Scoop to Kill

by Wendy Lyn Watson

  “Are you proposing?” I gasped.

  He pushed me away, then pulled me close, twisting us in a complicated and dizzying combination, before finally drawing me around to face him again.

  Quick, quick, slow, slow.

  “Is that so crazy?”

  “Last year you were ready to arrest me for murder, and now you want to get married and have babies?”

  He snorted, a sort of humorless laugh.

  “Give me a little credit, Tally. There was a warrant, so I asked you to turn yourself in. I didn’t want you to get hurt. But I didn’t really think you killed anyone.”

  “Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. But, Cal, where’s this coming from? We’ve never even been on a date.”

  “Don’t I know it! You always seemed way too young, and then before I made my move you started dating Finn. And when you broke up with Finn, I had already enlisted. By the time I got back, you were married.” He spun me around once, disorienting me as I lost sight of him, but then he was there, filling my field of vision again. “The timing was never right, Tally, but I’ve been half in love with you my whole life.”

  “Half in love,” I echoed. “But not all the way in love?”

  The expression on his stern face never wavered, but his nostrils flared just a bit. I had come to recognize that tiny motion as a sign of annoyance. “Like you said, we’ve never even gone on a date. I’m not saying we should get married tomorrow or anything. I was just thinking we might go out. Court. Go steady.” He laughed softly, as though surprised at his own whimsy. “We don’t have to talk about anything legally binding until we’ve at least kissed a couple of times.”

  He started to spin me into another complicated turn, but I resisted, led us to the edge of the dance floor, and to a halt. I pulled my hand away and cupped his hard jaw, his skin warm and slightly whiskery beneath my fingers. I melted a little when his eyelashes fluttered over his lightning blue eyes and he leaned into my caress.

  Part of me thought, what the heck? It wouldn’t hurt to go on a few dates with a handsome man, see where it led. But another part of me, the part that had been scorched by Finn Harper leaving me behind and burned by Wayne Jones’s infidelity, that part of me sounded a warning bell. Cal made light of his mention of marriage, but did I really want to toy with a man so serious?

  “Cal, what’s going on here? What’s brought this on?”

  When he opened his eyes, I saw such pain and yearning there, I had to resist the urge to pull him into an embrace.

  “I’m tired of waiting,” he said simply.

  “For what?”

  “For the future. For the right time. For you. Bryan . . .” He trailed off and looked into the middle distance, composing himself. “This past month has made me realize how life can just”—his brow furrowed as he searched for the words—“just end.”

  He cleared his throat. “When I stood by his coffin, I thought about what he’d been doing the day he died, the humdrum little things he was doing that day, filling up what turned out to be the last minutes of his life, and it made me question how I spend my minutes. I don’t want to waste any more minutes on waiting.”

  This time, I didn’t even try to resist my impulse to pull him close. He folded around me like an old bed quilt, warm and heavy.

  “Cal,” I said softly, my voice muffled by the surprisingly soft skin beneath his jaw. “I’m so touched. But I’ve already had one ill-advised marriage. That’s my quota. No more.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “I think you need to get past your grief before you jump into anything, even just going steady.”

  I felt his whole body stiffen beneath my hand.

  He pulled back. For a second, he wavered uncertainly, as though he might reach out and snatch me close again. But then he nodded his head once, turned on his heel, and stalked back to the table, drawing the anxious attention of everyone at the head table.

  I let him go.

  It was not a night for romance.

  chapter 28

  I tipped my head back against the brick facade of the Gish-Tunny Center. The wall still held the heat of the afternoon sun, and the contrast between warm wall and cool air felt oddly comforting. I let my mind drift along the faint strains of music coming from inside, doing my best not to think about how my love life had gone from zero to sixty—and back to zero—in nothing flat that night.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  My eyes snapped open, and I found Bree and Alice standing before me, all clean and pressed and ready for a dance.

  “Me? What about you?”

  “Your friendly neighborhood Cinderellas have finished the housework and are ready to get their dance on,” Bree replied.

  I chuckled, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  “Can I borrow Alice for a minute or two?”

  Bree gave me the stink-eye. “Are you going to get my child into more trouble?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said hopefully.

  “I’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll keep Aunt Tally safe.”

  “Okay. I’m going in to that dance to find some rich, handsome cowboy. But I’ve got my phone. Just buzz if you get in a pickle.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Tell Marla and Rosemary Gunderson that I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I just needed to check something out across campus.”

  I took Alice by the hand and led her across the moonlit campus toward Sinclair Hall. “You still have Emily’s keys, right?”

  Alice nodded. “Are we breaking in?”

  “No. Well, yes. But just to borrow her computer. We need to search the Internet for something.”

  We let ourselves into Emily’s office, and Alice booted up the computer.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Two words: q-u-i t-a-m.”

  She glanced up at me, her eyes wide with surprise, but then typed in the words.

  “The very first result is for something called a qui tam action.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “Um . . .” She clicked open a link and read to herself for a moment. “It looks like it’s a type of lawsuit where an individual person sues on behalf of the government. So, like, if you found out that someone was cheating the government by, like, charging the military too much for fighter jets, you could file a lawsuit representing the interest of the government.”

  She studied the screen some more, then uttered a short, mirthless laugh.

  “Apparently the government wants to pay people to narc. So if you bring one of these lawsuits, you get a cut of whatever the government recovers. Like fifteen to twenty-five percent. And your attorney fees.”

  “Attorney fees?” I had a sudden thought. “Can you do a search for this type of lawsuit and ‘attorneys’ and ‘Dalliance, Texas’?”

  Her fingers flew over the keyboard.

  “Huh,” Alice said. “It looks like there’s a directory of lawyers in Texas who handle these types of cases. And there’s only one listing in Dalliance: Jackson and Ver Steeg.”

  “Oh.” I sagged against Emily’s desk and closed my eyes. “Oh, my.”

  “What?” Alice asked.

  Silence stretched between us, and I could almost hear the wheel click in her giant brain as she made the same realization I had.

  “The difference between the two spreadsheets,” she said. “It wasn’t just a math error.”

  “No. Gunderson must have monkeyed with the spreadsheet template to calculate the facilities and administration charge using a slightly higher percentage. It padded all the grant requests by a bit, which he could then skim off the top. That’s why Bryan told Ashley that fractions of percents mattered.”

  Alice whistled. “With Emily’s grant, a fraction of a percent wouldn’t amount to much, but for the hard sciences, those grants can be millions of dollars. Just half a percent of that is thousands of dollars.”

  “Bryan figured it out. And he decided to cash in, to file one of these qui tam actions. Probably becau
se of the baby.”

  “But how would Gunderson have known?”

  “Bryan’s lawyer is Kristen Ver Steeg. Her partner is Madeline Jackson, who is Rosemary Gunderson’s niece. I’m guessing Madeline Jackson said something to the Gundersons.”

  “She did.”

  Alice and I both yelped. We hadn’t heard George Gunderson approach, and now he stood between us and the door. And he had a gun in his hand.

  “She didn’t mean to betray Bryan’s confidentiality. She simply thanked us for referring Bryan to the firm and mentioned that he was considering a qui tam action, which could prove lucrative for the firm. It never occurred to her that I was involved in the fraud Bryan planned to expose.”

  George stepped further into Emily’s office and shut the door behind him.

  “It seems I misjudged you, Ms. Jones,” he said. “I rather thought I might get caught, but not by you.”

  Was that a compliment? An insult? Did it really matter when I was clearly about to die?

  “May I ask what gave me away?”

  Fine. If the man wanted to play this game, I’d play, too. Anything to buy us a few more minutes, and maybe a chance of getting out of this pickle.

  “Little things,” I said. Beside me, I felt Alice shift in her seat, heard the faint click of her fingers on the computer keyboard. I kept talking to keep Gunderson’s attention on me rather than her. “The pieces have been there all along—you had opportunity to kill Bryan, and you could easily hide the blood from your crime beneath your academic robes. Rosemary said you’d been working late, so you might well have run into Emily here the night she died. In fact, it was probably your tiramisu on the counter at her house. Between your wife and Ginger, you probably knew enough about insulin and diabetes to manipulate her sugar levels to incapacitate her until you could kill her. Then there were all the hints in what Bryan said and did before he died, comments about percentages and safe bets. You also seemed to have more money than other members of the faculty.”

  I shrugged. “I never would have put it all together, though, if I hadn’t seen that French lesson on the whiteboard today. The night she died, Emily said something about a key, but it didn’t make sense until I realized that she meant q-u-i, not k-e-y. And then . . . well, then it just fell into place,” I concluded lamely.

  George sighed. “Yes, Reggie mentioned you had been agitated about that French lesson. Still, you were perfectly pleasant at dinner. I thought perhaps you’d failed to connect the dots. But then your cousin said you’d had a sudden inspiration and had hared off across campus. It had to be something important to take you away from the party. I knew then that you’d draw the inevitable conclusion.” He shook his head sadly. “I didn’t mean to do it, you know.”

  Was he serious? He stole tens of thousands of dollars over the course of years . . . Oops?

  He squeezed his eyes closed and tilted his head, like he was trying to stretch out a stiff neck. Before I could take advantage of his distraction, his eyes popped open and he steadied the gun on me.

  “I just . . . I need you to understand.”

  “I understand,” I lied.

  He laughed, a raw, desperate sound. “Anything to calm the crazy man? I’m afraid I’m not crazy, Ms. Jones. Just cornered. I . . . I’m not a bad man. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

  Which would be cold comfort, indeed, to Bryan and Emily.

  “Three years ago my Rosemary was diagnosed with breast cancer,” he said. “You cannot imagine what it was like, holding her hand through the chemotherapy, holding back her hair when she was sick and too weak to do it herself. My beautiful girl.”

  Despite the gravity of my situation, I felt a welling of emotion for this man, so obviously in love with his wife and so helpless in the face of her disease.

  “God, the morning they wheeled her into the operating room for her surgery, she looked so small and frail in the bed. I wanted to go with her, to be with her, but she had to face it alone.” He shrugged. “I was unmanned.”

  “She knew you loved her,” I said.

  “Yes, but love doesn’t save your life. Medicine does.” He shook his head tightly. “And then the bills started rolling in. I thought we had good insurance, but . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “I couldn’t let us lose everything, Ms. Jones. My Rosemary had suffered enough. She’d supported me through graduate school, picked up and moved across the country when I got my first academic job, endured the loneliness of my pre-tenure years when I was consumed by work. When I traveled for my research, she stayed here, alone, in this backwater town and never once complained. The thought of her spending her golden years in poverty again, all because she’d married a man who loved ideas more than money . . . I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “Of course not,” I murmured soothingly.

  “So I took some money. Just enough to cover the bills. I wasn’t greedy. I just shuffled it from one bloated research account to another. Rosemary’s happiness was worth more than a new computer that could solve a complex equation in thirty seconds instead of a minute.”

  I nodded again, but my attention had shifted to the door behind Gunderson. There was a tiny square window in that door, and I thought I saw a shadow move across it. If someone were out in the hallway, if I could just make a little noise . . . something to draw that unknown somebody’s attention without startling George.

  “I took the money, and then I had to find a way to give it back. Eventually, those accounts would be audited. The researchers would wonder where their money went. That was when I got the idea to pad the budgets up front. I only planned to fiddle with the percentages until I’d paid back the money I borrowed. But once I started, it was just so easy to keep doing it. And it meant I could take better care of Rosemary. We could afford help around the house, and I could take her on trips.”

  And to eat regularly at the Hickory Tavern. I kept my lips shut. My mama didn’t raise any fools, and I wasn’t going to poke back at the man with the gun.

  “I know it was wrong, Ms. Jones. If it were only my life on the line, I would have turned myself in when Bryan Campbell discovered what I’d been doing. I never would have paid him any blackmail money, and I certainly wouldn’t have killed him when he threatened to expose me anyway.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement. Someone at the door?

  “But it isn’t just my life,” George continued. “It’s Rosemary’s. She’s strong, stronger than I, and she could withstand the scandal. But I would have to pay back the money. They would take everything to get their pound of flesh: our house, Rosemary’s jewelry, our savings, everything. She’d be left with nothing. What if the cancer came back? How would she fight it, alone, without any money?”

  I heard a faint scraping sound. Someone was definitely right outside the door. I didn’t dare look to see who it was, though.

  Another sound, a squeak of rubber on linoleum, faint but clear. George twitched, and started to turn, as though he, too, had heard the noise.

  Quickly, I tried to distract him.

  “I see how it happened, Professor Gunderson. One small lapse in judgment, and then years covering it up.” In my peripheral vision, I saw the door behind Gunderson inch open. “The problem growing bigger and bigger,” I rushed on. “You didn’t mean to, but once you started, there was no stopping it.”

  Something flared in his eyes—joy, relief, excitement? “Exactly,” he exclaimed. “One small lapse in judgment . . .” He laughed softly. “The poet was correct. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!’ ” His gaze sharpened on me. “Do you know who said that?”

  Really? This hardly seemed the time for a quiz. I went with the old standby. “Shakespeare?”

  “Sir Walter Scott.”

  Gunderson and I both jumped nearly out of our skins and spun around to find Bree standing at the back of the room. She stood perfectly still, her hands open and spread away from her body to show that she wasn’t armed.<
br />
  Her eyes met mine briefly, and she must have seen the shock in my face. She arched a brow and drawled, “What? I can read, you know?”

  I don’t know whether it was Bree’s sudden appearance or her startling command of British literature that knocked George off guard, but I took full advantage of his momentary confusion. I grabbed the first thing I encountered—Emily Clowper’s flea market foam rooster—and threw it at Gunderson with all my might.

  The rooster bounced off him, doing no real damage, but he threw up his arms in a defensive reflex.

  Bree, too, snatched the nearest object, a much more weapon-worthy book from on top of Emily’s filing cabinet. She threw it overhand, and it struck Gunderson squarely in the forehead.

  He stumbled and the gun went flying.

  Alice scrambled over the desk, lunging for the gun, while Bree and I both tackled Gunderson.

  We had him pinned to the ground, groaning, and Alice was standing on top of Emily’s desk with the gun trained on Gunderson’s head, when Cal and Finn came rushing into the office.

  Cal, his weapon drawn and a look of panic on his face, surveyed the scene.

  “Lord-a-mighty, I’ve had nightmares like this.”

  Beside him, Finn laughed. “Me too. But in mine, a couple people were naked and the rooster was very much alive.”

  chapter 29

  I didn’t see Cal or Finn during the week between Gunderson’s arrest and Crystal and Jason’s wedding. Finn’s articles about ivory-tower corruption—Jonas Landry’s fabricated interviews and George Gunderson’s massive embezzlement—made national news, and Cal fielded media requests from across the state. I just wanted to lay low and wait for the dust to settle.

  But in a town the size of Dalliance, you can’t avoid anyone for very long, and we were all at the wedding at the Silver Jack.

  A whip-thin young man in a tux, a black cowboy hat, and silver-chased boots ushered Deena down the flower-lined aisle. She had the poor boy’s arm in a death grip, and he had to pry her fingers from his sleeve to hand her off to Tom Silver. A gentle murmur of laughter rippled through the guests, and then they grew silent when Crystal Tompkins stepped through the French doors and onto the patio.