by Donn Taylor
Mara gave a bitter laugh. “Won’t listen to us? Press, you win the brass donut for understatement of the year. But all right. It’s not much of a hope, but let’s get on with it.”
We arrived on campus at nine fifty, when the circle should have been swarming with students changing classes. I’d hoped we could hide by mingling with the crowd. Instead, the circle stood deserted except for a crowd of several hundred students milling in front of the executive center. At the top of the steps above the crowd stood President Cantwell and Dean-Dean. The president gestured as he addressed the massed students, who responded with hoots and chants.
“Oh, my, what’s happened now?” Mara asked.
“We don’t have time to find out,” I said. “Someone will spot us for sure on this bare campus. We’ll hide in the liberal arts center until ten o’clock.”
She looked at me in alarm. “What happens at ten o’clock?”
“That’s when Gifford Jessel has a class, remember? While he’s teaching, I’ll search his office for that laptop.”
“What if he’s taken it home?”
“Then I won’t find it, we won’t pass ‘Go,’ and we won’t get out of jail free.”
She sniffed. “If I know Brice Funderburk, we didn’t get out of jail free the first time.”
We made it into my office without meeting anyone, but I felt better when we closed the door behind us. The smell of waxed floors and old woodwork made it feel like coming home after a long absence, but that didn’t lessen the tension. I felt tighter than a violin E string tuned up to F-sharp. The set of Mara’s jaw showed her equally tense. We both knew our future depended on finding that laptop and somehow tying it to the two murders. And we both knew how slim our chances were.
We said nothing as we waited for ten o’clock. Desperation must have showed in my eyes as surely as it did in hers. Once in a while, crowd noise from across the campus penetrated to our ears—vague, rhythmic chants whose words we couldn’t discern.
Mara showed a nervous smile. “What could be important enough for all those students to stand out there in the cold? I hope they don’t catch pneumonia.”
It was so like her to be thinking of someone else, and so like me to focus totally on my own concerns.
“We’ll wait till five after ten,” I said. “By then, Giff should be well into his class. Same procedure as last time: you sit in the car out front and beep if you see Giff coming.”
“You’ll need this,” she said, and handed me the passkey I’d given her a week ago.
I’d forgotten about that. Apparently I wasn’t as focused as I’d thought.
I checked my watch again and said, “It’s time.”
Tears formed in her eyes but did not fall. “So it all comes down to this,” she mused. “We’ve worked every angle we could think of for two weeks, we’ve broken more than one law, and we’ve still come up empty. Now we either score or we lose everything.”
“That’s the size of it,” I said.
“Oh, Press . . .”
A single tear moistened her cheek. My first impulse was to place a reassuring pat on her shoulder, but I hesitated. While I stood there wondering, she stepped close, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me.
It was not a china-cup kiss.
For a few moments I stood stunned. Then I got my wits about me and returned the kiss with enthusiasm. I was not in the china-cup business either.
After awhile she put her hands on my chest and pushed away. “Be careful, Cupcake,” she said, silver tear-tracks now adorning both cheeks. “We’re dealing with a brutal murderer, and don’t you forget it.”
I confess that I didn’t feel much like a cupcake. Truth to tell, I didn’t feel much like anything except maybe that brass donut she’d mentioned earlier.
“Let’s get going,” I said.
She drove the short distance back to the science center and parked in front. The crowd, mob, or whatever it was, still milled around at the executive center, and President Cantwell seemed to make no headway with it. Every time Dean-Dean stepped up to say something, they booed him into silence. I wondered what the occasion was, but we had no time to find out.
I wouldn’t need my gloves and topcoat for the short distance from car to building, so I dropped them on the passenger seat. “Remember the signal if Giff comes back,” I said. “Two beeps followed by three more.”
“I remember,” she said. By now, she’d banished the tears, but apprehension showed in every line of her face. Her eyes were the softest blue I could remember. Her lips trembled as she said, “Be careful, Press.”
I nodded and headed into the building.
Our futures, personal and professional, depended on what I’d find in the next five minutes.
CHAPTER 44
Although Thanksgiving break would not begin until noon, the science center was deserted. The empty halls let me climb to Gifford Jessel’s office without being seen. Students weren’t allowed to leave campus early, but apparently everyone wanted to see what was happening at the executive center. Whatever it was certainly made enough racket. But the noise faded to an unintelligible murmur when I shut Giff’s office door behind me.
I searched the desk first because Mara said he kept a pistol there. No use allowing a weapon that could be used against me. I yanked each drawer open and sifted through any papers that might conceal a pistol. My fingerprints would be everywhere, but one more charge against me wouldn’t make much difference.
There was no pistol in the drawers.
Giff’s desk was one of the old kind with a door for a typewriter compartment on the right. The door was locked. I could look around for something to jimmy it with or I could open it the quick way. Time was ticking by. That crowd-murmur from across campus wouldn’t last forever, and Giff might let his class out early. So I took the quick way. I kicked the compartment door as hard as I could. Nothing happened except that my foot hurt. I kicked again. This time wood splintered and the door flew open.
The compartment was empty.
So I hadn’t found the pistol. But I’d come here to look for a laptop computer. A quick glance confirmed my memory that no other place in the office could hide anything larger than a Palm Pilot. That left the false ceiling installed years ago in the older, high-ceilinged buildings when central heating and air-conditioning were added. When Richmond Seagrave debugged my office, he’d removed ceiling tiles from the false ceiling and checked the space above them.
I would do the same thing here. I counted thirty-six tiles supported on a metal framework. But where should I start?
On my first visit to Jessel’s office, I’d noticed an unusually high table standing against the left-hand wall. Standing on top of it, a reasonably tall man could reach the panels, so that looked like the logical place to start. I vaulted myself up and sat on the edge of the table, then swung my feet onto it and scrambled erect. My five-foot-ten height put my head just below the false ceiling, but Jessel’s six foot three would have placed his eyes above it.
Nevertheless, I could lift the ceiling panels off of their supporting framework. I shifted the panel directly over my head and felt around as far as I could reach.
Nothing.
This wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t reach far enough from the opening to be sure I didn’t miss anything. Frantically, I glanced around the office for a solution. There! On a little corner table stood an unabridged dictionary. I scrambled down, seized the dictionary, and threw it onto the table.
Crowd noise from the executive center grew louder, accompanied by honking horns from a number of cars. The shouting and honking kept growing, now moving in this direction as if in a parade. How could I hear Mara’s signal in the midst of that yammer?
But there was no turning back. Another scramble brought me onto the table again, and standing on the four-inch-thick dictionary put my eyes barely above the false ceiling. The light was dim, but I could make out vague shapes ahead of me.
None of them looked like a computer
.
Moving gingerly on the uncertain footing of the dictionary, I turned ninety degrees and looked to my left.
Still nothing.
The shouting and horn-honking kept growing louder. It sounded like the mob was marching around the campus circle. I’d better hurry and get finished before it dispersed.
I turned another ninety degrees carefully, but my foot slipped off the edge of the dictionary. I gripped the ceiling’s metal framework to keep from falling. My gaze instinctively dropped below the ceiling to verify my balance. Steadied again, I raised my eyes above ceiling level.
There it was.
Unmistakably, a laptop computer.
Exhilaration flashed through me like electric shock. With unsteady hands, I grasped the computer and lowered it into the full light of the office. It was the largest laptop I’d ever seen. It had to be one of those all-capable models designed to replace someone’s desktop. It must be capable of performing all the network operations Richmond Seagrave had imputed to it.
Now all I had to do was put it back and notify Seagrave. He and the police could do the rest. Giff would have some explaining to do.
And I had to get out of there before he came back and caught me snooping. A new thought hit me. I’d known all along we were dealing with a murderer, and that it was probably one of our suspects. But that knowledge had stayed in a separate compartment from the knowledge that thugs were trying to kill Mara and me. My knowledge had in fact remained academic—impersonal and nonthreatening, like wondering which of several historical characters had slipped Napoleon the arsenic.
Now for the first time I thought of Gifford Jessel as someone really dangerous. And I knew I had better be somewhere else when he came back.
Outside, the shouting and honking had grown fainter. Above the fading din I could now make out a single horn. Two beeps, then three. Two beeps, then three.
Mara!
I had to put the computer back and get out of here.
But before I could move, the office door opened and Gifford Jessel stood in the doorway. His disapproving gaze moved from me to the computer in my hands and back to me.
There was a reason I hadn’t found the pistol in his desk.
It was in his hand, pointed at me.
CHAPTER 45
For days I’d felt time racing by at twice its normal pace. Now it seemed frozen, and Gifford Jessel and I seemed as far beyond its reach as the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn.
But we weren’t beyond time. The lover on Keats’s urn could never receive the imminent kiss, but one flick of Giff’s finger would complete his pistol’s deadly work on me.
I’d known fear during last night’s flight from armed gunmen. But now, certain I faced the murderer we’d sought and looking down the barrel of his pistol, I was paralyzed with terror. I couldn’t have moved if I’d tried.
I don’t know how long we stood motionless, but I do know the pistol never wavered in Giff’s hand.
“You have a bad habit, Press,” he said presently, “a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He stepped inside the office to a position where he could face me and watch the door at the same time. With at least ten feet between us, he could shoot me dead long before I could grapple with him for the pistol. If I were fool enough to try.
“You have that same bad habit,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from trembling. “You’re supposed to be in class.”
Outside, the crowd noise and horn-honking kept fading as the march around the circle continued. Inside my head, my cerebral musicians played the feathery violin passages Mendelssohn composed to represent Shakespeare’s fairies. They provided no consolation.
“My class didn’t show,” Giff said. “They all went to the demonstration.”
“What demonstration?”
“You haven’t heard?” Giff smirked. “When your little blonde friend’s students heard she was getting fired, they organized a demonstration to save her job. They have our glorious president and dean shaking in their wingtips.” The smirk changed to a snicker. “You’ll be happy to know the students supported you as an afterthought.”
A demonstration for Mara? I was too stunned to answer.
Giff spoke again. “Press, you also have a bad habit of minding other people’s business. And you can’t say we didn’t warn you.”
“Who is we?” I asked. Terrified or not, I was still curious.
Giff sneered. “You’re always the historian, Press, always after facts. I told them you wouldn’t quit.”
“Told who?” Even through the fear I felt the emotional surge that comes when the last piece of an intellectual puzzle falls into place. William Harvey must have felt it when the theory of blood circulation formed in his mind, or Newton when the mathematical relationships of gravity coalesced into elegant precision. Even insignificant researchers like me live for those rare flashes of insight.
“Told who?” Giff showed a knowing smile. “My colleagues from Las Vegas. Surely you must have realized this was no local operation.”
“So everything goes back to that vacation in Las Vegas?” Curiosity drove my question, but I also hoped Giff wouldn’t pull the trigger while he was talking.
The crowd noise seemed to have leveled at the far side of the circle, but it had not gone away.
“Yes, Las Vegas.” Giff grimaced. “I gambled and lost. Lost more than I could ever pay with a professor’s salary. And I already had a hard time keeping Mom in the nursing home. That’s why I gambled. If I won, I could do better by her.”
“But you lost,” I said. “Laila had connections in Vegas. Did she set you up?”
“I don’t think so. She made the trip with our group, but I didn’t see her after we got there. All I know is that when I couldn’t pay, they took me into a back room and told me what I had to do. If I didn’t, we’d take a ride in the country. I couldn’t let that happen. Then there’d be nobody to pay Mom’s bills at the nursing home.”
“Look,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit down? This computer is getting heavy.” Maybe if I could get off this silly table . . .
“Stay where you are.” Giff’s eyes flashed and he waved the pistol. “On second thought, get on your knees and face me. Lay the computer on the table.”
I did as I was told. My internal musicians seemed unable to leave Mendelssohn’s fairyland. I spoke in desperation, yet some distant part of me dispassionately recorded facts as if in a research library. “What did you do for the mob, Giff? I know you ran some kind of racket from the campus computer network.”
He laughed. “The boys from Vegas made a dunce out of Earl-George. They set it up so I could run some of their operations through our campus network with no records kept. Except in that computer beside you.” He seemed to enjoy explaining. I remembered that he’d always liked to brag. “They started me out small, arranging for overseas shipment of stolen goods.”
“That’s what Laila got involved in?”
“You learned that, did you?Yes, she answered a perfectly legal ad in a newspaper. She’d receive a package and get separate e-mail instructions on where to send it. We didn’t realize for a while that she was doing it wholesale under different names. We didn’t like it, but it didn’t hurt anything as long as she didn’t know who gave her the instructions.”
“But she found out.”
“Yes.” Irritation showed on Giff’s face, as if someone had slipped him a false minor premise. “I still don’t know how.”
“And that’s why you killed her?”
“She had it coming.” Anger flared in his eyes. “She called me into her office and tried to blackmail me. If I didn’t cut her in, she’d tell the police.” The pistol wavered, then steadied. “I still didn’t intend to kill her—just stall for a while and let the mob work out something with her as they had with me. But Laila never knew when to quit. She belittled me for letting her catch on to my racket, so I was already angry. Then she made an insulting personal remark about our m
arriage. Never mind what. But that pushed me over the top.”
Outside, the auto horns and shouting grew louder. It sounded like the students were making another circuit of the campus.
Giff didn’t seem to hear. He was breathing fast now, as if reliving the murder. “I’d just come in from shopping and had a heavy plumbing tool in my hand—one of those claw-ended rods you use to turn off your water at the water meter. Before I thought, I swung it and hit Laila on the temple. She went down and I hit her twice more. But my anger kept boiling up and reminding me of all the ways she’d insulted me when we were married. I let it control me. She was wearing a silk scarf, and I choked her with it till I knew she was dead.”
He showed a satisfied smile. “She will never insult me again.”
“What did you do with the plumbing tool?” I asked. Maybe I could use his arrogance to keep him talking.
“I got rid of it in the river. No one will ever find it.”
The outside noise grew louder as the students approached on the circle.
“Why did you try to throw suspicion on Professor Thorn and me?”
Giff laughed again. “You were a natural, Press. People already knew you were weird, and most of them thought you had it in for Laila. Professor Thorn was a loner, too, and the Wicca business made her even more vulnerable. It was pure luck that you two discovered the body. All I had to do was create evidence that both of you had reasons to kill Laila.”
“Using a passkey you stole from Dean-Dean,” I said.
Giff snorted. “There must be half a dozen of those loose on campus. Dean-Dean would lose his navel if it weren’t bolted on.”
Even in my fear I thought that a curious anatomical concept, but I let it pass and went for bigger game. “Your package-shipment racket was small-time, Giff. That elaborate computer setup must have been used for more lucrative tasks.”
“It was.” Giff’s pistol alternated between pointing at my chest and head. “We ran the full range of computer crime. Information theft—we stole Bob Harkins’s research records and sold them for forty thousand—and we hacked into hundreds of government records. Changed some of them, too, for substantial fees. The people I work for say I’m as good a manager as they’ve ever seen.”
