His hand closed around it and then just stayed there.

“You didn’t want the duct tape?” I looked around to see what else he might have wanted. “Pliers? Phillips screwdriver?”

The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it. “Sorry,” he said. His face was freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “I thought you were that mail person.”

“Flip,” I said. “No. She delivered the box to my office by mistake.”

“Figures.” He pulled himself out from under the furnace and stood up. “I really am sorry,” he said, dusting himself off. “I don’t usually act that rude to people who are trying to deliver things. It’s just that Flip…”

“I know,” I said, nodding sympathetically.

He pushed his hand through his sandy hair. “The last time she delivered a box to me she set it on top of one of the monitors, and it fell off and broke a video camera.”

“That sounds like Flip,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at him.

When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight: ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O’Reilly wasn’t any of them. He was about my age and about my height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on the knees. They’d shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they’d been let down.

The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn’t. For one thing, there were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn’t even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that made it impossible for me to categorize him.