by Susy Gage
“Ben.” He enveloped her hand in a massive, calloused paw and gave her a wink. “I’m here with the real Personal Property Pass.”
Pulling her hand away, Lori realized it now held a business card: Ben M. Gerson, Regents Professor of Microbiology and Earth Sciences, University of Southern California.
“Give me a call next week,” Ben murmured as he moved towards the interrogation room. “I just might tell you why I hate those motherfucking LEPERs.”
Twelve: A Bad Bulb
Twelve-thirty on Monday, and it had already been a rough week. Carol had lost her next-to-last SLAP, been forced to “testify” to the security guards about a co-worker’s parking violation, and then waited half an hour at the cafeteria for Bob before she gave up and bought lunch without him.
She was picking at her sushi when she saw the ambulance pull up outside of his building. Panicking, although she knew she shouldn’t, she abandoned her table and ran across the street, not caring if there were guards or police who would stop her.
Cramps of fish-flavored nausea assailed her as she stood outside the lab on the hot black asphalt of the new parking lot, painfully reminded of just how lucky she was to have Bob. He made good money, he was reasonably good-looking—the gray tooth in the front needed a cap, and she wished he would shave every day, but those were minor details—her parents approved of him, and his parents approved of her. Most men in science were so poorly socialized that even at the age of forty they all trailed after one or two unattainable female targets, PhD in physics with an Olympic gold medal and D-cup breasts.
Her terror evaporated as she caught sight of her husband striding purposefully from the building. Some EMTs followed, supporting a pale, staggering guy in shorts and a thick winter jacket and mittens. They helped the guy onto the stretcher, and before loading it into the ambulance had a conversation with Bob that Carol overheard.
“He says he’s been locked in the cold room all weekend,” one of them announced in a voice that carried to the small knot of gathering rubber-neckers.
“Claims you forced him to work and he got stuck with no one to hear him yell,” the other added. “I think he’ll be all right, but he could easily have died in there.”
Bob did his best to contend that he didn’t know anyone in his group had access to the lab on weekends, but it was clear that they didn’t believe him, and the guy in the jacket moaned and writhed theatrically. It seemed to take forever to load the stretcher up, and in this time Carol’s panic transformed into anger against Bob’s newest employee. He looked homeless, scruffy and dirty with a nasty little beard, and she would bet he didn’t get that way just from two days in the cold room.
As soon as the ambulance pulled away, she got up and prepared to run to Bob, but the Colony Manager appeared and she shrank back. The presence of Ellis D. Tripp always meant danger. She’d never been in his presence without being punished herself or being forced to explain why someone else had done something wrong.
Tripp put his arm around Bob, and Carol thought it was probably time to go home and start polishing her CV. If Bob got fired, she couldn’t stand to work here anymore, but she couldn’t just quit. Not with the mortgage they had.
She sighed, looking at the ground, and then bent over to pick something up: it was a sprig of wild rosemary, out of place out here by the cafeteria and the parking lot, where nothing grew. She twiddled it between her fingers, staring off into the distance. Who would hire a pair of ex-LEPERs? Neither she nor Bob had published anything in years.
She watched Bob being led away by Tripp, with a droop in his shoulders that made her sad. There were a lot of times that LPRL made her cry, but she had never seen Bob so discouraged before. She probably wouldn’t ever mention it to him, but she had had a bad feeling about this new hire from the beginning, even before catching sight of his beard and little mittens.
As a recovering bulimic, Carol knew one thing: the only thing worse than being stressed and scared was being stressed and scared with low blood sugar. The cafeteria was closed, but there should still be a roach coach down by the trailers where they put the temps, students, and those being punished. She started walking that way, thinking that she would get him a bean burrito and some fruit to leave on his desk.
A year ago—almost a year and a half ago—she had stayed home to meet the professional live-oak tree trimmers and make sure they were as professional as they advertised. That was when this Jim Kalb guy had first been to see Bob. Bob had talked about nothing else at dinner, and she wouldn’t remind him now, but he had been pretty suspicious. Jim had said there was a “big proposal” going out at STI and had wanted to know if Bob could hire him if he was on it as a co-investigator. That was OK, and the Colony Manager had confirmed that it was all true and reasonable. The problem was that the guy had been so secretive: he’d said he was a student of van Gnubbern’s, but he didn’t want van Gnubbern to know that he was applying for jobs…what sense did that make? Worst of all, it hadn’t sounded as if he actually was on the proposal, just that he wanted to be, or had “ways” to get himself on if he had to. Had he been blackmailing or threatening Dr. van Gnubbern?
But no, it wasn’t van Gnubbern who had been the principal investigator—she knew that from Absinthe. It was the young guy in the wheelchair, who’d made the mistake of being crippled and trying to talk down to Abby. Carol knew from painful experience that Abby didn’t tolerate physical weakness.
But Jim could certainly have taken advantage of him if his health was as bad as Abby made it sound. He could wait until he was in the hospital and then put his own name on the proposal. The more she thought about it, the more she started to think there was some truth to this. The meeting to open the subcontract had been delayed more than once, and all the problems always seemed to come back to Jim. No one knew why he was on there as a co-investigator, certainly not for such a large amount of money, and no one could get him into the same room with the principal.
Heading back from the roach coach with a burrito in her hand, Carol noticed that someone or something had trampled the rosemary behind the Colony Manager’s building. It looked like one of those safety movies about the deer attacks, but she didn’t really believe in killer deer, and from up close it was pretty clear that these were people-prints. Someone had gone all the way around the building in the bushes.
Someone who was wearing running shoes and had very small feet. Putting Bob’s lunch down on the curb, Carol went into the bushes and measured one of the prints against her own. Size 5 max. A kid? Kids weren’t allowed at the LPR Lab, certainly not running in the bushes.
No one was allowed to run in the bushes. How had they managed to do this without being seen or picked up by a go-cart? Sure enough, she had only been there for a few seconds when one came putt-putting by, yelling at her and demanding to see her ID.
She managed to grab a small white thing stuck to the rosemary and to retrieve the burrito before surrendering to the go-cart and allowing it to take her back to Bob’s building. Once free of the fumes, she turned the white thing over in her hand: a discount department store tag, $29.95 in size 2P.
There were a few small female LEPERs with bad fashion sense. But she didn’t know any small female LEPERs with bad fashion sense who would wallow in the rosemary.
She left Bob his lunch, with a little note telling him to look forward to Indian food tonight, and then rode a go-cart up to the Visitors’ desk just to set her mind at ease. They didn’t want to show her the list of visitors from last Friday, but she said she was processing their mileage reimbursements and they finally gave in. What she thought was a vague and absurd suspicion was confirmed: Lori had been to the LPR Lab on Friday just before Jim had been trapped in the cold room. She had been in the company of a Louis Maupertuis and a Solomon Rose—the latter was marked VIP—and had been driving a white SUV.
It was easy to dismiss Abby’s hyperbolic tendencies (they’d all loved the math pun in grad school), but apparently she had a point. Lori Barrow wa
s back in town and weird things were happening. And it was hard to imagine the nefariousness of a plot that would induce Lori Barrow to even get into an SUV.
Thirteen: Green-Eyed Monster
As swiftly as it had come, Lori’s experimental dream vanished. Both the basement labs were barred to entry, the old-fashioned keypads replaced by sturdy police locks. Like a grounded kid, she sat at her desk with a pencil, trying to be a theorist. Kuzno had told her—betraying no emotion—that she needed three theory papers before next year to earn tenure.
It wasn’t equations she found herself scribbling as she stared at the page, though. Instead she stared at her bare white wall, contemplated, and scratched a series of notes.
Marybeth made a mistake with budget, $200k sent to LEPERLab, was the first. Then:
Dim Bulb hired with the money. Who hired him? Why?
Who filed the report on the falling door?(Kuzno?)
The door squeaked and slammed open. Lori jumped and shoved the paper under her computer, pretending to be typing on the keyboard.
She’d expected the cops, or worse, but it was just Lou, waving a sheaf of paper in the air.
“What is it?” Lori exclaimed, pushing away her laptop.
“Here.” He slid the sheets onto her desk. “Take a look. Poincaré is right about this theorem, of course, but he does the proof in such a cumbersome way.”
“What?” Lori glanced down, seeing row upon row of differential equations in small, crabbed handwriting. In ink, no less.
Her reproach must have shown on her face, because Lou got defensive. “I’m just trying to help. You need three theory papers, right? Finish this with me and that’s one. In a few more days you’ll have a couple more, and then we can think about other things again.”
“I can’t believe you can think about this at all, when—when—”
“Spit it out, Barrow.”
Lori pulled out her own page of notes. “When your graduate student was murdered on Friday!”
Lou dropped his gaze to the Poincaré derivation, hiding his face. He pulled out a page and shuffled it elsewhere in the stack, as if it had been out of order. “Why would you say that?” he asked at last, in a flat voice.
Lori scrunched down to try to look him in the eye, but he stayed stubbornly riveted on the manuscript. “Because too many things are suspicious,” she said at last. “Kuzno got everything he wanted. He hated Marybeth, right? Now she’s gone. I refused to take his advice, and now I have no choice. I have to hire his students and be a string theorist. I can’t even complain about it, because I’m in disgrace for letting a poor blind girl stumble into a freezing room.”
She paused for breath, trying to think of the least-paranoid scenario. “Maybe Kuzno just wanted to get me in trouble, so he locked Marybeth in for an hour or so, not expecting her to die? What were those skits all about, anyway—did he really molest her?”
“Those skits were a joke, Barrow,” Lou growled. “My students were just taunting Kuzno.”
She looked back down at her notes. “Or maybe it wasn’t Kuzno at all. How about Dim Bulb? You said you didn’t even remember putting him on your proposal. And now look, he went from being in the basement to having his own position, based upon Marybeth’s `mistake.’”
Lou gave a strangled laugh. “Murdering someone to get a job at the LEPERLab would be so fucking pathetic that if I thought he was even capable of it… I’d almost feel sorry for him.”
“And did someone try to kill me?” She was about to explain about the falling door, but decided to try to trap him instead.
Lou glanced up at last, startled. He looked tired; no doubt he’d been up all night with his crazy French mathematicians. “Who and how?” he wondered, still without inflection.
“The door in the BSL-3,” she said quickly, not giving him a chance to think.
“You mean the yellow fever leak?” Lou was regaining his composure, smirking a little. “Surely that doesn’t count as a murder attempt.”
He didn’t know. It was a good thing, she supposed, and she needed an ally, so she told him the whole story.
This time she did get a response, if a lukewarm one. “OK, so you need to find out who submitted the incident report. If it’s Kuzno, then we can panic.”
“The problem is, head of Safety is Absinthe McRae. She’s my sworn enemy since the first year of grad school.”
Lou slapped Lori’s desk, scattering pages of math. “I really don’t have time for this shit. Can’t help you with Absinthe, sorry—she hates me too. But if you figure out who the killer is, I’ll be in my office.”
He left, running over the poor abandoned math paper that lay crumpled and forgotten like the shards of Lori’s career.
Maybe he was right. Maybe she should be writing proofs instead of seeing killers behind every self-latching door. But it wouldn’t hurt to go see Absinthe—and try to kill two birds with one stone, because Fang Li seemed to have found herself in Gitmo.
On Sunday evening, after another session with the police, Lori had returned home to find a weepy message on her answering machine from her Chinese-Canadian postdoc. Fang had apparently had visa problems at the border, and when she’d tried to contact STI, had been told she had no position—that, in fact, there was no evidence she ever existed.
HR couldn’t help, because STI’s HR was two senile old ladies who didn’t even seem aware they had jobs. If Lori wanted something done, she needed the all-powerful arm of the legal office. They called themselves “Intellectual Property,” but there really weren’t that many inventions coming out of a university this size. Patent lawyers though they may be, the employees of IP spent most of their time keeping student pranks, faculty backstabbings, and suicides out of the newspapers. They no doubt did things even more mysterious and underhanded, but what those things might be, Lori couldn’t even guess.
Taking her course text and a notebook in case she had to wait to see her lawyer of choice, she headed to the edge of campus and then one block west to the beautiful old Victorian that housed the STI legal center. The university had promised the city not to expand past its historical boundaries, but it had managed to get around that inconvenience by gradually allowing administrators and support staff to ooze, like metastatic cells, into the surrounding residential district.
An enormous specimen of floss-silk tree grew in front of the legal building. They had been imported from Brazil and looked like something out of the Jurassic. Their lizard-green trunks bore triangular, carnassial-like teeth, as if warding off brontosaurus attack. The palm-shaped leaves dropped off in the fall, giving way to pink and white hibiscus-like flowers that morphed into six-inch green footballs stuffed with soft cotton. This particular tree was in the stage between leaves and flowers, but by spring it would have all stages—flowers, footballs, cotton—and it was hard to imagine it needed such teeth to protect the hard, inedible fruit. She gave its spiky trunk a careful pat for luck and went up the stone steps to see Abby.
The secretary pointed her to an armchair and told her to be patient. She waited quite a while, solving end-of-chapter problems until she felt eyes on her. Her old classmate towered above her, pitiless gaze taking in every inch to judge whether Lori had gained a few pounds or learned how to dress (the answer to both was no). Her green poison-liqueur eyes finally fell on Lori’s work, and she burst into a mad cackle that probably terrorized the parakeets feeding in the floss-silk tree.
“Well, well, well, Lori,” she chortled, “It’s not just about the qualifying exam anymore, now is it?”
Lori slammed her notebook shut and stood up. Abby had always been intimidating, but back in grad school Lori had had the advantage. This role reversal was downright scary.
They’d never really been friends, but as Lori took her seat in the conference room and listened to Abby’s recriminations, she realized her old classmate hated her. After all these years, she was still angry that Lori had found graduate school in physics to be her natural element and that she, Abby, had
been forced to look elsewhere for a career, not because she couldn’t do physics—in fact, she’d been nearly brilliant—but because she couldn’t deal with the social aspect.
“You were this close—” Abby held two fingers a hairsbreadth apart, right under Lori’s nose—“and I mean THIS close to being arrested. The LPR Lab wanted to press charges against you for trespassing and theft. We had to tell them that legally, they are owned by STI, so STI faculty have the right to be on their campus at any time.” She chortled in a self-satisfied manner that Lori had never heard; Abby must have taken Arrogant Gestures 101 in law school. “It’s just a good thing those LEPERs tick me off, or I would have let them haul you away. Then it seems you’re buddies with Ben Gerson, too.”
“I don’t even know him,” Lori protested, remembering she was supposed to call him (About what? she wondered vaguely).
“You’ve been here less than a month,” Abby reminded her. “You’ve already been the target of a formal complaint, and now there’s a body to back it up. I don’t know why there’s anyone left trying to defend you.”
“What formal complaint?” Lori wondered.
“Oh, you’ve conveniently forgotten this already?” Abby got up and left the room, letting the heavy wooden door close with haunted creak. When she returned, she carried a bottle of water and the very thing that Lori had come here to see.
It was Marybeth who had filed the incident report on the falling door. Unable to believe it, Lori read it through several times, thinking it had to be a different event. But there it was—unsecured freezer door, falling to the ground and nearly causing personal injury.
“Listen to me,” Lori hissed, examining the signature very closely so she could verify it later. There was a special curlicue on Marybeth’s M. “Something is really strange here. I didn’t tell Marybeth about this. I didn’t tell anyone. There was no one besides me in the entire building that day, so far as I could tell. She had no way of knowing this happened, unless of course she set it up to happen.”
