Deadly Seduction by Cate Noble

staccato tapping of her functional pumps. It dawned on her that she could probably walk these halls blindfolded. The lack of windows and outside doors prompted many to compare the basement to a maze. No wonder she sometimes felt like the rat in the maze. Searching, searching.
    As always when she came this way, her thoughts sank. How many times had she walked these very same stairwells with her father before he’d retired “early” nine months ago, listening to his diatribe on exercise? And how many times had she walked them afterward, the weight of his suicide nearly breaking her?
    Suicide. She blinked back angry tears wondering how much longer she could keep up the act. No way had her father taken his own life.
    No one who knows what I know, who has seen what I’ve seen, leaves this business alive, her father had seemingly prophesied in a cryptic journal entry. Had he truly expected to die?
    Marguerite spotted her and waved her directly toward the double doors to her right. “You can wait there. He’ll be right with you.”
    Steeling herself, Erin stepped inside the very room that used to be her father’s office. Funny to think she’d practically grown up here, had slept many nights on the shabby old plaid couch that used to be in the corner. Following her mother’s death when Erin was only two years old, her father simply brought her along when he had to work late. Or he’d have the housekeeper drop her off when she left for the day.
    Her nose wrinkled at the faint smell of stale cigars. While the ancient facility was currently tobacco-free, for decades everyone had smoked in their offices. No amount of paint could ever cover it.
    She took a seat in front of the massive mahogany desk that Dr. Winchette had moved in when he’d taken over the office, converting it to a formal space used only for meetings. He was, after all, in charge of one of the country’s oldest mental health research programs. She eyed the montage of diplomas, citations, and certificates on the walls. Even more plaques, awards, and photos cluttered the credenza.
    She ignored them, her gaze coming to rest on the solitary picture frame that sat on the desk. It was an old photo of her father and Winchette back in their college days. Alpha-Geek-Geek. Horned rim glasses, white lab coats, and overflowing pocket protectors. Her father used to joke that if she looked up the word “nerd” in Webster’s , this picture would illustrate it.
    The two men had acted the part as well. As a child, Erin had spent countless hours watching and listening to her father and Dr. Winchette argue over an experiment. The two men would stand at the huge blackboard that used to grace the entire back wall and argue with chalk, both of them scribbling equations so rapidly that she’d get whiplash trying to keep up.
    At the time she couldn’t grasp any of it, but watching their process had always been both amazing and unsettling. The charged air, the parry and riposte. A stranger would have thought they were indeed fighting a duel. But always in the end, they’d formulate a new hypothesis that would leave them cackling like children.
    “It’s how we work,” her father had explained when she was older. “I am rock-solid reason, Stanley is unruly brilliance. We spark and collide, ultimately creating bold new worlds.”
    She stared at the photograph, wondering again if her father’s posthumous warning to trust no one included Stanley Winchette, who had once been his nearest and dearest friend.
    Though her father never discussed it with her, Winchette had insisted that the nosedive the two men’s personal relationship took following her father’s resignation amid unsavory rumors had been a temporary glitch born of embarrassment.
    Winchette had then gone on to draw a parallel between his professional relationship with Erin. “God knows you and I have had our awkward moments, but we’ve moved on.”
    The door opened and Dr. Winchette entered briskly. All business, he