Free Prescription: Makeover by Jessica Andersen Page A

transmitter that was tucked deep into her ear and hidden beneath her long hair.
    His restraint should have soothed her. Instead, as she climbed out of the SUV and shut the door, then crossed the parking lot toward the building the guard had indicated, nerves pulled her chest tight, making it hard to breathe.
    She paused at the double doors, suddenly unable to believe she was really going undercover in a dress and heels. She didn’t have her gun, didn’t have Tom, Dick and Harry or any of her usual equipment. She had a camera clipped to her bra — which was pink, for God’s sake — and nothing to work with besides her wits.
    “You going to stand there all day?” William’s transmitted question was dry as dust, but she knew he was really asking,
Are you going to be okay?
She felt a momentary flare of emotion at his concern, then cursed herself for wishful thinking. In all likelihood he’d really meant,
Move your flower-covered butt.
    “I’m fine,” she said and pushed open one of two glass doors that were embossed with researchers’ names in gold paint. “I’m going in.”
    “I’ve got a visual from the camera,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Don’t give me a running commentary or you’ll look like an idiot.”
    She found his sarcasm perversely comforting as she entered the building, stifling the urge to say things like
I’m on the elevator
and
I’m buzzing to get let in now.
As she stood in the chrome-and-glass waiting area just outside the elevator on the fifth floor, though, she couldn’t help feeling as if William were standing just behind her, smoothing out the jitter of nerves that gathered in her stomach. Figuring what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt either of them, she allowed herself to take comfort in the image as a hazy figure appeared on the other side of the frosted glass. There was a buzzing noise and the door popped free of its lock and pushed inward.
    The man who held open the door was about her height, shy of six feet by an inch or two, but rang in at about twice her mass. He wasn’t fat, more like heavy all over, with large arms and powerful-looking legs beneath a gray suit, white shirt and conservative navy tie. As in his photographs, Lukas Kupfer’s face seemed caught somewhere between laughter and sadness as he held out his hand. “Miss Roth, welcome. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
    She shook. “The pleasure is mine, Dr. Kupfer. Thank you so much for allowing me to visit your lab on such short notice.”
    “Anything to help out the good folk at Boston General.” He grinned, the expression taking at least five years off his looks. “That’s the joy of working in academia rather than industry — we get to share the fun stuff.”
    He ushered her through the door and into a lobby that was done in muted grays and beiges. It held two cluttered reception desks facing away from a wall of filing cabinets, printers and copy machines. Both desks were empty since it was after quitting time, but their surfaces gave the impression of ordered chaos. Two of the walls were hung with colorful prints — fluorescent-labeled cells on one side and schematic pictures of DNA molecules on the other. The remaining wall space was taken up by doorways: four leading to offices; one to what looked like a break room; and an airlock-type doorway in the far wall offering access to the lab area.
    Kupfer waved her across the lobby. “Come on into my office. I want to give you a couple of reprints for background info, and then we can head into the lab and have a look around.”
    His office was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were uniformly stuffed to the brim with journals, along with enough books to fill a small library, their titles ranging from
The Clinicogenetic Characteristics of the Muscular Dystrophies
and a thin volume entitled
A Boy Like Me — DMD Explained,
to what looked like just about every
Far Side
compendium ever published. The stacked journals, papers and books leaned