“I’m still impressed.”
“Are you and Mr. Huenengarth working at cross-purposes?”
“We’re not working together.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“The little girl’s.”
“Who’s paying your fee?”
“Officially, the parents.”
“Don’t you consider that a conflict of interest?”
“If it turns out to be, I won’t submit a bill.”
She studied me for several moments. “I do believe you might mean that. Now tell me this: Does possession of the disks put me in any danger?”
“I doubt it, but it can’t be ruled out.”
“Not a very comforting answer.”
“I don’t want to mislead you.”
“I appreciate that. I survived the Russian tanks in Budapest in ’56, and my survival instincts have been well developed ever since. What do you suspect might be the importance of the disks?”
“They may contain some kind of coded data,” I said, “imbedded in the random number table.”
“I must say I thought of the same thing — there really was no logical reason for her to have generated that table at such an early stage of her research. So I scanned it, ran a few basic programs, and no obvious algorithms jumped out. Do you have any cryptographic skills?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Neither do I, though good decoding programs do exist, so one no longer needs to be an expert. However, why don’t we take a look right now, and see if our combined wisdom produces anything. After that, I’ll hand the disks over to you and be rid of them. I’ll also be sending a letter to Huenengarth and the police, carbon-copied to my dean, stating that I passed the disks along to you and have no interest in them.”
“How about just to the police? I can give you a detective’s name.”
“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.”
26
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. Janos, 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:
Herbert, D.K. Prog: Ph.D., Bio-St.
D.O.B.: 12/13/63
POB: Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
A.B., Math, Poughkeepsie Coll.
“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/or Cindy doing something to their kids.
Ashmore and/or 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 to 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 different 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 Boulevard.
The northward cruise took me through a commercial cross-section: upscale shopping plazas still pretending trickle-down economics was working, shabby storefront businesses that had never believed it in the first place, insta-bilt strip malls without any ideological underpinnings.
Up above Nordhoff, the street turned residential and I was treated to a lean stretch of budget-box apartments and motor courts, condo complexes plastered with happy-talk banners. A few citrus groves and U-pick farms had resisted progress. Essences of manure, petroleum, and lemon leaves mingled, not quite masking the burnt-supper smell of simmering dust.
I drove to the Santa Susanna Pass, but the road was closed for no apparent reason and blockaded by Cal-Trans barriers. I kept going to the end of Topanga, where a jumble of freeway overpasses butted up against the mountains. Off to the right a group of sleek women cantered on beautiful horses. Some of the riders wore fox-hunting garb; all looked content.