“No.” She walked back to the desk, picked up the designer purse and
unclasped it. Removing a small key, she fit it into the lock of the
top desk drawer.
“I usually don’t lock up like this,” she said. “That man made me feel
as if I were back in Hungary.”
Sliding open a left-hand file drawer, she looked down into it.
Frowned. Stuck her arm in, moved it around, pulled it out empty.
“Gone,” she said, looking up. “How interesting.”
The two of us went up to the department office and Janos asked Merilee
to get Dawn Herbert’s student file. Five-by-eight index card.
“This is all of it?” she said, frowning.
“We recycle all the old paper now, Dr. )anos, remember?”
Ah, yes. How politically correct. . . ” Janos and I read the card:
DE-ENROLLED stamped at the top in red. Four typed lines under that:
BarDel: DX. ffog: ~.D BioS!.
D.O~.: 12/13/63
FOB: Po~eepaie, N.Y.
AB Matn, Po~eepsie Coin.
“Not much,” I said.
Janos gave a cold smile and handed the card back to Merilee.
“I’ve got a seminar, Dr. Delaware, if you’ll please excuse me.”
She left the office.
Merilee stood there holding the card, looking as if she’d been an
unwilling witness to a marital spat.
“Have a nice day,” she said, then turned her back on me.
I sat in the car and tried to untangle the knots the Jones family had
tied in my head.
Grandpa Chuck, doing something to the hospital.
Chip and for Cindy doing something to their kids.
Ashmore andlor Herbert learning about some or all of it. Ashmore’s
data confiscated by Huenengarth. Herbert’s data stolen by
Huenengarth.
Herbert probably murdered by a man who looked like Huenengarth.
The blackmail scenario obvious even to a casual observer like Janos.
But if Ashmore and Herbert had both been up to something, why had she
been the first to die?
And why had Huenengarth waited so long after her death to search for
her disks, when he’d moved in on Ashmore’s computers the day after the
toxicologist’s murder?
Unless he’d only learned about Herbert’s data after reading Ashmore’s
files.
I stayed with that for a while and came up with a possible chronology:
Herbert the first to suspect a tie-in between Chad Jones’s death and
Cassie’s illnesses-student leading the teacher, because the teacher
couldn’t care less about patients.
She pulled Chad’s chart, confirmed her suspicions, recorded her
findings-encoded as random numbers-on the university computer, printed
out a floppy disk, stashed it in her graduate locker, and put the
squeeze on the Jones family.
But not before making a duplicate record and filing it in one of
Ashmore’s computers, without Ashmore’s knowledge.
Two months after her murder, Ashmore found the file and tried to use it
too.
Greedy, despite his million-dollar grant.
I thought of the Ferris Dixon money. Way too much for what Ashmore
claimed to be doing with it. Why had the largesse of a chemical
foundation extended ~o a man who criticized chemical companies? A
foundation no one seemed to know much about, supposedly dedicated to
life-science research, but its only other grantee was an economist.
The elusive Professor Zimberg. . . the sound-alike secretaries at his
office and Ferris Dixon.
Some kind of game…
The waltz.
Maybe Ashmore and Herbert had worked dzfjerent angles.
He, leaning on Chuck Jones because he’d latched on to a financial
scam.
She, trying to milk Chip and Cindy on the child-abuse secret.
Two blackmailers operating out of one lab?
I worked with it a while longer.
Money and death, dollars and science.
I couldn’t get it to mesh.
The parking meter’s red VIOLATION flag popped up like toast. I looked
at my watch. Just after noon. Over two hours until my appointment
with Cassie and mommy.
In the meantime, why not a visit with daddy?
I used a pay phone in the administration building to call West Valley
Community College and get directions.
Forty-five-minute drive, if traffic was thin. leaving the campus and
heading north, I turned west on Sunset and got onto the 405.
At the interchange I transferred to the Ventura Freeway, drove toward
the western end of the Valley, and got off at Topanga Canyon