Kernel of Doubt: A Neela Durante Mystery

by Hillary Avis

  At the show he didn’t want to dance, and Neela had nearly forgotten how, it had been so long, so they both stayed near the back, leaning on a pony wall that separated the bar from the dance floor near the stage where the band was playing. Neela wasn’t sure Chalk was comfortable pressed up against all those bodies at the show. It was crowded but they had a good view of the band, especially the stand-up bass player who thoomped away, periodically twirling his instrument. She was tapping her foot and getting into the music when she saw An-Yi and Demetrius enter from the restaurant side of the venue. She wanted to shrink down into the floor.

  “Can we go somewhere else?” she mouthed to Chalk, who nodded gratefully and motioned with his head toward a couple standing next to him, whose enthusiastic make-out session was moving with the tide of people into his personal space.

  They got a booth with high walls on the restaurant side of the Waffle Nook. While they sipped coffee, Chalk poked away at his phone and Neela looked out the window at the headlights. Neela broke the silence, suddenly grateful for Chalk’s company.

  “Thank you for inviting me out. I know I’m not exactly a scintillating conversationalist,” she said.

  “And I am.”

  Neela cracked a smile. “My track record is not very good for retaining friends. I tend to make them feel unimportant and worthless until I drive them away entirely.”

  “I already feel that way, so no worries there.” Chalk didn’t look up, furrowing his forehead like a cornfield ready for planting.

  “What are you doing on that thing?” she asked.

  “Spying on you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been watching your account activity since you went home, so that I’d know when you were back.”

  “Ah, that’s how you found me in my new office,” said Neela. “Creepy.”

  “You were logged in from the east wing node, so I guessed it was your new office. Apologies for the creepy factor, but it’s not like I can just run into you in the basement,” Chalk said. “And you’re terrible at asking for help.”

  “You’re forgiven. Why are you spying on me now, when I’m right in front of you?”

  “Because,” said Chalk slowly, “you just logged in. I got a notification.”

  “What, how is that possible? Is there some kind of automatic gizmo or system process that could have logged me in? I know I logged out when I left at five, because I took my laptop home so I could watch a video about how to make this hairdo.”

  “It’s an architectural feat.”

  Neela was embarrassed to admit making any effort for the evening, but she supposed the red lipstick gave her away anyway. “Thanks. I owe it all to internet tutorials.”

  “To answer your question, the only possibility is that someone at Broad Earth is using your account.”

  “Why would anyone do that when they have their own account? Can you tell what they are doing? Sending rude emails to all my friends and family?”

  “It’s not email,” Chalk said. “They are in the case file editor but I can’t tell from my phone what file they are working on. I need my system at work. Sorry.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for, let’s go!” Neela reached across the table to grab his hand, but thought better of it and pointed to the door instead.

  In the car on the way back to Broad Earth, Chalk asked, “Who has your password?”

  “Just about everyone I’ve worked with. You know me, I’m hopeless!” Neela bit her lip. “You, Cassie, Art, Demetrius. What’s his name, the guy in the mail room.”

  “The mail room guy?!”

  Neela felt sheepish. “I don’t want to tell you the next part.”

  “You might as well, since I have already lost all respect for you.”

  “I taped my password inside my desk drawer, in case I forgot it.” She bit her tongue, wishing immediately that she had not told him.

  Chalk made a noise of disgust deep in his throat. “Your old desk or your new desk? Please say your new desk, at least.”

  “Both? I can’t remember if I took it out of my QA desk. I don’t get any hot and juicy email, so they can do what they like. Surf porn at work in my name. Whatever.”

  “Neela.” Chalk spoke slowly, like he was talking to a toddler. “You have the highest level administrative privileges for editing trait files. Everyone else’s access tracks changes, so the old version of the file is available alongside the new. But when you approve a change, it’s final. If someone wanted to alter a file and have it be invisible, without history, they would need your electronic permission. Or your access to your account.”

  Neela got a little lightheaded, and had a hard time catching her breath. “Do you remember, Chalk, when you said I was the only one to access the 13X file? And that only Miles and I had accessed the file? Maybe someone used my account to upload new blots that didn’t show the mystery protein!”

  Chalk didn’t respond, but set his jaw and drove faster. Too fast, because when they were only a couple of miles out from the Sunflower Springs Research Center, a motorcycle cop caught up with them, blue and red lights glowing in their rearview mirrors. Chalk pulled over, swearing under his breath.

  “Where’s the fire, buddy?” the cop asked, shifting his toothpick to the side of his mouth.

  “Work emergency. Sorry, officer,” said Chalk.

  “Oh, you were speeding for your job. After nine o’clock on a Wednesday night. Where do you work, the fire department?”

  “No.”

  “EMS?”

  “No.”

  “You and your lady friend, you’re police officers, too? Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re a doctor, and she’s in labor, and you’re trying to get her to the emergency room?” The cop was having way too much fun with this.

  “We’re scientists at Broad Earth,” said Neela helpfully.

  “And you have a corn emergency?” asked the officer.

  “Something like that,” muttered Chalk. He reached into the center console for his phone.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy!” The officer jumped backward and drew his weapon, pointing it into the car window. Chalk and Neela both put their hands up. “Step out of the vehicle.”

  “I was just checking the time—checking to see if we were too late,” said Chalk.

  “Step out of the vehicle, sir!”

  “We are too late,” Chalk said to Neela, as he opened the door and stepped out onto the dark roadway. “They already logged out.”

  Neela chewed her thumbnail to the quick, as if the more thoroughly she chewed it, the faster the police officer would write the ticket. She turned around to watch him out the back window. Oh no, he’s touching Chalk. Chalk’s hands were spread wide apart on the trunk, and he looked like he was going to puke as the cop ran his hands up the inside of his leg. She grimaced at him apologetically, and he mouthed don’t watch, so she turned around again.

  When Chalk got back in the car with a $211 ticket ($161 for speeding, an additional $50 for really speeding), he was green around the gills. “I don’t get that much action on most of my dates. Less expensive than most of my dates, too.”

  “Chalk, it’s not a date.”

  “Tell that to him! He had you knocked up and delivering a baby in the front seat a minute ago.”

  “Just don’t puke on these shoes, they are my only nice ones.”

  “No time for puking, we need to get back to my office and figure out what’s going on,” Chalk said grimly.

  Neela nodded. “To the Bat Cave.”

  “THIS ONE”—CHALK POINTED to the screen—“is the user log. You can see, you logged out twenty minutes ago, right before we were stopped by the motorcycle cop. Looks like you were logged in for seven minutes and active for most of that time in the case file editor.”

  “What trait was I editing?” asked Neela.

  “Care to place any bets?” asked Chalk.

  Neela bit her lip, hop
ing her guess was wrong. “13X?”

  Chalk nodded. “Yup.”

  “What was I doing? I mean, the person logged in as me.”

  “Looks like they put your electronic signature on it. It’s been approved for FDA submission.”

  “Did they make any changes to the file itself?”

  “Can’t tell without comparing it to the previous version, and since your account overwrites any changes, it’s impossible to know.

  “I know the 13X file like the back of my hand, though. I’ve spent days just staring at it.”

  “I guess you have some homework cut out for you, then,” Chalk said. “You can’t download it, unfortunately. They don’t want files walking out of here, especially not after the whole Miles situation. You’ll have to work on it from your office.”

  “That’s fine, I can stay the night here,” said Neela, who wasn’t really disappointed at the thought of not going home to an empty cottage.

  Chalk shook his head. “I don’t think it’s wise for you to stay here if it’s not something you’d normally do. Whoever is using your account works here and would know your usual routine. It might make them suspicious and cover their tracks if you call attention to yourself.”

  “I stay overnight sometimes when I’m running up against a deadline.”

  “Do you have any deadlines right now?” he asked.

  Neela shook her head. “I don’t have anything at all right now.”

  “Then it will have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, I will take you home.”

  “Chalk, there has to be something we can do now! I can’t sleep without knowing what’s going on. Why would someone put my name on the 13X approval instead of just waiting for the new director of QA to do it?”

  “We’ll have a better idea when you figure out what was changed in the file. It can’t be much, if they only spent seven minutes on it.”

  “I’ll work on it tomorrow. I’m exhausted.” Neela stretched out on the cushioned bench and yawned. “I think the adrenaline is wearing off. We should head back to the car.”

  Chalk swiveled his head and stared at her. “That gives me a thought. Maybe we can see who left the building right before we got here in the security footage. It’s not proof, but it might give us a clue.”

  “So pull up the cameras right after my username logged out!” Neela was gripping the edge of the bench as hard as she could.

  It took Chalk a few minutes of scrolling through the footage to find the right time-stamp. “Uh oh.”

  “Uh oh, what?” Neela asked.

  “There isn’t any footage for that time,” Chalk said.

  “Nobody, huh? Could they have logged in remotely?”

  “You’re not listening to me. The cameras weren’t recording anything at all for the last hour. They came up right after we got here. Look, there we are in the elevator on the way down to the basement.” Chalk’s face was paler than usual. “We have to go to security about this.”

  Neela’s hand flew to her mouth. “No, we can’t! Then they’ll know you’re mirroring the cameras. You’ll be fired!”

  Chalk nodded, his mouth grim. “You probably will be, too. We have to, though. It’s the only ethical thing to do.”

  “But if we tell about the security cameras, we’ll have our access to everything revoked immediately. I won’t be able to look at 13X and see if anything was changed. Can’t we wait a few days? Maybe then we’ll be able to figure out who is editing the files. It has to be connected to Miles’s death, right? So if we can figure it out and hand them a real criminal, maybe Broad Earth won’t fire us. And it might save other people, too—that has to outweigh being slightly unethical and waiting to tell security, right?”

  Chalk drummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. “Hm. OK. A few more days. But we can’t let this go on too long.”

  Neela grinned. Victory. “I guess I should change my password.”

  “Probably so.”

  “Will you show me how?” Neela asked, embarrassed.

  “I can pull up your account right now. Actually, it may be best if we leave your account as-is. Maybe we can induce them to log in again, and catch them at it.”

  Neela nodded. “A trap. I like it. I’ll look over the 13X file tomorrow, and that will give us a better idea of what they were doing. Maybe it’ll spark some ideas for laying a trap. I can’t think about it anymore tonight. My brain hurts.” She crinkled her nose in an enormous yawn.

  “I’m going to run to the restroom,” Chalk said. “I’ll come back for you, and we can head out.”

  In the three minutes he was gone, Neela fell asleep right there on top of his bookcase.

  WHEN SHE OPENED HER eyes, she saw Chalk balancing on one leg, poking her ankle with his polished wingtip.

  “Really? You’re using your foot to wake me up?” She rubbed the terrible cramp in her neck.

  “It seemed the least...personal,” Chalk said.

  “Yeah, like you’re flushing a toilet in a public restroom. What time is it? How long have I been asleep?” Neela asked blearily.

  “Time for work. You’re already a few minutes late, but I didn’t want to wake you. You were snoring.”

  “Ugh. Will you take me home to shower?”

  “You can shower in the employee gym,” Chalk said.

  “Where did you sleep?”

  “I didn’t,” Chalk said. “You should go.”

  Neela gathered her jacket and bag and turned to leave. “Wait, can I borrow a laptop? Mine is still at home.”

  Chalk nodded and found one in a storage locker. “Should work with your login. Bring it back when you’re done with it.”

  Neela caught sight of her reflection in the elevator doors when they closed: red lipstick smeared onto her cheek, eye makeup smudged in ghoulish circles. Her hair, so well-coiffed the night before, was rebelling in a spiky mane. She had planned to go straight to her office and start working, but the employee gym suddenly sounded very appealing.

  The door opened on the first floor to admit more passengers. Who else but An-Yi, in a neat blue dress with a ridiculous bird stuck to her head. Was it a hat? Neela studiously avoided eye contact. An-Yi was not so diplomatic and stared openly at Neela.

  “Where have you been? You look awful!” she blurted out, and Neela glared at her.

  “I went out last night.”

  “With who?”

  “With a friend,” said Neela stiffly. “I have other friends.”

  They both exited the elevator on the second floor, An-Yi heading to the east wing and Neela to the employee lounge in the opposite direction. In the locker room she shucked her clothes and heels and scrubbed her face with soap in the showers.

  “Walk of shame, huh?”

  Neela looked up and saw another woman enter the shower room, her blonde hair twisted up onto her head to keep it dry. Cassie Tremblay, naked. Neela crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Sort of,” said Neela. “It was a long night.”

  “Been there, done that,” said Cassie, soaping unselfconsciously. “Once I slept over in the visitor information center, and there was no sleeping involved. I just didn’t think you were the type.”

  “I’m not.” Neela stepped out of the shower and covering herself with not one towel, but two. She dried off behind a bank of lockers as quickly as she could, to avoid another encounter with Cassie. Her dress could pass for work, with a lab coat over it, but the shoes were too much. No choice. She bent down to tie the ribbons.

  “I have an extra pair in my bag, if you want to borrow them,” said Cassie, walking out of the showers. “They’re my gym shoes, but you wear that kind of thing.”

  “Why are you being so nice?” asked Neela, averting her eyes. “We’ve hardly said two words to each other and now you’re loaning me your shoes?”

  Cassie wrapped the towel around herself, much to Neela’s relief, and shrugged. “You want them or not?”

  “Yeah,” said Neela, looking down at the impossible ribbons.
“I have permanent dents in my ankles from sleeping with these on.”

  Cassie grinned at her. “I thought you weren’t the type.”

  “I’m not!” protested Neela. “I spent the night working on a project with Chalk, and I fell asleep in his office.”

  “Chalk, huh?” Cassie raised her eyebrows. “Not my first guess. What were you working on?”

  “It’s a long story, but the short version is 375.”

  Cassie nodded. “It’s being planted in the test fields next week. I’ve been doing the follow-up, now that—oh, never mind.”

  “Now that what?”

  Cassie sighed. “Now that Art made me the head of QA.”

  “I figured he promoted you,” Neela said. “You’re the obvious choice.”

  “I wasn’t so sure. Last time when I was the obvious choice, he hired you.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” said Neela. “For what it’s worth, I’ve always had a lot of respect for you as a scientist, so maybe we can be friends now that I’m not your supervisor.”

  “Maybe,” said Cassie. “Why are you working on 375? R&D shouldn’t have their hands on it now.”

  “I guess I still have some questions about it,” said Neela. “I’ve never come to terms with the autopsy results. Sheep just don’t get MCF like that.”

  “I agree,” said Cassie. “I think the vet, Johnson, was wrong about the cause of death. I called his Springfield office yesterday to talk to him about the autopsy, but he couldn’t speak with me.”

  “Why not?” asked Neela.

  “He was dead. Heart attack. And the vet tech who assisted him went on some trip to Europe.”

  “Did you try to contact her hotel? Her family might know how to reach her,” Neela said. “There’s just something off about all this. I feel like it’s connected to Miles, somehow. Did you know 375 was one of the data files he downloaded? Maybe we should run the animal trials again. I could help with them—I don’t mind doing some QA work.”

  Cassie crossed her arms and frowned. “I think you should stop working on this trait. Your obsession with it is a little inappropriate now that it has been submitted for FDA approval. Plus, it’s a conflict of interest, given your position. QA is my job now. You might not think I am as smart and capable as you are, but I assure you that I am.”