I breathed a sigh of relief when I stepped down safely onto the basement floor. I began looking around, trying to remember which computer Danny had been sitting at. It wasn’t easy. All the makeshift tables were liberally strewn with desk kibble, those random bits of flotsam and jetsam that seem to accumulate within five minutes after you sit a human being down at a desk. Instead of the kids’ pictures, award plaques, and vacation souvenirs you’d find in a typical office, the students seemed to have accumulated rather a lot of action figures, signs with incomprehensible slogans, and pictures of buxom female anime figures. The desks probably seemed incredibly personal to their owners, redolent with the flavor of their unique talents and interests, but they all blended into one to me. And I realized with a pang that I couldn’t even tell if their displays were cool or lame; I was the wrong gender and generation.
“Just let me find Danny’s desk,” I muttered.
As I was still pondering, I heard voices above.
“Bron? We need to talk.”
Danny Oh.
“Not so loud,” Bronwyn said. “Someone could come in.”
“There’s nobody here,” he said. “But we could go in the basement.”
“Good idea,” she said. “More private.”
She was using her flirtatious voice, the one that subtly suggested she had more in mind than a private conversation. Just force of habit, or was the lovely Bron two-timing Ramon?
I quickly ducked into the laundry room and hid myself behind the door, turning the light off but leaving the door open so I could overhear.
Steps sounded on the stairway. I glanced down and realized that while I might be well hidden, Holmes and Watson jutted out into the open doorway rather obviously. I looked behind me and saw a mountain of dirty laundry. Was that all ours? Surely we weren’t letting the students use the machines again. I thought we’d laid down the law about them going to the Laundromat in town after the first week, when we’d had major problems with our septic system.
No time to worry about that now. I eased myself back onto the laundry and, for good measure, grabbed an empty plastic laundry basket, turned it upside down, and pulled it on top of my head. Better than hiding behind the door. Not only was I sitting down, but I could peek out through the ventilation holes in the laundry basket and see at least some of what was happening in the basement.
The hollow sound of steps on the wooden stairs gave way to a few dull steps on the concrete of the basement floor. Then Bronwyn appeared. Luckily she decided to stop while she was still within my limited field of vision. Danny joined her.
“What did you want to ask me, Danny?” Bronwyn said. She probably was a wonderful actress. It was the voice—warm, intimate, caressing. The little tremor when she said his name was priceless. And from the poleaxed look on his face, he was falling for it, completely.
“I saw something,” Danny said. “At least I thought I did.”
“What?” Bronwyn said in an almost inaudible whisper.
“It looked like—but it couldn’t be . . .”
His voice faded away. He shook his head slightly but didn’t take his eyes from hers.
“You know you can tell me, Danny,” Bronwyn cooed. “What did you see?”
“It looked like you were putting something in Dr. Wright’s tea.” It wasn’t an accusation—more a plea for her to tell him it wasn’t so.
“Only some of Ramon’s sleeping medicine,” Bronwyn said. “Just a couple of pills. We—I didn’t want to hurt her. Just to knock her out for a while until we could figure out how to handle the problem.”
I digested this for a while and assumed Danny was doing the same. It was a masterful little bit of manipulation—the change from “we” to “I” suggesting, of course, that she was taking the blame for something that was ultimately Ramon’s idea.
Actually, from the look of it, Danny wasn’t digesting it. Bron was running her fingers across his chest, tracing the letters on his T-shirt, and from the look on his face, Danny wasn’t thinking much.
So apparently Bronwyn had also put something in Dr. Wright’s tea. Before or after she saw Ramon drugging it? And why did Bronwyn lie to Ramon, telling him that Danny had seen him put something in the tea? Was she just trying to pry an admission out of Ramon? Then why not say that she’d seen him? Why bring Danny into it? Or had Danny seen both of them?
I decided I could learn to dislike Bronwyn.
“You should tell the police,” Danny said. His voice sounded a little hoarse.
“They’d get the wrong idea,” Bronwyn said.
“You don’t know what those sleeping pills did to her.”
I had to hand it to Danny. He was clearly trying. And also clearly so besotted with Bronwyn that there was no danger he’d spill the beans.
“I’m going to tell Chief Burke, but I need to do it myself,” she said. “At the right time. You know how people would react if they knew I’d done that. I know now it was a stupid thing to do. So maybe after I’ve had a chance to talk to the chief, I can persuade him to keep it private. Just give me a chance to do that.”
“Okay,” Danny said. “And he’ll understand when you tell him about how evil she was, won’t he? How many lives she was ruining?”
“Of course he will,” Bronwyn said. “Now I’ve got to go—I’m late for the rehearsal.”
She turned and disappeared from my view. Footsteps began ascending the stairs. Danny’s eyes followed her, and the naked yearning on his face was painful to see.
“Rehearsal?” he said, after a few moments. “I thought the library was a crime scene.”
“We’re using the barn,” Bronwyn called down. “Come on. You can watch.”
“Okay.” From the expression of rapture on his face, you’d have thought she’d just conferred an enormous honor on him. He bounded away and his footsteps, like hers, faded into the distance.
I remained ensconced in the laundry, brain running furiously, like a hamster in a wheel.
Danny had seen Bronwyn putting something in Dr. Wright’s tea. Something that Bronwyn said was Ramon’s sleeping medicine.
And Ramon had admitted to putting his sleeping medicine in Dr. Wright’s tea.
Had they both done it, giving Dr. Wright an overdose?
Or was one—or both—of them lying about what they’d put in the tea? If you substituted a couple of Señor Mendoza’s heart pills for sleeping meds, would that be enough to kill her? Either alone or in combination with a dose of sleeping medicine?
And how many people had been drugging Dr. Wright’s tea, anyway? Were Ramon and Bronwyn the only ones? Even if they’d all only been using sleeping medicine rather than Señor Mendoza’s heart pills, what if the total dosage had reached a lethal level? Ramon’s Valium probably wasn’t going to kill anyone, but I didn’t know for sure that was what they’d been using. A question for Dad.
And clearly I needed to rethink using Danny Oh as my main source of online dirt. He had too much incentive to protect Bronwyn. He’d clearly do anything for her, including lying about what he’d seen her do.
And maybe doing what he could to make Ramon look guilty?
And—
“Meg? You okay?”
I started and looked up to see Josh, the leader of the interns, peering into the laundry room.
“Josh! How long have you been there?” I pulled the laundry basket off my head.
“Here in the doorway about thirty seconds,” he said. “In the basement since you came in. I was behind some boxes, hooking up some cables. I was going to come out and see what you wanted, but then you ducked into the laundry room and I figured if you wanted to eavesdrop on Danny and Bron, why should I spoil it for you?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Do you need a hand?”
I pondered the question.
“Probably,” I said.
With Josh’s help, I managed to extract myself from the laundry heap. He courteously pulled up a chair that looked sturdy enough to hold me, and I sat
down with murmured thanks.
“Did you just come in to spy on Danny?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” I said. I glanced around. “Anyone else hiding under their desk?”
“The others all went off to a database management class,” he said. “Except for Danny, who’s been cutting class, as usual, so he could hang around and maybe get a glance from Bronwyn.”
“You’re not taking database management?”
He laughed and sat down in a chair at one of the computers.
“I took it three years ago, when I was a junior,” he said. “I’m the token grown-up here. Regular Mutant Wizards staff. Assigned to oversee the student interns.”
He didn’t look appreciably older than the others to me. Of course, ever since I’d hit thirty-five, I’d had a hard time telling college students from junior high schoolers.
“I may need your help,” I said. “I’m beginning to rethink the wisdom of using Danny Oh as my sole information source.”
“Rob was right to recommend him,” Josh said. “He has the right skill set. He did a lot of work on some enhancements we did to the college e-mail system.”
“Mutant Wizards is doing work for the college?” I said in surprise. “Since when?”
“Since we set up that new corporate subsidiary a few months ago,” he said. “Data Wizards. Someone pointed out to Rob that we had the personnel to do it, and an inside track due to having such close connections to the computer science department.”
Clearly I needed to catch up on what Rob was up to.
“But getting back to Danny,” I said. “He might have had the right skill set, but at the time I talked to Rob, we didn’t have a murder, and Danny didn’t have a crush on one of the prime suspects.”
“A crush?” Josh said. “That’s rich. Like calling World War II a skirmish. I’m relieved to hear it was Bronwyn who poisoned Dr. Wright. I’m sure Danny would have volunteered to do it if he knew Bron wanted it.”
“We don’t know that Bron poisoned her,” I said. “She might have been telling the truth about what she put in the tea.”
Josh snorted.
“I gather Bron doesn’t seem like an improbable killer to you?” I asked.
“Just the opposite,” he said. “She’s a manipulative bi—er, she’s manipulative. It would be one thing if Danny just had this random unrequited crush on her, but she’s lured him on to the point he’s barely sane. So yeah, if Bron’s a suspect, you can’t trust Danny to dig up any dirt on her. And if he digs up any on Ramon, I’d be very suspicious. In fact, I’ve been wondering if I should tell someone about this.”
He got up and led me over to a computer.
“This is Danny’s,” he said. “And look what someone’s been using it for.”
He studied the screen for a few minutes, clicked a few keys, and pointed to the site he’d called up.
The headline read “Digitalis Overdose.”
Chapter 16
I studied the page on digitalis. Sounded authentic—not that I was an expert, but since Dad was not only a doctor but also an avid reader of mysteries, I’d managed to pick up a fair amount of normally useless trivia about poisons. Even better, the page was from the Web site of a major medical school. And it gave fairly specific information on clinical and toxic doses. Anyone with half a brain could probably figure out how many of Señor Mendoza’s little heart pills it would take to make sure Dr. Wright wouldn’t survive to meet with Ramon’s dissertation committee.
“Danny was looking at this?” I asked.
“Either Danny or someone he was letting use his computer,” Josh said.
“And was he letting anyone else use his computer?”
“Only Bron, that I saw,” Josh said. “Of course, the other students living in the house are always coming down trying to cadge a little computer time, and not all the guys are careful about password-protecting their machines. But Danny’s more careful than most—more paranoid, maybe. And his desk is the farthest from the stairs, so not as many people go all that way to mess with it.”
“Probably Bron or Danny, then,” I said.
“Not that you could prove it in court,” he said. “But yeah.”
I studied the evidence. Pretty damning. But was it maybe a little too damning, not to mention awfully convenient? After all, if Bron or Danny were planning on killing Dr. Wright with Señor Mendoza’s heart medicine, it would be fairly stupid to leave a page like this open. Even if they hadn’t left it open and Josh had found it by looking at the computer’s history, there were ways of wiping that kind of information trail clean. Even I know that, so wouldn’t a cyber-savvy killer know it?
Then again, Danny seemed a pretty unlikely killer, and I had no idea how tech-savvy Bronwyn was. It was possible that one or the other had not realized that someone like Josh would be checking up behind them.
And also possible that Josh had planted the evidence. He’d been here the whole time, too. I didn’t know what grudge he could have against Dr. Wright, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have one. If he had killed Dr. Wright and wanted to divert suspicion from himself, what better way to do it than to show me this page and claim Bron or Danny had been looking at it? Even if he wasn’t the killer, what if he had it in for Bron and Danny and wanted to cast suspicion on them?
“Of course, you probably don’t want to take my word for it,” Josh said. “For all you know, I could be the one who was looking at the digitalis information.”
Was the man a mind reader? Or had my sudden flash of doubt been all too visible on my face?
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “You might want to tell the chief about this.”
“I only just found it a few minutes ago,” he said. “You think he’d be interested?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said. He leaned over to reach behind the makeshift computer table. The monitor went dark.
“You don’t want to save that stuff first?” I asked.
“No, anything I did on the machine would muddy the waters,” he said. “Best way to preserve whatever evidence is on it is to just pull the plug. Leaves all the temporary files in place, and sometimes that’s your best source of forensic data.”
As I watched, he unplugged various cables and wires from Danny’s computer.
“Won’t Danny be suspicious when he finds his machine gone?”
“It belongs to the company, not him,” he said as he hefted the CPU under one arm. “I’ll tell him we had to take it back to the office for some kind of maintenance. You still interested in learning what you can about Drs. Wright and Blanco?”
I nodded.
“I’ll see what I can dig up,” he said. He put the CPU down under his own desk. “Danny might be a little distracted right now.”
“Thanks,” I said. “After you take that to the chief. Or if you like, I could tell him about it.”
“That’d be good,” he said. “Maybe he could send someone down to fetch it. I’d rather keep an eye on things here, if you don’t mind. Make sure no one else sneaks down and uses corporate property to research a murder. And I should probably show him this.”
He handed me a paper. I glanced down. It was an e-mail from Dr. Wright to Ramon. I read it quickly. She was acknowledging receipt of his paperwork and giving him permission to do his dissertation on Mendoza’s work. Her permission sounded grudging and was hedged with at least a dozen cautions and requirements, and I had no idea if he’d paid attention to them, but the core issue—whether he’d gotten permission for his topic—was there in black and white.
Either Dr. Wright had been mistaken or she’d been lying.
“Did you get this legally?” I asked.
“As far as I know,” he said. “Since Danny was clearly too distracted to do much, I thought I’d help out. I asked Ramon if I could search his e-mail for proof that he’d gotten permission for his dissertation and he wrote down his e-mail ID and password. Some friends in the college systems department helped a bit by restorin
g all his deleted e-mail from the archives, and voila.”
“You’d think he’d have kept a copy of this somewhere he could find it,” I said.
“I would,” he said. “Then again, I write code, not plays.”
“Can I take this to my husband?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I can run another copy.”
“Thanks.”
I got up and shuffled back across the basement to the stairs.
“Careful,” he said, frowning a little as I reached the basement stairs. “Shouldn’t you be lying down more?”
“Yes,” I said as I heaved myself upward once again.
I glanced back down from the top of the stairs. Josh’s face looked rather eerie, lit only by the light from the monitor, and as I watched, he pushed the same key over and over again a few seconds apart. Something to the right of the keyboard—possibly the page-down key. From his frown, he didn’t seem to like what he was seeing.
Was the e-mail from Dr. Wright real? I was at least ninety percent sure it was. I’d learned enough about computer security from some of my brother’s technical staff to know that it would be hard to fake something like that well enough to hold up under a forensic examination of the college mail system.
But right now I wasn’t going to trust anything a hundred percent. Josh had been here all day and for all I knew, he could have been holding a grudge if Dr. Wright had flunked him back in his all-too-recent college days. I needed some information that wasn’t coming from a possible murder suspect. I needed my own laptop.
Which, last I’d seen it, was locked up in the secure closet in Michael’s office. I should probably share what I’d learned with the chief anyway. As I passed by the stairs I glanced longingly up, thinking of our bedroom. Later. For now, I made a quick pit stop then shuffled down the long corridor toward the library.
Chapter 17
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Sammy called to me as I came down the hallway.
“Is there an echo in here?” I muttered.
Sammy was sitting in a chair at the far end of the hall, guarding the library door. Combined with the crime scene tape behind him and the chain and padlock wrapped around the knobs of the double doors, his guard post gave off a definite message: keep out. I ignored the message.
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