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had shut behind Meg, it opened again to admit a thin-hipped woman in her early forties with short, dark hair and piercing eyes. Annette Foulke, the nontenured Assistant Director of the Biochemistry Department at Thrace University, was Meg’s equal in the hospital’s hierarchy and had been anything but subtle in her efforts to block Meg from being voted tenure.
    As far as Annette was concerned, the position should be hers.
    Gritting her teeth as Annette sat primly beside Falco, Meg turned to Zach Cage, who sat behind his large, efficiently cluttered desk. “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.”
    “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Falco said. His lips twitched briefly, and she had to give him points for knowing his Monty Python .
    But all humor fled when Cage gestured her to the remaining empty chair. “Sit. We need to talk about what happened yesterday, and what we’re going to do about it. Annette is here because she’s the head of the hospital ethics committee. Mr. Falco is here to represent his interests.”
    Meg winced. Oh, hell. Somehow they’d figuredout that Max had used Raine’s DNA for an unauthorized test. She sat, but stayed forward in her chair as she said, “If we hadn’t done that genetic screen, the patient wouldn’t have been identified as having—”
    Cage held up a hand. “I’m not talking about your patients, Dr. Corning. I’m talking about what happened yesterday at the construction site.”
    Meg frowned and played it cool, as though she hadn’t dreamed of the fact that she’d almost died. “It was an accident. I’m fine.”
    “It wasn’t an accident,” Cage said quietly. He tapped a file folder on his desk. “The permanent railing was removed and somebody sawed through the temporary wood railing. The police have ruled it sabotage. They want to talk to you as soon as we’re done here.”
    “But I—” Meg’s breath whooshed out as his words caught up with her brain. “ Sabotage? Impossible!”
    But she flashed back on the jostling crowd. She’d pushed through the pedestrians near the construction site, called Erik’s name, reached for him—
    And she’d been bumped from behind. Hard.
    “We think the hospital may have been targeted by someone who doesn’t approve of the new wing. This is the latest in a string of problems with the new construction,” Cage said. “When I took over, it seemed reasonable to continue building the Gabney Wing, though of course, under a new name.”
    Meg nodded, brain spinning with too much information, too many questions. “Of course.” She knew that the previous head administrator, Leo Gabney,had put the project into motion before being fired. Though the construction was a major undertaking, so much of the preliminary work had already been done—and paid for—that it had made fiscal sense for the hospital to break ground.
    That had been eighteen months ago, and broken ground was almost all they had to show for it now. Broken ground and some cement forms.
    Cage shifted in his chair, face creasing with regret. “This added delay—on top of cost overruns—puts me in a tough position. Gabney left us with debts, and the plans weren’t nearly as complete as they appeared at first. We probably shouldn’t have gone ahead with the project, but now that we’ve started building—and made promises to the clinicians and researchers who are lined up to use the space—we can’t turn back.”
    Meg’s heart picked up a beat as she realized where this was going. “We’ve already nixed the idea of selling off the NPT technology to cover the construction costs. We agreed that the long-term licensing income outweighed the short term gain from a sale.”
    “That was before someone tried to kill you,” Erik said bluntly.
    “That’s ridiculous!” She shot to her feet. “You heard what Cage said—the construction project was the target. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “Detectives Peters and Sturgeon