Smoke in Mirrors (29 page)

“Now you feel that you have to do this one last thing for her, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay, you know,” Cassie said gently. “If anything terrible and mysterious ever happened to me, I’d like to know that someone cared enough to go after the truth.”

He took a deep breath, released it slowly. “I would care.”

That didn’t sound right.

“A lot,” he added.

That didn’t sound right, either.

“Hell, I can’t even stand to think about something bad happening to you, Cassie.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I can’t stand to think about anything terrible happening to you, either.”

It wasn’t exactly a declaration of love, he decided. But it would do. For now.

Thomas brought the
SUV to a halt in the driveway of Andrew Grayson’s home. Leonora examined it through the window.

The large house occupied a pricey stretch of waterfront property. Lush, green gardens framed an airy, modern structure that was oriented toward the view of the lake and the office towers of downtown Seattle on the other side. Two very expensive-looking vehicles of European extraction were parked outside the garage at the edge of the broad drive.

“Deke was right,” she said. “Whatever happened after the murder of Sebastian Eubanks, Andrew Grayson doesn’t seem to have suffered too much financially.”

“Judging from his attitude on the phone when I called him a while ago, he isn’t shy about discussing it, either.”

They got out of the SUV and walked toward the entrance. The double front doors were lacquered in a rich, gleaming red. They opened just as Thomas reached out to ring the bell.

A silver-haired man with patrician features stood in the opening. He wore a cream-colored shirt and hand-tailored trousers. Intelligent curiosity lit his eyes. There was also a measure of caution in his gaze.

“Miss Hutton and Mr. Walker? I’m Andrew Grayson. Please come in.”

“Thank you,” Leonora said.

Thomas held out his hand. “Call me Thomas.”

Andrew took the hand Thomas offered. His grip was firm and confident. He studied Thomas’s black eye.

“Mind if I ask?” he said.

“No, but it will be easier to explain in context.”

Andrew nodded. “This way, please.”

Thomas followed behind Leonora as Andrew led the way through a wide, two-story-atrium center hall.

The hall opened onto an expansive great room. The floor-to-ceiling windows captured the sweeping, panoramic view of the lake. A green lawn rolled down a gentle incline to the water’s edge. A sleek yacht was tied up at the private dock.

A man who looked to be about the same age as Andrew, but with more weight and far less hair, was working on the dock. Thomas watched him hoist a coil of rope and disappear inside the large craft.

“My partner, Ben Matthis,” Andrew said. He motioned toward a pair of black lacquered chairs upholstered in tan leather. “Please sit down.”

Leonora turned away from the window and sat down beside Thomas.

“Thanks for agreeing to see us on such short notice,” Thomas said.

Andrew lowered himself to the cushions of a black leather sofa and leaned back into the corner with negligent ease. “I must admit, you said just enough on the phone to make me curious. I went online while I waited
for you and I found nothing in the reports of the deaths of the two women you mentioned to connect them to the murder of Sebastian Eubanks.”

Thomas glanced at Leonora and then clasped his hands loosely between his knees.

“We’re not sure there is a connection,” he said. “But we do know that, shortly before she died, Bethany Walker was interested in the details of the Eubanks murder. The second woman, Meredith Spooner, found some clippings of the murder that Bethany had apparently tried to hide. A short time later, she, too, was dead. Both women spent a lot of time at Mirror House before their deaths and both women were rumored to have been using drugs.”

“We don’t believe that last part,” Leonora said. “We’re very sure that neither Bethany nor Meredith was into the drug scene.”

“That’s all you’ve got?” Andrew asked.

“There’s more.” Thomas gestured toward his shiner. “Some guy in a ski mask tried to throw me off the footbridge last night. He was high on drugs at the time. The chief of police says the kid probably won’t remember much about the assault.”

“But you don’t think it was a random act of violence, is that it?”

“No,” Thomas said. “I think a con man named Alex Rhodes is involved in this thing. He doesn’t want us digging any deeper.”

Andrew looked thoughtful. “The fact that you found me means you’ve already dug very deep. The college trustees went to great lengths to keep my connection to Eubanks a dark secret after I was asked to resign.”

“We had a little help from Margaret Lewis,” Leonora said.

Andrew’s expression first showed surprise and then
quiet amusement. “Ah, yes. The department secretary. That explains everything. I’m delighted to hear that she’s still alive. An amazingly competent individual, Mrs. Lewis.”

“What can you tell us about the murder?” Thomas asked.

“About the murder? Nothing.” Andrew moved one hand, palm up. “Except to say that I didn’t do it. And I don’t know anything about this Alex Rhodes person you mentioned. But I can tell you a few things about Sebastian Eubanks, if you like.”

“Margaret said that Eubanks had turned very eccentric towards the end,” Leonora said.

Andrew snorted softly. “He was a math geek. He was born eccentric. You had to remind him to change his underwear on a regular basis. But it’s true that, in those last months of his life, he got very strange. He was more than just consumed with his work. He became obsessed.”

“Obsessed is a heavy word,” Thomas said.

“It’s appropriate in this case,” Andrew said. “To be honest, at the time I thought he had lost his grip on reality. He was a genius, you know. Few realized it because he didn’t live long enough to prove himself. But I was close to him for several months and I was able to observe his incredible mind at work. Astonishing, really. Absolutely astonishing.”

“He wouldn’t have been the first genius to get lost in his own brilliance,” Leonora said quietly.

“True. It was the paranoia that drove us apart, though, not his brilliance. But after he was killed I decided that maybe he’d been right to be paranoid.”

“You don’t buy the interrupted burglary story?” Thomas asked.

“I did at the time.” Andrew propped his left ankle on his right knee. “I knew I wasn’t the one who had killed
him and there didn’t seem to be any other logical suspects. But I’ve done a lot of thinking over the years. I’ve arrived at some private conclusions. Pure conjecture and wild speculation, of course. I have not one shred of proof.”

“We’re here to listen to pure conjecture and wild speculation,” Leonora said. “We’re used to it. That’s about all we’ve had to go on so far.”

“I can see that,” Andrew said. “But I warn you that you won’t get anywhere trying to prove my theory.”

“Why do you think Eubanks was murdered?” Thomas asked.

“For the oldest reason in the academic world.”

Thomas frowned. “Someone caught him in bed with the wrong person?”

“No.” Andrew said. “Someone wanted to steal Sebastian’s work and publish it as his own.”

“Good heavens,” Leonora whispered. “Publish or perish? Literally?”

“The academic world is very Darwinian,” Andrew said. “But, then, you know that, don’t you? According to the online check I did before you arrived, you work in an academic library. Piercy College, I believe?”

“Yes.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “And I’ll be the first to admit that things can get a little rough in the academy. But I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of anyone murdering someone else in order to publish a paper.”

“Any cop will tell you that some people will commit murder for virtually any reason,” Andrew said. “But in this case there was far more than the publication of one minor paper in some obscure academic journal that only a couple of dozen people would have read at the time and which would have long since been forgotten.”

He stopped talking for a moment. Thomas kept quiet. So did Leonora.

“I was one of two people on campus at the time who had some knowledge of the nature of Sebastian’s work,” Andrew continued. “In the course of our relationship, he talked to me a bit about his theories. He couldn’t help himself. He needed to discuss them with someone and I was there.” He moved his hand again, this time in a dismissing gesture. “Also, to be blunt, he knew full well that I wouldn’t have been capable of stealing his concepts and publishing them as my own.”

“Why not?” Thomas asked.

“I was in the computer science department. Exactly where I belonged. I’m more of an engineer than a mathematician. My mind doesn’t work the same way that Sebastian’s did. I freely admit that I wouldn’t have been able to fake my way through a peer review article in his branch of mathematics even if I’d had unlimited access to his notes and papers. Which I did not.”

“But someone else did?” Leonora asked softly.

Andrew looked past her, through the windows, toward the sleek yacht berthed at the dock below the garden.

“As I said, there was far more than the publication of a minor paper in mathematics at stake. There was fame and fortune to be had. Not to mention a reputation that would survive for generations in academic circles.”

“Go on,” Thomas said.

“There was an extremely ambitious assistant professor in the department of mathematics at Eubanks who was capable of comprehending the full implications of Sebastian’s work. They had been friends and colleagues for a time, but they quarreled. Sebastian never trusted him after that.”

Thomas watched him. “What are you saying?”

“I’ve done a lot of soul-searching over the years,” Andrew said. “I’ve often wondered what might have happened if I had taken Sebastian’s fears more seriously.
Perhaps I might have been able to do something. But to this day, I honestly don’t know what that something would have been.”

“I don’t see how you could have done anything,” Leonora said. “You couldn’t possibly have guessed that someone might murder him in order to steal his work.”

“No.” Andrew sighed. “It simply never occurred to me at the time that Osmond Kern would kill for the privilege of getting his name in the textbooks.”

Andrew stood in
the doorway to say good-bye. “Sebastian’s murder was a real turning point in my life. I took a long, hard look at my future and decided that I wasn’t cut out for higher ed, even assuming I could get another teaching position. So I took a job with a local software startup instead. Ben worked there, too. We did okay when the company went public.”

Thomas gave the big house an amused glance. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“What are you going to do with the information I gave you?” Andrew asked.

Leonora exchanged glances with Thomas, who shrugged.

“We don’t know yet,” Thomas said. “We’re still trying to fit pieces of a puzzle together.”

“If anything comes of your investigation, I’d like to know about it.”

“We’ll keep you in the loop,” Thomas promised.

Andrew nodded. “I’d appreciate that. Sebastian was a very difficult man. Exasperating. Brilliant. Eccentric. No social skills to speak of. But for a time he and I were more than friends. He deserved to have his name attached to that damned algorithm. I’d like to see him get his rightful place in the textbooks.”

Leonora started to respond, but she stopped when she noticed the large car rolling toward them down the long drive. A woman was at the wheel. There were two children in the back seat.

“My niece’s twins,” Andrew said. “Their son of a bitch of a father filed for divorce last year. Married his girlfriend. Doesn’t have much time for his daughters now. The girls started having a lot of trouble in school. You know how it goes.”

“Yeah.” Thomas thought about how his grades had gone south after his parents’ divorce. “I know how it goes.”

“The family decided that Katie and Clara needed quality time with a reliable male role model so they won’t grow up thinking all men are undependable, untrustworthy scum like their dad. The upshot is that I get them a couple of times a week.” Andrew smiled. “What the hell, I’m male and I’m reliable. I’m also retired so I’ve got plenty of time.”

The car stopped a short distance away. The woman behind the wheel waved at Andrew. He returned the greeting. The rear doors popped open and two small girls erupted from the interior of the vehicle.

“Uncle Andrew.”

“Uncle Andrew.”

“I’ve been working with them on their studies.” Andrew grinned proudly. “They’re both doing fine now.”

“Pretty cool,” Leonora said.

“I could have used an uncle like you when I was a kid,” Thomas said.

The short day
was rapidly drawing to a close by the time they reached the Wing Cove exit. The mist that had dampened the windshield for the past twenty miles became a hard, driving rain with little warning. Thomas adjusted the wipers and eased into the right lane of Interstate 5.

He and Leonora had talked for a long time after leaving Andrew Grayson’s Mercer Island home. But their reasoning was starting to get circular.

“You’ve got to admit that some of the pieces do fit together,” Leonora said. “We’ve been looking for links and we’ve got some. Say that Bethany came to suspect, in the course of her own work in mathematics, that Sebastian Eubanks had actually developed the algorithm. Say she concluded that Osmond Kern had stolen it and published it as his own. What if she had confronted him with her suspicions?”

He kept his attention on his driving. “You think Kern murdered her to keep her from revealing the truth?”

“Why not? If he killed Eubanks thirty years ago to get the algorithm, why wouldn’t he kill again to keep his secret?”

“Then what? You think Meredith stumbled onto the same truth so he killed her, too? Why would she have cared about a thirty-year-old discovery in mathematics?”

“That algorithm made Kern wealthy. Maybe she tried to blackmail him.”