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Chapter 12

Eric carried the bowl, a set of chopsticks and a bottle of a local micro-brewed beer through an archway and into his equally retro-styled dining room. The wrought iron and wood-grained Formica dinette set, with its black vinyl-covered chairs, had come with the house. Since the table was easy to clean and the chairs were fairly comfortable, he'd never had any reason to replace the set, but tonight, looking at it made him wince. It was probably a good thing he hadn't invited Lori to come in. His house was a 1970s decorator's nightmare.

He ate his snack in a few minutes, while he glanced through The Evening Star, Kilkenny's small daily newspaper. It was lousy, as usual, with a plethora of spelling and grammatical errors and a severely biased view of both local and national politics, but he'd discovered that as a member of the community, reading the paper was a sacred responsibility. Local shopkeepers, for instance, tended to get offended if you hadn't seen their lovely little write-up in the business column and then you got all the worst cuts of meat, or last week's produce. When he'd finished the comics and his food, he piled his dishes into the aging dishwasher, collected another bottle of beer and headed to his television game system, where he spent the next three hours blowing virtual aliens into digitized puddles of slag.

Lori, too, passed a restless night. What could she have been thinking of, kissing a man she'd only just met? It was utterly unlike her. She might be impulsive about many things, but life had taught her to be careful when it came to matters of the heart. Besides, after her broken engagement last year, she had promised herself no more complications until after her tenure review. And God knew, any sort of relationship with the male of the species definitely constituted a complication.

She picked up the glass microscope slide containing a tiny piece of the reptile skin she'd found the night before and centered it carefully on the stage of her high-powered Nikon scope. The scale pattern was interesting and annoyingly unfamiliar. Most lizards had relatively small scales, really nothing more than tiny hardened patches in the skin. Unlike the scales of fish, reptile scales weren't something you could pluck out, like a hair or a feather. For reptiles, the scales were a characteristic of the skin itself. When snakes or lizards shed their outer layer of skin, the scales themselves weren't lost. The ghostly-looking shed was merely the translucent top layer of the whole epidermis, scale pattern and all. While snakes shed their entire skin surface at once, leaving a snake-shaped "ghost", lizards shed in a patchy, peeling manner, similar to a sunburned human. This bit of skin under Lori's microscope had been ready to shed, the outer layer was white and dried, but it must have snagged on a nail or splinter, because a small piece of actual flesh, about the size of a kernel of corn, had been torn away along with the discarded scrap.

Almost instinctively, she reached for a pencil and a pad of paper and began to sketch the scale pattern. The individual scales were larger than those of any lizard with which she was familiar, but they weren't the smooth, regular scales of a snake's belly, either. Lori had reasoned that if they could identify the reptile, they would be a huge step closer to unmasking the hacker. Large reptiles were relatively common pets, but each individual species was rare enough that the local pet store owners and other reptile enthusiasts would very likely know just who kept a particular rare lizard. If it was a monitor, as Lori suspected and therefore a carnivore, the owner would almost inevitably have to frequent one of the local pet shops for rats or mice to feed his pet.

She glanced fondly at Q. One of the advantages of owning an iguana was that they were vegetarians. She'd kept carnivorous reptiles, in the course of teaching and research, but she hated having to feed them live animals. Q, on the other hand, was quite happy with his salads and vitamin supplements. Her leopard geckoes were carnivorous, but they were so small that their diet primarily consisted of crickets. Sacrificing bugs was nowhere near as traumatic for Lori as feeding mice and rats.

She finished her sketch and examined it critically. The Nikon had a camera attachment, but she'd left her digital camera at home, so the drawing would have to do. She carefully wrapped the remaining skin in plastic, then placed the neatly labeled sample into the freezer. Lori knew she was a bit of a slob in her personal life, but in the lab she was a total perfectionist.

Moving over to her desk, she booted up her computer, humming along to an old Eagles tune that was playing on her favorite web radio station. Following her usual routine, she checked her e-mail, returning a few greetings from friends and family members. She smiled fondly at the jpeg her sister Kelly had attached, exhibiting Kelly's five-year-old daughter's most recent artwork. Lori printed the drawing and used a magnet to stick it to the side of an ancient olive-drab filing cabinet. The picture of an improbably vividly colored dinosaur was signed to Aunt Lori with love, from Jasmine. There was also reminder from Kelly regarding her son Jordan's upcoming birthday party. Lori obediently checked her personal calendar to be sure the day was noted, which, of course, it was. She'd be there with bells on. Being an aunt was fun. You got all the benefits of having kids, but you never had to be the one to worry about discipline or dentist appointments.