SixWhen late in the day T. J. D’Abro at the Austin Sheriff’s Department got a call from one of the physicists she’d met at CFRC not twenty-four hours earlier, she was already half out the door—for good. In her half-belligerent mood she verged on telling the guy to f**k off. Nah, she’d put him on hold. You know, why not celebrate? She puckered her lips and told him to meet her at Scholz’s Beer Garten.
She would have missed him stumbling in if she hadn’t glanced up from one of the picnic tables out back at the exact moment, scowling at the “game over” that blinked obnoxiously from her wrist. From a distance, he seemed tense, fatigued, distracted—she couldn’t tell what—surely no more festive than the voice over the phone. She could tell he didn’t come here often. That was dead obvious from t
