The Love Potion by Sandra Hill

had been cordoned off. He discovered that there had been a break-in the night before. Drawers had been pulled out, file cabinets were overturned, bottles smashed, papers scattered everywhere. A detective he’d represented once in a messy divorce suit told him off the recordthat all of Sylvie’s files and some of her experimental rats had been taken, though Luc noticed that a few of the rodent couples were humping away in the corner, despite the turmoil surrounding them.
    But there wasn’t a sign of Sylvie. Apparently she hadn’t been seen since yesterday.
    “Where’s Sylvie?” he asked her boss, Charles Henderson, who was standing in the open doorway of his office, talking with a police officer.
    The officer left and Henderson gave him a disdainful once-over, apparently because he hadn’t shaved in two days. Some hidden part of him wondered if his clothes were dirty or wrinkled, as they had been when he was a little boy, but, no, he’d donned clean jeans and a cotton shirt, fresh from the laundry packets. Maybe Henderson looked down on him just because he was who he was. Yep, that was probably it.
    “I have no idea where Sylvie is,” Henderson replied. “I thought maybe you would know, LeDeux.”
    Me? Why does everyone think I have some relationship with Sylvie? “She was supposed to meet me here this afternoon.”
    “Why?”
    “None of your freakin’ business, that’s why.” He inhaled deeply to control his temper. “Where’s Sylvie?”
    “I don’t know. I told her when I saw her yesterday not to come in today, but—”
    “You fired her?”
    “No, I didn’t fire her.”
    “Suspended?”
    “Look, I don’t have to explain myself to you. But if you must know, I advised her to stay away for a few days till the board met.”
    “What does the board have to do with her coming to work or not?”
    “Are you her lawyer or something?”
    “Something.”
    “The board needs to discuss all the ramifications of Sylvie’s…I mean, our…uh, product.”
    Luc’s eyes went wide with sudden understanding. “You intend to market her love potion? Now? Before the human testing?”
    “Well, that hasn’t been decided yet.”
    “And Sylvie agreed to this?”
    “Well, not exactly. But it’s not up to her. Any work done on Terrebonne Pharmaceuticals property belongs to the company,” Henderson proclaimed. His eyes shifted craftily with those last words.
    “Is that, so?” Luc swung on his heel, about to leave and hunt Sylvie down elsewhere. Apparently, Sylvie needed a good lawyer. Not that he was about to volunteer.
    “If you find Sylvie, tell her she’d better deliver those formula files to me right away. We need to put them under lock and key. And she’d better bring those two lab rats back, too.”
    “So, let me get this straight,” Luc said, peering back over his shoulder. “Neither you, nor the perps, got your hands on the precious formula?”
    Stains of red bloomed on Henderson’s cheeks, but he clamped his thin lips together.
    Luc smiled. Maybe Sylvie wasn’t as dumb as he’d thought.
     
    On second thought, Luc concluded a half hour later, Sylvie Fontaine was the dumbest broad this side of the Mississippi.
    Her home was a god-awful mess. Drawers pulled out and emptied, their contents tossed here and there. Paintings ripped off the walls. Oriental carpets flipped up. Chair and sofa cushions lifted off and slitted, their stuffing pulled out.
    Dumb, dumb, dumb! How could she have left her front door unlocked? Well, maybe it had been unlocked by the vandals once they’d entered. But that didn’t excuse her other dumb mistakes. How could a single woman live in a town house with first-floor French doors? All that glass was an open invitation to a burglar, as evidenced by the broken panes he’d seen first thing on entering her home. Hadn’t she ever heard of an alarm system? Or a guard dog?
    Good thing she wasn’t home, or the person who’d broken into her home might have done more than ransack