Kernel of Doubt: A Neela Durante Mystery

by Hillary Avis

  “No, he’s—he’s dead. He’s cold. I’m standing right here in the test field and he’s dead and I don’t know what to do!” Her voice rose up at the end into a half shriek.

  Art’s voice lost its chuckle. “Neela. Stay on the phone. I want you to walk into the building. Go straight to the security window and tell them that Dr. Hutto is in the field, and they will take care of him. I’m on my way. Keep talking.”

  Neela headed for the building entrance. “I’m walking, I’m walking. Oh god, Art, why would someone kill Miles?”

  “Don’t worry about that now, just get inside.”

  The sliding doors of the Broad Earth building opened with a whoosh, and Neela made a beeline for the security booth. It was staffed with three broad-shouldered men with guns strapped to their hips. They should have made her feel safe, but for some reason the sight of their weapons made her feel even more unsafe than the idea of a killer running around.

  “I’m here—I’m at the booth,” she said breathlessly into the phone.

  “OK, tell them what you told me.”

  Neela nodded even though Art couldn’t see her and pressed her hand against the shatterproof glass window. “Hey, Dr. Hutto is in the field by the parking lot. Behind his car. I think he’s been shot.”

  One of the men gaped at her. “What?”

  “He’s been shot.”

  All three men bolted for the door, radios in hand. “Stay there! Right there!” one of them called back over his shoulder.

  “I told them,” Neela said weakly. Her knees started to tremble, and she felt like she might collapse onto the floor of the lobby.

  Art’s soothing voice echoed in her ear. “Good, very good. You’re fine. I’ll be right there. I’m only a few minutes away.”

  Neela ended the call and stood frozen in the doorway, watching the security team assess Miles’s vital signs and then talk on their radios, presumably to someone still inside the building. A few minutes later, bright red swoops of light appeared in the distance at the same time that Art’s vintage Jag pulled into the parking lot and the head of security, Vince Crawford, came out of the elevator and walked up to Neela.

  “You need to come with me.”

  “Nonsense,” Art said, his corduroy blazer flapping as he jogged through the sliding doors into the marble foyer. “Dr. Durante can wait in her lab until it’s time to take her statement. Go on up, Neela. I’ll take care of this mess.”

  Vince Crawford looked unconvinced. “We really need to keep track of her.”

  Art waved away the concern. “You have cameras on every inch of the place. She won’t leave without you knowing. Go on, Neela!” He motioned with his head toward the elevator.

  Neela obeyed, her legs feeling separate from her body, and punched the button for the fourth floor. As the elevator rose, she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  Miles was dead.

  Miles was dead.

  She shook her head. She had to think about something else. She had to do her job. Double-check the Western blots for 13X to see if the rogue protein was there—that was what she was supposed to be doing. It seemed so unimportant now, but that was just what she needed: something orderly and mindless in a room that didn’t have a view of the parking lot.

  She pulled some unopened polyacrylamide gels from the cold-storage room. The dates on them were still good, and manufactured gels had no chance of being contaminated. The project refrigerator for 13X was still stocked, so she had plenty of material to work with. She ran multiple samples of 13X, some taken from seeds and others from leaf and stem tissue, each sample prepared with bromophenol blue.

  Neela’s hand shook as she loaded the wells in the gels with a micropipette, so she steadied one arm with the other. Not a perfect job, but she was out of practice and adrenaline was still coursing through her system. After focusing so intently on the precise work, she felt a little lightheaded, so she left the gel to run in the electrophoresis tank while she ate a granola bar in her office. Her mouth felt numb as she chewed, like it was detached from her body.

  Had they taken Miles away yet, or was he still out there in the field? She shook her head, trying to clear it so she could focus on her work. Just as she was preparing to go back to the lab, Cassie ran into the office in tears. “Did you hear? Miles shot himself!”

  Neela swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to control the trembling in her voice. “I know—I mean, I found him when I got to work this morning. Are they sure? I mean, sure that it was suicide?”

  Cassie nodded and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her lab coat. “Security found a gun beside him and residue on his hands. That’s what Art said.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible! He seemed fine the last time I saw him. I wish I’d known he was feeling depressed.” Neela stopped when she saw the devastated look on Cassie’s face. “You couldn’t have known, either. None of us did.” She patted Cassie’s arm awkwardly.

  Cassie shook her head vehemently and grabbed a tissue from the box on Neela’s desk to dab at the mascara dripping down her cheeks. “He wasn’t depressed. I know he wasn’t! I just talked to him last night and—”

  “You worked late?”

  “No, I was at home. He called around ten.”

  “Wait, you two talked on the phone?” Neela’s forehead scrunched. How did she not know they were friends? She’d never imagined that Miles had any friends in the QA department.

  “What I’m saying is that he was his normal self. He even said he had something important to work on today. Why would he say that if he was planning to—” Cassie gasped a sob and didn’t finish her sentence.

  “They’ll investigate,” Neela said, trying to sound reassuring. “They’ll figure it out.”

  Cassie sniffed and grabbed another tissue. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Neela nodded. “It’s weird. Like, why would he do it at work? Why wouldn’t he just wait until he got home?”

  “Maybe he left a note explaining his reasons. I hope he did—I just don’t understand.”

  “Maybe,” Neela said. “Or some other kind of message.”

  Like a voicemail. She touched the phone in her pocket. She’d forgotten about the message from the night before in the chaos of the moment. It could shed some light on Miles’s state of mind. Cassie looked like she was about to barf, though, so it was probably best not to listen to it in front of her.

  “Why don’t you do the compliance paperwork for 13X to take your mind off everything?” Neela suggested.

  “I can’t even think about work right now!” Cassie pulled out her phone and checked her makeup in selfie mode, scrubbing at her face with the tissue. “And I’m disgusting. I should go home.”

  “We’re supposed to stay here until we give our statements.”

  “I gave mine on the way in.” Cassie looked grim, like she was trying to quell her nausea. “I really need to get out of here.”

  Neela nodded. “Tell Art, then.”

  “Fine.” Cassie clicked off her phone and left.

  As soon as she was gone, Neela took out her own phone. She had to listen to the voicemail from Miles and find out what he had to say that was so pressing. Why did he leave a message late at night instead of waiting until the next morning to tell her at work?

  Her heart thudded in her chest as she pressed the “play” arrow. Instantly, she heard Miles’s voice, clear and alive.

  “We need to talk as soon as possible. Call me back when you get this message, no matter how late.” Click. That was the end of the message.

  Why did he need to speak with her so urgently?

  A knock came at her office door just then, loud and insistent, and the door swung open before she had time to stand up.

  It was Vince Crawford and a couple of cops. Well, one local cop and one agent from the Department of Agricultural Law Enforcement, or DALE. She recognized the uniform—and the broad shoulders inside it that always made her stomach flutter. It was Teo.
r />   Neela swore under her breath.

  “Dr. Durante,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He looked a little embarrassed to encounter her like this, too.

  Good, she thought, but her cheeks burned.

  “It’s time to give your statement,” Vince snapped. Apparently, he was still upset about being undermined in the lobby.

  She nodded and followed them to the conference room on the third floor. The table there was set up with a recording device and microphone. The three men sat across from her with notepads and pens, ready to jot down their impressions of her story.

  Her story. She shook her head. There wasn’t much to say.

  To her dismay, Teo took the lead in the questioning. “How well did you know Miles Hutto?”

  “We were colleagues.”

  “How did you feel about him?”

  Neela shrugged. “Neutral? We didn’t interact much.”

  Teo tapped his pen on his notepad. “What did you argue about two days ago?”

  “What?”

  Vince jumped in. “We have security footage of you arguing with Dr. Hutto. He held the door of your lab shut so you couldn’t enter. What were you fighting about?”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with Miles’s death.” Neela shook her head. “Why are you asking me this stuff?”

  Teo sighed. “Just answer, Neela, so we can get through this.”

  “We disagreed on the timeline for my previous project. It was nothing very serious. I guess we get too caught up in our work sometimes.”

  “When was your last contact with him?” Vince asked.

  “Yesterday after our meeting with Art. We talked about a project.” We had joint suspicions, she didn’t say. Reservations.

  Teo cleared his throat. “How was his state of mind?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “Not depressed, quiet, anything like that?”

  “No. I mean, he’s German, so it’s not like he’s chipper.”

  The local cop snickered, and Vince elbowed him to shut him up.

  Teo took a deep breath. “Okay, can you describe your movements over the last twenty-four hours?”

  “I thought you were investigating this as a suicide.”

  “We are.”

  Neela narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute. Why is DALE investigating a suicide?”

  Vince and Teo looked at each other, and it seemed like neither one wanted to answer her question.

  “I told you she’d ask,” Teo said. “You should have taken her statement without me.”

  “I thought she’d be more open with her husband,” Vince said. “Go ahead and tell her, then.”

  Teo set his mouth in a firm line. “We have reason to believe that Dr. Hutto was passing information to someone outside the organization. He downloaded a large amount of data to an external drive yesterday evening, but we can’t find it in his office or on his person.”

  Neela’s mouth fell open. “He wouldn’t do that! He knows the system tracks that kind of thing. He’d be caught immediately. His career would be over!”

  “Right,” Teo said. “It would be.”

  “So you think he killed himself because he knew he’d be caught?”

  “Yup,” the cop said, and Vince elbowed him again.

  Teo nodded. “It’s one theory we’re exploring.”

  “Why would he do something like that, then, if he knew it’d ruin him?”

  Vince gave her a cold, flat look. “People do bad things for all kinds of reasons, Dr. Durante. Threats to their family, blackmail, revenge, debt. Who knows what pressures he was feeling.”

  Neela shook her head vehemently. “You’re wrong. Miles wouldn’t steal from Broad Earth, and he wouldn’t kill himself to avoid the consequences. You should be out there looking for the person who hurt him.”

  Teo closed his eyes momentarily, and when he opened them, his expression was soft, sympathetic. “I know it’s hard to accept when a friend takes his own life. I’m very sorry.”

  “Enough, agent,” Vince said, punctuating his words with stabs of his pen into his notebook. “We’ll contact you if we need more information, Dr. Durante.”

  As soon as they left, Neela texted Demetrius.

  Neela: Suicide.

  Demetrius: What?! Are they sure?

  Neela: Guess so.

  Demetrius: Be there in a bit. Garage in Sunflower Springs called. They picked up your truck. Said it definitely needs a new starter. No big deal. You’ll have it back tomorrow, probably.

  For once, she left her phone on when she went back to the lab. While Neela worked on the blots, she thought about what Demetrius had said. If security footage of Miles’s death existed, then Teo and Vince had to be right—he committed suicide. Poor Miles.

  “Hey!” Someone was behind her in the lab. Neela jumped, knocking one of the gel cassettes to the floor, and whirled around. Chalk.

  “You are lucky,” Neela said evenly, “that I already transferred that gel.”

  “No, you’re lucky. And jumpy.”

  Neela returned to her task of rinsing antibodies off the membranes. “Death makes me nervous, what can I say.”

  Chalk shoved his hands into his pockets and nodded. “Tough break about Miles. Any idea why he did it?”

  “The cops think maybe he was being blackmailed or something.”

  “You buy it?”

  Neela stopped rinsing. “I think I’d have a hard time believing Miles committed suicide even if I watched him do it. He called me last night, really late. Left a message to call back. Why would he do that if he was minutes away from killing himself?”

  “Maybe he wanted you to talk him off the proverbial ledge. Maybe he wanted you to adopt his cats.”

  “It sounded more serious than that,” Neela said. She played the voicemail on speaker so Chalk could hear the urgency in Miles’s voice.

  Chalk’s face grew serious as he listened to the brief message. “What do you think he wanted to talk about?”

  Neela shrugged. “Who knows! Maybe something about the files he downloaded yesterday.”

  “We need to see those files, then, don’t we?”

  “They can’t find the drive.”

  “Neela, we don’t need the drive. The server will have logs of what he downloaded, and guess who administers the servers.”

  Realization dawned on Neela. Chalk did. Of course, Chalk could figure out exactly what Miles accessed. “They’ll see us.” She motioned upward with her eyes to the camera installed in the corner.

  Chalk nodded. “That’s fine. They’ll be asking for the server logs at some point, anyway, and I’ll hand them over when they do. Come downstairs with me.”

  Neela had never been to Chalk’s office before, though she’d been to the west wing of the basement where Mrs. Grimes presided over the cold-storage seed archives. His office was in the east wing of the basement, next to the server cages and equipment storage. She’d always imagined his office as the headquarters of an evil genius, maybe an industrial cement-and-steel kind of thing, with an array of monitors and wires everywhere. Either that, or a pit of fast food trash and dirty socks, with seven different gaming consoles and a single ergonomic chair.

  In reality, it had the same warm wood paneling as Art’s office. On one wall was a huge screen that at first Neela mistook as a fish tank. Another wall was buttressed by a long low bench with a cushion on top and bookshelves underneath. Above the bench, a frosted panel was lit from behind to resemble light streaming through a window pane. The desk was a cool modern number, supported on each end by orange file cabinets, and the only computer in the room was a white, whisper-thin laptop.

  “Chalk, this is amazing!”

  He bent from the waist in a stiff little bow. “You were expecting something else, I gather.”

  “I was expecting a lair,” said Neela, grinning.

  “Oh, I assure you, it is,” said Chalk. “Let me show you.” He released a catch that Neela hadn’t noticed and a section of paneling behin
d the desk slid away. Behind it was a bank of computers and monitors.

  “Oh, it’s a secret lair! Even better!” Neela almost clapped, she was so impressed.

  Chalk sat down and tapped away at the laptop, bringing several screens behind him to life.

  “Let’s see where Miles was poking around. I can check his activity logs.”

  Neela crossed her legs and drummed her knee impatiently. “Hurry up!”

  “Okay, okay. He downloaded two archives around 8:30 p.m., the files for BE-375 and 13X.”

  “Our two most recent projects. They’re not even in production yet. If another company wanted to steal something, that’s exactly what they’d want.”

  Chalk nodded. “Looks like the cops were right—he must have been working for someone else. There’d be no reason for him to download files rather than viewing them on the server if he wasn’t going to pass them to someone.”

  Neela chewed on her lower lip, thinking. “He died before he even got to his car, though. So how did he give the external drive to someone? That person would have to be here. Can you access the cameras?”

  “No, of course not. Only security has access to the cameras.” Chalk frowned at her.

  “So how do you find me in random corners of the building? You’re telling me that you just wander around all four floors until you run into me?”

  “I have very good intuition.” He snapped the laptop shut.

  Neela eyed him skeptically. “I don’t believe you. Come on, this is important.”

  “Sorry. No can do.”

  Neela sat back on the bench and crossed her arms. “Nice to know that something is beyond your abilities.”

  Chalk snorted. “I didn’t say that.”

  “So you can access the cameras!”

  “I told you I can’t.”

  “But...” Neela said leadingly. She could tell he was fudging the truth.

  “Okay, fine, but you can’t tell anyone. Not Demetrius, not Art, not Cassie, nobody.”

  Neela had to spend a few minutes begging him to tell her, swearing on the lives of family members, and promising him her firstborn child if she betrayed his confidence. Finally, she held up her little finger. “I pinky promise.”