Forever Dead

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “Intriguing. But not enough to open the case. And hardly an indication that his death was not as straightforward as it appeared. Your words, not mine. Pure conjecture. No proof.” Again that trace of amusement tinged his voice, but his face was perfectly composed, or was it because I couldn’t see anything else but the nose?

  “My career is at stake if I don’t find my disks. I’m sure they’re related in some way to Diamond’s death …” I paused, and out it came totally unbidden. “At least I didn’t say he was murdered.”

  Duncan drummed his fingers on the hard metal desk and grinned.

  “Was he?”

  I was taken aback. I had the sneaky feeling that MacPherson was pulling my leg, yet hearing the word was like making it real, and I realized that I had been skirting around the idea for days, without facing it.

  “Of course not. The bear got him, right? You did the autopsy?”

  “Yes, it was definitely a bear that got him.” I could feel his interest start to wane then, and I needed to jumpstart it back into action in a hurry. I told him about the attempt on my life and that I thought it was because whoever did it wanted to destroy the somehow incriminating larvae.

  “Sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” said MacPherson. I felt the wind go out of my sails and cursed myself that I could feel like giving up because of something some stranger with nothing at stake had just said to me.

  “Did you have the larvae on you at the time?” he asked.

  “That’s the funny part,” I said, desperate to recapture my momentum. It scared me that I could lose it so easily. “I’ve gone over it a dozen times in my head. All my collection was strapped under the seats of the canoe, and normally I carry my day’s collection with me in a container in my backpack. However, that day I took out the full container and left it at the end of the portage, replacing it with an empty one in case I came across something of interest.”

  “So, if someone had been waiting at the beginning of the portage they wouldn’t have seen you switch the containers?”

  I nodded. “They must have seen me collecting the larvae from Diamond’s body and were waiting for the chance to destroy them. When they saw me getting into the canoe to bail it they seized their chance. I was still wearing the backpack when we got caught by the current.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Duncan. “Your lab was broken into about two weeks after you got back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did they know? And if they knew why wouldn’t they have broken in sooner to destroy the insects? Why wait two weeks, especially after they had shown no qualms about killing you?”

  “Because that’s when it was reported in the papers that I still had some larvae from the body. When I called the cops they weren’t interested. The case was closed. Whoever it was obviously thought the larvae were lost in the canoe. Most of them were.”

  “So. You think you might be able to find something in the autopsy results that would help you?”

  I nodded.

  “You know I can’t let you look at them.”

  We looked at each other across his black metal desk. Duncan rose, and my heart sank, but as I got up he raised his hand.

  “Perhaps, my girl, you should take a look around my office while I go and help my students.” His hand absently tapped a brown folder on his desktop as he winked and left the room.

  I watched him go, and manually thrust my jaw back up from where it had fallen. I eagerly reached for the folder. The autopsy results were filed neatly and marked “Diamond” with the date of the autopsy and a large red stamp saying “confidential.” I was going to owe MacPherson more than the ID of one lousy butterfly.

  Everything was included in the file: a copy of the police report and a list of all the items found at the campsite, including those found in the backpack.

  I ran through them. One empty film canister had been found, but the camera had been empty. A deck of cards, a couple of pencils, one sleeping bag, bright orange. One chocolate bar. No mention of the diary anywhere. Interesting. The food pack had contained dried staples and fresh vegetables, carrots, potatoes, dried meats, sugar, flour, nuts, raisins, cook pots, even Diamond’s toothpaste and brush. Curious, that. I wondered again why an experienced camper like Diamond would be careful enough to haul his toothpaste out of a bear’s reach and then leave a chocolate bar in the tent and opened tin cans of beans and sardines lying about the site.

  I flipped through the file to the coroner’s report. The page was a sea of tight red ink, but the writing was totally illegible and highly technical. I could make out the odd word but nothing providing any continuity. Why hadn’t he typed it on a computer?

  “Solved it yet?” Duncan’s big voice crashed into the little office.

  I looked up and gave him my best hangdog look. “I can’t read your writing. Would you mind translating for me in a nutshell what you found?”

  “My dear girl, if you think that dew-eyed hound dog look is going to persuade me to help, you already know me better than you think,” he guffawed. “My writing’s not that bad, but those are just my original notes. The computer copy is with my secretary.” He picked up his notes and flipped through them. “Diamond died from loss of blood. He was severely mauled, but none of the wounds alone would have killed him. He bled to death.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Let’s see. Hmmm. He had taken some kind of sleeping pill, nothing really unusual …”

  His finger moved down through the jumble of words. “Ah, right. Here. This was a bit of a puzzler. We couldn’t explain it, but it wasn’t sufficient to keep the case open. We also found evidence of a strong tranquilizer in his blood.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Apparently he used tranquilizer guns in his work to put down his study subjects so he could radio-collar them. Looks as though, in his panic, he managed to get the tranquilizer gun but either it wasn’t soon enough or he was unable to jab the bear. The theory goes that he finally used it on himself to ease the pain. He certainly would have been in monstrous pain before the loss of blood mercifully let him lose consciousness. Awkward position, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The puncture mark was in his right shoulder, with the needle partly broken off in his arm. Strange. It’s a difficult place to jab yourself, especially if you are right-handed, but not impossible, I guess, with a bear pinning you down. The police concluded that the bear must have jerked Diamond at the wrong moment and the gun went off, hitting Diamond instead of the bear. They never found the tranquilizer gun, though, when they searched his campsite.”

  That’s not surprising if he wasn’t killed where he was found, I thought. “How did he get the gun, load it, and use it in the short time it takes a bear to charge?”

  “He must have already had it loaded up for its real purpose and grabbed it when the bear charged. He could even have been after the bear, following it to put it down for his research. Apparently he has done that before. Radio-collared bears, although his main line of research is cats.”

  I grunted and pointed at the report. “Were there any other marks on him?”

  Duncan laughed. “He was mauled by a bear, girl. Of course there were.”

  “I mean not made by a bear,” I said.

  Duncan looked at me shrewdly, nodded his head.

  “You’re sharp, my girl, very sharp, but no. Just the usual cuts and scrapes and bug bites that you’d find on a man in the bush.”

  I mulled this over in my mind while Duncan continued to talk.

  “None of this offers any insight into why any one would move the body, assuming you are correct, of course. If the body were discovered why not raise the alarm right there, let the police know? Why move it downriver and let some strangers trip over the remains?”

  “My guess is that somebody’s hiding something and it looks as though Diamond got mixed up in it somehow.”

  “Why not just hide the evidence and leave the bo
dy then?”

  “Because somehow the evidence is linked to the place of death itself?”

  Duncan poked some eraser droppings around on his memo pad, corralling them into a neat pile.

  “I’m afraid it’s all speculation. None of this merits reopening the case, so if you intend to go gallivanting around asking questions, getting people’s backs up by insinuating murder where murder may not exist, I’d be very careful. The cops would not take kindly to it.”

  “I have to get my disks back,” I said in quiet desperation. I hated how wobbly my resolve was. I had to keep reminding myself that going forward was better than going backward. I had everything to lose by doing nothing, but there was no guarantee that finding out the circumstances surrounding Diamond’s death would get me my disks back. But I had no other leads. I had to find out what happened.

  Duncan looked at me with a half smile, as if he were reading the positive side of my thoughts.

  “I’d do the same if I were in your shoes. Let me know how you get along.”

  He grinned at me, pulled on his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and rose from his chair.

  “Now, about my butterfly …”

  chapter ten

  “So what did the coroner say?”

  I looked up from my desk to see Martha poking her head in the door from the outer office.

  “How the hell did you know that I talked to the coroner?”

  Martha smiled. “Nothing gets past me. Actually you doodled on that pad by your phone. ‘See Coroner re: Diamond’s death.’”

  I quickly looked at the pad and thought I’d have to be more careful about what I doodled.

  “After all, what with your larvae disappearing and what you told me about your discovery that the body was moved, in combo with that memo, I put two and two together. Let’s have all the gory details.”

  I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. Nothing for it but to tell Martha all about my meeting.

  “So now what?” she asked when I was done.

  “So now, I’m going to go talk to all his colleagues, for starters, and see what happens, see if any of them can lead me to my disks.” I dreaded having to talk to all these people, in case I found myself stuck in that godawful darkness of one of my mood swings on the morning I had arranged to meet one of them. Depression has a habit of incapacitating its victim. I was thankful it was summer: more than likely I’d be okay. It was usually the winter months that haunted me, made worse by the fact that I seemed powerless to head it off. Maybe I needed to see a professional, but the thought made me feel ill and I hurriedly relegated it to the back of my mind with a lot of other baggage.

  It was four long days before I could get away from the university and drive out to Dumoine. On the morning of that day I woke up relieved to find that I was in a good mood — no fear, no dread, no despair, just normal anxiety about whether I would ever find my disks or not.

  No saving angel had delivered them to me with a note of apology for having taken them. The cops had no new leads and more or less said, “We’ll call you,” which of course meant my case had now been placed in the unimportant file, probably had never been in any other file.

  I left the farm as the sun was spreading over the Eardley Escarpment, rimming it with soft golden tones and the first pale hint of the leaves changing. The cows were mooing, their udders full to bursting, calling Mac to come and give them relief as I drove out the farm gates and turned northwest on Highway 148. I stopped in Shawville for gas and a bottle of water. Not much had changed in the years since I’d come here as a girl and shown my calf at the Shawville Fair. Pretty heady times for a 4-H kid way smaller than the calf, who basically walked me around the arena while I made a show of trying to be in charge. It didn’t help that Ryan and his friends were hooting and hollering like banshees. I’d showed them all, though, when I won first prize. And I’d gone back, year after year, because it was a fantastic agricultural fair to compete at. And because I liked the petting zoo.

  Two hours later I pulled into the grounds of Pontiac University in front of the zoology building in Dumoine. For a small campus in the country it was remarkably stark, as if the developer had chosen to ignore aesthetics. The results showed, raw and ugly. There were few trees and no effort had been made to have the buildings fit into their surroundings. They looked like a bunch of pill boxes in need of medication themselves.

  I pulled open the heavy glass doors of the two-storey zoology building, which shared its space with psychology and human resources. The familiar sweet, musty smell of formaldehyde, dirty cages, and disinfectant swept over me. Zoology buildings the world over smelled like this, I thought: urine and feces, scent glands, and formaldehyde — a veritable cocktail of smells. In the foyer, hanging from the ceiling, was a huge metal spider’s web with the resident spider, ass to ceiling, hunkered down looking as though it was waiting for some poor unsuspecting undergrad to commit to biology. A young man pushing a tray filled with glass flasks and Petri dishes walked briskly through the foyer.

  “Where can I find the zoology office?” I called after him.

  “Follow the typing,” he said and then he was gone, the rattle of the Petri dishes slowly being replaced by the distinctive soft tapping of a computer. I followed the sound down to a door splattered with a thousand notices for seminars and meetings, most of which seemed to have already happened.

  There was no sign of anyone in the main office, but the tap tap was coming from behind a portable wall.

  “Anyone home?”

  The tapping stopped abruptly, and seconds later a blue-eyed, red-haired, diminutive woman in a tight black skirt and pink spandex shirt flounced around the corner. I wondered how she had ever got the skirt on. It looked like paint. I felt my own worn pants, comfortable, practical, and wondered how this woman could stand high heels and tight skirts. It was certainly a rarity in any zoology building I had ever been in. If she was here for a degree, maybe it was a bachelors and not in zoology. I reeled back at my own chauvinism.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked in a high-pitched, squeaky kind of voice that made me want to oil it.

  Before I could answer she said, “I’m just filling in for one of the secs — she’s sick, my master’s research is stymied, and I need the cash so I offered, but there’s hardly time to eat. You should see the letters these guys want done. Been six days now and I’m getting good at it.”

  “Can you tell me where I can find Don Allenby or Leslie Mitchell?” I asked.

  She shot me a suspicious look, and the smile on her face grew brittle.

  “If you’re the press or the police we —”

  “No, actually I’m not. I’m just visiting. I’m a zoolo-gist from Sussex University.”

  “Oh, well, in that case no probs. Don Allenby’s my supervisor. He’s in room 202. Mitchell moved into 105 although how she can stand to do that so soon after …” she hesitated, blushed.

  “After what?”

  “Well, you know. Surely you’ve heard about it in the papers. Made Dumoine quite famous.”

  “You mean Jake Diamond?”

  “Oh, gruesome story there, isn’t it? I mean …” she glanced hurriedly at me. “I mean, they say he died fast, like, I think, at least they say …”

  “What a way to go.”

  “Yeah, but sort of like him, you know? Ever the macho man. Oh, such a great guy though. I had him for the course on animal form and function. Funny man and sexy as hell.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Ha. Would have loved that. Nah. He was just a prof. I got to know him a bit because I’m a grad student of his colleague, Don Allenby. They worked together on a bunch of papers, you know.”

  “You mean they collaborated?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Diamond was a cat man and Don is small mammals. They teamed up sometimes on those predator-prey jobs — you know, linking the number of predators to the number of prey and that sort of stuff. Diamond’s name always came first. I always wondered about
that. Guess Diamond felt he had to be first author. Had an ego the size of an elephant. Lots of profs around like to take all the credit, you know, but at least he did a lot of the work. Some profs do zip all. Their graduate students do it all and then the profs take all the praise. Oops, sorry.”

  “Sounds like he could have had a bunch of enemies.”

  She looked up suddenly, surprised.

  “Nah. Not Diamond. Everyone liked him. I’m pretty sure. Except Davies, of course, but Davies doesn’t much like anyone at all.”

  I gave her a quizzical look.

  “Guess you haven’t been around here before if you don’t know Davies. He calls himself the dean of the zoology department such as it is here, only four profs, you know. We’re a small operation. The student rumour mill has it they hated each other’s guts.”

  “Why?”

  The woman laughed. “Diamond was a free spirit, you know what I mean? He was classy, like, and didn’t care what Davies thought of his lectures so long as the students liked them. Like the time he taught us the mechanics of flight. He brought in a whole slew of mechanical birds and he had them flapping all over the lecture hall. It was great. Then Davies walks in and everybody shuts up. He’s kind of a dried-up little man. He kinda looks around and eyeballs Diamond with his fierce little flinty eyes and just as he’s about to say something — God, we would have given a lot to know what he was going to say — a little whirly-bird bashed into his bald head and everyone started laughing. Davies was furious and he stalked out like a scorched rooster. After that there were lots of rumours that he was actively trying to get rid of Diamond. Hard to do when Diamond had tenure but, well, there you go. Guess Davies won’t need to worry anymore, eh?”

  “Davies doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would have liked his profs getting involved in stuff like logging protests and things like that,” I noted.

  “You can say that again. He wants to be president of the university here, not just dean of science, and I think he feels Diamond was preventing that from happening. He was furious about Diamond’s high profile in this logging spree, said it harmed the reputation of the university — meaning his reputation. Oooeee was that fun. Manning the barricades. It was like one great big …”