The Tau Ceti Transmutation (Amazon) by Alex P. Berg

Anything?” I asked as I stood. “That’s a pretty blank card. What if I need help with a homework assignment?”
    Fran lifted an eyebrow and a smile tickled the corner of her lips. “Anything, Investigator. Though that wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”
    It took me a moment, but the gears in my head finally caught. “Oh. Um, excellent. I’ll keep that in mind, and, um…maybe we’ll talk later?”
    “I’d love to,” said Fran. “But not for a couple days, ok? I’ve got this grant stuff to finish, after all.”
    I left the professor’s office in a bit of a haze, wondering how I’d managed to make such a solid impression on the woman after bumbling my way through our conversation. I was sure I’d proven myself to be completely ignorant of her field of study as well as incompetent at my own job.
    Despite his reminder about my long lady drought during our climber ride, Carl apparently decided I needed to get my head out of the clouds and back to our maddening case. “So, what now?”
    “Now?” I said. “Now we call Valerie and see what the heck is going on, because there’s definitely something fishy about this operation we’ve gotten ourselves sucked into. Paige?”
    The trilling in my head started again.
    “You think she’s involved in this somehow?” said Carl.
    “I don’t know, but someone knows something we don’t, and I’m running out of ideas. Paige, anything?”
    Nope, she said. In fact—yup, she just blocked you.
    The ringing stopped.
    “Wait…” I said. “Valerie blocked me from calling her? Are you sure you pinged the right Brain?”
    Of course I’m sure, said Paige. She must still be busy, although I don’t know why she wouldn’t simply decline the call again.
    Carl and I glanced at each other.
    Maybe you were right earlier, said Paige.
    “About what?”
    Maybe someone did want to get us out of the way for a while, said Paige. Maybe it was Valerie herself.
    “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “As you said, if she didn’t want us involved in her personal business she never would’ve come calling in the first place. No, there must be something else going on.”
    I shook my head. Despite my best efforts and the lingering euphoria related to Fran’s interest, I couldn’t stop the knight in shining armor inside of me from thinking the beautiful, busty Valerie Meeks might be in trouble.
    “Let’s head back to Val’s place,” I suggested. “If we can’t call her, maybe we can track her down the old-fashioned way.”
    Nobody else had any better suggestions, so we exited the building and caught a cab to the tube station.
     

9
    Our car dropped us off in front of Valerie’s glossy, steel high-rise, and we took the lift back to the fifth floor. During the ride from downtown, I’d had Paige give Valerie’s Brain another try, but our call had immediately been declined. Despite having just met the strawberry blonde earlier in the day, and despite the fact that I felt she was somehow yanking my chain, I couldn’t help but feel a strange attraction to her—an attraction which, at the moment, manifested itself as concern.
    I approached her door and had Paige ring the chimes. As I waited for a response, I stared into the frosted glass and suffered a vision of the future: Valerie and I arguing furiously, me over her lackadaisical approach to her own safety, her over my lack of progress on her case, both of us yelling and pointing fingers and feeling our blood rush and boil before ultimately falling into each others arms’ and kissing passionately.
    Carl crashed my daydream party. “Hey, Rich?”
    I blinked the fog away from my eyes. “Huh?”
    “We need to reevaluate our plan.”
    “Oh, right, right,” I said. “You want to try the old good cop, bad cop routine? Or I could pose as the gallant savior and you could pose as the third wheel that gets lost.”
    Carl gave me a furrowed eyebrow sort of look. “Um…that’s not what I meant. The door’s ajar.”
    I