Читать книгу Cordi O'Callaghan Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 13

“So what did the coroner say?”

I looked up from my desk to see Martha poking her head in the door from the outer office.

“How the hell did you know that I talked to the coroner?”

Martha smiled. “Nothing gets past me. Actually you doodled on that pad by your phone. ‘See Coroner re: Diamond’s death.’”

I quickly looked at the pad and thought I’d have to be more careful about what I doodled.

“After all, what with your larvae disappearing and what you told me about your discovery that the body was moved, in combo with that memo, I put two and two together. Let’s have all the gory details.”

I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. Nothing for it but to tell Martha all about my meeting.

“So now what?” she asked when I was done.

“So now, I’m going to go talk to all his colleagues, for starters, and see what happens, see if any of them can lead me to my disks.” I dreaded having to talk to all these people, in case I found myself stuck in that godawful darkness of one of my mood swings on the morning I had arranged to meet one of them. Depression has a habit of incapacitating its victim. I was thankful it was summer: more than likely I’d be okay. It was usually the winter months that haunted me, made worse by the fact that I seemed powerless to head it off. Maybe I needed to see a professional, but the thought made me feel ill and I hurriedly relegated it to the back of my mind with a lot of other baggage.

It was four long days before I could get away from the university and drive out to Dumoine. On the morning of that day I woke up relieved to find that I was in a good mood — no fear, no dread, no despair, just normal anxiety about whether I would ever find my disks or not.

No saving angel had delivered them to me with a note of apology for having taken them. The cops had no new leads and more or less said, “We’ll call you,” which of course meant my case had now been placed in the unimportant file, probably had never been in any other file.

I left the farm as the sun was spreading over the Eardley Escarpment, rimming it with soft golden tones and the first pale hint of the leaves changing. The cows were mooing, their udders full to bursting, calling Mac to come and give them relief as I drove out the farm gates and turned northwest on Highway 148. I stopped in Shawville for gas and a bottle of water. Not much had changed in the years since I’d come here as a girl and shown my calf at the Shawville Fair. Pretty heady times for a 4-H kid way smaller than the calf, who basically walked me around the arena while I made a show of trying to be in charge. It didn’t help that Ryan and his friends were hooting and hollering like banshees. I’d showed them all, though, when I won first prize. And I’d gone back, year after year, because it was a fantastic agricultural fair to compete at. And because I liked the petting zoo.

Two hours later I pulled into the grounds of Pontiac University in front of the zoology building in Dumoine. For a small campus in the country it was remarkably stark, as if the developer had chosen to ignore aesthetics. The results showed, raw and ugly. There were few trees and no effort had been made to have the buildings fit into their surroundings. They looked like a bunch of pill boxes in need of medication themselves.

I pulled open the heavy glass doors of the two-storey zoology building, which shared its space with psychology and human resources. The familiar sweet, musty smell of formaldehyde, dirty cages, and disinfectant swept over me. Zoology buildings the world over smelled like this, I thought: urine and feces, scent glands, and formaldehyde — a veritable cocktail of smells. In the foyer, hanging from the ceiling, was a huge metal spider’s web with the resident spider, ass to ceiling, hunkered down looking as though it was waiting for some poor unsuspecting undergrad to commit to biology. A young man pushing a tray filled with glass flasks and Petri dishes walked briskly through the foyer.

“Where can I find the zoology office?” I called after him.

“Follow the typing,” he said and then he was gone, the rattle of the Petri dishes slowly being replaced by the distinctive soft tapping of a computer. I followed the sound down to a door splattered with a thousand notices for seminars and meetings, most of which seemed to have already happened.

There was no sign of anyone in the main office, but the tap tap was coming from behind a portable wall.

“Anyone home?”

The tapping stopped abruptly, and seconds later a blue-eyed, red-haired, diminutive woman in a tight black skirt and pink spandex shirt flounced around the corner. I wondered how she had ever got the skirt on. It looked like paint. I felt my own worn pants, comfortable, practical, and wondered how this woman could stand high heels and tight skirts. It was certainly a rarity in any zoology building I had ever been in. If she was here for a degree, maybe it was a bachelors and not in zoology. I reeled back at my own chauvinism.

“What can I do for you?” she asked in a high-pitched, squeaky kind of voice that made me want to oil it.

Before I could answer she said, “I’m just filling in for one of the secs — she’s sick, my master’s research is stymied, and I need the cash so I offered, but there’s hardly time to eat. You should see the letters these guys want done. Been six days now and I’m getting good at it.”

“Can you tell me where I can find Don Allenby or Leslie Mitchell?” I asked.

She shot me a suspicious look, and the smile on her face grew brittle.

“If you’re the press or the police we —”

“No, actually I’m not. I’m just visiting. I’m a zoolo-gist from Sussex University.”

“Oh, well, in that case no probs. Don Allenby’s my supervisor. He’s in room 202. Mitchell moved into 105 although how she can stand to do that so soon after …” she hesitated, blushed.

“After what?”

“Well, you know. Surely you’ve heard about it in the papers. Made Dumoine quite famous.”

“You mean Jake Diamond?”

“Oh, gruesome story there, isn’t it? I mean …” she glanced hurriedly at me. “I mean, they say he died fast, like, I think, at least they say …”

“What a way to go.”

“Yeah, but sort of like him, you know? Ever the macho man. Oh, such a great guy though. I had him for the course on animal form and function. Funny man and sexy as hell.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Ha. Would have loved that. Nah. He was just a prof. I got to know him a bit because I’m a grad student of his colleague, Don Allenby. They worked together on a bunch of papers, you know.”

“You mean they collaborated?”

“Yeah, I guess. Diamond was a cat man and Don is small mammals. They teamed up sometimes on those predator-prey jobs — you know, linking the number of predators to the number of prey and that sort of stuff. Diamond’s name always came first. I always wondered about that. Guess Diamond felt he had to be first author. Had an ego the size of an elephant. Lots of profs around like to take all the credit, you know, but at least he did a lot of the work. Some profs do zip all. Their graduate students do it all and then the profs take all the praise. Oops, sorry.”

“Sounds like he could have had a bunch of enemies.”

She looked up suddenly, surprised.

“Nah. Not Diamond. Everyone liked him. I’m pretty sure. Except Davies, of course, but Davies doesn’t much like anyone at all.”

I gave her a quizzical look.

“Guess you haven’t been around here before if you don’t know Davies. He calls himself the dean of the zoology department such as it is here, only four profs, you know. We’re a small operation. The student rumour mill has it they hated each other’s guts.”

“Why?”

The woman laughed. “Diamond was a free spirit, you know what I mean? He was classy, like, and didn’t care what Davies thought of his lectures so long as the students liked them. Like the time he taught us the mechanics of flight. He brought in a whole slew of mechanical birds and he had them flapping all over the lecture hall. It was great. Then Davies walks in and everybody shuts up. He’s kind of a dried-up little man. He kinda looks around and eyeballs Diamond with his fierce little flinty eyes and just as he’s about to say something — God, we would have given a lot to know what he was going to say — a little whirly-bird bashed into his bald head and everyone started laughing. Davies was furious and he stalked out like a scorched rooster. After that there were lots of rumours that he was actively trying to get rid of Diamond. Hard to do when Diamond had tenure but, well, there you go. Guess Davies won’t need to worry anymore, eh?”

“Davies doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would have liked his profs getting involved in stuff like logging protests and things like that,” I noted.

“You can say that again. He wants to be president of the university here, not just dean of science, and I think he feels Diamond was preventing that from happening. He was furious about Diamond’s high profile in this logging spree, said it harmed the reputation of the university — meaning his reputation. Oooeee was that fun. Manning the barricades. It was like one great big …”

She stopped in mid-sentence as footsteps sounded in the hall. She glanced at me, suddenly anxious. “Don’t tell anyone I said any of this, will you?” She turned and raced back to her typing as a gaggle of students entered the office on some mission or other.

I walked down to the end of a long tiled corridor, peering at the doors as I went. Each door had a glass pane in it, but most of the occupants had carefully blocked them with pictures of animals or pithy sayings.

Unlike the other offices, whose doors were closed, the door to room 202 was open. I knocked and walked in.

Allenby was sitting at a desk surrounded by papers and looked up quickly as I came in. He didn’t look much better than when I had last seen him in the bush, except that his clothes fitted him and were immaculate and his crisp white shirt highlighted the extreme pallor of his face.

“Dr. Allenby. I’m Cordi O’Callaghan.” I held out my hand. “We met up in Dumoine. I stumbled across the body.”

“Oh yes,” he said uncertainly. “Yes, I remember now. Come in, come in.” He didn’t get up to shake my hand because he hadn’t seen the gesture. Not surprising since the man hadn’t looked at me since his first quick preoccupied glance. He remained behind his desk as if it could defend him from my presence.

“Did we arrange to meet? I didn’t ask you to come, did I?” he said, looking at a point somewhere way off to the left of my ear.

“May I sit?” I asked.

Finally he looked at me and smiled. “Oh, yes, sorry, do.”

I studied him for a moment trying to evaluate how much to tell him.

I decided to keep it simple and told him that my lab had been fumigated and my disks stolen and suggested there was a possible link between that and Diamond’s death.

“What possible link could there be?” he asked.

I told him briefly about the significance of the cedar twigs and my certainty that the body had been moved. I was sure the disappearance of my larvae and my data were related to that one fact.

“I don’t know if there’s a link. I may simply be on a wild goose chase, but you’re a researcher. You can understand what it means to have your data stolen and why I’m grasping at the only straw I can find.”

Allenby began shuffling the papers on his desk. His eyes flitted across my face avoiding eye contact. I could see a fine mist of sweat forming on his upper lip. What was he so worried about? Could he have moved the body, and if so, why?

“What do you hope to get from me?” he asked the wall in front of him. I followed his eyes and saw a picture of a young woman and a small girl swinging on a hammock, laughing at the photographer. The little girl was the spitting image of Don.

“I don’t know. I’m hoping something will twig. What can you tell me about Diamond?”

“Diamond?” The word rang out like the tolling of a bell and lingered in the air, as if it were the first time Allenby had ever uttered the name. Finally he shifted in his seat, but the silence dragged on. Suddenly Allenby looked directly at me.

“He was a bit of a legend. He knew the bush backwards, could survive on nothing. You know the sort of thing. Give him a knife, a tinder and flint, and some snare wire and fishing line and he could live forever. Sweet irony that he got done in by a bear.”

I said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say.

“We were working on a paper together, a cycle paper on lynx and hare. Hares are my baby, lynx his. Now, I don’t mean to be rude but I don’t see why any of this should interest you. He’s dead, isn’t he? Mauled by a bear, so why are you poking about? It won’t bring your insects back to life and it’s not going to help you get your disks back. It isn’t related at all. Just some macabre coincidence.”

I didn’t say anything, waited. The silence lengthened until Don couldn’t stand it any longer.

“He was a good man. Ruthlessly honest in all his dealings, almost to a fault, and when he got behind a cause he gave everything he had to it.”

“Like the logging?”

“Yeah,” sighed Allenby. “Like the logging. It became a personal vendetta to him.” He glanced out the window, as though he were seeing a magnificent pine slowly topple, and then dragged his eyes back to me.

“Jake organized everyone to oppose logging up here in the Dumoine area. It’s prime logging country, has been for generations, but the logging companies haven’t done much replanting and the clear-cutting of the past has caused a lot of erosion.”

“How many of the faculty have study sites up in the area?”

Allenby looked at me and nodded.

“Yes. That’s right. We have a biology station up in the area and most of us have some ongoing and longstanding projects up there, either our own or those of our graduate students. If the area is logged, lots of research could go up in smoke. So yes, Diamond did have a very personal reason for fighting the logging companies. He’d been studying lynx and bobcat in the area for fifteen years. So, it was not all altruistic, although he probably would have argued otherwise.”

“I understand he organized a barricade to keep the loggers out.”

“Yeah. And it worked. Jake was the sort of guy that could inspire you. He was the catalyst. Now he’s dead, and no one has taken over his leadership. Without him the cause is winding down. Because of the barricade and the publicity surrounding it we got a temporary injunction, but it didn’t last long. Now the loggers are poised to move in and we’re without a leader. You see, Jake was one of a kind. He really believed we had to win or the world would collapse. That’s what drove him. No one else has quite the same drive.”

“Was he well liked?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Allenby raised his thin voice to the stretching point, was about to say something and then thought better of it. Instead his voice dropped and he said, “Yeah. He was well liked by most. He had people who didn’t much like him, loggers and people like that, but I don’t think he had any real enemies.”

“Were you in the area on or around the day he died? Did you see anything that might help me?” He hesitated only a fraction.

“I was out there well east of his site, working on a hare census in a new area. Left for the field before he did, and came out about a week before Leslie and I bumped into you.”

“What were you doing up there when I ran into you?”

Allenby stared past me, his round wet eyes unblinking.

“We were manning the barricade with about thirty other people. Didn’t you see it?”

I shook my head.

“It’s just up the road from the biology station. If you came by the portage, though, you’d bypass it, so I guess that’s why you never saw it. We’ve been using the biology station as a storage spot for food and other supplies.”

“Was anyone else with you who was out in the field who might have bumped into Diamond on his last day or seen something that could help me?”

“I don’t really know what you’re looking for so I can’t say. I didn’t see him. I generally prefer to do my fieldwork alone. You should check the bio station schedule, though. We have an in/out roster. Everyone signs out and signs in again when they return. We have to record where we’re going, who with, and for how long. It’s an honour system, but everybody observes it for their own safety. Besides, Davies doesn’t take kindly to wasting the budget on emergency rescue operations. They’re expensive and if they are unnecessary, well … you understand.”

“Where can I find this roster?”

“Dr. Davies keeps all the old ones in the registrar’s office. Roberta, my grad student, is helping out there this week. Someone’s sick, I think, and she needed the cash. It costs a lot to get a grad degree these days. Go ask her.”

“Who else should I talk to?”

“Diamond’s grad student, Patrick Whyte, might be able to tell you something. He sometimes went out in the field with Diamond, but I don’t think he went on this last trip. Anyway, Diamond and I weren’t that close, just work colleagues. I was far too conservative for his liking and not athletic enough. You should also speak to Leslie. They were friends once.”

His voice suddenly sounded hollow and empty.

“Look. I’m sorry. I have a load of work. Leslie’s new office is just down the hall. Diamond’s grad student is in the lab, room 205. But he won’t be there right now. He’s demonstrating a lab. But you’d better speak to Davies. He gets furious when things happen around here that he doesn’t know about.”

I stepped thankfully out of his office and went back up to see Roberta. Allenby had unnerved me and I wasn’t sure why. The tap tapping was still going on, and I popped my head around the barrier. She jumped.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, but Don said there was a roster for the biology station that I could take a look at.”

“Oh sure. You mean the ‘come look for me if I don’t show’ book? It’s over here.”

She led me across the cluttered space to a large desk heaped with magazines; above it was a huge topographical map with red pins scattered about. I waved my hand toward it while she got out the roster and put it on the table in front of me.

“Are these all the study sites for the faculty?”

“Yep. You got it. The little red pins mean people in the field right now. All those other little pins of various colours mean study sites.

There were strings linking together all the blue pins, all the yellow, and so forth, so at a glance you could see all the study sites.

“Who’s yellow?”

“That’s Don. He works in the area east and south of the bio station.”

“You’re Don’s student, right?”

“That’s right. Just finishing up my master’s. Roberta Smith. I’m doing a population study on hares, but most of my fieldwork is done. I’m glad of that. I don’t really like the bush. But he’s up there almost as much as Diamond.”

I remembered the picture of the woman and the little girl.

“What about his family? How does he juggle his time with them?”

She frowned.

“Oh no. Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“He doesn’t really have a family anymore.”

“But the picture in his office?”

“Yeah, his wife and kid. Really sad.”

I felt sick, anticipated what was coming. Waited.

“That picture was taken just before his wife died, five years ago now, I think. It was a godawful accident. They were driving home one night. Don fell asleep at the wheel, or so they say. They barrelled through a stop sign and were flattened by a truck. His wife died instantly, and the kid, who was only four years old at the time, is now a vegetable. But Don won’t give up hope that she’ll get well. The poor man was wracked with guilt and has spent every blessed penny and gone into debt giving her the best care in a private nursing home. He still talks about the day she’ll come home, but we all know she never will. He won’t face up to that, poor man. He’d do anything for the poor kid.”

I tried to say something, anything, but what do you say to a story like that?

“He changed after that. Never the same again, they say. Some men can get over their grief, but his daughter is always there to remind him, I guess. He moonlights at other jobs to help pay for the poor kid. Shows, too. His work here is suffering, and Davies is sitting on him pretty hard.”

Again, I had absolutely nothing to say. All I could think of was the pain the man had gone through.

“But it’s not all bad. He and Diamond have just done a paper together, but Diamond wanted to postpone publication for some reason, so it’s on hold. Don was really disappointed — so was I, because my name is going to be on it too. Diamond wouldn’t tell Don why, just asked him to be patient. When the paper gets published it will give Don a boost and hopefully help to get him some more funding. At first Diamond really was doing him a favour collaborating like that, but then Don’s data turned out to be good, so I guess Diamond was right to take him on. Surprised everyone, though, because Don’s work hadn’t been very good since the accident. Sloppy, you know.” She shrugged and said, “Diamond was a good man. He didn’t deserve such an awful death.” Roberta hastily wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and I wondered if the tears were for Diamond or Don.

I stood there like an idiot trying to think of something to say, but there really wasn’t anything that would make her feel better. I gave her some time to get herself back together again and then gently asked, “Does Don have a semi-permanent camp like Diamond’s?”

She shook her head. “Only Diamond did.” She said slowly, “You see, he loved the bush. Often went up just to write his reports and to get away from his students. Even if he had no fieldwork to do. Sometimes I think he started doing it to get away from his wife. Often he’d go up just for a night, mark some papers, and come back in time for afternoon lectures. I used to have a bird, ’cause I demonstrated his comparative anatomy class and I was always afraid he’d miss classes.”

“That’s a hell of a portage to get to his place for just an overnighter.”

I was remembering the rain-mucked steep cliff paths and treacherous footing Ryan and I had stumbled over in our haste to get help. Even in excellent shape it wasn’t your average sort of daily walk.

“Oh, that route. You been there? Canoeist, right?”

I nodded. “It was a bitch.”

She laughed. “Yeah, only the canoeists take that route. Diamond hardly ever used it, and no one at the station did. There’s another path, only a quarter-mile from the road through the forest. Easy footing. He’d drive up, park his car just out of sight in the bush, and walk in. Take him ten minutes at most. And he was real close to the barricade. He set it up just on the road between the biology station turn off and his portage. Very convenient for him. He sometimes slept at his camp when he was on the barricade.”

“You were part of that group, right?”

“What? The barricade? Oh sure. It was a hoot. We’d all go up as often as we could, take our sleeping bags and stuff. Diamond made sure there was all kinds of food and stuff, and his friend Shannon oversaw all the cooking. Just like camp.”

“Is the barricade still up?”

“It’s on hold. We got an injunction before Diamond died, but it was overturned. I don’t think we’ll stop the logging now, especially now that Diamond is gone. He was the leader.”

“Did the rest of the faculty support the cause?”

“A lot of us did, but Davies was furious. Diamond’s graduate student, Patrick Whyte, wasn’t too enamoured with it either. Not sure why. He’s usually a gung-ho environmentalist, but then he’s been working his butt off to get his thesis done by Christmas so he’s not had much time to get involved, I guess.”

She didn’t sound very convinced.

“He and Diamond actually had a vicious row over the barricade. Patrick thought it was stupid and would just make things worse, but there was no swaying Diamond. He was a stubborn son of a bitch. Even Davies had no effect on him. He just railroaded over everyone when he thought something was right.”

I picked up the roster and began flipping through it.

“I have to get back to work,” she said. “Just leave the roster on the table when you’re finished, ’kay?”

I thanked her and turned my attention to the roster. Fifteen minutes later I had it all. Diamond had died sometime on the eleventh of July, four days before he was due back. Leslie had signed out on July 5, returning July 13, the day before Ryan and I had stumbled upon the body. Don and Roberta had left July 8, returning July 11. Patrick had signed out from July 7 to July 11. Even Eric Davies had been out in the bush July 10 to 12 along with two grad students. And who knew how many people were manning the barricade a mere ten-minute walk from where Diamond’s body was found at his camp?

With so many people in the bush the week Diamond died, why had it taken so long for his body to be discovered?

I found Leslie in among a whole truckload of boxes in Diamond’s old office. His name was still on the door, and the snarling face of a Canada lynx growled out at me. I knocked, and a moment later Leslie appeared at the door eating an apple. Her black closely cropped hair made her face look quite masculine, but the rest of her was definitely a woman.

“Well, so we meet again.”

“Looks like you got promoted?”

“Yeah. Soon to be full professor from associate. But what a way to do it, eh? Over Diamond’s dead body. Nothing like taking over the responsibilities of a dead man.” I was startled by the bitterness in her voice, but then she smiled and I thought maybe I had been mistaken.

“We never properly introduced ourselves back up there in the woods. Leslie Mitchell.” She hastily switched the apple to her left hand, wiped her right hand on her pants, and held it out to me.

“Cordi O’Callaghan,” I said as I gripped her hand in mine. I winced at the strength of it. This was getting to be ridiculous. Had everyone learned that a limp grip labelled you a wimp? The harder you squeeze the more important you are?

“Come on in,” she said and led me into the chaos of her office. There were boxes everywhere, all in various stages of being unpacked.

She knelt down in front of a box and started rifling through its contents.

“You’re an entomologist aren’t you?” she asked.

“A zoologist, really, but I often work with insects.”

“And you’ve lost all your specimens, as well as your disks.” She looked up at me, and seeing my surprised look she laughed. “This is a small university. Nothing is private here, and we stick by each other. Don just phoned to warn me you were coming around.”

She sat back on her heels, a file folder in each hand.

“Being a zoologist I know what it’s like to lose data or have an experiment go wrong and the hopes of tenure with it. I gather you were hoping to recover the disks. What makes you think they’d still be around?”

“Hope. Desperation. I don’t know. They weren’t trashed at my office. They were physically removed, so I have some hope they’re still around, that whoever took them realizes what they mean and won’t destroy them. There’s nothing on them that would be the least bit useful to anyone but me.”

The words hung in the air. The silence lengthened. She dropped the folders back into the box.

“Not even to another zoologist or entomologist?”

I paused, startled by her question. I hadn’t really given that possibility much thought. What if someone had wanted my data to beat me to publication and the stolen disks had nothing to do with Diamond? Ridiculous. My work just wasn’t important enough, even if there was another team working on it. If I had some new breakthrough, then it would be different, but …

“Not interesting enough,” I said, and felt a pang of anger that my work really wasn’t something someone would want to steal.

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting to someone else,” she said. “What were you working on, besides the larvae?”

“Basic taxonomy. Nothing earth-shattering. Some succession work and some stuff with praying mantids. I can’t see that anyone would be interested, except me.”

“You’re probably right.”

I tried not to look hurt at this cryptic dismissal of my work.

“It was only a suggestion, but maybe you should be looking somewhere else besides here. Why do you think Diamond’s death is related to the theft of your disks anyway?”

“Don seems to have told you everything.”

Leslie rocked on her heels.

“Yeah, well, he said you had some crazy idea that the larvae you found on Diamond’s body indicated that he had been moved a long way from where he died. Even if your accidental attempt at forensic entomology can tell you that, what the hell does it mean? It makes no sense. I mean, why would anyone want to move his body somewhere else? It’s ludicrous.”

She yanked another box over to her side and rummaged inside.

“Because his death might not be what it seems.”

Leslie slowly turned to look at me, her face blank and unreadable. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

When I didn’t answer she waved her hand impatiently.

“You can’t get more straightforward than being killed by a bear. You really are desperate, aren’t you? Sounds as though you’re grasping at straws. Can’t say I blame you, though,” she added.

I watched as she emptied out the box and started sorting out the papers that had been in it. Finally, as I had hoped, she broke the silence.

“Did you ever actually meet Diamond?”

“No. I knew of his work, of course, but I never met him.”

“Yeah, well, he was well-liked by most people. He’ll be sorely missed. If you’re suggesting his death was anything but a horrible accident …”

“I’m not suggesting that, but was there anything Diamond was doing that could have made people angry enough or frightened enough to explain why his body was moved?”

“You mean like a sick prank or something? If you look hard enough everyone has enemies. But Diamond just got really careless. His campsite was a literal siren call of food. The cops said he even left a Mars bar in his tent, for God’s sake.”

She shrugged, and I waited, hoping for more.

“What do you want me to say? He got careless. I’ve been there, know what it’s like. But this time I got the consolation prize. I got his job. Lousy way to get it, and people calling me callous behind my back. What do they expect me to do? Say no to a promotion I’ve sought all my life? Sure, we were rivals — no secret there. I wanted his job. God knows I deserved it. But I didn’t want it this way. I’ve just learned the hard way to take what I can get in a deck stacked in favour of men. You got tenure?”

“No.”

“See? And you’re not likely to even have a chance at getting it without your disks, right?”

The look on my face must have said it all.

“What research are you working on?” I asked, wanting to get the spotlight off me. I hated it when my questions came back at me.

“Oh, I’m quite eclectic. Move around and fill in the gaps left by my colleagues. Some taxonomy. I’ve worked with parasites and planaria, and done some studies with mice. I’ve spent the last few years working on moose and their predators, and a new project that I hope will prove very interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t have enough data to go public yet or know for sure if the hypothesis will stand, so I’d rather not say just yet.” She smiled. She was actually quite pretty when her face lit up like that.

“It’s a new angle, may not pan out … but I have to wait and organize the data before I make it public. You know how it is with us scientists. Paranoid that someone else will beat us to it.”

The phone rang, and Leslie grabbed for it.

“Mitchell here.” I watched as she threw me a grimace and said into the phone, “Really Davies, don’t you have anything better to do than that? I’ll get it to you as soon as I have a moment. Yeah, she’s here. Why? You want me to send her over? Okay. No problem. I’ll tell her.”

She hung up the phone and stared through me.

“Odious little man, that Davies. Always skulking about trying to dig up dirt. Seems to hate us all. Can’t imagine what turns a man to hate so much.” She refocused her eyes on me and said, “He wants to see you. Two doors down and on the left.”

She turned back to her boxes and I started to leave, then hesitated.

“Why did it take so long for Diamond’s body to be discovered? Surely someone from the biology station would have gone up to his camp?”

“He never encouraged anyone to go up there. In fact, he actively discouraged anyone unless it was a dire emergency. We left him to his own devices. Didn’t make any difference to us. Even his women never went up there. It was his sacred turf. He guarded it like a cornered sow. We simply respected that, and by the time you found his body he wasn’t due out for another day.”

I thanked Leslie for answering my questions, but as I left, I hesitated in the hall outside her door, aware that something she had said had twigged something important somewhere in my mind. Problem was I couldn’t quite grasp what it had been before it was gone.

I followed Leslie’s instructions and found Davies sitting at his desk. He was a small man, no taller than I was, in his early sixties with a halo of white hair punctuating a bright red dome and a bristly, charcoal grey Groucho mustache. He was flipping through some files in the open drawer of a desk, but when he saw me he jumped to his feet and scurried around his desk to meet me at the door. He did rather give the impression of a rooster with his bald red head and jerky movements.

“You must be Dr. O’Callaghan.” His voice was cold but surprisingly beautiful with a deep, lilting, musical sound at odds with his size. He could have had a career in radio. He didn’t offer his hand or ask me in, so I stood in the doorway and waited. “May I ask you what you think you’re doing going around asking questions you have no business asking?”

Taken aback, I began to explain about my disks, but he impatiently waved me to silence.

“Yes, yes, your disks and larvae and things.” He dismissed my entire career with a wave of his hand. “Don filled me in on it all, and I want it to stop. I can’t have you in here wasting my people’s time. We’ve had enough from the police and the press. If you need anything please come to me.”

He was invading my personal space, herding me before him and out of his doorway and into the hall.

“Perhaps I can help you sometime, but not today. As you can see I am extremely busy.” With that, he withdrew his business card, handed it to me, and quietly closed the door behind him.

I stood in the hall a moment wondering why he felt so threatened. I debated precisely two seconds about going behind his back to see Patrick Whyte. But I was on a roll, my confidence level at an all-time high, and I wasn’t about to waste it — I never seemed to be able to count on it being there for me, so it was a real bonus. I needed it now, and I had it, so I cruised down the hallway and found a back stairway up to the second-floor labs, hoping Davies wouldn’t appear out of nowhere to scream at me. I peered into one lab and was directed down the hall to another whose door was wide open. Through it I could hear a male voice raised in anger.

“Yes, well, keep out of my damn business. I can speak to whomever I want. It’s a free world,” said the voice and then I heard a telephone slamming down.

I waited a discreet few seconds so that he wouldn’t think I’d overheard and then knocked on the open door. He was standing by the window looking out, and at the sound of my knock he jumped and turned around. Evidently he was making another phone call because he gripped the phone in his hand and I noticed his knuckles were white. He was very tall, maybe 6’ 5”, and well built, and his thick, unruly blond hair swept over his forehead like a tidal wave. His eyes were a soft, deep, clear cobalt blue, and as he turned them on me I felt myself involuntarily melting into them. We stared at each other in silence for some moments, and then he waved at me to sit down. Disconcerted I sat down rather suddenly as he barked some orders into the phone and hung up, having never taken his eyes off me.

“Photo lab’s always getting things mixed up” he said. “I asked them for black and white prints and they’ve given me colour. What can I do for you?” He smiled. You could get lost in a smile like that, I thought, momentarily sidetracked.

“My name’s Cordi O’Callaghan,” I said, when I finally found my voice. “I wanted to ask you some questions …” I hesitated, unsure how to proceed.

“So you’re Dr. O’Callaghan, eh? Tough luck about your insects.”

I looked at him and then laughed nervously. “Davies?”

“It was in the paper, and dear Davies just phoned to tell me not to talk to you. So, tell me why I should?” His eyes danced in amusement and watched me closely.

I gave him a brief outline of what had happened with my insects and disks and he seemed genuinely interested, so I asked him how well he had known Diamond.

“Well enough. He was a bit of a prick, to tell you the truth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry he’s dead, but he and I never really hit it off.” He moved over to a jumble of folders on a desk. “Mind if we talk while I work?”

He folded himself like a jackknife into a chair and began sorting through the mess. I sat and watched.

“Quite a mess, eh? It’s not usually like this. It’s Diamond’s main work area — was, I should say. He did most of his work here. Always kept it neat as a pin, but somebody came in a week or so ago and rifled through it. I haven’t had a chance to clean it up yet. Whoever it was spent a lot of time here by the looks of it — all his files have been searched. Don’t know what they were looking for, but they sure left a mess behind. Now I have the job of going through it, tidying it all up, and seeing what sort of papers we can publish for him posthumously.”

“Did you call security?”

Patrick looked up in surprise. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

“In case something was stolen.”

Patrick laughed, a deep rich chortle that was infectious.

“Nothing to steal here, but lots over there, and nothing’s gone, as far as I can see.” He waved his hand around the room and made his point. I could see three computers, microscopes, and all manner of equipment.

“What about the computer? Any files missing?” He looked at me quickly and frowned.

“I never thought of that. I’ll have to check, but I haven’t noticed anything missing.”

“You’re his PhD student, is that right?”

“Yes.” He smoothed out his frown. “I’ve been working with him for two years now looking at parasites on Canada lynx. He does most of the fieldwork and I do the lab stuff.”

“What was he working on up in the bush before he died?”

“I don’t know for sure. He said it was follow-up stuff on his lynx population experiments, that he needed to get a tad more data, but he’d already put in six weeks up there earlier in the spring with our pilot, Jeff, following our radio-tagged lynx. At first I thought he was goofing off, three weeks and all, when he had a lot to do here, but everyone needs a holiday and it was so peaceful without him hanging around me like a leech.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I got the impression that he was either working on something new or had a new angle on something old. He seemed quite excited about it, but then he always overreacted to everything. I did get the impression that it might have been a new project or maybe something to do with the logging, but he never said and I wasn’t about to ask. We all keep things close to our chests when it’s something new. No one wants to be scooped.”

I felt a pang of resentment. First Leslie, now Diamond. Why couldn’t I find something new?

“You didn’t like him.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He ended the sentence as if he was ending the conversation, but I persevered.

“I understand you two didn’t see eye to eye over this logging business.”

Patrick looked up quickly and fixed me with a frown that made his eyebrows merge into one long bushy slash. I much preferred the smile.

“We had our differences. He was a real firebrand radical when it came to the logging issue. He had to win at all costs. I thought he was an asshole and not harmless. He was a dangerous man. Intelligent but with a real temper, and he had a real problem with women. He did try to treat them as equals, but they shone out of his eyes as sex symbols — with no brains. If you’ve ever met his wife you’ll get my drift, although I must say his current girlfriend isn’t so bad. Guess he’s getting better at picking them.”

“He’s got a girlfriend? Does his wife know?”

“Does his wife know? Are you kidding? Everybody knew. The wife was filing for divorce. He’d been through half the department here. The man chased anything in a skirt. He wasn’t a cruel man — just horny.”

I thought about Lianna’s tear-streaked face. Perhaps not such a grief-stricken widow as she had seemed, pretending to rein in emotions that weren’t there. Good actor though. I had to wonder why. To get the black book? Why was it so important?

“Who’s his girlfriend?”

“You mean his current one?”

“Yes.” God, how many had he had, I thought, suddenly feeling sorry for Lianna in spite of myself.

“Shannon. Healthy, shy little thing, not like his usual mannequins. She was in here the other day picking up some stuff from his office. Pretty broken up about it, I’ll say that for her. Not like the wife. They had a hell of a fight here. Met in the hall outside his office.”

“What happened?”

“They lost it. What a ruckus. They were screeching so loudly and the swear words were colouring the air blue. Something about Diamond’s property and will, but why Shannon should be hoping to get it is beyond me. Wife’s entitled to everything unless he left a will saying otherwise. Anyway, it was pretty ugly, and Davies nearly burst a gut trying to get them out before the students heard any more. Quite comical, actually. He looked just like a sheepdog trying to herd his sheep.”

“Had she and Diamond been together long?”

“Year, year and a half, I’d say. No more, anyway. I must say, he seemed quite happy with her. She’d be able to tell you more about Diamond than any of us if you’re willing to be patient. She’s in Ottawa. Lives on McLeod, I think. Diamond commuted on weekends. I can give you her number if you like.”

I nodded. Patrick rummaged through a desk, then wrote down the number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. I noticed his fingers were long and slender and he wore a single ring on his right hand, a grey star sapphire that showed dull in the false light of his office.

“You should talk to Leslie, too. Do you know her?” he asked as I took the paper from him. He didn’t let his half go right away, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I shook my head and looked up at him, feeling like a fool as I hung onto my half of the little piece of paper.

He smiled and suddenly let go. I squirreled the piece of paper away and said, “I was just talking to her.”

“Good,” he said. “She can tell you a lot, I’m sure.” He laughed and shook his head. “They loved to hate each other, those two. He got tenure and she didn’t. Apparently they were equally qualified, but there was only one tenured position open. They say she was very bitter and vindictive. Claims it was sexist. Who knows? Happened before I was here. She’s got his job now and tenure will follow I’m sure. Damned happy about it, I should say. Poor taste though. Wouldn’t put it past her to have been smiling at the funeral.”

I picked up a small tooth on top of the desk, twirled it in my hands. It looked like the tooth of a carnivore.

“What’s this?”

“That’s a Canada lynx tooth. Diamond collected a lot of samples whenever he could, and he had an extensive tooth collection that he prized. All the cats from all over the world: lion, cougar, jaguar, cheetah … He nearly knocked the lights out of one of the loggers at a meeting when he broke the chain around Diamond’s neck and flung it across the room. It was one of his precious teeth, and nobody lays a finger on his precious teeth without permission. There’s a film of that meeting. You should take a look at it if you want to see what Diamond was like. Quite entertaining.”

“What meeting was that?”

“An information meeting about the logging up near Dumoine. It got quite emotional.”

“How can I get a copy of that film?”

“I’ll set up a showing for you at the media centre here if you want.”

“I’d like that. It could be useful,” I said. I put the tooth back on the desk. “Did Diamond usually take photos when he went out on his trips?”

“Yes. He always had his camera with him just in case.”

“What about this last trip? Anything turned up?”

He looked at me curiously, and I noticed that his blue eyes were flecked with black motes that made them appear fathomless.

“Nothing’s turned up here that I know of, but then the police are probably sitting on it still.”

“They didn’t find any film.”

He frowned but said nothing.

“Did you ever go on any of his field trips?”

“Yes. He hated company, but he usually needed it when he was tranquilizing the cats to put a radio collar on, and that’s when I’d get my samples — you know, you’re a zoologist — vials of ticks and stuff. Anyway, I always shot the dart — he hated to do that.”

“Isn’t that out of character? I would have thought he would be the sort of macho man who would hunt.”

“No, he hated weapons of any kind. He blinded a kid in one eye with a BB gun when he was eight. Apparently they were in the woods alone and the kid screamed and there was blood everywhere and he kind of lost it. It made him sick. As I said he was a sensitive man, at least when it came to anything inherently violent. I can’t help but like that in the man. But he was too damn stubborn. Thought he was right all the time. Trouble was he was bright enough that he usually was. Anyway, I would shoot the darts and then I’d help with the radio tracking equipment.”

“How easy would it be to accidentally shoot yourself with a tranquilizer gun?” Patrick looked at me and turned his head to one side. God, he was a nice-looking man. I mentally kicked my thoughts to scatter them out of my mind. They were too damn distracting. The effect this perfect stranger was having on me was unnerving.

“What kind of question’s that?” He shuffled some papers uneasily and cleared his throat. “Not easy, but I suppose it could happen. It’s a gun really, and the ammo is a dart that shoots out. The impact of the dart in the animal’s hide releases the tranquilizer. Still, you’d have to be pretty dumb or fantastically careless or accident-prone to do that unintentionally.”