Page 133 of In Cold Blood

Noah took it with him. While the coffee was brewing, he brought up the number for North Country Community College and their biology department. He scanned the sheet. There was no number for them and yet according to his browsing history, he’d looked at the college. His kids were too young to go there. It was a long way off. Working off a hunch, Noah phoned the college. He got through to a female administrator and asked to be transferred to biologist Douglas Fairbanks. His bio was listed on the page Luke had been looking at.

“He’s not in at the moment.”

“Would you have a personal contact number?”

“I’m not sure I can give that out.”

“I think you can see from your call display where I’m calling from.”

There was a pause.

“Give me a second.”

She put him on hold and returned with a number. “Please don’t say I gave this out. I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

“You’ve been very helpful.”

Noah poured out two cups of coffee. He took one to Rishi, who was busy working away at getting into the iCloud. Noah went back out and placed the call.

“Yes, this is Douglas Fairbanks, who are you?”

Noah introduced himself and cut to the chase. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but, I have to ask, were you ever contacted by my brother Luke Sutherland?”

“Deputy Sutherland. Yes. We spoke. My condolences to you. I caught the news.”

“Appreciate it.”

Fairbanks took a breath. “He’d seen my name in an article. He thought I would be able to give him answers to questions he had about a new form of drug hitting the market and how easy it would be to manufacture. I spoke with him and also gave him the contact for a colleague of mine at Stanford University. Angela Cuthbert.”

“Why her?”

“She’s a synthetic biologist who has been on the cutting edge of research into the use of yeast to produce opioids for medical use.”

That’s when it all started to come together. Dax’s last word — yeast, Axel alerted to narcotics on Route 73, and the reason why High Peaks Pub and Brewery was able to fly under the radar for so long. “I sent your brother a few articles.”

“Could you send those to me?”

“I sure can.”

Noah reeled off an email.

“Thanks for your time.”

It was the breakthrough he’d been looking for, the missinglink. While Noah waited to receive the articles, he went back in to see how Rishi was coming along.

“Any luck?”

“Nearly. A minute or two longer.” Rishi took a swig from his drink and went back to tapping. “I grabbed his Apple ID email from here,” he said, pointing to the Apple logo in the top left of the computer screen. “I went into preferences, then clicked on Apple ID. It shows the email there. I then requested to reset the password. I will then access the personal email to see if there is anything that can be salvaged from there.”

“That will take a while,” Noah remarked.

“For the average person. Yeah.” He looked up at Noah and smiled. “But that’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He muttered something about using a brute force tool to crack the password. Noah observed the software rotate through countless variations. “You might want to get yourself some breakfast. This is going to take a little while,” Rishi said.

While he was working his magic, Noah checked his inbox.

Twenty minutes passed before he received an email from Fairbanks full of links to articles.

Noah scanned the headlines.