Devil's Waltz Part 46

"Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That's as specific as she'd gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those disks. Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable. Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she had been using drugs."

"Did she show any other signs of that?"

"I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom. And sometimes she did seem agitated-almost manic. Trying to convince me-or herself-that she was making progress. But I know she wasn't taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four years-at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she enrolled."

"Could be cocaine," I said.

"Yes, I suppose so, but I've seen the same things happen to students who weren't on drugs. The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad."

"How true," I said.

She rubbed her nails, glanced over at the photos of her family. "When I found out she'd been murdered, it changed my perception of her. Up till then I'd been absolutely furious with her. But hearing about her death-the way she'd been found . . . well, I just felt sorry for her. The police told me she was dressed like some kind of punk-rocker. It made me realize she'd had an outside life she'd kept hidden from me. She was simply one of those people to whom the world of ideas would never be important."

"Could her lack of motivation have been due to an independent income?"

"Oh, no," she said. "She was poor. When I accepted her she begged me to get her funding, told me she couldn't enroll without it."

I thought of the carefree att.i.tude about money she'd shown the Murtaughs. The brand-new car she'd died in.

"What about her family?" I said.

"I seem to remember there was a mother-an alcoholic. But the policemen said they hadn't been able to locate anyone to claim the body. We actually took up a collection here at the school in order to bury her."

"Sad."

"Extremely."

"What part of the country was she from?" I said.

"Somewhere back east. No, she wasn't a rich girl, Dr. Delaware. Her lack of drive was due to something else."

"How did she react to losing her fellows.h.i.+p?"

"She didn't react at all. I'd expected some anger, tears, anything-hoped it would help clear the air and we'd reach an understanding. But she never even tried to contact me. Finally, I called her in, asked her how she was planning to support herself. She told me about the job at your hospital. Made it sound like something prestigious-was quite snotty, actually. Though your Mr. Huenengarth said she'd been little more than a bottle washer."

No bottles in Ashmore's lab. I was silent.

She looked at her watch, then over at her purse. For a moment I thought she was going to get up. But instead, she moved her chair closer and stared at me. Her eyes were hazel, hot, unmoving. An inquisitive heat. Chipmunk searching for the acorn h.o.a.rd.

"Why all the questions, Doctor? What are you really after?"

"I really can't give any details because of the confidentiality issue," I said. "I know it doesn't seem fair."

She said nothing for a moment. Then: "She was a thief. Those textbooks in her locker had been stolen from another student. I found other things too. Another student's sweater. A gold pen that had belonged to me. So I won't be surprised if she was involved in something unsavory."

"She may have been."

"Something that led to her being murdered?"

"It's possible."

"And what's your involvement with all of this, Doctor?"

"My patient's welfare may be at stake."

"Charles Jones's sister?"

I nodded, surprised that Huenengarth had revealed that much.

"Is some type of child abuse suspected?" she said. "Something Dawn found out about and tried to profit from?"

Swallowing my amazement, I managed to shrug and run a finger across my lips.

She smiled. "I'm no Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Delaware. But Mr. Huenengarth's visit made me very curious-all that pressure. I've studied health-care systems too long to believe anyone would go to that kind of effort for an average patient. So I asked my husband to make inquiries about the Jones boy. He's a vascular surgeon, has privileges at Western Peds, though he hasn't operated there in years. So I know who the Joneses are and the role the grandfather's playing in the turmoil the hospital's going through. I also know that the boy died of SIDS and another child keeps getting sick. Rumors are floating. Put that together with the fact that Dawn stole the first child's chart and went from abject student poverty to being quite cavalier about money, add two separate visits from professionals personally looking for that chart, and one doesn't need to be a detective."

"I'm still impressed."

"Are you and Mr. Huenengarth working at cross-purposes?"

"We're not working together."

"Whose side are you on?"

"The little girl's."

"Who's paying your fee?"

"Officially, the parents."

"Don't you consider that a conflict of interest?"

"If it turns out to be, I won't submit a bill."

She studied me for several moments. "I do believe you might mean that. Now tell me this: Does possession of the disks put me in any danger?"

"I doubt it, but it can't be ruled out."

"Not a very comforting answer."

"I don't want to mislead you."

"I appreciate that. I survived the Russian tanks in Budapest in '56, and my survival instincts have been well developed ever since. What do you suspect might be the importance of the disks?"

"They may contain some kind of coded data," I said, "imbedded in the random number table."

"I must say I thought of the same thing-there really was no logical reason for her to have generated that table at such an early stage of her research. So I scanned it, ran a few basic programs, and no obvious algorithms jumped out. Do you have any cryptographic skills?"

"None whatsoever."

"Neither do I, though good decoding programs do exist, so one no longer needs to be an expert. However, why don't we take a look right now, and see if our combined wisdom produces anything. After that, I'll hand the disks over to you and be rid of them. I'll also be sending a letter to Huenengarth and the police, carbon-copied to my dean, stating that I pa.s.sed the disks along to you and have no interest in them."

"How about just to the police? I can give you a detective's name."

"No." She walked back to the desk, picked up the designer purse and unclasped it. Removing a small key, she fit it into the lock of the top desk drawer.

"I usually don't lock up like this," she said. "That man made me feel as if I were back in Hungary."

Sliding open a left-hand file drawer, she looked down into it. Frowned. Stuck her arm in, moved it around, pulled it out empty.

"Gone," she said, looking up. "How interesting."

26.

The two of us went up to the department office and Janos asked Merilee to get Dawn Herbert's student file. Five-by-eight index card.

"This is all of it?" she said, frowning.

"We recycle all the old paper now, Dr. Janos, remember?"

"Ah, yes. How politically correct . . ." Janos and I read the card: DE-ENROLLED stamped at the top in red. Four typed lines under that: HERBERT, D.K. PROG: PH.D., BIO-ST.

D.O.B.: 12/13/63.

POB: POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.

A.B., MATH, POUGHKEEPSIE COLL.

"Not much," I said.

Janos gave a cold smile and handed the card back to Merilee. "I've got a seminar, Dr. Delaware, if you'll please excuse me."

She left the office.

Merilee stood there holding the card, looking as if she'd been an unwilling witness to a marital spat.

"Have a nice day," she said, then turned her back on me.

I sat in the car and tried to untangle the knots the Jones family had tied in my head.

Grandpa Chuck, doing something to the hospital.

Chip and/or Cindy doing something to their kids.

Ashmore and/or Herbert learning about some or all of it. Ashmore's data confiscated by Huenengarth. Herbert's data stolen by Huenengarth. Herbert probably murdered by a man who looked like Huenengarth.

The blackmail scenario obvious even to a casual observer like Janos.

But if Ashmore and Herbert had both been up to something, why had she been the first to die?

And why had Huenengarth waited so long after her death to search for her disks, when he'd moved in on Ashmore's computers the day after the toxicologist's murder?

Unless he'd only learned about Herbert's data after reading Ashmore's files.

I stayed with that for a while and came up with a possible chronology: Herbert the first to suspect a tie-in between Chad Jones's death and Ca.s.sie's illnesses-student leading the teacher, because the teacher couldn't care less about patients.

She pulled Chad's chart, confirmed her suspicions, recorded her findings-encoded as random numbers-on the university computer, printed out a floppy disk, stashed it in her graduate locker, and put the squeeze on the Jones family.

But not before making a duplicate record and filing it in one of Ashmore's computers, without Ashmore's knowledge.

Two months after her murder, Ashmore found the file and tried to use it too.

Greedy, despite his million-dollar grant.

I thought of the Ferris Dixon money. Way too much for what Ashmore claimed to be doing with it. Why had the largesse of a chemical foundation extended to a man who criticized chemical chemical companies? A foundation no one seemed to know much about, supposedly dedicated to life-science research, but its only other grantee was an economist.

The elusive Professor Zimberg . . . the sound-alike secretaries at his office and Ferris Dixon.

Some kind of game . . .

The waltz.

Maybe Ashmore and Herbert had worked different angles.

He, leaning on Chuck Jones because he'd latched on to a financial scam. She, trying to milk Chip and Cindy on the child-abuse secret.

Two blackmailers operating out of one lab?