Kernel of Doubt: A Neela Durante Mystery

by Hillary Avis

  Chalk shuddered. “I am not touching your finger. I can’t believe I’m telling you this but”—he sighed dramatically—“I have a secret mirror server that duplicates all the footage from the security cameras. I can’t see in real time, but I can see it with a ten-second delay. It’s very useful for finding people.”

  “Have you spied on me? Honestly, that’s a little creepy.”

  “It’s not spying! I knew I shouldn’t have told you. Anyway, you have no expectation of privacy at work.”

  Neela jumped to her feet and paced back and forth in front of his desk. “Seriously—thank you for being creepy. Don’t you understand what this means? We can watch the footage from last night and see who Miles gave the drive to!”

  “I’m sure law enforcement will review the footage. You know, legally. Let’s leave it to them and not jeopardize our careers.”

  “Don’t be such a stick in the mud. Don’t you realize? Whatever Miles did last night, he wanted to talk to me about it! What if he saw something in those files that he thought I needed to know about? Or what if he wanted to warn me about someone?” Neela gestured to the ceiling. “I can’t just go back up to my office and pretend everything is normal when literally everyone at Broad Earth is a murder suspect.”

  “Neela,” Chalk said gently, “Miles killed himself, remember?”

  She stopped pacing. “I guess—I guess I still don’t believe he would do that. And even if he did pull the trigger himself, it was because he gave the data to someone else, right? Come on, we have to look at the footage and see who it was.”

  “Fine. Fine. If you want to slog through hours of ridiculously boring security footage, be my guest.” He opened his laptop, tapped a few keys, and a grid of security footage appeared on the large wall screen. “There are twenty-five cameras. They cover the hallways, labs, exterior doors, and parking lots.”

  Neela dragged a chair in front of the screen and plopped down on it. “Start at 5:00 p.m., right after the meeting.”

  Chalk used a laser pointer to indicate a square in the middle of the grid. “Watch that camera. That’s the third-floor hallway outside the conference room.”

  Neela held her breath as small figures exited the room and scattered, only two remaining behind in the hall. “Hey, that’s me! And Miles.”

  She watched the little figures have a conversation and then go into the elevator. They reappeared in an adjacent square, in the fourth-floor hall, and walked in opposite directions. “We both went to our offices. I worked in the lab and went home around eight.”

  “Let’s see.” Chalk zoomed through the footage, pausing when someone walked down the hall. “Looks like you left with Demetrius at 8:15. Went to the parking lot, came back in, and got a ride with security around 8:30. That’s the same time that Miles was downloading the files in his office.”

  Neela jumped up and rummaged through Chalk’s desk for a notepad and a pen. She started jotting down a timeline as Chalk narrated what he was seeing on screen, adding notes of her own.

  5:00 p.m. — Left meeting.

  5:10 p.m. — Went to his office.

  8:30 p.m. — Downloaded files to external drive.

  Around 10:00 p.m. — Called Cassie. Said he had something important to do.

  11:15 p.m. — Called me and left a message. Requested that I call him back.

  “Stop the footage,” she said. “I’m not sure I want to watch him pull the trigger.”

  Chalk nodded. “Close your eyes. I’ll tell you what happens.”

  Neela put her hands over her eyes and waited.

  Chalk was silent for a few minutes. “Do you know what time it was when Miles...?”

  Neela shook her head. “He was cold at around seven o’clock in the morning, so it had to have been hours before that.”

  “I’ve scanned the footage from midnight to seven, and it’s the weirdest thing. Miles leaves his office at two a.m. and goes into the R&D lab. He goes into a storage room there, but he doesn’t leave the building. And there’s no one in the parking lot during the night except one security officer around two-thirty. She walks a circle around the lot and goes back inside. There’s nobody else until you and Demetrius show up just before seven. And you can’t see where the body is located from the parking lot cameras. It’s just out of view.”

  Neela dropped her hands from her eyes. “Show me.”

  “Watch the corner screens. Those are the exterior doors.”

  Neela held her breath and saw that Chalk was right—only a security officer came and went. Chalk then scrolled back through the footage, using the laser to point out Miles leaving his office, entering the lab, and disappearing behind a green door.

  “Oh!” Neela gasped. “That’s not a storage room. That’s the specimen elevator that runs down to the greenhouses.”

  “Could Miles get to the test field by the parking lot from the greenhouses?”

  Neela nodded. “He’d have to walk through the fields, but it’s possible.”

  “And not on camera,” Chalk finished. “So, he could have met someone there to give them the drive and walked to his truck without going through the parking lot. He must have known it wouldn’t be recorded. The fields are the perfect place for a handoff, but then he had second thoughts as he got near his car. He realized he’d done something terrible and figured he should end it.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe—maybe he didn’t kill himself! Anyone could have been in that field with him.”

  Chalk sat back in his chair and clicked a button under his desk. The screen on the wall went dark. “Would that make you feel better? I’m not sure murder is a preferable scenario here.”

  Neela ignored him and jotted three more entries in her timeline.

  2:00 am — Exited the building through the specimen elevator. Walked through test fields toward the parking lot.

  2:30 am — Security officer makes parking lot rounds and doesn’t notice anything. Miles not dead yet?

  6:55 am — Body found. Time of death = ???

  She thought a minute. “Here’s the way I see it. Miles wanted to tell me something—something urgent. A couple of hours later, the guy sneaks out of the office the back way, either to meet someone or to avoid someone. Then he kills himself? Tell me that story makes sense.”

  Chalk frowned. “Suicide never makes sense to anyone except the person who commits it.”

  “Let’s pretend he did kill himself, which I still don’t believe. And he did it because he was ashamed or afraid of the repercussions of handing off the files to someone else. Why would he want to talk to me about it beforehand? Or about something else urgent?”

  A knock came at the door, and Neela nearly jumped out of her skin. Art poked his head in the door.

  “There you are!” He smiled kindly at Neela. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  Neela flipped the notepad with her timeline facedown. “Chalk was just helping me access the 13X files.”

  “Back to the grind already? I wanted to see how you’re doing. I haven’t had a chance to speak with you since the terrible business this morning.” Art’s mustache quivered with emotion. “I wouldn’t blame you if you needed some time off after a shock like that.”

  “My usual coping mechanism for tragedy is to drown my feelings in work,” Neela joked, but she felt her eyes sting with unshed tears. Why does sympathy always make things worse? She needed to make a hasty exit to the elevator before she started crying in front of them. She tapped the notepad. “Can I keep this, Chalk?”

  He nodded. She said goodbye to both of them without making eye contact and risking a breakdown. On the way back to the QA lab, she turned one question over and over in her mind. Why did Miles want to speak with her so urgently? The only thing they had in common was their work, so it had to be about the mystery protein in 13X, didn’t it? And what could be so urgent about that—unless he knew something bad was going to happen later that night?

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Not your job
to figure this out, Neela. Leave it to the experts. Leave it to Teo.

  She busied herself in finishing the lab work. Maybe Teo was right and she was in denial. Maybe Miles was being paid by one of Broad Earth’s competitors to steal files, and he couldn’t live with himself anymore. Maybe he called everyone at work to say goodbye. Maybe 13X didn’t have the mystery protein at all and the blots were just contaminated the first time. She felt herself relax and sank into the rhythm of the task at hand.

  Hours later, she was still working. Everyone was gone, even Demetrius. She’d sent him home with An-Yi, promising that she’d get another ride from security since her truck was still at the shop. She only said that so he wouldn’t worry, though. She called Lily Sawyer so Molly wouldn’t go hungry and settled in for a long night.

  When she finally finished the lab work, Neela was a little afraid to look at the film from the blot. She slid it into the image scanner rather than looking at it with her naked eye. She held her breath, hoping that the dark band of the mystery protein would not show up. If it wasn’t there, it meant she could relax, approve the trait, and move on with grieving the suicide of her co-worker. If it was there, it meant something more serious: somebody was interfering with the seed lines at Broad Earth. And maybe that someone had hurt Miles.

  She gasped.

  It was there, a black bar in all the columns for 13X and in none of the columns for the archived trait 13. Someone had purposely added it to 13X—just like they had to 375—and Miles must have figured it out. That had to be what he wanted to talk to her about last night!

  Bethany yawned. She’d tell Art first thing in the morning. She barricaded her desk against the door of her office and curled up on the floor to sleep, using a thousand-page monograph called Corn and Corn Improvement for a pillow.

  Chapter Four

  Neela waited outside Art’s office with breakfast snagged from the cafeteria: a breakfast “burrito” and a cup of bitter coffee. Apparently anything wrapped in a tortilla is considered a burrito. She was wiping salsa off her chin when he arrived, mustache bristling with enjoyment at her awkward attempt at cleaning her face without getting it on her clothes.

  “I should have gotten a napkin,” she said.

  “Indeed. I’d offer you my handkerchief, but you never take it.”

  “Handkerchiefs are kind of unsanitary, don’t you think?”

  “Now you sound like Chalk. What brings you to the third floor so bright and early this Friday morning?” Art asked.

  “13X,” said Neela hesitantly.

  “You can just upload the report. No need to hand-deliver it!”

  “It’s not finished. I ran some additional tests and”—it pained Neela to say the actual words—“13X contains the same protein that gave us so much trouble with 375. I don’t see how both plants could contain the protein unless a gene for it was purposely inserted. The odds of it happening by chance are infinitesimal. You can ask An-Yi if you want the real odds calculated, but I swear to you it is not possible. And I think Miles must have known about it. It must have something to do with his death.”

  Art looked at her gravely. “Neela, are you sure about this? That is a very serious accusation to put forward. Do you have proof?”

  She nodded. “It’s all in the file. Look at the blots. The protein is there, plain as day. I have the ones I ran yesterday here, too.” She slid printouts across Art’s desk. He looked at the images for a moment and then pulled up the electronic file on his laptop to compare them. He leveled his gaze at her.

  “I see the dark band on your blots, but I don’t see the same band on the blots that Cassie ran for 13X.”

  “I didn’t see them until Chalk put them on the big screen at the meeting.”

  “Well, let’s get Chalk, then.”

  It didn’t take Chalk long to show up, as though he might have been lingering somewhere other than his basement office, waiting to be called upon. Neela held her breath while he pulled up the file for Cassie’s original tests on 13X, and the scrolled to the Western blots.

  “There,” she said—but it wasn’t there. A perfectly normal blot appeared, with no dark band at the top. The room spun, and she looked at Chalk for confirmation. “You saw it before, didn’t you?”

  “I thought so,” Chalk said slowly. He tapped a few keys, wrinkled his forehead.

  “Well, someone must have changed the files!” Neela could hear how shrill she sounded. “It was there! It was!”

  “The only people who have touched the 13X file since the meeting were you and Miles, Neela,” he said. “It’s here in the logs.”

  Neela could feel Art and Chalk staring at her.

  “Maybe you made a mistake. Maybe there was a smudge on the screen, or something on the projector lens that made it look like a dark band where there wasn’t one,” Chalk said.

  “But my results in the second blots, they confirm what I saw,” Neela protested.

  Art knit his eyebrows pensively. “Do you still have 375 samples in the lab? Maybe you were so shaken up after what happened yesterday that you mixed them up with 13X samples by mistake. It could happen to anyone.”

  “Maybe,” Neela said numbly, trying to work out which was the bad dream, finding the protein or not finding it and thinking she did. “Yesterday is kind of a blur.”

  “It’s no wonder,” Art said, reaching across the desk to pat her arm. “I think you’d better take some time off. To take care of yourself. We need you to be sharp.”

  Neela stared at him, “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “I am suggesting a leave of absence. That’s what Cassie’s doing. Take a few weeks, visit your family, mourn Miles. Your job will be waiting for you when you come back refreshed and ready to go. You have my word, Neela.”

  DEMETRIUS DROVE HER to the car repair place to pick up her truck, and then she took Molly to Sawtooth Lake for a goodbye. Sawtooth Lake wasn’t really a lake, but an old gravel quarry that the county had closed down. It filled up with rain water, and now it was a favorite spot for teenage kids to swim during the summer months and make out in their cars during the winter.

  The lake was surrounded by sunflowers taller than she was. When she lay down in the field of flowers, they nodded down at her with heavy benevolent heads. Dragonflies surfed the water like skipping stones and lazy bees bumbled from flower to flower without paying attention to any female primate standing among them, unimportant as a boulder or maple tree.

  Molly snuffled every bush and tree and rousted a pair of ducks from their nest on the bank. They flew to the middle of the lake. Neela let her bark at them a while, longer than she would normally let her. A last gift to the beagle who surely wouldn’t understand the decision she was making.

  She met Teo in Sunflower Springs near his office.

  “I’m going to be gone for a few weeks. I think it’s better if you keep Molly from now on. I know the divorce won’t be final until the fall, but this way will be easier for all of us.”

  Teo rubbed his hand through his hair. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s not what I want. I just don’t have a choice right now!” She kept her eyes trained on the asphalt, tracing a line of reflective paint with her shoe as guilt and sadness gnawed at her stomach.

  He sighed. “You always have a choice, Neela. You just always choose something other than us.”

  “Whatever.” Neela turned to leave. That was Teo's problem with her, her inability to abandon her responsibilities to run off with him to Tahoe for the weekend, or leave work early for a picnic in the park. While she might have a choice in theory, in reality almost nothing she did was by choice. Work needed her. Her sprawling family needed her—well, they needed her paycheck, anyway.

  Molly curled up on the front seat of Teo’s work SUV, biting at a flea on her paw. Maybe she would never notice Neela was gone and every day would wake up thinking that her two weeks with Teo weren’t up yet, until six months down the road she forgot Neela ever existed.

 
Neela existed—only existed, nothing more—on the two-hour drive up to her family’s farm in Fryer. She didn’t tell them she was coming because she didn’t want to explain why. She was grateful for the miles between Sunflower Springs and the farm. It gave her a chance to set her mind in order. The highway stretched out, pale and forgiving. She drove by olive orchards and almonds, fields of wheat and hills dotted with cattle. It was like driving over the landscape of her own body, it was so familiar to her. The hedge of pink and white oleander dividing the north and south freeways swept the sky like a dust broom. A red-tailed hawk perched on a fence post. An old farmhouse, once alone in this vast valley, now hugged up against the highway like a moth on a lampshade.

  She pulled into the farm’s gravel driveway slowly, eased up to the little porch, its roof raised an inch or two off its posts by thick, ropey grapevines. She learned to read sitting on the roof of that porch, Robin’s finger following along with the text, Dottie singing into a hairbrush in their bedroom.

  Neela wasn’t sure if it was real or remembered when she heard Dottie’s melodic soprano voice threading its way out of the house, singing Patsy Cline, Mama’s favorite. Must be now-Dottie, since then-Dottie was mostly singing Madonna. Neela didn’t knock, but opened the door into the little yellow kitchen, interrupting Dottie as she was up to her elbows in dishwater.

  Dottie squealed in staccato and stripped off her rubber gloves before crushing Neela in a hug, jumping up and down all the while. Shriek, shriek, shriek. Jump, jump, jump. Neela thought her head would fly off at any moment.

  “Who needs a burglar alarm with you around,” said Neela, as Dottie disentangled herself and put her rubber gloves back on to continue her work at the sink.

  “Oh, Neela, don’t poop on your own party! I can’t believe you’re here! Wait until Papa sees you!”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Orinda is at school, of course. Wendy and Mama are out grocery shopping. Rick and Robin drove Papa to the doctor. And I got stuck with the dishes, as usual!”