Stork Raving Mad (17 page)

“Of course, you probably don’t want to take my word for it,” Josh said. “For all you know, I could be the one who was looking at the digitalis information.”

Was the man a mind reader? Or had my sudden flash of doubt been all too visible on my face?

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “You might want to tell the chief about this.”

“I only just found it a few minutes ago,” he said. “You think he’d be interested?”

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said. He leaned over to reach behind the makeshift computer table. The monitor went dark.

“You don’t want to save that stuff first?” I asked.

“No, anything I did on the machine would muddy the waters,” he said. “Best way to preserve whatever evidence is on it is to just pull the plug. Leaves all the temporary files in place, and sometimes that’s your best source of forensic data.”

As I watched, he unplugged various cables and wires from Danny’s computer.

“Won’t Danny be suspicious when he finds his machine gone?”

“It belongs to the company, not him,” he said as he hefted the CPU under one arm. “I’ll tell him we had to take it back to the office for some kind of maintenance. You still interested in learning what you can about Drs. Wright and Blanco?”

I nodded.

“I’ll see what I can dig up,” he said. He put the CPU down under his own desk. “Danny might be a little distracted right now.”

“Thanks,” I said. “After you take that to the chief. Or if you like, I could tell him about it.”

“That’d be good,” he said. “Maybe he could send someone down to fetch it. I’d rather keep an eye on things here, if you don’t mind. Make sure no one else sneaks down and uses corporate property to research a murder. And I should probably show him this.”

He handed me a paper. I glanced down. It was an e-mail from Dr. Wright to Ramon. I read it quickly. She was acknowledging receipt of his paperwork and giving him permission to do his dissertation on Mendoza’s work. Her permission sounded grudging and was hedged with at least a dozen cautions and requirements, and I had no idea if he’d paid attention to them, but the core issue—whether he’d gotten permission for his topic—was there in black and white.

Either Dr. Wright had been mistaken or she’d been lying.

“Did you get this legally?” I asked.

“As far as I know,” he said. “Since Danny was clearly too distracted to do much, I thought I’d help out. I asked Ramon if I could search his e-mail for proof that he’d gotten permission for his dissertation and he wrote down his e-mail ID and password. Some friends in the college systems department helped a bit by restoring all his deleted e-mail from the archives, and voila.”

“You’d think he’d have kept a copy of this somewhere he could find it,” I said.

“I would,” he said. “Then again, I write code, not plays.”

“Can I take this to my husband?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I can run another copy.”

“Thanks.”

I got up and shuffled back across the basement to the stairs.

“Careful,” he said, frowning a little as I reached the basement stairs. “Shouldn’t you be lying down more?”

“Yes,” I said as I heaved myself upward once again.

I glanced back down from the top of the stairs. Josh’s face
looked rather eerie, lit only by the light from the monitor, and as I watched, he pushed the same key over and over again a few seconds apart. Something to the right of the keyboard—possibly the page-down key. From his frown, he didn’t seem to like what he was seeing.

Was the e-mail from Dr. Wright real? I was at least ninety percent sure it was. I’d learned enough about computer security from some of my brother’s technical staff to know that it would be hard to fake something like that well enough to hold up under a forensic examination of the college mail system.

But right now I wasn’t going to trust anything a hundred percent. Josh had been here all day and for all I knew, he could have been holding a grudge if Dr. Wright had flunked him back in his all-too-recent college days. I needed some information that wasn’t coming from a possible murder suspect. I needed my own laptop.

Which, last I’d seen it, was locked up in the secure closet in Michael’s office. I should probably share what I’d learned with the chief anyway. As I passed by the stairs I glanced longingly up, thinking of our bedroom. Later. For now, I made a quick pit stop then shuffled down the long corridor toward the library.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Sammy called to me as I came down the hallway.

“Is there an echo in here?” I muttered.

Sammy was sitting in a chair at the far end of the hall, guarding the library door. Combined with the crime scene tape behind him and the chain and padlock wrapped around the knobs of the double doors, his guard post gave off a definite message: keep out. I ignored the message.

“I wanted to get my laptop from Michael’s office,” I said. And then, remembering the pill bottle in my purse, I added, “And I’d like to see the chief for a few moments.”

Sammy nodded and gestured toward the small hallway that led to Michael’s office. He looked glum. I suddenly remembered why.

“Any more news on Hawkeye?” I asked. Sammy’s face clouded.

“Still doing well, thanks to Clarence and your dad,” he said. “It was touch-and-go for a while, though. And you know what really burns me?”

I shook my head.

“The guy who did it didn’t even stop,” Sammy said. “And I’m not even sure we could charge him with much if we manage to
locate him. The chief’s going to check with the DA, but I know what will happen. They’ll say it’s only a dog and he wasn’t killed. Except he almost was.”

“At least he’ll be all right,” I said, patting Sammy’s shoulder.

He nodded. I could see that he was deeply upset but pretended not to notice and plodded down the hall toward Michael’s office.

I found the chief sitting back in Michael’s desk chair, his feet up on a trash can. One hand held a cell phone to his ear while the other was scratching Scout, who sat leaning against the chair.

“You look comfortable,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean I’m not busy,” he said. He turned to sit up straight, feet on the floor.

“I was talking to Scout,” I said, reaching down to pet the dog. His short, light-brown tail thumped softly on the rug as I did so. “You, on the other hand, look overworked. Put your feet up again.”

“Hope it’s okay to have him in here,” the chief said, nodding at Scout. “We’ve all been too busy for me to assign anyone to take him home.”

“He can stay as long as you like,” I said. “Spike’s staying overnight at the vet’s for observation, so the coast is clear.” I sat down on an ottoman, which I knew from experience was a lot easier to get out of than the pseudo-comfy guest chairs. “I brought you something.”

I pulled the paper-wrapped pill bottle out of my pocket and put it on the desk in front of him.

“What’s this?” he asked, peering over his glasses at it.

“Ramon Soto’s sleeping medication. Which I overheard him admit slipping into Dr. Wright’s tea.”

“Overheard?” His voice was sharp. “You weren’t interrogating him?”

“I was trying to nap in the living room while you were interrogating people,” I said. “He and his girlfriend woke me up discussing it.”

I gave the chief a rundown of what I’d overheard between Ramon and Bronwyn, and for good measure Bronwyn’s conversation with Danny and the page on digitalis Josh had shown me.

When I finished, the chief continued frowning and scratching Scout’s head for a few moments.

“When you left here I thought you were going to rest,” he said finally.

“I was resting,” I said. “Can I help it if some of your suspects chose to wake me up with their plotting?”

A fleeting hint of a smile interrupted his scowl, so quickly that I wasn’t entirely sure I’d seen it.

“You weren’t resting when you found this,” he said, nodding at the pill bottle.

“The kitchen was off-limits the last time I checked,” I said. “I was rummaging through the students’ stuff for something safe to eat.” Which was only a small lie, I figured. The chief didn’t know I’d rummaged twice—once for food and once for incriminating evidence.

He nodded absently then picked up his cell phone and poked a couple of buttons.

“Dr. Langslow?” he said. “Could you step in here for a few moments? Thanks.”

He put the cell phone back on the desk. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of plastic gloves, and began putting them on.

A few seconds later, Dad appeared through the French doors between the library and Michael’s office. Well, that explained the chain and padlock.

“Meg!” he exclaimed. “Do you need me?”

“No,” I said. “The chief does.”

The chief picked up the pill bottle in one gloved hand and held it out to Dad, whose hands were also gloved. Dad peered at the pill bottle’s label, then smiled and held it up with a flourish, as if the chief had just handed him some kind of trophy.

“Diazepam!” he exclaimed, as if this alone solved the case.

“Meg says that’s generic for Valium,” the chief said.

“Very good,” Dad said, beaming at me. He opened the pill bottle, inspected the contents, and nodded.

“So this could be the murder weapon?” the chief asked.

“Oh no,” Dad said. And then, seeing how the chief’s face fell, he added, “But they could be another very useful piece in the puzzle.”

The chief didn’t look very happy to see the number of puzzle pieces multiplying.

“So what would happen if someone slipped two or three of these in our victim’s tea?” the chief asked.

“She’d feel sleepy,” Dad said. “Might even fall asleep, though that’s a pretty minimal dose. And she’d probably be just fine
when she woke up, as long as no one came along while she was asleep and did something else to her. Which appears to be what happened.”

“But I thought Valium was for anxiety, not insomnia,” the chief said.

“A lot of insomnia is caused by anxiety,” Dad said. “Dull the anxiety and the body’s natural sleep mechanisms take over. And the diazepam itself acts as a mild sedative. It can be very effective in the short term. In the longer term, patients tend to develop tolerance to the sedative effects.”

The chief pondered this briefly.

“So,” he said. “If Ramon’s doctor thought his insomnia was due to, say, the stress of trying to finish his dissertation and direct the play, he might prescribe this in the short term?”

Dad nodded.

“Or perhaps Ramon prefers to think of himself as taking sleeping medication rather than anxiety medication,” Dad suggested. “So many of us find physical ailments more socially acceptable than even the mildest form of mental illness.”

“So two or three of these wouldn’t kill her,” the chief said. “What about five or six?”

“Even a dozen wouldn’t necessarily kill someone,” Dad said. “Certainly not as rapidly as Dr. Wright’s death appears to have been.”

“What if they were combined with something else?” I asked. “Subdural hematoma, for example?”

“It wouldn’t be good on top of subdural hematoma,” he said. “But I think it’s unlikely she had that.”

“Dr. Blanco has been wondering aloud if she died from a subdural hematoma caused by the fall she took in our hallway,” I said.

“Unlikely,” Dad repeated. “Most people keep their brains in their skulls. She landed on her derriere, not her head.”

“You’re sure?” the chief asked.

“I cross-checked it with half a dozen witnesses,” Dad said. “If she’d landed on her head, I’d have insisted she go to the hospital, and if she refused, I’d have kept her under close observation. Can’t be too careful with a head injury.”

“So Ramon and Bronwyn could chuck handfuls of his sleeping meds into her tea with relative impunity,” I said. “But what if one or both of them is lying? What effect would it have if they used a couple of Señor Mendoza’s heart pills?”

“That would depend on what his heart pills are,” Dad said. “We should confiscate his pill bottle so we can test it!”

“We already confiscated it,” the chief said.

“Great!” Dad said. “Let’s have a look at it!”

“It’s already on its way by courier to the State Bureau of Investigation in Richmond,” the chief said. “Since we don’t actually have testing facilities here in Caerphilly.”

Dad’s face fell.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, that makes sense. I don’t suppose you took note of what it said on the label.”

The chief’s face softened.

“I did, but it wasn’t any use,” he said. “To start with, it was in Spanish. And Señor Mendoza admitted that he was not carrying the pills in the original prescription container. He combined the
contents of two smaller bottles of heart medicine into the big one we all saw. So even though I now have a translation of what the label says, it’s completely irrelevant. It’s for some over-the-counter antacid tablets.”

“Unwise,” Dad said, shaking his head. “Anyone treating him would have no idea what medication he was on, or the dosage.”

“And blasted inconvenient for my investigation,” the chief said. “But under the circumstances, you can see why I didn’t think showing it to you would be of any use.”

“Still, I’d have liked to have seen them,” Dad said.

“The pills? Is there really much you can tell from visual inspection?” the chief asked. “Assuming the name isn’t stenciled on the pills, and I can tell you that wasn’t the case.”

“It’s possible I could learn something,” Dad said. “If I’d had a chance to see them.”

“Then examine this,” the chief said, pulling something out of his pocket. “Dr. Waterston gave it to me. He says it’s one of Señor Mendoza’s, picked up after the spill in the front hallway. As far as Horace and I could see, it looks exactly the same as the ones in the bottle we sent in.”

He dropped the tiny pill into Dad’s outstretched palm.

“Excellent!” Dad retreated to the other end of Michael’s desk and trained the desk lamp on the pill.

Chief Burke shook his head slightly, as if exhausted by such enthusiasm.

“Meg,” he said. “I have a question for you. Was Dr. Wright carrying a handbag when she arrived?”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember.