Forever Dead (17 page)

“Come on in,” she said and led me into the chaos of her office. There were boxes everywhere, all in various stages of being unpacked.

She knelt down in front of a box and started rifling through its contents.

“You're an entomologist aren't you?” she asked.

“A zoologist, really, but I often work with insects.”

“And you've lost all your specimens, as well as your disks.” She looked up at me, and seeing my surprised look she laughed. “This is a small university. Nothing is private here, and we stick by each other. Don just phoned to warn me you were coming around.”

She sat back on her heels, a file folder in each hand.

“Being a zoologist I know what it's like to lose data or have an experiment go wrong and the hopes of tenure with it. I gather you were hoping to recover the disks. What makes you think they'd still be around?”

“Hope. Desperation. I don't know. They weren't trashed at my office. They were physically removed, so I have some hope they're still around, that whoever took them realizes what they mean and won't destroy them. There's nothing on them that would be the least bit useful to anyone but me.”

The words hung in the air. The silence lengthened. She dropped the folders back into the box.

“Not even to another zoologist or entomologist?”

I paused, startled by her question. I hadn't really given that possibility much thought. What if someone
had wanted my data to beat me to publication and the stolen disks had nothing to do with Diamond? Ridiculous. My work just wasn't important enough, even if there was another team working on it. If I had some new breakthrough, then it would be different, but …

“Not interesting enough,” I said, and felt a pang of anger that my work really wasn't something someone would want to steal.

“That doesn't mean it isn't interesting to someone else,” she said. “What were you working on, besides the larvae?”

“Basic taxonomy. Nothing earth-shattering. Some succession work and some stuff with praying mantids. I can't see that anyone would be interested, except me.”

“You're probably right.”

I tried not to look hurt at this cryptic dismissal of my work.

“It was only a suggestion, but maybe you should be looking somewhere else besides here. Why do you think Diamond's death is related to the theft of your disks anyway?”

“Don seems to have told you everything.”

Leslie rocked on her heels.

“Yeah, well, he said you had some crazy idea that the larvae you found on Diamond's body indicated that he had been moved a long way from where he died. Even if your accidental attempt at forensic entomology can tell you that, what the hell does it mean? It makes no sense. I mean, why would anyone want to move his body somewhere else? It's ludicrous.”

She yanked another box over to her side and rummaged inside.

“Because his death might not be what it seems.”

Leslie slowly turned to look at me, her face blank and unreadable. “What's that supposed to mean?”

When I didn't answer she waved her hand impatiently.

“You can't get more straightforward than being killed by a bear. You really are desperate, aren't you? Sounds as though you're grasping at straws. Can't say I blame you, though,” she added.

I watched as she emptied out the box and started sorting out the papers that had been in it. Finally, as I had hoped, she broke the silence.

“Did you ever actually meet Diamond?”

“No. I knew of his work, of course, but I never met him.”

“Yeah, well, he was well-liked by most people. He'll be sorely missed. If you're suggesting his death was anything but a horrible accident …”

“I'm not suggesting that, but was there anything Diamond was doing that could have made people angry enough or frightened enough to explain why his body was moved?”

“You mean like a sick prank or something? If you look hard enough everyone has enemies. But Diamond just got really careless. His campsite was a literal siren call of food. The cops said he even left a Mars bar in his tent, for God's sake.”

She shrugged, and I waited, hoping for more.

“What do you want me to say? He got careless. I've been there, know what it's like. But this time I got the consolation prize. I got his job. Lousy way to get it, and people calling me callous behind my back. What do they expect me to do? Say no to a promotion I've sought all my life? Sure, we were rivals — no secret there. I wanted his job. God knows I deserved it. But I didn't want it this way. I've just learned the hard way to take what I can get in a deck stacked in favour of men. You got tenure?”

“No.”

“See? And you're not likely to even have a chance at getting it without your disks, right?”

The look on my face must have said it all.

“What research are you working on?” I asked, wanting to get the spotlight off me. I hated it when my questions came back at me.

“Oh, I'm quite eclectic. Move around and fill in the gaps left by my colleagues. Some taxonomy. I've worked with parasites and planaria, and done some studies with mice. I've spent the last few years working on moose and their predators, and a new project that I hope will prove very interesting.”

“What's that?”

“Don't have enough data to go public yet or know for sure if the hypothesis will stand, so I'd rather not say just yet.” She smiled. She was actually quite pretty when her face lit up like that.

“It's a new angle, may not pan out … but I have to wait and organize the data before I make it public. You know how it is with us scientists. Paranoid that someone else will beat us to it.”

The phone rang, and Leslie grabbed for it.

“Mitchell here.” I watched as she threw me a grimace and said into the phone, “Really Davies, don't you have anything better to do than that? I'll get it to you as soon as I have a moment. Yeah, she's here. Why? You want me to send her over? Okay. No problem. I'll tell her.”

She hung up the phone and stared through me.

“Odious little man, that Davies. Always skulking about trying to dig up dirt. Seems to hate us all. Can't imagine what turns a man to hate so much.” She refocused her eyes on me and said, “He wants to see you. Two doors down and on the left.”

She turned back to her boxes and I started to leave, then hesitated.

“Why did it take so long for Diamond's body to be discovered? Surely someone from the biology station would have gone up to his camp?”

“He never encouraged anyone to go up there. In fact, he actively discouraged anyone unless it was a dire emergency. We left him to his own devices. Didn't make any difference to us. Even his women never went up there. It was his sacred turf. He guarded it like a cornered sow. We simply respected that, and by the time you found his body he wasn't due out for another day.”

I thanked Leslie for answering my questions, but as I left, I hesitated in the hall outside her door, aware that something she had said had twigged something important somewhere in my mind. Problem was I couldn't quite grasp what it had been before it was gone.

I followed Leslie's instructions and found Davies sitting at his desk. He was a small man, no taller than I was, in his early sixties with a halo of white hair punctuating a bright red dome and a bristly, charcoal grey Groucho mustache. He was flipping through some files in the open drawer of a desk, but when he saw me he jumped to his feet and scurried around his desk to meet me at the door. He did rather give the impression of a rooster with his bald red head and jerky movements.

“You must be Dr. O'Callaghan.” His voice was cold but surprisingly beautiful with a deep, lilting, musical sound at odds with his size. He could have had a career in radio. He didn't offer his hand or ask me in, so I stood in the doorway and waited. “May I ask you what you think you're doing going around asking questions you have no business asking?”

Taken aback, I began to explain about my disks, but he impatiently waved me to silence.

“Yes, yes, your disks and larvae and things.” He dismissed my entire career with a wave of his hand. “Don filled me in on it all, and I want it to stop. I can't have you in here wasting my people's time. We've had enough from the police and the press. If you need anything please come to me.”

He was invading my personal space, herding me before him and out of his doorway and into the hall.

“Perhaps I can help you sometime, but not today. As you can see I am extremely busy.” With that, he withdrew his business card, handed it to me, and quietly closed the door behind him.

I stood in the hall a moment wondering why he felt so threatened. I debated precisely two seconds about going behind his back to see Patrick Whyte. But I was on a roll, my confidence level at an all-time high, and I wasn't about to waste it — I never seemed to be able to count on it being there for me, so it was a real bonus. I needed it now, and I had it, so I cruised down the hallway and found a back stairway up to the second-floor labs, hoping Davies wouldn't appear out of nowhere to scream at me. I peered into one lab and was directed down the hall to another whose door was wide open. Through it I could hear a male voice raised in anger.

“Yes, well, keep out of my damn business. I can speak to whomever I want. It's a free world,” said the voice and then I heard a telephone slamming down.

I waited a discreet few seconds so that he wouldn't think I'd overheard and then knocked on the open door. He was standing by the window looking out, and at the sound of my knock he jumped and turned around. Evidently he was making another phone call because he gripped the phone in his hand and I noticed his knuckles were white. He was very tall, maybe 6' 5”, and well built, and his thick, unruly blond hair swept over his forehead
like a tidal wave. His eyes were a soft, deep, clear cobalt blue, and as he turned them on me I felt myself involuntarily melting into them. We stared at each other in silence for some moments, and then he waved at me to sit down. Disconcerted I sat down rather suddenly as he barked some orders into the phone and hung up, having never taken his eyes off me.

“Photo lab's always getting things mixed up” he said. “I asked them for black and white prints and they've given me colour. What can I do for you?” He smiled. You could get lost in a smile like that, I thought, momentarily sidetracked.

“My name's Cordi O'Callaghan,” I said, when I finally found my voice. “I wanted to ask you some questions …” I hesitated, unsure how to proceed.

“So you're Dr. O'Callaghan, eh? Tough luck about your insects.”

I looked at him and then laughed nervously. “Davies?”

“It was in the paper, and dear Davies just phoned to tell me not to talk to you. So, tell me why I should?” His eyes danced in amusement and watched me closely.

I gave him a brief outline of what had happened with my insects and disks and he seemed genuinely interested, so I asked him how well he had known Diamond.

“Well enough. He was a bit of a prick, to tell you the truth. Don't get me wrong, I'm sorry he's dead, but he and I never really hit it off.” He moved over to a jumble of folders on a desk. “Mind if we talk while I work?”

He folded himself like a jackknife into a chair and began sorting through the mess. I sat and watched.

“Quite a mess, eh? It's not usually like this. It's Diamond's main work area — was, I should say. He did most of his work here. Always kept it neat as a pin, but somebody came in a week or so ago and rifled through it.
I haven't had a chance to clean it up yet. Whoever it was spent a lot of time here by the looks of it — all his files have been searched. Don't know what they were looking for, but they sure left a mess behind. Now I have the job of going through it, tidying it all up, and seeing what sort of papers we can publish for him posthumously.”

“Did you call security?”

Patrick looked up in surprise. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

“In case something was stolen.”

Patrick laughed, a deep rich chortle that was infectious.

“Nothing to steal here, but lots over there, and nothing's gone, as far as I can see.” He waved his hand around the room and made his point. I could see three computers, microscopes, and all manner of equipment.

“What about the computer? Any files missing?” He looked at me quickly and frowned.

“I never thought of that. I'll have to check, but I haven't noticed anything missing.”

“You're his PhD student, is that right?”

“Yes.” He smoothed out his frown. “I've been working with him for two years now looking at parasites on Canada lynx. He does most of the fieldwork and I do the lab stuff.”

“What was he working on up in the bush before he died?”

“I don't know for sure. He said it was follow-up stuff on his lynx population experiments, that he needed to get a tad more data, but he'd already put in six weeks up there earlier in the spring with our pilot, Jeff, following our radio-tagged lynx. At first I thought he was goofing off, three weeks and all, when he had a lot to do here, but everyone needs a holiday and it was so peaceful without him hanging around me like a leech.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I got the impression that he was either working on something new or had a new angle on something old. He seemed quite excited about it, but then he always overreacted to everything. I did get the impression that it might have been a new project or maybe something to do with the logging, but he never said and I wasn't about to ask. We all keep things close to our chests when it's something new. No one wants to be scooped.”

I felt a pang of resentment. First Leslie, now Diamond. Why couldn't I find something new?

“You didn't like him.”

“No, I didn't.”

He ended the sentence as if he was ending the conversation, but I persevered.