Free Deadly Chemistry (Entangled Ignite) by Teri Anne Stanley

road to scientific glory.
    But she never did get a single beaker back on its proper shelf that afternoon.
    She probably would have made more progress, but she kept getting distracted with worries about how to find her missing drug. She did manage to clean her algae tank and get it up and running again. Fortunately, it didn’t require any sophisticated equipment—just a jug of nutrient-rich water and some UV light. Barring a working grow light, a sunny window would do, which was what she placed the tank under.
    Sunshine through a north-facing window wasn’t going to be enough to dig her out of her step one deficit, however. It took a week—under optimal conditions—to grow enough raw material to harvest the step one algae, dry it into pellets, and extract it into the potent, liquid step two substance, another few days to process it into step three—the chemical she hoped to use to launch herself into pharmaceutical history. And her meeting with the Pemberton society was in five days.
    And she’d tried to avoid thinking about this, but she was really beginning to be bugged about that news story she’d heard yesterday. What if that Devil’s Dust crap was her drug? She’d been noticing a shortage in her step two production. Could someone have possibly been siphoning off the drug as it dripped from the condenser, even before the lab was sacked and robbed?
    She mentally reviewed the production steps. After she grew algae in the flasks, she strained it out, mixed in the toxic chemical that would cause it to release the drug later, and dried it into pellets, which she kept until she had enough to process. Then, she mixed the pellets with extraction solution and put them in another set of flasks with a condenser. The step two drug dripped out of the condenser. For every liter of extraction, she should get ten milliliters of step two. And she did. She got the ten milliliters, anyway. But not as much concentrated step two as she had the first several times she’d run the experiment. Could someone be taking step two and replacing it with extraction solution?
    Who would know how to do that? Maybe someone who had heard one of her seminars, when she’d presented her data. But as she thought about the members of the Biology Department, she couldn’t imagine a single one of them taking her drug. Who would even know how to sell it to bad guys?
    She had to find out who had her drug and get it back. But how?
    Put an ad in the paper? Drug dealers probably didn’t read the paper. For that matter, regular people didn’t read the paper anymore. Craigslist? Make a plea on the news, like parents who’d lost a child? Tacky, at best. Hire a posse of mercenaries?
    At this last thought, Lauren started to giggle. She envisioned herself wearing camo, striding back and forth in front of a group of former Navy SEALs, giving them a speech about the dangers of drugs and the necessity of developing safe alternatives.
    The one thing she couldn’t do was tell the police that she had to get her drug back. If they knew she was going to try to get to the stuff before they got their hands on it, they wouldn’t tell her anything about the progress of the investigation. Heck, they’d probably suspect her. But Mike had some sort of connection to Chief Crawford.
    And what about Mike? Should she avoid him, like Evan suggested? Lauren was bummed about that. Way more than she should have been after knowing the man all of what? Thirty-some hours? Her instincts said that she should get closer to him, find out what he knew—but she thought perhaps that was her girly parts’ influence on her instincts and not her rational brain.
    At six thirty, Lauren finally gave up trying to work. She’d forgotten to eat lunch, and was getting a whale of a headache. She needed to get home and feed her cat, then call Crawford and find out if he’d made any progress. Because he would totally appreciate that. She should also try to sleep, because if she couldn’t figure out