Cited to Death

by Meg Perry

  The evidence techs arrived in a few minutes and did raise a couple of palm prints. Maybe they would be able to find something out. I signed off on the police report, and the officer gave me a copy of it for my insurance. He left, and I called Triple A.

  Kevin and the tow truck arrived about the same time. I filled Kevin in on the events of the day.

  The tow truck headed to the garage with my VW, and I got in Kevin's car to go home.

  Kevin started the engine, then turned and looked at me. "So. Your computer is messed up, and it's the only one that is, and your tires are slashed, and they're the only ones that are. Think there's any connection?"

  "It’s unusual, but I still don't see how there could be a link. Computers crash all the time. It just so happened that this was my week for it. And the tires - who knows? No one knew I was coming here. I didn’t even know I was coming here. Maybe someone didn't like my 'No to Prop 8' bumper sticker."

  "Maybe." Kevin started the car. "I just don't like coincidences. I'll check on those palm prints, see if anything turns up."

  "Gee, thanks, detective." I stuck my tongue out at him.

  He laughed. "Hey, we protect and serve."

  Since we had a car, we stopped at the grocery store. By the time we finished there and got home, I was getting tired. It was Abby’s turn to make dinner, and she had soup and sandwiches ready. After dinner, Kevin and Abby settled in to watch TV, and I started reading the second article again. The methodology was hard to follow, and the statistics were beyond me, but the results were pretty clear. Their procedure had been successful. The discussion noted the possible application to fertility treatment. It was couched in scientific language, but reading between the lines, I thought the authors sounded pretty pleased with themselves. That would certainly fit with my initial impression of both of the authors I’d met.

  I retrieved the copy of the article that I’d found in Dan’s desk and studied his margin notes again. I still couldn’t understand most of them. I Googled “SEM” and figured out that it probably stood for scanning electron microscopy. “Source” probably meant just that – Dan was wondering about the source for the statement. “Medium” was still a mystery. I looked again at his “BULLSHIT” notation over the statistics section. I was going to have to take a shot at interpreting those. But I’d have to do that at some time other than late evening. My brain wasn’t up to it now.

  Before I went to bed, I used my peak flowmeter to check my lung function. I was supposed to check and record it every morning and evening, but sometimes I forgot. I’d been trying to be more consistent with it since I got out of the hospital. This morning my peak flow had been within 90% of normal, but this evening it had dropped some, to 82%. If it got below 80%, I was supposed to call the doctor.

  I decided to take a hot shower before bed. I needed that peak flow to come back up by morning. Fifteen minutes of breathing clean, steamy air should get it turned around.

  I still wasn’t much closer to figuring out anything about Dan’s request. Tomorrow was Friday. In the morning I had my budget presentation, but after that, maybe I could find someone to help me analyze the statistical section of Oliver’s article. Or at least find a copy of “Statistics for Dummies.”

  I thought about my impressions of Drs. Oliver and Goldstein. The first thing I’d noticed with both of them was how expensively they were dressed. Did stem cell research pay that well? And how did they make their money? I needed to do a little research of my own, into the authors of the two articles and the labs they worked in. Maybe I’d get some answers, or at least an idea of what questions I should ask.

  Friday June 1

  The next morning, I hit the snooze button three times before I could drag my brain to full consciousness. God, I was tired. I sat up and checked my lung function before I even got out of bed. It was at 84% - still not good, but a little better than yesterday. I'd have to be extra careful today.

  I used my daily inhaler, took a steamy shower, and felt a little better. I got dressed and went to the kitchen. Abby was there, pouring coffee into her gargantuan travel mug. "Hey, how are you feeling? I heard you coughing last night."

  I was coughing in my sleep? That was bad news. "I'm okay. I was outside too much yesterday. My tires got slashed, and I had to wait for Triple A."

  "Mmm. Yeah, Kev said something about that."

  I poured cereal in a bowl and went for the milk. "Is he gone already?"

  "Yep. Yesterday and today. We're apparently having a murder wave in West LA." She put the lid on her coffee mug, washed out the pot, wiped up the counters, and walked past me to the door, patting me on the head. I swatted at her hand. She laughed and picked up her tool belt. "Stay inside. Take care of yourself today."

  "Yes, Mom." I stuck my tongue out at her. She laughed and closed the door. I finished my cereal, rinsed out my bowl, brushed my teeth, and went to work.

  I opened my office door onto a disaster. The mess I'd returned to on Tuesday was nothing compared to this. The whole place was tossed. My file cabinets and desk drawers had been locked, but they'd managed to open the file cabinet drawers and dump everything out. The floor and all of the furniture was coated in at least two inches of paper. All the books had been dumped off the shelves.

  A quick survey didn’t show that anything was missing. Hell, it looked like they’d added stuff to what was already in here. My diplomas were still hanging from the walls, and my pictures were still intact in their frames on the tops of my bookshelves. Everything else, though, was on the floor.

  And when I turned on my computer, I got the blue screen again.

  Fan-fucking-tastic.

  I called IT and left a message again. This was getting ridiculous. When IT Andy or whoever got here, I was just going to ask them to replace the computer. It must have gotten a virus of some sort which caused the email fiasco and then wiped the hard drive again. I still didn’t understand how that was possible, but it had happened, so it must be possible. It occurred to me again that I’d found Diane behind my desk twice this week. When she picked me up yesterday she was supposed to meet me outside, but she’d made a point to get here early and come inside. I’d only been in the men’s room a couple of minutes. Why would she need to check her email then? And didn’t she have a smart phone? Yes, she did; she’d pulled it out and checked it after the funeral.

  But why would Diane mess with my computer? Was that her idea of a joke?

  She’d kept in touch with Dan; did she have some knowledge about what he was investigating?

  No. Diane couldn’t be involved in this. There must be some innocent explanation for her actions.

  But she was the only other person that had used my computer. Whoever broke in to the office last night wouldn’t have been able to log on.

  I’d have to figure out a way to ask her about it that didn’t seem accusatory.

  And if Diane wasn’t sabotaging my computer, who was? And why?

  All of the weirdness had started after I got Dan’s letter.

  I sat down and took out a pen, found a scrap of paper, and started making a list.

  1. Tuesday - Diane comes in, I find her behind my desk

  2. Dan’s letter - someone after him?

  3. Wednesday - Dr. Oliver shows up after I get his article

  4. Wednesday, computer dead

  5. Creepy feeling Wednesday night – being watched?

  6. Thursday morning, email hacked

  7. Diane comes in, catch her using computer

  8. Thursday at funeral, author #2, Dan’s boyfriend, acting funny?

  9. Thursday evening, tires slashed

  10. Today, office broken into

  11. Today, computer dead again

  Wow. I hadn’t realized the list of weirdness had grown to eleven items. That was an awful lot of coincidence.

  A thought occurred to me. At one of our safety updates from the UCLA Police Department last fall, they had talked about having a detective that investigated computer crimes. Would t
his computer problem of mine qualify as something worthy of investigation?

  One way to find out. I called the police department main number and was transferred to the computer crimes detective. He wasn’t in; I left a voicemail with a brief explanation and asked him to call me back.

  Then I called back to the main number and reported that my office had been broken into. Duh. The dispatcher said he’d have someone right there.

  A few minutes later, an officer arrived. He surveyed the mess, took my statement, and called forensics. They arrived and started lifting fingerprints. Most of them would probably be mine, which were already on file from my initial employment background check. I told the officer about my computer issues, and he said I’d done the right thing by calling the computer crimes detective. The officer didn’t have an opinion about whether the detective would investigate my computer or not.

  The police finished up and left. I needed to clean up, but it was going to have to wait. My budget meeting was happening in less than 20 minutes.

  I hoped the detective would call me back before IT got here. If I turned my computer over to the police, IT would have to give me a new one.

  And if the police could tell me what had been done to my computer, I could then decide whether I should speak to Diane about it.

  With those decisions made, I went to my budget meeting.

  The budget meeting was relatively painless, and my presentation was well received. It was a relief to have that over with. When I got back to my office, the computer crimes detective was waiting for me.

  I introduced myself. “I’m surprised to see you in person. Thanks for coming over.”

  “No problem.” Roger Blake was tall, thin, and weathered. He reminded me of a hawk – an intense, beady-eyed predator. He had a pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket and was chewing gum vigorously. “I hadn’t been in this building in a long time. Figured I’d take a field trip.” The mess in my office took him aback. “Whoa. What happened here?”

  I shoved a pile of papers off the chair, invited him to sit, and told him about the break-in. He listened, drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Interesting. Okay, tell me about your computer problems.”

  I described everything that had happened - the daily issues with crashes and email and internet access and finding Diane behind my desk twice. Blake listened, then got out pen and paper and asked me to repeat everything, in detail, with dates and times. When I finished, he sat back and steepled his fingers. "And you're the only one in the library that has had any problems."

  "Yes, sir. Which makes me think it must be directed at me, but I have no idea who or why it's happening."

  “What makes you think it’s not this DeLong woman?”

  “Because she has no reason to do anything like this, and I’m not sure she has the skills. And she couldn’t have been the one to come in and trash my office last night.”

  “She’s not UCLA personnel?”

  “No, sir. She’s on staff at Pasadena High School.”

  “She live in Pasadena?”

  “No, sir. West Hollywood.”

  "Hmph.” West Hollywood didn’t meet with Blake’s approval. “Okay. Think back. Last Wednesday. Before your computer crashed for the first time. What happened that day?"

  I thought. "It was my second day back at work. I'd been out for two weeks after a bad asthma attack. Everything was fine on Tuesday. Everything was fine when I came in on Wednesday. I worked in my office in the morning, then I went to the biomedical library to request a couple of articles from their databases. Then I had a meeting in the library science building. When I got back from my meeting, my computer had crashed. That was the first time."

  Blake looked puzzled. "Well, none of that sounds particularly ominous. Is all of that pretty routine for you?"

  "Yeah, for the most part."

  His eyes narrowed a bit. "What do you mean, the most part?"

  "Well, it's not every day that I go to the biomedical library. I hardly ever go there at all. I'm a history librarian."

  "Okay. Why did you go there that day?"

  He was narrowing in on my own suspicions. I pulled out Dan's letter and handed it to him. "Last Tuesday morning, I found out that my friend, Dan Christensen, had died over the weekend. It was a surprise because he was young, only 37. Then, last Tuesday afternoon, I found this letter from him in the mail. It was these two articles that I requested from the biomed library."

  "Can I make a copy of this?"

  "Sure."

  Blake left the office for a second, came back with his copy of Dan's letter and handed the original back to me. "What did you think when you got this?"

  "Well, I was kind of freaked out. He says right there, 'If anything happens to me,' and something had happened to him."

  "Did they give a cause of death?"

  "Not yet. My brother is a homicide detective with LAPD. He’ll get the autopsy report when it’s released, but it’s too soon. You know how that goes."

  "I sure do. I was with LAPD for 15 years. Are they investigating this as a homicide?"

  "No, sir. They're not investigating it at all."

  "Hmm." Blake tapped the edge of the copied letter on the arm of the chair, thinking. "So if your buddy was involved in something weird...could your request of the articles have triggered something? Pointed someone out there in your direction?"

  "Well, it did point Dr. Oliver in my direction. But he seemed harmless. And he seemed satisfied with my explanation about why I wanted his article."

  “Huh.” Blake reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of gum. Dentyne. He stuffed two more sticks into his mouth. I wondered how many he already had in there.

  "You're a librarian. You know about electronic databases."

  "Yes, sir."

  "So you know that it's possible to create alerts. If an article gets published on a particular subject, you get an email alert, and you can retrieve the article from the database."

  "Right."

  "So...this Oliver guy has an alert set up to notify him when someone downloads his article. Maybe he’s not the only one who did that. What do you know about the other authors?"

  “Nothing. I did meet one of the other authors at my friend’s funeral. He said he was my friend’s boyfriend. He didn’t say anything about articles.”

  Blake was chomping away on his gum. Maybe it helped him think. “Boyfriend, huh? You think this is some kind of weird gay thing?”

  Oh brother. “No.”

  “Hmph.” Blake sounded like he was going to reserve judgment on that point for now. Probably conjuring up a gang of murderous gay hackers based in West Hollywood. He looked back at the titles in Dan's letter. "Stem cell research, huh?"

  "Yeah. I've read the second one, but I’m waiting for the first one to come through interlibrary loan."

  "What language is that?"

  "Welsh."

  "Weird. Okay. And so far, nothing has turned up in the article that seems...worthy of instigating computer sabotage?"

  "No. Not at all. And the authors of the article aren't affiliated with UCLA. They're at Cedars and they're on the clinical faculty at USC."

  “Okay.” Another stick of Dentyne disappeared into Blake’s jaw. Where was he putting it all? “Let’s shift gears. Tell me more about Ms. DeLong.”

  “She was in library school with me and Dan. The guy who died. She’s the librarian at Pasadena High. She’s…” I realized I didn’t really know all that much about Diane. “She’s a friend.” That sounded lame even to me.

  Blake drummed his fingers on his desk for a minute. "Okay. Here's what we'll do. I'm going to take your computer with me and see what's been done to it, and I’ll have a chat with your friend, Ms. DeLong. In the meantime, can you switch the computers you use every day?"

  I winced. "Yeah...it'll be inconvenient, but I can do it."

  "Good." Blake slapped his knees and stood up. "Let’s get this thing taken apart."

  I heaved the tower off the
floor, and we unhooked everything. Blake picked it up. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Okay, thank you.” I saw him out.

  Finally, I had time to start repairing the mess that the burglar had made. I got busy replacing books on my shelves, which lined the room. I created a pile with the loose papers and file folders. I’d address those at some other time. I was kicking up a lot of dust, and I didn’t want to start wheezing. But I did want to get the books re-shelved – the natural obsessive-compulsive tendencies of a librarian to organize, I guess. I finished that and took a puff from my inhaler that I kept in my desk drawer. It was getting low; I’d have to bring a replacement next week.