on his conference table.

“We’ve got a match,” he said.

Pam’s eyes started to tear up. This is it. The drug I’ve been after for all these years.

She sat down to steady herself as Coleman showed them two tracings. “This is the spectrum from the unknown compound you gave me earlier, and this is from one of the candidates you got from the chemical library.”

He lined them up and Pam could see they were identical. Coleman tapped the mass spec tracing. “There’s no question about it. This is your drug.”

Pam let out a deep breath. “Are you sure? Is it really the same compound?”

Karl answered with a chuckle. “You can see it is, Pam. This is your drug.”

She jumped up and managed to get her arms around both of them in a group hug.

• • •

Jake was surprised to get a mid-afternoon call from Pam.

“We’ve got it,” she said. “Ed Coleman identified the right drug by mass spec.”

“What!” Jake almost plowed into the car in front of him on Memorial Drive. He quickly pulled off the road. “My God Pam, that’s fabulous! Congratulations.”

She laughed. “It’s such an enormous relief, I can hardly believe it. After all this, I finally have a real Alzheimer’s drug.”

“It’s wonderful, it really is. So now what? Do you have more work to do there?”

“Karl and I are going to set up some big experiments over the next couple of days so that we’ll have biological data in the brain cell system. Once we get those started, I’m going to come home. It’ll take a couple of weeks before the cultures are ready to read, and I’ll come back here then to analyze the results.”

“Good, I miss you. And I also have some news about Prescott. I’ve confirmed that he was with Holly at the Gordon Conference and continued seeing her back in Boston.”

“So you were right. But still, that just means they were having an affair. Not that he was involved in trying to steal the drug.”

“True enough,” Jake said. “But I’ll bet what happened is that Prescott offered her a job in his lab if she sabotaged the work and pinned the fraud on you. Then the two of them could pretend to independently discover the real compound and get all the credit. Except he wound up killing her when he decided he didn’t trust her.”

Pam sighed. “I don’t know. He may be an asshole, but a killer? It’s hard to believe. Maybe Holly just killed herself when she was about to be exposed and laid the blame on me out of anger. Prescott didn’t have to have anything to do with her death.”

“Maybe. I agree that’s a possibility, but my gut tells me otherwise. I’m going to have to find out, for your own safety. If I’m right, we can’t leave him running around.”

“Yes, I can see that. So what are you going to do next?”

“Wait for one more piece of evidence. Prescott told me he was going to send me a copy of his paper claiming to have discovered his own Alzheimer’s drug. Let’s see how it compares to yours.”