“A few.”
“Then you know. Some students one really gets close to; others pass through without making a mark. I’m afraid Dawn was one of the latter. Not because she wasn’t bright. She was extremely sharp, mathematically. It’s why I accepted her in the first place, even though I had reservations about her motivation. I’m always looking for women who aren’t intimidated by numbers and she had a true gift for math. But we never... jelled.”
“What was the matter with her motivation?”
“She didn’t have any. I always got the feeling she’d drifted into grad school because it was the path of least resistance. She’d applied to medical school and gotten rejected. Kept applying even after she enrolled here — a lost cause, really, because her non-math grades weren’t very good and her M-CAT scores were significantly below average. Her math scores were so high I decided to accept her, though. I went so far as to get her funding — a Graduate Advanced Placement fellowship. This past fall, I had to cut that off. That’s when she found the job at your hospital.”
“Poor performance?”
“Poor progress on her dissertation. She finished her course work with adequate grades, submitted a research proposal that looked promising, dropped it, submitted another, dropped that, et cetera. Finally she came up with one that she seemed to like. Then she just froze. Went absolutely nowhere with it. You know how it is — students either zip through or languish for years. I’ve been able to help plenty of the languishers and I tried to help Dawn. But she rejected counseling. Didn’t show up for appointments, made excuses, kept saying she could handle it, just needed more time. I never felt I was getting through to her. I was at the point of considering dropping her from the program. Then she was...”
She rubbed a fingertip over one blood-colored nail. “I suppose none of that seems very important now. Would you like a chocolate?”
“No, thanks.”
She looked down at the truffles. Closed the box.
“Consider that little speech,” she said, “as an elongated answer to your question about her disks. But yes, I did boot them up, and there was nothing meaningful on them. She’d accomplished nothing on the dissertation. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t even bothered to look at them when your Mr. Huenengarth showed up — had put them away and forgotten about them, I was so upset by her death. Going through that locker felt ghoulish enough. But he made such a point of trying to get them that I booted them up the moment he was gone. It was worse than I’d imagined. All she’d produced, after all my encouragement, were statements and restatements of her hypotheses and a random numbers table.”
“A random numbers table?”
“For random sampling. You know how it’s done, I’m sure.”
I nodded. “Generate a collection of random numbers with a computer or some other technique, then use it to select subjects from a general pool. If the table says five, twenty-three, seven, choose the fifth, twenty-third, and seventh people on the list.”
“Exactly. Dawn’s table was huge — thousands of numbers. Pages and pages generated on the department’s mainframe. What a foolish waste of computer time. She was nowhere near ready to select her sample. Hadn’t even gotten her basic methodology straight.”
“What was her research topic?”
“Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That’s as specific as she’d gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those disks. Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable. Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she had been using drugs.”
“Did she show any other signs of that?”
“I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom. And sometimes she did seem agitated — almost manic. Trying to convince me — or herself — that she was making progress. But I know she wasn’t taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four years — at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she enrolled.”
“Could be cocaine,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose so, but I’ve seen the same things happen to students who weren’t on drugs. The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.”
“How true,” I said.
She rubbed her nails, glanced over at the photos of her family. “When I found out she’d been murdered, it changed my perception of her. Up till then I’d been absolutely furious with her. But hearing about her death — the way she’d been found... well, I just felt sorry for her. The police told me she was dressed like some kind of punk-rocker. It made me realize she’d had an outside life she’d kept hidden from me. She was simply one of those people to whom the world of ideas would never be important.”
“Could her lack of motivation have been due to an independent income?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “She was poor. When I accepted her she begged me to get her funding, told me she couldn’t enroll without it.”
I thought of the carefree attitude about money she’d shown the Murtaughs. The brand-new car she’d died in.
“What about her family?” I said.
“I seem to remember there was a mother — an alcoholic. But the policemen said they hadn’t been able to locate anyone to claim the body. We actually took up a collection here at the school in order to bury her.”
“Sad.”
“Extremely.”
“What part of the country was she from?” I said.
“Somewhere back east. No, she wasn’t a rich girl, Dr. Delaware. Her lack of drive was due to something else.”
“How did she react to losing her fellowship?”
“She didn’t react at all. I’d expected some anger, tears, anything — hoped it would help clear the air and we’d reach an understanding. But she never even tried to contact me. Finally, I called her in, asked her how she was planning to support herself. She told me about the job at your hospital. Made it sound like something prestigious — was quite snotty, actually. Though your Mr. Huenengarth said she’d been little more than a bottle washer.”
No bottles in Ashmore’s lab. I was silent.
She looked at her watch, then over at her purse. For a moment I thought she was going to get up. But instead, she moved her chair closer and stared at me. Her eyes were hazel, hot, unmoving. An inquisitive heat. Chipmunk searching for the acorn hoard.
“Why all the questions, Doctor? What are you really after?”
“I really can’t give any details because of the confidentiality issue,” I said. “I know it doesn’t seem fair.”
She said nothing for a moment. Then: “She was a thief. Those textbooks in her locker had been stolen from another student. I found other things too. Another student’s sweater. A gold pen that had belonged to me. So I won’t be surprised if she was involved in something unsavory.”
“She may have been.”
“Something that led to her being murdered?”
“It’s possible.”
“And what’s your involvement with all of this, Doctor?”
“My patient’s welfare may be at stake.”
“Charles Jones’s sister?”
I nodded, surprised that Huenengarth had revealed that much.
“Is some type of child abuse suspected?” she said. “Something Dawn found out about and tried to profit from?”
Swallowing my amazement, I managed to shrug and run a finger across my lips.
She smiled. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Delaware. But Mr. Huenengarth’s visit made me very curious — all that pressure. I’ve studied health-care systems too long to believe anyone would go to that kind of effort for an average patient. So I asked my husband to make inquiries about the Jones boy. He’s a vascular surgeon, has privileges at Western Peds, though he hasn’t operated there in years. So I know who the Joneses are and the role the grandfather’s playing in the turmoil the hospital’s going through. I also know that the boy died of SIDS and another child keeps getting sick. Rumors are floating. Put that together with the fact that Dawn stole the first child’s chart and went from abject student poverty to being quite cavalier about money, add two separate visits from professionals personally looking for that chart, and one doesn’t need to be a detective.”