Seeley said, “There's no case that isn't a crapshoot. Things come up. But, as far as I can see, you're in good shape.”

Leonard put a hand on Seeley's arm, pleased. “We can crack open a bottle of champagne tonight.”

Leonard's dismay when Seeley told him that he'd decided to stay at a hotel and not at his house in Atherton left Seeley no choice but to accept his brother's dinner invitation.

The walk to Steinhardt's office took them past laboratories that looked little different from the high-school labs at St. Boniface, where he and Leonard were students thirty years ago. There were more plastic containers than Seeley remembered, and there hadn't been laptops on the scarred black lab counters, but the shelves lined with reagent bottles were the same, as were the spaghetti of tubing that looped down from fat-globed flasks into glass beakers and the neatly labeled drawers, the refrigerator posted with black-and-yellow warnings, and the exhaust hood under which the class clown manufactured his stink bombs. White lab coats hung from hooks along the walls. Somehow science had made all these extraordinary leaps using little more than a high-school junior's lab tools.

Seeley said, “How closely did you monitor Steinhardt's work?”

Leonard heard the concern behind the question. “You just told me there weren't any loose ends.” His good humor had evaporated.

“I want to make sure Warren isn't a problem.”

Leonard took Seeley's arm and steered him around a jumbo-size doormat at the entrance to one of the labs. The white vinyl mat looked as sticky as flypaper and was clotted with shoe prints. “Real high tech,” Leonard said. “It's to get the crud off your shoes when you go into the lab.”

He continued on, holding Seeley's elbow. “I review Steinhardt's work as closely as anybody's. When he started getting results, I looked even more closely. But remember, Mike, I'm running seven fully staffed labs here.”