Sleeping With the Crawfish

by D. J. Donaldson

  “Well . . . maybe I’ll give it a couple of days.”

  “Good for you. Call me tomorrow night and we’ll see where we are.”

  After hanging up, Kit ate and took a long, hot bath, during which she remembered she hadn’t asked Tabor what he knew about Tom Ward. Filled to the brim with Agrilabs, Inc., she decided to hold that discussion until they spoke tomorrow.

  With her own needs met, she washed Lucky, who could always be found under the bed when there was water running in the tub. A few minutes before nine, he jumped up on the arm of the chair Kit was sitting in and stared at the phone. At nine, the call he was waiting for came in: Nolen wanting to know if she and Lucky were ready for their nightly walk with him and Mitzi. With that walk, Kit’s first day as Kate Martin came to a close.

  15

  “Before we do anything this morning,” Noell said as Broussard got in her car, “I want to say something about last night.” She hesitated, looking through the windshield at a gardener collecting spent blooms from the Peabody’s petunia bed. “I . . . may have given you the wrong impression. I admit I didn’t have dinner with you just because we both like Louis L’Amour. It was more than that. And I think you felt it, too. But while it’s true my husband and I don’t have a perfect marriage by any means, I’m not ready to throw it away.”

  In one sense, Broussard was happy to hear this. Being unaccustomed to the feelings of sexual attraction, he found it disturbing, unsettling to the mind and the body. But as unwilling as he might be to enter into any impropriety, let alone with a married woman, Noell’s declaration that nothing was going to happen was not entirely good news.

  Finally, she looked at him. “I’m sorry if I led you to believe otherwise.”

  “I’m kinda slow to accept anything until there’s adequate proof on the table, so I was still in the speculation stage of that particular investigation.”

  Noell smiled at this, and despite what they’d both said, Broussard felt the issue was not settled.

  The trip to the medical center was a short one, so after they’d been under way only a few minutes, Noell pointed to her left. “There’s the UT physiology building.”

  Looking across the street, Broussard saw a venerable old structure adorned with lots of cut stone and Gothic tracery. The arch over the entrance matched the one in the picture Kit had found of Anthony Hunter.

  Noell pulled into a McDonald’s and ditched the car. Putting their lives at risk, they jaywalked across four lanes of traffic so dense that when they safely reached the sidewalk, Broussard muttered a small prayer of thanks.

  Upon entering the target building, Broussard felt right at home, for it was as quiet as the morgue back in New Orleans and, in fact, had the same yellow tile on the walls. There was a directory to the left of the entrance, but there were so few letters on it, they spelled nothing.

  “You get the feeling we came in the wrong door?” Noell asked.

  “Obviously, we’re in the restful wing.”

  Being that she was the detective and it was her city, Broussard let Noell lead the way. Ultimately, this took them into something called the Nash Annex, a tall, narrow, gloomy atrium with the exterior facade, including the windows, of the building they’d just left on one wall and four floors of exposed walkway and offices on the other. Even here, there was no one around.

  “What are we suddenly . . . Adam and Eve?” Noell said in frustration. “Sorry, bad analogy.”

  The sound of a door opening echoed through the annex and a maintenance man appeared on the floor above, pushing a broom.

  Noell put two fingers in her mouth and whistled like a sailor. When he looked down, she said, “Where can we find the Physiology Department’s main office?”

  He made a hitchhiking gesture with his thumb. “Fourth floor Nash.” Then he pointed to his right. “Far end of the hall.”

  “How about that for detective work?” Noell said over her shoulder as she headed back the way they’d come.

  “I don’t think that kind of thing counts,” Broussard replied, hurrying to keep up.

  The only indication they’d found the right door was a departmental roster posted next to it, on which Anthony Hunter was still listed. Judging from the inattention to such things here, Broussard suspected his name would remain there for years.

  Inside, they encountered a woman with two reams of copy paper clutched to her chest. She had skin the color of a gingersnap and only a bit more hair. She paused in her duties to offer assistance.

  Noell made her standard introductions, then said, “And we’d like some information on Dr. Hunter.”

  The secretary’s eyes rolled upward. “Dr. Hunter . . . We’re all still in shock over that.” Then the implication of Noell’s affiliation sank in. “Homicide? You said Homicide. . . . You don’t think . . . No . . .”

  “That hasn’t been established yet,” Noell lied. “We’re trying to determine exactly what did happen.”

  “And to do that, we need to learn more about Dr. Hunter,” Broussard interjected. “For example, I’d like to know exactly what he’s been doin’ lately in his research.”

  “I don’t know anything about those matters,” the secretary said. “But you can find his published papers in the library.”

  “I’ve tried that. There’s nothin’ for the last two years. Did he submit any grant applications recently?”

  “His competing renewal went to NIH for a March first deadline.”

  “Do you keep a copy in this office?”

  The woman hesitated. “It’s not a public document.”

  “This isn’t idle curiosity,” Noell said. “We’re conducting an official inquiry. If necessary, we’ll get a search warrant.”

  “No need to get pushy,” the secretary said. “You can see it.”

  She led them into one of the rooms opening off the general area, put her load of paper on the desk there, and knelt at the bottom drawer of a long sideways file cabinet.

  She thumbed through the folders inside and paused, then worked her way through those that remained. Obviously agitated, she began at the first folder in the drawer and methodically went through them all again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. “Our copy doesn’t seem to be here. But the dean of research has one and so does the Office of Research Affairs. I’ll call one of them and have their copy sent over.”

  She picked up the phone, called the latter of the two offices she’d mentioned, and explained the situation. “They’ll send it right over,” she said, hanging up. “Mind if I go on with my work?”

  “Feel free,” Noell said.

  “You can wait in here if you like.”

  Broussard fished in his pocket for a couple of lemon balls, which he offered to Noell. Seeing that they nestled in pocket lint like eggs in a nest, she waved them off. “Too early in the day for me.”

  It was the right time of day for Broussard and he popped one into his mouth, then dropped into a chair and folded his hands over his belly. In one of the other rooms, a phone rang.

  Shortly thereafter, Ms. Gingersnap returned. “This is very odd,” she said.

  “Let me guess,” Broussard said. “Neither of the offices you mentioned can find its copy.”

  “How did you know?”

  “No other reason you’d have come in here lookin’ so surprised.”

  “Dr. Hunter must have kept a copy,” she suggested, entering now into the spirit of the search.

  Broussard got out of his chair. “How about showin’ us his office?”

  “And finding us some rubber gloves,” Noell added.

  As they followed her into the Nash Annex a short while later, the secretary wondered aloud at the disappearance of the three copies of Hunter’s grant. “It’s almost as if—” she stopped walking and looked at Broussard with the glow of discovery on her face—“as if someone took them.”

  Too kind to point out that this was a conclusion she could have reached back in the office, Broussard simply smiled a
nd nodded.

  “Which also means we’re not likely to find Dr. Hunter’s copy, either,” she said. “Ooooh, this is eerie.”

  Hunter’s two file cabinets were unlocked. A thorough search of them turned up copies of his three previous grants, but not the latest. Nor did they find it in the file drawer of his desk.

  “Who typed that grant?” Broussard asked.

  “Dr. Hunter. Most of the doctors type their own work.”

  They all looked at Hunter’s computer.

  “Bet it’s not there,” Noell said. She pulled out the chair in front of the computer and sat down and turned the thing on.

  “Can you operate it?” Broussard asked.

  “Well enough to find the grant if it’s in here and if we’re not locked out of anything.” The screen came on, displaying a bewildering number of icons. “This could take awhile,” she said, double-clicking the mouse on an icon at the top.

  Broussard turned to the secretary. “Hunter must have had technical help with his work. Are those people here today?”

  “Unfortunately not. They both took some vacation time—they’re married. They left the day Dr. Hunter died, so they might not even know about it. They haven’t called in, and I didn’t see them yesterday at the funeral.”

  While Noell worked at the computer, Broussard went through Hunter’s shelves, looking for data books. Finding none, he checked all the desk drawers, again without success.

  “Would you like to see his lab?” the secretary volunteered.

  “I would indeed.” He turned to Noell. “Anything locked?”

  “Not so far.”

  “I’m gonna look for data books in his lab.”

  She nodded and opened another file.

  Hunter’s lab was as neat as his office. The chemicals were alphabetically arranged, facing squarely forward, there was nothing lying on the benchtops, and all the drawers were labeled. Thinking of his own office and the piles of books and journals stacked all over it, Broussard wondered how a man got a decent thought in surroundings so sterile.

  It did make it easy, though, to find Hunter’s data books, which occupied the top three shelves of a metal cabinet in a small room off the main lab. As expected, they were arranged in chronological order, with the inclusive dates neatly written on their spines. The last book on the shelf contained data generated two years earlier. A search of the lab turned up nothing more current.

  “Whoever’s behind this sure isn’t bothered by a locked door,” the secretary observed, echoing a thought that had run through Broussard’s mind a few minutes earlier.

  “Who among Dr. Hunter’s colleagues here might know what he was workin’ on?” he asked.

  She thought a moment. “That’d probably be Dr. Ivy.”

  “Is he in?”

  “We can see. His office is at the end of this floor.”

  Taped to Ivy’s door was a cartoon showing a guy in a lab coat looking through a microscope. Behind him, another scientist was about to put a few drops of a liquid from a bottle labeled “Sulfuric Acid” on the seated man’s neck. The title of the cartoon was “Laboratory High Jinks.” Arrows identified the seated man as Dr. Hunter, the one with the acid as Dr. Ivy. The labels weren’t applied, but were actually part of the cartoon, indicating that someone with a lot of spare time had scanned the original into a computer and added the labels before printing it.

  The secretary’s knock was answered by a booming “Enter.”

  Dr. John Ivy rose from a littered desk to greet them. He was a big, lanky fellow with thin blond hair that hung to the nape of his neck like a sunscreen on a French Foreign Legion cap. He had the shoulders of an Olympic swimmer.

  “Dr. Ivy, this is Dr. Broussard. He’s here with a homicide detective investigating Dr. Hunter’s death.”

  “Wasn’t that ruled a heart attack?” Ivy said to Broussard.

  “We’re not so sure now,” Broussard replied.

  “All the copies of Dr. Hunter’s grant have disappeared,” the secretary said.

  “Would you mind telling Sergeant Noell I’m gonna be a few more minutes?” Broussard said, wanting no more such interruptions.

  “Of course.”

  Broussard accepted Ivy’s offer to sit, then before Ivy could ask about the grants, he said, “I’m curious about what Hunter has been workin’ on for the last year or two. The secretary said you two were friends, so I was hopin’ you’d know.”

  Ivy rocked back in his chair and folded his big hands behind his head. “We were friends, true enough, but these days I’m afraid that doesn’t extend to the lab.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Everybody’s got a piece of some biotech firm or they’re planning to patent something from their work. Free and open communication in science is a thing of the past. Everybody’s looking over his shoulder, afraid a competitor is going to beat him to the pot of gold.”

  He rocked forward, dropped his palms to the desk, and slid forward until he was leaning on his forearms. “I’ll tell you this—it’s ruining science. Used to be, anybody would give you any reagent they’d developed. In fact, some of the big journals have that as a credo: If we publish your work, it’s understood you’ll make any probes you’ve developed available to your colleagues. Good luck. It just ain’t happening like it used to. In the last six months, I’ve written three letters to a fellow at the Max Planck, asking for some antibodies he’s developed. Still haven’t heard from him . . . and I won’t.

  “I liked Tony . . . I really did. But I didn’t agree with that attitude. Christ, I don’t even work in the same area. What am I going to do, take his secrets and sell ’em to the highest bidder?”

  “You think he had secrets?”

  “Hell, he hadn’t published for two years. I think it was because he was afraid to let people know what he was doing.”

  “And you have no idea what that was?”

  “All I can say is, he must have thought it was pretty damn special to believe NIH was going to keep pushing money at him, with his publication record.”

  Broussard thanked Ivy for the information and went back to Hunter’s office, where he found Noell, sans secretary. “How you doin’?”

  “There’s no grant in here,” Noell said. “And no other kind of storage disks around, either.”

  “As I understand it, if the grant was there and somebody simply deleted it, all they did was corrupt the file name so it can’t be accessed. The rest of the file may still be on the hard disk. How about we take his CPU to your crime lab and see if they can find it.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. Didn’t know you were so computer-literate.”

  “My deputy ME in New Orleans keeps me updated whether I want to hear it or not.”

  “Learn anything down the hall?”

  “Just that Hunter’s latest data books are also missin’ and he didn’t even talk with his best friend here about his work. His friend thinks it was because Hunter had stumbled onto somethin’ he hoped would make a lot of money.”

  “Scientists motivated by greed? Say it ain’t so. I guess you’ve realized by now you’re not tracking one killer. You’re up against a skilled organization.”

  “I was aware of that before I left New Orleans. Just didn’t know if they were operatin’ up here.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Want to, but can’t.”

  “We’ve got some B and E charges here and probably theft. You’re going to have to discuss it with somebody in the department.”

  “I know. Right now, though, I’d like to talk to Hunter’s technicians.”

  He and Noell returned to the departmental office and got the address and phone number of the techs, Steve and Holly Keough, from the secretary who’d been helping them. A call to the Keoughs from a departmental phone went unanswered.

  “They’re probably just out of town,” Noell said. “But I think we should take a drive over there.”

  For the secretary’s benefit, she’d phras
ed her suggestion as though they just didn’t have anything better to do, but Broussard knew what was in the back of her mind. Whoever had murdered Hunter was surely aware the Keoughs knew what he’d been working on.

  With Hunter’s CPU in the trunk, Broussard and Noell arrived at the Keough household twenty minutes later. The couple lived in the area generally known as midtown, in a brick bungalow shaded by fifty-year-old oaks and elms. Enough time had passed since the lawn had been mowed for dandelions to flower. There was no car in the drive, but Noell rang the bell anyway.

  The house next door was a poorly maintained place with a big solar collector on the roof and a desert diorama out front made of Arkansas fieldstone and sand decorated with a few cacti, a dozen artificial snakes of various hues, and a ceramic parrot.

  An old woman in a bathrobe came out onto its porch. “They ain’t home.”

  “Do you know where they are?” Noell asked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  Broussard and Noell left the Keoughs’ house and walked over to her. Before they got there, she went inside and locked the storm door.

  Noell’s ID brought her back outside. They saw now that she was wearing slippers with fabric rabbit heads on them. Noell asked again about the Keoughs.

  “They’re on vacation—in Mexico. What’s wrong?”

  “We just want to talk to them about their work,” Noell said. “When did they leave?”

  “Last Wednesday . . . and today’s Tuesday. So that’s. . .”

  She recited the days that had passed, keeping track on her fingers. “Six days. Would you go away that long and not call and check on your mother if she had arthritis so bad that some days she could barely get dressed?”

  “You’re Steve’s mother?”

  “Lord no . . . Holly’s. She was a good girl, very affectionate to me, until Steve got hold of her. Since then, I get no consideration at all. You here because of somethin’ he did? Always thought he’d come to a bad end.”

  “We’re only seeking information,” Noell said. “Do you have the phone number of their hotel?”

  “It’s inside somewhere.”

  “May we use your phone to call them? I’ll charge it to the department.”