by Susy Gage
“Not for long,” Lori gasped. “Just wait till we catch a serial killer. Come on, Sam, pedal!”
Lori pedaled for all she was worth, skates and all. They abandoned the boat on the side of the pond and ran for Sam’s bike. As she had suspected, a car’s headlights came on just as they emerged from the bushes. “Up the sandy part! Go!”
“STOP!” yelled the LEPER, revving his engine.
But they were already off LEPER property and into the wilderness trail. She tried to shield herself behind vegetation and the bike, in case the guy was a guard with a gun, hoping the darkness would help them.
There was a rustling in the bushes. The LEPER was chasing them on foot. “Barrow, they’re after us!” Sam yelled.
“Tell me about it!” Even a fat LEPER was a match for a guy pushing a bike and a rollerblader in sand.
Sam hopped on the bike. “Grab on!” he yelled, downshifting all the way (yes) and tearing his way up the sandy hill as if it had been the smoothest pavement in the Tour de France.
Lori clutched his seatpost, too thrashed to assist, her skates completely useless in the soft surface anyway. She heard the LEPER give up, bellowing and wheezing like a hippo, but it wasn’t until they were more than a mile into the four-mile descent to campus that either one could say a word.
“I got what we need, Sam,” Lori breathed, still holding onto his seatpost. “You can call the journal in the morning. I think it was my computer that was the leak—they have all of my emails.”
“You mean your laptop?”
“It’s the only computer I own. Hold off on posting the video, OK? And don’t say anything to Lou and Rose. Tell them you found Drift’s laptop somewhere or something.”
“Don’t tell them?” Sam exclaimed. “You were brilliant! I want to give credit where credit is due.”
“As long as I don’t get the credit for what happened to Dim Bulb,” Lori replied grimly. “Because from what I heard, it sounds as if someone has tried to kill him again.”
Twenty-Two: The Only Fact We Have
Solomon Rose was standing right in the middle of the room, as far away from any surface as possible, refusing to take one of the BSL-3’s freshly-reupholstered, non-porous, and completely non-pathogenic lab chairs. Lou and van Gnubbern, on the other hand, were too blasé—elbows on the benchtop, holding cellphones, not wearing lab coats. They might not have had any yellow fever out, but it was still a hot-agent lab.
And it was also the safest place to talk in the building. “Well, Lori,” said Sol, “it looks as if you’ve been vindicated.”
He sounded as proud as if he’d killed Dim Bulb himself. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Lori objected. “I mean, I’m happy that the labs can re-open, but what does Dim Bulb have to do with Marybeth? Officially or unofficially?”
“Officially?” said Sol. “There is some old infrastructure in these buildings that needs repairing. It’s no one’s fault.”
“Unofficially,” continued van Gnubbern, “I think we can guess.”
“No we can’t!” Lori objected. “I thought Dim Bulb killed Marybeth. If someone killed him, it means there’s still a murderer on the loose.”
“No one says it was murder,” said Rose soothingly. “It could have been suicide, a careless accident…”
“How did he die?” Lori wondered.
“You mean you don’t know?” Lou was at his usual spot at the microscope, distracted with turning tiny screws on an optical filter. He wore no gloves at all. “You were up there. We thought you’d know everything.”
“For once, the evil on this campus has completely escaped me.”
“I’m the one who found his body,” van Gnubbern admitted. “No more than three hours ago.”
“Three hours?” Lori echoed. “But that’s before I left—that’s about the time I called Carol. Did they put you on PNG status because you found Dim Bulb dead?”
“Indeed,” said van Gnubbern. “I had gone up there at the request of Bob Drift to fix a microscope. When I went into the room, our old friend was lying on the floor, inert. I tried to revive him, but he was stone cold.”
“Not frozen again!” Lori shrieked.
“Oh, no.” Van Gnubbern chuckled. “The temperature in the room was quite normal. They say he was electrocuted, although I couldn’t tell you the basis for that conclusion.”
“We expected you to fill in the details—unofficially.” Rose no longer sounded quite so soothing. “It sounds as if you have some work to do.”
“Wait, what?” Lori was starting to suspect all three of them of conspiring without her. “I thought I was supposed to slice ice cores. Let’s cool down the room and I’ll go to it.”
“Oh, I can handle that,” said Lou casually—too casually.
Lori whirled and glared at him. “No you can’t! You’re a theorist! I bet you don’t even own a parka.”
“I was captain of the ski team in high school, Barrow,” said Lou.
“And I can certainly show this young man all he needs to know about sample prep,” continued van Gnubbern.
“So what are you saying?” Lori still couldn’t bring herself to yell at Rose, but this was outrageous. “Am I just your henchman, like Dim Bulb was Kuzno’s? Or maybe we’re all really on the same team? Who are you going to ask me to kill?”
“We certainly won’t ask you to go that far.” Rose had that comforting voice again. It was a good thing he hadn’t become a pediatrician, because it was really phony. “Nor will we ask you to do string theory.”
“We just want you to ask a few questions of the people who know too much,” added van Gnubbern.
Lori knew when she was outnumbered. She couldn’t even slam the door on her way out—it had to suck close with its negative-pressure suction. Waiting impatiently, she noticed three brightly-colored parkas hanging from the hooks in the vestibule.
“Ingrates!” she shouted, but of course over the laminar flow they wouldn’t hear a thing.
She didn’t know where to start, she realized as she ran up the stairs to her office. Her computer was suspect—apparently its entire contents had been leaked to Tripp, Bob, and the other LEPERs. She’d have to check it for spyware, but in the meantime, who was it who knew too much?
No one who would talk to her, that was for sure. Everyone she’d thought was on her side was hiding down in what was supposed to be her lab, doing experiments without her.
There were the three video cameras she’d given to Carol to install around the microscope—maybe that’s what Rose had meant. She wouldn’t put it past him to know all about that. Where had Carol been while Dimmy was being killed, anyway?
The trouble with Carol was that you had to make her believe you had called to talk to her, not just that you were after information. You had to make small talk and pretend you cared. It was a lot of work—especially when she started weeping.
“Bob is in trouble!” There were some noises in the background—it sounded as if Carol were driving in heavy traffic. “I thought he’d get punished the first time, but somehow he didn’t, and now this time…”
“What do the LEPERs do to punish people?” Lori asked, genuinely curious.
“Oh my God,” howled her old classmate, as if Lori had asked her to recall Pacific POW camps. “You have no idea… it’s horrible. Once my boss got a parking violation, and they locked us all in a purple room with no windows for hours, asking the same questions over and over. It was over a hundred degrees and we got no food or water. Even after people started fainting, they wouldn’t let us go. And what could we say? What do we know about our supervisor’s driving habits?”
That was petty and stupid, not the life-threatening abuse Lori had been expecting. She tried to gently steer the conversation around to the microscope room, but all she got were more LEPER parking stories and wailing about Bob.
She could be more direct, and risk Carol clamming up—or she could take her out and get her drunk. “I think the best way to deal with Bob for now is to avo
id him,” she suggested. “Why don’t we go to Arcadia and see 500 milliCoulumbs?”
“I don’t think I—” Carol swallowed hard. “OK. Fine. Let’s go. I’ll see you in a half hour.”
It took Lori almost twice that to get to the club on her winter bike. Tying it to a post and looking around both inside and out, she was dismayed to find that Carol wasn’t there. Thinking her not-really-friend had changed her mind, she grew rapidly impatient with the noise and stench of the busy street, noting the time on her watch and vowing to leave after fifteen minutes.
It was six and a half before an unmistakable din added itself to the background. Abby never let anyone forget that had owned her gray Porsche since she was sixteen, a present from her father who had owned it since he was sixteen. Somehow that gave it a smog exemption, or else she didn’t care about paying the Gross Polluter tax, because the thing rattled and stank like a leafblower. Shouting at the valet, she leapt out into traffic, coolly certain that she wouldn’t be run down like a squirrel.
Carol, on the passenger side, followed more slowly. It was clear that she’d spent the past hour trying to compete with Abby’s office-to-nightclub little black dress and absurd teetering shoes. She was a bit overdone, wrapped in something metallic red that looked confusing to put on, like a tangle of interleaved scarves. Her bright red lipstick and blue eyeshadow only made her face look older and more tired.
It was annoying. Annoying she was late, that she had dressed up to see some old loser classmate sing about how grad school sucked, and even more annoying that she had brought an enemy.
Lori braced herself for a wave of hissing as they approached, but Abby appeared relaxed and friendly. It was downright scary—the only thing that could make Abby stop hating her, she thought, was if her life truly were in danger.
“Come on, Carol,” she urged, probably too hastily. “Let me buy you a tequila. You too, Abby.”
It was just like old times. Old times where they’d had nothing in common but their gender and their quantum mechanics homework, and where each glared silently at the other wishing she could only understand.
At least then they could bond over trying to get good grades—tonight no one could find a word to say until the ethanol began to work on their GABA receptors. Lori worried that her soda water would make the others suspicious, but they didn’t seem to care, slamming back drinks each containing more alcohol and refined sugar than Lori had consumed in her life. The club was noisy, and they were clustered around a tiny table just to one side of the opening band, but there was never any problem hearing Abby.
“In fifteen years,” Abby raged, gesturing for a second (or third?) margarita, “no one has ever told me I made the right decision. Everyone thinks I left grad school because I was too stupid.”
“That’s not true. I always knew you were the most talented of any of us,” Lori objected mildly, not even bothering to shout over the music.
“Ha! You’re the one who kept telling me to come back and take the qualifying exam.”
“Just to prove to yourself that you could do it. So you wouldn’t stay angry for fifteen years. Look—you make twice as much money as I do, work half as many hours, and send my postdocs to prison. What do you hate me for?”
Abby contorted her face into a rictus of horror and fury, just as Kurt the drummer appeared and stood directly behind her—something she always used to despise. “I was sitting two feet away from a guy whose head was blown to pieces.” She pushed her chair back as if preparing to get up, knocked into Kurt, and then leapt to her feet with a hand raised as if preparing to slap him. She let her hand drop as she recognized who it was, but spluttered with uncontained wrath.
“A blast from the past!” Kurt chortled, making as if to pat Abby on the back but stopping himself at her expression. He had aged well—probably better than those who hadn’t dropped out, Lori thought, noticing his tongue piercing that glinted in the light when he laughed. His red hair was in a thick ponytail, and ape-like muscles stood out on his forearms. “Green-Eyed Monster and the Dugong! Suddenly I feel twenty-one again.”
The sound of the opening band’s last song died down, allowing Abby’s voice to carry to everyone in the room. “Then you should remember that if you stand behind me, I will assume you’re preparing a garrote and take appropriate action,” she spat, clearly not too drunk if she could put together sentences like that.
“Chill out, ladies,” chuckled Kurt. “I just came over to see how our class stars were doing. I hear you’re all rocket scientists now.”
Lori and Abby howled with scorn in unison. They had finally found something they agreed on.
“Rocket science!” Lori scoffed. “Those LEPERs don’t build their own rockets anymore—they contract everything out because they’re not allowed to touch sharp objects!”
“Their semi-official motto is Brilliant Engineering, Mediocre Science, Shitty Management,” Abby added. “I spend my days covering up for two-bit tyrants who think they can lock their employees in the closet with no food or water as punishment for criticizing the system. Then just today Carol’s dearly beloved Bob caused a scandal…” She clamped her mouth closed, and changed the subject by urging him to play old classics that she had inspired. “Remember `Gibber Ellen’?” she demanded for the whole room to hear. “Or `Santa’s Got Scurvy’!”
When the music resumed, Abby all but pushed Carol away to lean in and whisper to Lori. “Who would kill Silverman?” she inquired. “And why?”
“I don’t know,” Lori stammered, caught off guard.
“You hated him, didn’t you?” she persisted, with a trace—but only a shadow!—of the old loathing.
She must really think I’m doomed, Lori thought. Wow. “Only because he was an arrogant fuckwad, but we all are—I mean…”
Abby chortled. “What did he think about string theory?”
“I don’t know. I was only an undergrad. Is this really what you think it’s about?”
Ignored and neglected, Carol got up and wandered backstage. Abby waited until the red butt had just disappeared behind the curtain, and said too loudly, “Did you see her eyes on Kirk? I’m gonna tell him that she needs to ditch Bob ASAP. Even if he’s not fired, those LEPERs will make his life hell.”
“Back to the killer,” Lori urged, hating the way loosened inhibitions correlated with not making much sense. “Can we relax and work on our project now, or is Dim Bulb not the end of the story?”
For a moment Abby looked furious, as if she were about to respond in her usual hateful fashion. But the rage passed, and she leaned in again and spoke more quietly than Lori thought was possible. “If you’re still planning to work on an astrobiology proposal, we’re all going to need to watch your backs. I’ve got an idea for how to trap them—now listen carefully.”
Twenty-Three: Call Me Wigbert
A month after Dim Bulb was safely buried, they had all entirely forgotten the killer in the department in the frustration of trying to do cutting-edge science with an impossible deadline. Twenty-seven days of non-stop work, and they still didn’t have the data they needed. Some of their images were beautiful, from both the electron and fluorescence microscopes, but they still didn’t know what any of it meant. Lou had spent all Thanksgiving weekend trying to caption the pictures, not coming up with anything much better than “Unidentified microorganism from fifty centimeters depth in an Antarctic ice core.”
That wasn’t going to cut it. But he needed a break—they both did—or someone was going to melt down completely. His fingers were stained with dyes of seven different wavelengths, and when he shut his eyes, bacteria and fungi and algae swam across his retinas. The cracks in the road looked like mineral structures, or patterns in broken ice.
Lori’s little outing was probably going to kill him, but Lou didn’t care. It was the best adventure that he had had in years, and honestly, being left for dead in the desert was probably more pleasant than writing six hundred million dollars’ worth of budget pages.
“I used come here almost every weekend,” Lori informed him. “But this is the first time I’ve made it since I’ve been back, thanks to you and Sol and your project.”
“We’re in the home stretch now,” he promised, but didn’t believe it himself. “It feels weird not to have a cluster of Bubo bodyguards cataloging our every move.”
“Mad killers won’t find us here,” Lori promised. “You’ll see what I mean.”
He could already see what she meant. The adobe nature center had boards on its windows, and the asphalt in the parking lot sprouted with Bermuda grass and dandelions. She’d said they could go on this trail all the way to the beach, thirty-five miles out and thirty-five miles back, but Lou had doubts on every count: her home-made vehicles, her description of the terrain, and above all his own stamina.
Lori had a reputation for dragging people off on near-death adventures in unlikely pedal-powered craft. The most famous story involved Radhika, who had an incurable case of acrophobia, an ultralight airplane, and a cliff. Lou would have thought the story exaggerated if he hadn’t seen the pictures in Pasteur House, apparently taken at Lori’s 10-year reunion. There was also a rumor that none of her students graduated unless they survived at least one test of endurance in the wilderness—more extreme versions of the rumor said that not all of them emerged alive.