Free TrackingDesire by Elizabeth Lapthorne Page A

letting Kelly, Flame and Matt know where she and Julian were within
the house. A few brief acknowledgements came across crisply and once again
silence hummed in her earpiece.
    Side by side, she and Julian crept down the stairs, the thin
beam of the flashlight concealing as much as it showed. When they reached the
bottom of the stairs, Liv shone the light around until she found a desk lamp
sitting on a bench.
    Julian walked over to it and switched it on. The bulk of the
room lit up with an eerie orange glow, a few of the far corners still darkly
shadowed.
    Even so, most of the room was visible, and Liv felt her
mouth drop open. Benches ran the length of the basement, plants covering almost
every available surface. Only thin pathways had been left, crossing trails that
made it possible to move around the basement.
    “Damn,” Liv said with ill-concealed irritation, “it’s just
where she fiddles with her plants. What a pain in the ass. Now what do we do?”

Chapter Six
     
    “Well, babe,” Julian replied with more than a little
sympathy, “we’re here. We might as well look around. It’s possible she
may have hidden the drugs here.”
    Liv flashed her light around, her heart heavy with
disappointment and the crushing defeat of her hopes being squashed. She had
felt so sure they would find something useable, that they would uncover
a sample of the antidote Will wanted so badly. Liv had been all but able to
taste it, and now she faced the reality that they probably wouldn’t find it at
all.
    “I guess,” she replied, discouraged.
    Julian headed straight to the lab benches and pored over the
notes, lists and assorted papers spread over every conceivable surface.
    Less eager, Liv shone the beam over the room and looked at
the different varieties of plants, peering into corners and crevices, nooks and
crannies as she nosed her way around the room. It seemed this was a
mini-greenhouse where Blossom grew, spliced and modified her plants. Many were
in various stages of grafting and harvesting, most of them with tags and notes
explaining in a barely decipherable shorthand what they were.
    It was only at the very back of the basement, against one of
the far walls, that she discovered fume hoods had been installed and not
mentioned on the blue prints. Liv touched a button on the side of the hood and
a light appeared inside the glassed-off cavity. One switch was marked “Light”,
the other “Fan”.
    Not wanting to draw undue attention to herself, Liv decided
not to turn on the extraction fan. Aside from not really needing it—there was
no detectable smell and she sure as hell would not be sticking her head inside
the hood to sniff anything—Liv was not certain how noisy it would be, and even
whether it might be audible from the upper levels of the house. Having the
lights on so she could see clearly what lay inside was enough for now.
    The first fume hood she came across was full of more plant
materials. Liv didn’t really have a clue whether what she saw was important or
not. There were a few undeterminable items ground into beakers, grafts in
solution and a couple of petri dishes. The clear bases with matching lids held
what she assumed were different colors of agar, and tiny, fuzzy,
brown-and-green things growing within the plastic. She assumed they were
experiments of some sort, but it was well beyond her understanding.
    Curious and more than slightly freaked out, Liv looked in
the second fume cupboard.
    It took a moment for her eyes to take in exactly what she
was seeing. More beakers and glassware had been scattered around the large
cavity in the wall, and the glass door had been pulled down to protect the
contents from spilling out or contaminating the basement itself. But very
clearly the scales, titration units and paraphernalia were drug-related, not
plant-related.
    “Julian,” Liv breathed excitedly, her adrenaline once again
surging as her heart sped up in excitement. “Julian, come here. Look!”
    In an